While in comparison to the turmoil experienced by its Spanish-speaking neighbors, Brazil’s independence and early national period proved largely pacific. Nevertheless, that nation did pass through a time of troubles. The years from 1831 to 1850, spanning the regency and first decade of young Pedro IPs reign witnessed considerable political maneuvering, and a host of armed uprisings. Highly politicized, and of questionable loyalty to the new regime, the army seemed an unreliable instrument for expressing the regency’s authority. As such, Diogo Feijó, the liberal Minister of Justice, created a National Guard, a “citizen’s militia” that would preserve national order. Although the guard did accomplish that mission with some success, it failed to replicate the democratic character of the French institution which had served as its model.
The guard’s loss of popular and liberal character, and its ultimate transformation into the political arm of a conservative government forms the focus of A Milícia Cidadã, a doctoral dissertation written under the direction of the eminent Brazilian historian, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. It explains this alteration as the product of the guard’s Brazilianization, a process in which changes in orientation and structure resulted from the accommodation of a liberal French institution to a patrimonial Brazilian milieu. From this orientation, the National Guard becomes a paradigm; its transformations reflect the ongoing synthesis of change and tradition that characterized the early years of Brazil’s national experience.
Despite the soundness of this approach, and the positing of several important themes and questions, the book’s balance tips heavily toward simple description and narrow detail. Often, an impressive amount of documentation, arduously gleaned from a variety of archival sources, is marshaled to sustain obvious conclusions, or to no purpose at all. And a series of significant questions remain unanswered while relatively minor ones are exhaustively discussed. Careful research and frequent flashes of insight, however, do compensate for the dulling effect of detail and mark A Milicia Ciclada as a solid and worthwhile study.
