Who was copying

Brazilian culture stood accused of aping the foreign while politics followed a French script line by line.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ACCUSATION

For decades, those who spoke in the name of national identity accused Brazilian culture of copying. Whenever anyone was Brazilian in the way Brazilians are, the reproof came: that thing was imported, it was aping, it was rootlessness.

Aquarela do Brasil was disqualified in a competition for being too civic. The brass arrangement Radamés Gnattali wrote for its opening was called the work of a lackey of the imperialists. Pixinguinha's Carinhoso was held to be spurious: an imitation of the Americans.

And meanwhile politics declared itself sincere. Only politics would be genuine, devoted to the nation, supremely national, the owner of the national truth. Culture copied; politics did not.

It is worth looking now at what politics was doing.

WHAT POLITICS WAS DOING

It was following a French script, line by line.

If France had made its revolution in 1789, Brazil would make its own in 1889. If there had been a Vendée there in 1793, there would be ours here in 1893. The officers signed a pact in their own blood at the Military Club, and in Rio Grande do Sul a group had sworn theirs in a wood, seven months earlier. Silva Jardim called for the Count d'Eu to be shot. On a ranch in Uruguay, a family remarked over coffee that at least they had not shot Dom Pedro as they had shot Maximilian in Mexico.

None of this is a figure of speech. It was the declared model, debated in the newspapers and in the academies, and executed with the seriousness of men fulfilling a programme. The guillotine became the degola, the throat-cutting, and the throat-cuttings of the South emulated its blood.

Nor is it an adversary's reading. Sérgio da Costa Franco, biographer and admirer of Júlio de Castilhos, finds only two heroes comparable to him. One is Floriano Peixoto. The other is Robespierre. He writes that Castilhos recalls him in his incorruptibility, his firmness, his audacity, his power of will and his very sectarianism — and adds, in a tone of celebration, that he was a Robespierre who had no 9 Thermidor and who died in triumph.

It is worth rereading that with attention. What is being praised is not having been overthrown. The model is French, the measure is French, and the man applying it is the admirer.

So the accusation was exactly inverted. It was politics that copied. The accused was Pixinguinha.

WHERE THE INVERSION COMES FROM

It is not individual hypocrisy, and it is not resolved by showing the inconsistency to the man who commits it.

Whoever holds the single key does not see himself as one position among others: he sees himself as the place from which the others are assessed. Whoever bears the meaning of history does not copy, because he takes himself to be the original — and whatever does not resemble him is deviation, backwardness, or aping.

It is the same structure as tutelage without representation. Júlio de Castilhos presented himself with an immaculate purity of intention, and from that he drew the right to tutor the people with no obligation whatever to represent them. The pure man needs no mandate, and the original needs no comparison.

The elites of this country are tormented by illusions that only governments can lavish upon them.

THE SAINT WHO INTRIGUES

There is a description of this type of man, and it is not modern. It comes from the baroque theatre of the seventeenth century, which Walter Benjamin studied.

According to the thesis of that time, spirit proves itself in power: spirit is the faculty of exercising dictatorship. And that faculty demands two things at once — rigorous inner discipline and unscrupulous outward activity. Practising it produces a radical disillusionment with the course of the world, whose absolute coldness is matched in intensity only by the burning heat emanating from the will to power of the man who exercises it.

Cold without, burning within. Pure with himself, implacable with everything else.

The baroque stage had three figures that merge there: the tyrant, the martyr and the intriguer. Floriano Peixoto and Júlio de Castilhos are two supreme exponents of this within Brazilian republican modernity — saints who intrigue, and who draw from their own purity the licence for everything they do.

THE DRAMA OF THE TYRANT

Something of the Baroque resurfaces in the drama of the tyrant, as Benjamin describes it: the tyrant's function is the restoration of order during the state of exception — a dictatorship whose utopian vocation will always be to replace the uncertainties of history with the iron laws of nature. That drama is inseparable from the tragedy of martyrdom, which is reserved for the nation.

The pair of like men emerges from the condition of courtier, the intriguing saint, into that of despotic prince.

And the fractalised patterns of the Florianist-Castilhist alliance remain active throughout the history of the Brazilian Republic to this day. The historian Décio Freitas argues that Júlio de Castilhos established the first constitutional dictatorship in Latin America, and that it served as the mould for the regimes of 1937 and 1964. Dictatorships change face and body — now juridical, now external forces — but they never cease to devour the Brazilian nation: they came in the belly of the Republic.

The laws of history, stripped of transcendence and mired in private interests, actualise themselves in the Republic as natural history, recycling petrified patterns and the vicious cycle of decomposition and recomposition of an ill-born regime, in returns of the ever-same. Deodoro, Floriano and Castilhos realise themselves as baroque sovereigns, in a reading far closer to Carl Schmitt than to Benjamin.

And everything became so entangled that even someone looking for causes and effects could no longer say whether it is the Republic that stands behind the myth, or the myth that stands behind the Republic.