He is considered to be the chief ideologue and political leader of the faction that advocated for the full independence of Paraguay from the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata and from the Empire of Brazil.

Francia's father was an officer turned tobacco planter from São Paulo, and his mother was a Paraguayan descended from Spanish colonists.

On 13 April 1785, after four years studying, he became a doctor of theology and master of philosophy at the College of Monserrat at the National University of Córdoba[4]: 21  in what would soon become Argentina.

Although he was dogged by suggestions that his father, a Brazilian tobacco exporter, was a mulatto, Francia was awarded a coveted chair of theology at the Seminary of San Carlos in Asunción in 1790.

His interest in astronomy, combined with his knowledge of French and other subjects considered arcane in Asunción, caused some superstitious Paraguayans to regard him as a wizard who could predict the future.

[4]: 22  Other significant members included Fulgencio Yegros; Pedro Juan Caballero; Manuel Atanasio Cabañas; and the last colonial governor, Bernardo de Velasco.

[4]: 50 One Latin American scholar, Antonio de la Cova, summarised Francia's rule as follows: "... we find a strange mixture of capacity and caprice, of far-sighted wisdom and reckless infatuation, strenuous endeavours after a high ideal and flagrant violations of the simplest principles of justice.

He cut off Paraguay from the rest of the world by stopping foreign commerce, but carefully fostered its internal industries and agriculture under his personal supervision.

Dr. Francia disposed to be hospitable to strangers from other lands, and kept them prisoners for years; lived a life of republican simplicity, and severely punished the slightest want of respect.

He greatly limited the power of the Church and the landed elites in favor of giving peasants a way to make a living on state-run estancias.

Francia and his policies were in fact very well received by the majority of Paraguayans, excluding the small ruling classes, and his neutrality in foreign affairs kept peace in a period of turmoil.

[10] Francia's authoritarian regime built the foundations of a strong and dirigiste state in order to undertake the economic modernization of the country.

Paraguay thus instituted rigorous protectionism at a time when most other countries were adopting the free-trade system promoted by the United Kingdom while entrusting their national bourgeoisie with the task of piloting wealth creation.

The country had a growing industry and a merchant fleet made up of ships built in national shipyards, had a trade surplus and was debt-free.

[11] In February 1820, Francia's political police called the Pyraguës ("hairy feet") uncovered and quickly crushed a plot by the elites and many leading independence figures to assassinate him.

On 9 June 1821, a letter detailing an anti-Francia conspiracy was found by two slaves and Francia's priest, who had knowledge of the plot from the confessions of a conspirator.

He abolished flogging, but his implementation of the death penalty was brutal, as he insisted all executions be carried out at a banquillo ("stool") under an orange tree outside his window.

To avoid wasting bullets, most victims were bayoneted, and their families were not allowed to collect the corpses until they had been lying there all day to make sure that they were dead.

In 1821, Francia ordered the arrest and imprisonment of the famous French botanist and explorer Aimé Bonpland, who was running a private farm harvesting Yerba mate on the banks of the Paraná, which was seen to be a threat to the Paraguayan economy.

[17] Francia believed the states of Latin America should form a confederation based on equality of nations and joint defence.

Francia abolished higher education on the grounds that it was the nation's financial priority to fund the army and that private study could be freely conducted in his library.

He used this Regal Patronage in a severe way, controlling every aspect of the Catholic Church in Paraguay; however, there is no evidence nor tangible proof that Francia provoked a schism with the Pope.

At most, Paraguay's isolation, forced both by external pressures and by Francia himself, made it very difficult for the Vatican to establish communications with priests of the country.

Taking the prerrogatives of the "Real Patronato" to an extreme, in mid-June 1816, Francia ordered all nighttime processions to be banned except that of Corpus Christi.

He would lock the palace doors himself, unroll the cigars that his sister made to ensure there was no poison, prepare his own yerba mate, and sleep with a pistol under his pillow.

[24] Francia left the state treasury with at least twice as much money in it as when he took office, including 36,500 pesos of his unspent salary, the equivalent of several years' pay.

Thus, White's fictional account of Francia relies heavily on snippets of the work (e.g., one sentence in a footnote dealing with a tailor and cloth becomes an almost tragi-comic scene in El Supremo).

His reputation abroad was negative: Charles Darwin, for one, hoped he would be overthrown, though Thomas Carlyle (himself no friend to democracy) found material to admire even in the publications of Francia's detractors.

[26] Paraguayan author Augusto Roa Bastos wrote an ambivalent depiction of the life of Francia, a novel entitled Yo el Supremo (I, the Supreme).

In the next chapter, "Service By Edict", Francia forces the Catholic clerics he assembles to hold a third Sunday Mass before noon and give public prominence to the two women, who are allowed their corsets but not their gold hair combs: