CHAPTER 10

“The Progress of the Nation Consists Solely in Regression”

IN 1850, AN anonymous writer in the Liberal newspaper O grito nacional observed that the Conservative Paula Brito had “learned, and poorly, the French language in the home of a Frenchman, Mr. Plancher.” In his turn, Joaquim Manuel de Macedo wrote that Paula Brito had “learned it sufficiently.” Despite the fact that the publisher was not an authority on the language of Montaigne, he managed to translate a few plays, satires, and poems by Évariste de Parny.1 And if we trying to identify the time when the publisher expressed a Conservative conscience, supplanting the Exaltado politics of his youth before the Liberal and Conservative parties were even formed, one translation may provide a significant clue. It was not a play that Paula Brito translated, but one he did not:

Mr. Editor—Having learned that I am said to have been the translator of the play entitled: O rei se diverte [The king has fun]—[and] not wanting to steal the glory of the actual translator, nor be the target of the censure that has been expressed; I hereby declare that I not translated any plays for the Fluminense Constitutional Theater, except for the—Abrasadores (Incendiaries)—staged a long time ago, which did not please, despite being very decent, and having scenes with good morals. I beg you, Mr. Editor, to kindly publish these lines from your colleague and friend—Francisco de Paula Brito.2

O rei se diverte was a Portuguese translation of Le roi s’amuse, a play by Victor Hugo whose political content had already caused a stir in Paris, where its performances were suspended by the censors the day after it opened in November 1832. Looking to amuse himself, Francis I, the king in question, perpetrated all kinds of atrocities. Among them, he seduced the daughter of his fool, who sought to get his revenge on the perverse and perverted monarch by plotting his assassination. However, at the end of the play, it was the innocent girl who died. When it opened in Rio de Janeiro four years later, Justiniano José da Rocha harshly criticized O rei se diverte in his review published in O cronista. Da Rocha found fault with many aspects of the play, which extended to all the “depredations of the Romantic school,” focusing first on its immorality and second on the desecration of a king. When reading da Rocha’s review in the context of the series of theatre reviews that preceded it, the historian Jefferson Cano demonstrated that those essays were just another trait of the Conservatism inspired by Benjamin Constant which had emerged in the mid-1830s.³ At the time, concepts like liberty and equality were undergoing a profound reappraisal, gradually adapting to Regressist interests. Thus, da Rocha’s reviews were, according to Cano, “a scathing critique of Liberal mistakes.” This stance extended and, more than that, informed how a play like O rei se diverte should be received by the critics, as it was also considered immoral from the political point of view.⁴

Possibly feeling a stronger interest in protecting his image and business, Paula Brito may have simply wanted to avoid controversy. However, in this context, his objection to seeing his name associated with the translation of Le roi s’amuse is open to interpretation. In his appeasing note, the publisher openly stated that he had translated Os abrasadores, a play that had not been a popular success but at least was “very decent” and contained “scenes of good morals.”⁵ Furthermore, Paula Brito wrote that he did not want to “steal the glory” of the actual translator and, at the same time, wanted to avoid being the target of criticism aimed at the Victor Hugo play. Although he does not refer to Justiniano José da Rocha’s review in O Cronista directly, the publisher and journalist may have been going through a similar process after the fall of Feijó and the rise of the Regressists in 1837: both events had quenched the Liberal and, in Paula Brito’s case, Exaltado fires that blazed in their hearts during the early days of the Regency. Emphasis should be given to the word “process” because it seems we are not seeing an abrupt change—a Regressist and Conservative epiphany. It is likely that, for Paula Brito, it began with the prosecutions he endured during Feijó’s regency due to the publication of periodicals such as O Seis de Abril Extraordinário in June 1834, or, going a little further back in time, to the attempt to ransack his press in December 1833.

These speculations are plausible. However, a close reading of Paula Brito’s early newspaper in verse could provide the ideal angle for viewing this process. As of 1835, A mulher do Simplício might have continued to be Fluminense (from Rio de Janeiro province), but gradually ceased to be Exaltada. Despite its name, following Paula Brito’s leanings, the newspaper went from being Andradist to Maiorista (supporting the early declaration of Pedro II’s majority), and ended its days as a Conservative or Saquarema publication.

Paula Brito’s enthusiasm with the Andradas was clear in A mulher do Simplício in March 1837, when at the end of a long blank verse poem on page eight, the newspaper’s ostensibly female editor concluded:

Vivas are sung to the Loyal ANDRADAS

Who played a part in this Great Enterprise,

And to whom Brazil already owes so much!

Let the World know what we joyfully celebrate:

COUNTRY, CONSTITUTION, PEDRO THE SECOND.6

The different fonts originally used in the magazine seem to underline the key words of Paula Brito’s political convictions at the time: loyalty to the Andradas, to Country, Constitution, and Emperor Pedro II. For the editor—“Simplício’s wife”—the publisher’s poetic persona, the São Paulo Liberals were the main agents of Brazil’s Independence, a fact that should be taken into account during the Senate elections of 1838: “I am convinced that the Voters / Have a vivid memory / Of how much our ANDRADAS / Did for Independence.”⁷ After José Bonifácio de Andrada’s death, his brother Martim Francisco Ribeiro de Andrada entrusted Paula Brito with the publication of the manuscript of Elogio acadêmico da Senhora D. Maria Primeira (Academic elegy for Queen Maria I), recited at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Lisbon in March 1817. The publisher’s note that Paula Brito printed in that edition is very interesting, as it demonstrates how, in some cases, his publishing activities were closely related to his political principles:

His excellency Mr. Martim Francisco Riberito de Andrada having offered us, as a sign of the friendship with which he honors us, and which we are far from deserving, the manuscript of the present Elegy, we are delighted to publish it as another sign of the veneration and respect we have consecrated to the ever-lamented ashes of the patriarch of our Independence.

May this small service of ours, along with others we have done, become in the eyes of his distinguished brothers (to whom Brazil owes so much, and to whom it has been so ungrateful), always worthy of the esteem we so far from deserve, insofar as we are worthy of it.

Francisco de Paula Brito

Publisher Owner8

As we will see, this tendency would increase in the 1850s, when the Conservative publisher showed some reservations about publishing Liberal authors, particularly the young José de Alencar, who is now considered one of Brazil’s leading Romantic novelists. However, in 1839 Paula Brito was a staunch supporter of the Andrada brothers. During the months that followed, Antônio Carlos de Andrada would become one of the leading architects of the early declaration of Pedro II’s majority, a political maneuver by the Liberals to curb the supremacy of the Regressist Party, which had been in power since the fall of Feijó in September 1837. Without a doubt, all his life Francisco de Paula Brito was a loyal subject of his Imperial Majesty, “the Savior of Brazil,” as he described Pedro II in a sonnet dedicated to the emperor in December 1839. In this sense, the Liberals’ Age of Majority Coup in 1840 fueled Paula Brito’s sympathies for that party’s leaders. After all, at that time, both professed the same creed, summed up in verse by Paula Brito, hiding behind the persona of the female editor of A mulher do Simplício: “Only PEDRO and the Constitution / Brazil can save: / He who governs at eighteen, / Can at fifteen govern.”⁹

On the night of July 24, 1840, the day after Pedro II was declared an adult, when the Liberal cabinet headed by Antônio Carlos Ribeiro de Andrada was formed, Paula Brito recited a lengthy poem in the presence of the young monarch, the princesses, and the audience at the São Pedro Theater. It must have been unbearably tedious for a fifteen-year-old to listen patiently to those 111 verses, which began:

All hail, for thee, Lord, this golden Day

of your Acclamation! O tender Pedro

Brazilian Monarch—all hail the glory

of thy grateful people in acclaiming thee!

Motherland! The happy homeland strips off this mourning,

That for so long thy grief shows us;

Brazilian People, generous and docile,

You no longer have to fear the hideous arm

Of fallacious anarchy.10

This passage is interesting because it shows that Paula Brito viewed the emperor’s adulthood as something of a new age of prosperity and order, in which the homeland had finally exorcised the ghost of Regency anarchy. However, in a short time, the enthusiasm of A mulher do Simplício, ou, A fluminense exaltada regarding the directions taken after Pedro II’s celebrated coming of age dwindled considerably. In a poem entitled “Ora o homem tem razão” (“Why, the man is right”), “Simplício’s wife” wondered:

Does adulthood

produce the desired effects?

The promised equality,

In the order of its precepts

Do the peoples find it was in vain?

Why, the man is right!¹¹

Implicitly, for every question the editor poses, the answer is a resounding no, an expression of her political disillusionment with those formerly considered “firm, illustrious, liberal, and honorable” leaders of the nation, namely the Liberal cabinet of July 24. Moreover, several questions arose, some of which were of vital importance to Paula Brito, as well as to the Empire’s other citizens of African origin—“mixed” and “brown” people:

Could someone have disposed [the Emperor]

Among a people that is so mixed,

To despise due to his appearance

The citizen devoted

To the Throne, the Law, and the Nation?

Why, the man is right.

[ . . . ]

Will those who are deserving

Even if their color is brown,

Find recognition

Or continue with the usual

Tomorrow yes, today no?

Why, the man is right.12

According to José Murilo de Carvalho, intense public participation made July 23, 1840, seem like April 7, 1831, redux. Nine years later, the elite, people, and troops returned to the streets of Rio de Janeiro, this time with a view to enthroning a monarch instead of overthrowing him.¹³ From this perspective, that is, the viewpoint of those who were hailing the new emperor in the streets, the effective beginning of the Second Reign signaled social changes that, in the ensuing days and weeks, did not occur. Thus, in the above verses, Paula Brito showed that he was not only aware of his own situation but that of all the citizens of color who were devoted “to the Throne, the Law, and the Nation,” who were once again left high and dry. Meanwhile, many of the ships that were still afloat were slavers who continued to land on the nation’s beaches even though the slave trade had been banned since 1831:

Will we have to see the peoples,

And some authorities,

Trafficking in new blacks,

Which in the towns and cities

The classes go on mixing?

Why, the man is right.

Or will the law be banned

That prohibits the traffic,

So that then it will permit

This, daughter of ignorance,

Inhuman slavery!

Why, the man is right.¹⁴

The illegal trafficking of Africans and the exclusion of citizens of color were inseparable themes in Paula Brito’s mind. The problem is that this factor alone does not explain the publisher’s Conservative turn, as Liberals and Conservatives had turned a blind eye to the smuggling of enslaved Africans since the 1831 law was enacted. Lest we forget, in 1837 alone, after the rise of a Regressist cabinet headed by Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos, fifty-seven thousand Africans entered Brazil illegally.15 However, according to verses published in A mulher do Simplício, the Liberals who backed the declaration of Pedro II’s majority had not lived up to Paula Brito’s expectations.

This may explain why the publisher became openly Conservative at some point between 1840 and 1841, as another poem attests. In verses dedicated to Paulino José Soares de Souza, the future Viscount of Uruguai, Paula Brito wrote, paraphrasing Camões: “Scenes change, politics change, / Your party descends, the opposition rises / (Party that was mine).”¹⁶ In this poem, published in A mulher do Simplício in December 1841, Souza is often called a “patron.” Furthermore, the title, “Grateful Tribute,” implies that Paula Brito had in some way and for some reason received a favor from the Conservative leader, which was soon explained in one of the verses:

More than once, Sir, I have sought you out,

Always for the unfortunate,

(I have not yet asked for favors for myself)

I find you frank, fair, and open.

The more I look for you, the more I find you.¹⁷

If favors were “our nearly universal mediation,” according to Roberto Schwarz,¹⁸ as the above verse demonstrates, it was certainly Paula Brito who established closer ties with Souza. However, in addition to the future Viscount of Uruguai, Eusébio de Queirós, the chief of police of Rio de Janeiro and another major Conservative leader, also received a fulsome sonnet by Paula Brito, published in the same issue of A mulher do Simplício.¹⁹

The Liberal press, in its turn, did not leave Paula Brito’s habit of flattering Conservative leaders with his poetry unscathed. In 1856, on the occasion of the death of the Marquess of Paraná, the editor of O grito nacional would describe as a “fresh-water poem” the sonnet in honor of the late Conservative leader that Paula Brito distributed at the Lírico Theater. The editor accused the publisher of having “mixed up our first day, the day of Brazil’s emancipation, with the fate of a man who did not play the smallest part in that majestic event!” And after quoting the first two stanzas of the sonnet, he concluded: “Oh pooh, nothing but adulation! What foul-smelling toadying!”20 Also in 1856, O grito nacional would make fun of another sonnet that Paula Brito recited when Paulino José Soares de Souza, then called the “hero of the chouriços,” returned from a trip to Europe. According to the editor, “From the foot of Sugarloaf Mountain, Mr. Paula Brito addressed to His Excellency a speech in verse, with the title of sonnet, which was much applauded by the bystanders, and by some forty thousand more from the neighborhood who joined him for this noble end.”²¹ Thus, returning to A mulher do Simplício, we can see that the verses published in 1842 showed that its editor’s Conservative turn was in fact consistent: “Here, readers, so far / Are our causes as they are: / The progress of the nation / Consists solely in regression!”²² Therefore, like the Regency, his Exaltado days were a thing of the past: “If I once cried out ardently / Iron, fire, Exaltation; / Today, experienced, I merely ask for / Order, peace, sweet unity.”²³

