Abstract

FERRARO, Alceu Ravanello. Brasil: liberalismo, café, escola e voto (1878-1881). Educ. Rev. [online]. 2010, vol.26, n.03, pp.219-248. ISSN 0102-4698.

The paper shows how, in an agrarian country like Brazil, dominated by large land owners and slave holders, in the middle of the so-called coffee cycle, with a pre dominantly rural population that had absolutely no access to school education, the Brazilian elites, at that time massively represented by liberals at the Chamber of Deputies, managed to unite through the Saraiva Act (1881), in a partnership that lasted more than one century, two things apparently incompatible from a liberal perspective: the direct vote and the exclusion of the great mass of the people, viz, the illiterate (80% of the population), from the right to vote. It also shows the different path adopted in Argentina through the Law of Common Education (1884). It concludes by recalling a statement by José Bonifácio, the Young: according to him, because of the exclusion of the illiterate from the right to vote, the liberal draft bill on direct election was not the banner of reform, but the reform of the (liberal&) banner.

Keywords : Brazil; Liberalism; Illiteracy; Vote; Social Memory.

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