FIGURE 1. Posthumous portrait of Francisco de Paula Brito (1863)
ALTHOUGH THE RECORDS are extremely scarce on this point, all indications are that the portrait of Francisco de Paula Brito that illustrates his book of poetry, a posthumous work edited by Moreira de Azevedo, was a lithograph based on a painting unveiled in the headquarters of the Petalogical Society on the evening of December 15, 1862—a year after the publisher’s death.1 In any event, the portrait matches the physical description that Moreira de Azevedo has left us of his friend: a man who was “brown in color, slim, of average height, beardless, and when he died,” at the age of fifty-three, “his hair was just starting to go gray.”2 The artist’s skill not only managed to capture the features of the late Paula Brito, but the portrait has played an important role as a “place of memory,” according to Pierre Nora, whose function “is to stop time, to block the work of oblivion, affixing a state of things, immortalizing death.”3
Paula Brito cut a good figure by being immortalized with a calm visage, smartly dressed in a sober black coat, white shirt, and tie. In this regard, although it may have been posthumous, this portrait tells us a great deal. If his skin color, which the artist did not attempt to hide, is a manifest sign of his ancestors’ experience of slavery, his clothes leave no doubt that this was a citizen of African ancestry who had gained a good position in his society.4 The son and grandson of freedpersons, he was a merchant, bookseller, printer, and publisher who worked in Rio de Janeiro for three decades, between 1831 and 1861. Indeed, it was through his work and the bonds of solidarity that he formed during his life that made Brito a kind of catalyst in the cultural and literary scene of the capital of Imperial Brazil, gaining renown in his lifetime. In such cases, once a life has ended, no sooner is the body lying in its grave than a profusion of panegyric writings is produced, crystallizing a given image of the deceased for the use and memory of posterity, going beyond portraits and the unveiling of portraits.
The “memorialist construction” built up around the publisher, understood as the transformation of the historical character through history itself, goes through three clearly distinct phases.5 This is true both in literary history, in the history of books and reading in Brazil, and in studies of Machado de Assis, in which Paula Brito is usually an obligatory presence. Beginning with the first biography published in the Correio mercantil newspaper weeks after his death, many of those who wrote about the publisher were unanimous about his altruism, which led to the perception of his first being an “impoverished patron of the arts,” then a “pioneering publisher,” and, more recently, a “Liberal Freemason.”6 This demonstrates that Francisco de Paula Brito is far from being an unexplored subject and that, in a way, the problem proposed in this book, based on a study of his life, is not unprecedented. Machado de Assis put it very precisely in one of his essays, in which he lavished praise on the French publisher Baptiste Louis Garnier in January 1865: “Speaking of Mr. Garnier, and then of Paula Brito, is to bring them together with a common idea: Paula Brito was the first publisher worthy of the name that we had among us. Garnier now occupies that role, with the differences wrought by time and the vast relations he has established outside the country.”7
With a view to contributing to the history of print culture in Brazil, this book seeks to turn Machado de Assis’s statement, which is well known in the literature, into a question, and on that basis, to attempt to understand the historical conditions that made the emergence of the publisher possible in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro.
