Who was Dom Pedro II?

The boy left behind

Before dawn on April 7, 1831, Emperor Pedro I signed his abdication and sailed for Europe. At the Palace of São Cristóvão in Rio de Janeiro he left his son, Pedro de Alcântara, five years old, with three sisters. The boy’s mother, Empress Leopoldina, had died when he was one. His father’s story is in Who was Dom Pedro I?

The Constitution of 1824 said an emperor was a minor until 18, so regents governed while revolts flared from the Amazon to the far south. In 1840 the Liberals, out of power, pushed his majority forward. On July 23 the General Assembly declared him of age at 14, a maneuver remembered as the Coup of the Majority:

Brazilians! The nation’s hopes have become reality; a new era has dawned; may it be one of union and prosperity.

Tradition gives the boy a famous reply, “I want it now!”, but it is only attributed. He was crowned on July 18, 1841, at 15, with a cape of toucan feathers over his shoulders.

The scholar-emperor

Pedro II studied before dawn: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit, astronomy. How many languages he actually spoke is hard to pin down; what he studied is on record. He corresponded with Louis Pasteur and sponsored artists and scientists. At 14 he bought a daguerreotype camera, perhaps the first owned by a Brazilian, and over his life he gathered more than 20,000 photographs. He gave them to the National Library under his wife’s name, as the Thereza Christina Maria Collection, on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register since 2003. In his diary he admitted where his heart lay:

I was born to devote myself to letters and the sciences, and, were I to hold political office, I would rather be president of the Republic or a minister than emperor.

An empire of coffee and slavery

The court’s money came from coffee, grown in the Paraíba valley between Rio and São Paulo by enslaved people. By the 1880s coffee was more than half of Brazil’s exports. Through the moderating power, a feature of the 1824 Constitution, the emperor chose the cabinet and could dissolve the Chamber, so Liberals and Conservatives took turns in government at his call. The Atlantic slave trade ended after an 1850 law passed under British naval pressure. Slavery itself lasted until May 13, 1888, when his daughter, Princess Isabel, signed the Golden Law while he lay ill in Europe.

Was he a good emperor? The record cuts both ways: half a century of stable government and a famous patron of science, at the head of the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery. The historian Lilia Schwarcz has shown how the wise, white-bearded monarch was also an image he built, portrait by portrait.

War, fall and exile

He won the Paraguayan War (1864–1870), but the army came home with a grudge against the politicians. One by one he lost the Church, the army and the planters. On November 15, 1889, he was deposed; two days later he sailed into exile. He died in Paris on December 5, 1891, aged 66. His last two years are told in What happened to Pedro II after the Republic was proclaimed?, and his meeting with Bell’s telephone in Did Dom Pedro II say “My God, it talks!”?