However, Paula Brito’s backing for the Conservatives was not limited to the sonnets and verses published by the female editor of Simplício. It also extended to the ballot box. The publisher belonged to the group of Brazilians that the Imperial Constitution defined as “active citizens.” That is, he was one of the select few who were eligible to vote because they were born free, were not “criminals pronounced in quarrels or investigations,” and had an “annual net income of 200,000 réis through property, industry, commerce, or employment.” In fact, once the candidates had been chosen in the primaries, it was citizens like Paula Brito who voted for deputies, senators, and provincial council members.²⁴ In the August 1849 elections, Santíssimo Sacramento Parish had thirty-eight Conservative voters.²⁵ Paula Brito’s fellow electors were physicians, landlords, civil servants, judges, and even the Justice Minister, Eusébio de Queirós. However, in addition to voting Conservative, Paula Brito sometimes served as a member of the electoral council, which he did in the December 1848 elections. Serving alongside Antônio Joaquim de Azevedo, the publisher was secretary of the council chaired by Antônio Saldanha da Gama, the justice of the peace of the second district of Santíssimo Sacramento Parish.²⁶

The previous year, when he was an alternate, Paula Brito had been involved in a dispute with the chairman, the Liberal justice of the peace and police chief, Joaquim Pinheiro de Campos. The disagreement arose when Pinheiro de Campos decided that he should put the ballots in the ballot box himself. None of the electoral officials opposed the chairman, but Paula Brito noticed that the police chief was carefully scrutinizing each vote before casting it. The publisher protested that each elector should be able to cast his own vote. The police chief retorted that he was doing so to prevent voter fraud, which, according to him, had occurred in previous elections in that parish. Paula Brito was outraged at the chairman’s accusation because he had presided over the previous elections, so the charge of fraud fell on him. Thus, the publisher’s response was a counteraccusation. Paula Brito asked whether Pinheiro de Campos was making a point of examining each vote to determine whether it “sided with the government or not.” The other officials present backed Paula Brito, and Councilman Barreto Pedroso reportedly declared “that the ballots should enter the box without going through customs.” Grudgingly, Pinheiro de Campos was obliged to accept the publisher’s protest.27 In 1847, the country was going through the so-called Liberal quinquennium (1844–1848). Thus, by questioning Pinheiro de Campos’s actions in that year’s elections, Paula Brito was merely defending the interests of the Conservative party, a revelation that may have given rise to the rumor that spread in Rio de Janeiro regarding his supposed appointment as chief of police in March 1848.²⁸

Meanwhile, O grito nacional, one of Rio de Janeiro’s Liberal newspapers, attacked the publisher at every opportunity. That publication circulated in Rio for the respectable period of a decade, between 1848 and 1858, and in August 1849, precisely during the elections, Paula Brito’s name began to appear in its pages in articles like the following:

Setting aside the impartial Francisco de Paula Brito, deserter from the party, and who due to his birth, and COLOR, never should have done it; even though it was an advantage for the Liberals; because they do not want men who serve in election times to engage in certain transactions; letting our fellow countryman who (to be fair) does not pretend to be white, but yet is mixed up with the whites, the only ones who have positions in this country of bodes and caibras [sic] (goats), as they call them.²⁹

