Emperor Pedro II of Brazil — a respected monarch toppled by an army he had let drift

Summary

The Empire of Brazil ended on 15 November 1889 in Rio de Janeiro, when a column of soldiers under Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca occupied the capital and a republic was proclaimed, deposing Emperor Pedro II after a personal reign of nearly half a century. There was no battle and almost no bloodshed. The emperor, away at his summer retreat in Petrópolis, returned to a city already lost, declined every proposal to resist, and within two days was put aboard a ship for Europe with his family. He never saw Brazil again.

Pedro II had ruled since 1831, when he inherited the throne at the age of five on his father's abdication, and personally since 1840. He was, by the standards of nineteenth-century rulers, an unusually scrupulous constitutional monarch: learned, austere, broadly liberal, a patron of science and education who presided over decades of relative stability and a parliamentary system in which cabinets rose and fell. He was also genuinely popular, more respected at the moment of his fall than at almost any earlier point in his reign. The paradox of his deposition is that it was carried out against a sovereign few Brazilians actively wished to be rid of.

The monarchy fell not because it was hated but because the three groups on which it rested had each withdrawn their support. The Catholic Church had been alienated by the emperor's handling of a clash over Freemasonry in the 1870s. The slaveholding coffee planters of the south-east — the empire's economic backbone — were embittered by the abolition of slavery in May 1888, which freed roughly 700,000 enslaved people with no compensation to their owners. And the army, swollen and politicized by the Paraguayan War and then slighted in peacetime, had drifted into open contempt for civilian government and into the orbit of Positivist republican officers. By 1889 the throne had no defenders left.

Pedro II accepted his removal with a fatalism that bordered on collusion. Tired, diabetic, and ambivalent about a monarchy he doubted could outlive him through his unpopular daughter Isabel, he offered no fight. He died in a Paris hotel on 5 December 1891. Within a generation Brazil would bring his body home with honors the republic that overthrew him had never shown the living man.

Timeline

The scholar on the throne

Pedro II was, in temperament, almost the opposite of the autocrats whose falls fill this archive. Raised to the throne as a small child and shaped by tutors into a serious, bookish young man, he came to govern as a deliberately restrained constitutional monarch. Under the Constitution of 1824 he held a "moderating power" that let him dismiss cabinets and call elections, and he used it to keep the parliamentary system in a slow, managed alternation between Liberal and Conservative ministries. Over a personal reign of nearly fifty years he presided over thirty-six cabinets. He read widely, corresponded with scientists and writers across Europe and the Americas, founded and funded institutions of learning, and cultivated an image — largely deserved — of probity and self-denial.

For roughly four decades this earned him broad and genuine support. The empire he governed was vast, stable by the standards of post-colonial Latin America, and spared the cycles of caudillo rule that convulsed its Spanish-speaking neighbors. But the stability rested on a foundation Pedro never reformed: an economy built on enslaved labor, a social order dominated by a landed planter aristocracy, and a set of tacit alliances between the crown, the Church, and the army. Each of those alliances would fail him in turn, and the emperor — increasingly aloof, increasingly ill, and privately doubtful that the monarchy deserved to survive him — did little to repair any of them.

The three pillars fall away

The first crack opened with the Church. In the early 1870s a dispute over the place of Freemasonry in Catholic lay brotherhoods escalated until two bishops who defied the crown's authority were tried and imprisoned. Pedro, a man of Enlightenment instincts and cool religiosity, won the legal point but lost the loyalty of much of the clergy, who never again regarded the throne as their natural protector. A monarchy that in a Catholic country could not count on the Church had lost a load-bearing wall.

The second pillar was the army, and here the damage was self-inflicted by neglect. The long Paraguayan War of 1864–1870 had multiplied the size and prestige of the officer corps; peace returned it to a civilian government that underfunded it, blocked its advancement, and — in the so-called Military Question of the 1880s — forbade officers from airing political grievances in the press. Resentful and increasingly drawn to the Positivist doctrines of the philosopher and instructor Benjamin Constant, a faction of officers came to see the empire as an obstacle to a modern, rational, republican Brazil. The army that should have defended the throne had become the chief threat to it.

The third and decisive defection was that of the planter elite. The slow death of Brazilian slavery — through the Free Womb Law of 1871 and the Sexagenarian Law of 1885 — culminated on 13 May 1888 in the Lei Áurea, the Golden Law, which abolished slavery outright. It was signed by Princess Isabel, acting as regent while her father travelled in Europe for his health. Abolition was a moral landmark and the central humane act of the reign; for the enslaved it meant freedom, even if the republic that followed offered the freed people little land, protection, or recompense. But for the great coffee and sugar planters of the south-east it was the confiscation, without a cent of compensation, of the property on which their wealth was built. Overnight, the most powerful conservative interest in the country — the throne's oldest constituency — turned republican out of revenge.

By 1889 the monarchy was a structure whose every supporting wall had been pulled away. The emperor was 63, diabetic, frequently abroad for treatment, and visibly tired. His heir was his daughter Isabel, distrusted as devout and dominated, in the public mind, by her French-born husband, the Count d'Eu. Few could imagine the empire surviving Pedro's death intact, and that doubt corroded the will to defend it while he lived.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The Republic of Brazil that replaced the empire was proclaimed by men with no popular mandate — the historian's estimate is that the active conspirators commanded only a fraction of the army — and it began as a military government under Deodoro da Fonseca, soon riven by the instability the monarchists had warned of. Pedro II himself slipped into a quiet, dignified poverty in Europe, refusing a pension voted by the new regime. His wife, the empress Teresa Cristina, died only weeks after reaching exile. Pedro spent his last two years travelling and reading, and died of pneumonia in a Paris hotel on 5 December 1891, aged 66. He was buried, for a time, near Lisbon.

Brazil's verdict on him softened almost immediately. The emperor who had been overthrown without resistance was mourned as the republic's instability deepened, and his reputation as an honest, learned, and humane ruler outlived the regime that deposed him. In 1920 a law lifted the imperial family's banishment; the remains of Pedro and Teresa Cristina were brought home in 1921 amid public ceremony and, in 1939, entombed in the cathedral at Petrópolis, the mountain town he had loved. He is remembered today as one of the most respected heads of state of the nineteenth century — and as the rare monarch whose own people came to regret his fall.

Lessons

References

• Pedro II | Emperor of Brazil, Abolitionist & Reformer ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA
• Decline and fall of Pedro II of Brazil WIKIPEDIA
• Exile and death of Pedro II of Brazil WIKIPEDIA
• The collapse of the empire ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA
• Legacy of Pedro II of Brazil WIKIPEDIA