Although printers like Charles-Joseph Panckoucke were also working as publishers in the eighteenth century, employing a number of practices that were previously unheard of in France’s book trade, several authors agree that it was in the first half of the nineteenth century, around 1830, that publishers began to appear as entrepreneurs in the market of printed cultural goods. Therefore, we can initially consider that companies like Blackwood in Edinburgh and Ticknor and Fields in Boston, as well as the Michel and Calmann Lévy brothers in Paris, George Palmer Putnam in New York, and Francisco de Paula Brito in Rio de Janeiro, almost simultaneously became entrepreneurs in the expanding universe of newspapers, magazines, books, and other publications.8 The defining factor in this process is the gradual specialization of publishers, who began setting themselves apart from traditional printers and booksellers, acting like the other entrepreneurs of the arts that emerged at that time, such as theater impresarios. Thus, according to Christine Haynes, while in seventeenth-century France éditeurs were the scholars responsible for compiling and editing works in different genres, the meaning of the term éditeur changes dramatically as it designates the “capitalists who assumed the risk of producing the work of a (dead or living) author.” Accordingly, “the éditeur was defined by his role in investing capital, both financial and human, to create literary commodities—and monetary profits.”9
Although in certain cases, as Paula Brito’s career demonstrates, the publisher was responsible for the production and sale of printed works, as of the 1830s it was this new actor that, according to Roger Chartier and Henri-Jean Martin, began reorganizing the book world by “controlling authors, putting the printers to work and supplying retail bookstores.” In an article coauthored with Odile Martin, Henri-Jean Martin identifies the publication of illustrated books as the beginning of the awareness of the originality of the work of publishers in France, suggesting the importance of the modernization of the printing industry in that process.10 Addressing this problem, Christine Haynes shifts the focus of her analysis of technological change to politics. According to Haynes, the specialization of éditeurs in France might have come a long way since the seventeenth century, when that branch first appeared during the formation of booksellers’ guilds. In the following century, however, a single printer or book merchant could be responsible for the production and distribution chains for printed matter, so much so that by 1820 they were called printer-booksellers. Thus, Haynes believes that the capitalist publisher emerged between 1770 and 1830, in the wake of a series of liberal reforms of the laws governing the French book trade. Such reforms changed intellectual property rights, revised market restrictions, and reduced the powers of censorship bodies. Consequently, individuals who did not belong to the traditional corporations that controlled the book market in the ancien régime were free to go into that business. At the same time, the press laws enacted by the new constitutional regimes to replace the censorship bodies characteristic of the ancien régime had to deal with responsibility for what was being printed, and publishers were part of this new “blame economy,” alongside printers, booksellers, and authors.11
The bill for a law “against crimes of abuse of freedom of the press” tabled at the June 10, 1826, session of the General Legislative Assembly of the Empire of Brazil demonstrates that, when it came to establishing the legal responsibilities of publishers, the Brazilian situation was similar to that in France. The first articles of Title II of the bill established that those held responsible for press crimes would first be the authors, but since their anonymity was guaranteed by law, printers, publishers, and booksellers would be legally responsible for the content of the printed matter, in precisely that order.12 Similarly, the dictionaries published in the Empire at that time clearly defined the functions of editores (publishers), not confusing them, for example, with printers.13 However, going beyond legal and semantic abstractions, this book will focus on Paula Brito’s life to investigate the historical circumstances that converged to bring about the emergence of the publisher in Brazil—circumstances forged in competition with French publications and through political alliances.
Thus, despite covering the story of five generations of Francisco Paula Brito’s family, enslaved men and women who gained their manumission in the eighteenth century, this book focuses mainly on the protagonist’s activities between the 1830s and 1850s. His career encompassed watershed moments in Brazilian history in the first half of the nineteenth century. Paula Brito was born just one year after Portugal’s Royal Court was transferred to Rio de Janeiro in 1808, fleeing the invasion by Napoleon’s troops. The impact of Prince Regent João’s flight to the richest part of the vast Portuguese Overseas Empire would be irreversible, culminating in the process that led to the independence and formation of the Brazilian nation state. Moreover, it is important to note that, unlike the Spanish colonies in the Americas, some of which had enjoyed the benefits of printing presses since the sixteenth century, the situation was very different in Portugal’s dominions in the Americas. Except for the press of Antônio Isidoro da Fonseca, which operated briefly in Rio de Janeiro in 1747, it was only after the arrival of the prince regent and his family that the Royal Press was established in that city, marking the beginning of the systematic use of printing presses in Portuguese America.14
In addition to the Royal Press, the city of Rio de Janeiro also benefited from several improvements made after the arrival of the court, from the Botanical Gardens to the magnificent Royal Library. In the years that followed, the rise of coffee planting in the provinces of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais produced a political elite that was actively involved in the formation of the Brazilian nation state, while drastically changing the demographics of the nascent Brazilian Empire due to the unprecedented expansion of the transatlantic slave trade. However, it was not just the southeastern plantations that made use of the abundance of enslaved Africans. Different branches of industry, such as the printing trade, profited not only from slavery but also from the alliances established with the slave-owning elite, as we will see in the case of the publisher Francisco de Paula Brito.
