These short monographs address the regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas, the governor of Buenos Aires almost throughout the period 1829–52, providing new and fascinating detail on the period of the French blockade at the end of the 1830s. French naval intervention, meant ostensibly to ensure that French citizens and French commerce were accorded treatment equal to British, plunged Buenos Aires into commercial depression and encouraged uprisings and invasion by Rosas’s enemies, the “Savage Unitarios.” Following prolonged crisis, the French failed to achieve their objectives as Rosas rode out the blockade and defeated his enemies. The blockade of March 1838–January 1840 triggered the rural uprising known as the Revolución de los Libres del Sur in November 1839 and indirectly provoked two spates of political assassination by Rosas’s supporters in Buenos Aires in October 1840 and April 1842.
As Jorge Gelman shows, numerous estancieros in areas close to the southern frontier,...
