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in the last days of empire. Absent the funds for European study or to send his studious
offspring to one of the prominent national universities (playgrounds for sons of well-
off planters), there were two possibilities for advancement: the military and the sem-
inary. By temperament the austere Euclides was probably more suited to the seminary,
and all his life he yearned to teach in one of the new academies of higher learning that
economic concerns of his father suggested civil engineering rather than theology as the
boy's pragmatic career choice. Manuel da Cunha opted for what was the only sure way
to secure a degree and the positions, patronage, and prestige that usually went with it:
he sent him to the main technical institutes of the time. The youngster had brilliance in
language, natural history, and math, and soon he would be the protégé of the Brazilian
revolutionary, and author of the country's first constitution, Benjamin Constant Magal-
hães.
Euclides initially encountered Constant at the Colégio Aquino, a polytechnic high
schoolrun,ironically,byJesuitclericscommittedtothesecularideasofAugusteComte,
whose political philosophy and evolutionary social theory were sweeping South Amer-
a devotee of Comte and one of the people most instrumental in advancing these ideas
within the military and new republic, moved to the War College at Praia Vermelha on
Rio's back bay, so did the intellectually enthralled Euclides. Since fees and board were
provided there, this scholarly path was gratifying to the elder da Cunha. And so the
youngster was trundled off to learn an applied technical trade at this strange institution
that was half barracks and half boarding school. Euclides found himself in the upper
echelons of military privilege, within an institution that would successfully challenge
the monarchy and shape the ideological frameworks, political institutions, and national
identity of Brazil for much of the twentieth century. These Praia Vermelha connections
structured the contours of da Cunha's entire life and positioned him within the military
cohort of Brazil's elite in a moment of transitional national politics—something that his
social standing on its own never could have done for him.
Da Cunha came of age in a period of cataclysmic transformation of the three central
institutions that underpinned Brazilian life at the time: the monarchy, slavery, and the
military. By the end of the last decade of the nineteenth century, Emperor Pedro II was
gone, slavery was abolished, and the military had shifted from a commanded institu-
tion—one that had spent most of the nineteenth century chasing down runaway slaves,
quelling local rebellions, and building infrastructure—to a key political actor in the cre-
ation and rule of the modern Brazilian state, where it took charge, on and off, for much
of the twentieth century.
Precarious Times
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