Eduardo Prado

File:Karl Ernst Papf - Eduardo Prado, 1901.JPG

Eduardo Prado (1901), portrait by Karl Ernst Papf

Eduardo Paulo da Silva Prado (27 February 1860 – 30 August 1901) was a Brazilian lawyer, journalist and writer, a founding member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and one of the most important analysts of Brazilian political life.

A staunch monarchist, he was a friend of the Baron of Rio Branco and collaborated on the edition of Le Brésil (1889), a work published on the occasion of the 1889 Paris Exposition, commemorating the centenary of the French Revolution. He became friends with the Portuguese writers Eça de Queiroz, Ramalho Ortigão and Oliveira Martins, and was, despite being 15 years younger, a close friend of the former.

Biography

File:9683D - Dr. Eduardo Prado - 01, Acervo do Museu Paulista da USP.jpg

Eduardo Prado in his student years (1879)

Eduardo Prado was born in São Paulo, the son of Martinho Prado and Veridiana Prado. From a traditional São Paulo family. He was involved in historical studies from an early age. He stood out in national history as one of Brazil's most notable political analysts. He was a founding member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, a friend of the Baron of Rio Branco and the Portuguese writer Eça de Queiroz. Noted for being one of the most refined and acclaimed personalities of his time, he graduated in Law from the traditional Faculty of São Paulo, class of 1881. At the time, he was already a regular contributor to the Correio Paulistano, run by his brother Caio Prado, where he wrote articles on literary criticism and international politics.

He served as an attaché in the Brazilian delegation in London during the Empire. He visited various European countries as well as Egypt. He made meticulous observations on these trips in his book Viagens, published in Paris in 1886.

With the coup d'état on November 15, 1889, he began to combat the actions of the Republican government in books and newspapers. At the invitation of his friend, the Baron of Rio Branco, Eduardo Prado wrote the articles "L'Art" and "Immigration" for the book Le Brésil en 1889, published on the occasion of the International Exhibition in Paris, which commemorated the centenary of the French Revolution.

Prado had direct involvement with monarchist conspiracies, as indicated by Saldanha da Gama's request that he represent him financially in Europe to raise funds for the Federalist Revolution. In addition, he fled to Europe in 1894 due to the consequences of his work The American Illusion in the turbulent context of Floriano Peixoto's dictatorship. Eduardo Prado also had to fled again in 1897 due to the series of persecutions of monarchists after the Canudos Revolt.

Still in Europe, at the invitation of Eça de Queiroz, he became a contributor to the Revista de Portugal, writing the column "Acontecimentos do Brasil" under the pseudonym Frederico de S. These columns were later collected in a book entitled Fastos da Ditadura Militar no Brasil. Eduardo also collaborated on the book A Década Republicana (The Republican Decade), which featured the most illustrious Brazilian monarchists of the time.

His friendship with Eça de Queiroz led scholars to identify the figure of Eduardo Prado as the model for Jacinto, the famous main character of the 1901 novel The City and the Mountains: the millionaire bored with the comforts of civilization who ends his days in the quiet of the Portuguese mountains of Tormes.

Prado was also involved in activities aimed at forming a monarchist nucleus in São Paulo, which resulted in the creation of the Monarchist Party of São Paulo on November 15, 1895. To establish the party, Prado organized a banquet on October 15, which brought together various monarchist factions, and acquired the newspaper O Comércio de São Paulo with the intention of turning it into the monarchist house organ, counting on the advice of Afonso Arinos, Oliveira Lima and Couto de Magalhães Sobrinho. The Monarchist Party was formed by prominent figures present at the banquet, such as Prado and João Mendes, who would make São Paulo the main center of the anti-republican reaction.

Eduardo Prado vigorously fought the influence of the United States in Latin America and launched the work The American Illusion, which would become the first book to be censored in Brazil's republican history. The first edition of this work, dated 1895, was not only banned by Brazil's republican government, but also criminalized and seized due to its critical content.

File:União Nacional Restauradora.svg

Emblem of the National Restoration Union (UNR)

He lived in Paris, first in Casimir-Périer Street and then in Rivoli Street, and in the last years of his life he lived in Brejão Farm, in the interior of São Paulo. In São Paulo, he became a member of the Historic and Geographic Institute, where he published the brochure Conferência (Conference) on the life and work of Father Anchieta.

When a group of Rio de Janeiro writers and intellectuals led by Machado de Assis, Joaquim Nabuco and Rodrigo Otávio founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters, Eduardo Prado was invited to join the institution. Eduardo was present at the founding meeting of the ABL, where, in 1897, he took up chair number 40, whose patron was the Baron of Rio Branco. In 1900, Prado published his last work, III Centenário de Anchieta, a biography of the famous Jesuit.

