A Singular War?

Brazil’s 19th century is marked by two momentous wars: the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), in which imperial Brazil joined forces with Uruguay and Argentina against Paraguay, and the War of Canudos (1896–1897), an internal conflict in the northeastern backlands of the country fought between the community of Canudos (called Belo Monte by its inhabitants) and Brazil’s recently established republican government. Of these two wars it is the second one that looms largest in the Brazilian imaginary, particularly for the way it has been scripted into a founding moment of the modern Brazilian nation-state. Four military expeditions were sent out against the community and its religious leader Antônio Conselheiro (Antonio the Counselor). The first three were successfully resisted, but after a long siege imposed during the fourth expedition the war finally ended with the destruction of the community and the death of most of its inhabitants.

The war had a tremendous impact on Brazilian public discourse and sentiment at the time, particularly in the country’s urban centers, and became a media event. Although some newspapers had received dispatches from the front during the War of the Triple Alliance, the War of Canudos was the first time in Brazilian history that the country’s main newspapers—eight of them—sent journalists to the front lines. To facilitate the movement of the army and the transmission of news, new roads and telegraph lines were built between the north and the south and extended toward Queimadas and Monte Santo, towns in the vicinity of Belo Monte/Canudos. Twenty-nine new newspapers were founded in Rio de Janeiro during the final year of the war.¹ In addition to the attention it received in the press, an abundance of contemporary accounts appeared after the war’s end in other genres, including popular verse, memoirs, and manifestos as well as novelistic accounts.

Despite the multitude of accounts, the sense of what had happened and what the war meant soon found official expression in a book titled Os Sertões by Euclides da Cunha (translated as Rebellion in the Backlands by Samuel Putnam in 1944 or more recently as Backlands: The Canudos Campaign by Elizabeth Lowe in 2010). Trained as an engineer, da Cunha was sent to the battlefront as a newspaper correspondent for O Estado de S. Paulo. Os Sertões, which was published five years after the end of the war and drew on da Cunha’s experience, fieldnotes, and published articles, still represents the dominant representation of the war. Still, while the book combined elements of a historical account, anthropological essay, a testimonial, and political document, it has also been increasingly read in literary terms, particularly with the demise of the truth value of positivism and theories of race and civilization held by da Cunha.

Os Sertões is an extended mea culpa that ferociously denounces the destruction of the community of Belo Monte/Canudos and calls for the country to learn important lessons from the conflict. One of the work’s overarching arguments was that the war was ultimately the product of the fantastic circumstance of a government ignorant of part of its own territory and its inhabitants. Indeed, Regina Abreu, who traces the deliberate policy of consecration of da Cunha by the Brazilian government beginning in the 1930s, argues that the large-scale diffusion of Os Sertões was the basis for the inauguration of the genre of the so-called “estudos brasileiros” (Brazilian studies) where da Cunha’s book was read as the “parable of Brazilian history, which demonstrated Brazilian’s ignorance with its own territory and history.”² In da Cunha’s view, the seemingly alien nature of the community—what he sees as a disjuncture between the socially backward inhabitants of the backlands and new political developments they could not understand—was therefore a result of their essential abandonment by the state.³ Instead of being destroyed, this community should have been integrated into the Brazilian nation-state project, which da Cunha imagines as multi-faceted one aimed at both the land and the people living on it. Thus, for example, the geography and geology of the desert-like region needed to be studied and understood, and engineering needed to be put in place to banish water scarcity and the poverty it produced. “The thing that was necessary above everything else,” he asserts, “was to combat, not the jagunço [the ruffian], but the desert.”⁴ In turn, the inhabitants needed to be educated and ushered into modernity, thereby “drawing these rude and backward fellow-countrymen of ours into the current of our times and our own national life.”⁵

But if Bahian historian José Calasans characterized Os Sertões as the “golden cage” of Canudos, it is because the optic of da Cunha’s project of integration is structured essentially from the country’s power centers in the south.⁶ Os Sertões, and its elevation to the position of the “Bible of our nationality” (particularly during Getulio Vargas’s Estado Novo), played a crucial role in establishing the framework of what became sayable and seeable about the northeast as the great other of the southern urban centers of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. According to that framework, the northeast was a great medieval space marked by banditry, messianism, rural bossism, nostalgia for the past, or impetus for revolution.⁷ The community of Belo Monte/Canudos and its conflict with the Brazilian state was therefore measured and represented—from the perspective of southern Brazil—essentially in terms of what the northeast and its hinterlands was deemed to lack: water, modernity, enlightenment.