As we can see, the political use of race transcended the chronological boundaries of the Regency period, certainly enjoying a long career in the political language of the Empire. As in the first years following the Seventh of April 1831, once again, skin color was linked to and emerged from political discourse. According to O grito nacional, pardo and mulatto were synonymous with the Liberal party. Therefore, although he did not want to be white, but was always “mixed up with the whites,” Paula Brito was perpetrating a double betrayal. By abandoning the Liberal cause in the early 1840s, the publisher was also seen to be betraying his color. However, the fact that Africans and people of African descent were joining the Conservative party during the Second Reign belied O grito nacional’s free association. For example, to the extent that significant spatio-temporal proportions should be respected, in the 1880s the freedman Cândido da Fonseca Galvão, the self-proclaimed Obá II, African prince of Rio de Janeiro, fiercely defended the Conservatives in articles published in minor newspapers in that city. It is also worth noting that in the 1870s the activities of the capoeira gangs, or Maltas, such as the famous “Flor da Gente” (Flower of the People) from Glória Parish, were always willing to fight—in the broadest sense of the term—for that party’s interests. In Recife, pardo men organized through the Society of Mechanical and Liberal Arts sought political support from the leaders of the Conservative party in Pernambuco province.30

Going back to the pages of O grito nacional, we will see that, after accusing Paula Brito of betraying his color by becoming a Saquarema, the newspaper also sketched out a highly unflattering biography of the publisher. The aim of this long article, published in January 1850, was to contest a piece by Próspero Diniz published in A marmota da corte in December 1849 which was, according to the editor of O grito nacional, “most impertinent and insulting toward the noble and enlightened French Nation.”³¹ Paula Brito would go down in history as the “insinuator or advisor” of Prospero Diniz. That is why O grito nacional felt it necessary to disclose its version of the publisher’s past to all its readers:

Francisco de Paula Brito, it is rumored, went from being a bad tailor, working in the house of an old black female greengrocer, lived in Rua dos Barbonos to become a printer, where he learned and poorly the French language in the house of a Frenchman mister Planchér [sic], the first owner of the establishment and the newspaper Jornal do Comercio [sic]. Opening a small shop in Largo do Rocio, it is said that he set up a small print shop at the expense of several citizens, to print the proclamations that spread on April 3, 1832, and from then on he marched, always belonging to the liberal party, offering verses to all the members of that party, especially to the Great Andradas, who were removed from power soon after the Age of Majority: seeing that the wind blew bountifully toward the side of the party with which he then waged war, to general astonishment, (except ours) this political mountebank burnt the rotten incense, and the lowest and vilest flattery for the members of the ministry of forty-one, particularly Mr. Paulino José Soares de Souza! So, it went on; and aided by luck, with the HAPPY purchase of a mechanical press for 101,000,000 réis, soon afterwards spending a few thousand réis raised through the lotteries, and the income from the best tea and yerba mate, the best snuff and the best couplets to the catacombs of the dead, finally, with the hope of fifty million from the Provincial Assembly to set up a printing press, which publishes official acts; and so many other millions and privileges to extract castor oil etc.32

According to the editor, Paula Brito, who had become a printer because he was a bad tailor, was nothing but a “political mountebank” who had abandoned the Liberals when he saw that “the wind blew bountifully toward the side of the party with which he then waged war.” Effectively, attempting to decipher the editor of O grito nacional’s argument, we can see that his article bore witness to a time when Paula Brito was already a prominent printer and merchant in Rio de Janeiro. Therefore, he made a point of explaining to his readers that the publisher’s success could only be due to the patronage of the Conservative party and its leaders, such as the Viscount of Uruguai.

In a way, O grito nacional was right, particularly when it came to a grant that Paula Brito had expected to receive from the Provincial Assembly of Rio de Janeiro since 1848. In early June 1848, the publisher had applied to the Assembly for a loan in Provincial bonds totaling 50,000,000 réis. The newspaper O Brasil gave a detailed explanation of what Paula Brito intended to do with that enormous sum:

1. Set up a large-scale press, of an official nature, with modern improvements, thereby lowering the price of publications currently produced among us.

2. Create a daily newspaper with a fine format and clear printing in which he will publish FREE OF CHARGE acts of the government, as well as those of the Assembly; these, however, through agreements to be stipulated later.

3. Add to the establishment a lithographic press, book binding workshop, stationery, and bookshop, etc., all in the best possible taste, which is lacking in the province, etc.

4. Teach the art of printing to twenty young men from Rio de Janeiro Province, four of whom it will send, at its own expense, to learn stenography, to make them—stenographers of the Provincial Assembly.

5. That will have the right to print any and all works in order to standardize books, and other printed matter from tax offices, etc.

