The Rest Is History - 268: Brazil: The Last Emperor

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

As promised during the Portugal mini-series, Tom and Dominic are returning to Brazil to discuss its history post-independence. This episode will focus upon the Brazilian Empire, in particular the Emperor Pedro II. How did this boy who acceded to the throne at six years old, come to receive a French state funeral in front of 300,000 Parisians in the pouring rain? Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Bom dia! Today on our World Cup tour, we arrive, Dominic, at one of the great giants of the World Cup, don't we? Brazil. The greatest giant, I think people would say, Tom. The giantest giant. Yeah, absolutely. But Brazil is also, of course, a country that featured in a four-part special we did a few months back on the history of Portugal. Brazil, of course, was colonized by Portugal. And at one point during the Peninsular War, the entire Portuguese royal family got ferried across from Portugal by the British Navy to Brazil to escape the onslaught of Napoleon's French and

established an empire there. It became the capital of the entire Portuguese empire. And Portugal itself became a kind of colonial backwater. I mean, extraordinary development. And you promised us then, because we were focusing on Portugal, and once Brazil became independent, we rather left Brazil behind. But you promised us that we would do the history of the Brazilian empire. And that, unless I'm much mistaken, is what you have in store for us today. That's right, Tom. So it's a kind of spinoff, isn't it, from our Portuguese epic?

It is really, yes. I mean, Brazilian listeners will be horrified to hear they're a spinoff. They would say Portugal is a spinoff, wouldn't they, Tom? But this is an extraordinary thing that people, I mean, everybody, when they think of the World Cup, and they think of football, they think of Brazil. Brazil is, I think, the world's fifth largest country, its seventh largest by population, by far the largest country in Latin America. And yet its history has so little traction in the British, the European, and I guess the American imagination. We know so little of it. And the real focus today is Brazil's second emperor, second and last emperor, Pedro II. And we'll come to him in a moment. So I'm guessing if he's the second emperor

that the first emperor was pedro the first would that be correct that's very that's very astute yes but yeah so the the extraordinary thing about brazil is that brazil is the one latin american country that begins as a monarchy it is not a republic so it became independent in 1822 um so the napoleonic wars are over and um as you described as we talked about in our portugal podcasts there is this there's been this sort of rising tension between portugal and brazil the portuguese kind of want their top status back they want their royal family back um dom jao who was the the king of Portugal, has gone back to Portugal. But the Brazilians, the Brazilian elite, I should say, the sort of, obviously, the Europeanized kind of elite, have thrown off the shackles of Portugal and proclaimed independence. Encouraged by this Portuguese king, right? I mean, he goes and he tells his son, declare independence.

Yes. Which is very treacherous behavior from a king. Well, he doesn't want his son and the court in Rio to be subject to this sort of liberal constitutionalism that is all the rage in Portugal. So what happens is 1822, Brazil has about 3 million people. Its wealth is based in exploitation, I suppose you would say. It's on gold and sugar from which the Portuguese have been profiting in suppose you would say. It's on gold and sugar from which the Portuguese have been profiting in the 18th century. It's also largely based on slavery. So Brazil has imported more slaves than anywhere else in the world.

11 times more than the United States of America, is that right? Yeah, something more than 10 times more or something like that went from Africa to Brazil than went to the United States of America. So exactly, isn't it interesting that when people have these conversations about and arguments and debates about the Atlantic slave trade, we think of it in terms of the Caribbean of Jamaica, or we think of it in terms of the United States and this great southern cotton plantations, but Brazil is kind of left out of the story by English speakers because we know so little about it. So this nascent monarchy has been formed under Dom Pedro, who is the Portuguese king's son. And he has proclaimed the defender of Brazil, the emperor of Brazil.

His proclamation of independence is very monarchist. He has a coronation, Tom, that you would very much appreciate. is it sacral it's very sacral he is anointed is it weird it is not weird i know you've been some weeks ago very unpatriotically making comments about the weirdness of the um it's not unpatriotic dominic weird is a perfectly respectable old english word wellveying a sense of the otherworldly and the supernatural. You resorted to strange, abstruse linguistic... No, not at all. ...justifications of your use of the word weird to describe the British monarchy,

which I thought was absolutely disgraceful. And the 10-page Daily Mail denunciation is forthcoming. But in the meantime, while we're still doing the podcast together, while you are still allowed to travel the country and not yet confined to house arrest enjoying the peace of good king charles exactly uh we should continue with brazil so he's anointed he has a don pedro has a ceremony which is based i read on um the kind of enthroning of pontiffs and of emperors and so on. He's anointed and consecrated with holy oil. But weird.

Brazil is kind of- Properly weird. Yeah. It's completely reasonable and not weird at all. Is that correct? Right. So this is a very conservative state in many ways. It's unlike other what you might call revolutionary independent states.

It is devoted to the monarchy, to slavery, and to defending the interests of the big kind of Brazilian landowning classes, the people who own gold mines and sugar plantations, and so on. And obviously, that issue of slavery, because we're in the 19th century, means there is to some extent a kind of time bomb at the heart of the kind of Brazilian constitution. So about a third of the population are slaves. And in some areas in Salvador, in the sort of northeast of Brazil, about 80% of the people in the city are slaves. Even in Rio, about 45% of the people, so about half the people there are slaves. So they are not kind of citizens. They are not members of the sort of political community of this new country.

