LEGISLATIVE ACCLIMATIZATION

THE SAQUAREMA PENTARCHY AND THE BRAZILIAN RATIONAL-LEGAL STATE (1835-1862)

Abstract

This article analyzes the process of legislative acclimatization operationalized by the Brazilian conservative elite (Saquaremas) between 1835-1862. I propose "legislative acclimatization" as a concept to designate the cultural and political translation of European institutional models to Brazilian slaveholding reality. I argue that this process produced genuine peripheral originality: "Seigneurial Rational-Legal State," a configuration that combined formal modernization with substantial patrimonialism. Codes, bureaucracy, and centralized police functionally coexisted with slavery, property-based suffrage, and patronage. I analyze Rio de Janeiro as an institutional laboratory between 1835 and 1862, where the Saquarema Pentarchy operated as coordinating political intelligence. The five conservative statesmen were Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos, Paulino José Soares de Souza (Visconde do Uruguai), Joaquim José Rodrigues Torres (Visconde de Itaboraí), Euscébio de Queirós Coutinho Matoso da Câmara, and Honório Hermeto Carneiro Leão (Marquês de Paraná). This group operationalized "selective legality" through five types of legislation that modernized institutions while preserving seigneurial hierarchies: centralizing, disciplinary, fiscal, land-related, and symbolic legislation. Based on primary legislative sources such as the Imperial Law Collection, Ministerial Reports, and Parliamentary Records, alongside historiography from Mattos, Carvalho, Needell, and Lynch, the article mobilizes concepts of legal field from Bourdieu, disciplinarity from Foucault, Thompsonian legality, and Eliasian civilization. I explicitly recognize four methodological limitations: subalterns appear through repressive documentation, radical liberal opposition is underrepresented, regional variation remains unexplored, and the Pentarchy's intentional coordination was not directly documented. I conclude that Brazilian legislative acclimatization was not a poorly-made copy of European models but strategic peripheral adaptation. Cordial modernization, formally modern but substantially conservative, was functional for slaveholding oligarchic consolidation.