The poet Antônio Gonçalves Dias82 also caught the emperor’s eye. Considered a great Brazilian Romantic poet, he introduced Indianism to his poetry. Based on historical documents and his own ethnography, Gonçalves Dias wrote poems that depicted the early years of the colony. The central theme of his most famous poem, I-Juca-Pirama – ‘He that must die’ in Tupi – is the bravery of the warrior hero and the practice of cannibalism. The poem tells the story of a Tupi warrior taken prisoner by the Timbira, who, while awaiting his death, tells of his fears for his father who is old, weak and blind, and from whom he became separated in the woods. When the father is also captured, the son weeps. Seeing his weakness, the Timbira let him go because, according to their belief that they incorporated the qualities of the victims they ate, they would not eat a coward. The old man is appalled at his son’s weakness and curses him. The young man suddenly decides to confront the Timbira warriors alone, and thus earns the right to be sacrificed and reconciled with his father.83 Thus the Indian, despite his sacrifice, emerges as an idealized model of purity and honour, an example to be followed. In such work, the dividing line between literature and reality, between fiction and nonfiction, was blurred to say the least. History was at the service of a mythical form of literature, which in turn was at the service of creating a national identity.
In 1865, José de Alencar84 published Iracema, a novel that ignited the public imagination and revolutionized Brazilian literature by breaking with traditional Portuguese literary form. The book is not only set in the breathtaking natural surroundings that were central to the genre, but its title is also an anagram for America, as well as meaning ‘honey lips’. Set in an idealized seventeenth century, the work is an allegory of the birth of Brazil, via a depiction of the sacrifice of the Indians. The central couple – Iracema, a Tupi Indian maiden, and Martim, a Portuguese settler – symbolize the first inhabitants of the country, their union producing a predestined race. At the end of the book Iracema dies so that their son Moacir (‘the child of suffering’) can live. The book broaches themes including hybrid language, syncretic religion and a nation of mestizos. Once again, in a Brazil far removed from the realities of the nineteenth century, its white and Indian heroes intermix in a setting of untamed nature, behaving with honour and dignity.
Iracema was not José de Alencar’s first book with an indigenous theme. He had previously written a much longer novel, O Guarani, which was first published in instalments in the Diário do Rio de Janeiro between January and April 1857, and was published in book form later that year. The story is also set in the seventeenth century and its central character is the Indian Peri, who falls in love with the blonde, white-skinned Ceci, daughter of a Portuguese nobleman. At the end of the novel Peri tries to rescue the ‘blonde virgin’ and the story closes with their declaration of an almost platonic love, carried away by the torrential waters of the river – a metaphor for the idea of purification. The composer Carlos Gomes based the Italian libretto for his opera Il Guarany on José de Alencar’s book. The first performance was given at La Scala in Milan in 1870. Carlos Gomes’s work was also financed by Pedro II, and was conventionally European, with some original touches taken from Brazilian culture. Romantic music was composed, but with an indigenous foundation, as if affirming an identity at once universal and singular.
These and many other examples show how Romanticism in Brazil was not restricted to aesthetics. It was both cultural and political, with deep connections to nationalism, to the monarchy, and to cultural independence. Although they were attacked by historians such as Varnhagen, who called them ‘caboclo patriots’, the Romantic Indianists were successful in establishing a romanticized picture of the Indian as a national symbol. It is interesting to note the answer that Gonçalves Magalhães published in the press, defending his book. ‘The fatherland is a concept, represented by the land where we were born.’85
The idealized portrayal of the Indian not only resurrected what was ‘authentic and noble’, but also helped to construct an image of an ‘honourable past’. Contrary to the Africans, who were an ever-present reminder of the shameful institution of slavery, the Indian provided an origin for the country that was both mythical and aesthetically malleable. The country’s luxurious natural resources had a parallel function: Brazil may not have mediaeval castles or Renaissance churches, but it had the largest rivers and the most beautiful vegetation. The monarch, the state and the nation were depicted surrounded by palm trees, pineapples and exotic birds, displaying the country’s unequalled natural exuberance.
The Imperial Academy of Fine Arts – which had been created in 1826 but only began to operate on a regular basis during the reign of Pedro II – was also a fertile field for Romanticism. During this time a major transformation occurred with the rejection of the Baroque in favour of neoclassicism, above all at the court and in some of the provincial capitals. The change had first come about with the arrival of the group of French artists on 26 March 1816, but now became more firmly established, financed by both the state and the monarchy. The emperor adopted a similar policy with the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts that he had introduced at the IHGB, with the distribution of prizes, medals and scholarships to study abroad. He also participated enthusiastically in the annual General Exhibition of Fine Art, and awarded the most outstanding artists with the Order of Christ and the Order of the Rose. In 1845 the emperor inaugurated the annual Travel Fellowship, which funded the winner’s studies and living costs abroad for three years. And there was more: Dom Pedro II commissioned artists to paint official portraits, which were distributed around the country and taken with him on his travels, first within Brazil and later overseas. Some of these artists – such as Simplício Rodrigues de Sá86 and Félix-Émile Taunay87 – taught the emperor and his sisters the art of painting or became the official court painters. The exaltation of the exotic, the wonders of nature and romanticized Indians all became characteristic of the paintings produced at the Academy.