So that seems equivalent of being for the slave owners to be the equivalent of camping out on the edge of a volcano. You would think so, yeah. How can, if 80% of the population are slaves are there revolts are there there are i mean spoiler alert there will be slave revolts in this podcast um yes exactly and but the part that the monarchy plays in this slavery question is probably not the part that anybody is going to expect who doesn't know the story already so we'll come to that so what they're trying to do is to create a new nation they have a state but they don't really have a nation so one way of doing that they have a new flag the flag of brazil everybody kind of is green and yellow um the green interestingly so

they the flag of brazil now is not quite the same as it was in the 1820s but it's similar so the green represents the house of braganza the portuguese royal family i always thought it was the jungle no and the yellow is the austrian imperial family i always thought it was the gold no no no it's real old world kind of um heraldry kind of stuff uh there's a diamond shape in the flag and that apparently is a tribute to napoleon i don't know why um that seems counterintuitive. Well. Since they ran away there to get away from him.

I suppose so, but people are very transfixed by Napoleon, aren't they, at the beginning of the... Especially once he's been tamed and defeated. Yeah, but we haven't got a reference to Napoleon on our flag. I mean, it's interesting. No, that's true. But it's interesting that Brazil is not a kingdom. It's an empire. So right from the beginning, it's interesting that Brazil is not a kingdom. It's an empire.

So right from the beginning, there's a kind of ambition to the foundation of Brazil. This is going to be a kind of Napoleonic empire in the Americas. Obviously, you don't just need a flag for a nation. You need a dynasty. So Dom Pedro, who is a very dissolute and useless person, really, who's only really interested in sort of his endless affairs with different kind of society women. I mean, we talked about him in our Portugal podcasts

as having had chronic diarrhea when he was announcing. Yes. And that sort of sets the tone, I think, for his reign, I think it's fair to say. But he has a son in 1825, his wife, Donna Leopoldina. So she's from this sort of Austrian background, hence the flag. She gives birth to Dom Pedro, the future Dom Pedro II. And Dom Pedro II, who's going to dominate this podcast today,

the little boy, he is related to almost every royal family in Europe. So he can trace his descent from the kings of Castile and Aragon, from the kings of France, the kings of Hungary, from Maria Theresa of Austria. So this is a real, he is a sort of an icon of European royalty born in the Americas, an extraordinary kind of individual. So he's the future of the dynasty. But his father, Don Pedro I, useless, he's pretty much distracted. Yes, thank you for that, Tom. He is distracted pretty much straight away by Portugal

because his father died back in Portugal and he wants to be king of Portugal. So he's sort of increasingly torn between Portugal and Brazil. In 1831, the sort of tensions that underlie his rule, is he content as emperor of Brazil, or does he really ultimately want to go back to Portugal and claim the throne of Portugal? These come out in the open. There are a lot of liberals.

This is among the elite, the sort of elite in cities like Rio. People who are reading newspapers and kind of go into salons and things like that, who kind of chafe a little bit at the idea of an absolute monarch. They sort of take to the streets and they start sort of shouting, long live the constitution, as people tend to do in the early years of the 19th century. There's a thing called the night of the bottles where people are all throwing bottles at each other. Yeah, people are throwing bottles at each other. I assume empty bottles rather than, I mean,

it would seem utterly wasteful to be throwing bottles of wine or something at each other. Yeah, that would be a waste, wouldn't it? Yeah, it would be a terrible waste. And there's a sort of great groundswell of opinion against Don Pedro I. He says, right, I'm going to abdicate. and there's a sort of great groundswell of opinion against don pedro the first uh he says right i'm gonna abdicate so he abdicates he flounces off to portugal does he and he flounces off to portugal um so he he abdicates he says my son is now the emperor

even though his son is six five and a half six he's abdicated that's very irresponsible five and a half he says i'm off i'm out of here's very irresponsible. Five and a half. He says, I'm off. I'm out of here. I'm going off to Portugal. So he does go off to Portugal. He fights the civil war in Portugal to try and put his daughter on the throne of Portugal. So what's his plan? He's going to be the power behind the throne.

The Portuguese have made it clear they don't want him as king. But he thinks, I'll put my daughter on the throne and i'll be the you know i'll be the big man um he dies of tuberculosis in the hour of his victory tom oh that's sad but interesting here's the thing here's a sort of portent of the future don pedro the first to be described as useless on his deathbed he writes an open letter to the people of brazil so he hasn't forgotten about brazil which is nice okay that's good and in the open letter he says slavery is an evil and an attack against the rights and dignity of the human species but its consequences are less harmful to those who suffer in captivity than to the nation whose laws allow slavery it is cancer that devours its morality so he's sort of pinning is saying you know the monarchy should not be should not be in favor of slavery, and slavery is very bad.

