As províncias do Império e o “governo por conselhos”: o Conselho de Governo e o Conselho Geral de Minas Gerais (1825-1834)

Abstract

Amid the process of political emancipation in Brazil, the institutional organization of the provinces, then commuted into the first units of the territorial division of the Empire, played a decisive role in the political debates of that time. Not without opposition, the institutional design of the provincial arrangement in the post-emancipation period passed into law by the Constituent Assembly of October 20th 1823, which created in the provinces of the Empire the presidents of the province, appointed and removable by the Emperor, and the Governing Council , institutions of an elective nature, in charge of matters of “examination and administrative judgment”; and by the Constitution of 1824, which provided for the creation of the provincial councils of the province, also elective bodies whose main function was to “propose, discuss and deliberate on the most interesting business of their provinces; forming peculiar projects accommodated to their localities, and urgencies”. Far from static, the Councils of Government and the General Councils progressively received new and specialized competences from the legislation published in the First Reign and in the early years of the Regency until, in 1834, they ceased to exist. My goal in this thesis is precisely to analyze the emergence of the provinces as politicaladministrative (or governative) units, that is, the creation of Councils as an alternative for the institutional organization of these units, as well as to carry out an extensive investigation of the internal and external dynamics of these collective and elective institutions. To that end, I propose an analysis of the debates about the institutional organization of regional power units in the context of the political emancipation of Brazil and the repertoires with which they interacted, with a special emphasis on the French revolutionary-Napoleonic period, and the Spanish reformist projects initiated in Portugal in the second half of the eighteenth century, which, as I shall argue, were the basis for the emulation of authorities for the organization of the provinces. I also propose an analysis of the concrete performance of these institutions in a specific geographic reality, that of the province of Minas Gerais. The purpose is to identify the political and institutional dynamics of the Governing Council (and the presidency of the province) and that of the General Council in Minas Gerais and the forms and mechanisms from which these entities took part in the province's affairs. In this task, I offer a systematic analysis of the performance of these institutions, by the means of the systematization and interlacing of the institutional documentation produced by the Provincial Councils in Minas Gerais and, in a complementary way, from other sources, such as newspapers and parliamentary debates. As I will defend in this thesis, from this institutional design and the concrete action of the Council of Government and the General Council, a real “government by councils” was established in the provinces of the Empire in the First Reign and in the first years of the Regency. This led to the process of building the Empire, maintaining its order and, finally, the constitution of a "new" national unity.