Did Maria Leopoldina sign Brazil’s independence?

An archduchess in Rio

Maria Leopoldina of Austria, Brazil’s first empress, was a Habsburg: the daughter of Emperor Francis I of Austria and the sister of Marie-Louise, Napoleon’s second wife. She reached Rio on November 5, 1817, to marry Pedro, heir to the Portuguese king, who was then living in Brazil. She came with scientists, among them the naturalists Spix and Martius, and with the painter Thomas Ender. She collected minerals and plants, spoke several languages and wrote letters that historians still read.

On August 14, 1822, Pedro left for São Paulo to settle a political quarrel there. In Rio he left his wife as acting regent. That is how she entered the story of independence.

What happened on September 2

In late August news came from Lisbon: the Portuguese parliament, the Cortes, was annulling Pedro’s decisions and once more demanding that he come home. On September 2, Leopoldina, as acting regent, chaired the Council of State. The council argued for a break with Portugal. She wrote to Pedro, and so did his minister José Bonifácio.

Two couriers, Paulo Bregaro and Antônio Ramos Cordeiro, galloped off with the letters. Five days later they found the prince on a hilltop near the Ipiranga stream. What he did next is in Who said ‘Independence or Death’?.

A decree, and a ripe fruit

Here the legend begins. Many books and websites say that on September 2 Leopoldina signed a decree of independence, so that Brazil broke away by her hand. Historians dispute that version. What can be said with confidence is something else: she presided over the meeting that called for the break, and she sent that message to her husband.

Tradition also puts a striking line in her letter: “the fruit is ripe, pick it now or it will rot.” The image is vivid, but no archive holds it. It is tradition, not a document, that gives it to her.

None of this makes her smaller. At 25, at the head of a council of ministers at a moment of crisis, she urged Pedro toward the break. He proclaimed it on September 7, and the acclamation of October 12 sealed it. But the push came from a room in Rio that she was chairing. The full sequence of 1822 is in How did Brazil become independent from Portugal?.

Another myth: the fall

Leopoldina died on December 11, 1826, aged 29, the mother of seven children, among them the future Pedro II. Pedro was openly involved with Domitila, the Marquise of Santos, and for generations people said that a fall, or a blow from her husband, had killed her. In 2012 a University of São Paulo team exhumed her remains, which lie in the crypt of the Independence Monument in São Paulo. They found no fracture anywhere in her skeleton. The tale of the fatal fall does not survive the evidence of her bones.