Party Formation and State-Making: The Conservative Party and the Reconstruction of the Brazilian State, 1831-1840

In the nineteenth century Brazil was considered unique not only for its size and Portuguese heritage but also for its distinct social and political characteristics. Brazil was an established slave society that was maintained in peace and unity under a constitutional monarchy. Traditionally, historiography has separated these elements. Most recently, the social history dominant in the Brazilian and Anglo-American academies has given us rich studies of slave society, without sustained reference to Brazil's political history. In the nineteenth century, and in the earlier political analyses of the twentieth century, the monarchy has either been abstracted away from socioeconomic analysis or reconstructed as an apologia for Brazilian essentialism and authoritarianism. ¹

Since at least the 1970s, however, political analysis has addressed the relationship between state and society, but with debatable success. It has generally reduced the monarchy to an instrument of the ruling class, or reified it as an autonomous model for the military statism of 1964-85, or dismissed it as the convenient provider of stability and patronage for the socioeconomic elites. Few studies provide a detailed analysis of the political trends of the era, much less a discussion of their seemingly false or complicated ideological struggles. Although the works of José Murilo de Carvalho, Thomas Flory, Ilmar Rohloff de Mattos, and Roderick J. Barman are exceptions to this rule, their contributions are necessarily limited by their particular foci. Each, whether studying the state and its cadre formation, the ideology and programs of the Liberals or the Conservatives, or the complex detail of the political narrative explaining national consolidation, tends to neglect the dialectic with socioeconomic conditions. In other words, they shed little light on the specificity of the linkages of that context to the political struggles and ideology of the era. ²

Party origins and organization provide telling ways to understand such matters. The Conservative party has traditionally been considered to be the dominant of the two parties of the Second Reign (1840-89), the era that has generally been taken as the basis for analysis of the monarchy. It was the Conservative party that defined and defended the mission of the monarchy as an authoritarian, centralized state, and it was the party most identified with the dominant planter-merchant elites who battened off African slavery and its export production. The present study, focusing on the crucial, formative period of 1831-40, offers an analytical explanation of the early development of the Conservative party as an integral part of the evolution of the Brazilian monarchy by addressing some of the weaknesses in the canon noted above. This essay provides the socioeconomic context of political developments; offers a new synthesis and analysis of the political narrative; clarifies the ideological and organizational nature of party origins; and shows the specific linkages between state and society, party and province. It will also revise our understanding of the coffee planters' role in the Conservative party and conclude by pointing to the essential dilemma presented by the contradiction between the monarchy's architects and the monarch's role.

Provincial Oligarchies and the Political Narrative (ca. 1750-1837)

The able political analyses and narratives we have, while useful for many things, are inadequate to understand party formation. The latter requires a return to parliamentary annals and other contemporary sources for a more specific ideological and organizational analysis, as well as the integration of the political narrative with a synthesis of the more recent studies of socioeconomic development and elite formation. These strands, some old, some new, but all newly knit together here, will comprise the first part of this study. It forms the necessary context for the analysis to follow.

Although its mission was national, the Conservative party was provincial by birth. Indeed, to the extent that the geographic origins or social ramifications of the party are noted...