Well, I'm sure the slaves are happy about that, but I'm not entirely sure they'd agree with him that they're better off than their owners. Yes, exactly. That's right. Who's the real victim here? Exactly. So anyway, Dom Pedro I is dead. Meanwhile, back in Brazil, the Brazilians are having to get used to their second emperor, who is not yet six years old. So poor little Don Pedro II, they bring him onto a balcony in Rio. He's so small, he can't kind of look over the balustrade. So they put him on a chair and he waves a hanky. They get him to wave a hanky to the crowds and everybody cheers and says hurrah, hurrah, hurrah.

But for him, this is very bad news. He's sent off to a palace called São Cristóvão with his two sisters, Francisca and Januária. January. Great name. Great, great name. And they basically are just sort of locked in this palace and given endless lessons.

So the Brazilians think it's very important that their future emperor, well, their current emperor, I suppose. And what are they teaching him? Lepidoptera? They teach him. Well, we know because we have a letter. Botany? There are very few sources, actually, Tom,

on the life of poor Dom Pedro II, because he's locked in his room the whole time, so we don't really know. But he writes a letter to his sister at one point in 1833, and he says, Writing, arithmetic, geography, drawing, French, English, music and dance divide our time. point and he's in 1833 and he says writing arithmetic geography drawing french english music and dance divide our time we work constantly to acquire knowledge and it is only these efforts that mitigate how sorely we miss you during our separation oh so he's not really allowed any

friends he's not really learning about rainforests or anything no no no he's learning european old world sort of stuff so he's sort of locked in his room doing arithmetic all the time he's pretty miserable he's pretty unhappy he's lonely um he's been separated from his parents he's kind of shy and he's reclusive so there's the emperor that he's the little boy who's the emperor of brazil meanwhile brazil itself is a bit of a, I wouldn't call it a basket case. That's too harsh. But you asked about slave revolts.

There are an awful lot of slave revolts in the early decades of Brazilian independence. So the state of Pernambuco, there's a big revolt called the Cabanada Revolt. And that's, you've got Brazilian Indians, escaped slaves, squatters, people who've sort of been marginalized and forced out. They all come together and they form their own kind of community in the woods. And they kind of, they form their own army and they're always fighting off the landowners' attempts

to kind of put them down. And this is a real theme of 19th century Brazilianzilian history how long did they manage to hold out they held out for about four years i mean quite a long time yeah and this is absolutely that you know you see this pattern again and again so in the the big huge northern state of para in the late 1830s there's another revolt of again again, sort of Indians, slaves, and so on. And their slaves turn against their masters, and they whip them and kill them. And in the cities, there are huge sort of outpourings of hatred against the slaves and the Indians. And people say they're evil, they're the forces of the devil.

You know, this is what happened in Haiti, the Haitian Revolution. That will happen here in Brazil. The only way to deal with them is by intense violence and so on and so forth. And there was a colossal amount of violence. So in states like Pará, I think something like 100,000 people were killed. I mean, these are massive death tolls. I was about to say utterly unreported in the old world. That's not really true. But what is true, I suppose, is that they're utterly forgotten today.

So in Europe, people aren't even aware that these things happened. Well, presumably they are in Portugal. Yeah, I'm sure people know about it in Portugal. But we know about American history because we speak English. Right, I suppose that's true. I mean, that's the reason. A slave revolt that would really interest you is in the sort of northeastern state of bayern in 1835 famous city there which was a huge sort of trading sort of center for the slave trade salvador so there um there's an islamic element to the slave revolt so a lot of the african slaves who are being brought to bayern are mus. And Islam becomes the kind of the common ground

for different groups of slaves so they can unite around their faith. So they wear white tunics, white prayer tunics. They wear amulets inscribed with verses from the Quran when they rise up. And of course, that then means that for the slave owners... It's a religious war. It's a religious war, exactly. So again, extremely violent. When that's put down,

500 people are executed, publicly executed. Are there traces of Islam still in Salvador? That's a good question, Tom. I don't know. I don't know at all. Of course, the big story in Brazil has been the rise of Protestant evangelicalism. Yes. So originally a Catholic country, but... I just wondered whether... But I don't know. I'd be interested to find out actually um maybe so if we have brazilian listeners i don't think we ultimately do have any brazilian listeners but we do have a few tom

because we put out our brazilian independence episode yes so the story about the portuguese court on brazil's independence day and we had some listeners saying it was actually a complete coincidence wasn't it but we pretended it was by design and their brazilian listeners were very very excited um so there's a real sense at the end of the 1830s anyway that brazil is a bit of a sort of um it's in a terrible ferment with all this sort of stuff and the elites decide the way to deal with this is actually we need to crown the emperor even though he's still only a teenager if we put him in charge he will be a figure around whom everybody can can kind of

rally so it's 1841 and he is what he's he's about to turn 16 and they have this huge coronation ceremony um in rio uh all the newspapers sort of say he is the greatest man of his generation he is the new you know charles v or whatever he is a master of languages and of of education all this stuff because basically he's been locked in a school room for all his life so that all this sort of projection of him is the answer to all brazil's woes. It's interesting how they're still so kind of enthralled to European models. So they have huge medallions, four medallions for his models, Tom, and the people who he's going to emulate. And they are Charlemagne, François I of France, so Henry VIII's great rival, Napoleon, and sometime friend, sometime associate of the rest

