By JOHN KENNEDY FERREIRA*
In Brazil there was no evolutionary line that went from the radicalization of the ideals of freedom and equality to Utopian Socialism, as occurred in Europe and even in other Latin American countries.
The dissemination of socialist ideas in Brazil is completely different from that in other countries on the subcontinent. These countries carried out Independence Revolutions, there were establishments of Republican States, alterations and changes in institutions.
The Brazilian process occurred differently. Here, the institutions were practically the same as in the colony, and the absence of developed commerce and industry left a void in social relations. In other words, it is an agrarian country where the labor force is slave, and at the same time, there is a ruling class aware of its historical role and the difficulties of its present.
Brazil has been independent since 1822 under the formula of an imperial government guided by a cultured oligarchy penetrated by masonry, historically presenting a very suitable combination for the development of new ideas of “social reform” of a scientific type. These minorities, by definition freed from traditionalist ideology, are aware of the backwardness of a country of sudebilidad and ultimately of their inescapable involvement in great European bridges, before Portugal or England. (…) The “social project” of saintsimonism, especially in the version that stars railway builders and administrators such as Cichel Chevalier and Prosper Enfantín, Péreire bankers, and other entrepreneurs and economists, supporters of the expansion of the economic order of society, of the effectiveness of the State, which must necessarily find an echo in the highest spheres of the economy y Brazilian politics (VÉASE apud RAMA, 1996, p.LV).
There is a difference between socialist thinking in Brazil and in other neighboring countries. There was no evolutionary line here that went from the radicalization of the ideals of freedom and equality to Utopian Socialism, as occurred in Europe and even in other Latin American countries. Here, the reality was completely different. When socialist ideas “arrived” in Brazil in the 1940s, they found a unique situation: the absence of a bourgeoisie as a distinct social class and very little free labor. Trade and crafts, although with small regional differences, continued to be very limited. Furthermore, slave labor predominated even there.
A foreman, a joiner, a carpenter, a blacksmith, a bricklayer, a boss, in short, of any of these professions, instead of paying wages to free workers, buys blacks and instructs them (...) therefore, it was in the urban middle classes – liberal professionals, bureaucrats and even statesmen – that socialist ideas, like all new ideas that came from outside, would find a basis for their diffusion, but they in themselves did not represent any concrete social class. (LEONIDIO, 2009, p.99-100)
Therefore, the naturalization of socialist discourse in Brazil will occur in a different way from the discourse that predominated in Europe, especially in the revolution of 1848, where there was an encounter between Socialism, Democracy and Republicanism and which was the reason for the enchantment of utopian socialists from other Latin American countries.
Among the pioneers of Socialism in Brazil, the French doctors Jean Maurice Faivre and Jean Benoit Mure, both disciples of Charles Fourier, stand out. Faivre was born in France in 1795 and graduated in Medicine in 1825, where he came into contact with the ideas of Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, becoming a follower of the latter. In 1826, Brazil was a newly independent country. Faivre began working in the Army and was soon appointed to the Court Hospital, and was also one of the five founders of the Imperial Academy of Medicine. In the 1840s, using his connections at Court and with Empress Teresa Cristina, whose private doctor he was, he obtained funds to finance a phalanstery in the middle of the jungle in the province of São Paulo (today Paraná). The Teresa Cristina Phalanstery was on the banks of the Ivaí River. The initial nucleus consisted of 1847 families, with others coming from France. (MANFREDINI, 25).
Faivre imagined that if he took refuge in the jungle, together with his followers, developing a free and egalitarian life, he would be safe from the inequities – especially moral ones – that had ravaged the world of cities (idem 2013). One of the Colony's hallmarks was the prohibition of slavery, forty years before its abolition in Brazil. Faivre distributed land and helped to pay off debts.
