The Emperor of Brazil: An Experiment in Liberal Monarchy

The tiny company of American monarchs have, for the most part, been figures of melodrama and pathos, ruling briefly and departing in violence. Maximilian and Carlotta; Christophe, the megalomaniac Emperor of Haiti; Augustin of Mexico, proclaimed by a mob in 1822 and shot two years later in an obscure town near the Gulf Coast.

Julian, Emperor of the Huasteca, ruling over the mountain Indians above Tampico in the days of disorder that followed Hidalgo’s insurrection in 1810 and eventually slaughtered in the jungle by the Spanish soldiers—they form a group of exotic figures beside whose tales of high tragedy the long history of the Brazilian Empire seems prosaic and pedestrian indeed.

Yet it was the very duration of this monarchy—from the day in 1822 when Prince Pedro flourished his sword by the brook of Ypiranga and cried, “Independence or death! We are separated from Portugal!” to the dawn in 1889 when his son sailed away after a revolution in which there was only one casualty (and that not fatal)—that made it more remarkable, in a continent dedicated primarily to republicanism, than the reigns that ended in rapid tragedy.

Just as remarkable was the fact that the Brazilian empire lived successfully through several decades of war and internal disturbances, and finally collapsed in the middle of a long period of growing peace, prosperity and enlightenment.

The reasons for these paradoxical elements in the history of the empire are to be found partly, as we shall see, in the social structure of the country, partly in the dynastic concerns of the Braganzas, and to a great extent in the personal character of Dom Pedro II, a devoted liberal who assiduously prepared his subjects for the days when Emperors would be superseded.

The origin of the Brazilian Empire has its roots in the problems that afflicted the Kings of Portugal as rulers of a small country on the edge of a peninsula always dominated by the stronger power of Spain. As early as the 16th century, Admiral Martin Affonso de Souza, first governor-general of Brazil, advised João III to solve his political problems by transferring his centre of government to the New World.

Later in the century, the idea of a trans-Atlantic monarchy appeared in a different context, when Philip II of Spain, who had assumed the Portuguese crown after the extinction of the Aviz dynasty with the death of Dom Henrique in 1580, thought to buy off the rival Braganza claims by offering Brazil as an independent domain. The offer was refused, and eventually, in 1640, the Braganzas returned to rule in an independent Portugal.

But the new king, João IV, still feared a further Spanish attempt to unite the Iberian kingdoms, and, in in the hope of securing a powerful ally, he tried to marry his son, Dom Theodosio, to a Bourbon princess, intending to abdicate in their favour and to rule his own kingdom in Brazil. This plan came to nothing, as did a later suggestion of the Marquis of Pombal, after the great earthquake of 1755, that Lisbon should be superseded by a new capital to be created in the New World.

Thus, when the French crossed the Pyrenees in 1807, a plan familiar to Portuguese monarchs and statesmen for almost three centuries was put into operation, as the mad queen Maria and her regent son, Dom João, sailed from the Tagus a day before Junot’s army marched into an undefended Lisbon.

As a practical plan it was good. In Europe, the Portuguese monarchy could not hope to defend itself against the invading French, while in South America it was protected by 3,000 miles of ocean, patrolled by the British fleets, and could base itself on a land whose economic resources were potentially inexhaustible.

But neither Queen Maria nor her son, who succeeded as João VI in 1816, founded a Brazilian monarchy. They merely transferred the administrative centre of the Portuguese kingdom to Rio de Janeiro, then a primitive colonial city, where vultures were the only scavengers, where manual work was performed by slaves, and where white men preferred mendicancy to the indignity of soiling their hands.

Inevitably, the fact that for many years the colony was cut off from its mother country demanded certain important reforms which tended towards Brazilian self-sufficiency, such as the abolition of the Portuguese trade monopoly.

But the major policies of the government were always dominated by the prospect of an eventual return to Portugal, and by the dynastic ambitions of João and his Spanish Bourbon wife, Carlota Joaquina, whose desire to frustrate the independence movements in Spanish America led to the Portuguese invasion of the Banda Oriental (now Uruguay) and its incorporation into Brazil as the Cisplatine Province.

