Wars of the Republic

Between 1891 and 1897 the Republic mobilised army, navy and police against its own population.

The First Republic was, in its rawest form, a regime of war. Between 1891 and 1897, in the first five civil years of its existence, it mobilised the Army, the Navy and the state police forces in four military operations of size: the threat of Custódio de Mello against Deodoro's dictatorship, the Naval Revolt in Rio, the Federalist Revolution in the south, and the Canudos campaign in the backlands of Bahia. The official historiography called that period the consolidation of the Republic. In this project it receives another name: the armed crushing of dissent.

This essay maintains that the second description is the more faithful to the documents — to the military orders, the campaign reports, the correspondence of commanders, the newspapers of the time. Far from consolidating itself by adherence, the Republic imposed itself by suppression.

5.1 The rite of entry

The Brazilian Republic in its first years was marked by a series of violent conflicts that exposed the frailty of the new regime and the brutality involved in the transition. That was already clear in the way the royal family was expelled from the country. They were removed before dawn, in secret. No public farewell to the Emperor was allowed, probably because those responsible knew the Republic was the desire of few: some idealists, others ambitious. The people still lived under the aura of the monarchy. The Federalist Revolution in Rio Grande do Sul and the war of Canudos in the Bahian backlands reveal the incapacity of the Republic to integrate and represent the country's several realities, opting instead for violent repression of any form of opposition or autonomy. For the Brazilian Republic was not just any republic: it was a centralising republic meant for a few, who were impatient to take hold of the machinery of the State.

5.2 The misleading use of the word consolidation

Many crimes were committed and wars waged in the name of a supposed consolidation of the Republic. But it was never the consolidation of a republic; it was a radically centralising arrangement of national power and resources in the hands of the federal government. What they meant to consolidate — and did consolidate — was never the Republic as res publica, but the exclusive centrality of the State, built on the most rigid sectarianism and handled by a handful of oligarchs. Floriano, Castilhos and afterwards São Paulo reigned as absolute sovereigns, always protected by a curtain of legality. The new regime used the idea of federation as a brand. In practice it worked fiercely to dismantle any fact or event directed at making that idea real. While Pedro II travelled through Brazil, trying at least to know its different regions, the new regime shut itself in the capital and in the Rio–São Paulo axis, neglecting the rest of the country. And here rest means exactly that: the remainder.

5.3 Wars of the Republic

It is in this sense that the Federalist Revolution — in fact begun in 1892, out of electoral fraud and the crimes of the castilhistas — shows itself as a microcosm of what the Brazilian Republic became: a centre of power unified in the hands of an administrative tyranny, surrounded by accomplices and vassals. The florianista-castilhista alliance reveals the essence of the republican project in its dictatorial and centralising character. In the South as at the centre, even with the rise of Prudente de Morais, the first civilian president, the sectarian and excluding nature of the young Republic was maintained, sustained by authoritarianism, electoral fraud, privileges for supporters, sectarianism and violence. Once more we are before the category of Origin.

5.4 The Federalist Revolution and Canudos

Two faces of the same coin. One represented the fight for regional autonomy and resistance to a florianista-castilhista centralism, excluding and cruel; the other was the violent answer of the State to a popular messianic movement. Both reveal the atrocities with which republican order was imposed. The way Prudente de Morais handled the two situations leads us back to the repertoire of manoeuvres already presented at the Port of Torres. The result of peace in the south was converted into benefits for São Paulo, exactly as when the corruption and authoritarianism of Deodoro were stopped.

Prudente was mistakenly called the Pacifier. He ignored the dictatorial unconstitutionality of Castilhos and left the state in the hands of a persecuting and violent dictatorship that lasted decades. What Morais actually did was to staunch the flow of resources from the central government, withdrawing the national army from the conflict. War was not good for business, and São Paulo was hungry for money. There was no pacification at all: Castilhos went on with his personal war against everyone, pursuing adversaries in other countries and financing foreign wars to escape supposed avengers. Prudente de Morais excluded Rio Grande do Sul from republican life, leaving a window open for Castilhos's political allies in exchange for support and personal privileges. The real situation of Rio Grande mattered little to him; it was even a relief to be able to forget the state in the hands of whoever dominated it. One problem fewer to worry about.

Federalism as a brand served as the excuse: yes, the castilhista constitution goes against the national constitution, but in the name of the federation let us keep it. In this episode, as in so many others, what prevailed was the construction of an idea, an image — the Federation, the Pacification — rather than any effective transformation of reality. Rio Grande received from the hands of the Pacifier its shining shop window, displaying a trophy labelled Peace, while the opponents of the castilhista regime, impoverished and pursued, hid themselves in a foreign country. Just as the Morro da Favela was the against-the-grain of the Avenida Central, the misery of the maragatos hid wherever it could, and criminals became the names of streets. The pacification was an Avenida Central built for the gaúchos, along which most of them could not even walk, while the friends of power strolled unpunished.

