São Paulo was the vital centre of Brazilian economic, political, and social life at the beginning of the century. Spread over a plain eight hundred metres above sea level, the city had grown from about fifty thousand inhabitants in 1880 to over three hundred and fifty thousand in 1910.40 A wide, slow-moving river, the Tietê, flows along one side of it and a mountain range, the Serra da Cantareira, nourishes it with its waters. The houses are all one storey high, built very close together. However, the streets have already been widened into tree-lined avenues and the colonial houses are being replaced by villas, modern constructions and wide avenues. It seems like a European city in the tropics, destined for a great future.
In a letter from São Paulo, dated July 1911, a writer who hides under the pseudonym of “italicus” describes it as a city that lives in the preceding era as it prepares for its full prosperity.41
“São Paulo grew in twenty years with North American rapidity. It was a city that was famous almost exclusively for its Law University. The students were its whole life and everything had the slightly solemn and slightly calm rhythm of a provincial town. (…)
Now it is a city that is trembling and resounding with work. Big businesses and great industries have been established in just a few months; the Banks are doing tremendous business; journalism, which has been transformed in five years, competes with that of Europe.”42
A fever of work and initiative devours the city, while the movement of electric trams, inaugurated in 1901, by 1910 reaches the unbelievable number of thirty million passengers. “The city bustles with feverish movement. The immense populace undulates like a river. And, sullying one’s view of the blue sky, are the towering chimneys spewing smoke.”43
The reasons for this extraordinary growth are, as Stefan Zweig remarks, the same geopolitical and climatic causes that had led Nobrega, four hundred years earlier, to choose this place as the one most suited for a rapid expansion throughout Brazil.44 From as early as the seventeenth century, the Paulistas demonstrated more energy and ability than other Brazilians. “Real bearers of the national energy, the Paulistas conquered and discovered the country, semper novarum rerum cupidi (always desirous of new things); and this desire for risk, progress and expansion was carried over, in subsequent centuries, to commerce and industry.”45
São Paulo, the city of the fazendeiros (farmers), “people who were prouder of the farm than the city; and when they thought of a city, it was one in Europe, strictly speaking in Paris”,46 has the look and soul of a great city, where European cultures and ways of life come together. The underlying note is still that of Portuguese goodness and universality. This allows the fusion and amalgamation of so many different elements. If it is mostly Italian emigrants,47 who are at the head of the economic growth, French is the culture, courtesy and social life.48
Along 15 de Novembro Street, the most elegant street of the so-called Triangle, we find shops with unmistakable names: Au Printemps, Au Louvre, Au Palais Royal. The bookshop, Garraux, one of the meeting points of elegant São Paulo, does not only import books from Europe, but also French champagne, wine from the Rhine Valley, Swiss chocolate, while the most aristocratic area of the city is called Champs Elysées.49
Georges Clemenceau notes this aspect of his journey in Latin America in 1911:
“The city of São Paulo is so curiously French in some of its aspects that not once during a whole week did I have the sensation of being in a foreign country (…) São Paulo society (…) has a dual tendency: While it resolutely orients itself by the French spirit, it develops in parallel all the aspects of Brazilian individuality that determine its character. Be sure that the Paulista is Paulista to the depth of his soul, whether he is in Brazil, France, or anywhere else. This said, tell me if there ever was a Frenchman with more courteous manners, more agreeable conversation, and more aristocratic delicacy of spirit in the figure of a businessman who is prudent yet audacious, and who knows how to value coffee”.50
Vendean in origin and character, but a Protestant and a republican, Clemenceau saw the paradoxes of his soul and the contradictions of the Belle Epoque reflected in Brazil: the aristocratic spirit and naïve positivism, trust in the “immortal principles” of the French Revolution and nostalgia for the civilization and manners of the Ancien Régime.
“In that ambience—comprised of splendour and ceremony, tonified by the noble and joyful French note—the age-old aroma of Christian morality remained alive as something of primary importance in social life. This was a legacy left us by Portugal, a country with which Brazil had formed a united kingdom, not long since. Thus, marked by such characteristics, the aristocracy of São Paulo harmonized some of its typically fundamental elements: Faith, social life and selection.”51
The 1900s began in São Paulo with a social event that sealed the alliance between the two dynasties that symbolized the economic and social élite of the city at the end of the century: the marriage of the beautiful Eglantina, daughter of Count Antônio Alvares Penteado with the young Antônio Prado Jr., son of Counsillor Antônio Prado, mayor in the ten golden years of São Paulo, between 1898 and 1908.
Less worldly and much more private was another marriage that took place a few years later. This marriage united two of the old families of Brazil: that of João Paulo Corrêa de Oliveira and Lucilia Ribeiro dos Santos, and took place on 15 July 1906 in the chapel of the Episcopal Seminary of São Paulo by Mgr Francisco de Paula Rodrigues.52
The family was soon blessed with two children, Rosée and Plinio, whom the mother offered to God before they were born.53
Notes:
35. in Rangel de Castro, Quelques aspects de la civilisation brésilienne, p. 29.
36. Guglielmo Ferrero tells of having visited in Rio de Janeiro, on Benjamin Constant Street, a “temple of mankind” where one discusses “pleasantly about many things with the high priest, Mr Teixeira Mendes”. Ferrero, Fra i due mondi, (Milan, Fratelli Treves Editori, 1913), p. 187.
37. Freyre, Ordem e Progresso, 3rd edn., 2 vols., (Rio de Janeiro, Livraria José Olympio Editora, 1974), vol. I, p. 515, and more in general, Ronald M. Schneider, “Order and Progress.” A Political History of Brazil, Boulder (Colorado), Westview Press, 1991.
