Was Canudos a monarchist revolt?

What the Conselheiro actually said

Brazil’s last emperor, Dom Pedro II, was overthrown on November 15, 1889. In May 1895 the archbishop of Bahia sent a Capuchin friar, João Evangelista de Monte Marciano, to Belo Monte, the town that the holy man Antônio Conselheiro had founded in the backlands two years before. The friar found nearly a thousand armed men in the square and asked the people to disperse. His report records the answer:

It is for my protection that I keep these armed men with me, because Your Reverence must know that the police attacked me and tried to kill me at the place called Maceté, where there were deaths on both sides. In the time of the monarchy I let myself be arrested, because I recognized the government; today, no, because I do not recognize the Republic.

Notice what he does not say. He calls for no emperor and names no plan to march on Rio. He refuses to recognize the Republic, not Brazil, and the armed men, in his telling, are there because the police had already come for him.

A quarrel of faith

The Constitution of 1891 separated Church and State. Only civil marriage was valid, and cemeteries no longer belonged to the Church. To a man who had spent twenty years rebuilding chapels and cemetery walls with the poor, this was sacrilege. Verses found in the town called the new law “the law of the dog.” Historians sum it up as religious monarchism, not political monarchism: a rejection of a state without God, with no party, program or paymaster behind it.

Why Rio saw a plot

The capital’s fear had a context. The young Republic had just put down two uprisings, the Navy Revolt in Rio and the Federalist Revolution in the south, between 1893 and 1895. In March 1897, the third army expedition against Canudos collapsed and its commander, Colonel Moreira César, a hero to the loyalists of Brazil’s second president, Floriano Peixoto, was killed. Mobs in Rio wrecked the offices of monarchist newspapers, and Colonel Gentil de Castro, a monarchist editor, was murdered at a railway station.

Even Euclides da Cunha, a republican from the first hour, believed it. On March 14, 1897, before he had ever seen the backlands, he wrote:

As in the Vendée, the religious fanaticism that rules their naive and simple souls is cleverly exploited by the propagandists of the empire.

The Vendée was the Catholic peasant revolt against the French Revolution. The comparison said it all: simple country people, steered by royalists.

What the evidence showed

When the army finally took the town in October 1897, no proof of monarchist money or weapons turned up. Some of the defenders’ best rifles had come from the army itself, gathered after Moreira César’s rout. Euclides went to Canudos as a reporter, changed his mind, and in Os Sertões (1902) admitted there had been no monarchist conspiracy. The roots of the war lay in the backlands, in drought, land and faith, as What caused the War of Canudos? explains. The fall of the empire that the Conselheiro mourned is in Why did the Brazilian monarchy fall?.