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. Brazilians have tended to echo the frustration of the militant republican, Antonio da Silva Jardim, who lamented that this was not "the republic of my dreams." Embarrassed by the authoritarian coronelist re­ gimes that soon seized power under the Republic, Brazilian and foreign historians have seen little to celebrate in its birth. Indeed the centenniel of

3 Quoted in Helio Silva, 1889, a Repiiblica nao Esperou o Amanhecer (Rio: Civilizacao Brasileira, 1972), p. 88. 4 In Manoel Ernesto Campos Porto, Apontamentos para a Histdria da Repiiblica (Rio: Imprensa Nacional, 1890), p. 131. 5 Ibid, p. 195. 6 London Economist, 23 Nov. 1889, p. 495; Statesman, Jan. 3, 1890, p.l. 7 New York Times, Dec. 22, 1889, p.l. 8 South American Journal, 14 Dec. 1889, p. 757. 9 Public Opinion, 8:7 (Nov. 23, 1889):159-162. TOPIK AND LEVINE 135 the revolution two years ago passed with little fanfare. Many Brazilians seemed more interested in the bicentenniel of the French Revolution—now there was a revolution that meant something! Historians have tended to view the Republic, at least during the 1890s, the same way as the diplomat Manoel Oliveira Lima did when he talked of "public spirit" and then corrected himself "that is, the spirit of the ruling class (since one should not speak of public spirit in Brasil where no people [povo] exist."10 The "re­ publican revolution" was a charade in which elite factions changed cos­ tumes and flags but clutched on to the same values and clan allegiances.

Paradoxically, while the literature that focuses on the political changes attendant on the proclamation of the Republic tends to dismiss it as a sham or a missed opportunity, students of the economy have argued that the years between the emancipation of slaves in 1888 and the end of the administra­ tion of President Floriano Peixoto (1891-94) constituted something of a bourgeois revolution. This was an era of unparelleled industrial expansion and the rise of a financier class. Many economic historians argue that the Republic's birth was the inevitable result of the deepening of capitalist relations, rather than the off-spring of a relatively insignificant military putsch. Yet they too sadly note that the grand experiment soon failed and traditional economic policy resumed its hegemony. The articles in this volume, half by Brazilians and half by North Amer­ icans, argue that the transition from monarchy to republic aroused serious ideological debates and brought new social interests into the political fray. While the actual proclamation of the Republic was attended with little pop­ ular fanfare, the power vacuum of the 1890s that was created by the collapse of the old regime allowed previously muffled voices to be heard and new ideas to emerge. These essays attempt to reclaim from the oversimplifica­ tions of the historiography the various parties that contested the 1890s . Jose Murilo de Carvalho examines the different objectives of the Republic's founders by analyzing the ideas and symbolic importance of Marshal De- odoro da Fonseca, Lt. Colonel Benjamin Constant de Magalhaes, Marshal Floriano Peixoto, and Quintino Bocaiuva. He demonstrates that these men, who are generally viewed as complementary co-founders of the Republic, embodied very different and competing visions of what Brazil's future should be. Deodoro represented the corporate interests of the military, Ben­ jamin Constant and Floriano spoke for Postivists and urban "middle-class bolshevik" Jacobins while Quintino was a leader of the rural oligarchy. The

10 Manoel Oliveira Lima, "Sete Anos de Repulbica no Brasil" in Jose' Sebastiao Witter ed. Manoel Ernesto Campos Porto, Apontamentos para a Histdria da Repiiblica (SP: Brasiliense, 1990), p. 22. 136 INTRODUCTION four "revolutionaries" were joined only by their common refusal to allocate an important place for the "povo." Jeffrey Needell explores the shift from monarchy to republic through the lense of one prominent individual: Joaquim Nabuco. A leading abolitionist and social reformer under the Empire, he was branded a reactionary by the new regime when he continued to prefer monarchy. Nabuco ultimately came to defend the Republic as its ambassador to the United States, but not before writing a extremely influential and flattering history of the monarchy. Need­ ell cautions us of the pitfalls in associating the Empire with reaction and the Republic with progress. Robert M. Levine turns to a social history of the millenarian movement in Canudos to uncover the popular perceptions of the new regime. He notes that the most famous study of the movement, Euclides da Cunha's Os Sertoes, was framed in Jacobin terms that did a disservice to Canudos' residents. Levine finds that they were not fanatics, not revolutionaries, and only tepidly monarchists. Rather than ignorant, superstitious peasants, they were simple folk who knew where their interests lay. They remembered the monarchy fondly because they believed that the Emperor Dom Pedro proved himself to be a friend of the people by freeing the slaves while the Republic was the redoubt of oligarchs who viewed the people as the spoils of office. The backlanders were not overcome with hopelessness, resignation or su­ perstition. They took control of their lives and participated in the local political alliances Conselheiro forged. By making the defenders of Canudos less spectacular and exceptional Levine has rescued them from the museum of curiosities and restored them to the mainstream of backland life. They were probably typical of many people suffering the droughts and despair of the Northeast.

