IN 1822, REFLECTING UPON THE THIRTEEN YEARS OF DOM JOÃO’S REIGN IN BRAZIL, one anonymous critic concluded that the “invasion of the French in Portugal, and the consequent transfer of the Portuguese throne to Brazil, necessarily had to produce a revolution in the political and commercial system of the European and American continents. Whether this revolution was to be fortuitous or fatal for the Portuguese monarchy,” he then explained, “depended entirely on the good or bad regime that the government adopted.”1 It was not, in other words, the transfer of the court itself but rather what happened in its wake—the ways in which the relocation of the court in Brazil was defined—that shaped the political and economic future of Portuguese on both sides of the Atlantic. More than in the royal family’s departure from Lisbon, it was in the local and transatlantic politics of monarchy and empire in the 1810s that the Portuguese monarch’s vassals saw obstacles to their fortune to be defeated and opportunities for transformation to be seized.
In Rio de Janeiro the creation of an American imperial capital appeared to embody a divinely, historically, and scientifically inspired rectification of the errors of an old colonial system that then ensured the renovation of imperial glory and prosperity. “In the year 1808 the Hand of Omnipotence,” the bishop of Rio de Janeiro proclaimed with flourish in a pastoral letter published in 1822, “brought Lord Dom João VI to Brazil to open its closed ports to the commerce of nations, to raise it from the abject state of colony in which it was entombed, [and] with the sublime category of kingdom to place it on par with free and civilized peoples of Europe and America.”2 As they experienced these transformations, residents of the new royal court embraced, with a range of practices and discourses, what they beheld as their unprecedented full access to the traditional potential of vassalage and royal patronage and reckoned with the restorative innovations of political economy. Yet, the elevation of Brazil to “the degree of prosperity to which its physical circumstances made it disposed” was not, according to the anonymous critic cited above, the only task that the crown and its vassals faced. Equally important was the need to consolidate “by way of mystical political and economic interests, the union of diverse members of the monarchy, which nature put so distant from one another, spread out across the four parts of the globe.”3 This consolidation was made difficult, however, by the perception that Brazil’s fortune had come at Portugal’s expense. Whereas residents of Rio de Janeiro celebrated their new status, Portuguese in Portugal fought to expel the French and struggled against what many perceived to be the transformation of the old metropolis into a colony. In the 1810s, notwithstanding official and unofficial appeals to unity founded on the institution of monarchy (historic loyalties), the new commercial empire (unprecedented prosperity), and the nation (the renovation of virtue), tensions between the European and American experiences of a new royal court in Rio de Janeiro persisted.
As the decade of the 1820s commenced, constitutionalism then offered a resolution of these tensions by guaranteeing political and economic rights and freedoms (that Portuguese in Portugal perceived to be lost and Portuguese in Brazil claimed to have gained) through representation and national sovereignty. As rebels in Portugal set out to convoke the Cortes to draft a constitution, residents of Rio de Janeiro, joining constitutionalists in other parts of Brazil, took to the streets, witnessed and supported a rebellion, gathered for an assembly of representatives, and pamphleteered as part of an ultimately successful effort to guarantee Dom João’s support for the new “constitutional system” for both Portugal and Brazil. In the months that followed the king’s departure from Rio de Janeiro to return to Lisbon, his heir, the new prince regent Dom Pedro, assumed the crown’s pledge to defend zealously the future constitution and respect the authority of the Lisbon Cortes.
