Na charneira de dois séculos: a questão criminal na Primeira República brasileira

Abstract

The present thesis images a research, which aimed the legal and penal culture at the time of the Brazilian First Republic (1889-1930). Aside from the specific time frame, we sought to stress the handling of some privileged targets by the apparatus of criminal justice, deemed as disqualified that the social and political system of the time, contradictory and sim-ultaneously, produced and wished to control, if not annihilate. The main goal here was to retrace the general guidelines throughout which the criminal issue in the First Republic was thought, practiced and developed. To that end, through access to some primary sources, it was possible to make out anapproximate image of the means of dealing with a demand for social order and discipline which had to account, among other things, and with greater interest, for more than 300 years of African slavery and the dif-ficulties generated by such policy, especially for the needed social and overall economic as-similation from the resulting populations. This research took over the advantages and disadvantages that a diverse methodology necessarily implies. It favored those risks because it offers a conduction and paceconsolidated by its capacity of inciting and, majorly, facing some issues. From this point of view, it could summon all approaches. The impossibility of doing so made a cultural approach without being culturalist one prevail. We added a non-exclusive criminological orientation. The uncertain originality of our approach led to an unpretentious mapping of the histo-riography concerned, more or less plainly, with the same object as the research. Thereafter, we performed a theoretical digression, followed by access to some sources of the period, in-cluding primary ones, in order to assure the necessary empiricism and to fulfill the objects presented. We verified which could be the effects, the efficiency and the projections brought up by the different theoretical and political perspectives that claim to themselves what direction to take regarding the criminal justice proceedings. The foremost cultural and institutional con-cern about the poor, which the Brazilian Republic neglected, became so apparent that the re-search was refined towards such issue. The two major movements, with an antagonism prompted by the dispute between the so called positive and classical schools, converged when promoting solutions, as the penalty sentence, for example, than they disagreed with one an-other. It was interesting to notice that the more traditional legal knowledge, also conceived, at a national level, as bacharelesco (the bachelor s degree level), might have worked as a con-tention barrier for setbacks proposed by the criminal anthropology, even at a legislative field