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

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The monarchy fell not because it was hated but because the three groups on which it rested had each withdrawn their support.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.