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disaster-fruit · 4 years

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and I know it's unfair because I haven't answered the ask yet but you're Brazilian so you know way more than me but I'd love to hear your thoughts about Imperial Brazil?? I'm really struggling with him bc i know about him in this era more from a portuguese perspective.....

YOU THOUGHT I WOULDN’T ANSWER THIS HUH

Sorry for taking so damn long audshdf I was saving this ask to do a real deep dive into the whole empire with a lot of historical explanation and a lot of detail buuuut I was having some trouble coherently organizing my thoughts about Pedro II’s reign so instead I’m gonna use this ask to more loosely talk abt the first half of the empire. You’ve seen my basic thoughts on the second half on that other post, so now I’m gonna ramble mostly about 1808-1840.

Also, hm, this is LONG. It’s embarrassingly long. I hope you have time.

And yes 1808-1822 is not part of the empire, but Brazil was no longer a colony in practice during those years, and I think they were crucial to his development as a person.

Before 1808, Brazil pretty much grew up alone. His mother was around less and less, and he had no friends. Portugal was, as we already know, a shitty dad. Up to that point, he was not only absent but also very controlling. He never allowed Brazil or his people to learn how to read, Brazil wasn’t allowed to have libraries or universities or newspapers or even print. Portugal alienated Brazil both from his mother and from Port himself. He was forcefully kept from developing his own ideas, and his growth was stagnant – even physically. The way I see it, after 300 years he was still a small child, while the others around him were already growing into teenagers even though they were younger in actual numbers. Portugal literally kept him from developing as a person, by force.

But suddenly, Portugal needed him. Suddenly, he showed up at his shore, with hundreds of people, and objects, and books. And though Portugal desperately needed Brazil at that time, his king couldn’t be there with Brazil being like that. That land with no cities and no libraries and no economy no nothing because he was forced to have nothing.

He starts growing really, really fast, and forcefully again. And it was a painful process – his people were being kicked out of their houses so that the people that arrived from Portugal had where to live. In a few years, he grew almost as fast as humans did. But it was still an incomplete growth – most of his people were still living in misery, but now he had a structured state that allowed him to more firmly fit into what a nation means. But it all happened so fast he was… dizzy.

And that was all combined with what was happening in his relationship with his father. They had both gotten much closer now that Portugal was physically there more often. I think Portugal is considerably less shitty to Brazil during these years, both because he needs him and because he is a relief from everything going on in Europe. But that doesn’t mean he became a good dad, but also Brazil was a lot smarter now, a lot freer, and quick to realize something that had always been true – Portugal needed Brazil more than Brazil needed Portugal. Much more.

The fact that he wasn’t a colony anymore but wasn’t quite independent, and thus still had to obey Portugal to some degree, started to annoy him. This has quite a bit of teenage rebellion element into it, but that doesn’t mean it came from unjustified anger. Not at all. His pride and ego were starting to really develop. The king of Portugal liked him better than he liked port himself, Brazil was heaven on earth, Brazil was rich, Brazil was full of potential, Brazil was great, Brazil was paradise, Brazil was not his own.

And that just keeps building.

And when Portugal starts talking about making him a colony again. After all that shit about the being a united kingdom, about Portugal being his father and trying to get close to him, of seeing him as a refuge and a relief, after all of that connection I think Portugal genuinely tried to build with him, the ugly truth is bare again – Portugal never saw him as worthy of equal footing, never saw that united kingdom as anything but temporary, never saw brazil as anything more than a colony.

And Brazil is mad.

When he found out the plans of Pedro I to declare independence, he’s more than happy. He’s been thinking of it for a while, and I think maybe deep down he didn’t love the idea of another Portuguese man being his boss, but Pedro had grown up in brazil, dude was carioca at heart, his wife was wonderful, Brazil could work with that. He declared independence, fought against Portugal, won, still had to pay for his independence, but, at last, he got it.

I think in a way Brazil’s anger, as righteous as it was, did blind him to what was going on. He wanted so bad to get rid of Portugal and avoid going back to how it was when he was a colony, that he waved away or even approved things that really just kept him stuck in the same place. Very little actually changed for most people, and as someone who literally represented all the people, he knew that and could feel that, but he was still so euphoric personally about it that he… ignored it.

Pedro I’s reign was… messy. He needed a constitution, he got into a war with Argentina, everyone was talking about who Pedro was fucking, it was just a whole mess. For that reason, I think despite declaring his independence, brazil remembers Pedro as being mostly an irresponsible asshole who couldn’t keep it in his pants and was too busy being a playboy to rule this country yet still managed to be authoritarian and also made him lose Uruguay. And when it came time for him to choose Brazil or Portugal, just like his father, he chooses Portugal.

That was a blow on his ego. Brazil at this point was still just a teenager, who had in two decades grown insanely fast for a nation, has been told by each king his land was heaven on earth and so much richer than Portugal, yet no one was willing to choose him. Ever. He was still an afterthought. Like a colony, that still had a metropolis. Pedro left him with a 4-year-old, with a government disorganized, and no money.

And then the Provinces start to rise up.