Yet, even as Dom Pedro’s defense of the future constitution and the Cortes appeared to favor Rio’s residents’ own demands for constitutional government as a guarantee of the rights and freedoms achieved since 1808, it also came to imply other foreboding consequences: that the new prince regent would return to Portugal, that Rio de Janeiro would be stripped of its status as a court and instead be made one of many provincial capitals, and that the exercise of political rights and the range of future economic exchange would be defined exclusively, as they were before 1808, by a distant government in Europe. In response, residents of the New World court used petitions, one of which included as many as 8,000 signatures, as well as newly achieved freedoms of the press to challenge these threats to their sovereignty and prosperity. Consequently, 1822 began with Dom Pedro’s pledge to remain in Brazil: “tell the people I stay.” As his presence proved to be irreconcilable with the Lisbon Cortes’ claim of sovereignty over Brazil, a claim that the Cortes was willing to support with force, in Rio local campaigns for autonomy continued with placards, petitions, meetings, and public demonstrations. Before the year’s end, on September 7, 1822, almost a year and a half after he bid his father good-bye, Prince Regent Dom Pedro then pledged to secure Brazil’s independence from his native Portugal: “Independence or Death!”4 As Rio’s bishop proclaimed, the omnipotent “Hand, always constant and generous,” now had worked to retain Dom Pedro in Brazil so as “to bring to a conclusion the act of its emancipation, and to crown the great work of its happiness,” to proclaim and defend the “well-regarded independence of all of Brazilian territory.”5 Thus, the Empire of Brazil was created.
This contemporary claim, made with the advantage of hindsight, that independence finally brought to fruition the emancipation initiated during Dom João’s residence in Rio effaced efforts, however assailable and ultimately short-lived, made throughout the 1810s in the new court to safeguard the unity of the Portuguese crown’s dominions. Yet the claim also shaped, at least in part, the way in which independence would be defined in the months and years that followed. In designating the new polity as an “empire” the defenders of Dom Pedro and independence recognized what eighteenth-century Portuguese statesmen had characterized as Brazil’s continental dimensions and copious resources. They reaffirmed, as the royal exiles and the city’s residents had in the 1810s, that Brazil was a place where prosperity and political renovation could be achieved. Furthermore, this independent Empire of Brazil was built on the conviction that the monarch was a “protector” of rights, as well as of interests formerly denied or suppressed by the so-called old colonial system. By entrusting the monarch with maintaining “equilibrium and harmony” among other authorities, the Empire also affirmed that while defending certain privileges, the monarch could provide a defense against those privileges and interests. Following the transfer of the court to Rio de Janeiro, these professedly universal powers and responsibilities had been emblematically expressed within the city in Dom João’s audiences and in acts of royal patronage and grace. On these occasions the sovereign both affirmed “the certainty that owners have that the state will always ensure the punishment of slaves” and defended slaves when undercutting their owners’ authority enhanced the expression of his own power. The monarch, in other words, had shown that he would uphold social hierarchies, while also revealing the relative vulnerabilities of those hierarchies. Even as the monarch thus established the formal limits to the city’s residents’ political participation, he also constituted a forum in which they expressed their expectations and claimed their rights.
The new Empire of Brazil was proclaimed with the promise of a written constitution as well, one that would express the nation’s sovereignty and define the political rights of the members of that nation. The political preeminence of the nation expressed a complex legacy of the transfer of the court. During the Peninsular War, the historic, heroic, and moral nation had served to reunite the divided Portuguese world. Having risen in 1808 to defend itself and its besieged sovereign, the nation then proclaimed its “regeneration” by assuming the role of sovereign itself in 1820 and 1821. The basis for unity, however, then became the basis for division, as the vision of a moral Portuguese nationhood expounded in the 1810s by exiles and longstanding residents of Rio de Janeiro collided fatally with nationalist discourse in Portugal that placed geography above all. As the Empire of Brazil then called into being a new nation “free and independent” from Portugal, the historic and heroic as well as the voluntary dimensions of nationhood would have to be formally rearticulated. In 1824 a constitution affirmed the nation’s political representation to be both an Assembly and the Emperor himself, “unanimously acclaimed by the people.”
The proclamation of the Empire of Brazil and its reception also revealed the local dimensions of imperial, monarchical, and constitutional politics. In the 1820s, as in the 1810s, certain understandings of monarchy and empire formed in Rio de Janeiro, and then projected beyond the city, were not necessarily shared or incorporated into other local contexts. Indeed, in 1824, as in 1817 and 1821, the northeastern provinces would rebel against the government in Rio, proclaiming their own, often republican, understandings of the end of the old colonial system. And across Brazil even among supporters of the new imperial, monarchical, and constitutional “system,” conflicts and divisions surfaced. Questions of the status of slavery and the slave trade, the scope of economic liberties and open ports, relations with British merchants and their empire, and the conditions for civilization, order, and progress at the local level that emerged in the 1810s would continue to demand the attentions of residents of the empire throughout the nineteenth century.
