From Paraguay to the Republic: the militaries, the middle classes and the crisis of the Brazilian Empire.

Abstract

This proposal accords chronological sequence and thematic development to the researches undertaken during the master's and the doctorate degrees. On these occasions, I sought to trace the genesis of the veterans, delimiting from where they came and to where they returned. It was also intended to evaluate the experiences of the combatants during the conflict and the immediate return to the Empire, circumscribing the analysis to the period between the beginning of the Paraguayan War and the first years of the 1870s. It was then verified that the veterans' frustration was expressed, upon returning to the Empire, throughout a situation characterized by social destitution. In this proposal, we intend to evaluate the crisis of the Empire. The objective, therefore, is to evaluate the political performance of the ex-combatants in the process leading to the Proclamation of the Republic. The method through which this research deals with its historical object refers to an analysis of the veterans' capacity of political organization. This capacity, to be demonstrated, coincided very firstly with the mobilization of the war memories as a form of political legitimation and, secondly, with the political articulation of the urban classes, specifically, the popular classes and the middle classes. The veterans constituted an alternative project of government and State which, to a large extent, coincided with the grievances of the classes they intended to mobilize. The eventual disparity of interests was altogether erased by a military agenda that, in the first instance, condemned the rigidity of the social structure, the disparity of income, the use of the public machine for one economic sector only or, in short, the concentration of power in the hands of few. From here on, it is intended to prove, the conditions for the Proclamation of the Republic were broadened.