#heart #Emperor #Pedro #returns #Brazil #state #visit
Nearly two centuries after it was excised from his body and stuffed in formaldehyde, the heart of Emperor Pedro I, who declared Brazil’s independence from Portugal, returned on Monday for politically charged commemorations of the South American nation’s 200th birthday.
Dom Pedro, a popular figure in both Brazilian and Portuguese history, was divided between the two countries at death – his heart in a church in Porto, Portugal and the rest of his remains in an independence monument in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
But after Porto city officials agreed to return the borrowed heart, it came to the country’s bicentenary celebrations of independence to Brazil on Sept. 7.
The heart, kept in a glass jar in a gold urn, arrived with all the pomp and circumstance of a state visit.
“It will be treated as if Dom Pedro I were alive and with us … as if it were a state visit by a foreign leader,” said Alan Coelho, head of ceremonial protocol at Brazil’s foreign ministry.
As a nine-year-old boy, Dom Pedro fled to Brazil with his family when Napoleon’s army invaded Portugal in 1807.
He stayed behind to rule what was then the colony as regent when his father, King Joao VI, returned home to the increasingly troubled motherland in 1821.
Faced with pressure to limit the colony’s political autonomy, Pedro I instead declared it an independent country on September 7, 1822, and became its first emperor.
But no sooner had he thrown off Portuguese rule and established Brazil as a constitutional empire than turbulence across the Atlantic forced him to return to Portugal, where his younger brother had usurped the throne and was attempting to return the country from constitutional government to absolute monarchy .
Pedro I, known in Portugal as Pedro IV, abdicated in 1831 and sailed back to Portugal to lead an army to Porto to support the Constitutional struggle, which was ultimately successful.
After his death from tuberculosis in 1834, he was celebrated in both Brazil and Portugal as a champion of liberal causes and representative rule.
At his request, his heart was removed and preserved in Porto, in gratitude to the residents for their support.
“Today the heart of this national hero, the first Emperor of Brazil, returns home to our soil,” Defense Minister Paulo Sergio Nogueira said at a ceremony welcoming the organ at an air force base in Brasilia.
“This important relic represents the courage, passion, and most importantly, the immeasurable strength of our first Emperor.”
– “Bolsonaro Farce” –
The heart has a busy schedule for its visit.
President Jair Bolsonaro will hold an official ceremony with military honors on Tuesday.
The nine-kilogram urn will then be displayed for 17 days at the Foreign Ministry’s headquarters, the Itamaraty Palace.
Bolsonaro, who is running for re-election in October, has been accused of fanning the flames of nationalism with the celebrations surrounding the heart.
The far-right leader is also planning a large rally of supporters and a military parade on Independence Day.
Critics said the parading of the heart is reminiscent of when Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship – which Bolsonaro openly admires – brought back the rest of Pedro I’s body from Portugal in 1972.
“It’s going to be a sham of Bolsonaro welcoming this heart like a visiting dignitary,” said historian Lilia Schwarcz, who has written books on Pedro I and Brazilian independence.
“We should ask ourselves what that way of thinking about history is – dead history stuck in time like a dead emperor’s occluded organ.”
Others found humor in the occasion.
“Since the independence process began with the Napoleonic invasion, I suggest they bring Bonaparte’s penis over as well,” his fellow historian Luiz Antonio Simas quipped.
The heart, kept under five locks and bars in the Church of Our Lady of Lapa in Porto, will be under the watchful eye of a police officer dispatched from the Portuguese city before being returned on September 8th.
Social Tags:
#heart #Emperor #Pedro #returns #Brazil #state #visit
