Brazil

by Heloisa Maria Murgel Starling

  Nevertheless, the emperor’s virility was taken as a sign of his maturity, and from this point on he began to become more and more involved in affairs of state. In Europe the year 1848 was marked by a wave of revolutions that began in Paris with the Second Republic on 24 February, and spread to Germany, Bavaria, Austria, Hungary, Milan, and finally to Sicily. Pedro’s two sisters were both directly affected. Dona Francisca, who was married to the son of Louis-Philippe, the now deposed King of France, was obliged to go into exile in Britain and Dona Januária, married to the son of the King of the Two Sicilies, had a miraculous escape. In contrast, Dom Pedro II’s empire appeared to be heading in the opposite direction: it seemed like an island of tranquillity.

  GOOD AND BAD WINDS

  Far from the storms in Europe, the young king started to face a series of new challenges and surprises, some better than others. The ministry that had been in power in Brazil since 1848 was ideologically conservative: Araújo Lima (the Marquis of Olinda), Eusébio de Queirós, Paulino José Soares de Sousa and Joaquim José Rodrigues Torres. Of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies, 110 were held by conservatives, and only one by a liberal. Nevertheless, the ministers, who tended to suffer from inertia, were obliged to confront a number of questions of radical importance: the problem of landownership, incentives for immigration, and the thorny issue of the slave traffic.

  First, the recurrent pressure for the end of the ‘infamous trade’ was ever greater, with England at the helm. Between 1839 and 1842 the number of seizures of ships carrying slaves progressively increased and by 1850 the situation had become unsustainable. The issue was an embarrassment: despite collusion with the traffic, the Brazilian government knew prohibition was essential if political autonomy were to be maintained. Furthermore, for Brazil to be among the ‘barbarous nations’ still engaging in slave-trafficking was in direct contrast to the civilized image the country sought. To make matters more complex, the interior provinces were entirely dependent on slave labour and not in favour of making any changes. Between 1841 and 1850, 83 per cent of all the Africans transported to the Americas came to Brazil; 12 per cent went to Cuba and the rest were divided between Puerto Rico and the United States.13 These statistics only scratch the surface; dealers reaped enormous profits from both the slave trade and the commerce affiliated with it.14

  The issue of slave-trafficking had become so important that it permeated other government legislation. In 1850, in response largely to British pressure, Brazil adopted the Eusébio de Queiróz Act that prohibited the maritime trade in slaves. The question was of such importance that it began to affect other domestic issues in the empire. For example, the 1850 Land Law, which had first been presented in 1843, was aimed at reorganizing the agricultural system in Brazil with an eye to the end of slave labour.15 It passed only a few days after slave-trafficking had been interrupted. This was the beginning of a struggle that was to last until the end of the empire. The aim of the land law was to discourage subsistence farmers and prevent future immigrants from owning land. A further measure taken at this time was the centralization of the National Guard, to strengthen the federal government in the event of a conflict with landowners from the interior. These landowners were against both the prohibition of slave-trafficking and the regulation of landownership. The same year a new commercial code was passed into law, made necessary by the vast number of new businesses that had emerged funded by capital previously invested in the slave trade.

  Every cause has many effects, and the end of the slave trade in 1850 is no exception. Since a great deal of the slave traffic had been conducted illegally, large amounts of profit had been concealed from the official state accounts. Thus, with the end of slave-trafficking, vast quantities of resources appeared, virtually overnight, as if by magic. The government’s response was to invest in the country’s infrastructure, above all railways. Between 1854 and 1858 the first railways were constructed, the first telegraph lines erected, navigation routes were established, gas lighting was introduced in the cities, and the number of schools and educational institutions began to increase. Investment in trafficking was transferred to other sectors of the economy, and imports grew by 57.2 per cent in a period of two years: a pleasant surprise for a government that was basically sustained by import tariffs.16

