The Dia do Fico: the day Prince Pedro refused to leave Brazil, 9 January 1822

At ten in the morning of Wednesday 9 January 1822, the procurador of Rio de Janeiro's municipal council, the Senado da Câmara, came to the palace on the city's waterfront square. The council's old and new members had met together, he told Prince Regent Pedro, and asked for an audience. Pedro, 23 years old and heir to the throne of Portugal, said he would receive them at noon.2 sources2 sources

The councillors set out at eleven, with the city's notables and the masters of its trades. They carried petitions asking the prince to put off the journey to Lisbon that Portugal's new parliament, the Cortes, had ordered. A large crowd filled the square outside.2 sources2 sources

In the audience hall the council's president, the judge José Clemente Pereira, read an address. Its first sentence set the tone.1 source1 source

A colonel spoke for the province of Rio Grande do Sul, and a letter from the councils of two nearby towns, Santo António de Sá and Magé, was handed over. Then Pedro answered. In the record the council drew up that day he said: “As it is for the good of all and the general happiness of the Nation, I am ready: tell the people that I am staying.” Fico, “I stay”, gave the day its name.2 sources2 sources

From a window he told the crowd: “Now I have only to recommend union and tranquillity to you.” Clemente Pereira led the cheers, in this order: for religion, the constitution, the Cortes, the constitutional king, the constitutional prince and the union of Portugal and Brazil. The crowd cheered the assembly whose orders the prince had just declined to obey.1 source1 source

Pedro had grown up in Brazil. He was born at Queluz, outside Lisbon, on 12 October 1798, and was nine when the royal family sailed for Rio as French troops invaded Portugal in November 1807, a story Lisboeta tells in a separate article. From March 1808 Rio was the seat of the monarchy, and Prince Regent João built there the ministries, courts and offices of a state.2 sources2 sources

On 16 December 1815 a royal law raised Brazil from a state to a kingdom, joined to Portugal and the Algarve in a United Kingdom. The Brazilian Câmara dos Deputados' bicentenary exhibition calls this Brazil's legal independence, because from then on the two kingdoms were equals under one crown.2 sources2 sources

On 24 August 1820 a liberal revolution broke out in Porto, and Lisbon followed on 15 September. The revolutionaries summoned Cortes to write a constitution and asked the king to come home. In Rio the Portuguese troops of the Divisão Auxiliadora forced João VI to swear in advance to that constitution on 26 February 1821.2 sources2 sources

On 22 April 1821 João VI made Pedro regent of Brazil, with wide powers, and on 26 April he sailed. He landed in Lisbon on 4 July and swore the constitution at once. Pedro stayed in Rio with his wife, the Austrian archduchess Leopoldina, whom he had married in 1817. Her part in his decision is told in Lisboeta's article on her death in 1826; the Câmara exhibition credits her with seeing, before her husband did, that the Bragança dynasty could keep Brazil only if Pedro led the resistance to Lisbon.3 sources3 sources

Brazil elected deputies to the Cortes in 1821, in its first general elections. They reached Lisbon slowly. The first, from Pernambuco, arrived on 29 August 1821, and the decrees on Brazil of September 1821 were voted when few Brazilian deputies had arrived. Historians disagree on how many were elected, but several agree that 46 sat.3 sources3 sources

On 29 September 1821 the Cortes decreed a new government for the Brazilian provinces. Each would be run by an elected provisional junta answering to Lisbon, alongside a governor of arms, the military commander, who was independent of the junta and answerable to the government in Lisbon and to the Cortes. With Rio reduced to one province among many, a second decree that day judged the prince's stay there “not only unnecessary but even unbecoming”. He was to return as soon as possible and then travel incognito in Spain, France and England, escorted by men of “enlightenment, virtue and devotion to the constitutional system”. The king signed both on 1 October.4 sources4 sources

The motion to take Pedro out of Brazil, proposed on 20 September by the deputy Francisco Soares Franco, passed unanimously; the deputies of Pernambuco and Rio already seated did not object. On what should happen next, 53 deputies voted for the tour of instruction and 46 for simply bringing him back to Portugal.1 source1 source

The brig Infante D. Sebastião brought the decrees into Rio at three in the afternoon of 9 December 1821, and the Gazeta printed them in an extraordinary issue on the 11th. Pedro's first letter to his father promised to carry out the order to leave “without delay” once a junta was elected. Four days later he was reporting what people were saying in the streets.1 source1 source

