THE LIFE AND career of Francisco de Paula Brito allow us to grasp the historical specificity of the publisher’s emergence in Rio de Janeiro at a time when similar entrepreneurs of printed cultural goods were also emerging in different Western cities, each in response to specific and varied stimuli. In the case of Brazil, two factors came together to galvanize that process. The first, given the increasing internationalization of the publishing market in the 1840s, was the need to compete with the French translations that were avidly consumed in Rio de Janeiro in different formats. The second was the political alliances that gave access to the forms of financing introduced by the Imperial government, ranging from privileges to lottery money. In this regard, it is important to stress that, in Brazil, the emergence of the publisher coincided with the formation of the nation state, which, in effect, makes this a more complex matter.
Robert Darnton’s studies have pointed to the need to think about (and write) a history of books that goes beyond books. This is done through what he calls a “social and cultural history of communication by print” whose “purpose is to understand how ideas were transmitted through print and how exposure to the printed word affected the thought and behavior of mankind during the last five hundred years.” Publishers played a key role in this process, and for that reason, an inquiry into the activities of those agents would “carry the history of books deep into the territory of social, economic, and political history, to their mutual benefit.”1
One of the most influential studies on the origins of the Brazilian nation state is Ilmar Rohloff de Mattos’s Tempo Saquarema. In it, the historian describes how the imperial state was built alongside the formation of the seigneurial class, which in turn, in a pendular motion, forged itself and the nation it led. Consisting of a small group of politicians and landowners and slaves in the province of Rio de Janeiro, the Saquarema leadership, as the historian called them, made “order” and “civilization” the watchwords of its ambitious project. However, what was meant by “order” was, above all, controlling the population, maintaining the monarchy and the vast national territory, political and economic centralization in the city of Rio de Janeiro, the perpetuation of the latifundia and slave labor, as well as the monopoly on violence against the free and poor masses. “Civilization,” in turn, was viewed as the instrument for building a “good society,” which was ultimately characterized by the means of transforming a coffee grower and buyer of smuggled Africans into a member of the imperial polis—that is, a worthy participant in the State and the class that was being formed. To achieve this aim, it was necessary for the Saquarema leadership to go beyond planters, ministers, and senators, encompassing other social strata that also accepted and spread the principles of order and civilization.2
Francisco de Paula Brito’s unconditional adherence to the core of Saquaremas, who became indistinguishable from the leadership of the Conservative party, exemplifies the effectiveness of that group. Considering that the moral and intellectual formation of the “good society” was largely influenced by what it read, the recruitment of a book publisher by the seigneurial class that was forging itself and the imperial state was vital for the maintenance and reproduction of that class. Francisco de Paula Brito had himself become a Saquarema leader, intent on recruiting novelists and journalists who would ultimately serve the same purpose. Therefore, if both expressions did not essentially share similar means and almost identical ends, we can replace Ilmar Mattos’s “policy of public education” in the following extract with a “policy of publishing activity”:
The close relationship between the policy of public education and the building of the imperial state was a facet of the constitution of the seigneurial class, of the mechanisms it sought to forge and set in motion in order to carry out a necessary expansion. Thus, . . . the education of the people consisted, first and foremost, of distinguishing each of the future citizens from the mass of slaves and rescuing them from barbarism.3
Considered “vehicles of civilization,” novels, plays, and literary and scientific journals and magazines were believed to help maintain order through “the beliefs and ideas” they transmitted. However, that “order” was primarily based on the barbarous system of slavery. Therefore, a male or female reader who was entertained or enlightened by perusing the cultural section of a newspaper like Marmota fluminense may not have cared that a page replete with entertainment as well as moral and material progress could have been printed by a slave, or that an enslaved beater might have spread ink on the form used in printing.
According to Machado de Assis, the publisher who came to dominate the market in Rio de Janeiro after Paula Brito’s death was a Frenchman, Baptiste-Louis Garnier. Writing as a columnist of the Diário do Rio de Janeiro in 1865, the novelist stressed the “vast relations” Garnier had established outside the country, implicitly referring to his brothers Auguste and Hippolyte, who were booksellers and publishers based in Paris.4 However, the modes of reproduction of this policy on publishing activity in the Empire, which served both to consolidate the Brazilian nation state and disseminate a specific project of “civilization and order,” are described in a document found in the papers of the Marquess of Olinda, currently housed in the Brazilian Historical and Geographic Institute:
Batista Luís Garnier, bookseller-publisher, requested a decoration two years ago; the application has been found in the Office of the Ministry of Empire ever since.
The petitioner has been established in the Imperial Capital for more than twenty years, having been the publisher of most of the scientific, literary, and elementary school books extant in this country.
There are many Brazilian authors whose works would not have seen the light of day if it were not for the help that that publisher gave them by purchasing the publishing rights and providing them with the capital for their publication.
In addition to many authors of several works and compendia for public education, those who have found in the petitioner effective help in producing their publications include, among others, senior officials of the state.
The petitioner has rendered a real service by reprinting the Classics of Portuguese Literature, some of which were very difficult to find in the market.
The History of the Founding of the Brazilian Empire, by Councilor João Manuel Pereira da Silva, the works of the Viscount of Uruguai, and many others, which would take too long to mention, were published by the petitioner.
Other bookseller-publishers have already received honors equal to that to which he aspires; and therefore, we ask Your Excellency the Marquess of Olinda to deign to answer his plea.5
Although it is embedded in the grammar peculiar to such requests, this plea, which may have been read by the Marquess of Olinda when he was the head of the Cabinet of May 12, 1865, first sought to convince him that Garnier was worthy of the decoration because of the services he had rendered to public education in Brazil. From the outset, however, it touched on a point considered to be of vital importance by the administration of the imperial state. In addition to academic compendia and schoolbooks, Garnier was also reminding the minister that he had published a work by one of the most renowned Conservative historians, Pereira da Silva, as well as works by the Viscount of Uruguai, Paulino José Soares de Souza. Given that “other bookseller-publishers [had] already received honors equal to that to which he aspires,” it was only fair for Baptiste-Louis Garnier’s services to receive the same recognition.
In 1867, at a time when Brazilian citizens were receiving similar imperial decorations for freeing their slaves and handing them over to the army to fight in the war against Paraguay, “the French subject Baptiste Louis Garnier” finally became a Knight of the Order of the Rose “in recognition of the services he has provided to the advancement of literature and the press.”6