38. The successive Heads of State were: Prudente de Morais (1894-98), Campos Sales (1898-1902), Rodrigues Alves (1902-06), Afonso Pena (1906-09), Nilo Peçanha (1909-10), Hermes da Fonseca (1910-14), while Brazilian foreign policy was continuously directed during this period by the Baron of Rio Branco (1845-1912).
39. “It was ‘the golden period’of the First Republic, if we are to give names to different epochs as did the historians of old….” Plinio Doyle, Brasil 1900-1910, (Rio de Janeiro, Biblioteca Nacional, 1980), vol. I, p. 14. At the dawn of the century, Brazil had 17,318,556 inhabitants, over 60 percent of whom lived in the rural areas.
40. Ibid, p. 180.
41. Italicus, “Dove vive un milione di Italiani. Lo stato di São Paulo in Brasile”, L’Illustrazione italiana, no. 34, 20 August 1911, pp. 177-200. The magazine dedicates a large article to the State of São Paulo, a third of its population being Italian. The Italians in 1911 were about one million, six hundred thousand of whom worked in the fazendas or other farming enterprises, one hundred and thirty thousand lived in the capital, the others lived in the hinterland towns of the State (p. 181).
42. Ibid.
43. Batista Cepelos, O fundador de S. Paulo, in Werneck, Antologia Brasileira, p. 326.
44. S. Zweig, Brazil, pp. 212-13.
45. Ibid, p. 213.
46. E. Silva Bruno, História e Tradições da Cidade de São Paulo, vol. III, p. 1315.
47. This mass immigration coincided with the end of slavery. The vast majority of the Italian immigrants who arrived in Brazil settled in São Paulo. Almost all the workers of the developing Paulista industry crowded above all into the area of the Brás, whose main street was Caetano Pinto. In 1881 the twenty-seven-year-old Francesco Matarazzo, accompanied by his wife Filomena and two children, arrived in Brazil. In 1910, he owned the largest industrial group of South America, the Indústrias Reunidas F. Matarazzo. Vincenzo Grossi, Storia della colonizzazione europea nel Brasile e della emigrazione italiana nello Stato di São Paulo, Milan, Società Editrice Dante Alighieri, 1914; Angelo Trento, Là dov’è la raccolta del caffé. L’emigrazione italiana in Brasile, 1875-1940, Padua, Antenore, 1984; A presença italiana no Brasil, edited by Rovílio Costa and Luis Alberto de Boni, It. edn. edited by A. Trento, Turin, Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1991.
48. Count of Gobineau relates a conversation with the Emperor who asked him: “So what do you think of the Brazilians?” He replied: “Well, a Brazilian is a man who passionately desires to live in Paris” (Letter to Mme de Gobineau of 7 June 1869, in GEORGES RAEDERS, Le comte de Gobineau au Brésil, (Paris, Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1934), p. 53. “It seems that there are almost no Brazilians who do not speak French” observes in amazement Ina von Binzer, the German governess of the Prado family. Os Meus Romanos. Alegrias e Tristezas de uma educadora alemã no Brasil, (São Paulo, Editora Paz e Terra, 1991), p. 18.
49. Paulo Cursino de Moura, São Paulo de outrora, (Belo Horizonte, Editora Itatiaia Limitada, 1980), p. 19.
50. Georges Clemenceau, Notes de Voyage dans l’Amérique du Sud, (Paris, Utz, 1991 (1911), pp. 231-2. In a volume by Baron d’Anthouard that appeared in that same 1911, under the title Le progrès brésilien. La participation de la France (Paris, Plon- Nourrit, 1911), the author observes that “Brazil (…) adheres with its innermost being to the movement of ideas in France” (ibid, p. 41). “The Brazilian feels an unequalled powerful attraction to French culture, he follows our intellectual movement with the liveliest sympathy; he reads and knows all our authors; he is also sensitive to our artistic production. Finally, France is the country of all his dreams, the country of wellbeing and pleasure, of elegance and luxury, of novelties and great discoveries, of the wise, of artists, of philosophers” (ibid, p. 375).
51. J. S. Clá Dias, Dona Lucilia, vol. I, p. 85. The Ribeiro dos Santos are remembered among the families that were noticed at the parties of the Paulista aristocracy. “At these ceremonies, the ambience is one of family intimacy even though richly ornamented uniforms, grand crosses, diamonds and jewels are paraded”. Wanderley Pinho, Salões e Damas do Segundo Reinado, 4th edn., (São Paulo, Livraria Martins, 1942), p. 112.
52. J. S. Clá Dias, Dona Lucilia, vol. III, pp. 209-10. Among those present at the marriage were Count Antônio Alvares Penteado with his wife Anna Paulina Lacerda; Manoel Antonio Duarte de Azevedo (1831-1912), President of the Senate and of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de São Paulo; the historian Affonso d’Escragnolle Taunay (1875-1958), future President of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico and historian of the Bandeiras. Mgr Francisco da Paula Rodrigues born on 3 July 1847 and who died on 21 June 1915 was one of the outstanding figures of Paulista religious life between the two centuries. Canon of the Cathedral of São Paulo (1874), archdeacon (1878), he was then Vicar-General of the diocese, which he governed ad interim after the death of Bishop José de Camargo Barros (1906).
53. J. S. Clá Dias, Dona Lucilia, vol. II, p. 67. Plinio’s sister, Rosenda Corrêa de Oliveira, called Rosée, born on 6 July 1907 and who died in 1993, married a farmer from Minas, Antônio Castro Magalhães.