of his history, Peter the Great. These are the people that... What do you think of that? Well, I think there'd be a lot of roistering. But he doesn't sound the kind of roistering kind, does he? No, he's not. François Premier and Peter the Great, both they love throwing a dwarf around

and they're great rushing up a garden yeah yeah absolutely very racist and all that kind of charlemagne charlemagne not he liked a hot bath and and he'd hang out in the bath and chat to churchman so i don't know it's bad to say chatting to churchman is his thing isn't it yes and who is the other person napoleon Well, we know about Napoleon. Yeah, metric system. Is that what first comes into your mind when you think Napoleon? The metric system? What should I think of it? You wrote for the Daily Mail.

Well, should I? Well, but I mean, the metric system is surely the greatest of Napoleon's chorus. The greatest evil. Yeah. Tom, you're talking to a man who once wrote a column saying that the the adoption of decimal currency was the moment

Britain lost its national soul so okay okay well I can see that why that's a shadow a shadow hanging over you all right so um

to what extent does he live up to these four role models do you know what he doesn't do too badly now there is one he needs a wife so

because he's so he's not a milksop. Not a total milk. No. Well, you shall discover that he's not a total milksop. They bring over a wife for him two years after he's been crowned. She's Princess Teresa Maria Cristina of the two Sicilies. She comes over. He's been told.

It's very Anne of Cleves. He has been told she's an absolute beauty. You know, know god you're going to be over the moon you can't wait she arrives she's quite short she's quite large and she's lame and um okay it is said that he he composed himself he was sufficiently composed not to disgrace himself when she was brought in but when she went out again he burst into tears and um sad for both of them and his sort of major domo embraced him and kind of consoled him and said remember the dignity of your position do your duty my child and does he and he did do his duty actually he's very unlucky because all his sons died very young, but he was left with an heir, a daughter called Isabel,

who we will come to later on. So Don Pedro II, he's a kind of constitutional monarch. He's got more power than in Britain, but obviously he's not got the power of a czar or sort of Louis XIV or something like that. And I suppose the big sort of pressure is the 14th or something like that um and and the i suppose the big sort of pressure is this issue of slavery so just to give you a sense of of slavery in brazil slavery is so embedded in the brazilian social structure that rio de janeiro in let's say 1850 has more slaves

than any city supposedly since the end of the Roman Empire. That's an amazing statistic. That is an amazing fact. So 110,000 slaves live in the ancient Europe. More than Baghdad. Apparently so. I mean, I don't compile these mysterious facts that I find on the internet, so I'm not.

I think, actually, I read this. There's a brilliant book called Brazil, a Biography by Eloisa Starling and Lilia Moritz-Schwartz, which I talked about in our Portuguese episodes. It's the definitive English language history, I think, of Brazil, academic history of Brazil. And it's absolutely brilliant on this sort of the world of the in the mid 19th century so to give you a sort of sense of it it's not just that former slaves own slaves but actual slaves own slaves that was a roman thing is that did roman slaves own slaves yeah well this is what they have in brazil i mean it's so embedded it's latin america right we Right. We're Latin America. Very good. But that obviously is coming under pressure because the British are moving internationally against the slave trade, for example.

And there's a move within Brazil to encourage immigration rather than slavery. So in the mid-19th century, you're starting to get the government encouraging lots of massive immigration of cheap labor from Europe as an alternative to the slave trade. So that is going to create all kinds of pressures of its own. And those are some of the things that Don Pedro is going to have to wrestle with now that he has really taken the reins of his country. So should we look at his wrestling with the reins of his country in part two? Is that a good image, wrestling with the reins? Quite like it. I mean, it's better than wrestling with dwarves like his country in part two. Is that a good image, wrestling with the reins? I mean, it's better than wrestling with dwarves like Peter the Great or something.

Yeah. So when we come back, there will be a rein wrestling. So something to look forward to there. That's exciting. Bye-bye. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment.

It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, a splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes, and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com.

That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to our brazil special um we're looking at the reign of emperor pedro the second of brazil um and dominic in the first part we uh briefly you touched on a slave revolt in which uh in salvador in north brazil where lots of the slaves were Muslim. And I asked you, does Islam still have much of a presence in Brazil? And during the break, I went to the Bodleian and I checked. And do you know, out of a population of 191 million, the total number of Muslims in Brazil, 35,000. Crikey. So very, very small, under 1%.

Yeah, really tiny. And apparently the Muslims that took part in the slave revolts were very aggressively proselytized. So they essentially forcibly converted to Catholicism. Crikey. So the trace elements of Islam were wiped out. And the Muslims now are basically immigrants from Lebanon and Syria. Yeah. So that tells you something about the violence of the system, right?

Yes, it does. That they're able to suppress the slave's religion so completely. Yeah. So Pedro II, what he really wants to do is to create a unique Brazilian national culture. And it's under his aegis that he encourages all kinds of Brazilian writers and painters and so on to create a kind of idea of Brazilian-ness. And what it's going to be is slavery is not part of the story at all. So what he does is he kind of creates this idea of a specifically kind of tropical culture full of images of Indians and things and of the Portuguese, but the slaves are almost entirely absent.

