Pedro II

Emperor of Brazil (r. 1840-1889)

• Born: December 2, 1825
• Birthplace: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Died: December 5, 1891
• Place of death: Paris, France

During the early years of his nearly fifty-year reign as emperor of Brazil, Pedro II stabilized the country politically and presided over fundamental economic developments. However, a draining war against Paraguay and the nation’s divisive campaign against slavery undermined his rule until he was forced to abdicate.

Early Life

Dom Pedro II (PAY-throh) was the Brazilian-born son of the first emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro I , and the latter’s Austrian wife, the Archduchess Leopoldina, daughter of the last Holy Roman Emperor. The youngest of seven children, Pedro lost his mother a year after he was born when she died from complications during childbirth. In 1831, when he was five years old, his father was forced to abdicate and leave the country, leaving him behind as the heir to the Brazilian throne.

Because Dom Pedro was too young to rule, a regency governed the country until he was declared of age in 1840, with leading figures of the period carefully guiding his education. Meanwhile, the death of his father in Portugal in 1834 left young Pedro orphaned. His oldest sister, Maria da Glória, became queen of Portugal, and Dom Pedro’s reign as the second emperor of Brazil began officially with the declaration of his majority in 1840. His coronation occurred one year later.

Life’s Work

The declaration of the majority of Dom Pedro II when he was only fourteen years old occurred as a consequence of the eroding authority of Brazil’s central government under the regency. Addressing this rising anarchy was the immediate priority of the young monarch and his advisers. Supported by an exceptionally skilled and dedicated military officer, later ennobled as the duke of Caxias, the young monarch was able to suppress revolts in several provinces.

By the end of the first decade of Pedro’s reign, the interior of the country was pacified. In addition the economy prospered due to the growing importance of coffee exports. During the previous three centuries, Brazil’s prosperity had been based first on sugar and later on gold. The climate and soil in the highlands of southeastern Brazil were ideal for coffee growing, and its cultivation came to make the province of São Paulo one of the wealthiest and most economically dynamic in the empire.

Dom Pedro earnestly encouraged technical and cultural advances, supporting numerous projects for capital investment, banking, railroads, shipping, public health, and education. On the occasion of the centennial of the independence of the United States, in 1876, he visited that country. During a meeting with Alexander Graham Bell, he witnessed the operation of a telephone and afterward had the first telephone system installed in Brazil. The emperor also had temporarily as his chaplain the Brazilian inventor of wireless communication, Father Roberto Landell de Moura.

Dom Pedro acquired a reputation as a benign and progressive ruler, a magnanimous sovereign. However, he presided over an essentially archaic social regime, in which virtually all labor was performed by slaves, and most property and income were dominated by a small elite. Pedro favored constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy. However, the electoral franchise was quite limited in a realm such as his, a vast patriarchal plantation slavocracy. Conservative and liberal political parties existed, but had little of any electoral competitiveness, and political offices were allotted among members of the landed elites. Dom Pedro presided over a realm to which he gave conscientious attention, but was, at the same, the keystone of a regime with which he was fundamentally unsympathetic.

War and abolition eventually proved the downfall of the Brazilian empire and its last emperor. From 1864 to 1870, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay were in a war with Paraguay. This triple alliance of countries was ultimately victorious, and Brazil and the duke of Caxias made the greatest contributions to that victory. However, at the end of the war, the Brazilian army observed the sad condition of its impoverished soldiers, products of the archaic society from which they originated.

During the 1870’s, the military increasingly became the focus of dissatisfaction with the imperial regime, viewing it as a feudal relic that hindered the economic and social progress of the country. To the military, the aging Dom Pedro increasingly came to appear as the representative of a society that compromised the security of Brazil, weakening it against modern and industrializing countries. Brazil needed a republican form of government, equal to any other country in the Americas.

Furthermore, the end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865 meant that Brazil remained the last major bastion of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Dom Pedro favored the end of slavery. However, slave labor was the backbone not only of the national economy and society but also of the regime over which he presided. His opposition to slavery alienated from him some of the most conservative landed gentry, a key segment that traditionally had supported the monarchy. In addition, Pedro alienated the Roman Catholic hierarchy by favoring a separation of church and state, and he adhered to freemasonry.