  A little bit of luck goes a long way, and it so happened that the prohibition of the slave traffic occurred simultaneously with the rise in the international price of coffee. Between 1840 and 1844, Brazil’s coffee trade had been making a net loss, but after 1845 it became extremely profitable. Between 1850 and 1851 sales rose by 23 per cent and optimism began to pervade the empire. The financial situation was indeed encouraging: for the fiscal year of 1831 to 1832, immediately after Pedro I’s abdication, the government’s total receipts had been 11 171:520$000.17 For 1840–1, after the new emperor’s majority, this figure rose to 16 310:571$000. For the fiscal year of 1862–3 it tripled to 48 343:182$000. This period of economic growth became known as the ‘Mauá Era’ – the name of the Brazilian entrepreneur18 who owned seventeen different companies. His sphere of business extended as far as Uruguay and Argentina, with investments in the financial and industrial segments – a very fortunate circumstance since between 1854 and 1889, 10,000 kilometres of railroads were constructed in the country.

  The empire’s foreign policy was also successful. Brazilian troops defeated the Uruguayan leader Manuel Oribe, thus putting an end (at least temporarily) to the complicated political dispute over the region of the River Plate, a dispute that, among other factors, had led to Pedro I’s abdication. At the same time, in the wake of the new land law and the prohibition of the slave traffic, the government launched a policy to attract European immigrants. Brazil had little to offer them compared to the United States, which offered greater facilities for the acquisition of land, had a more developed transport system and, in much of its territory, no slave labour to compete with. Nevertheless, from 1850 onwards, immigrant workers began to arrive from Europe and the East. Since the prohibition of the slave traffic, the price of a slave had doubled on the domestic market, and the policy of attracting immigrants had been planned to replace them.

  But the policy of importing farm labourers, financed by landowners, created a series of problems. A model emerged that was no more than a form of slavery through the accumulation of debt. The immigrants had to pay the landowners back for all their expenses, including travel, housing, use of the land and farming tools. Having been tricked with the promise of plots of land of their own, many left for the towns. Revolts followed, the most famous of which occurred on the estates of Senador Vergueiro in 1856. Three years later the Prussian government banned all emigration of its nationals to Brazil.19

  At the end of the 1860s the government decided to finance immigration. One of the aims was the ‘whitening’ of the population, which, according to the scientific theories of the time, would be beneficial for the country. There was concern over the ‘future of a country of mixed races’20 and, with slaves still a majority, the old fears of a Haitian-style revolution had not been laid to rest. In 1849 there were 110,000 slaves living in Rio de Janeiro, and 266,000 white people.21 The district around the palace was known as ‘Little Africa’, a name that could appropriately be applied to the city itself.

  The long, difficult decade ended in tragedy. In 1859, Rio de Janeiro succumbed to its first major epidemic of yellow fever, with thousands of deaths, including one of Pedro II’s young sons.22

  LIFE AT COURT23

  But even with good and bad moments, the decade of the 1850s would be remembered for its financial stability and for the domestic peace the country was to experience from then on. In Rio de Janeiro the impact of the end of the slave traffic was greatest. In fact, the city was undergoing an enormous transformation. The urbanization was meant to transform the city into a bourgeois Paris, although the reality oscillated between elegant residential districts and working-class neighbourhoods, where slaves and freemen predominated.
r />   Urban slavery was present throughout, in all the town houses, large or small. All that varied were the particular characteristics of any given town and the wealth of its inhabitants. In larger houses a hierarchy of enslaved pages, message boys, nurses and domestic servants, well dressed and neatly turned out, were a symbol of the status of their owners. In the smaller houses belonging to single women and widows or to the lower rungs of government employees, male and female slaves toiled alongside their owners, and above all their wives, creating bonds of friendship. These, however, did not lessen the violence that always lay beneath the surface of urban slavery. Some of these household slaves were emblematic, like the wet nurses, whose photos appeared alongside the family in picture albums and on carte de visite photos which, when taken to Europe, offered the exotic, romantic and peaceful image of slavery that Brazil was eager to export. But the tension – albeit latent – was always there. The young masters were identified by their Christian names and surnames, while the wet nurses remained anonymous.