Revisionist historiography since the 1960s, in the vein of a history from below, has attempted to push back on the chiaroscuros that have marked much of the writing on the War of Canudos. Much of these revisions have been driven by efforts to rescue local narratives on the part of historians, musicians, sociologists, and filmmakers based in the northeast. This historiography has represented the Belo Monte community not as a space of deviance—as the squalid refuge of primitives, criminals, racial degenerates, or the destitute—but as a community that shared many continuities in terms of ethnic composition, hierarchical structure, economic activity, and popular culture with other sertanejo cities. Against da Cunha’s characterization of the religious beliefs of the community as ones of fanaticism and heresy, for example, newer scholarship has argued that Conselheiro and his followers practiced a folk Catholicism deeply rooted in the region and which included an ample repertory of folk traditions, Iberian practices, pilgrimages, the cultivation of saints, and the influence of Amerindian and African shamanism.⁸ Indeed, not only was the community of Belo Monte not entirely singular within the context of the Brazilian sertão, but the fact that it also became embroiled in conflict was itself not unusual. The long, hybrid, and uneven processes of modernization that accompanied Brazil’s passage from a monarchical political form to a republican one in 1889 sparked a number of comparable religious movements as well as rebellions in Brazil through the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, such as the Federalist Revolution in Rio Grande do Sul (1893), the Contestado Rebellion in Santa Catarina and Paraná (1912–1916), and the movement of Padre Cícero Romão Batista in Juazeiro (1872–1934). Yet none of these acquired the singular status of the War of Canudos and have not been remembered in the same way. To some extent, the historiographical effort to cut the community of Belo Monte back down to human proportions pushes the opacity and mystery of the conflict to the side of the government’s reaction: if the community formed part of a general dynamic landscape that included so many other religious movements as well as other political conflicts, how does one account for a war that seems so out of proportion to all of these and that is remembered under the form of an epic? Several other accounts of the war that were contemporary to that of da Cunha, such as Afonso Arinos’s novel Os Jagunços (1898) and Manoel Benício’s hybrid text O Rei dos Jagunços (1899), are notable precisely for their attempts to paint a picture of the Conselheiro’s community as relatively ordinary within the context of the sertão. What is curious, however, is the extent to which these and other texts have been sidelined, perhaps because their understanding of the war fails to conform to the way Canudos was ultimately etched into the archives of Brazilian history. While the official story is still hegemonic and largely defines the boundary of how the war is allowed to be understood, it is possible to mark some of the places at which the concatenation of events might have followed a different path and signified otherwise.

Antônio Conselheiro

The leader of the community was Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel, known also as Antônio Conselheiro, Santo Conselheiro, Antônio dos Mares, Santo Antônio Aparecido, and Bom Jesus. He was born to a small-time merchant in Quixeramobim, Ceará, in 1828 or 1830. His mother died when he was young and his father remarried to a woman who, according to oral tradition, was mentally unstable and mistreated Antônio. Although he was sent to school and learned reading and writing as well as arithmetic, Latin, and French, Antônio eventually abandoned his studies and went to work in his father’s commercial establishment, taking it over upon his father’s death. It seems he was unsuccessful commercially, however, and he eventually closed the business in 1857, the same year he married his cousin Brasilina Laurentina de Lima (1857). For the next decade or so he worked at a series of odd jobs, from primary school teacher to itinerant merchant to legal advocate for the poor. Around this time he also separated from his wife, who, as the story goes, had an affair. In 1871 he was taken to court for a debt that he subsequently paid off by selling all that he had. It was apparently not long after this incident that he turned to a wandering, religious life.

The first public notice of Antônio showed up three years later, on November 22, 1874, in O Rabudo, a newspaper from Sergipe. The article announced that a certain Antônio dos Mares had appeared—with bare feet, long hair, and a blue robe—and was preaching about morality and customs. He did not accept alms, ate little, and constructed churches and cemeteries. Twelve years later a more extensive description of Conselheiro and his activities showed up in Descrições práticas da Província da Bahia (1888), written by a member of the Bahian police, Durval Vieira de Aguiar:

When we passed by the village there was a famous Counselor. He was short and dark-skinned, with a long beard and hair, and dressed in a blue robe. He lived alone in an unfurnished house, where pious women amassed, showering him with gifts of food. This guy is more of an ignorant fanatic than a hermit, and his occupation consists of preaching a patchwork of messages, teaching prayers, making banal predictions, and praying rosaries and litanies with the people. He uses local churches for these activities. Passing by, the civilized traveler is treated to a ludicrous spectacle, especially when the Counselor recites in Latin and none of his listeners can understand him. The people tend to gather around any religious act performed by the Counselor, whose indications they blindly obey. They will even resist laws. For this reason the vicars allow him to pass himself off as a saint, particularly because he does not seek to gain from the situation. On the contrary, he promotes extraordinarily baptisms, marriages . . . , festivals, novenas and other activities from which the Church reaps its profits. On this occasion the Counselor had finished building an elegant church in Mucambo, and he was building another excellent one in Cumbe, where he maintained admirable peace despite the multitude of people.⁹

Although the description is condescending and pokes fun at the “ludicrous spectacle” of the Conselheiro preaching in Latin for an audience that could not understand him, it is also clear that it indicates little perception of threat and even expresses an appreciation of the “admirable peace” maintained by the Conselheiro. Similarly, in a letter written to the Jornal de Notícias in 1893 another witness recounts that, drawn by curiosity, he visited the Conselheiro and found that “his conversation is pleasant” although his house is filthy and has only one place to sit. In Antônio’s practices, he writes,

he counsels only the good of the people; if they follow him around it is because they want to. . . . How is this citizen offensive? Whom does he harm? . . . He counsels the people not to abandon their homes for his sake; the people disobey him because of their fanaticism and follow him around. He is an honorable man; if he wanted to he could become rich overnight but he accepts only food and nothing else.¹⁰

