The euphoria of February 26 quickly gave way to new agitation, though. The more radical leaders thought the constitutional reforms insufficient. They wanted the king to cede even more ground. As a result, a second popular demonstration was scheduled for April 21, a date that marked the anniversary of the 1792 hanging of Tiradentes, the rebel leader of the Conjuração Mineira. To shouts of “It is the people who give the orders!” and “There will be revolution!” the crowd, gathered at the Plaza of Commerce, demanded that João swear to the Spanish constitution—an even more radical document than the first—adopted in Cádiz in 1812 during the uprisings of the Peninsular War, which had become an inspiration for the Portuguese rebels in 1820. They also wanted the king to remain in Brazil, defying the decision of the Portuguese Cortes. But this time the demonstration ended in tragedy, violently repressed by troops commanded by Prince Pedro. Thirty people were killed, and dozens wounded. Dawn broke on the façade of the elegant building designed by Grandjean de Montigny in the Plaza of Commerce scrawled with the graffiti, “Butchery of the Braganças.”4
João departed Rio de Janeiro on April 26, five days after the massacre at the Plaza of Commerce. His retinue included approximately four thousand Portuguese—a third of the total who had accompanied him southwest across the Atlantic thirteen years earlier.5 It is said that the king embarked in tears. If it were up to only him, he would have stayed in Brazil forever. Nonetheless, once more, this fat, good-natured, tranquil, solitary, indecisive, and often fearful king hunkered down under the responsibility put upon him by history.
Hard evidence that the king didn’t want to return exists in a pamphlet that circulated in Rio de Janeiro and major Brazilian cities in January 1821. Written by Francisco Cailhé de Geine, the French text defends the notion that João VI should remain in Brazil. It argues that Brazil could live without Portugal—but not vice versa. It warns further that the departure of the king would bring independence, which in fact happened the following year. “The king should not abandon the country while the revolutionary storm threatens and while he is needed more than ever here.”6 The proof lies in the document’s origins. Under the order of Thomaz Villa Nova Portugal, minister and private advisor to João VI, the Royal Press printed the leaflet in 1820. Historian Tobias Monteiro uncovered evidence that João not only knew of the text but authorized its propagation.7 The document therefore defended ideas shared by the king and his principal assistant.
The departure of the court left Brazil indigent on the eve of its independence. On embarking, João VI scraped clean the coffers of the Bank of Brazil and withdrew all that remained of the royal treasury brought to the colony in 1808. “The royalty, which lived in corruption, carried out a veritable raid on the Brazilian treasury,” wrote de Oliveira Lima.8 Eyewitness Maria Graham recounts that “the treasury was left so poor” that Pedro had to delay the increase of military pay promised before the king’s departure, which further heightened the discontent and uncertainty in Brazil. “The funds for carrying on several branches of industry, and several works of public utility were destroyed by this great and sudden drain,” she wrote, “and thereby much that had been begun after the arrival of the court, and which it was hoped would have been of the greatest benefit to the country, was stopped.”9
The withdrawal of treasury funds had dramatic consequences on the Brazilian economy and in practice “amounted to bankruptcy, even if not declared” in the evaluation of historian Pereira da Silva.
Gold is no longer found in circulation. Silver has raised to a 7 or 8 percent premium. The discredit of bank notes has paralyzed, tormented, damaged, and dragged commerce to a slow liquidation. It has suspended the regular whirl of commerce. Many things have failed. A hideous crisis has formed. A panic of terror has seized everyone’s spirits. The price of basic necessities has raised, and this fact has powerfully influenced everyone and everything, multiplying the disasters resulting from the restless spirits, anarchic ideas, and general disorder in which the society is plunged.10
João VI arrived in Lisbon on July 3 after sixty-eight days of travel, as vulnerable as when he had left. When he departed in 1807 he was a hostage to England and a fugitive from Napoleon. Now he was again a hostage, this time of the Portuguese Cortes. According to historian Oliveira Martins, even before setting foot on solid ground, the king was “insulted and humiliated.”11 While still aboard his ship, he was obliged to swear to the new Constitution, developed without consulting him. José Honório Rodrigues recounts that “D. João swore the oath in a hushed voice, mumbling with the cowardice that was his alone.”12
The king had to accept certain impositions that in the epoch of absolute monarchy were unimaginable. One prohibited a number of his companions, accused of corruption and robbery in the administration of the public treasury, from disembarkation in Portugal. Among the blacklisted was Joaquim de Azevedo, count of Rio Seco, the official invited to the Palace of Queluz in November 1807 to organize the voyage to Brazil in the first place. In Rio de Janeiro, where he served as head treasurer in the royal exchequer, he became one of the richest men in the former colony and new kingdom. In addition, Bento Maria Targini, viscount of São Lourenço, and the Lobato brothers, chamberlains and private advisors to the king, couldn’t enter Lisbon either.13
For the Portuguese, who for so many years anxiously awaited the return of the royal family, the arrival of João VI on the docks of Lisbon was a spectacle to behold, just as much as it had been for the Brazilians thirteen years earlier. Oliveira Martins captures the moment vividly:
By then old, overweight, filthy, greasy, ugly, obese, with a dead look in his eyes, a fallen, sunburned face, a sagging pout, hunched over on swollen knees, he hung like a sagging load between the velvet pillows of aged golden coaches . . . and was followed by a gaunt cavalry—for those who beheld this scene on the rocky streets of Lisbon, he was a grotesque apparition.14
XXVII
A New Brazil
In 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.”1
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 w
itnessed 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.2 “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.”3
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.4 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.5 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.6
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.”7
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.8 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.”9
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.10 “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.”11
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.12
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.13
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? 14
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.”15
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.16
1808: The Flight of the Emperor Page 25