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Hispanic American Historical Review 84.1 (2004) 176-177



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O cerne da discórdia: A guerra do Paraguai e o núcleo profissional do exército. By Vitor Izecksohn. Rio de Janeiro: E-Papers Serviços Editoriais, 2002. Illustrations. Tables. Figures. Maps. Appendixes. Bibliography. 201 pp. Paper.

These are banner times for Triple Alliance War scholarship. Over the last year, two important narrative histories of the conflict have appeared, along with several useful articles on war demographics and three separate biographies (one a novel) of Madame Lynch, the Irish courtesan of Paraguay's Francisco Solano López—and these studies represent only the English-language publications. When we factor in works written in Spanish, German, and Portuguese, we see extensive progress on all sides, and there seems to be little reason to predict an early end to this interesting trend.

The present study demonstrates exactly why the Triple Alliance War will remain a key topic for future historians—because it was so profoundly catalytic in so many directions at once. Izecksohn builds a nuanced historical sociology of Brazil's military during the 1860s, showing how poorly prepared Dom Pedro's army was to fight a war of attrition against Solano López's Paraguay. In order to win that struggle, the Brazilians had to professionalize their officer corps. Both the emperor and the army commander (the marquis of Caxias) had long since grown accustomed to the National Guard model of military organization but now willingly supported this change. Yet even at this early juncture, the process had a potentially destabilizing effect; strengthening the corporate identity of the army left military men with a political influence they had never previously enjoyed in Brazil. A generation later, a clique of battle-tested professional officers saw it as natural that their mission would include toppling the empire. Ironically, then, Dom Pedro's sponsorship of a revamped military may have destroyed the Paraguayan army in the short term, but it also cleared the way for his eventual demise.

Shorn of its details, this argument is not especially new. Indeed, the book tends to endorse an orthodox historiography established years ago by Nelson Werneck Sodré, John Schulz, and June Hahner and more recently by Wilma Pires Costa. Whereas most of the earlier historians had the field to themselves, however, Izecksohn has had to contend with a formidible array of revisionist challengers, including scholars as serious as Celso Castro and as polemical as Julio José Chiavenato. To my way of thinking, Izecksohn's careful analysis of archival documents (notably the letters of Caxias, Benjamin Constant, and Dionísio Cerqueira) effectively checks the revisionist onslaught—and much to our benefit, for we learn a great deal about a complex period.

This said, O cerne da discórdia will still strike readers as somewhat tentative. This is not, for the most part, the author's fault. The book started out in 1992 as a master's thesis at Rio's Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas and was then published, in a highly truncated form, by the Brazilian army's publishing house. The editors did a sloppy job of transcribing the original text and even changed the author's [End Page 176] meaning at certain key points. Izecksohn sued and ultimately had the satisfaction of seeing the unsold copies of the first edition removed from circulation. But by the time the second version appeared its arguments were already ten years old, and the most recent scholarship of Peter Beattie, Hendrik Kraay, and Francisco Doratioto had gone well beyond the point where Izecksohn left off.

To be sure, these writers all respect the emphasis he places on changes in military organization during the 1860s, but they specifically question the existence of a straight line between that process and the climactic events of November 1889. For Izecksohn to have countered or incorporated these new works would have required him to cover another 20 years in his study, but he chose to leave it as originally written. Too bad. Our grasp of the Brazilian military...

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