Elementos bonapartistas no processo de constitucionalização brasileiro: uma análise crítico-reflexiva da história constitucional brasileira de 1823 a 1945

Abstract

This thesis aims to defend that Bonapartist elements were present in Brazilian constitutional history, especially from 1822 to 1945, a period marked by constant authoritarian processes of de-emancipation of universal suffrage and neutralizing the transformative potential of democracy, caused by certain forms organization of power, as well as the restriction on political participation of the people. Considerable part of the brazilian constitutional thinkers analyzing the brazilian constitutional process without a historiographical critical reflection did not notice the existing constitutive tension between the process of writing a constitution and democracy. Existing analyzes incur misconceptions as to uphold a immanent sense in Brazilian constitutional history based on failure of the constitutional project or mismatch between the constitutional text and its social and political context, denying the most outstanding and essential meaning of the concept of constitution that is to be the process of political self-constitution, legal and social development of a people. To cover up the constitutive tension between constitution and democracy, text and constitutional context, the classical analyzes of the Brazilian constitutional history, not realized and fueled the risk of Bonapartism action, understood in this thesis as the denial of this breakthrough process to conquist new rights and the consolidation of democracy. The Bonapartism is the expression of an authoritarian phenomenon present from Modernity, in which a centralized structure of political power that is stated as democratic, popular and defending the rights of the people, actually implement a process of political and social dis-empowerment. This phenomenon occurred when the realization of the Works of constituent assembly of 1823 and later with the use of the institution of the moderating power, also occurs in the proclamation of the Republic in 1891 and his oligarchic government, reaching its peak during the Vargas Era and the presidential dictatorship.