Pedro I

Portuguese-born emperor of Brazil (r. 1822-1831)

• Born: October 12, 1798
• Birthplace: Lisbon, Portugal
• Died: September 24, 1834
• Place of death: Lisbon, Portugal

Pedro I was the heir to the Portuguese throne—which he briefly held—but through a historical accident he grew up in colonial Brazil and became a leader of that colony’s independence movement, which made him the first emperor of independent Brazil. However, military defeats and personal scandals during his comparatively brief reign forced him to abdicate, and he returned to Portugal, where his last significant act was to secure the throne of his native land for his daughter.

Early Life

Dom Pedro I (PAY-throh) was born in a royal palace near Lisbon, the son of Portugal’s future king Dom João (John) VI. His mother was the Infanta Carlota Joaquina de Bourbon, a daughter of the king of Spain. Pedro was educated privately, mainly by members of clergy. His interests, however, lay not in scholarship but in physical and athletic activities. His upbringing was somewhat chaotic. His parents were quarrelsome. His father was a genial but unkempt figure; his mother was a demanding and authoritative one. The boon companion of his youthful carousing, “Chalaça” (meaning the “joker” or “prankster”), was among Dom Pedro’s closest friends and most trusted Brazilian advisers.

In 1808, Dom Pedro and the entire royal family fled from Portugal to Rio de Janeiro in colonial Brazil to escape the forces of Napoleon Bonaparte, which were invading the Iberian peninsula. While still exiled in Brazil, his father became king of Portugal and raised the colony of Brazil to the status of a kingdom. As the next in line to the Portuguese throne, nineteen-year-old Dom Pedro married the Archduchess Leopoldina of Austria, a daughter of the last Holy Roman Emperor, in 1817. Of the seven children that Pedro would have with his wife, the eldest would eventually become queen of Portugal, Maria II (da Glória); and the youngest would become the second emperor of Brazil, Pedro II. Pedro also had numerous other offspring with various mistresses in Brazil, Uruguay, France, and Portugal.

Life’s Work

In 1821, six years after the collapse of the French Empire, the Portuguese parliament required that Dom João VI return to Portugal. The following year, it demanded that Crown Prince Dom Pedro also return. However, the young prince refused, defiantly announcing that he would stay in Brazil with the the response famously associated with him: “Fico!” (I will remain!). On September 7, 1822, along the banks of the Ipiranga River in the province of São Paulo, he declared Brazil separated from Portugal with the battle cry “Independência ou Morte!” (independence or death!). By the end of the year he was crowned, in the cathedral of Rio de Janeiro, as emperor of Brazil. The new sovereign realm was designated an “empire” both for its continental size—which was nearly one hundred times greater than that of Portugal—and its recent role as having been the center of the Portuguese Empire.

A dashing figure who played historical roles on two continents, Dom Pedro led a brief, ill-fated life. After Brazil achieved its independence, a constituent assembly began to write a constitution for the new country. In the wake of the overthrow of absolutist regimes in Europe by Napoleon and under the influence of British liberal politics, the young sovereign was committed to constitutional monarchy, to ruling under a written charter of rights and responsibilities among shared powers. However, concerned that the document did not give adequate authority to the monarchy to moderate among competing factions, Pedro dissolved the constituent body and issued his own constitution. This action considerably alienated liberal political forces that earlier had welcomed his declaration of independence.

In 1826, Pedro’s father, Dom João VI, died. As the king’s designated heir, Dom Pedro briefly assumed the title as Dom Pedro IV of Portugal. However, according to his own Brazilian constitution, he was not authorized to assume such a role. He therefore abdicated and placed his eldest daughter, then seven years old, on the throne as Maria II (also Maria da Glória) and tried to arrange for his brother Miguel to act as her regent. However, Miguel, who was the leader of the antiliberal forces in Portugal, considered himself the rightful heir. Pedro then tried to arrange for Miguel to marry Maria da Glória and serve as her regent, but instead of marrying his niece, Miguel assumed the throne for himself in 1828.

Meanwhile, Dom Pedro’s attentions were consumed by a series of crises in Brazil. From the beginning of his reign, Brazil had been at war with neighboring Argentina over Brazil’s occupation of the province of Uruguay. During 1826, the young monarch personally directed Brazilian forces there. However, Brazil lost the war, and Uruguay became independent in 1828, thereby serving the British interest in a buffer state between Brazil and Argentina. Thus, during a brief period, Dom Pedro suffered the losses of the Portuguese throne for his daughter and the territory of Uruguay for Brazil. He was left politically bankrupt in international adventures.