Far from being limited to a recounting the events of an individual’s life, there is a vast historical biography on the world of printing. In this regard, Alistair McCleery, in an article on the publisher Allen Lane, defends the importance of the study of the publisher’s individual agency to the history of books, considering the application of theoretical concepts such as “the field” and “functional principles” formulated respectively by Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, to be of little relevance for understanding the publishing market.15 For the nineteenth century, prime examples of the fruitfulness of such studies include Jean-Yves Mollier’s biographies of the Lévy brothers and Louis Hachette, as well as Ezra Greenspan’s work on the life of New York publisher George Palmer Putnam.16 It should be noted, however, that the biographies of publishers fall within a broader context, in which the biographical genre itself, long regarded as “impure,” as observed by François Dosse, has been welcomed in the bastions of academia, especially in the last three decades, given the collapse of so-called totalizing paradigms. Since then, craft historians—such as the new British Marxists, the third generation of the Annales, and the Italian scholars of “microhistory”—have begun focusing on the experiences and aspirations of flesh-and-blood men and women. Going from individual-agency-centered studies to biography was a major step, and indeed it has been systematically problematized and practiced in the different domains of history, including the history of printing.17
Many of the historians who have written about the experiences of nineteenth-century publishers have been able to rely on complete sets of documents, such as the records of Blackwood studied by David Finkelstein at the National Library of Scotland. Considered one of the most complete archives left to us by a nineteenth-century British publishing house, these records enabled Finkelstein to engage in a detailed study of the activities of the company and its directors between 1860 and 1910.18 In the case of Paula Brito, if similar records once existed, they must have been destroyed in the fire that razed the buildings surrounding the press run by the publisher’s widow in the early hours of September 25, 1866. Although the printing workshop was only superficially damaged by the flames, the water the firefighters used to control the blaze damaged most of the late publisher’s estate. Thus, writing a biography of Francisco de Paula Brito first required an effort to locate and gather sources. In addition to researching newspapers, initially at the Edgard Leuenroth Archive, and over the past two years using the National Digital Library, I have also studied manuscripts found in different archives and libraries mainly located in Rio de Janeiro.
The story of Francisco de Paula Brito, “the first publisher worthy of the name that we had among us,” according to Machado de Assis, will be revisited in this book in four parts. The first, divided into six chapters, deals with the publisher’s formative years and activities during the Regency period (1831 to 1841). However, going back to the eighteenth century, we will also see how Paula Brito’s family members gradually rid themselves of the bonds of slavery and established themselves as free—and what is more, literate—artisans in Rio de Janeiro. The fact of belonging to a family of freedpersons with a penchant for reading gave the young man access to literacy at a very young age, which made a significant contribution to his apprenticeship as a printer and the development of his taste for poetry. Given the possibilities that emerged after the abdication of Pedro I in 1831, the young Paula Brito decided to buy his cousin Silvino José de Almeida’s bookshop, where he later installed a wooden printing press. By becoming a printer-bookseller, Paula Brito was exposing himself to the negative consequences of entering that business, from the threat of having his presses smashed by angry mobs to legal persecution during the Feijó Regency.
Divided into four chapters, the second part deals with the publisher’s social ascension in the 1840s. Paula Brito’s success as a seller of books, newspapers, and miscellaneous items was essential to the improvements he made in his printing shop. Consequently, that was when Paula Brito became a publisher. Driven by competition with French fictional narratives, the printer-bookseller made the original decision to finance the publication of a work by a Brazilian novelist, the young Teixeira e Sousa. This part of the book also deals with the alliances the publisher formed with Conservative politicians after the coup that declared the majority of Pedro II, well as the organization of labor in his world, both at the press and at home—a microcosm that included foreign workers, hired-out slave women, and free Africans.
After planning the establishment of a large-scale press to meet the needs of Rio de Janeiro’s provincial government, Paula Brito founded the Dous de Dezembro company. The third part of this book is entirely devoted to the history of that firm, founded amid the reconversion of capital formerly employed in the transatlantic slave trade to businesses in Rio de Janeiro in the 1850s. The chapters in the fourth and final section deal with the reconstruction of the publisher’s businesses after the company failed in 1857. Although he had to scale down his operations and deal with hordes of creditors, some factors enabled Paula Brito to continue printing newspapers and publishing Brazilian authors after his firm went bankrupt. These include the networks of social interactions and personal relationships the publisher-bookseller had formed, such as those established through the Petalogical Society. Furthermore, to expand on this question, part four also discusses the vicissitudes of the book market in Rio de Janeiro, as well as Paula Brito’s relations with his authors. At the time, all the raw materials used by printers in Rio de Janeiro were imported, from paper to printing ink, which inevitably affected the cost of books, magazines, and newspapers. There were also serious obstacles to their distribution in the other provinces of Imperial Brazil. Finally, we will see how Paula Brito’s widow, Rufina, tried and failed to keep the family business going after his death.
