Alves Branco, Manuel (1797–1855)

Manuel Alves Branco, second viscount of Caravelas and poet, was among the most respected of the Empire of Brazil's liberal statesmen. A graduate of the University of Coimbra, Portugal (1823), Branco entered politics by 1830. A Bahian deputy (1830–1837), then a senator (1837–1855), he emerged during the crises between the abdication of the emperor Pedro I in 1831 and the installation of Pedro II in 1840. His reputation as a liberal derived from his work on the reform Code of Criminal Procedure (1832), his decentralism, and his championship of the reformist wing of the moderados (Regency liberals). Branco was a key minister for the embattled reformist regent, Diogo Antônio Feijó (1835–1837), during the dramatic rightward parliamentary shift against liberal reforms and in the context of revolts, secession, and diminishing state authority associated with them. However, with the triumph of the reactionary (later, Conservative) party of 1837, Branco refused to succeed Feijó and, after the early enthronement (1840) at the age of fourteen of Pedro III, left partisanship, confining himself to serving the emperor as a minister. Appointed to the Council of State in 1842, Branco also became the first cabinet minister to occupy the new position of prime minister, in 1847. Both appointments recognized his political skills, his loyalty to the monarch, and his achievements as a financial reformer.

See alsoBrazil: 1808–1889; Brazil: Constitutions; Brazil: The Empire (Second); Brazil: Liberal Movements; Brazil: The Regency; Feijó, Diogo Antônio.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barman, Roderick J. Brazil: The Forging of a Nation: 1798–1852. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.

Flory, Thomas. Judge and Jury in Imperial Brazil, 1808–1871: Social Control and Political Stability in the New State. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Lyra, Tavares de. Instituições políticas do Império. Brasília: Senado Federal, 1979.

Needell, Jeffrey D. The Party of Order: The Conservatives, the State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831–1871. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2006.

Sacramento Blake, Augusto Victorino Alves. Diccionario bibliographico brazileiro. 7 vols. Rio de Janeiro: Nacional, 1893–1902.

                                  Jeffrey D. Needell