Francisco Garcia-Calderon Rey

Francisco García Calderón Rey (Valparaíso, Chile, April 8, 1883 - Lima, Peru, July 1, 1953) was a Peruvian philosopher, writer, and diplomat.

He belonged to the so-called Generation of the 900s, along with Ventura García Calderón, his brother, Víctor Andrés Belaunde, and José de la Riva-Agüero y Osma, leader of the group. In general, he was influenced by Émile Boutroux, Raymond Poincaré and the French monarchists who followed Charles Maurras, head of l'Action Francaise, a powerful intellectual movement of the time that sought to reestablish the Old Regime in France and it was inspired by the nationalism of Ernst Renan and others. He was never a monarchist himself, like Riva-Agüero, but he had sympathies for the imperial trials in Mexico and Brazil during the 19th century as a remedy for democratic anarchy.

Biography

He was born during the war with Chile (1879-1883). He was the son of the President of Peru Francisco García Calderón Landa, an illustrious 19th century jurist and rector of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, and Carmen Rey Basadre. His father, who was deported to Chile while he was president, retired to Europe in 1884 with his family and was able to return to Peru in 1886.

He studied at the Colegio Sagrados Corazones Recoleta, where he met the Marquis of Montealegre de Aulestia, José de la Riva-Agüero y Osma, who would become one of his closest friends. In 1901, he entered to study Letters and Law at the Letters Faculty of the University of San Marcos, of which his father was rector. In San Marcos, along with Riva-Agüero and his brother, Ventura, they formed a group influenced by Alejandro Deústua Escarza, which would later be known as the Generation of 900.

With the death of his father, in 1906, he moved his permanent address to Paris, where he emigrated with his entire family. To France he took the position of chancellor of the Peruvian legation.

In 1908, he won a prize from the French Academy for Le Pérou Contemporain (1907) and, that same year, he was appointed second secretary of the Peruvian legation in London, where he met Baron Friedrich von Hügel and Ramiro de Maeztu.

In 1909, he married, in Lima, Rosa Amalia Lores Hurtado, daughter of Benito Lores Bathel and Dolores Hurtado Fernández-Prada. That same year, he is appointed second secretary of the Peruvian legation in Paris. In 1912 he published Les démocraties latines de l'Amérique in a collection directed by Gustave Le Bon. In 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, he was appointed first secretary of the Peruvian legation, but unfortunately, in 1916, his brother José died in Verdun in the ranks of the Foreign Legion.

In 1918, he was appointed Plenipotentiary Minister of Peru in France and, the following year, he obtained the same position in Belgium. He publishes writings in his native country, some of them published in the weekly ¨Sudamérica¨, directed by the also writer and consular agent Carlos Pérez Cánepa. With the end of the great war, in 1919, he was appointed as the Peruvian representative at the Paris Peace Conference and, in 1920, at the League of Nations in Geneva. In 1921, he resigned from his position as plenipotentiary minister in opposition to the government of President Augusto B. Leguía.

In 1930, with the fall of the Leguía regime, he resumed his post as minister in France. The following year, he was appointed delegate to the XV International Labor Conference in Geneva and, in 1933, to the League of Nations, of which he presided over the 103rd session, in 1938. With the start of World War II, in 1940, He is accredited Minister Plenipotentiary for the Vichy Government. In 1942, while in Paris as ambassador, he was arrested by the German occupation forces, as a diplomat from a belligerent country in the Bad Godesberg camp, which accelerated an early process of insanity. The following year, he is named ambassador of Peru in Portugal, but, in 1945, he retires from the diplomatic service.

Given his precarious state of health, in 1947 he decided to return to Peru with his wife and, the following year, he was admitted to the Larco Herrera mental hospital. He died in Lima on July 7, 1953 and was buried in the Presbítero Maestro Cemetery.

He had been a member of the Peruvian Academy, the International Diplomatic Academy, the Sociological Society of Paris, and the Franco-American Committee of Paris.

Works

• Literis (1904).
• Le Pérou contemporain (1907).
• Men and ideas of our time (1907).
• Les courrents sociologiques de l'Amérique Latine (1908).
• Professors of idealism (1909).
• The creation of a continent (1912).
• Les démocraties latines de l'Amerique (1912).
• The dilemma of the Great War (1919).
• Ideas and impressions (1919).
• Europe restless (1927, Madrid, Editorial Mundo Latino)
• Francisco García Calderón, Latin America and Peru of the nine hundred (text anthology) / compilation, introduction and notes of Teodoro Hampe Martínez. Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos " Corporación Financiero de Desarrollo, 2003. The full electronic version is available at http://sisbib.unmsm.edu.pe/bibvirtual/books/History/amer_peru/content.htm
• The spirit of the new Germany (1928).
• In Memoriam (1944).

Awards and recognitions

• Great cross of the Order of the Sun, Peru.
• Grand Cross Knight of the Order of Isabel la Catholic, Spain.
• Comrade of the Legion of Honor, France (1918).
• Order of the Liberator, Venezuela (1919).