The Holidays that the Republic Declares

• Autor(a) principal: Oliveira, Lúcia Maria Lippi
• Data de Publicação: 1989
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Estudos Históricos (Rio de Janeiro)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.fgv.br/reh/article/view/2283

This article examines the characteristics which distinguish the Republic from the Empire in Brazil. It explores the process of breaking with tradition and constructing a new symbolic universe capable of lending the emergent republican nation legitimacy. Political revolutions must deal at one and the same time with the organization of a new social and political life and with the construction of an imagery capable of reestablishing an equilibrium lost over time. When a new moment begun, it thus becomes necessary to evoke a remote time, a time where the roots - the true meaning of man and society - are to be found. This ubiqui tousness of revolutions, which are characterized by having one foot in the future and another in the past, has taken form in different ways. Dates, heroes, monuments, music, songs, and folklore come together in shaping a national memory, and if the latter has consistency, it proves an important reinforcement of social cohesion. When the Brazilian Republic was being built, monarchists and republicans struggled for the upper hand in devising a project for Brazil. The hypothesis sustained by the author is that the new symbolic universe was unable to lend the republican nation legitimacy. On the other hand, the monarchists, although not strong enough to restore the monarchy, were strong enough to guarantee the supremacy of their interpretation of Brazil.