So paintings, they do lots of landscapes and lots of kind of very romantic. And is it now that they're starting to wake up to the grandeur of the natural world on their doorstep? Yes. So the natural world is, you asked at the beginning about him and the natural world, and the natural world is very much his thing. So now they're getting to jaguars and things. Exactly. So the imagery is all kind of exotic fruits and exotic beasts.

You see these in lots of Brazilian kind of landscape paintings. He himself, he's very much a sort of bookish person. So he starts to learn. He loves languages. He's kind of like sort of J.R.R. Tolkien figure, studying lots of languages. Studying Finnish grammars. But he's not's a he loves languages he's kind of like sort of jr tolkien figure studying lots of languages grammar but he's not studying finnish grammars he's studying tupi and guarani so indigenous indian yeah brazilian indian languages which other people in the elite

regard with scorn but the emperor is really interested in all this sort of stuff he finances all kinds of research projects he brings over german botanists and sort of um swedish naturalists and mineralogists and linguists and geologists from all over europe and he basically pays for them to come to brazil and to produce these beautifully illustrated but he's i mean he's, so this isn't something completely new, is it? Because there's that, the very famous and beautiful library that burnt down, I think, four years ago, something like that. Which I think, I think dates to the kind of the early years of the arrival of the Portuguese family, royal family in Brazil. They have beautiful libraries in Portugal, actually, Tom.

Amazing. Yes, that's very much, much in in in the tradition yeah and it was it was um i think it's where the brazilian emperor stayed so so he so that tradition of that that library and that kind of tradition of scholarship and interest in the natural world to a degree is something that he's he must be picking up on from that oh absolutely and i think what's really interesting is that he's – so what he's trying to do, is he trying to reproduce the old world in the new? I mean, not quite. He's giving it this spin, this sort of tropical culture

and this tropical monarchy. But he's obviously very – you know, it's very important to Dom Pedro II that he creates a Brazilian culture that people will consider alongside, you know, Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Italian culture, or whatever, that it's part of the same kind of continuum, I guess. And science, he's absolutely passionate about science. He's the first Brazilian photographer because he acquires a kind of very early daguerreotype camera in 1840.

He sets up a photo laboratory in his palace in Sao Cristobal. He also has a chemistry laboratory and a physics laboratory. He has an astronomical observatory. He has a saying that he likes to bring out and bore his courtiers with. He says, la science c'est moi. Well, Dominic, I'm just the in the bodleian that he apparently there was a um a meteorite that landed um in the badlands and he sent an expedition to try and find it that's exactly the kind of thing he did it was a five metric ton space rock wow did they get it so it was it it

landed in um uh 1784 and so when when um when pedro ii learned about the meteorite he organised a commission of engineers to relocate it to Rio and the trek lasted 126 days and it was taken to the National Museum the one with the library so there you go and I'm glad to say that that meteorite was among

the objects that were left unscathed by the fire that destroyed the museum so it survived Tom, as somebody who likes science dinosaurs all that kind of business you would love don pedro the second he sounds great great guy he's he's a man of i'll tell you what he sounds like he sounds an absolutely ideal subject to be uh the hero of a magical realist novel yeah he absolutely is he absolutely is so he's very intellectual as well he writes writes to people like Victor Hugo, to Nietzsche, to Wagner, to all these people. They think he's brilliant. So his reputation in Europe, among the European lettered classes, could not be higher. He asked Wagner to write an opera that would be premiered in real would you say he is the pelle of he is the european monarchs very nice yes he's the pelle and rather than the neymar of um of of european style american monarchs so yeah, he asked Wagner to write an opera. Wagner was too busy, so he couldn't.

However, supposedly, when they did the whole ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1876, Don Pedro II was present. We should come on to his European travels in due course. And he sat next to the new emperor of Germany at the premiere. So this is not the Kaiser, Tom, friend of the rest of his history, great yachting enthusiast and shoe wearer. It's his grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm I. And Don Pedro ruins the opera for everybody by constantly saying to all the other bigwigs,

he says, oh, I'm very familiar with this music. This is the first time you've heard it, but I know it by heart. I know all about this. You don't need to tell me anything about wagner i know wagner i love wagner wagner's my friend and all this kind of thing yeah this drives everybody else completely completely mad so in other words his reputation is sky high brazil itself um they fight a terrible incredibly bloody war called the War of the Triple Alliance in Paraguay in the 1860s, which apart from being bloody, it's very useful for Brazil because it creates this sort of image of Brazilian nationalism and of the sort of united fatherland and all this sort of stuff. But obviously, there is this issue of slavery. Now, let's get to the 1870s. Brazil has about 10 million people by now. And between 10

and 20% of them, I think, are slaves. But the epicenter of slavery has slightly moved. Because what's changed with Brazil is before we were talking about gold and we're talking about the mining, but the big thing in Brazil now is coffee. So coffee is produced in the south of Brazil. And that's where the sort of the epicenter of slavery has really has moved to. The big landowners are based in the south around Rio and Sao Paulo. And in those in the big sort of the four southernmost provinces, about just under two thirds of the population are slaves. Now, the emperor himself, Don Pedro II, personally, is not in favor of slavery at all.

