Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

El Brasil monárquico: De la independencia a la república, capítulos de historia e historiografia

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 96; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3484498

1527-1900

Roderick J. Barman,

Argentine historical studies

The Empire of Brazil existed from 1822 to 1889 or, more generously, it extended from 1808, when the Portuguese crown settled in Rio de Janeiro, to its fall in 1889. As the only indigenous, long-lasting monarchy in the New World, the empire is not easy to place in historical context given the consensus in both Brazil and Latin America that the region is intrinsically republican. The main title and the first subtitle of Professor Jurandir Malerba's book suggest that it is a reevaluation by a leading Brazilian scholar of the nearly 70 years of monarchical governance. The second subtitle is more apt. A compilation of ten articles by the author published between 1995 and 2011, all apparently in their original format, the work is designed “to trace the stages of our academic career” both in terms of research undertaken by the author and of his evolving comprehension of the past and its historiography (p. 3). The immediate purpose is to make Professor Malerba's writings available to Spanish Americans in their own tongue.Six chapters, constituting the meat of the work, focus on the Johannine period (1808–1821), both for itself and for its formative effect on independent Brazil. Two chapters focus on the imperial regime and another two analyze the historiography of imperial Brazil with heavy emphasis on the writings of the post-1889 period. Given the unrevised nature of the chapters, there is a significant overlap in content and repetition in approach. There is no consolidated bibliography. The approach adopted is as much as and perhaps more sociological than historical, a primary inspiration and influence being the ideas of Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu. A recurrent theme, one that much attracts the author, is politics as dramatic performance. The stage plays and the street decorations in Brazil in the late 1810s form the subject of the third chapter, while 25 pages are devoted in chapter 8 to the various dimensions of the Baile da Ilha Fiscal, the lavish ball held six days before the regime's overthrow on November 15, 1889.Notwithstanding the work's title, a single and fairly brief (pp. 120–28) chapter is devoted to the empire as regime: “La Casa del Rey: Reflexiones en torno del carácter patriarcal del estado imperial brasileño.” Set within a consideration of Fernand Braudel's concept of the longue durée, the author argues that the dominant view presented in 43 legal commentaries, published up to 1888, on the Brazilian criminal code of 1830 perceived the Brazilian state in Aristotelian terms—as an extended family. “Slavery provided the fundamental cause for the reemergence of Roman law at the time of the construction of the Brazilian imperial state” (p. 123). The need to assure to the fazendeiro his domination over his plantation and slave labor force dictated the patriarchal nature of the Brazilian state, despite the efforts of the imperial-period jurists to “uphold the tenets of liberalism that they had imported from Europe.” The state, as an extended family, “was managed by a summa potestas [highest authority] holding powers similar to that of the senhor in his domains—the emperor. This fact makes more understandable the Aristotelian conception of the state among the imperial-period jurists covered by a varnish of liberalism” (p. 124). Alternative explanations for the entrustment by the 1824 constitution of enormous powers to the emperor, such as the conception of the state and politics advanced by the political theorists the Abbé Sieyes and Benjamin Constant, are not considered, much less refuted. Similarly the author perceives the political order as patriarchal, the “political factions” being “linked by sentiment and obligations, not by interests and ideas” (p. 216). Here again no alternative interpretations of what shaped the nature of politics are considered, much less investigated.As the above overview makes plain, readers should not expect to find in this work a systematic, considered analysis of the Brazilian empire. It is not intended to be such. The author, who does identify himself as a historian (“nosotros, historiadores” [p. 121]), is most interested in discussing sociological theories about the past and its nature through applying them to specific topics in Brazil of the imperial period. Professor Malerba is equally interested, as the final chapter (“Historia, memoria, historiografia: Algunas consideraciones sobre historia normativa e cognitiva en el Brasil”) attests, in discussing historical writing on Brazil since independence in the context of the conceptual approaches employed in them. Perhaps the most rewarding part of the work is the insights it provides into the mind and the writings of a leading historian in early twenty-first-century Brazil.