Domingo faustino sarmiento biography

2nd President of Argentina from 1868 to 1874

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (Spanish:[doˈmiŋɡosaɾˈmjento]; 15 February 1811 – 11 September 1888) was an Argentine activist, intellectual, writer, statesman and President of Argentina. His writing spanned a wide range of genres and topics, from journalism to autobiography, to political philosophy and history. He was a member of a group of intellectuals, known as the Generation of 1837, who had a great influence on 19th-century Argentina. He was particularly concerned with educational issues and was also an important influence on the region's literature.

Sarmiento grew up in a poor but politically active family that paved the way for many of his future accomplishments. Between 1843 and 1850, he was frequently in exile, and wrote in both Chile and in Argentina. His greatest literary achievement was Facundo, a critique of Juan Manuel de Rosas, that Sarmiento wrote while working for the newspaper El Progreso during his exile in Chile. The book brought him far more than just literary recognition; he expended his efforts and energy on the war against dictatorships, specifically that of Rosas, and contrasted enlightened Europe—a world where, in his eyes, democracy, social services, and intelligent thought were valued—with the barbarism of the gaucho and especially the caudillo, the ruthless strongmen of nineteenth-century Argentina.

While president of Argentina from 1868 to 1874, Sarmiento championed intelligent thought—including education for children and women—and democracy for Latin America. He also took advantage of the opportunity to modernize and develop train systems, a postal system, and a comprehensive education system. He spent many years in ministerial roles on the federal and state levels where he travelled abroad and examined other education systems.

Sarmiento died in Asunción, Paraguay, at the age of 77 from a heart attack. He was buried in Buenos Aires. Tod

Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino

. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888). Argentine writer and statesman who visited Europe in 1846-1847, met several of the most important figures in French political and cultural life, and later claimed to have foreseen the Revolution of 1848.

Sarmiento was born in the isolated far western province of San Juan, just across the Andes from Chile. His formal education ended after elementary school, but he studied French on his own and devoured the few French books and periodicals available in San Juan. In 1840, amid the chaos and violence of political life in Argentina, Sarmiento's hostility to the nation's dictator, Juan Manuel de Rosas, forced him into exile in Chile. He worked as a journalist and teacher there, and in 1845 published his masterpiece, Civilizacion y Barbarie: Vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga. Facundo, as this text is known, is the most famous work of Argentine literature, and is arguably the most influential book published in Spanish in the nineteenth century. In it, Sarmiento described the life of Quiroga, an Argentine war-lord, but used that topic both to attack Rosas and to attempt to analyze the causes of the nation's violence and backwardness; that analysis drew heavily upon ideas taken from French writers and thinkers from Volney and Chateaubriand to Hugo, Leroux, and Lerminier.

The publication of Facundo in Chile led to political difficulties between that country and Rosas's Argentina, and in 1845 the Chilean government sought to ease those strains by sending Sarmiento to Europe to study educational systems there and to attract European immigration. Sarmiento described his three-year trip --to France, to Algeria and Spain, to Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, eventually to the United States--in a series of letters written to friends. Those letters were published, starting in 1849, as his Viajes--the first important travel narrative written by a Latin American.

Sarmiento arrived in Le Havre in May of

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Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (b. 15 February 1811; d. 11 September 1888), writer, educator, journalist, historian, linguist, and president of Argentina (1868–1874). According to Mary Peabody Mann, Sarmiento was "not a man but a nation." Born in the frontier city of San Juan, near the Andes, he was the son of a soldier who fought in the wars of independence and a mother who supported the family by weaving. An early intellectual influence was a maternal uncle and private tutor, the priest José de Oro. Steeped in the classics, the Bible, Latin, and French, Sarmiento began teaching elementary school in his teens. Post-Independence chaos and anarchy awakened his interest in orderly government. By 1829 he fought with the unitarists against caudillo rule. When the federalists gained control of San Juan, he fled to Chile to the town of Los Andes, where he taught school and worked in a store. Upon returning to San Juan in 1836, he started the newspaper, El Zonda, in which he expounded his ideas about education, agriculture, and modernization. Ahead of his time, Sarmiento advocated educating women. In 1839 he founded a secondary school for girls in San Juan (Colegio de Santa Rosa de América), for which he wrote the by-laws. Facing jail because of political activities against tyrant Juan Manuel de Rosas, Sarmiento fled to Chile in 1840.

In contrast to Argentina, Chile was developing peacefully under a government framework organized by Diego Portales. In Santiago, Sarmiento rose to a position of prestige and influence; he befriended educator and writer Andrés Bello, director of education (and later president of Chile) Manuel Montt, historian José Victorino Lastarria, and political activist Francisco Bilbao. Sarmiento pursued his twin interests—education and journalism—and he contributed articles to the influential newspapers El Mercurio, El Nacional, and El Progreso. He believed that Argentina's problems were "rooted in barb