Brazil’s last and fondly remembered emperor

THE EMPEROR’S BEARD: DOM PEDRO II AND THE TROPICAL MONARCHY OF BRAZIL

By Lilia Moritz Schwarcz

Hull and Wing, $35, 436 pages

REVIEWED BY BART McDOWELL

Imagine the voluptuous harbor of Rio de Janeiro in the year 1808. Past Sugarloaf mountain, ships of the British navy enter under full sail. Napoleon’s armies have just overrun the whole Iberian Peninsula, and these ships are ferrying the entire royal court of Portugal to their Brazilian colony — 15,000 exiled people crowding into Rio with its population of 60,000. Instantly, the colony has become a seat of empire.

“It is difficult to imagine a greater cultural shock,” writes the author Lilia Moritz Schwarcz in her strange book with its strange title. Partly, this book is a biography of the man who was emperor of Brazil from the age of five until his exile 58 years later. Partly, it is a history, telling the story of Brazilian independence, how one ruler from the House of Braganca abdicated and returned to Lisbon, leaving his toddler son to reign in the New World.

But this book and its copious illustrations — paintings, drawings, portraits, old photographs, maps, cartoons — also serve as a kind of Rorschach slash of the past — visual semantics that reveal the making of a myth. And its unmaking.

The author has used many of the 20,000 illustrations given to the Republic of Brazil by Dom Pedro II, after his exile. The collection, Mrs. Schwarcz notes, is “an effort to construct and perpetuate a certain national memory … . It shows us what the emperor saw and what he did not see or wanted to forget….Slavery is absent, like an actor hidden in the wings….More than 600 Pedros observe us as we observe him…in his evolution as a symbol of the state.”

The reader sometimes feels like an intruder in a neighbor’s family album. We start with the baby Pedro, crying pitifully. His mother died, “of sadness,” said court gossips, just nine days after Pedro’s first birthday. Many Brazilians blamed the child’s father Dom Pedro I, whose rascally reputation had grieved the queen. The little prince was called “the nation’s martyr.” Soon the first Pedro remarried — and was forced to abdicate and leave the country.

Portrayed on medals, plaster busts, and postcards, the chubby-cheeked young prince grows as we watch. Always there are uniforms and crowns and other symbols of the monarchy. The regent is doing his job, and young Pedro seems ever the serious ruler-in-waiting. Though during this Regency period, insurrections and rebellions are breaking out in other places, the palace presents a great silence, and “the secrecy of the monarchy gave it a sacred quality.” (Not bad advice for modern royalty: just shut up.)

Pedro’s image was being minted: “his impassive mien, his care in choosing his words, his enigmatic character” and his appearance, “prominent chin, very blue eyes,…blond hair.” He stood out in a population made up “of mestizos and mulattos.” As a symbol of stability, the court moved up Pedro’s consecration and coronation to 1841, and pictures soon show him wearning a youthful beard “though it did not disguise the emperor’s callow youth.” The ceremonies show “the poor, frightened lad, fifteen years old…tangled up in clothes too big for him” with a gold crown 16 inches high and “heavy for the little emperor’s head.”

It was a good two years later when the Brazilian press took note that “at last our monarch has a beard.” Notes Mrs. Schwarcz, “The beard was part of a political iconography.” It grows longer with the years, and portraits begin to show his adult interests: a telescope for his study of astronomy, a book for which wide scholarship in philosophy and languages.

Then, finding a wife and consort for the emperor presented problems. His realm was exotic and far away from proper princesses in Europe. Many thought the Brazilian court both primitive and poor. And Pedro was so shy “that he blushed at the idea of marrying.” But treaties and social acceptance were important to the young nation.

Diplomats arranged Pedro’s marriage to Teresa Cristina Maria, princess of the Two Sicilies, a Bourbon by three of her grandparents and a Habsburg by one grandmother. She was four years older than Pedro, and her dowry was modest, but she was said to be a good singer, and her portraits showed a pretty face. Misleadingly.

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