It is certainly not the first time that I have written about Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, who has, as of late, become one of my recurring study topics, nor the first time that I have written about Alexis de Tocqueville, having previously compared him to Juan Donoso Cortés in their different perspectives and transitions from liberalism into more concise political doctrines, those of conservatism and traditionalism.
In the last year and a half, and in contrast with my own experience in Poland as a traveler, a student, and an observer of the political reality in a foreign country, I have realized that Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel, Vicomte de Tocqueville and Ernest Che Guevara belong to the same category of thinkers, despite their many notable differences: both were wandering, politically inclined intellectuals, whose main body of (literary) work was directly inspired by their travels.
From Tocqueville, the reference is more than obvious: De la Démocratie en Amérique, or Democracy in America, as it was later translated and published in English, is probably his most famous work and the one that best reflects his thoughts, that of a liberal but Catholic aristocrat, preserver of freedom in civil society, and critical of the excesses of power from the masses, which have to be politically organized in deliberative bodies to moderate their passions and guide them for the common good.
Democracy in America resulted from Tocqueville’s trip to the United States with his lifelong friend, Gustave de Beaumont. For this trip, he was commissioned by the government of Citizen-King Louis-Philippe d’Orléans to inspect, observe, and analyze the American penitentiary system to see if its implementation in France was plausible.
Although Tocqueville carried out what was requested by the July Monarchy and effectively delivered a report on the subject, his observations and notes of the social and economic reality of the United States during the nine months of his stay were the basis of the monumental work for which he is, up to the present day, hailed as one of the unrivaled thinkers of the 19th century, both in France and in North America, essentially inspiring the liberal-conservative doctrine that, in principle, would be foundational for the Western moderate right.
Due to the twists and turns of life and politics in his lifetime, Tocqueville also managed to travel to many other countries, including Great Britain and Ireland, and the French colony of Algeria, experiences from which he also produced separate writings, such as his controversial, nationalistic and aggressive Discourse on the Conquest of Algeria in 1841, before he eventually partook in the Revolution of 1848, contributing to the drafting of the Constitution of the 2nd French Republic, which would replace the Liberal Monarchy of the House of Orléans with a presidential and popular republic.
Tocqueville would also be part of the initial government of General Cavaignac, acting as his Foreign Minister in the few years that the republican experiment would last before it was replaced in turn by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s socialist populism, who, after carrying out a (self-) coup d’état in 1851, in imitation of his uncle, Napoleon the First, would make him become the last Emperor of the French, and last sovereign French monarch overall.
Tocqueville ended up exiling and cloistering himself in his ancestral castle in Normandy, where he would write his final work, a reflection on The Ancien Regime and the Revolution, as he titled it. This work focused on clarifying the political, social, and economic causes of the collapse of the Old Order in France.
On the other hand, Che Guevara’s life is strangely similar to that of the Vicomte de Tocqueville, that is, however, taking into account that Ernesto Guevara de la Serna came from a rather bourgeois family, whereas Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel was of aristocratic background.
Recognizing Che for his literary work is more difficult than considering him for his revolutionary fervor and violent struggle toward the establishment of global communism. As such, contrasting him with Tocqueville would seem perhaps crazy or an exaggeration, but he is undoubtedly an interesting and complex subject of study.
Che Guevara’s life cannot be mentioned more extensively than Tocqueville’s life beyond his travels. Still, of course, this is where the comparison begins, as just as Tocqueville, Che had a transcendental trip in his life and on the same continent, America. However, whereas the French nobleman visited not the Anglo-Saxon (and maybe a little French, in Louisiana) North America, Che journeyed through Southern, Hispanic America, around which he also traveled with a dear friend of his: his colleague, Alberto Granado.
That coincidence, which from the unexpected Right leanings of Tocqueville and Beaumont could be reflected in Guevara and Granado in their deliberate Left-wing beliefs, should not be anything but synchronicity, they way how History does not really repeat itself, but it rhymes cyclically, as it can be deduced from some works about the philosophy of History, by Oswald Spengler and Arthur Toynbee. All the great figures in history have their similarities, which are archetypal in the Greats.
As such, Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries were the result of his trip through South America with his friend, but unlike Tocqueville, this trip and work were not commissioned by any government but rather responded to the idealistic dream of a couple of young and irresponsible students.
In their adventure, they tried and half succeed in crossing the Andes mountain range on an old motorcycle, reach Peru, and volunteer in a medical capacity (Che was a medical graduate, Granado was already a trained biochemist) in a leper colony run by a fellow Marxist doctor to which they were sent with recommendations, and then sail on a raft through the Amazon river, before arriving to Venezuela, and even reach Miami, in the United States, before returning via plane to their home in Argentina.
Che‘s journey had indeed important phases in Chile and Peru, and it was there where he perceived, from his preconceived left-wing bias, a certain social and economic reality in Latin America, plagued by material misery and poverty but also by a common identity, ideas which would plague his mind to the point of becoming the basis of his Marxist political activism and later his revolutionary terrorism, activities which would ultimately lead to his death in a martyrdom fashion.
No wonder why Che is still to this day hailed as one of the unparalleled figures of the 20th century, an icon of both defined and undefined leftists and a trademark paradoxically adopted by the very capitalist forces he faced from his guerilla trench, essentially becoming the symbol of the postmodern schizophrenia that characterizes our era.
Due to his own life decisions and his revolutionary affinities in global politics, Che Guevara continued his journey after graduating as a doctor, reaching many other countries, including the Central American republics, like Guatemala, where he would begin his revolutionary life, or Mexico, where he would come into contact with the future Cuban tyrant Fidel Castro, whom he would later support as his strategist and second-in-command in his invasion and guerrilla warfare in the island of Cuba, leading to a coup d’état against the government of Fulgencio Batista.
