What is Tiradentes Day?

A holiday that marks an execution

Most national holidays celebrate a beginning. Brazil’s April 21 remembers an ending. On that Saturday morning in 1792, in Rio de Janeiro, Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, an ensign nicknamed Tiradentes, “the tooth-puller,” went to the gallows for plotting to turn the gold-mining captaincy of Minas Gerais into a republic. Ten fellow conspirators had been sentenced with him and spared by the Portuguese queen. He alone was not.

Forgotten by the Empire

For almost a century, nobody official wanted to remember him. After independence in 1822 Brazil was an empire, and its two emperors, Pedro I and Pedro II, were the grandson and great-grandson of Queen Maria I, in whose name he had been condemned. In 1862 Rio’s Praça da Constituição received a grand equestrian statue. It was of Pedro I. The square has since been renamed Praça Tiradentes, but the bronze emperor still rides in the middle of it.

The people who brought the ensign back were the republicans of the 1870s and 1880s. A man who had died for a republic, sentenced in the name of a Portuguese queen, was the perfect martyr for a movement that wanted the monarchy gone. Republican clubs began to mark April 21.

The Republic’s first calendar

The monarchy fell on November 15, 1889. Two months later the Provisional Government issued a list of national days, and the date of the hanging was on it.

The following are declared days of national celebration: … 21 April, devoted to commemorating the precursors of Brazilian Independence, summed up in Tiradentes.

The decree created nine such days. The positivists in the new government believed a republic needed civic festivals and heroes of its own. The historian José Murilo de Carvalho adds a sharper reason: the Republic had been proclaimed without crowds in the streets, and it needed a figure ordinary people could feel for. A martyr hanged in a queen’s name fitted perfectly. That same year an illustrator gave him a beard and the face of Christ, an image with no basis in the records.

Patron of the nation

The honors kept coming. Law 4,897 of December 9, 1965, declared Tiradentes the civic patron of the Brazilian nation and ordered public bodies, schools and the armed forces to unveil his likeness and celebrate him every April 21. It also answered the sentence of 1792, which had declared his children and grandchildren infamous: the conviction, the law says, is no stain on his memory. Today the holiday is set by Law 10,607 of December 19, 2002, which lists Brazil’s national holidays.

Other April 21s

The date kept drawing history to it. Brasília, the new capital, was inaugurated on April 21, 1960. Tancredo Neves, born in São João del-Rei, the town the conspirators had picked as the capital of their republic, died on April 21, 1985, without ever taking office as president. And on April 21, 1993, Brazilians voted in a referendum on whether to keep the republic or bring back a monarchy. They kept the republic Tiradentes had been made the symbol of.