In the early years, the Colony showed some progress with the production of brown sugar and brandy, and built a pottery. However, isolation gradually led to families abandoning Tereza Cristina, and in 1858, Faivre died of fever and the Colony was closed shortly after. The president of the province of Paraná praised Faivre's pioneering work and moral and political rectitude as an example of a pure man dedicated to a cause. (MANFREDINE, 2013)
The other experience was with Dr. Jean Benoit Mure, a physician who came to Brazil in 1841. Here his mission was to convince the conservative Brazilian Court to give him the structure for the construction of a phalanstery in Brazil. After a few years of work, he managed to obtain land from Brigadier Machado Oliveira in the region of Sai in Santa Catarina for the construction of his phalanstery. (QUEIROZ, 1990, p. 10).
To this end, he brought a group of settlers from France who were soon divided between two leaders: the first led by Mure and the second by Michel Derrion, who founded another phalanstery in the Palmital region. The fact is that both attempts failed in the 1840s, driven by internal disputes and private interests that challenged Charles Fourier's dogma of building Paradise on Earth. (QUEIROZ, 1990, p. 11)
Despite the failure, Mure continued to spread Fourierism and socialism through his newspaper “Socialism of the Province” and managed to get the construction of a new phalanstery approved by the conservative imperial court, which was thus welcomed by Mure’s newspaper (LEONÍDIO, 2009, p104).
Brazil is the first country where the government welcomes and protects even social science, Fourierism! The government of Brazil is the first to lend social ideas the support of its legislation! Four years ago, in agreement with the chambers, the government authorized the formation of a phalanstery; today an illustrious senator of the Empire, placing himself at the forefront of social progress in his country, has just obtained from His Imperial Majesty the decree that we publish below and from whose execution we can date a new era of true prosperity (O Socialista da Província do Rio de Janeiro, 06/08/1845).
It was believed that, with the benevolent support of Emperor Pedro II, Brazil would be the first country where Fourier's phalansterian conception would be realized. The “illustrious senator” to whom the quote refers is Nicolau Pereira de Campos Vergueiro and the “phalanstery” is the Sociedade Família Industrial de Ibicaba near Limeira, in the interior of São Paulo. (LEONÍDIO, idem 104)
Leonídio draws attention to the conservative relationship between socialist ideas and their naturalization in Brazil. Except for the first experiment carried out by Faivre, at no time were slavery, property and the monarchy questioned or republican, democratic and egalitarian ideas disseminated. (LEONÍDIO, idem p. 105)
It is also worth noting that the first time socialism was mentioned in the country was through the newspaper “O Globo”, a philosophical, literary, industrial and scientific newspaper, founded in 1844 by A. Guimarães, which presented the ideas of the French socialist as an antidote to urban anarchy, as a means of building new agricultural colonies and occupying idle land.
The same newspaper is concerned with reassuring its readers by informing them that Fourier's thinking is a way of combating the revolutionary ideas in vogue in Europe and also preventing misery and poverty from spreading through Brazilian cities. (LEONÍDIO, idem p101)
In Pernambuco, several newspapers appeared that disseminated socialist ideas. Both Carlos Rama and Leonidío highlight the presence of José Ignácio Abreu e Lima as an important Brazilian socialist. He was the son of a revolutionary from 1817 who had to go into exile in the United States and later joined Simon Bolivar. Abreu e Lima participated in the Bolivarian Army, having served in several battles, distinguished himself with heroism and being discharged with the rank of General. Inspired by the work of Abbot Félicité Robert de La Mennais, his son wrote his book “Socialism”, considered by Rama to be the most important South American work on socialism of that time. In this work, he shows knowledge of the works of Saint Simon, Fourier and Proudhon. (RAMA, 1996, p. XLIX).
The presence of the French engineer Louis Léger Vauthier as head of Public Works in Pernambuco also denotes the introduction of socialist ideas linked to Fourier in this region. Vauthier will spread Socialism through discussion circles and will also contribute to the newspaper “O Progresso” of his friend and fellow socialist Antônio Pedro Figueiredo.
