Brazil remained a monarchy until 1889. Did this make a difference?
It had an oligarchic political system; the oligarchs did have a real role in decision making. They
had power in the national Parliament. Pedro II ruled through the oligarchy.
1847: 7.3 million persons of whom 3 million were black
1871: 10 million persons of whom 1½ million were slaves
Slavery was abolished on the state and local levels long before national law attacked and,
finally, ended it.
Generalizations about the entire period
- The economy remains basically the same.
- The country was run by a rural agrarian oligarchy
- The social system was formed by oligarchical control with rigid class lines and an
- The government was highly centralized
- The Brazilian oligarchy liked to think it was like. the British oligarchy. There was lots of
talk about representative government, about parliamentary government but Pedro ruled.
- The political system did have Liberal and Conservative parties but they were both for the
elites and only differed on such issues as the role of the established church and slavery.
- It had a "colonial" economy, dependent upon the export of raw materials (agricultural and
mineral) to pay for manufactured goods.
- The slave trade did not end until 1850 when the British forced it, threatening to come into
Brazilian harbors in pursuit of slave ships.
- The military was insignificant in political affairs until the end of 1818-1889 period.
- The was some immigration but it was small. Few people wanted to compete against
- Was it a boom or bust economy as sometimes stated? No, there was continuity but
Brazilians took advantage of opportunities as they arose.
- The Amazon Basin was useless. Brazilians, as well as others, got excited about its
possibilities but little economic activity occurred there in the nineteen century.
- The bulk of the population was illiterate
Pedro I, 1821-1831
He was badly educated, learning as much from jockeys as others. Although he could be
likable, he lacked ability. He didn't have a reliable instrument of maintaining himself in power in
face of strong opposition. His behavior--wenching, drinking, partying--was a source of
problems. He had a well-known affair with Domitila de Castro with whom he fell in love
and set her up as his mistress. His wife, Leopoldina, an Austrian princess, finds out from the
hairdresser they both used. Pedro elevates Domitila to the position of Marquesa de Santos.
Leopoldina is humiliated and complains to the Emperor of Austria but, of course, he can do nothing about it. Pedro has other mistresses as well.
The Brazilian upper class disliked the efforts of the Portuguese to subordinate Brazil to
Portugal. Then the Portuguese court came to Brazil in 1808, exacerbating tensions. Many
Brazilians came to realize how very "foreign" the Portuguese were--and arrogant towards
Brazilians, whom they considered inferior. The Crown did, however, elevate Brazil to a kingdom
co-equal with Portugal.
On April, 1821, the Portuguese Emperor, Dom Joâo VI, went back to Portugal, taking with
him the Brazilian treasury [Bank of Brazil] and four thousand courtiers and hangers on. He left his
son, Pedro, as regent with the chief advisor , José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva of São Paulo.
Bonifácio was a science professor and royal official. It was quite clear that the Portugese in
Portugal were going to reduce Brazil back to full colonial status. The Portuguese government
wanted Pedro to return also, but, in September, 1822, he declared the independence of Brazil with
the Grito de Ypiranga. In December 1822, he has himself crowned Emperor of Brazil.
A constitution was drawn up by assembly of oligarchs in 1823. Pedro didn't like it because
too much authority was given to the assembly. He dissolved the constitutional convention and
arrested some of its members.
He promulgated his own Constitution of 1824. It created a government of four
branches--executive, legislative, judicial, and moderating power. The moderating power gave
the Emperor, who also served as the executive, great power because it allowed him to override
decisions of the other three branches. Moreover, the Emperor chose the Senators, could dismiss
Parliament, appointed and dismissed ministers of state and lesser officials. For the lower house of
Parliament, very few people could vote for representative.
Pedro I tended to see any attack on a position he took as an attack on the dynasty. He
tended to act arbitrarily, resulting in dissatisfaction among the political class.
Regionalism was always present in the independence period. The Empire was vast, much
of it uncharted and unexplored. The bulk of the population lived in communities which hugged the
coast; the landed oligarchy owned vast estates (fazendas) stretching westward into the interior.
They were like little kingdoms with the fazendeiros able to rule at will, often paying only lip
service to royal authority. In the northeast, slavery and sugar plantations were common; mine
owners were powerful in Minas Gerais; and the south was cowboy country.
