The short answer
He was sent into exile. On November 16, 1889, the new government ordered him to leave Brazil, and he replied that he was going “yielding to the force of circumstances.” Before dawn on the 17th the imperial family was taken aboard in secret. He never returned alive: he died in Paris on December 5, 1891.
Last reviewed
The order to leave
On the afternoon of November 15, 1889, Pedro II came down from Petrópolis, the hill town where the court spent its summers, and tried to form a new cabinet. It was too late. On the 16th, Major Sólon Ribeiro, the officer who had spread the false arrest rumor in the barracks two nights before, handed the emperor the provisional government’s order: the family must leave the country.
Pedro II answered in writing that he would go cedendo ao império das circunstâncias, “yielding to the force of circumstances.” There was no resistance. The new government wanted him gone before crowds could gather at the docks. Before dawn on November 17 the family was taken aboard in secret, and the steamer Alagoas carried them to Europe. After 49 years on the throne, he never saw Brazil again.
Banished
On December 21, 1889, the provisional government’s Decree No. 78-A banished the former emperor and his whole family from Brazilian territory. It was not a trip abroad anymore; it was a ban on coming home. Empress Teresa Cristina, his wife of more than forty years, died in Porto, in northern Portugal, that same December, weeks after landing.
Two years among hotels and libraries
A widower now, Pedro II settled in France and lived among hotels and libraries, the scholar he had always wanted to be. He died in Paris on December 5, 1891, aged 66, with Brazilian soil in his coffin. Twelve days earlier, in Rio, Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca, the man who had toppled his last cabinet, had resigned the presidency (Who was the first president of Brazil?). Pedro II was given a head of state’s funeral at the Church of the Madeleine, which the illustrator Charles Morel drew from life. The coffin then went to Lisbon, to the pantheon of the Braganza dynasty in the church of São Vicente de Fora.
Home after thirty years
Did Pedro II ever go back to Brazil? Not alive. In 1920 President Epitácio Pessoa revoked the banishment, and in 1921 the remains of Pedro II and Teresa Cristina came back to Brazil. Since 1939 they have rested in the cathedral of Petrópolis, the city that carries his name: Petrópolis means “Pedro’s city.” His summer palace there is now the Imperial Museum, where visitors can see the crown made for his coronation in 1841, when he was 15.
The man behind the white beard, from the boy left in the palace to the emperor with a camera, is in Who was Dom Pedro II?. Why the throne had no one left to defend it is in Why did the monarchy fall in Brazil?
Sources
- Pedro II, reply to the provisional government, November 16, 1889
- Decree No. 78-A, December 21, 1889 (banishment of the imperial family)
- Charles Morel, drawing of Pedro II’s funeral in Paris (December 1891)
- José Murilo de Carvalho, D. Pedro II (2007)
- Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, As barbas do imperador (1998)