  The streets were filled with all kinds of characters. Slaves who were hired out, the so-called escravos de ganho, who earned daily wages, bustled about either looking for work or executing tasks. They carried enormous loads – barrels, crates, pianos – and stood out with their burdens, singing in syncopated rhythms. Similarly, female street vendors and snack sellers stood out for their independence in their trades and social contacts. Many of those women managed to save enough money to buy their freedom. They sometimes formed families of their own by purchasing young slaves, who were later granted their freedom as well. In the world of urban slavery, where vigilance was not so strict, many ways of practising a profession and of moving about freely were invented. Slaves and freemen joined together with the poor and through ties of solidarity and mutual help created an invisible world, alongside the brilliance of the court, which now shone brighter than ever.24

  This so-called modern urban world was meant to reflect the aspirations and mores of a white society along traditional European lines. Perhaps this is the reason that, practically from one day to the next, palaces, public gardens and wide avenues were built. The court accomplished several other significant improvements. They contracted the planting of trees (from 1820), cobblestone pavements (1853), gas street lighting (1854), a sewage network (1862), donkey-drawn trams (1868) and piped water (1874). The traditional streets for commerce also began to change. The once elegant Rua Direita – where both high fashion and haberdashery and dry goods were sold – no longer seemed sufficient. The narrow city streets teeming with slaves, with the smell of sewage and the damp sea breeze, all seemed to contribute to an aura of decay.

  This was the beginning of the golden age of the Rua do Ouvidor, where French fashion stores, florists, jewellers, hairdressers, tobacconists and even ice-cream shops were opening every day. In contrast to former times, being out and about town became fashionable: evening walks, and teas in elegant cafés, with passers-by decked out in elegant suits tailored in British fabric, and the latest fashions recreated after Paris couture. It was no accident that Rua do Ouvidor became the symbol of this new urban sophistication – the European boulevard in the heart of the tropics. This exaggerated aspiration did not escape the pen of the great author Machado de Assis,25 whose short story ‘Fulano’ features a character, Fulano Beltrão.26 In the short narrative, Mr Beltrão’s social and political ascension led him to stroll along Rua do Ouvidor. When his wife died, ‘he ordered the construction of a magnificent mausoleum in Italy’, which was then brought to Brazil and ‘displayed in the Rua do Ouvidor for almost a month’.27 Not only was Rua do Ouvidor the very heart of social life, the street was also the centre for political debate and the meeting place for journalists, writers, poets and artists.

  As ‘high society’ became more established, Rio de Janeiro became both the centre of comings and goings, and the place where social customs and manner of speech were established for the rest of the country. It was not by chance that while ‘marriageable young women’ dreamt of life at court, wealthy landowners wanted their sons to experience the pleasures of the ‘Babylonian court’.28 These large landowners took pride in their coffee plantations and manors, more than adequate for balls and perhaps even a visit from the emperor himself – the ultimate trophy. But it was in the big cities that social life was becoming established amid a fever of concerts, parties and balls.

  And then there were the theatres, where people went to see and be seen. The most important stages in Rio de Janeiro included the São João theatre and the Lírico Fluminense theatre, located in the Campo da Aclamação. In the latter, Carlos Gomes29 presented his first opera, A Noite do Castelo, and his most famous work, Il Guarani, was first performed there on 2 December 1870, in honour of the emperor’s birthday. In addition to actors from abroad, these theatres featured Brazilian artists, such as the playwright Martins Pena,30 known for having introduced the comedy of manners to Brazilian theatre. In one of his plays, O caixeiro da taverna31 the character Francisco complains: ‘All you see in this town are French tailors, American dentists, English engineers, German doctors, Swiss watchmakers, French hairdressers, foreigners from the four corners of the earth …’32 In Martins Pena’s plays Englishmen are addressed as ‘senhor mister’, but he saves most of his satire for the Brazilian fixation on the French.

  The most popular pastimes, however, were the balls and the soirées. Here lectures were given, jokes told, waltzes danced, arias sung, poetry was declaimed and women courted.33 The balls were at the height of their popularity and importance at this time; both political and social, opponents argued and rifts were healed at the balls. ‘One cannot talk politics without croquettes,’ the Baron of Cotegipe34 used to say, referring to soirées accompanied by Donizetti, Rossini and Verdi arias. The women were dressed elegantly with, of course, fillers and corsets that miraculously transformed their figures. Bouquets for the ladies, cigars for the men, the casino balls were filled with silks, bonnets, golden bracelets, plumes, Belgian lace, and fans made of ivory, mother-of-pearl, tortoiseshell or sandalwood – the balls at the casinos displayed all the luxury of life at court, the dream of living in Brazil as people lived in France, despite the heat of the tropics.

