Ler História 55 / 2008
Dossier: Conceptual History in Luso-Brazilian World. 1750-1850
Javier Fernandéz Sebastián
Presentation - Notes on conceptual history and its application to the Ibero-AmericanFátima Sá e Melo Ferreira e João Feres Júnior
IntroductionJoão Feres Júnior e Maria Elisa Mäder
America - AmericansBeatriz C. Cruz Santos e Bernardo Ferreira
Citizen – neighbourLúcia Bastos Pereira das Neves e Guilherme Pereira das Neves
ConstitutionIvo Coser
FederalismJoão Paulo G. Pimenta e Valdei Lopes de Araujo
HistoryNuno Gonçalo Monteiro
Liberal – LiberalismSérgio Campos Matos
NationAna Cristina Araújo
Public opinionFátima Sá e Melo Ferreira
People – PeoplesRui Ramos
Republic - Republicans
Brief Studies
Susana Chalante
«Demolimania» Royal Association of Architects and Civil Portuguese Archaeologists and «cross of honour and pride» (1866 - 1880)
Espelho de Clio
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Homage to Jill Dias (1944 – 2008)
Abstracts
Ler História 55 / 2008
America / AmericansThis article examines the history of the concept of America in Brazil between 1750 and 1850. The concept assumed several key meanings during the period, among them, one geographic that equals America, or the American continent, to the New World, one political that referred to the possessions of European metropolises, America as the source of endless riches and a future promise of prosperity, as the place of freedom, of new political and social forms, associated with concepts such as republic, federalism and democracy. The experience with republican government in Spanish America, characterized as politically unstable and violent, and also associated with republicanism and democracy, was often used negatively by those who defended the monarchical solution during the political crisis that preceded independence and after the Regency period, when the advocates of political centralization dominated Brazilian politics.
Citizen / neighbourThis article deals with the semantic transformations that happened to the concept of citizen from the middle of eighteenth century to the initial decades of nineteenth. During this period, the category, that was originally associated to the corporative political order started being elaborated based on new individualist and egalitarian premises. The essay explores the problems and tensions that arose in the use of the modern concept of citizen in a society marked by the colonial condition and the preservation of social structures such as slavery.
Constitution
This article aims at exploring the history of the concept of Constitution among the political and intellectual elites of the Luso-Brazilian world between 1750 and 1850. Although the word may be found in this space since the beginning of the period, its modern meaning only appeared after the constitutional movement of 1820. Nevertheless, the idea of an “old constitutionalism” was not forsaken. Therefore, in order to understand the concept of constitution in Brazil during decades that followed the constitutional movement, it is necessary to identify the underground tensions between these meanings, which were usually hidden beneath the surface of political conflict pitching liberals against conservatives.
FederalismThis article aims at understanding the formation of the concept of federalism and of provincial interest in the Brazilian political debate of the XIXth century. At first federalism was a synonym of confederation, as revealed, for example, in the political debate surrounding the 1823 Constitution. During the 1830s, the innovations achieved in the North-American political arrangement after the convention of 1787 were started being received by Brazil’s political elite. Supporters of the «Código do Processo», Federalists argued that government employees in the provinces should come from the local population, and that decentralization should allow citizens that reside in a municipality to participate in setting the judiciary system. The rebellions that occurred during the Regency period lead to a reformulation of their political agenda, which started to give precedence to provincial interests over municipal interests. The decentralization should be conducted by the provincial legislative power to the detriment of the municipalities, and the federative pact should be understood as a space in which the various interests of the provinces contribute to push forward national development and to control public power.
HistoryRoughly between 1750 and 1850, the concept of history experienced, in Portuguese America and in Brazil, a dynamic indicator of changes whose magnitude and depth can only be duly assessed considering the entire period. Such changes relate directly to the deepening of the difficulties experienced by the Portuguese empire in the eighteenth century and to the establishment of the historical conditions that allowed, in the first decades of the following century, the rupture between Portugal and its American domains and the forming, in these, of a national and sovereign political unity, no longer Portuguese but Brazilian. To the Brazilian State and Nation, the concept of History and its mutations proved fundamental.
Liberal / liberalismThe history of the words liberal and liberalism and the usages that were made in the Portuguese context share, as expected, many of the lines that are detectable in other scenarios. If you seek for specifics, perhaps they can be found, firstly, in the greater persistence of the old sense of liberality, in the fact that it was not the word (Liberal) that served as the primary identifier to those who were opposed to Realist/Absolutist and, finally, in the fact that only belated and partially, although on a consistent basis, those words have been connected to a different policy doctrine of the emerging democracy.
NationThe concept of nation has undergone a profound change between 1750 and 1850, only understandable in the context of historical changes that occurred following the French invasion. If by 1808 it was not yet much used by the political elite (the words Kingdom and Monarchy were preferred), during the resistance to French occupation it is at some point asserted the principle of popular sovereignty. The Constitution of 1822 establishes the concept of sovereignty of the Nation and consecrates for the first time the doctrine of self-determination of the nation and its primacy regarding any law or authority. The word gets a central role in the political discourse of the first Liberalism. Now the term Kingdom loses protagonism (excluding in the realist, counter-revolutionary press). But in liberal political discourse, the concept of Nation, viewed as political association or independent totality of citizens or of the Portuguese as a whole, sometimes excluded several categories: the foreigners, men of faction (supporters of the Old political Regime) and, in some sense, the illiterate. For the Miguelists, the political opponents were also excluded from the national whole.
Public opinionDespite the late introduction of ‘public opinion’ into dictionaries, its use is documented back to the last quarter of the 18th century. In the communication standards set by the ‘Enlightened’ elites, the distance, very often in an anonymous fashion and the ethics of the commitment towards public interests characterise the appearance of this invisible deliberative instance, conquering audiences, thanks to freedom of expression and to publicising from a distance. After de Peninsular War, following the Liberal Revolution in 1820, the different opinion makers’ struggle for independence takes place in the context of the separation of civil society from the State. The public sphere claims control over executives and parliaments. The protection of the freedom of the press, the existence of political parties, the publicity around parliament debates, the electoral process and the freedom of expression are, therefore, fundamental topics in the theorisation by Almeida Garrett of this new concept. Thanks to the press, the theatre, schools and the actions of influential civic associations, the strength of democratic propaganda became, later on, a synonym of the irrepressible power of public opinion.
People / peoplesIn this article are highlighted some of the main paths covered by the term «people» as singular and plural, in Portugal in the last decades of the XVIIIth century and in the first half of the XIXth century. The most significant semantic variations that the word suffered in the backdrop of the political conflicts caused by the establishment of Liberalism are investigated, taking in consideration that the modern political uses of this word arose with the French Invasions (1807-1811) and with the resistance to those invasions by a part of the Portuguese population.
Republic / RepublicansRepublic and Republicans did not always mean the same thing, as can be seen in the use of these terms until the nineteenth century. This uncertainty of concepts has been noted in several linguistic and cultural areas. The current concept Republic emerged from deflections and semantic confrontations that can be located between 1750 and 1850. The study of the Portuguese case suggests that the term Republic, used in connection with various forms of government between the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, became, in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the opposite of Monarchy and synonymous of a form of government: the popular government. In the mid-nineteenth century, especially after the 1848 revolutions, the semantic scope of Republic might have been reduced again, tending to no longer designate just a form of government, but a very specific political and social formula: secular democracy, sometimes already socialist. It was in this context, in fact, that Republican came to mean the activist of the political movements that aimed such regimes, while the old term «Repúblico», in the sense of an exemplary citizen, fell into disuse.