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Roderick Barman and Jean Barman - The Role of The Law Graduate in The Political Elite of Imperial Braz PDF
Roderick Barman and Jean Barman - The Role of The Law Graduate in The Political Elite of Imperial Braz PDF
Roderick Barman and Jean Barman - The Role of The Law Graduate in The Political Elite of Imperial Braz PDF
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Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Vol. 18 No. 4, November 1976
? 1976 Sage Publications, Inc.
[423]
SOURCES: Information on academic training taken from data base and Nogueira and Sere
Tavares de Lyra (1926, 1946). Information on ministers.and senate nominations from Braz
4 Brazil, Senado (1886).
4 a. Such training in some cases included a degree in mathematics or engineering.
b. In the period 22.126-23.7.40 the majority were priests.
N) TABLE2
Brazilian-Born Students Graduating from Coimbra, by Subje
1776-80 66 3 4
1781-85 49 1 2
1786-90 46 3 1
1791-95 35 4 2
1796-1800 4o 8 1
1801-05 30 14 3
1806-10 34 0 3
1811-15 9 1 0
1816-20 44 1 1
1821-25 101 6 3
1826-30 35 3 2
SOURCES: Morais (1949), Fonseca (1951), and Rio de Janeiro, Biblioteca Nacional (1943).
a.-Where, as in 90% of cases, students remained for the fifth year and were "formado," that
"bacharel" after four years, that year is considered to have been the year of graduation. So
subject; in such cases only the earliest subject is used.
SOURCES: As in Table 2, with figures for total students (unavailable before 1800) taken from
a. Coimbra was closed during the years 1810 and 1828.
1849-51:
1874-76:
a. Thirteen years, the time period between the class of 1876 and the end of the Empire, is used
classes of 1874-1876 and the earlier classes.
TABLE 5
Annual Number of Graduates from Sao Paulo and
Pernambuco Law Academies, 1831-1889
SOURCES: Data for Sao Paulo from original student matriculation records located in
archive at Sao Paulo Law School, supplemented by Goncalves Maia (1900) where
original records were destroyed or damaged by 1881 fire. Pernambuco data from
Bevilaqua (1927) and Martins (1931).
a. As a result of the major fire at the Sao Paulo Law Academy in 1881, classes were
temporarily suspended and many students who would have entered Sao Paulo went
instead to Pernambuco or waited a year to matriculate at Sao Paulo.
300 -
250 -
200 -
150
100-
50
Figure 1: Annual Total Number of Graduates from Sao Paulo and Pernambuco Law Academie
TABLE6
Provincial Origin of Graduates from Sao Paulo
and Pernambuco Law Academies, 1831-1889
Para/Amazonasa 98 14
Maranh&o 237 30
Piaul 110 11
Ceara 268 23
Pernambuco 1359 30
Alagoas 208 21
Sergipe 152 20
Goias 6 31
Mato Grosso 9 17
Esplrito Santo 5 10
Santa Catarina 1 15
rather flat height in the 1860s, while the last wave seems to
have peaked in the mid-i 880s.
Of the two declines or troughs, the bottom of the first came
about 1840, probably a reflection of the political and social
troubles of the Regency. The decline permitted the existing
elite to retain a tight hold on the political and judicial system
without antagonizing the new graduates. When the number of
graduates did begin to rise in the late 1840s and early 1850s,
the increase was matched at first by a substantial expansion in
the political and judicial apparatus. Between 1845 and 1860 the
number of seats in the Chamber of Deputies was increased by
17 percent, from 104 to 122. The number of judicial districts
was expanded in the same period by some 60 percent, from
about 115 to about 195. A comparable expansion of the
Treasury and the creation of the Department of Lands and of
the Ministry of Agriculture caused a sizable increase in the
central bureaucracy.
By the late 1850s, however, the situation had begun to
change. National unity and civil peace, all important to the
ruling elite, were not imperatives for the younger generation.