As these notices suggest, a number of “holy” men wandered the Brazilian backlands at the time, as an accepted part of popular Catholicism due in part to the scarcity of ordained priests in rural areas. In fact, one of the earliest sources of tension and conflict focused on the Conselheiro emerged on the terrain of religion, between this traditional form of lay Catholicism and a Catholic Church that had initiated an episcopal reform in the 1860s. The reform was intended to eliminate heterodoxy by reaffirming the control of bishops over their jurisdictions, and one of its consequences was that the popular expressions of communities such as those in the Brazilian sertões would be classified as fanaticism and superstition. The dispute played out in a string of letters sent from priests and secular authorities to the Archbishop of Bahia beginning in the 1880s, several of which included mentions of Conselheiro. In one example of these letters, an Italian Capuchin missionary named Júlio Fiorentini, a defender of the episcopal reforms, accused Antônio Porfirio Ramos, vicar of the Divino Espírito Santo do Inhambupe parish, of a lax and improper interpretation of religious doctrine and of supporting Conselheiro. In his defense, Ramos wrote to the archbishop assuring him that the Conselheiro presented no threat to religion: “I can guarantee Your Excellency that I have sought to listen to him to know the doctrine he announces and I found nothing offensive to religion. In fact, to the contrary, his explanations are but the true law of God, and his life true penitence.”¹¹ Such a defense is not surprising given the assessment offered by religious historian Alexandre Otten of sermons attributed to the Conselheiro from a manuscript discovered after his death by a soldier. The manuscript includes the following: twenty-nine sermons on “Storms that arise in Mary’s heart”; ten sermons on the Ten Commandments; texts extracted from the Bible (on the Ten Commandments and the life and sayings of Jesus); and miscellaneous sermons on religious material (including “On Confession” and “On the Sower’s parable”), as well as a sermon on the republic and a “Farewell.” In his study of the manuscripts, Otten argues that the Conselheiro was not a heretic who led a messianic and apocalyptic movement but instead an ultraconservative by the parameters of traditional lay Catholicism. According to Otten, Conselheiro did not want to be seen as a Messiah but simply as a prophet who counseled an exodus and return to a primitive Christian community. Still, while the Conselheiro’s views might not have been heretical within the local context, his success at building churches, praying, and preaching put him at odds with the church’s drive to reassert its own clerical and hierarchical authority at a time when difficult socioeconomic conditions and a scarcity of priests bedeviled institutional religion.

A New Surface of Inscription

Although the Conselheiro did not initially seem to present a threat to other sectors of society, this changed with the proclamation of the republic in 1889 and his shift from a nomadic life to the establishment of the community of Belo Monte four years later.

The incident that supposedly prompted the change in question is described by Manoel Benício in O Rei dos Jagunços: Chronica Historica e de Costumes Sertanejos sobre os Acontecimentos de Canudos (The King of the Henchmen: A Historical Chronicle and Account of Sertanejo Mores and the Happenings of Canudos). The term “jagunço”—used to refer to the henchmen hired by large landowners—was frequently used to describe Conselheiro’s men, carrying thus the connotations of a mercenary and threatening armed force as opposed to the term followers or simply “sertanejos” (inhabitants of the sertão). Born in Pernambuco, Benício worked as a war correspondent for Jornal do Commercio (Rio de Janeiro) and arrived at the front lines two months before da Cunha. Yet his critique of the army’s tactics and the pressure or threats he received in response meant that he remained at the front for little over a month and his dispatches were published only after he had arrived safely back in Bahia. O Rei dos Jagunços is striking as a hybrid text that combines sections that follow the codes of discourses of knowledge such as journalism, anthropology, or history with other sections that are novelized and often told from a simulated insider’s perspective of the Belo Monte community:

A poor old woman arrived at the fair in question to sell bamboo. The tax collector demanded 100 réis for the piece of land on which the poor old woman had settled to sell her goods. The woman, who estimated the value of her goods at 80 réis, complained loudly to those around her, crying and lamenting. A group of people gathered and they all agreed with her, for how could one pay a tax that was more than the worth of the goods to be sold. . . . In his sermon that night the Conselheiro referred to the old woman, declaring, “This is what the Republic is: captivity, working only for the government. It is the slavery announced by maps, that is now beginning. Didn’t you see that tia Benta (the name of the old woman) is religious and white? Thus, this slavery does not respect anyone.”¹²

The scene gives voice to a political antagonism in which the Conselheiro equates the recently proclaimed republic with a new form of captivity. Yet Benício’s account of his denunciation of taxes also suggests associations with a series of revolts that had spread throughout northeastern Brazil about twenty years earlier, known as the Quebra-Quilos (Smash the Kilos) riots (1874–1875); indeed, Benício specifically writes that the Conselheiro “opposed the introduction of the metric system in commerce.”¹³ While the name Quebra-Quilos pinpoints opposition to the monarchical government’s introduction of the metric system in Brazil almost ten years earlier (1862)—and consequent changes in the weights system—the various riots, upheavals, and conflicts articulated a broad series of fears and demands regarding the expansion of new forms of governmentality, standardization, and control, all of which preceded the proclamation of the republic. In addition to the metric system, new taxes and the Recruitment Law of 1874 were perceived as intrusions into as yet uncolonized spheres of everyday life. Rioters burned official records (including tax records and land titles) in addition to destroying scales.¹⁴

