The proclamation of the Republic in Brazil : revolution or coup d’état?

This thesis seeks to observe and comprehend some of the changes that Brazil went through with the fall of the Monarchy and the establishment of the Republic at the end of the Nineteenth century. It is clear enough that the regime change took place through a coup d’état carried out by the Brazilian army. Therefore, I do not propose to question this understanding. Rather, this project intends to go further and analyze whether the Proclamation of the Republic can also be considered a revolution. This was done by comparing the previously established imperial system and the newly implemented republican organization, in order to asses how meaningful this regime change was for the country’s history. This thesis is divided into two parts. Chapter one looks at certain key moments in Brazilian history that led to the independence from Portugal in 1822 and the establishment of the constitution two years later. The constitution itself is also analyzed along with the political philosophy on which it was based. To this end, it was important to study Benjamin Constant’s constitutional theories that allowed Brazil to have a liberal monarchy as its first post-independence political system. Chapter two, in turn, addresses the central topic of this thesis, that is, the proclamation and consolidation of the Republic in 1889 and 1891. This section presents some of the reasons why the army rebelled against the government and the influence of Auguste Comte’s positivism among the country’s new generation of military officers. Therefore, positivism’s philosophical tenets are also presented throughout this chapter. Finally, a comparison between the republican and imperial constitutions was also added to this section, as well as a brief analysis of the foundations of the American political system upon which the republican constitution of Brazil was based. The Proclamation of the Republic was a turning point in Brazilian history. Like any other historical event, its causes and effects are complex. Yet, the army’s insurgency that resulted in the establishment of the new regime in 1889 had a clear and distinguishable consequence: the fall of the monarchical political system legitimized in 1824 by the country’s first constitution and whose origins had been the result of centuries of Portuguese colonization in South America