Antonio Pedro Figueiredo was an important intellectual, the first to highlight the need for a division of land in the country. This division was somewhat fanciful, and he imagined it to be more of a distributive desire than a piece of legislation. Figueiredo studied the French socialist philosophy course of Victor Cousin and began to defend and disseminate socialist ideas through the newspaper “O Progresso”.
With an approach closer to the Brazilian situation, Borges Fonseca was the most radical of the socialist thinkers, defending the Republic and spreading ideas in his various newspapers that ranged from the end of the Empire to reforms within it. His ideas include the right to universal suffrage and the right to work. Borges Fonseca and Inácio Bento Loyola even made timid defenses of the end of Slavery. (QUEIROZ, 1990, p.13).
It should be noted that the first Brazilian socialist ideas were captive to the limits and contradictions that the Brazilian context – profoundly conservative – imposed on them. They saw themselves as limited by reality and expressed a conservatism that tended to overvalue hierarchy, above Freedom and Equality among men, to display a true obsession with order, before and above any ideal of progress and reform. It proposed to articulate with modern ideas, but without ever taking them to their ultimate consequences, instead adapting them and imposing limits on them such that almost nothing of them would remain. In any case, the ideas of Utopian Socialism passed through colonial Brazil, as did those of Liberalism.
In the conclusion of his work, Leonídío gives us a demonstration of the limits expressed by the pioneers of Brazilian Utopian Socialism, adapted to the rules, always dialoguing with hierarchies, without having a presence in the social activities and political movements that existed on a large scale in the first half of the 19th Century.
Also noteworthy is the utopian concern with a society, but this implied reconciling with the interests of the oligarchies in maintaining Slavery and the Monarchy. In their own way, utopian policies responded to part of the desires of the ruling classes at the time, in combating the idleness that was growing in Brazilian cities, especially in Rio de Janeiro.
Their proposals for collective organization in the countryside were well received by the dominant power circles and expressed more the concerns of these circles in formulating alternative projects for occupation of the vast and empty Brazilian territory through agricultural colonies, which would expand the defensive occupation of the national territory, as well as eliminate the marginal groups that populated the cities, than in building a new project for society.
The legitimization of a hierarchy of races and classes seemed natural in socialist discourse. This was the opinion of Abreu e Lima and also of Albuquerque e Melo in the newspaper “A Verdade” in 1848.
We cannot stop having slaves (…) therefore the equality proclaimed by the Republic cannot be between us and slaves, and whoever wants a republican government in Brazil cannot want to end slavery, because this would be the same as annihilating the republic (LEONIDIO, idem p.114)
The interesting comparison is that in Chile, Uruguay and Argentina, socialist demonstrations pointed to overcoming the colonial past and established the Republic and Democracy as presuppositions, inspired by the Revolution of 1848. In Brazil, socialist ideas accommodated themselves to the Empire and became part of the discourse of order, whether in the Phalanx colonies or in the anarchist-inspired Cecília Colony, founded in Palmeira, with initial assistance from the Empire in 1890, by Giovanni Rossi.
*John Kennedy Ferreira Professor of Sociology at the Federal University of Maranhão (UFMA).
REFERENCES
ABRAMSON, Pierre-Luc. Social utopias in Latin America in the XIX century. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999.
LEONIDIO A(2009). The ideas of utopian socialism in Brazil. Electronic Journal Cadernos de História, vol. VIII, year 4, no. 2, December 2009. www.ichs.ufop.br/cadernosdehistoria
MANFREDINI, Luiz. http://www.vermelho.org.br/coluna.php?id_coluna_texto=5112&id_coluna=66
QUEIROZ, Mauricio Vinhas de. Fourier and Brazil. In History Magazine. N. 122. 1990
RAMA, Carlos M. Socialist utopianism (1830-1893). Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1987.66 Ibero-American Studies, Porto Alegre, v. 36, no. 1, p. 48-66, Jan./Jun. 2010
* JOHN KENNEDY FERREIRA Professor of Sociology – DESOC- UFMA
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