will need me; there is in him a candid gentleness, a vulnerable passion that requires the hand of a friend. Dorrego, however, is as insistent and dogmatic as his master Voltaire, and nothing inspires more scorn in him than the news that in Mexico and Chile there are priests who share our ideas, start discussion groups, publish revolutionary newspapers. Heâs adopted Voltaireâs anticlerical motto: Ecrasez lâinfâme!
Which is to say that the Café de Malcos was our university, and in it circulated, now openly instead of in secret, La Nouvelle Héloïse, The Social Contract, The Spirit of the Laws, and Candide. There all these books were read and meticulously discussed by the young men who were now opposing the Spanish administrators and the Argentine conservatives.
âIn the City Hall they talk about the general will of the people!â
âYou should have seen the faces on the Spaniards!â
âOne even said youâd never hear nonsense like this in a Spanish assembly!â
Baltasar Bustos declared, in opposition to his friends, that the general ideas of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu were all well and good, but it was up to each individual to put them into practice in his personal and civic life. It is not enough, he exclaimed, to denounce the general injustice of social relations or even to change the government if personal relationships arenât also changed. Let us begin by revolutionizing our behavior, Bustos suggested; but at the same time we should change the government, suggested Dorrego and Varela.
âWhy are laws valid only in one country and not in all countries?â
âYouâre right. They must be changed. Human law is universal.â
âThatâs what Argentina should doâwe should universalize the laws of civilization. We must assume the risks of the human race.â
We laughed at him a little, affectionately. Everyone knew that Baltasar Bustos had read all the books of the Enlightenment; we called him the Quixote of Reason, but we didnât know what to fear most: his eloquent confusion of philosophies or his foolhardy, quixotic decision to test the validity of his readings in reality.
âNow, Baltasar, I hope youâre not going toâ¦â
âBaltasar, act politically, with usâ¦â
âWith you, Iâll never find out if the law can really encompass all classes and not just one. The three of us are sons of ranchers, merchants, viceregal functionaries. We risk confusing our freedom with that of everyone else, without being certain thatâs the way things really are.â
âThe government has to be changed!â
âThe new government will change the laws!â
âWeâll see to it that your ideas become reality!â
âAll revolutions begin in the individual conscience. Everything else derives from that.â
âSo, what are you suggesting, Baltasar?â
While he was putting his plan into action that night in the bedrooms of the aristocracy, Dorrego and I, Varela, were proclaiming a junta headed by Cornelio Saavedra, hero in the defeat of the British invasion of 1807, a born military leader, but in fact a conservative man. According to Bustos, Saavedra wanted freedom for the Creoles but not for the blacks, the poor, the downtrodden. The other leader of the junta was Bustosâs personal hero, Juan José Castelli, a man of ideas and an activist as well, who diligently sought to make law and reality coincide. Biologically speaking, neither was young any longer: Saavedra was fifty and Castelli forty-six. The young man of the revolution was Mariano Moreno, beloved by all, indomitable, radical, who at the age of thirty had made the greatest economic demands possible for the nascent Argentine revolution: free trade was necessary for the well-being of the people in the RÃo de la Plata. The young, ardent, fragile Mariano Moreno inspired love in everyone; we had heard strong and