  But it would be a mistake to believe that Rio de Janeiro was Paris or that Recife was London. The two cities were islands surrounded by plantations where slave labour was omnipresent. In his bitter short story ‘Pai contra mãe’,35 Machado de Assis comments that ‘slavery creates its own professions and its own tools’: the steel mask, the iron ring around the neck, the profession of capturing slaves whose escapes were advertised every day in the press. In the same short story, Cândido Neves, a capturer of escaped slaves, is proud of his job. On the verge of being forced to hand over his own son because he is so in need, he captures a pregnant mulatta who aborts as he is chasing her. ‘Not all children prosper’ is Neves’s only comment.36

  While the court attempted to maintain a system of slave labour alongside paid workers as silently as it could, the contrast with its pretensions to civilization was all too obvious. The density of the slave population was in evidence everywhere. During the nineteenth century the number of slaves fluctuated between half and two-fifths of the population of Rio de Janeiro. According to the Almanak Laemmert,37 in 1849 the city was home to the largest number of slaves since the end of the Roman Empire, 110,000 in a population of 266,000 residents. In the eight parishes that formed the rest of the city – Sacramento, Engenho Velho, São José, Candelária, Santa Rita, Santana, Glória, Lagoa – the proportion of slaves was lower, but their impact was greater. These centrally located parishes were the centre of government activity, with government buildings, public squares and the bustling trade. Of the total of 206,000 inhabitants who lived in those regions, 75,000 (38 per cent) were slaves.38 The area around the palace was known as the Kingdom of Obá or, as mentioned above, Little Africa. The inhabitants were mainly Africans and crioulos, both slaves and freemen. In fact, according to the 1849 census,
one in every three residents was African. The proportion of slaves was even greater in other Brazilian cities. In Niterói, four-fifths of the population were slaves in 1833, and in Campos,39 59 per cent were slaves. Salvador, with its smaller population (around 81,000 inhabitants in 1855), also had a greater proportion of slaves as residents than Rio de Janeiro.

  But it was not only slavery that eclipsed the empire’s aspirations to civilization. There was an enormous imbalance between the population of the cities and that of the rural areas. In 1823 the population of the provincial capitals represented 8.49 per cent of the country’s total population; in 1872, 10.41 per cent and in 1890, 9.54 per cent.40 The situation was further complicated by the fact that approximately 50 per cent of the city dwellers were concentrated in just three capitals – Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Recife: 59 per cent in 1832; 48 per cent in 1872; and 58 per cent in 1890.41 It is clear, then, that while the court was the centre of society and fashion, it was also the exception. The fashionable world was for the few. Slavery and the abandonment of the rural workers were, and would remain, the great contradictions of Dom Pedro II’s purportedly civilized reign: a quasi-European empire.

  POLITICS IN THE SECOND REIGN: MORE OF THE SAME

  The world of politics was also only for the few. After Pedro I’s death in 1834, his supporters joined the monarchist party – then known as the conservatives – who won the elections of 1836 and governed from 1837 to 1840. That year, the liberals – the other major party – in alliance with a few conservatives, won the elections and governed until 1841. The two parties continued to take turns: 1841–4 the conservatives; 1844–8 the liberals; 1848–53 the conservatives, until in 1853 a ‘national conciliation’ government took power, with representatives from both parties. The union lasted for five years, during which time the fragility of both parties became evident, as well as the potential of the monarchy to intervene in politics. Brazil had no bourgeois class to regulate social relations through market forces, and thus it fell to the state to consolidate the nation and enact policies of economic protectionism.42 It helped that the governing elite was homogeneous in terms of social background, ideology and training. During this process of increased state involvement in the economy, the bureaucratic sector, which had previously been run by magistrates and military offices, was gradually taken over by liberal professionals and lawyers – the so-called bacharéis.