Eles estão prontos a contribuir: guardas nacionais, hierarquias sociais e cidadania: Província do Rio Grande do Sul – segunda metade do século XIX

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze the National Guard during the Brazilian Empire. Considering mainly the men who participated in it, both officers and privates, during the period between 1850 – the year when the law to reform the militia was enacted – and 1873 – when the rules were again reformulated – it seeks to understand factors involving social practices and behavioral interfaces of various subjects in a delimited context whose scenario is the former German Settlement [“Colônia Alemã”] of São Leopoldo. Experiences, behaviors and daily strategies are revealed, thus seeking edges and cracks in the systems that controlled sociability. Going along the “threads” and “tracks” of the political networks configured in an area of German settlement/immigration in the province of Rio Grande de São Pedro, during the 1800s, it looks especially at tacit agreements among the local authorities, approaching Imperial society through a vertical section. The daily life of the citizens-at-arms is a key object, especially issues of conflictiveness, which reveal the militarization that molded the meshes and webs that composed that society. In brief, it looks for not always written rules that spell out the modus operandi of the militia in complex maneuvers of normative revelation and concealment. Immigrants who became Brazilian citizens and descendents of pioneers, as historical subjects, thus become homo politicus. Lastly, it concerns itself with unveiling games of cooperation and conflict, whose analysis focuses on the militia officer’ corps.