How, then, do we read Conselheiro’s opposition to the republic? Although almost all of his sermons in the found manuscript address religion, only one of them addresses the republic, which he called “a great evil for Brazil.”¹⁵ His arguments largely revolve around a concern with the emptying out of religious content from the structures of government and social order and the evacuation of sources of authority and meaning as a consequence of the separation of church and state in the Constitution of 1891. He opposed civil marriage, for example, arguing that it was unlawful and null since real marriage consists of the union of souls and only the church had the power to effect it.¹⁶ The only moment in which the Conselheiro’s sermon deviates from his preoccupation with legitimate authority is when he explains the overthrow of the monarchy as retaliation on the part of republicans for D. Princess Isabel’s emancipation of enslaved people (such an argument was common in monarchist discourse at the time). Conselheiro’s stated support for abolition is perhaps his most “liberal” position.¹⁷

To some extent, then, the passage from monarchy to republic simply gives a name and face to changes that had already been taking place throughout the 19th century in Brazil and that included not only secularization but also an intensification and expansion of oligarchic power—what Martin Lienhard describes as a “second conquest”—in areas where colonial rule had been loose, porous, or incomplete.¹⁸ Yet the fact that in Brazil some of these changes could be associated and named with a change in the form of government made all the difference. The republic and its equivalence with a new form of captivity became, to use a concept from Argentine political theorist Ernesto Laclau, a “surface of inscription” for all forms of rural discontent.¹⁹

After this incident in which Conselheiro speaks out against taxes, he and his followers were pursued by and clashed with a police force of thirty men. After defeating the police officers, Conselheiro and his followers gave up wandering and settled in Belo Monte.

Belo Monte

While da Cunha described the place where Conselheiro settled as an “old cattle ranch” on the banks of the Vasa-Barris and as a “backwoods hamlet” with “abandoned” and “vacant” buildings, according to oral history the settlement was relatively privileged.²⁰ Manuel Ciríaco, a Canudos survivor interviewed in 1947, claimed that the site already contained a plaza and a sheltered stand, a small chapel, and some houses in better condition, one of which pertained to the leather merchant Antônio da Mota.²¹ The community, called Belo Monte by its inhabitants, grew quickly and was said to eventually have two churches, warehouses, a barracks, cemeteries, munitions houses, roads, five “neighborhoods,” and a school that both boys and girls attended where tuition costs were 2,000 réis a month.²² Based on the army’s count of 5,200 houses and the assumption of an average of five people per sertanejo household, Belo Monte at its height had an estimated population of around 25,000 people, although some historians have contested this figure.²³

In da Cunha’s account, Canudos is a “hamlet situated in a hole-in-the-ground,” a squalid settlement whose appearance was “midway between that of a warrior’s camp and that of an African kraal,” whose inhabitants were an “an unconscious brute mass . . . wholly immersed in their dreams of religion.”²⁴ A few surviving testimonies, however, register a more heterogeneous community in both economic means (some members were destitute, some less so) as well as occupation and category (religious people and apostles, teachers, merchants, cangaceiros [bandits], indigenous peoples, and exslaves).²⁵ Indeed, there are sufficient testimonies of an apparently large presence of blacks liberated by abolition for Calasans to suggest that Belo Monte/Canudos might be thought of as the last quilombo (runaway slave community) in Brazil.²⁶ Although many of the Belo Monte settlers were likely drawn by religious faith and a belief in Conselheiro as a miracle worker, others might therefore have moved there for reasons of kinship or simply to escape economic hardship since Belo Monte seems to have been able to sustain a stable, self-sufficient economy.²⁷ There are accounts of subsistence agriculture, sugar cane cultivation, and the raising of goats and cattle (for food and leather production) in the region. There also appeared to have been a significant amount of contact and travel between the city and its surrounding regions until the very end of the war: located at the crossroads of several major roads, the city was an obligatory rest stop for travelers, who came to trade or hear the Conselheiro speak, and the inhabitants of Belo Monte would also leave to trade or offer their labor in neighboring farms. The testimony of Honório Villanova, who was a merchant in Belo Monte/Canudos and by his admission someone who rarely went to prayer or services, speaks to its appeal as a place of order, peace, and quiet. While there were certain rules laid down by Conselheiro for the community, Villanova’s testimony suggests a measure of individual freedom: “Great was the Canudos of my time. Those who had orchards cared for the orchards on the banks of the river. Those who had cattle cared for their cattle. Those who had women and children cared for their women and children. Those who liked to pray prayed. Everything was taken care of because none of it belonged to anyone in particular. All of it belonged to everyone, small and great, in the rule taught by the Pilgrim.”²⁸

