The FirstRepublic
BRAZIL · 1889 — 1930
Walter Benjamin's theory of history applied to the Brazilian First Republic, with essays and fiction on the period and its international context.
The booksLer em português
BRAZIL · 1889 — 1930
Walter Benjamin's theory of history applied to the Brazilian First Republic, with essays and fiction on the period and its international context.
The booksLer em portuguêsEuclides da Cunha called Canudos our Vendee. The phrase is taken here as a dialectical image in Benjamin's exact sense. If France made its revolution in 1789 and Brazil in 1889, then the Vendee of 1793 finds its correspondence in the Federalist Revolution of 1893. Canudos and the Federalist Revolution are read as two phases of a single Brazilian Vendee.
Three novels follow one family from the last ball of the Brazilian Empire, in November 1889, to the eve of the First World War, asking a single question: what happens to people, and to a country, when a just war is lost and the injustice continues under a different name?
The essays and the serialised novel are published in Portuguese. Read them here.