Citizen Emperor: Pedro II and the Making of Brazil, 1825-91 (review)

Citizen Emperor: Pedro II and the Making of Brazil, 1825-91. By RODERICK J. BARMAN. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Photographs. Illustrations. Map. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xviii, 548 pp. Cloth, $55.00.

This analysis clarifies the role of a monarch in shaping a nation-state. The author's evidence includes a wide variety of personal and diplomatic correspondence, contemporary periodicals and books, as well as appropriate secondary sources. He has sifted more than a score of Brazilian and European archives, including the imperial family's private Arquivo Grão Pará (Petrópolis). In the early chapters, the author often cites his Brazil: The Forging of a Nation (1989), our most trustworthy political narrative of the era 1798-1852.

It is a commonplace that a biographer inevitably falls victim to the charms of his subject. Here, the author is no hagiographer; his view of the person and the statesman is balanced and critical. Nonetheless, if the book is to be faulted for bias, it lies in its inevitable preoccupation with Pedro II's point of view. While it must be said that this is central to the book's contribution (and that it is, after all, the perspective of the period's most important statesman), it sometimes suggests other actors were simply accessory players. For better or for worse, the author places most responsibility for the successes and failures of the monarchy on the monarch; other statesmen, as well as the larger impact of political parties and their constituencies, tend to be obscured as context to which the emperor responds or which he shapes to his purposes. The effect on the book is, at times, a rather abrupt foreshortening of Brazilian political history. Fortunately, however, these broader aspects of political affairs, along with the crucial socioeconomic context, are often deftly brought to bear when they are especially pertinent to the political analysis at issue. Moreover, the book is written with an accessible elegance and appealing sense of drama, and will thus attract the attention of laymen and students alike.

If readers have done their homework, they will appreciate this study even more. Since 1938, those studying the emperor and the monarchy (1822-89) have preferred Heitor Lira's three-volume História de Dom Pedro II, an uncritical but relatively exhaustive study strengthened by archival research. Pedro Calmon's five-volume História de Dom Pedro II (1975) also enjoyed scholarly acclaim. Other biographies were distinctly inferior; those available in English more inferior still. Now, the author of Citizen Emperor has supplanted Lira's classic and Calmon's work with a far richer historical understanding of the monarchy and a psychologically acute political biography. With admirable sensitivity, he demonstrates and documents how Pedro's early years--a traumatic childhood, and an adolescence that combined isolation with adoration--shaped a man. For readers unfamiliar with monarchy's charismatic authority, or this monarch's constitutional role, the author also makes clear what the emperor's contemporaries assumed; that a monarch mattered. Mattered for national unity, mattered for political discourse, mattered for a sense of public propriety. Perhaps most novel is how the author demonstrates this man's impact upon the meaning and direction of the institutions of the nation state--both in its triumph under a monarchy and in its transition to the federal republic of 1889.

This is an overdue and salutary contribution. After 1945, the established historiography has generally dismissed nineteenth-century formal political history as irrelevant. Indeed, if we put aside the narrative anthologies intended for schools, and glance at more recent scholarly political studies, their foci are generally indicative of this. There is José Murilo de Carvalho's elegant political analysis, written in the 1970s and republished twice since for its incisive understanding of the larger issues of class and state. There is the very useful study of the failure of early liberal reform by Thomas Flory (1981...