Greater prosperity and a diversification of the economy
increased the number of attractive careers open. Not all of these
were of suitable status for law graduates, although the new
prosperity and the new economic undertaking did produce
much more work for lawyers (advogados). It became quite
common for law graduates to serve a term as district attorney
(promotor pu'blico) and then to set up a private law practice in
their home town.
At the same time, the percentage of law graduates entering
public office was in decline. As shown in Table 4, only three
out of ten graduates of the classes of 1849 to 1851 entered the
peripheral elite, compared to almost seven out of ten from the
classes of 1824 to 1826. Furthermore, the number of graduates
combining a political and a judicial career declined from over
one-third of those with either career to less than one in ten.1 4
NOTES
identification with that country, since they were born there due only to their father's
temporary presence in Portugal on business, taking a degree, and the like, or since
they were born in Portugal prior to their family's permanent migration to Brazil.
6. While at least 42 percent of the students entering Coimbra between 1817 and
1830 had a sibling relationship with another student, no more than 14 percent were
the sons of earlier Brazilian-born students. Even though a part of these students had
Portuguese-born fathers who may have attended Coimbra, the failure of Brazilian-
born students of the period 1771-1816 to send their sons to the university does
suggest a fluid socioeconomic situation in late colonial Brazil.
7. Of the 122 judges named to the highest legal body during the Empire, the
Supreme Tribunal of Justice, 37, or 30 percent, were born in Bahia. The high point
of Bahian supremacy came in 1860-1861 when 13 of the 17 judges were natives of
that province. A majority of the tribunal were bahiano throughout the period
1857-1870 and again in 1876 (Lago, 1940).
8. Father's occupation is, however, given for only a minority of the Coimbra
law graduates, so our findings can be no more than suggestive. We have excluded the
occupation of judge because of the complications mentioned in note 5.
9. All five students of the 1831 graduating class from Sao Paulo were Coimbra
transfer students, as were almost a third of the 35 students graduating the next year.
Twelve of the 41 members of the Pernambuco class of 1832, the first to graduate
from that school, came from Coimbra.
After Coimbra reopened in 1834, five Brazilians on average matriculated annually
with no more than 13 ever entering in a single year. It is our suspicion that many of
these students were Brazilian-born sons of Portuguese merchants trading in Brazil:
certainly almost half of the students from 1834 onwards came from Rio de Janeiro.
Slightly less than a quarter were from the northern provinces of Para, Maranhao, and
Amazonas, which were physically almost as proximate to Portugal as to some parts of
Brazil and which, before the steamship, had better communications with Portugal
than with the rest of Brazil.
10. Since those who graduated in the 1790s were in their late fifties and early
sixties in 1831, they were mature and experienced men who found their peremptory
exclusion from executive power not only unexpected but humiliating. It is this
exclusion which explains many of the events of the early Regency including the
surprising strength of the Restaurador Party, which wanted to bring back Pedro I. It
was also a group from this generation which helped to engineer Pedro II's premature
declaration of age in 1840.
11. It would appear, however, that the later classes of the 1830s contained a
rising proportion of those who would be Liberals in the 1840s or Progressistas in the
1860s.
12. Our data concerning matriculation is limited to those students from Sao
Paulo for whom we were able to consult the original records (see Table 5, notes on
sources).
13. Of those students from the classes of 1824-1826, 1849-185 1, and 1874-1876
who served as Deputy or Senator, the two national positions elected by province, 80
out of a total of 94, or 85 percent, represented their native province. For the three
sets of classes the respective percentages are 78, 88, and 90, which could suggest that
identification with the provinces rather than with the nation increased as the Empire
progressed. This evidence is in conflict with the thesis of Pang and Seckinger (1972),
which views the national elite primarily as a group of "mandarins" and which
postulates that, during the mandarins' rise in the judicial and administrative structure,
their provincial ties were deliberately removed by those in power above them.
14. We have defined a political career as including at least one position as
national substitute deputy, provincial president, or higher; a judicial career as
including appointment as juiz de direito, provincial chief of police, or higher. Out of
the 46 graduates from the three Coimbra classes of 1824-1826, 50 percent had a
political career, 58 percent a judicial career, and 34 percent both. However, the
percentage for those with a judicial career and for both may well be low, since we
have no data on judicial appointments prior to the 1832 reform. Of the 253 Brazilian
law graduates of 1849-1851, 23 percent had political careers, 27 percent judicial
careers, and 8 percent both.
