1808: The Flight of the Emperor (27 page)

XXVII

A New Brazil

I
n May 1821, while João VI's fleet was sailing northeast to Lisbon, thousands of miles to the east, on the solitary rocks of Saint Helena, Napoleon Bonaparte breathed his last—in Chateaubriand's words: “He gave up to God the mightiest breath of life that ever animated human clay.” This mighty Corsican, responsible for the Portuguese court's flight to Brazil and for virtually all the torments of João's life, died on the morning of May 4 in the company of his private doctor, amid attacks of vomiting blood and bouts of delirium in which he called after his son, the king of Rome, a scrawny boy of ten years, known officially as the duke of Reichstadt, at that moment prisoner of the Austrian court in Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna. The cause of the French emperor's death remained a subject of controversy for many years. At the outset, some suspected arsenic poisoning. More recent research suggests the more probable cause of stomach cancer. While imprisoned on Saint Helena, Bonaparte dictated his memoirs, in which he weighed in the balance his life and military career, his victories and defeats. For João VI, he reserved a single laconic phrase: “He was the only one who tricked me.”
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These two men, whose destinies crossed for the last time in the waters of the South Atlantic, left behind legacies that profoundly affected the future of millions. Napoleon's legacy, already well tilled by historians and enthusiasts, included redrawing the map of Europe. Within twenty years, the old regime
that had dominated the continent for centuries collapsed and gave way to a world stirred by revolutions that continuously cast doubt on the authority and legitimacy of its own governments. João VI's legacy still remains a matter of controversy. Some view the downfall of the Portuguese monarchy and the colonial empire itself as the result of his timid and fearful personality. Others consider him a political strategist who successfully faced Napoleon's forces without recourse to armed conflict and managed not only to preserve the interests of Portugal but also to leave behind a bigger and better Brazil than he found upon arriving in 1808.

No other period of Brazilian history has witnessed such profound, decisive, and rapid changes as those thirteen years in which the Portuguese court resided in Rio de Janeiro. Within that span, Brazil transformed from a closed and backward colony into an independent nation. For this reason, most view João VI in a positive light, despite all his weaknesses. For historian de Oliveira Lima, he was “the real founder of Brazilian nationhood” for two reasons: He secured its territorial integrity, and he put in place a ruling class responsible for constructing the new country.
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“In effect, he began the process of decolonization,” claimed writer and literary critic Wilson Martins, “not only by the act of elevating Brazil to a kingdom, but by having so quickly provided the structures that constitute a nation.”
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One way of evaluating João VI's legacy is to approach the question in reverse: What would Brazil be today if the court
hadn't
arrived? Despite their reluctance to engage in such conjectures, most historians agree that the country simply wouldn't exist in its present state. In the most likely hypothesis, independence and the republic might have come sooner, but the old Portuguese colony would have fragmented into a patchwork of small autonomous countries resembling their Spanish American neighbors and with little affinity beyond a shared language. We can envision the chief consequence of this separation: This Brazil in pieces wouldn't even come close to having the power and influence that it exerts over Latin America today. In the absence of a large, integrated Brazil, this role would fall probably to Argentina, the second largest country on the continent.

We should not underestimate the role of João VI in constructing the identity of today's Brazilians. Remember that two centuries ago the political
and territorial unity of Brazil looked quite delicate. Evidence of this fragility lies in the Brazilian delegation sent to Portugal to participate in the elections of the Cortes between 1821 and 1822. While Brazil had the right to sixty-five representatives, only forty-six showed up in Lisbon, which left them squarely in the minority compared with the Portuguese representation, composed of one hundred delegates.
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Their numbers aside, the Brazilians were divided in their voting as well. The delegates of the provinces of Pará, Maranhão, Piauí, and Bahia remained loyal to the Portuguese crown and systematically voted against the interests of other regions.
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Nor did these northern and northeastern provinces adhere to independence in 1822. Pedro I had to resort to military force to convince them to break away from Portugal. Even after doing so, the Brazilian political atmosphere remained unstable for many decades, subject to numerous rebellions and regional separatist movements.

