To each his own myth

The elite took its costumes from the France of 1789, the people took theirs from the salons of 1889, and both were looking at a court.

The sentence that stuck is by Aristides Lobo: the people watched it all bestialised. He wrote it a few days after the fifteenth of November, and it crossed the century — repeated as diagnosis, as joke, as lament about the national character.

It is worth remembering who wrote it. Aristides Lobo is one of the seven men who were at Deodoro's house asking him to bring down the regime. He was inside the room where the Republic was decided. The remark about the absence of the people belongs to a man who helped make it without them.

And the word deserves suspicion. Bestialised says the people did not understand. It is possible they understood very well, and were somewhere else.

A doctrine, and where it lived

The Republic was not a diffuse feeling of the country. It was an ideology, with a seat, a doctrine and a definite public.

It lived in two places. In the academies and the press — the graduates in law, the journalists, the men of letters who discussed Comte, Littré, the Great Revolution. And in the Military School, where Benjamin Constant taught positivism to the cadets. Outside those two places it had practically nothing to rest on.

This is not an accusation; it is a description. And it explains the rest. A doctrine that lives in academies and barracks has cannon and newspapers at its disposal, and does not need votes. That is how it did what it did, in one morning, with a rumour.

On the other side, affection

Meanwhile, the country was fond of the Emperor.

Fond of an old man of sixty-four who spoke many languages and took an interest in science, and whose daughter had signed, eighteen months earlier, the law that ended slavery. They called her the Redeemer. One need not idealise the Monarchy to acknowledge the fact: there was affection, and the affection had proper names.

It was precisely that affection the republicans feared. The imperial family left the palace at three in the morning, under escort, so that the city would not wake. One does not remove in secret those whom nobody holds dear.

So the people did not watch bestialised. They watched what was being done to them, and those doing it knew they would watch badly — so much so that they acted before dawn.

Two mythologies, each in its own ballroom

Here is the asymmetry that matters, and it is not between those who think and those who do not. It is between two mythologies.

The intellectuals looked to France. From the Great Revolution they gathered the figures that turned them into something more than aspirants to power: instruments of civilisation. That is another thing, and it changes everything. Whoever wants power contends for it and may lose it; whoever is an instrument of civilisation does not contend — he carries out. That is why they signed pacts in their own blood, and why an admiring biographer would think it praise to compare his hero to Robespierre.

And the people? The people had their myths too, and went looking for them precisely where the doctrine was not looking: in the aristocratic salons. In the balls, the princesses, the gowns, the courts — in that imaginary of the Empire which the republicans considered backwardness and which the popular imagination kept as splendour.

The samba schools made that nostalgia eternal. A carnival parade is a court going by. Wings of baianas in court skirts, the master of ceremonies and the flag-bearer dancing a ballroom dance, the featured figures on floats, the costumes of nobility, the plots of kings and queens. The people the Republic left outside built for themselves, once a year, the ball to which they were never invited — and have been parading it in the street for a hundred years.

Note the symmetry, because it is exact. The republican elite went looking for its fancy dress in the France of 1789. The people went looking for theirs in the salons of 1889. Both sides were looking at a court. Only one of the courts had cannon.

And where it parades

It remains to say where that court passes, because the place completes the figure.

Carioca samba was formed in the Praça Onze and around it — the Little Africa, the houses of the Bahian aunts, the yard of Tia Ciata. That was where the people lived whom the Avenida Central of 1904 had driven out of the centre: the same Pereira Passos reform, the same knock it down, the same tenements pulled apart. The Praça Onze was the place the removed went to, and it was there that they invented what the country now exports as its own image.

In 1941 the demolitions began that opened the Avenida Presidente Vargas, inaugurated on 7 September 1944. The Praça Onze disappeared beneath it. Herivelto Martins and Grande Otelo wrote the farewell in 1942, and the words need no commentary: they are going to do away with the Praça Onze; there will be no more samba schools, there will not.

There were. And here is the whole drawing. Before the Sambódromo, which dates from 1984, the parades were held on the Avenida Rio Branco — which is Pereira Passos's Avenida Central, renamed in 1912 — and afterwards on the Presidente Vargas itself. Which is to say: the people parade their imaginary court along the two avenues that were opened over the places where they used to live. First the tenements, then the Praça Onze. Two removals, and the parade on top of both.

There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism, and here the sentence stops being abstract: the document of culture parades literally over the document of barbarism, once a year, on the same track.

And one thread still closes the circle from inside this project. The avenue that buried the Praça Onze bears the name of Getúlio Vargas — son of Manuel do Nascimento Vargas, who in the first volume of the trilogy commands a government troop in the Federalist war, and of whom it is said on the page: the Vargas of São Borja are always with the government.

What persists

None of this would be more than a historical curiosity had it stayed in 1889. It did not.

What settled in at that moment, and never left, was a habit: the country grew used to accepting anything, provided it came wrapped in the right words.

The right words were all there from the start. Order and Progress, on the flag. Civilisation. Patriotism. The white flag of peace and love — written by a man who promised, in the same sentence, the irrepressible wrath with which he would punish the criminals, whoever they might be. The patriots, which is what the civilian troops called themselves as they fell upon unarmed people. The pacification, name given to the agreement of 1895 that ended the war in the South by leaving in the government of the state the very man on whose word of honour it had begun — and which would later serve to describe what was done at Canudos as well.

In each of these cases the word does not describe the act: it takes its place. And it works — it worked then and it works now. That is why the rupture between discourse and reality is not a defect of our Republic: it is its way of operating. The regime was born saying one thing and doing another, and taught that this is how it is done.

Hence the importance of principles

And it is here that the conversation stops being about 1889.

A principle is not a fine word. A principle is what can be invoked against the one who proclaims it. That is exactly what it is for: so that the proclaimer stays bound to what he said. If I say the law applies to everyone, someone may come and hold me to it when I make an exception — and the demand has something to rest on.

The right word does the opposite. It binds no one: it absolves. To call the militias patriots obliges nothing; it dispenses. To call what was done in the South a pacification does not commit the man who said it: it closes the subject — and keeps in command the man whose word of honour, three years earlier, had disarmed Bagé before handing it to the colonels. The officer who gave that word was named Arthur Oscar, and he was a colonel; five years later, by then a general, he would command the slaughter at Canudos.

The difference between a principle and a right word is therefore the usual one: one can be used against whoever says it, the other cannot. Where there are only right words, there is nothing to hold anyone to — and a country where there is nothing to hold anyone to accepts everything, provided it is well said.

That is what was learned in November 1889, and is still being taught. The people, those same people, were never bestialised. They spent the century hearing the right words, and anaesthetised to what those words conceal.