Abstracts Political Science

Martins Júnior (1860-1904) : ciência como fé, república como razão – a trajetória de um radical

by Flávia Bruna Ribeiro da Silva BRAGA

Traditionally, studies on the period from the end of the Empire to the beginning of the 20th century used to reaffirm that the process of the fall of the monarchy and construction of the Republic was carried out without the people, in a “military coup”, establishing an oligarchic regime. The “Old Republic” started to become a widespread concept that brought with it the idea of an obsolete, outdated and chaotic era. In this matter, positivism became one of the ideas to be fought, considered as old and confused as the very regime that it wanted to overcome. Thus, men of literature and science, politicians and technicians who approached that ideology came to be seen as an enemy to be fought by the historians. From the 1980s onwards, however, with the process of political renewal that Brazil and the world were going through – with the end of the Civil-Military Dictatorship in the country and the decay of the Cold War – it brought new perspectives to the studies of political history. This renovation started to bring new interpretations, whose analyzes started to revisit the “Old Republic” and name it in its broadest sense, “First Republic”. With this opening, the understanding of the process of the fall of the Empire and the consolidation of the republican regime has been increasingly revised and diversified, demonstrating the number of attempts, expectations, dreams and projects that faced each other to form the Republic as we know it. This thesis chose to follow the life story of a person who lived, dreamed and dedicated himself to the Republic: José Isidoro Martins Júnior. His trajectory, in addition to contributing to a unique view of events from a Northern perspective of the Empire, also brings one of the many ways in which positivism was understood and put into practice as a political project in the country. In the course of renewed political history proposed by René Rémond and in line with researches that contests the thesis of the “bestialized”, this work is one of many possible biographies: the political Martins Júnior.