Brazil’s other woman

Photo: El País

To absolutely no one’s surprise, Dilma Rouseff won election yesterday as Brazil’s first woman president… although not the first woman to serve as Chief of State in Brazil.

HUH?

Brazil’s independence from Portugal coincided with that of the former Spanish colonies, several of which  — including Mexico — seriously considered monarchy as the best form of government for their new nations.  Mexico, like the other colonies, had rebelled against not so much the Spanish crown, but the Spanish control of their resources, and for many of the insurgents,  there was no particular brief for republicanism as a form of government.

In the Spanish-speaking Americas, it was the absence of the Bourbons on the throne (Napoleon, when he occupied Spain, installed his brother Joseph as King of Spain) which gave many the rationale they needed to support independence.  They were not rebelling against the King, but against an illegitimate king.  At independence, several considered either a dual monarchy with Spain, or inviting a member of the House of Bourbon to take an American throne.  Mexico  had a brief stab at a “native monarchy” for ten months in 1822-23,  under Emperor Augustin the First… and last.

The Portuguese -ruled Brazil had quite a different history.  When Napoleon marched into Portugal, the Portuguese royal family fled to Brazil, together with most of the imperial bureaucracy.  From Bahía, and later Rio de Janeiro, the far-flung Portuguese Empire and its monarchs were able to sit out the Napoleonic Wars.  By the end of the French occupation, the Portuguese rulers found they rather liked Rio much better than Lisbon, and some were more than reluctant to go home.  Besides, they realized their wealth depended on loot from the colonies, and wanted to keep an eye on their income.  In 1822, Pedro IV of Portugal took on a second title as Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil.  Which, of course, made the PORTUGUESE feel like colonials, and threatening to rebel.  In 1826, Pedro gave up the Portuguese throne, his daughter, Maria, becoming Maria IV of Portugal and Pedro staying on in Brazil.

If the Brazilian royal house was an oddity among crowned heads, the Imperial government was even odder … a “Constitutional Empire”.  The Brazilian Emperors were not, in the 19th century way, “liberal” because the monarch granted the people a parliament, but in that the parliament granted the monarch a political role as arbitrator and expected the monarch to take an open role as much head of state as head of  the head of the political system:  more like a modern President who should appear to have national interests in mind, but of course, is beholden to the party that brought him or her to office.   For the Brazilian royals, their party was the “liberal” one.

Having a Brazilian born son gave some legitimacy to the monarchy when the erratic Pedro I abdicated in 1831 making the five year old Pedro II (“Dom Pedro”) Emperor.  Of course, a five year old is not going to run the country, and Brazil’s monarchy was, at least until Dom Pedro turned 14 (they grew up early in those days), under a regency.  Dom Pedro spent a lonely childhood learning the Empire-ruling biz, and, incidentally, getting Brazilians used to the idea of a regent running the country.

Odd as the Brazilian monarchy was, unlike the phantom Hapsburg Empire in Mexico of Maximiliano and Carlota who had to kidnap an heir, the royal house was considered on the up and up as these things go.  Dom Pedro sired a male heir (by the Sicilian born Empress Teresa-Cristina), but Prince Alfonso died at the age of two, leaving the next in line, Princess Isabel (born 1846) as heir-apparent.

Princess Imperial Isabel, as regent for her absent father, Emperor Pedro II, “Dom Pedro”, was the first American woman head of state.  During her first regency, she gave the royal assent to the Lei do Ventre Livre (“Free-born Law”) of 21 September 1871.   Although Brazil, under the monarchy considered itself a “liberal” and modern government, it depended on slave labor for much of its agricultural production.  The arguments for and against abolition were much the same as in the United States, although, in Brazil, there was less regional distribution of slavery (unlike the U.S. where slavery had become unprofitable, and ended much earlier in the North) and — in Brazil, the economy was much more dependent on agriculture than on manufacturing, and  the government was too weak to risk a confrontation with the wealthy slave-owning class.

Still abolition was popular among two key groups (besides the poor, who had no say in things anyway):  urban elites and the well-educated, outward looking royal family, at least in part because of the Emperor’s continual obsession with creating a “modern” country (something not uncommon among Latin American leaders then or now) and slavery was retro in the extreme.

Importation of slaves having been outlawed in 1850, the Lei do Ventre Livre was intended to lead to a gradual extinction of slavery.  Under the law, children of slaves born on or after 21 September 1871 were free-born Brazilians.

Dom Pedro, the titular head of state, and something of a Lula da Silva of his time (in that he tireless sought to give Brazil a larger role in international and Latin American affairs, and was an extremely popular  figure with foreign commentators) — while supportive of abolition — thought it prudent to be out of the country when the controversial law was passed.  Leaving the 21 year old Isabel to give the royal stamp of approval.

In 1888, knowing the monarchy was likely to be overthrown by conservatives who rejected Dom Pedro’s push for a liberalized government, and with the critically ill Dom Pedro in Europe for medical treatment, Isabel took advantage of her regency to work with the Brazilian Senate to push through the Lei Áurea (Golden Law) of 13 May 1888, abolishing slavery outright.  As Isabel fully knew, and as her father had predicted, abolition gave the conservative land-owners one more reason to back republicans, who would overthrow the monarchy the next year.

Isabel was celebrated in her time as a defender of basic human rights, and as that rare being, the head of state willing to take the right action, even when they know it is likely to destroy their own career.

Like so many Latin American exiles before and since, Princess Imperial Isabel sailed off to France (where she died in 1921) but maintained contact with political thinkers back home, and closely observed her homeland’s political and social development.  At the time of her death she was planning to return to Brazil as a private citizen.