At school, one of the main lessons in Brazilian history is that it was a princess who, in 1888, signed the Lei Áurea and made official the end of slavery in the country. Her name was long: Isabel Cristina Leopoldina Augusta Micaela Gabriela Rafaela Gonzaga de Bourbon-Duas Sicilies and Bragança. She was 41 years old at the time and was already in her third and last period of regency (which means that she was the ruler, in practice, due to the illness of her father, Emperor Pedro II). But that’s only part of the story.
One hundred years after the death of Isabel, who died on November 14, 1921, in France, historians heard by Brazil Agency defend that the legacy needs to be seen in its due size. For these researchers, history classes and books need to broaden the understanding of the role of a woman that went beyond signing a document.
According to these scholars, to do justice to the princess’s trajectory, it is necessary to understand the obstacles she faced and the articulations she needed to organize. If, on the one hand, she was aware of the repudiation of slaveholding farmers and also of structural and historical machismo, the “Redeemer” (as she became known because of the law) managed to act behind the scenes. It wasn’t simple. But she wrote that she was “heart relieved” in pulling the empire away from slavery.
“It was with a more relieved heart that at around one o’clock in the afternoon we left for Rio in order for me to sign the great law, whose greatest glory belongs to Papae, who has been striving for so many years for such an end. I also did something and I confess that I am very happy to have also worked for such a humanitarian and grandiose idea”, Isabel wrote to her parents (original spelling kept).
Another Princess Elizabeth
To investigate in depth the trajectory of the ruling woman who became known for such a special signature, historian Maria de Fátima Moraes Argon has been studying, for more than 20 years, the letters exchanged between the princess and the imperial family. He has already pored over more than a thousand correspondences, from documents from the Imperial Museum to the family’s private archive.
For the researcher, there is still a lot to be unraveled in the path of “Dona Isabel”, as a woman who took advantage of opportunities to get closer to what she believed most. Elizabeth was mistakenly recognized, above all, as a religious person unaccustomed to the power or responsibilities she would occupy. In her opinion, Isabel had wit and knew how to gather experiences to deal with the powerful. “I realized that the books I knew brought a very different person from the one I read in the letters. Another woman emerged, another figure and then I became interested. For the last 20 years, at least, I have been dedicating myself to discovering (what is missing)”.
Among the focuses of the investigation, for example, are the sensitivity and artistic relationships that the princess, who played several instruments, maintained. Among them are figures such as composers Carlos Gomes, who dedicated works to the princess, such as the opera the slave, and Chiquinha Gonzaga, who made the Hymn to the Redeemer. “I’ve already seen books dealing with the relationship between Carlos Gomes and Dom Pedro II, as if Dona Isabel had not existed”, laments the researcher.
Historian Bruno Antunes de Cerqueira, who is one of the founders and manager of the D. Isabel I, the Redeemer Cultural Institute, also identifies that the memory in relation to the character was frayed. “From everything we read, it seemed that it was, in a superficial way, a nun with little intelligence. I started to research works like Raquel de Queiroz, which exalted the princess (by wisdom and public commitment)”. The researcher then realized that there could also be sexist bans in relation to public documentation. “There are books that do not recognize her as someone who acted for abolition.”
Researchers Bruno Cerqueira and Maria de Fátima Argon have also published, in partnership, the book Joys and sorrows: studies on the autobiography of D.Isabel do Brasil (with 888 pages). Even being the legitimate heir to the throne, Isabel was viewed with suspicion by the politicians of the time, in a patriarchal and slave system. In her first regency, with her father’s absence on a trip, in 1871, she signed the Lei do Ventre Livre. In the second period of regency (1876/77), when his father also traveled, he had to deal with a period of historic drought in Brazil.
“We are talking about a time when women were reserved there for their domestic life condition. This already starts there in the Empire itself. The political class recognized Dona Isabel as the heir. But the fact that they were headed by her was, to say the least, unsettling. They couldn’t understand this, at a time when women did not have the right to vote or the possibility of holding public office”, points out researcher Maria de Fátima Argon.
woman and abolitionist
Another Princess Isabel biographer, journalist Regina Echeverria, in the book Princess Isabel’s story: love, freedom and exile, also highlights that there was a process of discrediting the conductor’s deeds, with arguments that her knowledge was limited to religious issues. “She had an opinion, fought for what she believed. She lived a great love with her husband and was the mother of three children. She had complicated births. She freed slaves from the monarchy and managed to get where she wanted to go”, he says.
Abolitionist signs stirred up political arrangements. He received threats from landowners, who would inflate whoever they could against the heiress they considered bold. “She was a woman, and on top of that she was publicly abolitionist. It was an outrage for them and for the farmers, who also held political positions”, says Bruno Cerqueira. He contextualizes that, despite the discomfort with the fact that she is a woman, more convinced monarchists passed over it because of the family.
That scenario presented itself with no going back. Dona Isabel would inherit her father’s throne and would become the first woman in history to come to power in Brazil. She already had experience, because she had known politicians since she was a 25-year-old girl and for the first time occupied the country’s regency (since the male brothers had died). “Dona Isabel really had no ambition for power. The fact that she saw her own father, in the various letters he sent to her daughter, treating the throne as a martyrdom, and also the desire to be a mother and to be with her husband, did not make her dream of power all the time” , says Maria de Fatima Argon.
However, the researcher contextualizes that the princess was prepared to reach the throne and did not omit herself. In a letter dated 1865, the emperor writes to his daughter: “Do you know how much I have studied lately? I studied for you to study”. Isabel’s teachers had also been Pedro’s educators, professionals who were the main exponents of the various disciplines in the country. “She was a prepared woman and had a sense of the challenge of thinking that this was a country with an illiterate and slave-owning majority”, says the researcher.
For scholars, there is no doubt that Isabel was an abolitionist since she was young, but this was something that only revealed itself over time. “The primary and secondary sources narrate that she was an abolitionist. She was an abolitionist, privately, since she was very young. She opened her thoughts wide open in 1888”, says professor Bruno Cerqueira. He argues that, since she was little, she asked on her birthday for slaves to be freed. “But she was part of the kingdom and had no way to go out on the street to leaflet”.
It was then that Isabel realized that there was a movement in Brazilian public opinion to become pro-abolition. “Before, hidden, I did it in a reserved way. She protected, for example, the quilombo of Leblon, when Baron de Cotegipe and judge Coelho Bastos, chief of police, were going to massacre people. It was she who did not let this happen in 1886”, says the researcher. “The Golden Law is not a micro thing. It decreed equality. She took advantage of the moment and was audacious”, says Bruno Cerqueira.
May 13, 1888, was a celebration in Brazil, as historians explain. The next day’s papers brought the news to the headlines. The people in Petrópolis went to honor her and she received flowers, in the rain, from people. In the year following Abolition, the monarchy was overthrown, and the imperial family went into exile. “Her influences in France are little explored. Therefore, we are developing research on this subject for a new book. There are important questions about Dona Isabel that we need to understand more”.
For the biographer Regina Echeverria, Isabel was very sorry to have left the country and did not authorize anyone to protest for the family’s return. In France, he chatted with famous Brazilian friends, such as Alberto Santos Dumont.
Isabel died in exile, aged 75, after worsening pneumonia. The remains of the princess and her husband, the Count d’Eu (who died a year after his wife), were transported by ship to Rio de Janeiro, in 1953, and remained in the capital’s Cathedral. Eighteen years later, they were buried in a mausoleum of the Cathedral of São Pedro de Alcântara, in the city of Petrópolis (RJ), where the bodies of the princess’s parents, Pedro II and Teresa Cristina were already lying.
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