5.5 Canudos

The community of Canudos, formed of poor peasants and formerly enslaved people, represented an alternative life outside the control of the oligarchies and of the State. The military answer of the Republic to the messianic movement led by Antônio Conselheiro in the Bahian backlands was as violent as the Federalist Revolution. It is no accident that the same military chiefs who led the army in the South fought at Canudos. They gathered soldiers from across Brazil, indebted the country in order to kill, and afterwards transferred the victors to nowhere at all.

The true face of Prudente de Morais appears here. After successive defeats of the government in the backlands of Bahia, Prudente felt his presidency threatened. The military did not look kindly on a civilian government that seemed incapable of resolving armed conflict. Morais needed to show his strength. Without hesitating, he asked his Minister of War to put an end to the problem at once. The massacre of Canudos was an extermination ordered. The financial resources squandered in useless wars were once again released to São Paulo and its supporters. Republican luxury sprouted from the human rubble left along its way.

5.5.1 The same men

There is a continuity between the South and the backlands that neither historiography usually traces, and it has two proper names: the colonel who in 1892 allowed the sacking of Bagé after guaranteeing that it would not occur, and who five years later, by then a general, would command at Canudos; and the president who received the title of Pacifier in 1895 and dispatched the matter of Canudos in 1897.

That course is told separately, in the essay The same men.

5.6 The Naval Revolt

The Navy is the third character in this history, and the least told. There were two revolts, and they should not be confused.

Before them, a scene that memory tends to join to the others and that is of another order. On 15 November 1889 Floriano Peixoto was adjutant-general of the Army, the second military authority of the Empire. When the defenders of the regime asked him to give the order to fire on the rebels who supported Deodoro, he did not give it. He did not fire on those who were overthrowing the regime he served.

The first revolt is of 1891, and answers a coup. With the Provisional Government installed, the first republican Constitution promulgated on 24 February 1891, and Deodoro elected president and Floriano vice-president by Congress the following day, in November Deodoro closed the National Congress and declared a state of siege. The fleet, under Custódio de Mello and Eduardo Wandenkolk, threatened to bombard Rio de Janeiro. Deodoro resigned on 23 November, nine months into the office.

The Constitution just promulgated required a new election if the president did not complete the first two years of the mandate. There was no election. Floriano took office and governed until 15 November 1894 — against the text that had only just been promulgated. He would die in June 1895.

The second revolt is of 1893 and extends through 1894, already under Floriano's government, and it is this one the essay treats. What it demands is exactly what the Constitution promised and the regime did not deliver: elections. Custódio de Mello takes the ironclad Aquidabã — the same ship whose searchlights, four years earlier, had lit the last ball of the Empire on the Ilha Fiscal. The cruisers and ironclads República, Javari, Trajano and Guanabara join him. Saldanha da Gama will come later.

And here is the articulation that makes this revolt an episode of the war in the South. Prevented from landing by Floriano's allies, the rebels move down the coast and join the federalists. The Federalist Revolution ceases to be a regional conflict and becomes the southern front of a national war against the government. From that point there are not two wars: there is one.

5.6.1 The sovereignty that called for help

The government that presented itself as the incarnation of national sovereignty kept itself in power with foreign help, and this is not interpretation: it is in the orders it gave.

Floriano sends Rear Admiral Coelho Neto to all the foreign ships anchored in Guanabara Bay to ask support against the rebels — and instructs him to say publicly that he went only to inform them. The subordinate's reply completes the scene: I shall take every care that the foreign intervention does not become public. The foreign commanders meet aboard the French ship Aréthuse, and the English commander announces that His Majesty's government has decided to prevent the bombardment of the capital. The press of the court openly asked for intervention, comparing the case to that of Málaga in 1873, and an editorial of 28 September called it an imperious solution.

It did not stop at asking for support. Floriano commissioned and armed a fleet of his own abroad — the so-called Flint squadron, bought through an American dealer. With it, and with the help of the powers, he came to dominate the sea entirely and to be able to land at any point on the coast. And the political balance is stated, in the novel, by a character who knows him: as soon as he has completed the fortifications of the city — which was possible only under the protection of the foreign ships — he will become a nationalist again, railing against any and all foreign intervention.

