Marquês de Pombal, arauto do Segundo Império (brasileiro)?

Abstract

Along the nineteenth century, almost all manuals concerning to the Brazilian History helped to build, disseminate and sediment a positive and modernizing image of Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, overestimating the «hits» and reducing the «excesses» practiced by the minister of the King D. José I. In this article, we analyze how Pombal’s controversial figure was incorporated into the official historiography of Brazilian nation, based on ideological assumptions agreed upon by the founding partners of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico do Brasil, under Emperor D. Pedro II protection and patronage. The validation of Conde de Oeiras, especially in didactic materials, obeyed a teleological conception of History, a method that persists in twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ historiography.