Conservative Party

The Conservative Party was the most important of the Brazilian monarchy. Founded in 1837 by reactionaries among the liberal Moderados, the party dominated the last years of the Regency (1831–1840) and the seminal beginnings of the Second Reign (1840–1889). Indeed, its leaders figured in the most important initiatives of the period, for example, the conciliação (1853–1857), which ended the initial partisan struggles between Conservatives and Liberals; foreign policy in the Río de la Plata area (1848–1870); far-reaching reformism in the early 1870s; and the final abolition of slavery in 1888. From 1837 to the monarchy's fall in 1889, there were forty cabinets; Conservatives controlled more than half of the cabinets over more than thirty-two years in power. Moreover, nine of the ten longest administrations had Conservative leadership, including the three longest and most decisive: that of the Marquês de Olinda and Viscount de Monte Alegre (1848–1852), that of Marquês de Paraná (1853–1857), and that of Viscount do Rio Branco (1871–1875).

The party was born of the reaction against Regency decentralization and democratization, which were perceived to be the cause of the secessionist popular revolts of the era. The most dynamic party element, called the Saquaremas, dominated the party during the period when these issues remained unresolved, ca. 1837–1852. Generally trained magistrates, Saquaremas were identified with the slaveholding planter and merchant interests of Rio de Janeiro, allied to similar elements of Bahia and Pernambuco, and emphasized an authoritarian, constitutional state as the only secure guarantor of social order and national integrity. Eusébio de Queirós, Paulino José Soares de Sousa (later Viscount do Uruguai), and Joaquim José Rodrigues Tôrres (later Viscount de Itaboraí), the Saquarema "trinity," organized the Conservative majority in the Chamber and, working closely with Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos and Honôrio Hermeto Carneiro Leão (later Marquês de Paraná), led the parliamentary Regresso, or reaction, which, by 1841, reversed the liberal reforms of 1831–1834. As ministers, senators, and councilors of state, they later figured in the repression of the last Liberal revolts of 1842 and 1848 and oversaw the ministry of 1848–1853, which consolidated the Monarchy as the preeminent force in national politics and in the international relations of the Río de la Plata.

With the maturity of Pedro II by the 1850s, a movement against Saquarema hegemony and partisan strife triumphed, associated with the Marquês de Paraná's opening to Liberals and electoral reforms. By the 1860s, key moderate Conservatives, such as José Tomás Nabuco De Araújo, shifted over to the Liberals, and the Conservative Party itself was increasingly dominated by Paraná's protege, the one-time Liberal, José Maria Paranhos de Silva (later Viscount do Rio Branco). The latter was able to defeat the Saquaremas' heirs in the struggle over gradual abolition of slavery in 1871, thus fatally dividing the party. By 1888, the party's reformist wing successfully presided over slavery's complete abolition. The ideological incoherence this suggests points to the party's increasing demoralization and disarray, central to the context for the military's republican coup of 1889.

See alsoBrazil, The Empire (First); Brazil, The Empire (Second).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Joaquim Nabuco, Um estadista do impérro (1898–1899).

José Antonio Soares De Sousa, A vida do visconde do Uruguai (1944).

Ilmar Rohloff De Mattos, O tempo saquarema (1987).

Roderick Barman, Brazil: The Forging of a Nation, 1798–1852 (1988).

José Murilo De Carvalho, Teatro de sombras (1988).

Emília Viotti Da Costa, The Brazilian Empire (1988).

Richard Graham, Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (1990).

Jeffrey D. Needell, "Brasilien 1830–1889," in Raymond Buve and John Fisher, eds., Handbuch der Geschichte Lateinamericas, vol. 2 (1992).

Additional Bibliography

Needell, Jeffrey D. The Party of Order: The Conservatives, the State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831–1871. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

                                       Jeffrey D. Needell