The law on the tribunals came later still. Voted on 11 January 1822 and signed on the 13th, it abolished the courts and boards set up in Rio since 1808 and reduced its supreme court, the Casa da Suplicação, to a provincial appeal court. Rio knew it was coming: Clemente Pereira's address complained of the motion, and São Paulo's council cited the news of it.3 sources3 sources

Opposition organised within days. On 15 December, in the convent of Santo António, Friar Francisco de Sampaio drafted a petition for Rio after meetings of a group known as the Clube da Resistência. According to the historian Lúcia Bastos Pereira das Neves, more than 8,000 people signed it within a few days.1 source1 source

Clemente Pereira did not think Rio should act alone while a strong Portuguese force was quartered in the city, and asked for the support of the provisional governments of São Paulo and Minas Gerais. Rio's petition took the form of a manifesto of the People of Rio de Janeiro, dated 29 December 1821, and its most quoted line looked across the Atlantic.2 sources2 sources

São Paulo was blunter. Its provisional government, whose signatories included its president João Carlos Augusto de Oeynhausen and José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, wrote to Pedro on 24 December. The decrees, it said, would leave Brazil “in miserable orphanhood”, and if he obeyed them he would answer before heaven for “the river of blood” that would flow. A courier put the letter into Pedro's hands at eight in the evening of 1 January, and with his consent the Gazeta printed it on 8 January.2 sources2 sources

On 31 December São Paulo's municipal council named three men to carry its plea to Rio: José Bonifácio, Colonel António Leite Pereira da Gama Lobo and Marshal José Arouche de Toledo Rendon. Paulistas, the council wrote, would rather die than be enslaved.1 source1 source

Minas Gerais moved more slowly. José Teixeira da Fonseca Vasconcelos, vice-president of its provisional junta, left for Rio on 5 January, but the Minas deputation addressed Pedro only on 15 February, and historians still debate how far it spoke for the junta.1 source1 source

In Rio the ministers wanted no part in the decision. On 7 and 8 January they all asked to resign and were excused from the ceremony. On the 8th the council announced it would receive the petitions the next day and asked people to keep calm and to raise no cries or cheers of any kind, while a printed notice told anyone who wished to sign to go that day to number 137, Rua da Ajuda. An unconfirmed tradition has Clemente Pereira sounding Pedro out in the royal chapel on Christmas Eve and hearing that he would stay.2 sources2 sources

Within two days Rio had read two different answers. The first notice, printed on 9 January over the signature of the council's clerk, José Martins Rocha, was careful. Pedro, “convinced that the presence of my person in Brazil is in the interest of the whole Portuguese Nation, and knowing that the will of some provinces requires it”, would “delay my departure until the Cortes and my August Father and Lord deliberate on this matter with full knowledge of the circumstances”.1 source1 source

On 10 January Clemente Pereira signed a second notice. The council, it said, had published the prince's answer “with a notable alteration of words”, and the original words were the ones now famous. The error was not deliberate, the notice pleaded, but “born solely of the transport of joy that seized everyone who was in the audience hall”. Confusingly, it added that all who had accompanied the council agreed the notice “just published” gave the prince's own words “with some small difference”. The newspaper A Malagueta told of everyone's astonishment when the Diário of the 11th printed the answer “in words different from those of the day before”.2 sources2 sources

Historians interviewed by DW for the bicentenary in 2022 called the famous phrase probably a later invention. It cannot have been invented decades later: it is in Pedro's own letter to his father, dated that day, and in the certified copy of the council's record, both printed in Lisbon in 1822. But the cautious notice came first. The biographer Paulo Rezzutti told DW that the cautious wording is the true one, the version recorded in the council's book, although the certified copy of that book's entry carries the famous phrase. Which words Pedro actually spoke cannot now be proved.2 sources2 sources

In substance the two versions agree. Either way Pedro would stay until Lisbon reconsidered, and on 17 January his government told the provinces simply that he had decided to “suspend his departure for Portugal”.2 sources2 sources

The decision set Pedro against the Divisão Auxiliadora, the Portuguese division in Rio under Lieutenant General Jorge de Avilez Zuzarte de Sousa Tavares. Its regiments had fought the French in the Peninsular War. It had forced João VI's oath in February 1821, and on 5 June 1821 it had made Pedro swear to the Bases and send his chief minister, the Count of Arcos, to Portugal.3 sources3 sources

