Aristocratic Revolutionaries: The Nobility during the Independence Period of Spanish America and Brazil (c. 1808–1821)

Abstract

Aristocratic Revolutionaries: The Nobility during the Independence Period of Spanish America and Brazil (c. 1808–1821)

While in Spanish-America traditional claims of social and political pre-eminence based on hereditary rights were outright abandoned with the birth of the new republican states, the exile of the Portuguese court at Rio de Janeiro following the French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 1808 led to the creation of a new Brazilian aristocracy. Endowed with social and political privileges that had never existed to a similar degree during colonial times, the Brazilian nobility played an important part in the new political institutions of the independent constitutional monarchy. At the same time, some of the Spanish-American aristocrats participated actively in the political disputes and military struggles of the independence period and joined, as did part of their Brazilian counterparts, the new political associations, both liberal and conservative, that emerged from the late colonial masonic lodges during the early Republican era.