He never bought slaves. He inherited 40 slaves, and he set them all free as soon as he could. He would often write to friends, and he would say he doesn't like slavery. Slavery is a terrible curse on my nation, he would say. But he was always inhibited um from moving against it because he's worried about alienating the elite he thinks the elite who own the slaves he depends on them for his power um so brazil is sort of slowly beginning to change so they do things like there's a law of free birth in 1871, which is that basically all children of slaves will be freed.

They have to stay with their mothers until they're eight. And then their owners, the mother's owner can choose between being compensated by the state then and there and the child is set free at the age of eight. Or they can continue to use the child's services until the child turns 21. So this is hardly, you know, kind of overnight abolition, but even so, it begins to alienate the big kind of coffee elites, the slave owners, because they start to think, well, if the government can do this, the monarch is not to be trusted. The monarch is going to end up abolishing slavery completely. This is all a very bad thing. So what you get in the 1870s is something that I think a lot of listeners may consider, may find a bit weird,

which is that what you'd call the kind of liberal elite, i.e. the people who read newspapers, who go to the opera, who are sophisticated people of the world, people who are well-traveled. These people start to flirt with republicanism and become interested in republicanism because they equate republicanism with the defense of slavery. So in other words, something that you might think of as very progressive becomes identified with a cause that could hardly be more reactionary. So there's this sort of sense in the 1870s that for all his amazing scientific stuff, interferometer rights. Sourcing, yeah.

Yeah, being a fan of Wagner, all this kind of stuff, that the emperor is losing support among the very people that he really most needs um to keep his regime going do the slaves not love him well yeah the slaves do do quite as we'll discover the slaves do quite like the emperor because they see him as the sort of face of of the the abolitionist movement which is perhaps um a slight misreading of it because he doesn't really do that much to encourage abolition but so you start to get mockery of ped II. People, they have some very strange names for him, actually. His opponents call him Pedro Banana.

Why? Seems very harsh. Well, they say his head is very long. He has a very long head. He looks like a banana. Right, okay. Maybe his sort of Habsburg blood or something like that. Yeah.

And the way they used to call Pericles the squid. The squid. They also call him Pedro the squid the squid they also call pedro the cashew would you rather be cashew or banana tom um i think i think cashew i think a cashew as well i think i'd much rather be likened to a cashew i think a banana is just an undecorous isn't it yeah if you're gonna be likened to a fruit of any kind louis philippe in france was likened to a pear yeah and um chan kai shek was likened to a pear. Yeah. And Chiang Kai-shek was likened to a peanut, wasn't he? Was he?

By General Sitwell. Oh, yes, of course he was. Yes, he used to call them a peanut. Yeah. So there's a whole podcast to be done about emperors and nuts. Fruit and nut-based abuse is the real theme there that we can perhaps run with a bit later on. It definitely is.

Yeah. So the elites, the sort of liberal elites, think that Don Pedro is unsound on slavery. They also think he's unsound on travel because in the 1870s, he starts to go traveling a lot and they think this is very bad and very unpatriotic and he should be more interested in Brazil, but he keeps sort of going for these jaunts around Europe. So he goes to America. So Tom, would you believe he is the first ruling monarch to set foot in the United States? But not the first to set foot in North America

because of Mexico, who we did a whole episode on, didn't we? We did. So when Ulysses S. Grant opens the World's Fair in Philadelphia in 1876, Don Pedro II is standing by his side i mean the world's fair he loves all that science machines yeah displays of international travel international travel exactly he goes to visit alexander graham bell and allows him to test his first telephone which is very nice he goes off to france he goes to visit victor hug He visits Victor Hugo at his house. There's a lovely story here, Tom.

Victor Hugo's daughter shows him in and says, Papa, here is His Majesty from Brazil. And Dom Pedro II says, My dear, there is only one majesty here, and it is Victor Hugo. Oh, that's splendid. I like him. Isn't that good?

And Victor Hugo says... No, I really like him. He sources meteorites, and he's polite to great French novelists. He is. Victor Hugo said to him, Sire, you are a great man. You are the grandson of Marcus Aurelius. Isn't that a nice thing to hear? Yeah, fabulous.

Everything. I mean, this is all very good. All very, very good. I hope it doesn't go wrong. It's going to end badly, Tom. Oh, no. I just wanted, I think, I feel like i don't want you to think i don't want it to come as too much as a shock when don pedro's life ends in misery as it will so he gets back to brazil and um the brazilians you know they

they're very displeased by all this behavior. They say, by this stage, he's grown a massive beard. He's got glasses. He doesn't look... They're sort of puffed up, I think, a little bit with a sense of sort of national destiny. And they think he's an unprepossessing monarch. He's too interested in books and science and stuff. And he's unsound, as they think, on slavery, on the defense of slavery. And so they're sort of losing enthusiasm for him. A few years go by. 1887, he goes on another of his trips. So this time he goes and visits Louis Pasteur, I do believe.