The fate of the rebels is the test of that rhetoric, and it deserves to be told precisely. Defeated and without food, the sailors were in danger of summary execution by Floriano's troops. It was then that the Portuguese captain Augusto de Castilho invoked the Right of Asylum — warships were considered floating extensions of their country's territory, and a request for asylum on board was, juridically, a request made on foreign soil. He took in about five hundred men in two ships, the Mindelo and the Afonso de Albuquerque, and landed them at Montevideo. Another fifteen hundred, half naked and starving, had asked for asylum in Buenos Aires on 17 April.

The answer of the Brazilian government was to break off diplomatic relations with Portugal. They would be restored only in 1895, under Prudente de Morais. It is worth adding up the two columns: to ask foreign fleets for help and to buy an entire squadron abroad did not injure national sovereignty; to take in starving castaways did. Saldanha da Gama would die in combat in 1895, at Campo Osório, inside the war of the South.

The formula is worth keeping, because it reappears throughout: national sovereignty was proclaimed and the foreigner was called upon; legality was proclaimed and the government ruled against the Constitution; crushing was called consolidation. In each case the word does not describe the act — it takes its place.

5.7 What came after: the Lash and the Contestado

This essay treats the first years, but it would be false to leave the impression that the violence was a rite of passage, got over once the regime had settled. It was not an episode. It was a method, and it continued.

In November 1910 — twenty-two years after abolition — the sailors of the fleet revolt against corporal punishment. It was called the Revolt of the Lash because that is literally what it was: men mostly black, sons and grandsons of enslaved people, flogged aboard the warships of a Republic that called itself civilised. Under the leadership of João Cândido they take the ironclads Minas Gerais and São Paulo, train the guns on the capital and demand an end to the lash. The government — of Hermes da Fonseca, Deodoro's nephew — grants an amnesty and yields to the demands. Having granted the amnesty, it breaks it: the rebels are arrested, many killed, others deported to Amazonia. Note the pattern, because we have seen it before: a word given in exchange for disarmament, and the word broken as soon as the disarmament was complete. It is the same procedure as at Bagé, in the South, transposed to the sea.

Between 1912 and 1916, on the border between Paraná and Santa Catarina, the Army of the Republic makes war on its own population in a territory disputed between the two states. Backlanders expelled from their land by the building of the railway and by the timber company that came with it gather around a holy man, and the answer is the usual one: a military campaign, artillery, villages razed. It was at the Contestado that Brazilian military aviation had its baptism of fire. The numbers are disputed; the form is not. It is Canudos again, twenty years later, with train and aeroplane in place of the marching column.

And there is a date to keep. The Contestado ends in 1916 — the same year in which the trilogy closes, at Maneco's burial. The First Republic still had fourteen years ahead of it.

5.8 Anatomy of a republic of monuments

Instead of an age of democratisation, what emerges is a period of centralised privilege, institutional exclusion, electoral fraud, corruption and systematic violence, with no concern whatever for the structural reforms that were needed. The noble period is known as the Consolidation of the Republic, and its leading men are praised as though they had defeated the Hydra of Lerna or the dragon of wickedness. The conflicts of the Federalist Revolution and of Canudos exposed the violence with which republican order and progress were imposed. What is being drawn is the anatomy of a Republic born under the sign of the falsification of political and social reality, stamped with fine names that have no legitimate substance behind them. As Origin, the historical process of the First Republic unfolds into our own days in a diversity of historical manifestations. Few achievements show with more exactness the legitimacy of Benjamin's saying: that there has never been a document of culture which was not at the same time a document of barbarism.

5.9 Connection with the archive

The First Republic is not an imperfect or unfinished democratic regime that merely needed more time to perfect itself. It is a regime whose effective working combines, structurally: the oligarchic capture of economic decisions; the credential filter on political representation; contempt for the human collapse produced by its advance; and violence as its inaugural act, exposing the rapacity with which republican power was seized — its wars being the declaration of its triumph.

5.10 Synthesis

The Port of Torres showed what the Republic refused to build; coffee, what it was willing to finance; the invention of the doctors, whom it authorised to speak; the consequences of that invention, what it chose to abandon as social ruin. This fifth essay is its calling card. To recognise this is not to reduce the First Republic to a military dictatorship; that would be inexact. The regime was civil in its presidency, parliamentary in its façade, constitutional in its rhetoric. But the civil, the parliamentary and the constitutional lived, throughout the period, alongside the permanent availability of force — and its effective use whenever the oligarchic design met a refusal it could not absorb. It is in that coexistence, and not in its suppression, that the historical truth of the period lies. What the historiography called consolidation was, in the facts, crushing. That difference of name is, in the last analysis, the object of the archive: to restore to the episodes the weight they had for those who suffered them, against the weight with which they were described by those who carried them out.

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