The Contestado Rebellion: Millenarian Vision vs. Capitalist Reality

Introduction: Societal Disruption and Millenarian Response

Millenarian movements such as that of the Contestado are a form of rural protest, rooted in material conditions but imbued with a profound religious sensibility. They tend to emerge in moments of societal stress and change. The specific disruptions in the lives of rural folk that triggered this particular millenarian response — and the reasons the state reacted so harshly to repress it — are questions worth examining in depth.

When the millenarian movement known as the Contestado erupted in 1912, Brazil had just undergone a profound social and economic disruption. The country was shifting to a more impersonal economic system, moving away from the landlord-and-tenant relationships that had defined rural life up to that point. The stakes were high for the state: there had been an infusion of foreign money to fund a massive connecting railroad, which promised great profits for Brazil but also meant the displacement of many workers from their lands and ways of life. It also meant a wave of immigrant labor flowing into formerly isolated areas. Former peasants — once dependent for their livelihoods on small plots of land — rose up in the form of the Contestado movement because it gave legitimacy to the old ideals they believed in: the close relationships between patron and farmer, and the religious significance of a life that transcended material profit.

Diacon's Argument: Patronage, Not Political Rebellion

In his analysis of early twentieth-century Brazil, Todd A. Diacon's Millenarian Vision, Capitalist Reality argues that the protest movement was spawned by a desire to return to older forms of patronage — not a demand for new and more equitable systems of governance, as some historians have suggested. Once landowners had protected the peasants; now that support was gone in the new age of capitalism and foreign control of the land. The Contestado movement was not a "political rebellion in which the peasantry rose up to destroy the landlord class," but a movement to resurrect and redefine the peasant-landlord relationship outside of the new capitalist mindset that had been imposed upon rural society (Diacon 127). Thus, the movement was not a political rebellion: it was more of a local spiritual crisis of meaning (Diacon 143).

Material Conditions and the Pre-Railroad Rural Economy

One persuasive argument in favor of the idea that the rebellion was not a kind of proto-Marxist uprising is manifested in how strikingly pre-industrial the peasants were, largely confined to using mules and cattle to till the soil. These were not workers of the world desiring to unite; rather, they resisted industrialization instead of embracing it, and they rallied together not as a class but as a religious people with shared indigenous traditions.

The basic subsistence farming practiced among supporters of the Contestado was so common that class and social divisions between landowners and farmers had not been especially pronounced before the incursion of the railroads. There was a limit to how much money could be made from this earlier type of farming, even by large landowners, and those landowners could sometimes be seen working side by side with peasants in the fields — creating a rough kind of social equity. "Squatter" families on public lands were also often ignored by authorities, giving peasants yet another means of survival.

Works Cited

Diacon, Todd A. Millenarian Vision, Capitalist Reality. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.