And he spends a lot of time in Europe. He often goes under an assumed name when he's walking when he's traveling europe so he doesn't go as the emperor so i think the brazilians also think this is poor form they would like him to go in splendor whereas in fact he goes and stays in hotels under false names and spends his time writing poems and they basically think this is this is and also he's he's it's known that he's basically said to people, I love doing this. Left to me, I would just do this all the time.

I'd much rather live in Europe than in Brazil and hang around with Victor Hugo. So meanwhile, while he's away, obviously the issue of slavery is still there. Slavery has been abolished in the United States since the 1860s. We're now in the 1880s. There's a real sense that it's on its last legs, not least because the age of mass immigration means that the Brazilian economy is not as dependent on slavery as it once was. There are rising slave revolts in the 1880s,

and eventually, basically, the Brazilian government passes a law overnight, May 1888, the remaining 700,000 slaves are emancipated kind of forthwith. So end of slavery. Now, the people who are really outraged about this are the coffee planters, the coffee elites of Rio and Sao Paulo. As far as they're concerned, they've lost their property. They blame the emperor. Actually, he's out of the country when it happens because he's on one of his tours. He's hanging out with Louis Pasteur. Right. But they say it's all his fault. He hasn't stuck up for us. He's a waste of space. He's got to go. There's also this huge thing in Brazil of positivism. The late 19th century, the idea of science and reform and all that kind of thing.

That has a massive traction with the kind of Brazil, the Brazilian educated classes, I guess, because it's about anti-clericalism. So and so and this turns against the idea of emperors, does it? Against the idea of emperors, that kind of positivism, republicanism, secularism, this sort of beautiful new future, which just so neatly, you know, happens to align with their interests. Exactly. So there's all this sort of stuff about the positivism and the republicans, and they're all kind of meetings and conspiracies. He gets back to Brazil, and in 1889, on the 9th of, 1889, he has a ball called the Ball on Fiscal Island. So this is a particular island. And he goes, it's basically to welcome the Chilean Navy who are visiting Brazil.

And he goes to this ball, and there are all kinds of rumors going around the city about this ball, that there are orgies happening, that he hasn't invited sufficient numbers of bigwigs, sort of liberal-minded bigwigs and so on. And while he's at the ball, the sort of Republican agitators have a meeting with officers in the Brazilian army. The Brazilian army, and this is a very bizarre thing to say about an army, the Brazilian army is a hotbed of positivism, Tom. The officers like nothing better than an evening chatting about positivist ideas they've got from Europe. So they basically, a whole load of young officers go to this old marshal

who's called Deodoro de Fonseca. They go to his house and they say, you know, the cause of positivism and of Brazil, it's time to get rid of the emperor. This old fool is at his party. We should move against him. The marshal Deodoro da Fonseca, he sort of drags his heels a bit, but eventually agrees to do it. So five days later on the 14th of November, he rides to the army headquarters. It's all a bit confused. He proclaims this coup against the emperor with the words, long live his majesty, the emperor, the imperial family, and the army, which is obviously not the ideal launch for a republican coup. But nevertheless, he says, the government's got to go, we have a new regime and all this kind of stuff.

The emperor is up in his palace, and he's sort of, you know, thinking about meteorites. Yeah, exactly. He gets a telegram from the center of Rio saying there's been some kind of coup. And he says to his wife, oh, it's fine. He says, I'll go down to Rio, but when I arrive there, it'll all be over. It's just a storm in a teacup. He travels by train, and on the train, says, I'll go down to Rio, but when I arrive there, it'll all be over. It's just a storm in a teacup. He travels by train, and on the train, Tom,

he'd be delighted to hear. He spends his time on the train. He takes it so seriously. He spends his time reading the latest scientific periodicals. So he gets to the center of Rio, and various sort of marquises and stuff present themselves, and they say, should we raise troops to suppress this coup? The emperor says, no, no, no, I know that this is nothing. I know the people of Brazil.

This is absolutely nothing. Then eventually a load of officers pitch up at the palace. So on the 16th of November, and they say, actually, it is something we've decided that you and the rest of the imperial family should be banished. Now this is by no means, you know, this is quite small groups of people. this is by no means, you know, we're talking about quite small groups of people. This is by no means a mass uprising.

This isn't the French Revolution. There are no kind of great mobs pouring through the streets because the emperor is actually pretty popular. But the emperor, I think partly because there's part of him that thinks this basically means a lot of time I can spend with Louis Pasteur. When they tell him this, he says, if it is so, then this will be my retirement. I've worked hard and I'm tired. It is time to

go and rest. And so unbelievably, without raising an army to defend himself or anything like this, he says, right, let's pack our bags. In fact, the only time he kind of gets angry is when the officers come back in a day later and they say um basically have you not have you not packed yet you've got it you've got to go now in the middle of the night and the emperor is very cross and he shouts at them and he says i am not an escaped slave i will not leave in the middle of the night and then he shouts all of you are mad but then he packs his bags anyway and he gets gets on the boat, and off he goes to Europe. And that's basically the end of him.