Revisionist history and oral history also push back on accounts that the community completely rejected money, private property, or economic transactions. One of the largest landowners in the region, Cícero Dantas Martins, the Baron of Jeremoabo, wrote in a letter about his alarm at the movement of people who sold their belongings (livestock, objects, land, and houses) for nothing (“por preço de nonada”) to go serve the Conselheiro.²⁹ He drew particular attention to the apparently strange and unbelievable sight of the burning of goods considered “luxuries”:

In plain daylight, in the houses, streets and highways, there would be piles of shawls, dresses, skirts, hats, shoes, and any object that contained wool and silk. These were delivered over to the voracity of flames, because luxury was contrary to the doctrine preached by the stubborn missionary.³⁰

From the baron’s perspective the inhabitants of Canudos/Belo Monte were engaged in irrational and antieconomic behavior. Others corroborated this impression. A Capuchin delegation sent to negotiate with Conselheiro claimed, for example, that “whoever had goods, disposed of them and handed over the product to the good Conselheiro, reserving for themselves only twenty percent,” and da Cunha wrote that “property with them took on the exaggerated form of the tribal collectivism of the Bedouins.”³¹ Nonetheless, the few existing firsthand testimonials suggest not a wholesale rejection of private property or economic transactions but instead a difference of degree according to which the community conducted its economic life—in a relatively more egalitarian and communal way—by comparison to the surrounding sertão. Thus, Manuel Ciríaco claimed that land was given freely to the newly arrived and that the Conselheiro allowed newcomers to build houses. Indeed, Lélis Piedade, a Bahian journalist at the time of Canudos, observed, based on the information of officials, that the great majority of papers found in Canudos referred to the sale and purchase of houses.³² The merchant Honório Villanova claimed that “there was no need to steal in Canudos because everything existed in abundance . . . there was no scarcity of provisions.”³³ Villanova also avowed that neither private property, commerce, nor money were banned, even though the Conselheiro himself refused to touch either republican or monarchist currency.

The question of degrees of difference is not an irrelevant one. The Capuchin missionary who was sent to negotiate with Conselheiro in 1895, Friar Evangelista do Monte Marciano, describes Canudos as a settlement of filthy, rude, windowless huts and almost naked inhabitants whose “squalid and skeletal appearance” attested to the “multiple privations they experienced.”³⁴ Yet his account simultaneously reveals important cultural gaps that shape his impression: when preaching about fasting he assured his listeners that the practice should not be interpreted too strictly, for the church did not want them to be deprived of nutrients; thus, during fasting one could always drink and sometimes eat meat. To this, one of the listeners exclaimed, “That’s not fasting, that’s feasting!”³⁵ The gap revealed here attests to the missionary’s ignorance about living conditions in the sertão. What struck him as misery and deprivation, therefore, could seem like relative abundance to others.

Abundance is a marker associated with Belo Monte/Canudos in much of the oral history of the region. The notion takes on mythological tones in some accounts, such as the oral history of indigenous groups who lived and participated in Canudos: “My mother . . . wanted to go and catch a glimpse of the beauty in Canudos. . . . She thought it was pretty, since they said that over in Canudos there was a river of milk and embankments made of couscous.”³⁶ Yet the notion also assumes more ordinary forms in the testimonies of both Villanova and Ciríaco. As Ciríaco said: “In the time of Conselheiro, I don’t like to talk about it, so that others don’t call me a liar, but there was everything around here. Everything grew, even sugar cane that you could peel with your fingernails, it grew pretty here. Vegetables in abundance, and all the rain you could want. . . . Those times, it seems like a lie.”³⁷

Landowners

As the stated alarm of the Baron of Jeremoaba might suggest, the establishment of a viable community in Belo Monte generated opposition from neighboring landowners and was key to the change in the perception of Conselheiro from a somewhat ordinary and inoffensive feature of the local social landscape to representing a threat.

In part, this was so because the community drew followers away from many of the economic relationships that undergirded power structures in the region. In the words of the archbishop to the president of the province in 1887, the Conselheiro’s community “distracted” people from their responsibilities and even led to a drain on available labor. The mayor of Tucano, for example, complains that to build a wall in his city he had to double workers’ pay due to the scarcity of labor: “Because of the plague of Conselheiro there are no workers.”³⁸ And the Baron of Jeremoaba writes, “With the abolition of slaves, the effects of the propaganda were felt even more due to the lack of free hands for work. The population lived in delirium or ecstasy. . . . Thus, agricultural labor became scarcer and scarcer and now it is with great difficulty that any property can function, and without the necessary regularity.”³⁹ These economic concerns were tied to a larger economic decline in the northeast as Brazil’s central economic focus shifted from sugar production based on slave labor in the northeast to coffee production in the southeast. Economic conditions further deteriorated in the sertão due to a relentless cycle of droughts in 1877–1879, 1888–1889, and 1893–1895.