Pedro’s personal affairs brought him further damage. At the time of independence, he had acquired a mistress in São Paulo named Domitila de Castro Canto e Melo, who was married to a low-ranking army officer. Pedro installed her and her entourage in a prominent residence near the royal palace in Rio de Janeiro and made her marchioness of Santos. He had five children with her. Pedro’s wife felt so humiliated by Pedro’s brazen affair that she died during childbirth in 1826. A popular outcry then arose against Pedro, for both the public scandal of openly keeping a mistress and the tragic death of the empress, who was a beloved figure noted for her charity and benevolence. In response to public criticisms, Dom Pedro separated from his mistress, so that he could attract a second wife among the European nobility. In 1829, he married Archduchess Amelia of Bavaria, the granddaughter of the French empress Joséphine, the first wife of Napoleon I. Dom Pedro had one daughter with his second wife.

In 1831, a political crisis proved the final blow to Pedro’s reign in Brazil. His Portuguese birth had come to isolate him from the preponderance of Brazilian-born advisers who were increasingly surrounding him, and he was challenged over his ability to determine ministerial appointments. With his constitutional authority compromised, he abdicated the Brazilian throne on April 7, 1831. Now designated the duke of Bragança—after a city in northeastern Brazil—he resolved to return to Portugal to reestablish his daughter as queen of that country.

After residing briefly in Great Britain, Dom Pedro proceeded to the Azores, a group of Portuguese islands in the Atlantic that opposed the reactionary rule of his brother Miguel. There, Dom Pedro organized a force to invade Portugal and to establish a liberal constitutional monarchy under Maria da Glória. Supported by the British, but with many fewer troops than Miguel, Dom Pedro invaded Portugal in 1832. He occupied the northern city of Porto, a key commercial center, which favored a liberal regime. Besieged in Porto by the enemy, Pedro had his naval forces move south. He victoriously entered Lisbon by the middle of the following year.

The final battles of the war occurred during spring of 1834, with Miguel defeated and entering into exile. After Maria II was restored to the throne, she reigned until 1853. Dom Pedro, however, succumbed to tuberculosis, which had been wasting him for some months. He died on September 24, 1834, expiring in the royal palace where he had been born nearly thirty-six years earlier.

Significance

Dom Pedro had a personality that was both engaging and mercurial. He left as a legacy within both Brazilian and Portuguese political history a nucleus for the principle of constitutional government. Nonetheless, he also reflected the elitist and unstable nature of Brazil’s government through his authoritarian decree of the nation’s first constitution and an abdication that was a consequence of both his personal whims and the political rivalries in which he was pitted. Most tellingly, he recognized the debilitating socioeconomic trap of slavery in which Brazilian history was caught. However, his insight tragically did not give him the personal or political weight to unmake it.

Despite his flaws and failures, Pedro I was nonetheless the founder of Brazilian independence. Within that role and over the forgiving course of time, he has risen to become an iconic figure of Brazilian history, the symbol of the country’s nationhood. His mortal remains were returned to Brazil in 1972 during commemorations of the sesquicentennial of Brazilian independence.

Bibliography

Barman, Roderick J. Brazil: The Forging of a Nation, 1798-1852. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. Reviews events and key figures of Brazilian independence and nation building from late colonial to imperial period.

Bethel, Leslie, ed. Brazil: Empire and Republic, 1822-1930. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Comprehensive overview of political, economic, and social history of imperial and early republican Brazil by six leading specialists.

Costa, Sergio Corrêa da. Every Inch a King: A Biography of Dom Pedro I, First Emperor of Brazil. London: Hale, 1972. Detailed biography, translated from Portuguese to English, of Dom Pedro I by a leading Brazilian scholar.

Kaiser, Gloria. Dona Leopoldina: The Habsburg Empress of Brazil. Riverside, Calif.: Ariadne Press, 1998. Novel by an Austrian author, translated from German, that re-creates the life of Dom Pedro’s first wife, with its trials and frustrations, based on correspondence with her family.

Macaulay, Neill. Dom Pedro: The Struggle for Liberty in Brazil and Portugal, 1798-1834. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986. Scholarly study of Dom Pedro I tracing his life, particularly political and military actions, in relation to his commitment to liberal constitutional monarchy.