Based on these regional divergences, Roderick Barman, author of
Brazil: The Forging of a Nation
, posits a few hypotheses about the destiny of the Portuguese territories in America had the court not arrived. Barman believes that Brazil could have disintegrated into three different countries. The first, which he calls the Republic of Brazil, would encompass the current South and Southwest regions, including the provinces of Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, Espirito Santo, São Paulo, Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul, Goiás, and Mato Grosso (Paraná at this time constituting part of the province of São Paulo). These provinces encircled the region where the Conjuração Mineira of Tiradentes took place in the late eighteenth century. A repeat episode, in Barman's opinion, would potentially hit all of them along a single axis, thereby consolidating a single independent republic.

The second country, Barman conjectures, would be called the Republic of the Equator, formed in the Northeast, including Bahia, Sergipe, Alagoas, Pernambuco, Paraíba, Rio Grande do Norte, and Ceará. Three large insurrections agitated this region in less than three decades. First came the Tailors' Conspiracy of 1798 in Bahia, then the Pernambucan Revolt in 1817, and finally the Confederation of the Equator, again in Pernambuco, in 1824. It would have made a strong candidate for autonomy had a central government in Rio de Janeiro not sufficiently controlled those rebellions.

The third country would form in the North, encompassing Maranhão, Grão-Pará, and the Province of Rio Negro, in the modern-day state of Amazonas. These provinces, already an autonomous territory enjoying direct relations with Lisbon in the colonial period, would probably detach last from Portugal. The state of Piauí, Barman postulates, would act as a wild card: It could just as easily become part of the Republic of the Equator as it could remain loyal to the Portuguese Crown and align with the northern provinces.
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When viewed from this hypothetical perspective, the preservation of territorial integrity therefore made for a great royal victory. Without the transfer of the Portuguese court, regional conflicts would have deepened to the point where separation between the provinces would have become inevitable. “These colonies would indeed no longer belong to the metropolis if D. João did not migrate to Brazil,” claimed Admiral Sidney Smith, commander of the fleet who brought the court to Rio de Janeiro, in his memoirs. “The English would have occupied them under the pretext of defending them, and if this did not come to pass, the Independence of Portuguese America would have been realized at the same time, and with much less resistance, than that of Spanish America.”
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But thanks to João VI, Brazil maintained itself as a country of continental proportions—larger than Australia—and today the chief heir of Portuguese culture and language. “D. João VI came to create, and indeed founded an empire in America; this is how his act of giving the status of nationhood to an immense, amorphous colony deserves to be seen,” wrote de Oliveira Lima.
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But ironically neither João himself nor Lisbon enjoyed the fruits of this legacy. “While he himself would return less of a king than when he arrived,” adds de Oliveira Lima, “nonetheless he left Brazil larger than he found it.” In other words, by improving Brazil he lost it forever. Independence, the direct result, came in 1822. “The doors shut for three hundred years were thrown open, and the colony passed beyond the control of the mother country,” writes historian Alan Manchester. “Contact with the outside world awakened the torpid colony; new people, new capital, and new ideas entered. As a consequence of the new importance of the colony, the Brazilians felt their destiny to be larger and more important.”
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But Brazilian independence resulted less from a desire for separation on the part of the Brazilians than from the divisions among the Portuguese themselves. Historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda defined Brazilian independence as “a civil war among the Portuguese,” triggered by the Porto Revolution rather than the mobilization of the colony in defense of their common interests against Lisbon.
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“The Porto Revolution of 1820 was an anti-Brazilian movement, an explosion of resentment, of wounded pride,” writes historian José Honório Rodrigues. The result, according to him, contrasted sharply with the hopes of the Cortes, as it “strengthened Brazil, its conscience, its national sentiment, its unity, and its indivisibility.”
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In no way did this mean that the country was ready, however. On the contrary, poor, illiterate, and dependent on slave labor, the new Brazil left behind by King João to his son Emperor Pedro I continued the three anesthetized centuries of colonial exploitation inhibiting its sense of initiative and entrepreneurial spirit. The debates surrounding independence foretold of the enormous challenges that the country faced—and which, two hundred years later, still remain in many ways. Brazil at the beginning of the nineteenth century constituted a dangerous, unruly place where whites, blacks, natives, mestizos, masters, and slaves lived alongside one another precariously, without any clearly defined vision of society or even a cohesive nation. “Amalgamation of so much heterogeneous metal will be difficult indeed . . . in forging a solid political body,” wrote the patriarch of independence, José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, in 1813 to Domingos de Sousa Coutinho, the Portuguese ambassador in England.
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In the view of José Bonifacio and other leaders of the era, if independence seemed inevitable, it was necessary to block Brazil from becoming a republic at all costs. In this case, they believed, the conflicts of interest in such a heterogeneous society could prove uncontrollable. “The white race will end up hostage to other castes and the province of Bahia will disappear from the civilized world,” claimed Francisco de Sierra y Mariscal in 1823 on analyzing the independence movement in Northeast Brazil.
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In 1821, a pamphlet by José Antonio de Miranda circulated in Rio de Janeiro, asking,

