Liberal Party

The Liberal Party (Partido Liberal), one of the two great parties of the monarchy (1822–1889), formed (c. 1837) in opposition to the Conservative Party's reactionary, authoritarian regime. A minority party, the Liberals circumvented Conservative hegemony by an 1840 coup (the Majoridade, bringing the adolescent emperor to power early in return for cabinet control). When the emperor's advisers engineered their fall (1841), the Liberals revolted (1842) in São Paulo and Minas Gerais and were pitilessly repressed. This failure, and that of Pernambuco's Praieira Revolt (1848), confirmed the Conservatives' goal: state power was to be preeminent and exercised indirectly by the Crown through cabinet control of patronage, elections, and legislation.

In order to defend and increase their partisans, the Liberal cabinets of the mid-1840s refused to reverse such control. This pragmatism caused a rift between purists and the party's leadership. Indeed, pragmatists from both parties joined to form the Conciliation cabinets (1853–1857) and some successors, culminating in the Progressive League (1862).

This league was a parliamentary coalition in which moderate Conservative dissidents led the Liberals against the Conservative Party (despite divisions over reforms and marked internal suspicion) and presided over cabinets in 1862 and 1864–1868. The league's gradual reformism and crown support were undermined in parliament, where the purists of both parties attacked them as either going too far or attempting too little.

In 1868, the emperor brought the Conservatives to power (partly to support the Conservative general leading imperial forces in the War of the Triple Alliance); they held it exclusively until 1878. This monopoly led to Liberal radicalization. The Progressive League leaders and the old Liberal purists united to refound the Liberal Party and called for dramatic reforms in the Liberal Manifesto of 1869. A radical faction called for even more dramatic reform, and others went still further, deciding to form the Republican Party (1870).

The Liberals used reformism to critique the Conservative cabinets until 1879; afterward several Liberal cabinets, increasingly divided, failed to effect such programs themselves: abolition of slavery, reform of the emperor's prerogatives, decentralization, separation of church and state. By 1889, the last prime minister, a Liberal, led a party so badly splintered that his refurbished radical proposals (designed to save the monarchy) failed to secure support in the Chamber of Deputies, thereby adding to the postabolitionist milieu of political crisis.

See alsoBrazil, Liberal Movements; Conciliação.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Joaquim Nabuco, Um estadista do império, 3 vols. (1898–1899).

Emilia Viotti Da Costa, The Brazilian Empire (1985).

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

Roderick J. Barman, Brazil: The Forging of a Nation (1988).

Leslie Bethell, ed., Brazil: Empire and Republic (1989), chaps. 2-4.

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

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.

Peixoto, Antonio Carlos, Lucia Maria Paschoal Guimarães, and Maria Emília Prado. O liberalismo no Brasil imperial: Origens, conceitos e prática. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Revan, 2001.

                                     Jeffrey D. Needell