Um moralista nos trópicos: O visconde de Cairú e o Duque de la Rochefoucauld (review)

The eighteenth century was, among other things, the age of the maxim. Maxims often analyzed the behavior and the character—virtues and vices—of human beings, as with "hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue." The most celebrated writer of maxims was François, duke of La Rochefoucauld, who died in 1680. By 1695 the sixth edition of his maxims, originally published anonymously, had appeared. The eighteenth century saw the publication of no less fourteen works, based on La Rochefoucauld but reorganizing and amending his maxims, commenting on them, and incorporating the aphorisms of other writers. In the 1820s, almost a century and a half after La Rochefoucauld's, there appeared in Rio de Janeiro a work, Constituição moral, e deveres da cidadão, by José da Silva Lisboa (future viscount of Cairu) with an appendix containing La Rochefoucauld's maxims.

Pedro Meira Monteiro is enamoured by La Rochefoucauld. A major theme of his wide ranging study, composed of three disparate parts, is the contrasting perceptions of human nature and behavior presented by La Rochefoucauld and by Silva Lisboa. For Meira Monteiro the most revealing of La Rochefoucauld's sayings are "our virtues are generally no more than our vices in disguise" (26) and "nobody merits being praised for goodness, if he does not possess the power and the boldness to be wicked" (78). Maxims such as these indicate a detached, almost cynical view of existence. Virtue and vice are so interrelated that moral perfection is an illusion. To Silva Lisboa such an attitude was the first step on the downward path to the French Revolution, the font of all evil. Maxims in Silva Lisboa's view had to guide, direct, and uplift, instilling the virtues proclaimed in both Natural Religion and the Catholic faith, which he did not perceive as incompatible. Understandably, given the Brazilian's didactic style, his aphorisms do not figure in Meira Monteiro's text.

The book's first and briefest part reviews the perception of human character, nature, and culture appearing in the Júbilos da América, a collection of prose and poems produced in 1754 by the Acadêmia dos Seletos at Rio de Janeiro. Silva Lisboa made use of this bombastic and self-laudatory work in his Constituição moral, and he did so, Meira Monteiro suggests, because the panegyrists agreed with him in ignoring nature and equating civilization solely with European culture. The author's motive for including this first section may in part be to discover some utility in the Júbilos and so rehabilitate it as an element an incipient Brazilian literature.

The second, longest, and perhaps ablest section is devoted to an analysis of the reception of La Rochefoucauld's maxims after 1700. During his own lifetime the duke's perception of morality and human nature aroused unease, often distaste. The passage of time confirmed the perspicacity and literary merit of the maxims but intensified unhappiness over their view of humanity. Meira Monteiro demonstrates how a virtual industry grew up to make, through reordering, reinterpretation, and even rephrasing, La Rochefoucauld's aphorisms palatable both to a specific public's emotional and intellectual expectation. Silva Lisboa, for example, reproduced some of La Rochefoucauld's maxims, as "Worldly Morality," with his own precis of Catholic doctrines, "Christian Morality," thereby sanitizing the duke's aphorisms.

The final section reviews Silva Lisboa's many publications, seeking to understand his vision of humanity and the world. Whereas physical ruins, decline, and decadence fascinated authors such as Edward Gibbon, the Brazilian saw the world in terms of constructing a coherent and beneficent order, an order Silva Lisboa identified with European culture and Catholicism. Belonging to a new nation state, Silva Lisboa necessarily sought to shape through his writings model citizens, but he was also, despite his clamor against "the libertines," a product of the Enlightenment and shared its assumptions about the capacity...