Dom Pedro II: To Be or Not to Be

Pedro de Alcântara was born in Rio de Janeiro in December 1825, the son of Emperor Pedro I and Empress Leopoldina. He was not even a year old when his mother died in 1826, leaving him and his sisters in the care of wet nurses and tutors at the Palace of São Cristóvão. His father gradually became an increasingly distant figure.

In 1831, pressured by a political crisis, Pedro I abdicated in favor of his five-year-old son and returned to Portugal, where he would die a few years later. In practice, Pedro II grew up an orphan even while his father was alive: surrounded by adults who answered for him, but with neither mother nor father nearby to watch him grow up in an ordinary way.

The most influential tutor of this period was the strict José Inácio Ramalho, known as Mello Matos, who imposed a boarding-school study routine on the boy: fixed schedules for everything, classes from morning till night, languages, sciences, religion. José Murilo shows that this discipline explains much of the adult Pedro II would become: methodical, studious, and uncomfortable with open displays of affection.

During the regency that governed the country between 1831 and 1840, Brazil lived through years of instability: provincial revolts, partisan disputes, and the fear that the monarchy would collapse before the heir grew up. Part of the political elite concluded that the way out was simple: rush the boy-emperor's age of majority.

Instead of waiting for Pedro II to turn eighteen, as the law required, a group of politicians engineered an early coming of age when he was only fourteen. In July 1840 he was declared of age and took the throne in a Brazil that barely knew him, yet needed him as a symbol of unity much more than as an actual ruler.

José Murilo highlights the symbolic weight of this move: a teenager who was still growing up began signing decrees, appointing ministers, and representing the country before other nations. His childhood ended abruptly, decided by adults in a hurry rather than by Pedro II himself.

The book's title plays on Hamlet's most famous line to describe a tension that ran through Pedro II's entire life: to be an emperor, a role he never chose, or to be what he truly wanted, a man of learning, almost a professor with free time for research. That internal struggle was never truly resolved.

Over the course of his life, he learned an impressive number of languages: besides Portuguese, he spoke French, English, German, and Italian; he read Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and even studied Sanskrit and Arabic. He exchanged letters with foreign scientists and took an interest in astronomy, geology, and Egyptian archaeology, all while handling affairs of state.

This love of knowledge was not just a rich man's hobby: José Murilo argues that it was also a way to escape the part of the job Pedro II disliked most, the pomp, the ceremony, the theater of the court. Whenever he could choose, he preferred visiting a library or a laboratory over parading at an official party.