At the same time, declarations of the menace Canudos represented to the economic and power base of local landowners might have been disingenuous at least in part. According to historian Consuelo Novais Sampaio, Canudos was used as a pawn in the political chessboard of two political factions struggling for power in Bahia. Canudos was equated with a series of disruptions and disorders that were then blamed on the governor in power so as to invite federal intervention and invert the balance of power in the state. For example, the Baron of Jeremoabo cited Canudos’s growth as a sign of the Bahian governor’s indecision and incompetence: “The Bahian government’s criminal and culpable tolerance . . . allowed the [Conselheiro’s] followers to multiply astonishingly. . . . That was the nefarious administration of Sr. Dr. Rodrigues Lima. Let public condemnation fall upon his head.”⁴⁰ Yet there was enough disorder throughout Bahia in the 1890s that both Rodrigues Lima and then governor Luiz Vianna were busy with what seemed more pressing problems, including the public burning of tax decrees in 1893 and 1894 in several towns, an attack by bandits on the city of Lençóis, ruffians threatening the Lavras Diamantinas, a mob siege of the village of Barra do Mendes, and a series of violent crimes in the town of Jequié, among others.⁴¹ The infighting by the local Bahian oligarchy and rhetorical manipulation of such instances of unrest were thus key to the way the conflict ratcheted up in intensity.⁴² In this fashion, the Conselheiro and the community of Belo Monte became a “surface of inscription” for a series of tensions and problems that exceeded them. As Ranajit Guha says of subaltern rebellions in India, the community’s existence becomes a datum into a life story of a political entity that was not their own: “a contingent element in another history with another subject.”⁴³

The Conflict

According to the official story, the conflict was sparked by a misunderstanding between the Canudenses and a provider of wood in Juazeiro in 1896. Ostensibly, the inhabitants of Belo Monte/Canudos requested and paid for wood to be used in the construction of the church. The wood was never delivered, and when the Canudenses declared they would arrange to acquire it themselves, Juazeiro city officials claimed they were being threatened and requested protection from the governor of Bahia.

Vianna responded in November 1896 by sending a police battalion of 100 men. When the police force arrived in Uauá on November 7 to spend the night in Juazeiro, most of the city’s inhabitants fled and many of them went to warn the Canudos’s population. On November 21, a procession or 300, 1000, or 3,000 people (the versions vary) met the police battalion singing, carrying standards, and armed with old muskets, poles, knives, and icons. The battalion retreated after a short fierce combat, despite heavier losses on the part of the Canudenses.

Although this incident ignited public opinion in the Bahian press, the governor maintained that federal intervention was unnecessary. He quickly amassed a second expedition of 103 men combined with 108 more from the Federal Force stationed in Bahia led by Febrônio de Brito. Finally, after delays, the expedition marched toward Canudos on January 12, 1897, reinforced yet by more federal army troops totaling 543 soldiers. The expedition got no further than the edge of Canudos, however. After two battles fought guerilla style on the part of the Canudenses, the expedition found itself low on munitions and suffering from hunger and exhaustion, and decided to withdraw.

According to several historians, the defeat of Febrônio’s expedition marked a turning point whereby Canudos ceased to be a “chess piece in the game of the local Bahian oligarchies” and became visible on the national stage.⁴⁴ Simultaneously, the conflict with the community was transformed into a “revolutionary crusade for the consolidation of the [republican] regime.”⁴⁵ In other words, it now acquired larger significance as a clash between a recalcitrant community and the new republican form of the national Brazilian state. As da Cunha characterized the situation: “The Republic was in danger; the Republic must be saved: this was the one cry that arose above the general delirium.”⁴⁶ As da Cunha suggests, the national press joined in at this point, playing a significant role in constructing and disseminating ever more alarming representations of an unruly Canudos. According to Brazilian critic Walnice Nogueira Galvão, the war “invaded” the pages of newspapers, working its way like a virus into editorials, crônicas, reports, humor, and advertising. Even the 1897 carnival in Rio de Janeiro was marked by an abundance of costumes portraying Conselheiro and his men.

In February 1897 a third expedition of 1,300 soldiers (the first expedition to involve federal soldiers from the south) was sent under the command of Colonel Moreira César. The colonel was well-known as the “Headcutter” (Corte Cabeças) for his brutality in putting down the Federalist Revolt in Santa Catarina, and it was generally assumed that he would easily prevail over Canudos. His reputation for ferocity even led some landowners around Canudos to lament what they foresaw as an unnecessary impending massacre: “To take care of Antônio Conselheiro, whom I know personally, it is not necessary to send in Colonel Moreira César, a wicked man, and bloody by nature, who will fill the soil of our beloved backlands with corpses.”⁴⁷ This overconfidence on the part both of Moreira César and observers in Brazil’s southeast made his subsequent defeat all the more shocking. The reasons given for the defeat are varied. By some accounts, Moreira César forced his troops into a rapid march on Canudos as soon as they arrived in the area, despite weariness from the long journey and an epileptic fit suffered by the colonel himself. He was wounded in the hasty attack and died that same night. Pedro Nunes Tamarindo then took over and ordered a hurried retreat, leaving behind weapons and munitions for the Conselheiristas. Whereas the latter knew the terrain well and fought guerrilla style, the soldiers were poorly trained and fighting in unknown territory. They were also ill prepared. For example, they had brought well-drilling tools and equipment that did not work in the sertão and were consequently plagued by a lack of water.⁴⁸

After the defeat, the press and public opinion in the urban centers of the southeast were dominated by hysterical rhetoric that cast the Canudos settlement as a menace to the republic. One example is the following excerpt from O Paiz, on July 18:

The monster, far away in the depths of the mysterious backlands, opens its insatiable gills, asking for more people, more pasture of Republican hearts, an opulent snack of heroes; and the beast will continue devouring and stuffing itself until, in fit of rage, feeling the lack of provisions, this meal of bodies, it shakes its mane and with one step of its monstrous paw seeks to crush the motherland, who is draped in mourning for the death of her most beloved sons and for the massacre of her glorious army!⁴⁹

The shock at Moreira César’s defeat also led to a series of fantastic conspiracy theories. So improbable seemed the idea that a ragged, backlands group of fighters could defeat the national army that rumors circulated that a network of agents was seeking to restore the monarchy in Brazil, that these agents had international support, that modern arms were being smuggled into Canudos, and that Italian fighters were leading the attacks.

By June 1897, a fourth expedition had been organized by Brazil’s Minister of War Marechal Bittencourt. A contingent of 11,000 soldiers was divided into two columns and placed under the command of Artur Oscar, who opted for a siege and slow war of attrition. Belo Monte/Canudos eventually succumbed as much to the lack of food, water, and munitions as it did to active attack.

The Conselheiro died around September 22, one week before the war ended. The exact reasons for his death—whether from sickness, exhaustion, or wounds—are not known. In the 1993 documentary by Bahian photographer and filmmaker Antonio Olavo, Paixão e guerra nos sertões, Zé de Isabé, who was 100 years old at the time of filming, provides the following testimony:

I knew an old man named Santinho and he told me that he was Conselheiro’s bodyguard. He was guarding him and the Conselheiro died. Three days passed. He said he would be resurrected. Three days passed. They couldn’t stand the stench and they buried him with mats, he was stinking, and they put the images that he had and buried him. He didn’t die from the shells. He fell ill and died.⁵⁰

In the same documentary, however, another witness claims to have heard from Balbino, a man who guarded the church, that the Conselheiro died from a fragment of a shell that exploded in his vicinity. Whatever the cause of death, once located, the Conselheiro’s body was exhumed by the army and photographed by Flávio de Barros. (The photograph was publicly exhibited the following year and later became one of the four photographs by Barros to be included in Os Sertões.) The Conselheiro’s head was cut off, displayed on a pike by soldiers in a victory parade, and given to the famous Bahian doctor Raimundo Nina Rodrigues to be examined for signs of degeneracy and madness.

A famous passage from da Cunha’s account of the end of the war claims that Canudos did not surrender and that, in the end, “There were only four of them left: an old man, two other full-grown men, and a child, facing a furiously raging army of five thousand soldiers.”⁵¹ While this dramatic ending draws out the pathos of the war, it also suggests that the entire community had been completely eradicated and might live on only in the pages of Os Sertões. Nonetheless, according to local oral history there were in fact many survivors. Manuel Ciríaco, in a personal deposition to José Calasans, gave the following account:

It was frightening. The rot stank from leagues away. We would see the animals running around the bodies and the buzzards formed a great cloud. Everything was abandoned. No one was buried. That was when Angelo dos Rios, out of charity, brought some men and buried the dead jagunços there. All of these hills that you see there are filled with bones of jagunços. Canudos was over for about ten years; people only passed by here on their way to somewhere else. There were no houses until 1909. And those who survived lived on the farms.⁵²

Despite the devastation registered by Ciríaco—the hills filled with bones—it is also clear that there was a “we” who remained and lived in some proximity to the battle site, smelling the rot, seeing the buzzards, and burying some of the dead. There were also occasional travelers and, after 1909, the slow return of some houses. A second Canudos was slowly formed, made up both by a few former Canudos inhabitants as well as newcomers. In 1968 the settlement was again destroyed when the region was flooded to make way for the Cocorobó dam. The population was moved to a nearby locale, to what in the late 20th century was called the Nova Canudos (formerly Cocorobó). The ruins of Conselheiro’s church remains visible in the early 21st century when the water level of the dam’s reservoir recedes in times of drought.

Near Nova Canudos is the Parque Estadual de Canudos, founded in 1986 and administered by the Centro de Estudos Euclydes da Cunha, part of the Universidade do Estado da Bahia (UNEB). Described as a “verdadeiro museu a céu aberto” (a true open-sky museum), the park is essentially composed of native plants and placards planted in the earth that correlate the various sites with places or events from the conflict. Most of these placards bear quotes from Os Sertões.

Nonetheless, traces of a non-Euclidean Canudos subsist in proximity to the battle site and town. Perhaps one of the most forceful attempts to give expression to these traces is Olavo’s documentary Paixão e Guerra no Sertões de Canudos (1993). At the core of the film is an effort to rescue the last living memory of the conflict through a series of testimonies and narratives by older inhabitants of the region. Many of those interviewed were born between 1893 and 1903. As young children during the war or in its immediate aftermath, they grew up hearing stories of the conflict as told by their elders. Olavo’s documentary thus shows us the living traces of ordinary men and women who remember the conflict not as a foundational event in a national history nor as an index of a barbarian otherworld, but as stories recounted by family members and neighbors of devastation wrought upon their land from afar. In registering their calloused hands and feet and signs of age, as well as the words and voices that bear a different kind of memory, the documentary adds to the living continuity of these alternative traces.