Eduardo Prado died on August 30, 1901, in São Paulo, a victim of yellow fever, leaving no children.

After his death, appeared the book Coletâneas, containing articles published by Prado in the Rio de Janeiro press shortly after his return to Brazil.

Eduardo Prado is the patron of the National Restoration Union, a nationalist and dissident monarchist movement.

See also

• Conservatism in Brazil

Works

The Institutional Historical Archive Service of the House of Rui Barbosa Foundation (FCRB) holds Eduardo Prado's personal papers. The collection was donated to the FCRB in 1991 and consists of 01 linear meter of textual documents, all of which have been digitized and made available online in the Eduardo Prado Collection. It is divided into the following series: Companhia Paulista (CEP CP), Correspondência Geral (CEP CR), Revolução Federalista (CEP RF), Documentos Pessoais (CEP DP), Estudos Históricos (CEP EH) and Diversos (CEP D).

Major publications

• Viagens (1886–1902)
• Os fastos da ditadura militar no Brasil (1890)
• Anulação das liberdades públicas (1892)
• A ilusão americana (1893)
• III centenário de Anchieta (1900)
• Coletâneas (1904–1906)

References

Dantas Mota, Lourenço (1999). Um Banquete no Trópico. São Paulo: Editora Senac.

D'Avila, Luiz Felipe (2004). Dona Veridiana: A Trajetória de Uma Dinastia Paulista. São Paulo, SP : A Girafa Editora.

Dimas, Antonio (2017). "Americanos por Brasileiros no Fim do século XIX," Revista USP, No. 112, pp. 39–54.

Eça de Queiroz (1951). "Eduardo Prado." In: Notas Contemporâneas. Porto: Lello & Irmão, pp. 475–96.

Giarola, Flávio Raimundo (2018). "O Antiamericanismo entre os Monarquistas como Forma de Combate à República (1889-1917)," REVES, Vol. I, No. 3, pp. 459–70.

Hahner, June Edith (1969). Civilian-military Relations in Brazil, 1889-1898. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Janotti, Maria de Lourdes Mônaco (1986). Os Subversivos da República. São Paulo: Brasiliense.

Janotti, Maria de Lourdes Mônaco (1991). "The Monarchist Response to the Beginnings of the Brazilian Republic," The Americas, Vol. XLVIII, No. 2, pp. 223–43.

Levi, Darrell E. (1987). The Prados of São Paulo, Brazil: An Elite Family and Social Change, 1840-1930. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press.

Levine, Robert M. (1992). Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1893–1897. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Machado de Assis (1959). "Eduardo Prado." In: Obras Completas de Machado de Assis, Vol. 29. Crítica Literária. São Paulo: Editôra Mérito, pp. 260–63.

Matos, A. Campos (2014). Eça de Queiroz: Uma Biografia. Cotia/Campinas: Ateliê Editorial/UNICAMP.

Merquior, José Guilherme (1979). De Anchieta a Euclides: Breve História da Literatura Brasileira. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria José Olympio.

Mota Filho, Cândido (1967). A Vida de Eduardo Prado. São Paulo: José Olympio.

Newcomb, Robert Patrick (2019). "‘Across the Waves’: The Luso-Brazilian Republic of Letters at the Fin de Siècle." In: Cecilia Enjuto-Rangel, ed., Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 148–56.

Pagano, Sebastião (1960). Eduardo Prado e Sua Época. São Paulo: O Cetro.

Preuss, Ori (2011). Bridging the Island: Brazilians’ Views of Spanish America and Themselves, 1865–1912. Madrid: Iberoamericana.

Preuss, Ori (2012). "Brazil into Latin America: The Demise of Slavery and Monarchy as Transnational Events," Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. XLIX, No. 1, pp. 96–126.

Rezende, José Severiano de (1901). Eduardo Prado: Páginas de Crítica e Polêmica. São Paulo: N. Falcone & C. Editores.

Saba, Roberto (2021). "Into the Coffee Kingdom." In: American Mirror: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Emancipation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 131–70.

Skidmore, Thomas E. (1975). "Eduardo Prado: A Conservative Nationalist Critic of the Early Brazilian Republic, 1889-1901," Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. XII, No. 2, pp. 149–61.

Skidmore, Thomas E. (1986). "Brazil's American Illusion: From Dom Pedro II to the Coup of 1964," Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, pp. 71–84.

External links

• Eduardo Prado
• O Anti-revolucionário
• Works by Eduardo Prado at Internet Archive
• Works by Eduardo Prado at Federal Senate

Academic offices
Patron: Viscount of Rio Branco	1st Academic of the 40th chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters 1897–1901	Succeeded by Afonso Arinos