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Citizen Emperor: Pedro II and the Making of Brazil, 1825–91

2001; Duke University Press; Volume: 81; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-81-1-194

1527-1900

Jeffrey D. Needell,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

This analysis clarifies the role of a monarch in shaping a nation-state. The author’s evidence includes a wide variety of personal and diplomatic correspondence, contemporary periodicals and books, as well as appropriate secondary sources. He has sifted more than a score of Brazilian and European archives, including the imperial family’s private Arquivo Grão Pará (Petrópolis). In the early chapters, the author often cites his Brazil: The Forging of a Nation (1989), our most trustworthy political narrative of the era 1798–1852.It is a commonplace that a biographer inevitably falls victim to the charms of his subject. Here, the author is no hagiographer; his view of the person and the statesman is balanced and critical. Nonetheless, if the book is to be faulted for bias, it lies in its inevitable preoccupation with Pedro II’s point of view. While it must be said that this is central to the book’s contribution (and that it is, after all, the perspective of the period’s most important statesman), it sometimes suggests other actors were simply accessory players. For better or for worse, the author places most responsibility for the successes and failures of the monarchy on the monarch; other statesmen, as well as the larger impact of political parties and their constituencies, tend to be obscured as context to which the emperor responds or which he shapes to his purposes. The effect on the book is, at times, a rather abrupt foreshortening of Brazilian political history. Fortunately, however, these broader aspects of political affairs, along with the crucial socioeconomic context, are often deftly brought to bear when they are especially pertinent to the political analysis at issue. Moreover, the book is written with an accessible elegance and appealing sense of drama, and will thus attract the attention of laymen and students alike.If readers have done their homework, they will appreciate this study even more. Since 1938, those studying the emperor and the monarchy (1822–89) have preferred Heitor Lira’s three-volume História de Dom Pedro II, an uncritical but relatively exhaustive study strengthened by archival research. Pedro Calmon’s five-volume História de Dom Pedro II (1975) also enjoyed scholarly acclaim. Other biographies were distinctly inferior; those available in English more inferior still. Now, the author of Citizen Emperor has supplanted Lira’s classic and Calmon’s work with a far richer historical understanding of the monarchy and a psychologically acute political biography. With admirable sensitivity, he demonstrates and documents how Pedro’s early years—a traumatic childhood, and an adolescence that combined isolation with adoration—shaped a man. For readers unfamiliar with monarchy’s charismatic authority, or this monarch’s constitutional role, the author also makes clear what the emperor’s contemporaries assumed; that a monarch mattered. Mattered for national unity, mattered for political discourse, mattered for a sense of public propriety. Perhaps most novel is how the author demonstrates this man’s impact upon the meaning and direction of the institutions of the nation state—both in its triumph under a monarchy and in its transition to the federal republic of 1889.This is an overdue and salutary contribution. After 1945, the established historiography has generally dismissed nineteenth-century formal political history as irrelevant. Indeed, if we put aside the narrative anthologies intended for schools, and glance at more recent scholarly political studies, their foci are generally indicative of this. There is José Murilo de Carvalho’s elegant political analysis, written in the 1970s and republished twice since for its incisive understanding of the larger issues of class and state. There is the very useful study of the failure of early liberal reform by Thomas Flory (1981) and Ilmar Rohloff de Matos’ idiosyncratic discussion of seigneurial reaction and state-making (1987). There is Emília Viotti da Costa’s indispensable collection of essays (1988), representing the best of sophisticated Marxist analysis (compare it to Paula Beiguelman’s pioneering study). There is Eul-Soo Pang’s painstaking zoology of the elite families (1988) and Richard Graham’s beautifully written anthropology of political patronage (1990). While these scholars may use statesmen to make their larger points, they eschew biography and often generalize regarding formal political history, when they touch upon the latter at all. Of those that do, few do so capably, and none recognizes the significant role of the emperor, except Murilo de Carvalho, master of the narrative and the published literature, who clearly points to the Crown’s centrality.So, while contemporaries viewed Pedro II as pivotal in the political world, historians emphasized the larger forces they perceived blowing that world in one direction or another. The political past in its biographical specificity and in its institutional development were abandoned as the meaningless preoccupations of an alienated elite or the meaningless façade to a struggle between more ponderous and important forces. Political actors and institutions that shaped and changed most people’s lives were often noted, rather than examined and explained. Too often, they were not even noted. The process by which the nation-state was constituted and understood; the rise and fall of parties and policies; the actual mechanics of the relationship between state and society—these were often dismissed, reduced, or left essentially inexplicable. The abolitionist laws of 1871 and 1888, in the analyses of Robert E. Conrad (1972) or Murilo de Carvalho, are telling exceptions. These scholars, by discussing the crucial roles of the monarch and parliamentary politics, point to their relevance in understanding dramatic social and political transitions. Their work, however, is in jarring contrast to the understanding and concerns of most colleagues.The author’s work may help to correct this. It may compel a larger number of serious scholars to deal with the specificity and importance of political actors, political institutions, and formal political history in understanding the era. In a book of such ambitious scope, there will also be much to debate and much to pursue afterward. However, the author is to be thanked and congratulated for making both possible. This is a pioneering study of an epoch in which sophisticated political history supported by adequate archival and other contemporary evidence remains embarrassingly sparse. Given the central role of the monarch, no better starting place could have been chosen.