6. Allowing him to repay the amount requested to the province’s coffers within eleven to twelve years.33

The idea was to set up a modern press that could meet the needs of Rio de Janeiro’s provincial government. The key point is that Rio de Janeiro province had been a bastion of Conservatism since the administration of President Rodrigues Torres had ended in 1836. According to Ilmar Rohloff de Mattos, the extent of its sway went beyond the boundaries of the provincial government, as Rio de Janeiro became a laboratory “in which the Saquaremas tested measures and assessed actions they sought to extend to the general administration when implementing the decisions of the General-Government, always with the final aim of establishing order in the Empire.”³⁴ One of the fronts favored by successive Conservative administrations in Rio de Janeiro province, according to Ilmar Mattos’s key study, was public schools, as their leaders soon discovered the political effectiveness of education.

By taking education beyond the school system—which was also important to the Saquarema leadership—to include instructing the public through the consumption of publications and, consequently, ideas, Paula Brito was linked to the historical process Ilmar Mattos described. This went beyond being a voter and electoral officer ready to defend his party’s interests, or a poet whose Conservative muse was always willing to sing its leaders’ praises. Paula Brito was one of the citizens recruited by the Saquaremas to implement an ambitious plan to build the Imperial State while establishing themselves as the masters of that state. Ordinary citizens, such as men of letters, doctors, teachers, and, in our case, publishers, joined the Conservative cause.³⁵ However, that process was highly transactional. At least, this is what Paula Brito’s relations with the Viscount of Uruguai suggest, as well as the indignation of O grito nacional’s editor at the wind that “blew bountifully” in the publisher’s direction after his Conservative turn. The benefits could take the form of government grants like the one Paula Brito was attempting to obtain from the Provincial Assembly of Rio de Janeiro.

Despite O grito nacional’s criticism, the press hailed Paula Brito’s initiative. Two days after reporting on that matter first-hand, Justiniano José da Rocha returned to it in O Brasil. In another article, Paula Brito was described as “one of our most intelligent printers, most zealous about the progress of his art. . . . A well-known, highly admired citizen,” the owner of “one of the best presses in Rio,” equal to the foreign presses in that city. Da Rocha saw nothing but advantages in granting the loan to Paula Brito. According to the editor, the National Press was not just a burden on the public coffers but technically outdated, “one of the slowest of our major presses,” because, in his assessment, “the government is a terrible administrator of industrial firms.” In his view, the solution was what we now call private enterprise.36 Da Rocha also explained that the new business would be established on the other side of Guanabara Bay, in Niterói, the provincial capital. Furthermore, he gave a more detailed explanation of how the loan would be made through the concession and sale of bonds. According to the editor of O Brasil, the amount of the loan could be considered small compared with the cost of publishing the official gazette, which was roughly 40,000,000 réis.³⁷

The following month, the newspaper O americano enthusiastically announced that the commission appointed by the Provincial Assembly of Rio de Janeiro to deliberate on issuing bonds had approved the proposal submitted by Paula Brito, “our foremost printer,” with just one vote to the contrary. Respectfully, the newspaper criticized the recalcitrant deputy, reaffirming that the grant “could be in no way prejudicial to the financial interests of the Province.”³⁸ However, the publisher was not the only printer who had his eye on provincial bonds, as “the two tenders in which Mr. Paula Brito has bid should not embarrass us or make us hesitate about the subsequent confirmation of the Assembly.” In this regard, Paula Brito must have written a memorial reporting “his constant efforts . . . commitment and constant dedication to his work.” For these and other reasons, also according to O americano, public opinion clearly favored Paula Brito. However, it was up to the deputies to make the final decision.³⁹ In 1848, in addition to Paula Brito’s Impartial Press and the National Press, there were nineteen other printing establishments in Rio de Janeiro.⁴⁰ There is no concrete evidence of this, but the provincial government may have opened a prior tender for the granting of bonds, which made all other printers possible competitors.

Despite his credentials, the backing of public opinion, and close ties with Conservative politicians, all indications are that Paula Brito did not receive that loan in bonds from the Province of Rio de Janeiro. However, two years later, the publisher tackled a fresh project that resumed and expanded the plan devised in 1848. The idea was to establish one of the most ambitious publishing houses in the Empire—the Empresa Tipográfica Dous de Dezembro.