Introduction

the Americas XLVIIK2), October 1991, 131-138 Copyright by the Academy of American Franciscan History INTRODUCTION Early on the fateful morning of Friday, November 15, 1889, a group of fellow officers and civilian republicans implored the gravely-ill Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca to ignore his wife's tearful protest and rise from his bed to lead his troops against the government of Brazil's Prime Minister, the Viscount of Ouro Preto. The republicans wanted to bring down the monar chy, but the Marshal was more concerned with correcting the existing mis treatment and disrespect of the army by causing a change of ministry. Deodoro heeded the men around him and rose to lead his troops in rebellion. He returned to his bed in the early afternoon once his troops successfully convinced the Prime Minister to step down in an attempt to salvage the Empire. But the Minister's gesture came too late to save the New World's only successful monarchy. Civilian republicans had already run a green and yellow replica of the United States flag up Rio's city hall and declared Brazil a republic. The bed-ridden Marshal was named Provisional Dictator. With few gun shots and but one casualty most other Brazilians accepted the new regime. The day which had begun so melodramatically with a plot to expell a ministry ended with boisterous and drunken groups of civilians marching through the streets of Rio singing the Marseilles and proclaming the Bra zilian Republic. This volume examines the first years of that new regime. Contemporaries were dazed by the pace of eyents. In the eighteen months since slavery had been abolished on May 13,1888 Brazil seemed to have shifted from one historical epoch to another. In that brief period after the slaves were emancipated, Latin America's longest-lived monarchy was overthrown, the aristocracy was terminated, the Church was disestablished, and the country's first military dictatorship was declared. Marshal De- odoro's coup d'etat did not prove to be the culmination of the struggles that had emerged in the Empire's last years; they would haunt the tumultuous decade of the 1890s. Indeed, the quarrels grew. During the century's last decade it seemed that time in Brazil had sped up; in just a few years the same conflicts erupted in Brazil that had emerged in Spanish America over the span of the nineteenth century under the guise of the Liberal Revolution: church versus state; centralism versus federalism; civilization versus barba- 131 132 INTRODUCTION rism (read: city versus countryside); nationalism versus cosmopolitanism; the Iberian tradition versus British, French and United States fashion; export agriculture versus industry; corporatism (and slavery) versus liberal individ ualism; monarchy versus republic. Some historians have argued that Marshal Deodoro was the unwitting agent of Brazil's bourgeois revolution.1 Certainly it was a contentious pe riod for Brazil in which rival groups sometimes debated and fought over vital points of principle. Republicans forged a new constitution which in serted the state into property and labor relations as well as into the private lives of citizens. The new regime also disrupted existing power relations by declaring a federal republic. The new alignment of forces allowed long standing political feuds to explode into open combat. The most bloody of these outbreaks, a civil war that raged in the South from 1893 to 1895, led to the establishment of a provisional government in Desterro, Santa Catarina and threatened to embroil Uruguayans and Argentines in Brazil's internal affairs. Marshal Deodoro became himself a victim of the struggles he had unin tentionally ushered in when the army, assisted by the first large scale rail road strike in the country's history, overthrew his government in 1891. Two years later the navy blockaded Rio's harbor in a six-month long revolt finally quelled by United States gunboats as North Americans successfully moved to replace British influence in Brazil. Revolts occured in the capitals of almost all states as new groups vied for power. In the huge states of Mato Grosso and Para separationist movements attempted to secede from the country and take with them over half the national territory. Brazilian society experienced great flux and agitation in the 1890s. In the Southeast, the freed men, who had just won their liberty, became margin alized by Italian immigrants who flooded in and changed the face of the cities: in Sao Paulo one heard more Italian than Portuguese. In Rio de Janeiro, in contrast, a nativist Jacobin movement consciously imitating its French namesake hunted down Portuguese merchants and monarchists who they accused of stoking the fires of inflation in the service of a purported plot to restore the monarchy. At the same time, a rubber boom began attracting despairing Northeastern migrants to the Amazon in search of "black gold." Other nordestinos flocked to Brazil's "mud-hut Jerusalem," Canudos, where a supposedly millenarian movement led by the mystic, Antonio