15. Examples of the use of empenhos abound. See Instituto Historico e
Geografico Brasileiro, Arquivo Senador Nabuco, Lata 383, Pasta 2, Letter of the
Marquesa de Santos to Nabuco, 16.12.1855; Instituto Historico e Geografico
Brasileiro, Arquivo do Instituto, Lata 439, Pasta 17, Letters of the Marques de Santa
Cruz to Joaquim Pinto de Campos, 13.10,1857, 18.10.1857, and 22.10.1857; and
Arquivo Historico do Itamarati, Arquivo do Visconde do Rio Branco, Lata 317, Maco
1, Letter of Joao da Silva Carrao to Rio Branco, 8.11.1853.
16. The extent to which favoritism was exhibited toward the sons of those having
political or judicial careers is a crucial but as yet incomplete aspect of our research.
Our present data, limited to those graduates from Sao Paulo for which we have the
original records or other data with father's name, indicates that from the mid-Empire
test classes of 1849-1851, 37 percent of those with known nonpolitical, nonjudicial
fathers themselves had political and/or judicial careers while 88 percent of those with
known political and/or judicial fathers had political and/or judicial careers.
17. Using our test classes of 1824-1826 and 1849-1851, we find that of those
who at some time in their career would enter at least the peripheral elite, 69 percent
of the earlier classes had so done within the shorter 13-year period as compared with
46 percent of the later classes. However, the earlier figure is misleading. One of our
criteria for entry into the peripheral elite is appointment as appeal judge, or
desembargador.In the early period it was possible to obtain such appointment with a
minimum of service. By the mid-Empire the time which it was necessary to serve
within the lower judiciary before being made appeal judge had risen to a minimum of
20 years. If the earlier figures are revised to exclude all those who obtained entry into
the peripheral elite within 13 years only through appointment as appeal judge, the
percentage drops from 69 to 52. In short, if the figures are revised to compensate for
a differing judicial system over which the individual graduates had no control, of all
those who would enter the peripheral elite during their careers, in both periods
roughly half did so within 13 years.
18. Of the Coimbra classes of 1824-1826, 86 percent of those in the peripheral
elite advanced to the middle elite, as compared with 56 percent from the classes of
1849-1851. Of those in the middle elite, 25 percent from both the earlier and later
classes rose to the core elite.
19. See, for example, the cartoon in the December 21, 1872 issue of 0 Mosquito,
a weekly review by no means hostile to the Republicans.
20. It would be ungracious and unscholarly to close this article without
mentioning the chapter "The Rise of the College Graduate and the Mulatto" in
Freyre (1968), a work which is, more or less, an analysis of Brazilian society during
the Empire. Building on the remarks of Gilberto Amado and Sylvio Romero, Freyre
grasped, with his usual insight, that the college graduates played an essential role in
nineteenth-century Brazil, but his blunt correlation of "white" elite with "dominant
plantation group" and of "mulatto" graduates with "deprived but rising urban
group" is too crude and simplistic to be analytically useful. Moreover, in
contradiction to the evidence presented in this article, Freyre does not see the
graduate as becoming dominant until well after Pedro II's accession in 1840, a
dominance which he attributed to the Emperor's personal preferences.
A variation of Freyre's dichotomy between established rural elite and rising
bacharel group is postulated in Flory (1975), but not only does Flory fail to use his
own concept successfully but the evidence he presents contradicts it. The author's
correlation of the bacharel with the juiz de direito, his incomprehension of the nature
and development of political parties in Imperial Brazil, and his total failure to
investigate the institutional development of the magistracy after 1849 vitiates what is
otherwise a useful article.
In addition, the recent doctoral dissertation by Carvalho (1974), unavailable at
time of writing, contains a chapter entitled "Elite Socialization: Higher Education."
REFERENCES