1808: The Flight of the Emperor by Laurentino Gomes Read Free Book Online Page A

New World in over four centuries. Dom João VI, king of Brazil and Portugal, received his subjects, ministers, diplomats, and foreign visitors in that building over the course of more than a decade. The transformation of Brazil into an independent nation also took place there. Despite its historical importance, however, virtually nothing in the São Cristovão Palace recalls the Portuguese court that thrived in Rio de Janeiro. This three-story rectangular building, which Dom João received as a present from one of the city’s slave traffickers when he arrived in Brazil in 1808, stands today neglected and forgotten. No plaques indicate where the royal bedrooms,kitchens, or stables once lay. It is as if history had vanished deliberately from the place.
    The same negligence repeats itself in the center of Rio de Janeiro, where another building ought to serve as a place of remembrance for this period. In the Plaza 15th of November, in front of the docks where ferries cross the Bay of Guanabara toward the city of Niterói, lies the ancient Imperial Palace, a two-story seventeenth-century mansion. This was the official seat of the government of Dom João in Brazil from 1808 to 1821, but today you might pass in front of it without discovering any such information. An unidentified old-timey wooden carriage sits against the window to the right of the main entrance, but otherwise nothing makes reference to the building’s past. On the wall next to the carriage, a map in high-relief shows the buildings and skyscrapers of modern Rio de Janeiro—an anachronistic curiosity. A map of the colonial city when the Portuguese court first arrived would be more in keeping. This is the Imperial Palace after all.
    The otherwise empty rooms sporadically host events often either ignorant or devoid of context. On the upper floor in November 2005, the throne room where João VI once dispatched his ministers contained an art exhibition in which rosaries on the floor simulated male genitalia. It is the province of art to surprise and challenge common sense, but the exhibition of these objects in a place that for so many years housed one of the most pious courts in Europe amounted to little more than provocation for provocation’s sake.
    But then disdain for historical monuments was never a novelty in Brazil. In the case of João VI, however, an additional factor heightens the seemingly deliberate amnesia surrounding him. Modern caricatures represent the king and his court in books, theater, television, and film. Take for one example, among many, the film Carlota Joaquina, Princess of Brazil, by Carla Camurati. The queen, who gives her name to the film, appears as a hysterical and treacherous nymphomaniac, and João as a bumbling, gluttonous ruler incapable of making a single decision.
    The present book attempts to recapture the history of the Portuguese court in Brazil from the relative oblivion into which it has sunk and to develop its protagonists and the roles they played two centuries ago in the most accurate dimensions possible. As you will see, these people at timesbehaved unbelievably cartoonishly, as have many of the rulers who have followed them—including many of the present day. The flight of the royal family to Rio de Janeiro occurred during one of the most passionate and revolutionary periods of world history, in which monarchists, republicans, federalists, separatists, abolitionists, traffickers, and slave-masters opposed each other in a power struggle that radically changed the history not only of Brazil and Portugal but eventually the world. These clashing interests explain in part the abandonment of the locales frequented by the royal family as much as the weight of prejudice that still accompanies the works depicting them.
    Equally important as the first objective, this book also aims to make this central thread of Brazilian history more accessible to readers interested in the past but unaccustomed or