The idea of a separate Brazilian monarchy was hastened when, in 1815, the Congress of Vienna declared the former colony a co-ordinate part of the Kingdom of Portugal, Algarve and Brazil. This move, designed to pacify the colony and foster its loyalty to the mother country, had the opposite effect; it encouraged a sense of self-importance which combined with hatred of the Portuguese party in court, and with the desire—fostered by examples in Spanish America—for a liberal constitution, to produce a growing movement towards separation.

João VI, who opposed all constitutional reform, became the symbol of reaction; crown prince Pedro and his wife, Maria Leopoldina of Hapsburg, became liberal figureheads.

The conflict of views developed rapidly towards violence; uprisings occurred in the remoter provinces; and king João, having called a convention to discuss the problems that were troubling the country, quarrelled with its members and dispersed them by force, with the result that several delegates were killed.

It is probable that civil war was averted only by the fact that a political crisis in Portugal forced king João vi to return in 1821 to his European kingdom.

Prince Pedro remained as Regent. Encouraged by princess Maria Leopoldina and by the liberal leader, Jose Bonifacio de Andrada, he accepted the idea of separation and, when the king ordered his return to Europe—a move that seemed to indicate the intention to re-affirm the colonial status of Brazil—he made his declaration of independence. On December 1st, he was crowned emperor of Brazil.

The motives of Dom Pedro I were perhaps not wholly idealistic; for, anxious to maintain the dynastic interests of the Braganzas, king João had, on leaving Brazil, urged his son to take this very course if separation seemed inevitable, rather than let Brazil pass under alien control. The nine years of his stormy reign were certainly to show that, as emperor, Dom Pedro was by no means so consistent a liberal as he appeared during his regency.

Some of the difficulties that the new monarch endured were inherited from the policies followed by his parents. Carlota Joaquina’s enterprises on the Rio de la Plata had left a distrust between Brazil and her neighbours to the south which was to trouble the empire for several decades. In particular, the Uruguayans had never accepted their incorporation into the Portuguese dominions, and the Brazilian declaration of independence gave them a renewed hope that their own desire for autonomy would be recognized.

This hope was vain; and, in April, 1825, the exiled leader Juan Antonio Lavalleja led a band of 33 horsemen over the border into the Cisplatine Province and started a war of independence which went on for three years, embroiled Brazil with Argentina, and ended, thanks largely to British intervention, in the recognition of Uruguayan independence in 1828.

This virtual defeat was a setback to Brazilian national pride that intensified the growing unpopularity of Dom Pedro, who displayed a basic weakness of character, combined with inopportune spells of inflexibility. Among other errors, he took as his mistress an adventuress named Domitilia de Castro Canto e Mello.

This affair might have been tolerated, but for the fact that it was carried on with an almost total disregard for the feelings of the empress Maria Leopoldina, whom the Brazilians loved for her gentle character and her liberal principles. When Maria Leopoldina died of puerperal fever in 1826, rumour attributed her death to grief over Pedro’s infidelity; and popular indignation was aggravated when Domitilia later began to interfere in public affairs.

But it was the lingering influence of the Portuguese connection that precipitated the final conflict between the emperor and his subjects. The death of king João VI in 1826 resulted in the Portuguese proclaiming Pedro their king; and, although he abdicated in favour of his seven-year-old daughter, Maria da Gloria, the emperor continued to be concerned with the affairs of his native country. When his brother Miguel usurped the throne in 1828, Pedro used money from the Brazilian treasury to support the forces that upheld the interests of his daughter.

This was greatly resented by the Brazilians; but Pedro’s pro-Portuguese sentiments were revealed in an even more disturbing way in his handling of internal affairs. As time went on, he listened more closely to the advice of Portuguese courtiers of absolutist convictions, and used the poder moderador (moderating power) granted him under the constitution in a despotic manner, so as to frustrate the wishes of the elected legislators.

The deputies retaliated by refusing to vote budgets and by ignoring other imperial recommendations; and the situation was exacerbated by the news of the French Revolution of 1830; in the spring of 1831, there were armed rebellions in the outlying regions.

