1889

Laurentino Gomes wrote "1889" to close the trilogy that began with the Portuguese court's flight to Rio in 1808 and continued with independence in 1822. Now the subject is the end of the Empire: how a regime of almost seventy years fell on a morning at an army barracks without a single shot, while most of the population had no idea what was happening.

The method is the same as in the trilogy: historical reportage, drawing on letters, diaries and newspapers of the period, building the narrative around flesh-and-blood people rather than abstract concepts. That's why the book has a subtitle with three characters: a tired emperor, a vain marshal and a wronged professor.

Those three labels sum up the central thesis: the Proclamation was not born of an organized popular revolution. It came from the exhaustion of those at the top, the wounded vanity of someone who felt scorned, and the ideas of officers who saw in positivism the answer to everything that bothered them about monarchical Brazil.

Dom Pedro II took the throne as a teenager in 1840 and ruled Brazil for almost fifty years. By the 1880s he was a man past sixty with advanced diabetes, worn out from dispatching paperwork and signing decrees every day, in a regime that depended far too much on his personal presence to function.

He himself said he would rather live among libraries and travel than keep carrying the weight of the crown. He had visited Europe and the United States, admired the republics he saw there, and made no secret that the monarchy, for him, now weighed more than it gave him pleasure.

For the book, this personal exhaustion is one of the pieces that explain why almost no one truly fought to save the throne in November 1889. A regime held up by the willpower of one man trembles easily when that man no longer wants to hold anything up.

Dom Pedro II had a son who died as a baby, and the heir to the throne became his eldest daughter, Princess Isabel. She was seen as capable, but the custom of the time viewed a woman on the throne as a weakness, especially one married to a French prince, the Count d'Eu, who was not popular among Brazilian officers.

The prospect of a third reign, under Isabel, troubled sectors that already complained about foreign influence at court and feared losing political ground to a foreign husband. That fear, more than any debate about forms of government, pushed part of the elite to look for an alternative to the monarchy even before Dom Pedro II died.

It's a detail the book doesn't let slide: a good part of the movement against the monarchy was born of a concrete fear of what would come after the tired emperor, in a succession that weakened even further a throne already losing support.