Regionalism prompted the Pernambuccan Rebellion of 1817 in the Northeast.
Pernambuco, followed by Paraíba do Norte, Río Grande do Norte, and part of Ceará, sought
home rule under a republican government. With the arrival of the Portuguese in 1808, power
shifted to Río de Janeiro, where the Crown eventually settled. The Northeast had been the locus
of power in Brazil, based on its sugar plantations, and Bahía had briefly hosted the Crown. Now,
it was clear that Río and the more southern states held the power. The revolt was crushed and the
Crown stationed troops in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Recife. When independence was
declared, the Northeast was the scene of fighting.
The Imperial government had a tenuous hold on much of the country and had few means
of making its will felt. Brazil was like a federation in most respects, a fact recognized by the
Additional Act of 1834 which provided some autonomy for the provinces. It was only with
difficulty that it put down the numerous rebellions. In Rio de Janeiro alone there were five
uprisings in 1831 and 1832. There were also rebellions in Pará in 1835-37, Salvador in 1837-38,
Maranhao in 1838-41, and the ones in Minas Gerais and São Paulo in 1842. The Ragamuffins
Rebellion ( the Farroupilha Revolution) (1835-45) in Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul was
finally put down by Field Marshall Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, the Baron of Caxias. Subsequently
called the Patron of the Army, he reorganized the army, making it a more effective fighting force
and was very instrumental in preserving the territorial integrity of the Empire.
The regency was ended and Pedro II elevated to full power on July 18, 1841 at age
fifteen in hopes that the mystery and majesty of the monarchy would discourage rebellion. It took
Pedro II a few years but rebellion became a thing of the past by 1848.
Brazil used an indirect system of election. The size if the electorate was small--in 1881,
the country had fifteen million people but only approximately 181,000 could vote. The system
used property qualifications and few owned real property. Voters were gathered together by
parishes. An electoral committee, under an imperial magistrate as chairman, determined whether a
person was eligible. He could close the polls when he wanted to do so. The committee counted
the votes and stipulated the number of electors. The Emperor had all the cards in his hands.
Between 1840 and 1881, only one minister defeated at election while he was in office. The
Crown decided when one was to be forced out.
Reform Law of 1881, a Liberal measure, attempted to make the lower house more
representative of the will of the citizens. It extended the franchise and created a bipartisan
committee to supervise elections.
There probably would have been more popular participation if the Emperor had not been
around. He did not want to lose control and the majesty of his office awed people.
The members of government were from the oligarchy. There were good men in
government, for example Rui Barbosa and Joaquim Nabuco. Nabuco became a leader in the slave
emancipation movement but he also believed strongly of importance of oligarchy in government
The slave trade ended in 1850 but there were one and one-half slavers out of a population
of ten million (15% of the total population) in 1871. The campaign against slavery increased. In
1871, Brazil Rio Branco Law (Law of the Free Womb) whereby children born of slaves were
automatically free but had to work for their parents' master until adulthood to pay the cost of
raising them. The liberals had managed to get this compromise measure passed which, eventually,
would have ended slavery through attrition. Nevertheless, liberals continued to press for more
immediate emancipation an achieved great success at the local and state levels. Most states had
ended slavery before 1889.
The slave oligarchy was opposed to emancipation but it was trying to hold back the tide of
history; Brazil was entering the modern Western world.
While Pedro II was in Europe seeking medical treatment and his daughter Princess Isabel
was acting as Regent, slavery finally ended. On 13th May, 1888, under pressure from
abolitionists, she signed the Golden Law (Lei Áurea) that abolished slavery without compensation
in Brazil. Abolitionists argued the slavery was immoral and one should not be paid for immorality;
this infuriated the slave owners and much of the upper class who withdrew support from the
Emperor. Pedro II's prestige and skills were not able to overcome this loss of support.
The Fall of the Empire
The Golden Law was a proximate cause of the fall of the Empire in November, 1889 but
there were numerous underlying factors.
Since the Crown was dominant in the political system, the person who was the monarch
was very important. Pedro's health was failing, meaning that Isabel would soon rule. Many
objected to the idea of rule by a woman; Brazilian culture, like many others, expected men to
occupy the positions of power. Isabel might have been more acceptable is she had been more
sensitive to the demands of the oligarchy. She was also hampered by her French husband, who
seemed cold and distant. Since some assumed that he, not Isabel, would actually control things,
this was an issue. The perception of him as cold and unresponsive was largely the result of his
hiding the fact that he was deaf in one ear. If one spoke to him from that side, he didn't respond!
