the Occupation of Araucanía by Chilean forces. Chilean president José Joaquín Pérez authorized Cornelio Saavedra Rodríguez, commander of the Chilean troops, to arrest Antoine de Tounens on January 5, 1862. Tounens was then imprisoned and declared insane on September 2, 1862, by the court of Santiago and expelled to France on October 28, 1862. Attempts to return and fears of French intervention In a 1870 meeting of Saavedra with Mapuche lonkos at Toltén, Mapuche chiefs revealed to Saavedra that Antoine de Tounens was once again at Araucanía. Upon hearing that his presence in Araucanía had been revealed Orélie-Antoine de Tounens fled to Argentina, having however promised Quilapán to obtain arms. There is some reports that a shipment of arms seized by Argentine authorities at Buenos Aires in 1871 had been ordered by Orélie-Antoine de Tounens. A French battleship, d'Entrecasteaux, that anchored in 1870 at Corral, drew suspicions from Saavedra of some sort of French interference. Accordingly there may have been substance to these fears as information given to Abdón Cifuentes in 1870 an intervention in favour of the Kingdom of Araucanía and Patagonia against Chile was discussed in Napoleon III's Conseil d'Êtat. On August 28, 1873, the Criminal Court of Paris ruled that Antoine de Tounens, first "king of Araucania and Patagonia", did not justify his claim to the status of sovereignty. He died in poverty on September 17, 1878, in Tourtoirac, France, after years of fruitlessly struggling to regain his kingdom. After de Tounens (1873–present) Historians Simon Collier and William F. Sater describe the Kingdom of Araucanía as a "curious and semi-comic episode". According to travel writer Bruce Chatwin, the later history of the "kingdom" belongs rather to "the obsessions of bourgeois France than to the politics of South America." A French champagne salesman, Gustave Laviarde, impressed by the story, decided to assume the vacant throne as Aquiles I. He was appointed heir to the throne by Orélie-Antoine. The pretenders to the throne of Araucania and Patagonia have been called monarchs and sovereigns of fantasy, "having only fanciful claims to a kingdom without legal existence and having no international recognition". Therefore the "throne of Araucania" is sometimes the subject of disputes between "pretenders", some journalists wrote : "The memory of the French adventurer Orélie-Antoine, self-proclaimed king in 1860, and the defense of the rights of the Mapuches guide the action of this strange symbolic monarchy" and "The intensification of