The celebration of the centennial of the Brazilian Republic (1889-1989) was marked by a few events of academic or civic nature and no enthusiasm whatsoever. It has been observed that the bicentennial of the French Revolution aroused more interest in the people of Brazil. The reasons for this are not difficult to understand. Two seem to have particular relevance. First, is the recent memory of a military regime (1964-1985) in the minds of the people. The proclamation of the Republic on 15 November 1889 is generally held to be the making of the Brazilian military; it would be somewhat embarrassing to celebrate the actions of yesterday's enemies.

The second reason relates to the disappointment felt among the populace with the New Republic—the name given to the civilian government inaugurated in 1985. The New Republic rode in on the crest of huge mass demonstrations, the most impressive ever to take place in the country. These people called for the end of military rule and the direct election of a civilian president. In 1985 a civilian president took over, although not chosen by direct election, and a constituent assembly drafted a new constitution. Freedom of the press was restored and the people lived in great hope that a new era had finally dawned for the nation. Four years later, in 1989, a new constitution was in effect, and the fundamental precepts of a democratic system—the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary branches of government; a free press; multiple political parties; and a politicized populace—were all in place.

Joaquim Nabuco (1849-1910) is known to most students of Brazilian history as an abolitionist, a member of the Second Reign's Liberal opposition and, perhaps, as the first Brazilian ambassador to the United States. Some of us, however, note that Nabuco was also an important spokesman for the monarchist reaction against the early Republic and an outstanding historian and apologist for the Monarchy. He thus suggests something of both the range, contradictions, and limits of elite political thought in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

This presentation will attempt to go beyond the commonplace solution to the apparent contradiction in Nabuco—his liberal monarchism—to suggest the nature of his socio-political assumptions as they evolved from his more radical youth to his rather conservative maturity. It will also attempt, as an integral part of this, to identify Nabuco's role in clarifying and promoting elite conservative social thought through the use and interpretation of Brazil's national history.

The study of the first decade of the Republic permits one to reflect on the numerous myths that permeate Brazil's history. These myths have served to reduce social conflict and to provide ideological foundations for the holders of power. In particular, examination of the 1890s challenges the commonly accepted notion of the peaceful character of the Brazilian historical process and the myth of consensus. The roots of these traditions, according to Henry Keith, date from the viceregal period. But the republicans were particularly active in reinforcing it by exalting the bloodless character of the change of regime in 1889. “Revolution without blood” the politicians Martim Francisco Ribeiro de Andrada of São Paulo and Karl von Koseritz of Rio Grande do Sul would say. The Correio Mercantil of Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul agreed; the country had witnessed a “marvelous political change that Brazil brought about instantaneously without shedding a drop of blood, without firing a single bullet.”

In 1893, the penitent known as Antônio Conselheiro convinced several thousand devout followers to join with him in creating a religious community at Canudos in the Bahian sertão. It grew precipitously, attracting pilgrims from every part of the region, some from places more than two hundred kilometers distant. Within two years it had become the second largest urban center (after the capital, Salvador) in Bahia, Brazil's second most populous state. As soon as the effect on the traditional labor system began to be felt by landowners, pressure was applied to state officials, who in 1896 agreed to take action to dismantle the settlement. This would prove arduous, but after four bloody military campaigns, Canudos was destroyed by the Brazilian army in 1897. The so-called “rebellion” left an indelible legacy on late nineteenth-century Brazil. Taken to be a symbol of the clash between urban rationality and rural “backwardness,” Canudos was celebrated as a pivotal national victory for “progress” and “civilization.”

The economic transformations which the new exigencies of capitalism brought to Brazil at the end of the second half of the nineteenth century caused the emergence of new urban sectors, the end of slavery, the utilization of free labor and the rise of a dynamic agrarian bourgeoisie. These in turn provoked a crisis of hegemony within the dominant classes in the final moments of the Empire which reached the sphere of political domination. Their loss of hegemony resulted in administrative inertia and the impression of a power vacuum since the coffee bourgeoisie was not yet able to exercise the direction of the State alone. With the advent of the Republic, it fell to the army to temporarily occupy power and to institutionalize the new regime, while the bourgeoisie was organizing itself to take charge definitively in a hegemonic form.

The centennial of the founding of the Brazilian Republic, which coincides with the bicentennial of France's republican revolution of 1789, has not aroused the same debates as the French Revolution. The extent to which France's eruption represented a bourgeois revolution has been much questioned. Indeed, bourgeois revolutions everywhere have been subject to greater scrutiny and skepticism. This debate has excited much less passion in Brazil.

Most historians have viewed the Brazilian Republic's birth as a rather unimportant event—and a failure. It was neither bourgeois nor a revolution. Rather, the overthrow of the Emperor on November 15, 1889 was a palace coup that replaced one authoritarian rural regime with another. According to this interpretation, no social change occurred as the population stood by “beastlike.” Historians often argue that although the army, which launched the coup, was able to maintain some autonomy in policy formulation for five years, it soon succumbed to the revived agrarian export elite, leaving behind few positive achievements. Yet at the time, the London Statesman declared that the overthrow of the Brazilian monarchy to be the world's most significant event in a very busy 1889. Historians are now starting to echo this sentiment, reasserting the importance of the early 1890s. Décio Saes, for instance, asserts that the 1889-1891 period marked the advent of the “bourgeois state” which confirmed on the political level the transformation set into motion by the emancipation of slaves in 1888.

Brazil came late to republican government. By 1889 Brazilians had witnessed almost a century of tumultuous politics in neighboring republics. The aspirations of the 1817 and 1824 separatists had been transformed as order and progress, the positivist creed, chased away the specter of social reform. In some ways Brazil itself had changed profoundly during the empire; yet in others it remained deeply rooted to its colonial past. The tension between tradition and change, between old alliances and new possibilities, highlighted the proclamation and consolidation of Brazil's republic. Political transition provided opportunity for widely differing groups to seek preeminence. The myth of a uniquely Brazilian peaceful transition to republicanism is shattered as we witness the power struggles that began on November 15, 1889. But one hundred years later it is the image of lost opportunity, the failure to seize the moment created by abolition, the absence of the povo from the process, that impresses those who experience another transition in Brazilian republican history.