Liberals? If we want everything to continue as it is, everything must change. Pernambuco and Monsignor Francisco Muniz Tavares in the context of the Revolution to the General and Extraordinary Courts of the Portuguese Nation (1817-1822).
Keywords: Liberalism. Francisco Muniz Tavares. Pernambuco. Worldview. Independence of Brazil. General and Extraordinary Cortes of the Portuguese Nation
In the second half of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, liberal ideas spread around the world as a basis for criticism of the Old Regime and, arriving in the Americas, they were of fundamental importance in influencing the various independences in this vast and complex continent. In Brazil, this independence process - which we will delimit here between 1808 and 1824 - had in the then Province of Pernambuco a place of considerable relevance, which makes us understand that an understanding of this process involves thinking about the political conjuncture in Pernambuco during the period in question. To think about this conjuncture is, necessarily, to work on the formation of a political culture constituted in the framework of a thought that had in the Olinda Seminary a radiating point and that ended up reelaborating illustrated issues through an umbilical relationship with conceptions dear to the Old Regime, what we call illustrated reformism. We start from such questions in this work to show, through concepts such as the worldview of the French-Romanian thinker Lucien Goldmann, how Father Francisco Muniz Tavares inserts himself in what we consider a Pernambuco tradition and how he takes this tradition to a space that is understood as liberal, which is the Cortes Gerais e Extraordinária da Nação Portuguesa (1821-1822). Therefore, it was important to us to elaborate on what the priests with formation in those milestones thought and how this formation manifests itself in the concrete example of Muniz Tavares. From the foundation of the Olinda Seminary to the interventions of Francisco Muniz Tavares in the sovereign congress and to his later intellectual and political production, there is a path that we need to follow. The intellectuals of a time can be privileged windows to access the past, even if such an idea should be taken with the necessary care.