Professor Raimundo Pereira de Carvalho (?–1885) enlisted to fight in the Paraguayan War in late 1865, one year after the start of the conflict that mobilized Brazilians, Argentines, and Uruguayans against the neighboring country. He lived in the town of Barras, in the Piauí countryside, and marched as a lieutenant in a company of volunteers dispatched by the province to the front lines. He returned to Piauí before the end of the war, which lasted much longer than anticipated.
No glory awaited him. Carvalho worked for a time recruiting soldiers in the final phase of the conflict but was dismissed in 1868 after a rebellion by the residents of Picos, who refused to fight for the Brazilian Empire (1822–1889). As a member of the provincial police, he had a disagreement with a deputy and was discharged. He returned to teaching at a school and soon lost his job. The veteran was even arrested three times, once accused of shooting rioters who harassed him at his home.
Recounted by historian Elton Larry Valerio in a dissertation he defended at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in 2022, Carvalho’s story was not uncommon among participants in the Paraguayan War who survived the battlefields. In recent years, figures like Carvalho have received increasing attention from scholars who study the conflict. “The historiography of the period talks at length about great heroes and little about those who never received recognition,” says Valerio, a professor at the Federal Institute of Piauí (IFPI).
The Paraguayan War began in December 1864, nearly 160 years ago, and ended in March 1870, more than five years later. It was the largest military conflict in Latin American history, both in duration and carnage. Conservative estimates put the death toll at more than 100,000, taking into account the losses suffered by the four countries involved in the fighting. It is possible that the total was four times that. Most died from cholera and other diseases, not from the wounds inflicted by their enemies (see Pesquisa FAPESP issue no. 309).
The conflict began after Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López (1827–1870) invaded Mato Grosso and the Argentine province of Corrientes, and ended after he was killed by Brazilian forces and his country was destroyed. Disputes surrounding the conflict continued to be fought in the history books, and it took decades of studies to dispel the myths and misconceptions that emerged as soon as the troops returned home.
“The traditional historiography of the period, written at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was done without much methodology and with a lot of emotion,” says historian Francisco Doratioto, retired professor at the University of Brasília (UnB) and author of Maldita guerra – Nova história da Guerra do Paraguai (Damned War – A new history of the Paraguayan War; Companhia das Letras). The book, which has become a reference point for the topic in Brazil, was published in 2002 and was revised and expanded by the author two years ago. “There has been a lot of historical falsification, because the goal of various authors has been to create myths and legitimize political groups.”
In the 1960s, a wave of revisionists, including Brazilian writer Júlio José Chiavenato, author of Genocídio americano (American genocide; Brasiliense, 1979), proposed a new theory for the war’s origin. He attributed the cause of the conflict to the interests of the then powerful British Empire, which had funded the involvement of Brazil and its allies to prevent Paraguay’s economic development. This theory was discredited over time.
Brazilian National Library Foundation’s Collection Brazilian soldiers in the Paraguayan War kneeling during a religious procession in 1868Brazilian National Library Foundation’s Collection
In Brazil, the most rigorous work on the war began being produced in the late 1990s, when historians trained at the first graduate centers in the field began studying the subject. Among them are Doratioto and colleagues such as Ricardo Salles (1950–2021), of the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), Vitor Izecksohn, of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), and Wilma Peres Costa, of the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP).
These historians contextualized the conflict within the nation-building process in the region and the interests that Brazil and its neighbors had in navigating the River Plate basin. They also began to pay attention to issues such as the conscription of enslaved people, women’s participation, and life in the camps, which have been explored in greater depth in more recent works. Doratioto took it upon himself to arrange publication of the memoirs written by Dorothée Duprat de Lassereb (1845–1932), a Frenchwoman who lived through the hardships of the Paraguayan War (see Pesquisa FAPESP issue no. 338). The book was published in 2023 by Chão Editora. Four years earlier, the same publishing house published a book by historian José Murilo de Carvalho (1939–2023) about Jovita Alves Feitosa (1848–1867), a woman from Ceará who tried in vain to become a soldier in the conflict.
The digitization of previously inaccessible sources and discoveries made in unexplored archives have contributed to the advances made in research conducted in Brazil and neighboring countries. In May, the Guita and José Mindlin Brasiliana Library at the University of São Paulo (BBM-USP) received a collection of 4,000 books and documents about the Paraguayan War, including works considered rare by experts. The collection was built up over decades by a former business consultant, Sinésio de Siqueira Filho, who decided to sell it to ensure its future preservation. Someone who prefers to not be identified purchased the collection, donated it to the USP library, and hired the company that will catalog the material.
The collection covers a wide range of topics and includes sources that enhance studies of the war and broaden our understanding of the history of the involved countries and their relationships. “There are many accounts from foreign travelers who visited the region during the conflict that can provide new perspectives,” highlights USP historian Rodrigo Goyena Soares, who helped evaluate the collection. Researchers will be able to access the material after it is cataloged later this year. The library plans to digitize the rarest works.
Goyena researched the history of Paraguayan War veterans in Brazilian, Argentine, and Uruguayan archives while writing his master’s thesis, presented in 2014, and continued the study in his doctoral dissertation, defended in 2017. Both works were carried out at UNIRIO, under the supervision of Salles. Goyena was immersed in the subject when he made a discovery that had major implications for researchers dedicated to the Paraguayan War.
