Against the Grain: Portugal and Its Empire in the Face of Napoleonic Invasions

Abstract

Writing in 1846, Caetano Lopes de Moura, by birth a subject of the Portuguese Empire, expressed his deep admiration for the French emperor in his Histoire de Napoléon — a biography in which the glorious events of the past were celebrated according to a certain model of nineteenth-century historiography.¹ The most puzzling thing is that the author, who came from a modest social milieu, was in fact of metis or mixed-race origin, born in 1790 in Bahia, Portuguese America. At the time of the book’s publication he had been living in France for quite some time. Relating the Battle of Wagram he mentions that he ‘was present at this unforgettable battle as a surgeon-major in the Portuguese Legion’. In his short account of meeting Napoleon at Ebersdorf he notes enthusiastically that ‘his eyes were so full of life that anyone who looked into them was obliged to lower their own to the ground, such was the fire given off. The enthusiasm is still more manifest when describing the fall of the French emperor: ‘The great man has fallen…but not really brought down from the eminent position he held and will continue to hold in history… he has kept all his glory, all his genius, and all his moral greatness.’ Caetano Lopes de Moura never went back to Brazil and spent the rest of his life in France. He died in 1860, after a lifetime dominated by two great figures, Napoleon and Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil.²