The death of José Honório Rodrigues is a time to offer an interim assessment of his contributions to our understanding of Brazil's past. Along with the late Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Rodrigues was a major figure of Brazilian historiography after 1940.
Rodrigues was 17 when the Vargas period opened with the overthrow of the Old Republic in 1930, and the next 15 years of that administration influenced Rodrigues's views of the Brazilian past. His career as a historian opened with his chapters in Civilização holandesa no Brasil (1940), coauthored with Joaquim Ribeiro.1 A research fellowship to the United States awarded by the Rockefeller Foundation (1943–44) led to a long-term interest in U.S. historiographical currents, notably those reflected in the work of Walter Webb.2 At this time, too, he initiated his second abiding interest—a study of Brazil’s historiographical traditions, its leading practitioners, and their methodologies and sources—which he pursued throughout his career.3 In the 1960s, he began a series of interpretative studies touching on aspects of Brazil’s development, both nationally and internationally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.4 Here he emphasized what he considered critical periods of revolution and counterrevolution; independence and postindependence, the regency, and ensuing political compromise in the four decades after 1820. Throughout this time, Rodrigues served as chief of Rare Rooks in the Biblioteca Nacional (1946-58), research director of the Instituto Rio Branco (1948-51), director of the Arquivo Nacional (1958-64), professor of higher education in the state of Guanabara, and member of the Academia de Letras (1970-87).
Rodrigues’s contributions as editor of documentary materials aside (his publications in this genre deserve a separate assessment),5 it is appropriate at this juncture to highlight certain main currents in his historical publications, to form the historical framework (what he might term his tradição interpretativa)6 which informed his work since about 1961. Three themes surfaced repeatedly between 1961 and 1976. First, there is a strain of liberal political philosophy, faith in the institutions of representative government, and the division of state powers, coupled with a recognition of the importance of a strong executive. (Fundamentally a political historian, Rodrigues did not neglect economic, social, and psychological factors, elements which appeared in his first publication, Civilização holandesa no Brasil.) Second, one finds the conviction that Brazilian state policy has poorly served what Rodrigues would define as the national interest. Third, there is his personal aspiration to redress the conservative and profoundly elitist perspective of the diplomat-historian Varnhagen, by contributing to the socially conscious, liberal, and critical counterstrain of Silvio Romero, João Ribeiro, and Rodrigues’s much admired historian, Capistrano de Abreu. As he once explained his approach, he tried “to show how history ought to, and can be made to, contribute toward constructing the present.’’7
Rodrigues, we must recall, was a product of his time and place. The decade and a half dominated by Vargas signaled to Rodrigues and many of his generation that an ill-defined break had occurred with Brazil’s colonial and neocolonial past. These were years of nationalism as ideology rather than as political ploy, of urbanization and industrialization, the upsurge of the middle class and the bourgeoisie, emergence of a widespread social consciousness, and recognition that handling the growing industrial proletariat was not primarily the province of the police. To be sure, there were also authoritarian undercurrents in the Vargas years, but, in a curiously contradictory and still unexplored fashion, there were also developments generating a fragile party system in the postwar decades, 1945-64. Those years, one suspects, led Rodrigues to discern certain structures running through Brazil’s past. There was a pattern of domination of Brazilian politics and society by Mineiro and Bahian family networks, sustained throughout the empire in the nineteenth century and the Old Republic in the twentieth, but which the Vargas years splintered, a process of change continued until the military intervention of 1964 backed by the enduring oligarchies. The framework shaped Rodrigues’s interpretation and periodization of postcolonial Brazil: the moments of upsurge and possibility of radical change in independence, the regency, the early republican years of Floriano Peixoto, and the initial promise of Vargas, followed by backlash and counterrevolution in the end of the regency (1840), compromise (1850-61), Floriano’s retirement (1895), and the coup of 1964.
With his contemporary, Gilberto Freyre, Rodrigues shared an interest in the other Brazil, even if it was sometimes tinged with subjacent elitism: the Brazil of the countryside; the underdog; the black, mulatto, and Indian and their intermixture. For its time, Rodrigues's vision of the social formation of Brazil was a refreshing break with traditional prejudice. Until the end of the slave trade to Brazil, Rodrigues saw his country Indianized and Africanized, hardly Europeanized; after 1850, he saw Brazil shifting its focus from West Africa to Europe and later the United States. He appears to have shared uncritically with Freyre (whom he often cited in t is connection) faith in the thaumaturgical powers of miscegenation which he saw as derivative of predileção portuguesa and tolerância. No historian lacks blemishes. Perhaps it was his view of miscegenation which led Rodrigues to conclude that class conflict was minimal in the Brazilian past. What most galled him as a historian was the enduring inability of conservative interests and social classes to dominate their fears of the lower orders, limiting their action in accordance with the “princípio conservador que sempre dirigiu o Brasil, de reformas lentas e graduais.”8
What may turn out to be Rodrigues’s magnum opus is his five-volume Independência, revolução e contra-revolução. Based on an impressive control of published primary and secondary sources, he applied an interdisciplinary methodology examining, in turn, politics, economy, and society; the military; the political elite; and Brazil’s international dimension. Independence brought a short span of revolutionary possibilities during the predominance of José Bonifácio and his supporters; his ouster in June 1823 initiated the ebb of this revolutionary moment, which ended with the treaties with Portugal and England and the compromise of Brazil's national interests. It was a pattern, Rodrigues believed, to be repeated later: "[A] revolução quando não desemboca em contrarevolução, acaba en reformas, e a Conciliação entre dois princípios extremos . . . não estava fora do alcance dos vitoriosos.”9 Bedridden in his last months, he still managed to revise his História do azucar no Brasil as well as finish the companion volume of his História da história do Brasil. His career, like Sérgio Buarque's, bridged the transition from the old to the new Brazilian historiography.
Nine years later he published his comprehensive Historiografia e bibliografia do domínio holandês no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1949).
“Webb’s Great Frontier and the Interpretation of Modern History," in The New World Looks at its History, A. R. Lewis and T. F. McGann, eds. (Austin, 1963). Alter a research fellowship from the British Council in 1950, he termed his historical formation “Anglo-American.” John D. Wirth, “An Interview with José Honório Rodrigues," HAHR, 64:2 (May 1984), 220.
For example, Teoria da historia do Brasil (São Paulo, 1949); A pesquisa histórica no Brasil. Sua evolução e problemas atuais (Bio de Janeiro, 1952); Historiografía del Brasil Siglo XVI (Mexico City, 1957); Historiografía del Brasil. Siglo XVII (Mexico City, 1963); História e historiadores do Brasil (São Paulo, 1979), the second volume of which will appear posthumously.
These include: Brasil e Africa: Outro horizonte (Rio de Janeiro, 1961) with a revised edition in two volumes in 1964; Conciliação e reforma no Brasil: Um desafio histórico cultural (Rio de Janeiro, 1965); Interesse nacional e política externa (Rio de Janeiro, 1966); O Parlamento e a consolidação do Império, 1840-1861 (Brasília, 1982).
See the appended “Selected Bibliography” in Wirth, “An Interview,” 231-232.
Independência, revolução e contra-revolução, 5 vols. (Rio de Janeiro, 1975-76), I, introduction.
Wirth, “An Interview,” 225.
O Parlamento e a consolidação, 166.
Independencia, revolução e contra-revolução, V, 149. “All of Brazil’s social revolutions,” he remarked to John Wirth, “were met with an iron fist and fire. All were destroyed.” Wirth, “An Interview,” 226.