Pedro had hoped progressively to replace slavery with free labor built on new European immigration. However, most European emigrants preferred to go to the United States or Argentina, where free labor markets were already established. Brazil abolished slavery in stages. First, in 1850, the importation of slaves was legally abolished. Next, all children born of slaves after 1871 were to become free when they reached their majority, and aged slaves were freed in 1885. The final stage, total abolition, occurred in 1888.

This last act of abolition, however, was not undertaken by Dom Pedro. Ill and overburdened, he was traveling abroad at that time, leaving his daughter Princess Isabel as regent in his place, and she signed the act of abolition. When Pedro returned to Brazil, he found himself in a country that no longer had any economic, political, or intellectual rationale to justify his regime. The empire was further jeopardized by the fact that Dom Pedro’s successor would be his daughter Isabel, and a woman would not be welcome as a ruler in an overwhelmingly patriarchal society. Moreover, Isabel was not married to a Brazilian but to a French aristocrat.

On November 15, 1889, while Emperor Pedro was resting at his palace in the mountains near Rio de Janeiro, the armed forces declared that the empire was abolished, replaced by a republic. On receiving this news, the emperor offered no resistance. By that time, he was considered unreliable by political conservatives and irrelevant by liberals. He departed with his immediate family, setting sail for exile in Europe. The following year he died while staying at a hotel in Paris. Pedro and his empress are buried in the cathedral of Petropolis, the mountain retreat that was the summer seat of the imperial court. The palace there is now a museum commemorating his life and work and housing the former crown jewels.

In 1843, Pedro married Princess Teresa Cristina, the daughter of Francis I, king of the Two Sicilies. With her he had four children. Two sons, Afonso and Pedro, died in infancy; and one of his daughters, Leopoldina, predeceased her parents. His second child, and older daughter, was Princess Isabel. Over the following century, some descendants of Pedro II remained pretenders to the Brazilian throne, and a small monarchical party maintained a tenuous existence within Brazil.

Significance

For no other figure in nineteenth century Brazil are there more images than those of Emperor Pedro II. However, it is the pictures of the closing years of his reign and life, of an aged figure, sad and meditative, that have come most to represent the tragic nature of his rule. He was a respected figure, recognized for his intelligence and humanity, and his authority during his time was rarely questioned. Nonetheless, he was powerless to undo what he himself recognized as the most debilitating aspect of Brazilian society and development: slavery. His tragedy was to be powerless against the socioeconomic condition that was the basis of his political position. Nonetheless, beyond the lasting images of the end of his reign should be balanced the vigor and hope of its beginning. Its accomplishments included foundations for Brazilian parliamentary, cultural, and intellectual development. He also supported innovations in Brazilian economic, commercial, and technical endeavors.

Pedro’s limitations were those that lay across all Brazilian society. As a slavocracy, Brazil was made up not of owners of property or participants in society but by those owned as property and marginal to its social dynamic. No foundations or innovations could penetrate any deeper than the superficial layer of elites that composed the active whole of the country.

Bibliography

Barman, Roderick J. Citizen Emperor: Pedro II and the Making of Brazil, 1825-91. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. Details life of second emperor of Brazil within context of constitutional monarchy with recognized political responsibilities and limits; clarifies personal, political, and socioeconomic factors that contributed to successes and failures of his reign.

Bernstein, Harry. Dom Pedro II. New York: Twayne, 1973. Biography of Dom Pedro in a series on major historical figures in Europe and the Americas that offers concise biographies for general readership.

Bethel, Leslie. Brazil: Empire and Republic, 1822-1930. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Places reign of Pedro II within context of Brazil’s first century of independence.

Schwarcz, Lilia Moritz. The Emperor’s Beard: Dom Pedro II and the Tropical Monarchy of Brazil. New York: Hill & Wang, 2004. Translation of work by leading Brazilian historian, emphasizing evolving imagery of Dom Pedro II during his reign. Amply illustrated.

Simmons, Charles Willis. Marshal Deodoro and the Fall of Dom Pedro II. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1966. Details final stages of Brazilan empire and monarchy in confrontation between Pedro II and the head of military forces, Marshal Deodora da Fonseca, who established the republic in 1889.

Williams, Mary Wilhelmine. Dom Pedro, the Magnanimous, Second Emperor of Brazil. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937. Earliest scholarly work in English on life of Pedro II, emphasizing his conscientiousness and sagacity.