As the producer of the official images of the empire, the Academy would impose not only styles but also themes: the noble motif, the portrait, the landscape and the historical indigenism would become à la mode. Most such images were produced abroad and represented an idealized picture of Brazil’s landscapes and people, as is to be expected from one observing from afar. This is the case of Victor Meirelles de Lima,88 the painter of iconic works such as A primeira missa no Brasil (1860)89 and Moema (1866), and of José Maria Medeiros’s Iracema (1881).90 Paintings such as these were part of the Romantic Indianist movement in vogue in the 1860s. In these works, idealized and passive Indians are depicted against the background of a tropical landscape as if they were almost an element of nature. In these large canvases the colonization process is not portrayed as an invasion, but rather as a harmonious, consensual meeting between two peoples.
Brazilian Romanticism was widely disseminated, and the main symbol was the native Brazilian. Ironically, while the monarch and Brazilian culture became more and more tropical, the indigenous peoples had never been so ‘white’. The African slave population and even the early colonizers were overlooked as the role as a ‘legitimate representative of the nation’ was left to the idealized Indian. Pure, honest and courageous, the native Brazilian was depicted as a king of the exuberant forests, where he lived in harmony with nature. The early travellers, chroniclers and historians – names such as Gabriel Soares de Sousa,91 Sebastião da Rocha Pita92 and Manuel da Nóbrega – are mere footnotes in the narratives on which the paintings were based. History and myth went hand in hand but also had a didactic purpose: the ‘noble Indian’ was part of a remote past and could thus become a mythical figure, the inspiration of the Romantic dramas produced at court. Native Brazilians were seen in the grandiose canvases and the beautiful operas that presented the European public with a picture of an exotic and noble empire in the tropics. The ‘noble Indian’ made it possible for the young nation to make peace with its past and foresee a future filled with promise.
The emperor was equally interested in medicine, financing the research of Brazilian professionals and investing his own resources in the city’s asylum, which was named after him in 1850. He was also the patron of the first Scientific Exploration Committee (1859) – nicknamed the Butterfly Commission by its opponents – which collected species in the north of the country.
So Brazil became a ‘tropical empire’ and, at the same time, a (somewhat distorted) mirror image of Europe. During a period of political tranquillity, Dom Pedro II was used to epitomizing Brazilian nationality, appearing crowned as a Roman Caesar amid coconut palms and cotton plants, coffee trees and tobacco leaves, with books arranged on his lap to display his erudition and wisdom.
But in 1865 the disastrous Paraguay War, which marked both the high point of the Brazilian monarchy and the beginning of its decline, broke out. The war ended five years later, in 1870, with an appalling death toll, casting a shadow over the empire for its part in the massacre. The Republican Party was founded the same year, and the abolitionist movement gained an impetus that was irreversible. The idea that the tropics were a natural, eternal paradise where people coexisted in peace and harmony was no more than a figment of the imagination.
12
The End of the Monarchy in Brazil
THE PARTY IS OVER: THE LONG, DISASTROUS WAR IN PARAGUAY
As the 1870s approached a radical change took place in what, until then, had been the placid routine of Dom Pedro II’s reign. In 1865 the most notorious international war in which Brazil had been involved broke out: the Paraguayan War. Unlike what the monarch, his ministers and generals – and even the country’s allies Argentina and Uruguay – had assumed, the war was neither easy nor short. And it demanded so much of the government’s time and capital that little was left over for domestic reforms. The cost of the war was enormous: 614,000 contos de réis, eleven times the government budget for 1864, creating a deficit that was to persist until the end of the monarchy.1
Tensions in international relations had been rising in the run-up to the war. In 1862, while the country was preparing to participate in the Universal Exhibition in London – where it was to display the wealth of its agricultural produce – the diplomatic incident known as the Christie Affair occurred. William Douglas Christie had been the British representative at the Brazilian court since 1860 and was known for his confrontational behaviour. Things came to a head when three drunken British officers wandering around the streets of Rio de Janeiro were arrested for disorderly conduct. Christie reacted immediately to what he considered an unacceptable affront to his country. He had the British squadron stationed in Rio de Janeiro blockade the port. Five Brazilian merchant ships were apprehended by the British navy outside Guanabara Bay, causing a serious international incident that could even have led to a declaration of war. The politicians at the time generally treated Christie’s confrontational behaviour with irony. ‘He learnt diplomacy in the land of the Mosquito,’ commented the Baron of Penedo.2 ‘These are the follies of Mr. Christie,’ declared the minister Zacarias.3 But the greatest of the British representative’s follies was still to come. On 2 December 1862 he failed to attend the emperor’s birthday celebrations, to which the diplomatic corps had been summoned. This time Dom Pedro II decided to force Christie to back down and broke off diplomatic relations with the British government. Leopold I of Belgium, who was asked to arbitrate, decided that Brazil had been wronged and Britain offered a formal apology. Even so, diplomatic relations between the two countries remained suspended for two years.