Discussion of the Literature

References to the War of Canudos often continue to be refracted through discussions or analyses of Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões. Olímpio de Sousa Andrade’s História e interpretação de “Os Sertões” (1966) is a classic and comprehensive analysis of the text. For an assessment of da Cunha within the broader panorama of intellectual life in the Brazilian First Republic, see Nicolau Sevcenko’s Literatura como missão: tensões sociais e criação cultural na Primeira República (1983). Regina Abreu’s O Enigma de os Sertões traces the later consecration of the book, particularly under the Vargas regime. The principal archival collection on Euclides da Cunha is held at the Casa de Euclides da Cunha (São José do Rio Pardo, SP).

Rui Facó’s Cangaceiros e fanáticos: gênese e lutas (1965) analyzes Canudos as part of a series of crises—economic crisis, ideological crisis, crisis of authority—characteristic of the transition of the last quarter of the 19th century and the first quarter of 20th that find expression in religious fanaticism and banditry. His thesis that banditry was a more active form of political expression than religion leads to the theory that João Abade, a military leader of Canudos, rose in power throughout the conflict and ultimately eclipsed the Conselheiro.

Sociologist Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz’s O messianismo no Brasil e no mundo is a classic comparative study of various messianic and millenarian movements (including Canudos, the Contestado rebellion, and the movement of Padre Cícero) arguing (in terms not that different from da Cunha’s) that such movements arose as reactions to crisis or change in culturally distinct, geographically isolated traditional societies.⁵³ Religious historian Alexandre Otten gives close attention to Conselheiro’s manuscripts in Só Deus é grande: A mensagem religiosa de Antônio Conselheiro (1990).

The historian who did the most to combat the tendency to read the War of Canudos through Os Sertões was José Calasans Brandão da Silva (1915–2001), professor of history at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) and expert in popular cultures and oral traditions. Calasans created the Núcleo Sertão at UFBA, which houses many of the texts he collected and is still one of the best archival collections of materials on Canudos. See particularly his Canudos na literatura de cordel; Canudos: Subsídio para a sua reavaliação histórica; Cartografia de Canudos; A Faculdade Livre de Direito da Bahia (subsídios para sua história); and Quase biografias de jagunços: O séquito de Antonio Conselheiro. In Incompreensível e bárbaro inimigo: A guerra simbólica contra Canudos (1995), José Augusto Cabral Barreto Bastos also reads da Cunha critically as participating in a symbolic production on Canudos that took place within a shared ideological structure imparting it with overall coherence, direction, and meaning despite the singularities of the various sources of discourse (Catholic church, military, rural oligarchy, and intellectuals). This symbolic production was traversed by an epistemological limit that left it unable to grasp a reality that resisted its conceptual schema. For this reason, rather than an exaltation of the sertão, da Cuha’s book was “a fatalistic condemnation of the man of the sertão draped in the social biology popular at the time.”⁵⁴ Lizir Arcanjo Alves’s Humor e sátira na Guerra de Canudos (1997) offers a reading of representations of Canudos, both written and visual, in the press and includes a lot of material from local Bahian newspapers. See also Adriana Michele Campos Johnson’s Sentencing Canudos: Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil for an account of the discursive construction of the war as ultimately subalternizing.⁵⁵ For a comprehensive historical account of the war in English, see Robert Levine’s Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1893–1897.⁵⁶

Finally, the war has been fictionalized in both print and film, both in Brazil and elsewhere. Contemporary fictional accounts of the conflict include Francisco Mangabeira’s Tragédia Epica (1900); novels by Manuel Benício (O rei dos jagunços: Crônica histórica e de costumes sertanejos sobre os acontecimentos de Canudos, 1898) and Afonso Arinos (Os jagunços, 1898); as well as several chronicles by Machado de Assis. For an analysis of Assis’s chronicles see Carolina S. Carvalho, “Spectacle and Rebellion in Fin-de-Siècle Brazil: The Commodified Rebel.”⁵⁷ Late 20th-century novelized versions of the war in Brazil include Paulo Dantas’s O Menino-Jagunço (1970) and Purgatório (1971); Eldon Canário’s Cativos da terra (1988); J. J. Veiga’s A casca da serpente (1989); Julio José Chiavento’s As meninas do Belo Monte (1993); Ayrton Marcondes’s Canudos: As memórias de Frei João Evangelista (1997); and Luiz Carlos Lisboa’s A guerra santa do gato (2002). Scottish politician and writer R. B. Cunninghame Graham wrote an early biography of Conselheiro in A Brazilian Mystic: Being the Life and Miracles of Antonio Conselheiro (1920); novelized versions of the war written by non-Brazilians include Lucien Marchal’s The Sage of Canudos (1954); Sandor Marai’s Veredicto em Canudos (1969); and, perhaps the most well-known, Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World (1981). Filmic representations include Sergio Rezende’s Battle for Canudos (1999). Glauber Rocha’s famous Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (Black God, White Devil) (1965) is also widely interpreted as a representation of the conflict.