Pedro's account, sent to his father on 23 January, runs like this. At four in the afternoon of 11 January Avilez went to the barracks of the 11th and 15th battalions and told the men, falsely, that he had been relieved of his command. That night, while Pedro was at the theatre, soldiers went through the streets breaking windows and knocking out the celebration lamps with sticks. The two battalions and the artillery took up arms; the 3rd battalion of caçadores, light infantry, stayed in barracks on Pedro's order.1 source1 source

Avilez told it differently. In a manifesto of 14 January he wrote that news of his dismissal made the division fear it would be disarmed and shipped off by force, as Portuguese troops in Pernambuco had been. On the night of the 11th, he wrote, he found the local troops already armed and in position, and had his own battalions take up arms “to prevent all disorder”. Then, he complained, “the rabble” hurled insults at them.1 source1 source

By dawn on the 12th the Campo de Santana, a large square inland, had become an armed camp of loyal regiments, militia and townspeople; Avilez reported armed friars and priests among them. The division held the Morro do Castelo, the hill above the old city.3 sources3 sources

How many gathered is disputed. The historian Adriana Barreto de Souza gives 8,000 to 10,000 men, but a 1922 estimate she cites put Rio's whole garrison, Avilez's men included, at about 3,000, so most of the rest were militia and civilians, and she allows that the figures may be exaggerated. The Câmara dos Deputados' bicentenary exhibition speaks of several hundred armed civilians beside the loyal regiments.2 sources2 sources

Nobody fired. On the afternoon of the 12th, after Pedro sent an officer to each side, the division agreed to cross the bay to Praia Grande, today's Niterói, and wait there for the troops coming from Portugal to relieve it. Pedro dismissed Avilez as governor of arms and that evening asked São Paulo and Minas Gerais to send armed men.2 sources2 sources

At Praia Grande the division refused to embark. Pedro set a deadline of 5 February, threatened to cut off its pay, food and water, and placed the frigate União and gunboats in the bay. “They will embark, or they will die,” he wrote to his father on 2 February. The division sailed for Portugal on 15 February 1822.2 sources2 sources

In the same letter of 23 January Pedro reported a new ministry, with José Bonifácio in charge of the Kingdom and Foreign Affairs. On 21 January Bonifácio ordered that no law arriving from Portugal be sent to any office until the prince had judged it suited to Brazil. On 4 May 1822 he went further: no decree of the Cortes would be carried out without the prince's “Cumpra-se”, “let it be done”.2 sources2 sources

On 16 February Pedro created a council of procurators-general of the provinces, the “centre of union” the petitions had asked for; the Minas deputation had requested it the day before. In March and April he rode to Minas Gerais, whose junta had been defying Rio, and had a new one elected. On 13 May he took the title of Perpetual Defender of Brazil, and on 3 June he called a Brazilian constituent assembly.4 sources4 sources

In Lisbon, São Paulo's letter was read in the Cortes in March 1822 and deputies called it treason. On 23 July the Cortes allowed Pedro to stay in Rio to govern the southern provinces, under the king and the Cortes, annulled his council of procurators and ordered São Paulo's junta held to account. On 7 September 1822, by the Ipiranga stream near São Paulo, Pedro proclaimed Brazil independent. He was acclaimed emperor on 12 October and crowned on 1 December.2 sources2 sources

For Portugal the Fico was the point at which its liberal revolution began to lose Brazil. Most deputies in Lisbon wanted one nation run from Lisbon on both sides of the Atlantic. The petitions of December 1821 asked instead for a centre of government in Rio under the same king, and threatened independence in order to avoid it. Eight months later the United Kingdom of 1815 had split.2 sources2 sources

Brazilian historians now read the day less as the first step to independence than as a bid for autonomy inside the Portuguese monarchy. Marcelo Cheche Galves of the State University of Maranhão argues that the heroic version was built over the nineteenth century and part of the twentieth, as part of an effort to “invent the Brazilian nation”.2 sources2 sources

The man who asked Pedro to stay was Portuguese by birth. José Clemente Pereira was born at Trancoso in 1787 and came to Brazil in 1815. He gave Pedro the title of Perpetual Defender in the council's name, was deported in December 1822 by José Bonifácio's government, returned in 1824 and ended his career in the Brazilian Senate.1 source1 source

Pedro came back too. When João VI died in March 1826 he became Pedro IV of Portugal, granted a constitutional charter and abdicated in favour of his daughter Maria. In 1832 he landed in the Azores to fight his brother Miguel for her throne, and he died at Queluz, where he had been born, on 24 September 1834.1 source1 source