But this was by no means the worst of the government’s problems. The 1860s saw an upsurge in the abolitionist movement. With the prohibition of the slave traffic in 1850 the question of slavery had become a major political issue. In 1865, with the end of the Civil War, the United States passed the thirteenth amendment to their constitution, abolishing slavery in North America. There was fear among the local and government elites that Brazil would soon follow suit. Apart from Brazil, Cuba was the only other country where slavery was still legal. International pressure was increasing.
Yet, the crisis in the River Plate region put the question of abolition on hold. The Paraguayan War, also known as the War of the Triple Alliance, evolved into a national problem so enormous that all political differences were put aside. At the beginning of the 1860s the region was in a state of fragile peace. Four countries, with conflicting interests, had frontiers between the Uruguay and Paraguay rivers: Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay. Shipping access in the River Plate basin, and which country should control the area, was a fraught question. The region was so volatile that a long list of conflicts had occurred long before the beginning of the Paraguayan War. The ambitions of the Argentinean dictator, Dom Juan Manuel Rosas, had led to a serious incident in 1849. Rosas wanted to revert to the former viceroyalty established in the region by Spain. He had already conquered Uruguay and now threatened Brazil’s southern border in the province of Rio Grande do Sul. The Brazilian government was aware of Dom Juan Manuel Rosa’s intentions, but thought it best to avoid a conflict, a decision that led to the fall of the ministry and the appointment of a new President of the Council: Eusébio de Queirós.4 The government was under pressure from many directions: increasingly aggressive attacks in the region of the River Plate and the prospect of a gradual end to slavery. There was generalized unease at the high concentration of slaves in the southeast due to the expansion of the coffee plantations there in the 1830s and 1840s.5 In a political move the government conducted a new census and introduced civil registration, to evaluate the number of slaves and the imminent risk of rebellion. But the elite rejected the idea: the landowners, as was their wont, preferred not to know what the proportion of either slaves or freemen really was.6
But from 1851 the ‘business of the Plate’ took centre stage in Brazilian politics. Although the first confrontation ended quickly, with Brazil entering the war in 1851 and Dom Juan Manuel Rosas’ surrender in February 1852, the volatility of the region caused increasing concern. In 1863 a civil war broke out in Uruguay. On the one side were the supporters of the moderate Colorado Party, led by General Venancio Flores, and on the other those of the conservative Blanco Party, led by the divided country’s president, Atanasio Aguirre. Brazil and Argentina supported General Flores, as both countries were afraid of the expansionist plans of the Blanco Party.7 But this particular conflict soon subsided. On 15 February 1865, Aguirre capitulated and signed a peace agreement with Brazil.
Still, trouble in the region was soon to start again, only this time with a different enemy: Paraguay. The state of play was changing: in Argentina the federalists were defeated when Bartolomé Mitre won the presidency and implemented a centralization process. In Brazil, after fourteen years of conservative rule, the Liberal Party came to power. In Paraguay, President Carlos Antonio López died in 1862, and was replaced by his son, Francisco Solano López, who lost no time in entering into confrontation with Brazil. The Brazilian government did not appreciate his attempt – failed, by the way – to arbitrate in the conflict between Brazil and Uruguay. Furthermore, Paraguay vied with Brazil to be the main supplier of maté8 to the Latin American market, and had aspirations to take over Montevideo as an outlet for its exports, demanding that the borders be redrawn. The Argentinean federalists had
the same aspiration, for very similar reasons. Thus two unofficial blocs were formed: on the one hand the Argentinean federalists, the Uruguayan Blancos and Paraguay; and on the other the Brazilian Empire, the Colorado Party and the Argentinean government.
The whole region was undergoing a period of political reconstruction following independence. In addition to the discord over the River Plate basin, there were internal divisions as well, due to the conflicting ambitions of the governments involved. The countries were also separated by their cultural differences and political regimes. Brazil liked to see itself as a stable regime surrounded by unstable republics; an example of civilization compared to aggressive expansionism, and led by an emperor rather than a dictator.
War was in the air; all it needed was an event to spark it off. That event occurred in 1864, in Uruguay. The Brazilian government issued an ultimatum demanding that rapid measures be taken against alleged abuses of Brazilian residents in Uruguay. Cattle-breeders in Rio Grande do Sul, on the Brazilian side of the border, were also subject to attack and Brazil would have none of it. When the Uruguayans ignored the ultimatum, Brazil invaded the country. Meanwhile, there were confrontations between the other countries in the region. Perhaps the most serious of all stemmed from President Solano’s determination that Paraguay gain access to the sea. War broke out when, on 12 November, the Paraguayan authorities seized the Brazilian steamship Marquês de Olinda. Then in December, President Solano invaded Mato Grosso. Four months later, in April 1865, he invaded Argentina, attacking Corrientes and Entre Rios, two provinces that had previously been his allies. From then on the Paraguayan leader found himself isolated in a very dangerous game.
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