 

How is it possible to form a republic in a vast country, still largely unknown, full of infinite forests, without citizenry, without civilization, without art, without streets, without mutually necessary relations, with opposing interests and with a multitude of slaves, without customs, with neither civil nor religious education and full of vices and antisocial habits?
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The proposed solution, which in the end triumphed, was to maintain a centralized, powerful monarchy capable of quelling popular insurrections and separatist movements. “Brazil, still in its infancy, made up of many huge, distant and uninhabited provinces, needs to grow out from a center of power, where measures can be taken vigorously, forcefully, and with promptness,” argued an anonymous pamphlet published in Lisbon in 1822. “Well, there is no government more vigorous than a monarchy. . . . The general character of the Nation clearly excludes the possibility of a republic.”
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Fearful sentiments of this type catalyzed political force, maintaining the country under the crown at a moment in which regionalists and diverse interests could have divided it. According to historian Maria Odila Leite da Silva Dias,

 

Under complete political separation, the prospects of the colony to transform itself into a nation would not seem promising for the men of the Independence generation. . . . They were quite conscious of internal tensions, social and racial, of fragmentation, regionalism, and lack of unity, which did not yield the conditions for a national conscience capable of supporting a revolutionary movement to reconstruct society.
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We should view the events of 1822, therefore, as a controlled break, threatened by internal divisions and by the sea of poverty and marginalization left by three centuries of slavery and colonial exploitation. When regional rebellions appeared, the new crown immediately suppresed them. As a result, the path chosen in 1822 represented neither republican nor genuinely revolutionary aims. It was simply conciliatory. Instead of being faced and resolved, long-lived social tensions were damped and postponed.

In the interests of maintaining the colonial elite, slavery remained as a festering wound in Brazilian society until its total abolition in 1888 under the Golden Law, signed by Princess Isabel, a great-granddaughter of João VI. Regional divisions violently reappeared from time to time, as in the Confederation of the Equator in 1824, the War of the Ragamuffins in 1835, and the Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932. Popular participation in government decisions persisted largely as an idea. In 1881, when the Saraiva Law established direct election of certain legislative posts for the first time, only 1.5 percent of the population had this right to vote. Only prominent merchants and rural proprietors could participate, excluding an enormous disenfranchised mass composed of women, blacks, the poor, the illiterate, and the destitute.
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Legacies barely resolved in 1822, these problems remained for the following two hundred years, haunting the future of Brazilian society like the phantom of an unburied corpse.