Why did the monarchy fall in Brazil?

A small idea in 1870

On December 3, 1870, the first issue of the Rio newspaper A República carried a manifesto drafted by the journalist Quintino Bocaiúva and signed by nearly sixty men, most of them lawyers, doctors, merchants and journalists. They wanted a federation and an end to the monarchy. Brazil was an empire surrounded by South American republics, and one line said so plainly:

We are of America and we want to be Americans.

Slavery barely appears in the text. In 1873, coffee planters from western São Paulo founded the São Paulo Republican Party at Itu. They were a new elite, rich and with little say in Rio, and they wanted their province to set its own taxes. The idea now had money behind it, but not the strength to topple anyone. That strength came from three ruptures.

The Church and the army

In the Empire, Catholicism was the state religion, and not even an order from the pope was valid in Brazil without the emperor’s approval. In 1872 two bishops, Dom Vital of Olinda and Dom Macedo Costa of Pará, punished lay brotherhoods tied to Freemasonry. The government sided with the brotherhoods, and in 1874 the bishops were sentenced to prison. They were amnestied the next year, but the Church did not forget.

The army came back from the Paraguayan War with prestige and a grievance: it had shed its blood while the politicians argued in Rio. At the Military School of Praia Vermelha, Professor Benjamin Constant taught Auguste Comte’s positivism to young officers. Between 1883 and 1887, in what became known as the Military Question, officers punished for writing in the newspapers stood up to the civilian ministers. Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca took their side, and in 1887 he became president of the new Military Club. That same year the club asked Princess Isabel, then regent, not to use the army to hunt down people who had fled slavery.

The planters and the fear of a third reign

The monarchy had kept the order and the slavery that the coffee plantations depended on. On May 13, 1888, with the emperor ill in Europe, Princess Isabel signed the Golden Law. It had two articles and no compensation, for the slaveholders or for the freed. Many planters of the Paraíba valley, the throne’s old base, turned republican overnight. Brazilians nicknamed them the republicanos de 14 de maio, the republicans of May 14.

Then there was the succession. Pedro II came home in August 1888, worn down, at 62. His heir was Isabel, a devout Catholic married to a French prince, the unpopular Count of Eu. For much of the elite, a third reign was more frightening than a republic.

Which crisis mattered most?

Historians weigh them differently. Celso Castro puts the young officers trained at Praia Vermelha at the center of the movement. Others, such as Emília Viotti da Costa, look first at the changes in the coffee economy and at planters who no longer needed the Crown. The outcome is not in dispute: on the morning of November 15, 1889, the government’s soldiers did not fire, and the Empire fell in a day. How that day unfolded is in Who proclaimed the Republic of Brazil?

And the Ilha Fiscal ball?

Six days before, on November 9, the government threw a ball on the Ilha Fiscal, a small island in Guanabara Bay, for the officers of the Chilean ironclad Almirante Cochrane. Between 3,000 and 4,500 guests came, and the menu read “Homenagem ao Chile,” homage to Chile. It was neither a farewell nor a cause of the fall. The name “last ball” came later, with the Republic and Aurélio de Figueiredo’s painting of 1905. That same night the Military Club met with Benjamin Constant in the chair.