[Serviez, Alfred de]:

$2,000 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

L'AIDE DE CAMP OU L'AUTEUR INCONNU. SOUVENIRS DES DEUX-MONDES, PUBLIÉS PAR MAURICE DE VIARZ. A scarce account of the independence movement in South America, with questions regarding authorship still outstanding. Palau notes that some scholars believe that only the first part of these memoirs was written by General Serviez, a French officer who became Bolivar's aide-de-camp and was assassinated in 1816. The text after page 251 was supposedly completed by the General's assistant, José Maria Córdoba. Other scholars have indicated that the entire work is a plagiarism of Lallemant's Historia de Colombia, and that the attribution to Gen. Serviez is the work of the French officer's relative, novelist Alfred Emmanuel Roergas de Serviez.Questions of authorship aside, it is known that Serviez served as an officer under Napoleon and was wounded in the French war against Spain. Afterwards he took refuge with the wife of a French general in England, travelled to the United States, and eventually made his way to Venezuela, where he devoted himself to the cause of independence for the Latin American republics. In addition to recounting Serviez's experiences before arriving in South America, L'Aide de Camp... provides much information about Bolívar and the fight for independence through the early constitutional period, focusing on the northern portion of South America, particularly present-day Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador. A rare account of Latin American independence.

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