His experiences as a guerrilla fighter in this part of his life would be captured in his Guerrilla Warfare manual, which would inspire the military strategies of many other left-wing dissident groups around the world, such as in South Africa, and which is still studied by North American counter-intelligence experts, paradoxically to the extent that some of them, CIA-trained, even managed to apply it against its own author when they captured him in a subsequent failed revolution attempt in Bolivia.
Nicknamed Che, in reference to his Argentinian ancestry and slang, when he became part of Fidel Castro’s circle, Guevara would also end up working in his socialist government in Cuba, first as a military judge in the war tribunals against the defeated “enemies of the revolution,” and then as Minister of Industries, of Finance and President of the National Bank of Cuba, as well as later as Cuban leading diplomat, joint positions in which he engineered the collapse of the Cuban economy and its subsequent dependence, first diplomatically, and then also economically, towards the Soviet Union, and after its fall, replaced by yet another nominally socialist country, Venezuela, which has recently suffered hard economic struggles of its own.
Like Tocqueville, Ernesto Guevara would also end up in self-exile. Still, instead of choosing a cloistered life and devoting his time to writing, he decided to take another path and travel again through the Third World, offering himself to promote the cause of socialist revolution.
In any case, the reflections from Che that remain from this period already demonstrate his growing discontent with Soviet communism, which he saw as an imperial parallel to American capitalism, reflecting what another thinker, the forgotten father of the European Union, Franco-Russian Hegelian bureaucrat and philosopher Alexandre Kojève, would also share, although without there ever having been any contact between the two of them.
In his final trips, especially to the Congo and Bolivia, his stints at revolution would inevitably fail, and Che would eventually be captured and executed, ending his chapter in history.
At this point, it would be worth considering how these two characters represent an ideal of the wandering intellectual, whose ideas were formed by their journeys and their journeys ended up shaping their political life, but to conclude with a mere comparison of the lives and works of the journeyman thinker par excellence in the Right, and his socialist counterpart on the Left, would be somewhat mediocre. In honor of both, a third figure should be introduced: that of the Polish romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz.
Without a doubt, Mickiewicz will be the most unknown of the trio, and with unfair reason, since he is probably the most famous and important Polish author in history. However, Mickiewicz is a name that is not well-known outside of Poland, and those who have no idea who he was probably cannot perceive the importance of his work for the Polish nation.
Like Tocqueville or Che, Mickiewicz’s life was marked by travelling and politics, although unlike the two of them, the essence of the Polish-Lithuanian bard’s work was neither philosophy, nor the practice of war, but literature, and poetry, mainly, but also playwriting, as well as prose.
Born after the unfortunate partitions of the Republic of Two Nations and educated in Russian territory, Mickiewicz’s first itinerant experience would be in Ukrainian lands, namely, Odessa and Crimea, until he was finally able to leave Russia and go into exile in Western Europe, beginning in Germany, where he would meet Hegel and Goethe, Switzerland and even Italy, where he would make contact with the revolutionary Carbonari (hence the link between Italian and Polish nationalism) before returning for short to Polish territory, this time in the Prussian partition, and then finally go to France, where he would settle, reconnecting with Switzerland, in its French-speaking regions, shortly after.
Mickiewicz was, above all, a Romantic, and his work, which was largely produced before his travels, reflects that philosophical inclination, demonstrating a strong nationalism, which was undoubtedly justified, since his homeland, what would have been the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, had been split between Russians, Austrians and Prussians mere years before its birth.
Like Tocqueville and Che, Mickiewicz’s writings represent his own political perspective, expressed in various ways, some more aesthetically beautiful than others.
If Motorcycle Diaries and Democracy in America were autobiographical narratives of their authors and sociological studies on the realities of the American continent in two different periods, many of Mickiewicz’s epic poems, like Konrad Wallenrod, but especially Pan Tadeusz, show not only details of his life of nobility in disgrace, but also of the collapse, struggle, and sacrifice of the Polish people under the imperial occupation to which they were subjected, which is why many of the Polish rebellions of the 19th century, eminently against Russia, would be inspired by the texts of the ‘Lithuanian’ bard. (I use both Polish and Lithuanian for Mickiewicz since he considered himself a Lithuanian of the Polish nation, that is, as belonging to the former Commonwealth.)
Adam Mickiewicz, like Tocqueville, would die in exile, although not in France, but in the Ottoman Empire, and just like Che, he would die surrounded by his followers and co-ideologues. Although he could not reach the degree of influence of these two, his spirit is still alive in the founding doctrines of the contemporary Polish state and in the monuments built in his honor after his death.
Perhaps his central idea, which still endures up to this day in Polish thought, is that of Poland as the Christ of the Nations, well represented in his theatrical drama Dziady, which, while not showing the conservative empiricism of Tocqueville nor the violent praxis of Che, undoubtedly represents the mysticism of a deep thinker, loyal to a cause, not that of freedom and cooperation, nor of equality and revolution, but that of his country and its rebirth from the sacrifice it was enduring.
I make that comparison because, so far in my Polish exile, between my decreasing nostalgia for a rebellious Latin America, which Che somewhat represents, and the hope for more freedom, rightly ordered towards the greater good, embodied in Tocqueville, I am left with the sacrifice in the face of adversity and the search for a grounding, maybe national, spirit, which curiously, or perhaps divinely, manifests itself in Mickiewicz.
It never ceases to amaze me that it is, once again, a strange, syncretic combination of authors and ideas that is brewing in my head and my soul. Still, it is indeed what also happened with all the itinerant intellectuals that I have mentioned and explored here, as their beliefs brewed in their journeys. It is precisely that connection and synchronicity that occurs in favor of those who seek greatness.
