Charles Rene Gaston Gustave de Raousset-Boulbon (Avignon, 1817 - Guaymas, 1854) was a French adventurer and entrepreneur and, by some accounts a pirate, and a theoretician of colonialism. He was born in Avignon in 1817. During his life in France he was a typical "rural nobleman." He inherited the title of count and, as happened to many members of French nobility after the French Revolution, he spent his fortune gambling and drinking in Paris. He moved to Algiers, where his first theories about colonialism were born; the French Revolution of 1848 killed his hopes of making a new fortune on Africa and he returned to Paris, where he failed to integrate into a society where aristocrats were fading and giving way to a new bourgeoisie.
Unable to survive in France he boarded a ship sailing to the Americas as a third-class passenger; he disembarked in a Colombian port. His impressions are typical of a 19th century aristocrat: A letter to a friend describes Colombia as:
...the true America, the Spanish America. Ruins, mendicants, racial degradation, the haphazard mixture of all kins of blood, vagabonds playing guitar... naked children, little savages running everywhere amongst dogs... All of it in an admirable state of Nature.
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He arrived in San Francisco and felt deeply disillusioned after not receiving the treatment he thought was deserved for a Count.
After a series of failed enterprises as a gold prospector he became involved in a conflict in the Mexican state of Sonora. A group of mercenaries under the command of the Count Raousset-Boulbon attempted two filibuster expeditions from San Francisco against Sonora, Mexico in 1852 and 1854. The main objective of the invaders was to attain independence for the province of Sonora to form a new country separate from Mexico, following the example of Texas, which had achieved the same thing in 1836. The first expedition was under the guise of a mining company known as La Compenia Restauradora de la Mina de la Arizona. He captured Hermosillo, Sonora, the capital of the State, in 1852. A retreat to Guaymas resulted in his surrender to General Miguel Blanco. In 1854 he returned to Sonora, but his forces did not get the support they needed. They were defeated in Guaymas by a small army led by Jose Maria Yanez, in the Battle of Guaymas, July 13, 1854.
On August 13, 1854 the Count Raousset-Boulbon was executed by a firing squad in Guaymas. He refused to wear a blindfold.