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Euclides da Cunha called Canudos our Vendée. This book takes the phrase literally and turns it into a method. If France made its revolution in 1789 and Brazil in 1889, then the Vendée of 1793 finds its correspondence in the Federalist Revolution of 1893 — and Canudos and the Federalist War become legible as two phases of a single Brazilian Vendée. The correspondence is neither analogy nor influence: it is a dialectical image in Walter Benjamin's precise sense, a constellation in which two times recognise each other without either causing the other. From this follows the refusal that organises the book — the refusal to explain the fall of the Monarchy by a deep cause. No totality can be a cause or an effect. Within totalities there are causal chains that do work: a telegram arrives, a troop marches, a man dies. But the economy, society or the spirit of the age put in the place of the Cause explain nothing; they give the sum a name and call it a reason. In the place of cause the book puts origin — Benjamin's Ursprung, described as an eddy in the river of becoming: a form that holds while the matter passes through it, without substance of its own and real nonetheless. Read this way, the Brazilian First Republic appears as what it was: a political and ideological coup carried out by a small group in a state of doctrinal excitement, following a declared French script, debated in the newspapers and executed with the seriousness of men fulfilling a programme — the guillotine becoming the degola, the throat-cutting of the southern wars. And its foremost figures, Floriano Peixoto and Júlio de Castilhos, prove to be baroque sovereigns in the sense of the Trauerspiel: tyrant, martyr and intriguer confounded in one person, who draws from his own purity the licence for everything he does.
Walter Benjamin · dialectical image · Ursprung · Trauerspiel · natural history · Euclides da Cunha · Canudos · Federalist Revolution · Vendée · Brazilian First Republic · Júlio de Castilhos · Floriano Peixoto · positivism · Goethe's theory of colours · complex systems
The book opens where no book on the Brazilian First Republic is expected to open: with complex systems and Goethe's theory of colours. This is not ornament. It is the position from which everything else is decided.
The nineteenth century was the century of single keys. Comte found three stages, Marx the economy, Freud sexuality, Taine race, milieu and moment — each with his key, opening every door with it. And this was no distant debate: it was Comte's doctrine that Benjamin Constant taught the officers of the Military School and that Júlio de Castilhos would apply to Rio Grande do Sul. Ordem e Progresso on the Brazilian flag is a single-cause theory of history written in cloth.
Against this, Goethe. Newton passes light through a prism and explains what is seen by what lies behind it; Goethe refuses the move and stops the explanation at the phenomenon — the Urphänomen, in which everything factual is already theory. Benjamin lifts the concept out of nature and makes it a concept of history: origin, which is not a chronological beginning and is not a cause, but a form recognised in an event. To say it he chose an exact image, the eddy in the river of becoming: the water composing it at one instant is not the same at the next, and it remains the same eddy. It is not caused by the flow, nor hidden behind it. It is a shape the flow takes — and it produces effects. Benjamin wrote this in the 1920s, when turbulence was the unresolved scandal of physics and the mathematics of chaos was forty years away. He reached for the one image that already contained the argument before there was a science of it.
With that instrument the book reads the Brazilian case. Non-linearity, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, radical effects produced by minimal and accidental alterations: the phenomenology of chaos describes 15 November 1889 better than any deep determination. Deodoro was a personal friend of the Emperor and wanted no Republic at all; the false rumour that he had been arrested ran from barracks to barracks and did more than any programme. Economic and social questions were of course present — but they dragged on throughout, with no government decision to resolve them, because the government was intoxicated with the constitution of the new regime.
Then the dialectical image. The claim is not that France caused Brazil, nor that the repetition was necessary. It is that a form recurs at a different scale — a fractal of one century in the next. If 1789 there and 1889 here, then 1793 there and 1893 here. The Brazilian republicans were not being compared to Frenchmen by a later historian: they were deliberately following the script, and said so. One hundred and sixteen officers signed a pact in their own blood at the Military Club; seven months earlier, with the Empire still standing, Júlio de Castilhos and thirteen companions had sworn theirs in a wood in Rio Grande do Sul. Silva Jardim called for the Count d'Eu to be shot. And Castilhos's admiring biographer, Sérgio da Costa Franco, finds only two heroes comparable to him: Floriano Peixoto and Robespierre — a Robespierre, he writes approvingly, who had no 9 Thermidor and died in triumph. The model is French, the measure is French, and the man applying it is the admirer.
Hence the inversion the book undoes. For decades Brazilian culture was accused of aping the foreign — Aquarela do Brasil disqualified for being too civic, Pixinguinha's Carinhoso dismissed as an imitation of the Americans — while politics declared itself genuine and supremely national. It was precisely the other way round. It was politics that copied. The accused was Pixinguinha.
The last part of the book names what these figures are. There is a description of this type of man, and it comes from the seventeenth-century baroque theatre Benjamin studied: spirit proves itself in power, and demands at once rigorous inner discipline and unscrupulous outward activity — absolute coldness without, the burning heat of the will to power within. The baroque stage had three figures that merge there: the tyrant, the martyr and the intriguer. Floriano and Castilhos are their fullest expression in Brazilian republican modernity — saints who intrigue, drawing from their own purity the licence for everything. Castilhos presented himself with an immaculate purity of intention and derived from it the right to tutor the people with no obligation to represent them: the pure man needs no mandate. This is a reading far closer to Carl Schmitt than to Benjamin — and that is precisely why Benjamin is needed to make it.
What follows is natural history in Benjamin's sense: laws stripped of transcendence and mired in private interest, actualising themselves as nature, recycling petrified patterns in the vicious cycle of decomposition and recomposition of an ill-born regime, in returns of the ever-same. Décio Freitas argues that Castilhos established the first constitutional dictatorship in Latin America, and that it served as the mould for 1937 and 1964. Dictatorships change face and body — now juridical, now external forces — but they never stop devouring the nation: they came in the belly of the Republic.
The book closes on a sentence that is also the announcement of the trilogy's third volume, handing over to Musil: our republic was cut along the essential lines of crime and madness.