A further dispute between Dom Pedro and the legislature over the constitutionality of his arbitrary appointment of ministers resulted in a final and childish act of defiance on the Emperor’s part, when, on 6 April 1831, he appointed a ministry chosen from among the most unpopular of the titled reactionaries.

Angry crowds surged into the streets and public places of Rio de Janeiro; the troops fraternized with the demonstrators; finally the household guards deserted and left Dom Pedro alone with his family in the palace.

On the morning of 7 April, he abdicated in favour of his four-year-old son, also named Pedro, and bade farewell in a mood of romantic renunciation. “Farewell, Patria, farewell, friends, farewell forever,” he wrote in a lachrymose letter to the newspapers of the capital.

The rest of his life was dedicated to the war to establish his daughter on the Portuguese throne. His direct influence on Brazilian affairs ended with his departure; although his name was sometimes invoked by discontented politicians, he himself played no further part, and the Portuguese question ceased to be a point of contention after his death in 1834.

The early part of the reign of Pedro II was administered by a regency, which developed into a political office not unlike the presidency of a republic; after ten years, the competition of the political parties to control it had resulted in such dissension within the country that it was finally decided to acquire a non-partisan ruler by declaring the Emperor of age several years before the constitution would normally have allowed.

In 1840, the fourteen-year-old Dom Pedro II assumed the poder moderador; since the constitution provided for no prime minister, this necessitated his appointing and presiding over the council of ministers. In this task his youth made it inevitable that he should be influenced by the advice of the courtiers who surrounded him, until the Brazilians began to think they were being ruled by an aulic faction, popularly referred to as the Club da Joanna.

In 1847, this situation was ended by the appointment of a president of the council, equivalent to a prime minister, who assumed the responsibility for selecting ministers and presiding over their consultations.

Even so, the emperor still retained considerable powers and duties, including not only the approval of laws, but also the dismissal of cabinets and the dissolution of legislatures, all of which tasks Dom Pedro took very seriously, using them to preserve a balance between the opposing parties, while steering the country in the direction of the democratic progress he considered desirable.

The young man who thus, in his early twenties, assumed the responsibilities of the principal office in one of the world’s largest countries was a benign and bearded giant, who on principle refused to sign a death sentence, and who delighted to drive at top speed through the streets of Rio, preceded by two mounted trumpeters who warned the people to clear the streets.

Dom Pedro was a philosopher, who carried his democracy and his tolerance to logical extremes. A Catholic of the school of Lord Acton, he once sat on the platform at a Sankey and Moody revival meeting and, on another occasion, went down on his knees to pray in Luther’s chapel.

Although an emperor, he engaged a republican to tutor his children, and travelled abroad like an ordinary tourist, on at least one occasion bolting for a hackney cab with a paper parcel under his arm to avoid a full-scale royal welcome in a European city.

He was a scholar of versatility and imaginativeness, a minor poet of respectable achievement, and a linguistic prodigy, understanding not merely the principal antique and modern European languages, but also Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic, Provencal, and Tupi.

Any new idea, any promising experiment, aroused his enthusiastic curiosity; he encouraged Schliemann in his search for the historical Troy and Alexander Graham Bell in his work on the telephone; and Charles Darwin once remarked of him: “The emperor has done so much for science that every scientific man is bound to show him the utmost respect.”

Dom Pedro’s visits to Europe and the United States were energetic tours of investigation and learning; he would seek out every inventive or speculative mind he could discover, and spend his days sitting in lecture rooms among the students, peering into the secrets of laboratories and indefatigably tramping around factories, museums and the grandiose international exhibitions of the later 19th century.

After receiving a visit from him, Victor Hugo crustily admitted that, if European monarchs were like Dom Pedro, there would be no republicans; and European scholars as varied as Renan, Pasteur, Manzoni and the Comte de Gobineau were among the emperor’s regular correspondents. As a private citizen, Dom Pedro might have been a savant of international and lasting repute.

But his energies were perforce directed to the affairs of his country during the particularly critical decades when it was developing from a colony based on slavery into a democratic nation; and his scholarly attainments remained, as it were, the decorations of his career. In the land he steered towards democracy few citizens were as enlightened as the emperor himself.

