People & Histories
15 November 1889 – 1897

The Republic, and the war at Canudos

Army officers overthrow the emperor and proclaim a republic run by coffee oligarchs; in the backlands of Bahia, the army destroys the religious community of Canudos.

  • A Concise History of Brazil — Boris Fausto and Sergio Fausto, Cambridge University Press (2014)
  • Brazil: A Biography — Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling, Allen Lane (2018)
  • Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands) — Euclides da Cunha, Laemmert (1902)

Well established statehoodmilitaryviolence

On 15 November 1889 Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca led troops in Rio to depose Pedro II, who went quietly into exile and died in Paris two years later. The “Old Republic” that followed was dominated by the coffee planters of São Paulo and the cattle and dairy elites of Minas Gerais, with few voters and much fraud.

  • A Concise History of Brazil — Boris Fausto and Sergio Fausto, Cambridge University Press (2014)
  • Brazil: A Biography — Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling, Allen Lane (2018)
In 1896–97 the new state sent four military expeditions against Canudos, a community of many thousands of poor backlanders in Bahia gathered around the lay preacher Antônio Conselheiro, whom Rio wrongly saw as a monarchist threat. The settlement was razed and most of its people killed. The journalist Euclides da Cunha, who covered the campaign, called it a crime.
  • Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands) — Euclides da Cunha, Laemmert (1902)
  • Brazil: A Biography — Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling, Allen Lane (2018)

Why it matters today

Brazil

The coup of 1889 set a pattern of the military stepping into politics that recurred until 1985. Canudos, retold in Euclides da Cunha's classic "Os Sertões", became the symbol of a coastal state at war with its own poor interior.