The Roman Catholic hierarchy in Brazil also abandoned the Empire. The constitution
allowed religious freedom although Roman Catholicism was the official religion. Brazilians tended
to be relaxed about religion. In fact, some Catholics, including Pedro II, were also Masons
(which the Church considered to be a rival religion). In 1864, the conservative Pope issued an
encyclical forbidding Catholics from being in the Mason order. Pedro II, as was his right, refused
to allow the encyclical to be published in Brazil. Not much happened until seven years later when
a priest gave a sermon on emancipation which was obviously influenced by Masonic doctrine. The
bishop of Río de Janeiro castigated him and ordered him to leave the Masonic order. He refused
on the grounds that the encyclical was invalid in Brazil. Also in 1871, the bishop of Pernambuco
denounced both Masonry and the constitutional provision which allowed the Crown to control the
church in Brazil. He tried to get all Masons out of the religious brotherhoods (irmandades). Other
bishops joined the fray. Masons in Río de Janeiro retaliated by telling their members to oppose the
bishops. The crown arrested clerics who refused to obey the law. The controversy had been
elevated into a Church versus State issue.
The issue was taken to the Pope, who, surprisingly, was most conciliatory towards the
State. He told the bishops to cease and desist. In return, the Emperor granted amnesty in 1875 to
the clergy it had jailed.
Both the pro-Church and the pro-government factions thought that Pedro II had been
weak. Some began to doubt the efficacy of having this monarch; some began to oppose monarchy
The army in the 1880s was doing some striking things; always wanted a more active role
in politics. From the coup d'etat of 1889 until now, the military has been the most important
institution in politics. The military was decisive in the overthrow of the Empire. The Club Militar
was political as well as social. The political party system was extremely weak. Pedro would not let
the two monarchial parties, liberals and conservatives, develop as much as they could in the
No one defended the Empire. The ease of coup suggests that, politically, the Empire had not
accomplished very much other than holding territory together and enabling some economic
Argentina and Brazil had long intervened in Uruguayan politics. In fact, the little country
was created with British help because its giant neighbors has been contesting control of it for so
long. After independence in 1828, Brazil and Argentina continued to intervene in its domestic
affairs. By the mid-1860s, Pedro II's government, in alliance with the Argentine government, tried
to get the Colorado Party in power in place of the Blancos. The latter then appealed to the
Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López. Solano López had long been afraid of the
imperialistic intentions of his neighbors. He had the largest army with 64,000 soldiers compared
with Brazil's standing army of 18,000. Brazil and Argentina agreed to act if Solano López actively
backed the Blancos. In September 1864, the Brazilians invaded Uruguay to put the Colorados in
Paraguay seized Brazilian vessels on the Rio Paraguay and by attacked the Brazilian
province of Mato Grosso. Solano López thought he would get help from the anti-Buenos Aires
caudillos, but didn't. He sent an army into Corrientes state, Argentina, to get at Rio Grande do
Sul and Uruguay. By 1858, he was at war with Argentina, Brazil, and Colorado-led Uruguay. the
and found himself at war with both Argentina and Brazil.
Faced with such overwhelming force, Paraguay had little chance of winning even though it
took time and money until the Brazilians could field a large army and many Argentinians did not
support the war. They fought a very good fight ion their own territory. The loyalty of
Paraguayans to Francisco Solano López was strong. They were willing to die for him. However,
"the war left Paraguay utterly prostrate; its prewar population of approximately
525,000 was reduced to about 221,000 in 1871, of which only about 28,000 were
In 1870, the Brazilian army finally trapped Solano López and killed him. Brazil occupied
Paraguay until 1878.
The Empire fell because it was dependent upon the personality of one man, Pedro II, who,
as intelligent and learned as he was, was handicapped by his own limitations. He could not know
or understand everything. He did not prepare his daughter well enough to assume rule or the
powerful to accept her rule. He underestimated the strength of republican sentiment, military ill
will towards him and his government, and the pro-slavery sentiment in the country. No one
defended the Empire. He and his family were politely sent into exile.
by Don Mabry