This movement towards political maturity was slowed down by the rebellions and wars of the early part of his reign. One of the main reasons for the ending of the regency had been that at hardly any time during its period of power was the country wholly at peace.

A military mutiny in 1832 led to an insurrection that for five years controlled the region of the Amazons; in 1835, the troubles on the Plata broke out again, when the ranchers of the province of Rio Grande do Sul, encouraged by the Blanco party in Uruguay, proclaimed their territory an independent republic. Constantly ambushed and eluded by the mobile bands of cowboys against whom they had to fight, the Brazilian imperial forces took ten years to subdue this separatist movement.

Behind the fighting in Rio Grande do Sul loomed the disputes between rival parties in Uruguay, which, in turn, were fanned by the intrigues of Rosas, the dictator of the Argentine, who had never abandoned the hope of uniting under his rule all the territories of the Plata basin. Hardly had the fighting in Rio Grande do Sul been subdued than this province began to suffer from cattle-rustling expeditions organized in Uruguay.

Rosas insisted on interfering in the diplomatic controversies over this issue, with the result that relations between Brazil and the Argentine were broken off in 1850. In the following year, Brazil, the Colorado government of Uruguay, and the two northern Argentinian provinces of Entre Rios and Corrientes formed an alliance against Rosas and invaded the territories under his control. Twenty years of tyrannical misrule had sapped the dictator’s power; his armies deserted en masse; and, in the spring of 1852, he left his country for good.

The departure of Rosas created a power vacuum in the Plata basin which seemed to invite interference; and the divisions in Uruguay continued to be exploited by neighbouring powers, the Brazilians supporting the relatively liberal Colorado party, and Francisco Lopez, the dictator of Paraguay, taking the place of Rosas as the supporter of the Blancos.

Lopez was motivated by frankly expansionist aims; in his remote inland republic he had built up the largest army in South America; and he hoped to use it to become the arbiter of the whole continent.

But Brazil itself was not without jingoistic impulses, which were encouraged by recent humiliations at the hands of the British; led by the fierier young liberals, the country was willing to take a flimsy excuse for what seemed an easy chance of military glory; and, in 1864, under the pretext of forcing the Montevideo government to grant free elections, the Brazilian army crossed the Uruguayan border.

The Paraguayan dictator refused to tolerate such interference in a territory that he had decided would become his own preserve; and a few weeks later he sent an army into the Brazilian province of Matto Grosso. He wished to send a second army across the Argentinian province of Corrientes; when permission was refused, he declared war on Argentina as well.

It was a bitter conflict, which only ended in 1870 when Lopez was killed in a remote corner of his country. Paraguay was almost totally ravaged, and more than half of its population, including almost all its able-bodied men, was killed. As for Brazil, which had borne the major burden of the fighting against the dictator, a vast strain had been imposed upon the structure of the empire.

More than once the emperor’s obstinate determination to carry on the war until Lopez was eliminated had produced intense resentment among a weary people; and the sheer physical toll in fives and money delayed the introduction of urgent social reforms for almost a decade. The one positive result of the war was the final stabilization of the Platine situation, which meant that, for the remaining two decades of the empire, the problems that faced it were almost wholly internal.

One at least of them, however, was a heritage of the Paraguayan war, since the circumstances of this conflict did a great deal to increase the friction between the civil and military authorities which had existed in Brazil since the 1830s, when the army showed such evident signs of disloyalty that a civilian national guard was formed for the express purpose of guarding against military insurrection.

The social problem that laid a steadily deepening shadow over the empire for the whole of its existence was that of slavery. When Dom Pedro I declared independence in 1821, the Brazilian people—or the ruling class—were barely conscious of the moral ambiguity of an institution on which their whole economic fife was based.

At this time, almost two-thirds of the population were bondsmen (whose situation appears in general to have been better than that of slaves in the United States) and the trade in enslaved people went on unhindered between Brazil and the West African coasts.