So, hm, a quick background on how I see the provinces: Some of them existed since around 1530, some were younger and some weren't around yet, and if Brazil first appeared representing the people that were born in this new colony, the provinces were much more… administrative and political. Yet many of the ones that were around grew much faster than Brazil – they were already teenagers or even adults by independence. They had always responded directly to Portugal and for a long time saw no connection between themselves or between them and Brazil. The idea of “Brazil” was only like… 100 years old, even less than that. And some of them were not loving being attached to those two kids – Brazil and the baby emperor. They saw the weak government of the regency as a chance to rise up and declare their own independence, as many who started as provinces around them had – like Uruguay.

The regency lasted 9 years, but I think those few years were also crucial to form Brazil as a person, due to how stressful they were. Think about it, he saw what was happening around him, with Spain’s former colonies. And I think he for the first time had to grapple with the very human existential fear of death.

If each of his provinces became their own country, would he still be around? Would he just become… Rio? But Rio existed as a province too. Would he just… be a lot of different countries? Probably not. He would probably disappear. He had only just started to be allowed to live, but that could be taken away at any moment. Uruguay and Rio Grande do Sul succeeded in getting their independence. How long until the others? It was quite terrifying. And I think that experience not only made him averse to the idea of being a republic in general at the time, but also created a lot of emotional and psychological problems for him, a lot of insecurity, as well as it made him realize he was nothing. There was nothing to justify his existence. He couldn’t say he existed because he wanted freedom or republic, he had none of these, plus it was something the provinces too could have. What united that land? What made him him? Those were all questions that would haunt him for the rest of the empire, and he would soon be more than willing to go after and accept easy answers. That’s how he gets to that whole indianismo think I talked about some time ago.

He fights his own provinces, on people, countless times. Revolts that really were like civil wars kept popping, and he, who was just a teenager, had to fight to oppress his provinces and force them into being a part of him, for a reason he himself didn’t know. He couldn’t explain why they should be a part of him, except that they were and he wanted them to be and he wanted to live. And he didn’t know why.

In summary, this whole period was one of fear, and insecurity, and doubt. It shook him profoundly as a person more than as a country. Because once Pedrinho was in power, things were quick to stabilize and it was, in some ways, as if those revolts had never happened, but Brazil remembered them, he lived through them, and never really forgot that fear.

If the regency was marked by external peace and internal turmoil, Pedrinho’s reign was one of relatively internal peace and external turmoil. Pedro II was… a complicated figure. Most Brazilians today regard him as an excellent ruler and a wise man, but I at least can’t be this optimistic about the man who insisted on the Paraguayan war, refused to abolish slavery for decades, and basically laid ground to a lot of the problems we still have today, like bad distribution of land and late industrialization. He didn’t do all that by himself, of course, a lot can be blamed on the senate, but he was the most powerful man on the country, and he receives way too much credit for his personal beliefs of being an abolitionist and a pacifist. Maybe he really was both these things, but that doesn’t change the fact that he didn’t use his power to end slavery and avoid war, quite the opposite. And why is that important here? Because I think brazil, the tan, was also fooled by it. He quickly bought into the narrative that Pedro II was this wise incredible man, and overlooked all the ways he kept the worst structures of the country untouched in order to not upset the elite that kept him in power. Brazil wanted nothing but stability and power, and Pedro, looking like the opposite of his father at the surface, brought that. There were no more separatist movements or civil wars once he rose to power, Rio Grande do Sul was reabsorbed, and the years that followed were ones of relative prosperity, and all of that really made brazil more and more attached to the whole concept of the empire. I think just like he was willing to ignore a lot of things during independence for the sake of it, here too he ignored all the ways Pedro II held him back so that he could fully feel the pride of being a powerful empire.

Brazil really did like being an empire during that time. The narrative of the empire was one that answered the question that haunted him for so long – what justified his existence. Justifying it, in the 19th century, is what I believe to be the main motivation underlying everything he did and thought. And the narrative was that the empire guaranteed stability and avoided civil wars and fragmentation, allowing Brazil to be, to quote José Bonifacio, “This majestic and solid piece of social architecture from the Prata to the Amazonas”, and again, all that in comparison to his neighbors that were constantly drowning in civil wars and fragmenting. For stability and that justification, he was willing to turn a blind eye to anything else.

So he rose from the regency feeling stronger than ever. Pedrinho had put everything into place, he was growing, he had a Brazilian in power for the first time, his coffee was going well, and he had survived. Many of his neighbors hadn’t, or at least not in the sense of managing to keep their territories intact. He did. His neighbors were unstable, with wars and coups and wars (like he hadn’t just had exactly that), he was stable and growing and he was the strongest. Once free of the fear of being destroyed from the inside, his ego grew once again, and he felt good. He felt pride in being a big strong and centralized empire, and to look down on the other Latin Americans and even on his father. He was ready now to make his power and influence spread, as an Empire.

That's it, sorry if this is both ridiculously long and also a mess, I have way too many thoughts about imperial brazil and I could've probably written ten more pages of it and still have something to say. Also I'd still love to hear your thoughts on the empire for a Portuguese perspective, because I genuinely have no clue what that would look like. But anyway hmm I hope this was fun?

#ask #sorry this is so goddamn long but come on yall know me at this point i cant and wont shut up #long post #hcs

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