And that's it. So he doesn't come to a terrible end. Actually, it's quite a happy story. Because he said he wanted, you know, he was. I think it's a disappointing end, Tom. He'd been good for Brazil. I thought he was going to have a horrible end in a dungeon or something. No, no, he doesn't have an end in a dungeon.

I'm happy about that. And what happens to his daughter? Well, she goes with him. Actually, she never wanted to be empress. And he didn't even want her to be a procedure then except he doesn't live very well we'll come on to what happens to him so this is 1889 i'll quote a brazilian writer about what happened next to brazil so in the century after they got rid of emperor don pedro ii the brazilian republic had 12 states of emergency, 17 institutional acts. The National Congress dissolved six times, 19 military revolutions, two presidential resignations,

three presidents prevented from assuming office, four presidents deposed, seven different constitutions, four dictatorships, and nine authoritarian governments. So I think it's fair to say Dom Pedro II was a relative oasis of stability. And in fact, you ask about the slaves and what the slaves thought of him. He was very popular among Brazil's kind of African population and Indian population. Exactly. So we did a podcast, what seems like an eternity ago about weird wars. one of the weird wars one of my choices was a war called the war of canudos in the 1890s written about in a brilliant book called the war at the end of the world by mario vargas yosa the peruvian novelist and this was a kind of there

was a guy called antonio the counselor who led this kind of weird kind of religious commune and that appealed to former slaves. And there were thousands of them. And they fought this war in which 30,000 people died against the Brazilian government. And part of the appeal of his kind of commune and his millenarian religious movement was that an emperor, a king, would return.

So it was a combination of Dom Pedro II and the lost king of Portugal, Sebastian, Dom Sebastião, from the 16th century. And this side, Dom Pedro II lived on lost King of Portugal, Sebastian, Dom Sebastião from the 16th century. And this Dom Pedro II lived on in the memory of lots of Brazilians as this kind of exiled enlightenment paragon. King over the water. Yeah, the king over the water who had presided over abolition.

So what happened to him? So he went off to Europe. It wasn't a great laugh, actually. He didn't hang out as much as he would have liked with scientists and novice because he's in very poor health. He suffered from what I think diabetes. Most people think he had diabetes. He didn't have much money because the Brazilians basically cut off all his money.

So he lived for only two years in Europe. So this sort of dream of a lovely retirement. That's sad. However, when he died in Paris, which he loved, of pneumonia in December 1891, the French,

they're very good with dead monarchs, Tom. Aren't they the French? President Macron absolutely distinguished himself. Yes, he did. Not always a friend of the rest is history.

Yeah. But he distinguished himself with his reaction to the death of the Queen. So the French stage a state funeral for don pedro ii uh where his his coffin was escorted by 30 000 french troops 30 000 goodness and 300 000 people stood in the pouring rain to to see it go well the french do the french do love a monarch they don't they? They love this. There are hundreds of wreaths and the message on

the wreath that stands out, there was one wreath that said, just said simply, from a Brazilian black on behalf of his race. Which sort of tells you about how... So then his coffin was taken by train to Portugal and he was buried alongside the other

Braganza monarchs. Because he didn't go back to brazil to brazil but interestingly he is pretty much regarded i think by a lot of ordinary brazilians as the greatest brazilian so he wins polls and things like that did they have um did they have an equivalent of the i don't think they did because we have one in portugal we often talk about that do they have i don't think they did in brazil i might be wrong so there's no this so there's no there's no um a kind of imperial party in brazil saying let's no bring back the uh bring back the imperial family the emperor but i think i mean i i you know i think brazil is a fascinating country obviously great footballing history but it'd be even more fascinating if it was an empire again don't you think tom yeah i mean at the moment i'm gonna pin my colors can i pin my colors to the mask yeah i'm not a massive admirer of bolsonaro no in fact i would i think i'd go as far as to say

he's not a friend of of the rest is history what about president lula he's got a great name um because he's he's because he was in prison wasn't he and now he was in prison um of the two i would i would i would pick lula i'll be honest with you but but given the choice of lula boltonero or or don pedro the second an emperor with an interest in meteorites who would you go for i'd go for the emperor well i always you know i'm a monarchy fan um um an emperor who an emperor yeah an emperor who like stages operas and um gives money to historical associations i think he'd be very he'd be very into dinosaurs as well i think he's is he a friend of the rest of history

i'd like to think he is yeah let's let's enthrone him as a friend of the rest of history right okay well that's wonderful yeah that's wonderful i i's wonderful. I need nothing about him at all. Nothing. So I really feel that I've educated myself here. You've gained a friend, I think is fair to say. I've gained knowledge and I've gained a friend. Oh, that's lovely. That is, you know, that can't be reckoned a waste of time.

If anybody says this podcast is a waste of time, I'll be very shocked. I hope that everyone listening, likewise, has gained a friend, perhaps, in the form of Don Pedro and has maybe learned something, as I have done. So thank you all very much for listening. Thank you, Dominic, for, dare I call it, a tour de force? I think you should. I think I will. A tour de force.

So thank you very much. Thank you all for listening. And we will be back very, very soon with more. Bye-bye. Adios. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.

I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.