Con- 1 Two of the most prominent studies to make this arguement are: Decio Saes, A Formagao do Estado Burgues no Brasil (1888-1891) (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1985) and Nelson Werneck Sodre, Historia da Burguesia Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizagao Brasileira, 1976). TOPIK AND LEVINE 133 selheiro, appeared to menace the Republic by attempting to restore the monarchy and jeopardize traditional property relations. Surprisingly, the economy flourished amid this political and social tur moil. The new constitution and institutions combined with a frenzied stock market to make everything seem possible. Brazilian capitalists forged large semi-monopoly companies that even bought out British firms. Factories feverishly stepped up production and the railroad, obeying the demands of prospering export planters, tied together ever greater stretches of the inte rior. Yet republicans ultimately failed to break sharply with the past despite their grandioise rhetoric and visionary projects. Republicans had preached that the new regime was inevitable and necessary because the overcentral- ized, aristocratic, and feudalistic Empire could not fulfill the needs of pro gressive capitalist development. Their most militant champions hoped that Marshal Deodoro could indeed deliver a bourgeios revolution. As Brazil's minister to the United States Salvador de Mendonca explained: "the transformation of the Brazilian Empire into the United States of Brazil was not a mere accident in the lives of political parties, an unexpected product of a military pronunciamento; it is the logical result of the historic evolution of progess of a nationality on the ascending road of liberty and civilization."2 But this view of the Republic's transformative promise quickly faded. Re publicans' failure to realize their expansive vision, their inability to force march Brazil into the modern world, subsequently condemned them to the derision of history. Republicans may have won the political battle, but they lost the historiographic war. Most scholars have seen nothing revolutionary in the new regime. They have ignored or ridiculed its initial audacious projects and instead emphasized its long-run failure to transform Brazilian society. Historians have come to accept the monarchist version of the Re public's founding. They see the Republican Revolution as a non-event, a mostly political effort by planters to wrap themselves in new language and institutions in order to maintain their traditional dominance. The essays in this volume argue that neither the grandiose teleological republican position nor the cynical monarchist stand is entirely tenable. It is clear that the plot hatched by the cabal in Deodoro's bedroom was a surprise to the vast majority of Brazilians. By one estimate, in November of 1889 there were only five thousand republicans in the entire country and very few people were informed of the plot. The entire operation was peace- 2 Salvador de Mendonca, Ajuste de contas (Rio de Janeiro: n.p., 1912) p. 58. 134 INTRODUCTION ful. Only the minister of navy resisted. The population stood by "beastlike" in Aristides Lobo's famous phrase, believing they were witnessing a mili tary parade.3 Even the Rio newspapers that reported the population's en thusiastic support of the Empire's overthrow had to explain the lack of mass participation or even excitement in the founding of the new regime. The Gazeta de Tarde assured its readers that despite the tiny number of repub licans in the country, the idea was in people's hearts; "all they lacked was the word" and then they became republican.4 The Didrio de Noticias went further, making a virtue of the limited public demonstration of support: "In the first moment, the [revolution] made a great impression, but one idea dominated the hearts of the most impatient and the most conservative or ganizations. Let us preserve order and respect property!"5 Surely in its origins this was not a popular movement. Foreigners were not sure what to make of the coup. The London Econ omist and the Statesman believed it one of the year's most important events that threatened European capital markets.6 Continental monarchs feared that the ease with which Emperor Dom Pedro II was overthrown would inspire republicans in Portugal which in turn would topple the crown of Spain, then Italy and finally "by a general upheaval of the social forces throughout Europe."7 The South American Journal in contrast, belittled the operation quipping that it occurred "without bloodshed and with very little more excitement than is customary in the streets during Carnival."8 The majority foreign opinion, even in republican United States was consternation rather than support; Dom Pedro had been a very popular figure and his regime one of the world's most stable governments.9 The ambiguity of Marshal Deodoro's intentions in creating the Republic and the lack of popular enthusiasm for it have been reflected in the histo riography.

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