And in the Empire of Brazil, the same imperative of a self-consciously postcolonial predicament that had led, for example, to attempts to metropolitanize slavery in Dom João’s New World court, would yield similarly ambivalent readings of the liberal “ideas of this century.” Liberals in nineteenth-century Brazil, along with their counterparts elsewhere in the Atlantic world, distinguished between “universal capacities” and “the conditions for their actualization” and therefore raised the bar for political inclusion.6 Thus, popular sovereignty was both celebrated and targeted for discipline through education. Although citizenship was formally inclusive, the grounds for political participation were based on racialized understandings of difference: freedpersons (libertos) were citizens, but could not be electors. The Constitution of 1824 neither explicitly defended slavery nor decreed its demise. Consequently, the intendant’s deliberations on the place of slaves at royal audiences and in judicial courts were followed by debates on the limits of imperial clemency for slaves and the further development of a complex, “ambiguous,” and “peculiar” body of law that sought “to protect the master from the slave, the slave from the master, and the whole society from the institution of slavery itself.”7 These same tensions between ideals and realities, the imperial present and a colonial past, elite and popular practices and aspirations, Europe and Africa, which marked the transformation of Rio de Janeiro into the court and capital of the Portuguese empire in the 1810s, also shaped successive reformations and remodelations of the city, including twentieth-century quests to “civilize,” once again, the built environment and the residents of the capital of a Brazilian republic.8
The transfer of the court had been a moment of incertitude and reckoning, of facing the consequences of and coming to terms with changing understandings of political legitimacy and empire. Rather than a simple reaction against these changes, the ways in which royal officials and vassals, exiles and residents in Rio de Janeiro and across the dominions of the Portuguese crown defined the meaning of monarchy and empire in the New World deepened an engagement already underway in eighteenth-century Portugal and Brazil with the “ideas of the century” that included political economy and representative government, liberty and equality, and renewed quests for social order and “civilization.” While the transfer of the court alone did not determine that Brazilian independence would be its own outcome, an exclusively American empire both consecrated an earlier “emancipation,” as it was defined by residents and officials in the new court of Rio de Janeiro, and reproduced its equivocations.
Notes
1. Anonymous, “Considerações sobre o estado de Portugal e do Brasil desde a sahida d’el rei de Lisboa em 1807 até ao presente. Indicando algumas providencias para a consolidação do reino unido” [1822], RIHGB 26 (1873), 145–184.
2. [José Caetano da Silva Coutinho], Carta Pastoral do Bispo do Rio de Janeiro … (Rio de Janeiro: Silva Porto e Companhia, 1822), 3–4.
3. Anonymous, “Considerações.”
4. Roderick Barman, Brazil: The Forging of a Nation, 1798–1852 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 83–96.
5. [Coutinho], Carta Pastoral.
6. Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 49. On the North American revolutionary vanguard’s exclusionary reactions to popular politics see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 236–240.
7. Robert Edgar Conrad, Children of God’s fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984), 236; Alexandra Kelly Brown, “‘On the Vanguard of Civilization’: Slavery, the Police, and Conflicts between Public and Private Power in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, 1835–1888” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1998), 204–207; Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, “Silences of the Law: Customary Law and Positive Law on the Manumission of Slaves in 19th-Century Brazil,” History and Anthropology v. 1 (1995), 427–443; and Keila Grinberg, Liberata, a lei da ambigüidade: As ações de liberdade da corte de apelação do Rio de Janeiro no século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Dumará, 1994).
8. Jeffrey D. Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque: Elite culture and society in turn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Teresa A. Meade, “Civilizing” Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889–1930 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).