Instabilidade política na província do Grão-Pará: o processo de difusão do liberalismo (1817-1834)

Abstract

The main objective of the present work was to analyze the spread of liberalism in the province of Grão-Pará in the first decades of the nineteenth century (1817-1834). During the period studied, the disintegration of the remnants of the Ancien Regime was observed, with the diffusion of liberal ideas among its inhabitants, especially the poorest, giving rise to the outbreak of the largest popular revolution in the North of the country, the Cabanagem. The spread of liberalism in Pará is usually related to the introduction of liberal ideas after the Porto Revolution (Vintismo), however, and unlike other researches, we tried to identify other forms of contact with political movements that could have contributed to the formation of a “radical” liberal thought typical of the inhabitants of Pará. On the one hand, there was an effort to unveil external contributions to the province, such as French Guiana, the Spanish-American revolutions, the Pernambuco Revolution, the Confederation of Ecuador, among others; it has not been lost sight of the fact that the diffusion of such liberal ideas are intertwined with the main historical episodes of the province, among them the Constitutionalization Movement, the adhesion to the Independence of Brazil and the rejection of the centralism of dom Pedro I, in which popular pressure and the performance of the regional press played an important role. In this sense, It showed up the popular armed movements that indicated a collective ideal of freedom. Thus, it was possible to verify the aspects that characterized the singularity of liberalism in Pará in the different layers of society. Finally, there was a tendency of the local political elite to adapt to the governing courses of the Empire, while the majority of the population wanted broader and deeper transformations, and its resulting frustration, both with the local government and with the Court in Rio de Janeiro, which made the popular aspirations of Pará irreconcilable with the Brazilian Empire. This research is inserted in the field of political history, as it deals with traditional aspects of this field, notably governments, legitimacy, the State and the dispute for power, having its foundations in the theoretical principles of political liberalism in its various prisms. For a better understanding of the popular dimension in the diffusion of liberal political ideas, an attempt was made to understand the entire process through Koselleck's concepts of “experience space” and “expectation horizon”. With an analysis focused on the lower strata of Pará society, it was possible to see that the spaces of experience defined by the Ancien Regime no longer guided their actions, as there was a new and unusual horizon of expectations based on “radical” liberal ideas.