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José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva; Andrada e Silva, José Bonifácio de
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"I will never be a pure royalist, but all the same I will never completely enrol myself under the ragged flags of dirty and chaotic democracy", Brazil´s foremost politician and intellectual, the "father of Independence" and the empire´s first prime minister, declared in one of his discourses. A promoter of enlightened ideas of national independence, José Bonifácio was also a fierce opponent of radical liberalism and a defender of a centralized monarchy with only very limited popular participation, as well as of slavery as a means to stabilize the new nation-state. Born in 1763 in Santos, the son of a wealthy and aristocratic Portuguese family, José Bonifácio graduated in Natural Philosophy at Coimbra University in 1787, and again in Laws a year later, and was soon becoming one of the foremost experts in mineralogy and mining in Portugal. He was appointed as a member to the Academia de Ciências at Lisbon in 1789 and as professor of Mineralogy at Coimbra in 1801, and was eventually nominated as Royal Intendent-General of Mining and Metals. Having fought against the French invasions after 1808, he returned to Brazil in 1819, and immediately became involved in independentist agitation. In 1821 he was elected president of the Junta Gobernativa of his native São Paulo, and became the chief advisor to the young prince regent, Dom Pedro. He headed the ministry formed by the regent in January 1822, and supported his determination to declare independence, formally realized on September 7 of that same year. In the Constitutional Assembly Andrada e Silva and his brothers Martim Francisco and Antonio Carlos soon became the leading lights of the most conservative faction, vocalizing an authoritarian project with powers centralised in the Court and little autonomy for the provinces.
The Andradas´ hardline conservatism soon clashed with the Emperor´s interest to come to an agreement with the more liberal group, and José Bonifácio was forced to step down as prime minister in June 1823, turning into a fierce opponent of his former mentor. In August of the same year, the Andradas founded the journal O Tamoio whose indigenous title foreshadowed the advent of romantic indianism, and from whose columns they attacked the emperor´s liberal politics and further advocated a centralist monarchical order. Forced into exile after the dissolution of the Assambléia Constituinte in 1823, José Bonifácio went on publishing from Europe under the pseudonym of Américo Elísio, and was eventually rehabilitated in 1829, when he returned to Brazil and, following Pedro I´s abdication in 1831, assumed the influential position of tutor to the child emperor Pedro II. Falling prey to a political intrigue once again in 1833, which accused him of participation in a conspiration to reinstall Pedro I as monarch, he was soon absolved unanimously by a trial but preferred to refrain from political life until his death in 1838.
Even though in his more programmatic writings he argued in favour of a gradual abolition of slavery and supported the distribution of uncultivated land among the peasantry, José Bonifácio hardly made any attempt to put these measures into practice when in power. His political project, then, was more concerned with the consolidation of state authority than with nation formation. His stance on slavery and abolition is exemplary: while, in 1823, he argued that an eventual abolition of the slave regime was necessary so as to ensure the kind of `racial improvement´ he regarded as the very condition of forming a people (an idea which, towards the century, would be taken on in openly biologistic terms by the advocates of branqueamento), and pointed to the Haitian revolution as a dangerous example of the consequences of a belated liberation of slaves, he nevertheless excluded any possibility of putting the measure into practice for the time being. Only slave labour, he concluded, could provide the economic base for industry and technological progress to emerge in Brazil, after which, abolition would become possible. For the moment, however, immediate reform would undermine the political consensus and cause a schism within the ruling elites that would endanger the very institution of monarchy.
Ending his days on the island of Paquetá in Guanabara bay, José Bonifácio, apart from his political writings and mineralogical treatises, also left behind a volume of Poesias avulsas, first published in 1825.
- http://historianet.zip.net/main/conteudos.asp?conteudo=202
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