The Guarda Nacional was a key institution in the success of the Brazilian empire. Founded in 1831, the Guard replaced the militia and the ordenanças inherited from the colonial past. Modeled on the Gardes Nationales of Orléanist France, the Guard was a part-time force recruited from the classes favorable to the new, liberal regency and interested in maintaining the social status quo. Despite a succession of major organizational changes, the National Guard remained the empire’s most effective means of political and social control. The standing down of the Guard as an active force in 1873 both contributed to, and was symptomatic of, the empire’s declining effectiveness as a regime.
The National Guard has attracted little historical attention and it is not unfair to Jeanne Berrance de Castro’s valuable pioneering work, A Milícia Cidadã, to state that a definitive study has yet to be written. Fernando Uricoechea’s book aspires to fill that gap. It is the result of very considerable research in the Arquivo Nacional and state archives, ranging from Bahia to Rio Grande do Sul. Resolutely analytical in its handling of the subject, the book draws heavily on the ideas of Max Weber for its conceptual approach.
The author sees the National Guard as exemplary of, and as central to, “an inherent structural tension” existing during the empire (p. 3). On the one hand, the central state was struggling to impose on Brazil an administrative control that was bureaucratic in the Weberian sense—rational and impersonal in outlook and functioning according to acquired values. On the other hand, the localities had been controlled since the colonial period by social groups that were, in Weber’s terms, “patrimonialistic”—their values were ascribed, they were orientated toward status, and their outlook was personalistic. When appointed to administrative positions, members of these groups treated their posts as personal possessions, to be used to the advantage of themselves and their families. This process is dubbed—and a very ugly word it is—“prebendalization.” The national government therefore struggles to bureaucratize and the local power groups to prebendalize all administrative structures: the result, almost a compromise, was “patrimonial bureaucratization,” in which the two trends clashed and coexisted and in which the bureaucratic state slowly, but inexorably, gained the upper hand. Uricoechea perceives the National Guard as the quintessence, in its forms of existence and in its decline, of the rise and fall of bureaucratic patrimonialism in Brazil.
The author employs consistently and persistently the ideas of Max Weber. If the concepts of “patrimonialism” and “bureaucratization” are not developed in depth, it is probably because that has already been done by Weber himself. It is confusing not to be given more precise expositions of such key terms as “militarization,” which the author extensively employs in his theorization. The consequent lack of rigor and, for this reviewer at least, a want of integration among the various parts of the analysis is indirectly conceded by Uricoechea when he states that “this research cannot be said to be guided as much by a systematic and general theory as by the imaginative use of those problematic concepts that permit the construction of meaningful patterns of historical interpretation” (p. 5). If “problematic” means “speculative,” then the author is presenting his work more as a series of theoretical speculations about the nature and development of political society in nineteenth-century Brazil based on the imaginative use of selected pieces of evidence than the application of a rigorous analytical model to the study of a specific institution in a specific period.
To conclude, this is not to state that the work of Uricoechea does not contain a great many original, stimulating, and useful insights into the crucial problem of the relationship between the national government and the local elements of power in imperial Brazil. Those with some familiarity with social-science concepts and Weberian theory will find those insights worth the searching out. Others would do best to begin by reading the conclusion (pp. 180–184) and then to see how far their perseverance will take them.
