Who proclaimed the Republic of Brazil?

A rumor in the barracks

On the night of November 14, 1889, a rumor ran through the army barracks of Rio de Janeiro, then Brazil’s capital. The government, it said, had ordered the arrest of Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca and of Benjamin Constant, the young officers’ favorite teacher. It was false. Major Sólon Ribeiro spread it, and it worked. Deodoro, 62, was in bed and short of breath. He got up anyway.

Early in the morning he led the troops to the Campo de Santana, where the ministers were meeting at army headquarters. The government’s soldiers did not fire. Many of the men marching thought they were going to fight the police, not bring down a monarchy. Deodoro walked in and declared the cabinet deposed.

The painting and the witnesses

The best-known image of the day, Benedito Calixto’s Proclamação da República (1893), now in the Pinacoteca of São Paulo, shows Deodoro on horseback, raising his kepi to proclaim the Republic. The witnesses describe another scene. He said he would take the emperor the names of a new cabinet, and some swore he cheered Pedro II. Was Deodoro a monarchist? A year earlier he had written to a nephew:

A republic in Brazil and utter disaster are one and the same

A civilian proclaims, a decree makes it law

Late that afternoon, the man who actually proclaimed the Republic was a civilian. At the City Council, José do Patrocínio, a Black journalist and one of the great voices of abolition, read a motion and declared the new regime. Meanwhile Pedro II came down from Petrópolis, his summer town, and tried to form a new government. The name going round was Gaspar Silveira Martins, Deodoro’s old personal enemy. When the marshal heard it, he stopped wavering. That night the provisional government, with him at its head, signed Decree No. 1. Brazil became a federal republic, and its provinces became states:

The Federative Republic is hereby proclaimed provisionally and decreed as the form of government of the Brazilian nation. … awaiting, as is its duty, the final pronouncement of the nation’s vote, freely expressed by popular suffrage.

“Provisionally” until 1993?

The promised vote did not come in 1889, or in the decades after. The Constitution of 1891 adopted the Republic without a referendum and even barred Congress from debating proposals to abolish it. The plebiscite came a century later, and by another route: the Constitution of 1988 called it in article 2 of its transitional provisions, and a 1992 amendment moved the date up to April 21, 1993. The republic won about 66% of the votes, the monarchy about 10%. The 1993 vote did not carry out the decree of 1889: it was the 1988 Constituent Assembly’s own decision.

Why November 15 is a holiday

Proclamation of the Republic Day, November 15, has been a national holiday in Brazil since 1890. The date holds three moments: the troops in the morning, the civilian in the afternoon, the decree at night. What the marshal did with the power he had taken, from the provisional government to his resignation in 1891, is in Who was the first president of Brazil?. The new flag, adopted four days later, is in What does “Ordem e Progresso” mean?