These two volumes are really part of a four-volume set: The first, A Primeira República: texto e contexto (São Paulo: Difusão Européia, 1969) is a collection of documents organized around the same themes as A República velha, I; and the fourth, an annotated bibliography, is completed but not yet published. A República velha and its complementary volumes form the most ambitious work yet to appear on the era alternately called the Old or First Republic (1889-1930), an age which has received far less attention from historians of Brazil than have the colonial and imperial periods, despite the growing number of specialized studies on it by Brazilians and North Americans.
To this reviewer, the first of the two substantive volumes is the more interesting, partly because of its unconventional topical rather than chronological format, partly because of its broader scale. Volume I of A República velha is divided into five sections, namely, “Economia,” “Classes Sociais,” “Sistemas Politicos,” “As Forças Armadas,” and “Monarquismo.” While it contains no startlingly novel interpretations, it systematically lays out the workings of Brazil’s neocolonial economy, policy, and to some extent, its society in the era.
Financial and monetary policy receives considerable attention. Along with a detailed description of the evolution of external financial dependency, the author provides a lucid explanation of the domestic struggle to control exchange rate policy. While acknowledging the power of coffee interests, Carone shows how coffee groups occasionally faced effective opposition from importers, consumers, foreign investors (interested in profits remittances) and the federal treasury, whose debts in “hard” currencies were ever more burdensome as the value of the milréis deteriorated (I, 96-99).
Professor Carone’s treatment of social classes in volume I is highly schematic, and he confines his analysis to politically mobilized groups; in the rural sector, only large property owners are studied. Likewise, social phenomena associated with the rural destitute—banditry and millenarianism—as well as the adjustments forced on immigrants and former slaves, are not covered. By contrast, working-class movements are described in detail, as are those of the urban petit bourgeoisie.
Mainstream politics, however, is the story of rural oligarchies supported by wealthy bourgeois groups (II, xv). The second volume, organized chronologically and devoted exclusively to politics, is divided into four sections (“Os Governos Militares”; “O Fastígio do Regime”; “Os Abalos Intermitentes do Regime”; and “O Período das Contestações”) and subdivided into the presidencies of the era. One of the major themes is “formal” versus “real” institutions: “Dualism [dualidade] is the fundamental norm of Brazilian society,” Carone asserts (II, xi). Thus bacharéis in the statehouse provide the window-dressing for coronéis in the countryside; the constitution provides a cover for the real power of the executive; and formal sovereignty masks economic and financial dependence on foreign lenders and investors.
In this two-volume treatment, the Old Republic, which on the surface seems to have provided a stable constitutional regime for almost forty years, emerges as an era of agitation, confusion, and protest. For example, Carone shows that military revolts were almost annual occurrences, and that the tenentes of 1922 did not appear ex nihilo, but derived their ideology from the sergeants’ revolts of 1915 and 1916 (II, 308). Moreover, the navy was wrecked by the civil war of 1893-95, and humiliated by the chibata revolt of 1910; in 1921 it was still a completely demoralized institution (I, 371). Labor agitation and strikes were frequent, at least in the large cities. Yet radical groups were no more successful than their establishment counterparts at building enduring organizations, save for the Communist Party (founded in 1922), the only national political structure to outlive the era.
The Old Republic is usually described as a failure, and Carone’s interpretation seems to fall within the “failure” school. He shows how attempts to tax rural property failed; how foreign borrowing repeatedly forced Brazilian statesmen to make loan repayments the cynosure of federal policy; how the export economy was developed and protected at the expense of the national market; how foreign firms took over the coffee export trade; and how reformist and even revolutionary groups failed to grasp the structural weaknesses of Brazilian society in their efforts to modernize and democratize the country. Failure, of course, is relative, and one wishes the performance of the first Republican regime had been gauged against that of the Empire; certainly the statesmen of the Republic were relatively successful in their endeavors in public health, education (compared to the dismal neglect under the Empire), and diplomacy, to mention the more conspicuous areas.
A related aspect, regrettable at least to the novice, is the nearabsence of chronological perspective: there is almost no discussion of the contours of society and politics in the late Empire, and no treatment of the consequences of the fall of the Old Republic in the period after 1930. Furthermore, although the work is massively documented, the author does not list any of the half-dozen or more relevant English-language monographs, at least some of which were available at the time of writing.
Despite these omissions, this is an elaborate and serious work, indispensable for the study of modern Brazil. While the author apparently confined his researches to printed sources, the bibliography at the end of volume II is itself a significant contribution, containing more than 1,000 items. In addition, he makes extensive use of the Documentos Parlamentares and three contemporary newspapers, O Estado de S. Paulo, Correio da Manhã, and the Jornal do Comércio. This is clearly the best synthesis to date on the Old Republic.