Returning to the litoral, Maria de Lourdes M. Janotti presents the activ­ ities of monarchists in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo after the fall. Ironically, she argues, there was no monarchist ideology until near the end of the Empire when the republican challenge forced a coherent response. The proclamation of the new regime, while convincing most monarchists to adhere to republicanism, caused others such as Joaquim Nabuco, Affonso Celso, and Eduardo Prado to promote monarchy in print. Action was more difficult. The resistance of the royal family to a restoration undercut mon­ archist activity. But there were plans aplenty. Jacobin fears of a monarchist conspiracy were well founded.

Those Jacobin enemies of the monarchists and of Antonio Conselheiro are the subject of Suely R.R. Queiroz's article. She charts their rise especially TOPIK AND LEVINE 137 in Rio de Janeiro with the ascendancy to power of Marshal Floriano Peixoto. Avid defenders of the Republic, which had brought many employment in the government, this urban petite bourgeoisie believed it was reliving the French Revolution. They were convinced that the feudal monarchists, excessively religious peasants (Canudos was characterized as "our Vendee") and for­ eigners—particularly Portuguese and British—conspired against the new regime and against the nation. Jacobins swore that only a strong, central­ ized, militaristic state could withstand the many challenges it faced. When Floriano handed the presidency to the Paulista civilian Prudente de Morais, the Jacobins went into the opposition. They plotted Prudente's overthrow, but failed. Their unsuccessful assassination plot combined with the defeat of the Canudos peasants ended the Jacobins as a significant political force and guaranteed the hegemony of the "coffee republic's" rural oligarchy.

Steven C. Topik views the struggles of the 1890s through the prism of the economy, particularly the spectacular stock market boom known as the Encilhamento. He notes that it began already under the Empire because of unusually propitious international capital conditions and as a response to the abolition of slavery. While the boom's architects were motivated by political considerations and greed, they should receive credit for the daring initiatives they took to recast Brazil in the image of the United States. Policies and motives changed little after Dom Pedro's overthrow. Despite his liberal rhetoric, the first republican minister of finance Rui Barbosa essentially continued the programs of the late monarchy as did his successor. The principal beneficiaries were a financier class that had emerged under the Empire to tap national and international capital markets in order to create vast corporations. While there was much fraud involved, there were also serious and well considered projects of previously unimagined scope. Bank­ ers pieced together enormous conglomerates, many of which survived the stock boom. Ultimately, however, financial folly joined with the hostility of Marshal Floriano and the Jacobins to the Encilhamento's monarchist finan­ ciers to burst the bubble of speculation and discredit activist state policies for the next decade.

The last contribution is an overview by Joan Meznar. She pieces together the various images of the decade of the 1890s that are reflected in the articles in this volume to create a coherent, if discouraging whole. She notes that the theme of missed opportunities and exclusion of the mass of Brazilians has been altogether too common in Brazilian history.

We hope that these articles will stimulate further research in this fasci­ nating, but often overlooked era. Although the Republic did not match the 138 INTRODUCTION dreams of its most visionary proponents, for a short time it did push into the center of debate many people and issues that had formerly been marginal and which would soon return to obscurity. Its failed experiments offer a glimpse of the other paths that Brazil might have trod. This moment of political ferment and economic boom might have given birth to a different Brazil. One of the objects of this collection is to recover the heat and excitement of the times, to explain the new directions pursued in Brazil and why much of their promise went unfulfilled. One wonders, had Marshal Deodoro that morning of November 15 been able to anticipate the events of the following years and the ultimate course of the Republic, would he have heeded his wife and remained in bed?

STEVEN C. TOPIK AND ROBERT M. LEVINE