Pedro II of Brazil

Pedro II reigned over Brazil for fifty-eight years, was widely admired, freed the slaves, and was deposed eighteen months later by an army that nobody had asked. He was five when his father Pedro I abdicated and returned to Portugal, and he grew up under regents in a palace with tutors and almost no company his own age, declared of age at fourteen to end a decade of revolts. He read Hebrew, Sanskrit, Greek and Tupi, corresponded with Pasteur, Gobineau and Wagner, funded scholars, and told visitors he would rather have been a schoolteacher. He held the empire together through the Platine wars and then the Paraguayan War of 1864-70, which Brazil won at enormous cost and which left the army large, professional and conscious of itself. On slavery he moved slowly and deliberately: he freed his own inherited slaves, supported the 1871 law freeing children born to enslaved mothers and the 1885 law freeing those over sixty, and the final abolition came in 1888 by the Golden Law, signed by his daughter Isabel as regent while he was ill in Europe. Abolition without compensation turned the landowners against the monarchy; the army, the republicans and the church had grievances of their own. In November 1889 a bloodless military coup deposed him and the family was put on a ship within two days. He refused an offer of a pension and died in a Paris hotel two years later. Brazil brought his body home in 1922. He was the first head of state to make a telephone call in Brazil, at the Philadelphia exhibition of 1876, where he met Alexander Graham Bell. He sat for photographs constantly and one of the earliest surviving photographs of a monarch anywhere is of him. Republican sentiment before 1889 was weak enough that the empire's fall is generally explained by the loss of the landowners rather than by any popular movement. His two sons died in infancy, which meant the throne would pass to Isabel and through her to a French husband, and that mattered more to the officers than anything he did.

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