The first attack on Brazilian slavery came, indeed, from outside. The British, having abolished their own slave trade in 1807, were imbued with a missionary zeal to put a total end to this traffic; and, by a convention of 1817, they established the right to search Portuguese vessels north of the equator. In 1827, at the price of having persuaded Portugal to recognize Brazilian independence, the British ministry secured a treaty by which the Rio de Janeiro government agreed that the trade should end altogether in 1830.

The effect of this external interference was to arouse Brazilian resentment, and to embarrass those liberals who, during the 1820s, were seeking of their own accord means by which the institution of servitude might be brought to an end. The landowners bitterly opposed any restriction of the slave trade, from which they foresaw the ruin of agriculture.

In alliance with the shipowners, they wielded a great political influence; and thus, although the slave trade was legally abolished in 1830, in accordance with the treaty with Britain, it was, in fact, carried on illegally for another 20 years. Finally, faced by Palmerston’s threat to invade territorial waters, the Brazilian authorities, in 1850, established commissions under whose vigilance the trade, which in 1848 had imported 60,000 enslaved people from Africa, dwindled rapidly to nothing.

Now the greater problem of internal emancipation remained; and, by setting a personal example, Dom Pedro took the lead. Already, as a boy of fourteen, he had liberated all the slaves he had inherited; and he consistently encouraged his subjects to perform similar acts of voluntary manumission.

Furthermore, he rejected the advice of ministers who suggested that, as ruler of a nation where slavery was legal, he should remain neutral upon the issue, declaring publicly that the “most happy hour” of his reign would be “that in which I can announce to the world that now not a single slave exists in my country, and that the last of those unfortunates is as free as I.”

During the 1840s, Brazilian opinion gradually became more favourable to abolition. Immigration from Europe increased, and the old idea that work was degrading had begun gradually to disappear, while educated Brazilians became sensitive to the disapproval of slavery expressed not merely in Europe but also in the neighbouring South American republics.

The war against Paraguay, which brought Brazilian soldiers into contact with Argentinian and Uruguayan allies, increased the popular awareness of this fact; and when, at the end of the American civil war, Brazil stood alone as the only ‘civilized’ country that tolerated slavery, abolitionist sentiment rapidly increased and voluntary manumissions became so numerous that by the mid-1860s the proportion of slaves had fallen to about a fourth of the population.

There remained, however, an irreconcilable core of opposition among the landowners; and the conservative ministers used the war with Paraguay as an excuse to postpone consideration of the question as long as possible. The liberals, on the other hand, pronounced in favour of abolition in 1869.

As soon as the Paraguayan war came to an end, the emperor began to press strongly for an early beginning of emancipation. He was opposed by almost all his ministers; but the lower house of the legislature helped him to force the issue; and, in 1871, it was decreed that the children of slaves should henceforward be born free.

This was only the beginning of emancipation; to the abolitionists nothing short of complete liberation seemed enough. During the 1880s, the issue became progressively more acute; and some of the provinces, like Amazonas and Rio Grande do Sul, freed their slaves without waiting for action from the central government. On the other hand, the pro-slavery elements began to form organizations for opposing any further steps towards abolition.

These groups were politically conservative; but resentment against the emperor infused them with republican sentiments. They claimed that, in prompting the law of 1871, he had shown absolutist tendencies, and that he was inspired less by a desire for the country’s good than by a vainglorious wish for approval in other countries.

Thus the opposition to the monarchy, which hitherto had been consistently maintained by only a relatively small minority of theoretical purists, began to gain a solid and influential support, particularly among the planters, who feared the loss of their labour supply, and the bankers, manufacturers and merchants, who were their natural allies in the cities.

The abolitionists, however, controlled the greater mass following; and, after a second Act in 1885 had decreed the emancipation of elderly slaves, their movement gained vastly in impetus. Large public funds were raised to purchase freedom; slaves who deserted their masters were protected; and the regular army objected to being used to capture fugitives.

From the imperial palace itself the emperor’s grandsons published an abolitionist journal; and the cause was further promoted by a statement in which Pope Leo XIII condemned slavery as unchristian. The issue finally came to a head in 1887, when Dom Pedro was forced to travel in Europe in order to recover his health.

