The day that could have been otherwise

15 November 1889, the hundred years between 1789 and 1889, and a picture that held us captive.

The previous text showed why explaining the fall of the Monarchy by a deep cause is a category mistake, and what Benjamin puts in the place of cause: origin, which is read the way an eddy is read.

THE FIFTEENTH OF NOVEMBER

That week a rumour ran through the barracks that Marshal Deodoro had been arrested. It was not true: he was at home, ill, and he was a personal friend of the Emperor. Benjamin Constant visited him the day before and left saying that he would not see the morning. He saw it. A captain was sent to denounce the conspiracy to the adjutant-general of the Army — who was Floriano Peixoto, and who did nothing.

Pull any one of those threads in another direction and the day would have been another day. That is what a system of this kind does: a minimal difference at the beginning changes the whole trajectory.

And here is the thing that tends to look like a contradiction and is not. The trajectory is unpredictable and the form is recognisable. In chaotic systems the two properties travel together: one cannot say where the thing will pass, and the shape is identifiable nonetheless. An explanation by deep currents has nothing to bite on in a day like that. Not for want of data, but for a mistake of category.

A HUNDRED YEARS

Euclides da Cunha called Canudos our Vendée. If France made its revolution in 1789 and Brazil in 1889, the Vendée of 1793 has its correspondence in 1893.

Faced with this, the historian usually has two options, both bad. Either he asserts that the events are linked by cause — and they are not, 1793 did not cause 1893 — or he treats the comparison as rhetoric, a writer's ornament.

There is a third path, and it is that of fractals: the same form at another scale, without causal descent. In a fractal, one level is not the effect of the level above it; it is the same structure at another magnitude. It is not repetition, not coincidence, not inheritance. It is self-similarity.

There is no exact symmetry between the two sides. These are not whole numbers superimposed, but fractions that appear and disappear according to the perspective and the horizon of whoever is looking. Anyone who goes looking for item-by-item correspondence will not find it, and that is not what is at issue.

But the traits do appear, and some of them are disconcerting. Brazilian republicans celebrated the fourteenth of July to the sound of the Marseillaise. In France, Louis XVI was detested for having married Marie Antoinette, an Austrian; in Brazil, one of the obstacles raised against a third reign was the Count d'Eu, a Frenchman married to Princess Isabel — it was said that she would end up obeying her husband and that Brazil would have a French emperor. While in France reason was being made a god, here Comte's positivist rationalism was taking over the cadet school.

That is what Euclides saw, and he named it before the mathematics existed to describe it. The dialectical image, here, is a fractal of an event a hundred years old.

AN EXAMPLE, SO AS NOT TO LEAVE IT HANGING

Between 1893 and 1895, Rio Grande do Sul had a civil war among ranchers, caudillos and regular troops, on a cattle frontier, with men who emigrated to Uruguay and came back armed. Between 1896 and 1897, in the backlands of Bahia, the Army destroyed a settlement of poor backlanders gathered around a lay preacher.

These are two societies with almost nothing in common. Different economy, different geography, different people, different motives.

And they received the same definition and the same answer. Both were declared savages, outlaws, monarchist restorers threatening progress. Both were dealt with by the Army, and not by politics. In both cases there was throat-cutting. And in both the accusation was false: Euclides was sent as a convinced republican and came back having concluded that there had never been any monarchist conspiracy at all.

If the conditions were so different and the answer was the same, then it was not the conditions that produced the answer. It was the form. And the form came from somewhere else — from a century earlier and another continent.

Every origin seals its own becoming with its own signature. The French Vendée did not come back: the same form appeared at another scale, with other dead and another name.

And this is why one does not investigate the cause of the Brazilian Republic. One investigates its origin — which is another thing, and which is read the way an eddy is read: by the form, and not by what lies behind it. A picture of which we are prisoners, as Wittgenstein says, and which leads us to mythology; or a picture made dialectical, which leads us to understanding.

One sentence to carry away: in 1889 it was impossible for us to inherit 1789 without the terror.