In 2014, the researcher found a forgotten diary at the Imperial Museum of Petrópolis (RJ). The diary was written during the final phase of the conflict, by Gastão de Orléans (1842–1922), Count of Eu, husband of Princess Isabel (1846–1921). He had been sent by his father-in-law, Emperor Pedro II (1825–1891), to take command of the Brazilian troops in 1869. The document, written in French, had never been carefully studied. Goyena found information in it that allowed him to refute versions that implicated the count in the executions of enemy officers by Brazilian troops at the end of the war. Translated by the historian, Diário do conde d’Eu (The Count of Eu’s diary) was published by Paz & Terra publishing house in 2017.
Over the last 10 years, thirty-nine master’s theses and fifteen doctoral dissertations on the Paraguayan War have been submitted in Brazil, according to the catalog kept by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education in Brazil (CAPES) and the websites for major graduate programs. An average of five theses per year seems low in a field where 1,400 researchers complete at least one of the two stages of graduate studies each year, but it could be a sign that interest in the subject is not yet exhausted.
Um Fluminense [José Alves Visconti Coaraci, 1837–92], Traços biographicos da heroina brasileira Jovita Alves Feitosa.Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia Imparcial de Brito & Irmão. 1865 / Collection: Guita and José Mindlin Brasiliana Library | José Rosael / Hélio Nobre / Paulista Museum – USPJovita Alves Feitosa and the canvas Herói da Guerra do Paraguai (Hero of the Paraguayan War; n.d.), by Belgian Adrien Henri Vital van EmelenUm Fluminense [José Alves Visconti Coaraci, 1837–92], Traços biographicos da heroina brasileira Jovita Alves Feitosa.Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia Imparcial de Brito & Irmão. 1865 / Collection: Guita and José Mindlin Brasiliana Library | José Rosael / Hélio Nobre / Paulista Museum – USP
Many of these papers examine the problems associated with recruiting troops in Brazil. Research by Salles and other historians since the 1990s has shown that local political leaders resisted enlisting members of the National Guard in the provinces and landowners resisted freeing enslaved people and allowing them to don the uniform even after the central government began paying compensation. More recent studies have confirmed these findings and present new evidence.
In Piauí, Valerio was able to gather information about 96 former soldiers, such as Professor Carvalho, after studying official documents and newspapers from the period, digitized by the National Library and the Piauí Journalism Remembrance Project, an initiative undertaken by the Federal University of Piauí (UFPI). In addition, he scoured the Piauí Public Archive and collected petitions from people who wanted to be exempted from military service, documenting situations that other publications have only described based on the reports sent to the Court by the provincial chairmen during the war.
Historian Edilson Pereira Brito followed a similar path in his research on recruitment during his master’s thesis, defended in 2011 at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), as well as his doctoral dissertation on the National Guard, completed in 2018 at UNICAMP. Police reports and private letters helped him tell the story of interpreter Frutuoso Antônio de Moraes Dutra, who recruited Indigenous people from villages in Paraná for the war effort, in exchange for rewards.
Additionally, the researcher found evidence that enslaved people took advantage of the conflict to negotiate the conditions of their release, since many free men did not want to fight and only freedmen could join the Army in their place. “The liberation of enslaved people who joined the troops was conditional on them completing a few years of military service, which created opportunities that many seized to achieve freedom,” says Brito, of the Federal Institute of Paraná (IFPR).
Data from an 1872 Ministry of War report, compiled by Izecksohn, of the UFRJ, indicate that participation by enslaved people in the troops was relatively minor, but proved crucial to sustaining war efforts in the final phase of the conflict. At least 6,000 enslaved people were recruited into the Army and Navy. In an article published in 2015 in Navigator, a science journal released by the Brazilian Navy, historians calculated that they represented only 4 percent of the total number of combatants, but a quarter of those sent to the front during the last two years of the war. “The number of men mobilized by Brazil could have been as high as 150,000, but nobody knows for sure because of the precariousness of the statistics at the time,” says Doratioto.
According to biologist Pedro Souza Moreira da Silva, who began studying the war while completing a master’s program in history at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation’s Oswaldo Cruz House (COC-FIOCRUZ), the conflict helps us understand how the country is still dealing with some of its problems today. Later this year, he will complete his doctorate at the same institution, where he seeks to understand the war from an environmental perspective, by analyzing the interactions between soldiers and the environment they encountered—from using plants to feed the troops and care for the wounded, to dealing with the obstacles imposed by climate and geography.
“The way the troops [interacted] made the environment even more unhealthy and dangerous, which contributed to the spread of diseases and prolonged the conflict longer than perhaps necessary,” says Moreira. Documents show that Army officers ate better than soldiers and slept in tents at their camps, while troops often slept out in the elements. “The inequality was a reflection of the slave society at the time, but it makes us reflect on the inequality that persists in our social relations today,” he says.
The story above was published with the title “A never-ending battle” in issue 343 of September/2024.
Scientific article
IZECKSOHN, V. O recrutamento de libertos para a Guerra do Paraguai: Considerações recentes sobre um tema complexo. Navigator, Vol. 11, no. 21. 2015.
Books
DORATIOTO, F. Maldita guerra – Nova história da Guerra do Paraguai. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2022.
SOARES, R. G. (org.). Diário do Conde d’Eu. Rio de Janeiro/São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2017.