His daughter, the princess Isabella, who ruled as regent during his absence, was an even more determined enemy of slavery than her father. At the first opportunity, she appointed a cabinet headed by the abolitionist leader João Alfredo Correa de Oliveira; and, on 9 May 1888, a resolution declaring “From the date of this law slavery in Brazil is declared extinct,” was passed by a great majority of the legislators.

The emancipation, which freed the remaining 600,000 slaves, was generally approved in the cities. But, since no compensation was provided, it meant ruin for many of the planters; and these embittered men began to work for the abolition of the monarchy, which now, at the moment of its moral triumph, entered a period of extraordinarily rapid decline.

The anger of the planters formed a focus for the discontents that had been rising up against the monarchy for several decades and from several directions. Some of the opponents of Dom Pedro were radicals who wanted a republic for reasons of principle; others pointed to the administrative injustices and electoral abuses that still lingered in Brazil, ignoring the fact that the neighbouring republics were at least as bad, and probably worse, in these respects.

But the core of the opposition was conservative, not radical. Apart from the planters, the Emperor had earned the hatred of the clergy by his dispute during the 1870s with the ultramontanist bishops, who had declared the incompatibility of Catholicism and Freemasonry, a doctrine repugnant to the principles of Tolerance which he regarded as essential to political justice. Finally, during the 1880s, the growing discontent of the army added the corps of officers to the groups opposing the Empire.

This military disaffection arose from a feeling, existent since the Paraguayan war, that the army was not allowed to play a sufficiently important part in the national life.

The legislators were parsimonious in their military grants; the Emperor, committed by his ideas and his disposition to a pacific policy, gave no encouragement to bellicose sentiments; and the officers looked with envy on the Spanish American republics, where military prestige was high and the army was a political force. These vague discontents and grandiose ambitions were given theoretical focus by a professor at the military academy, Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhaes, who converted the younger officers to republicanism.

After the emancipation decree, the intrigues of this motley group of militarists, clericals, angry slave-owners and idealistic radicals became more purposive; and they were made all the more ominous by the fact that no real opposition to a determined republican movement existed.

The emperor had never even contemplated forming a monarchist party; his whole policy had been directed by the idea that the monarchy would eventually give way to a more libertarian society, while he had consistently defended the right of his critics, and even his calumniators, to say whatever they wished without fear of punishment.

The liberals were for the most part favourably disposed towards Dom Pedro, and he inspired a certain devotion among the common people; but few Brazilians imagined that after his death another Braganza would rule over their country, and there was no strong loyalty to the monarchy as an institution.

When the empire was eventually overthrown, it was not by a popular demonstration of the kind that had caused the departure of Dom Pedro I, but by a conspiracy of the army officers. Throughout 1888 and the early part of 1889, there had been disputes between the civil and the military authorities; officers had been censured for interference in politics, and clashes between soldiers and police had taken place in several cities.

Military leaders talked openly of using their power to purge the country of its evils; and, in 1889, the alarmed government decided on a plan of dispersing the units of the regular army in order to reduce the risk of an uprising. The reaction of the army to this decision proved that the fears of the civil authorities were well-founded.

A coup d'etat was immediately plotted; the troops in Rio de Janeiro rose on 15 November; a republic was declared with General Deodoro at its head; and the Emperor departed into exile in Portugal. In these events the civilian population played almost no part; there were no great demonstrations of joy at the proclamation of the republic, and there was almost no resistance.

The emperor refused to authorize any movement on his behalf—“I will not conspire...,” he said; “it would be the negation of my entire life”—and it is unlikely that, if such a movement had been attempted, it would have had any success, for everywhere the feeling prevailed that the empire had served its purpose and reached its end.

As for Dom Pedro, he accepted what had happened with grief, with some perplexity, but with complete dignity. When he landed in Portugal, the newspaper reporters asked him whether he would not like to issue a manifesto.

“Why should I?” he asked. “My life is my manifesto.” Dom Pedro, indeed, had tried to be the philosopher king; and his eventual failure may perhaps be attributed to some deeper incompatibility between the two roles than he or Plato had perceived.