"Políticos da nova raça": o jardim da infância e a experiência do poder na Primeira República

Abstract

We intend with this research to launch new light on a period of the brazilian republican history: the Afonso Pena governance (1906-1909). By aiming to limit the interference of the Coligacao that carries him to the head of the nation, Afonso Pena handles to the power a young ministerial and parliamentary front with a precocious insertion in the national public life. The group would be nicknamed by the opposite forces and the political chronicle as "Kindergarten". Identified with the introduction of the values of probity and professionalism in the public administration, its performances had entered in conflict with the traditional federal and state partisan structures. Leaving of the inquiry of its familiar origins, academic phase and initiation in the public life, we follow an experience of political power in the brazilian First Republic. The biographical trajectory of the members of the "Kindergarten" allowed us to identify, in one same group, moments of coexistence and confrontation between innovation and tradition, the ethical and the moral. The permanence of the personalism, the fraud and the violence, so current in the political landscape of the First Republic gives tone to our research. With the visibility reached by the "Kindergarten" in the presidency of Afonso Pena we look for to understand how an essentially oligarchical and bachelorque regimen sheltered critics to its basic structures.