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an ideal society, an ethical culture. This elite would direct society forward through its
selflessness, oriented by scientific methods and moral thought.
Imbued with such uplifting principles, excited by their role in the crucible of national
identity, and clearly the only social segment able to incarnate Comte's technocratic van-
guard, the army (and its cadets) felt “it was the Right and the Duty of the army to as-
institutions for most of the twentieth century and gave impetus and prestige to Brazil's
well-developed technocratic cultures.
. . .
There is nothing to suggest that Manuel da Cunha realized that he was sending his im-
pressionable son into the one of the most socially complex, racially diverse, intellectu-
ally demanding, and antimonarchist institutions in Brazil. It was the incubator for many
radical leftist political activists, like Luis Prestes, whose battalions sought to stimulate
local uprisings for land reform to rectify centuries of social injustice and inequalities of
wealth in the Brazilian Northeast. It sheltered the half-Terena Indian (and Euclides da
Cunha's companion) Cândido Rondon, who would become Brazil's first activist on be-
halfofindigenousrightsandwouldtravelwithTeddyRooseveltthroughthewildsofthe
western Amazon (da Cunha had hoped to join him on that expedition). It harbored men
of letters like Alfredo Rangel and military historians like Tasso Fragoso. The builders
of the cities of Brazil, like Lauro Müller, came from its ranks, as well as scores of gov-
ernors, senators, and politicians.
It is in this strange military institution where Euclides da Cunha first comes into view
in 1888, intense, neurasthenic, and like his friend Cândido Rondon, an impoverished,
nerdy boy of uncertain race but strong ideas. He was writing adolescent poetry. He had
begun his journalistic career in the school newspaper, was enthralled by the heroes of
the French Revolution, and wrote sonnets on the most Jacobin of them: Danton, Robe-
spierre, St. Juste. He longed for the grand gesture and insurrection with all his yearning
heart.Thecadetswereinferment,thecitywasrifewithrumors.Theirteachersandidols
were at the very center of the machinery of change.
Da Cunha and this cohort were students in an institution subsidized by the emperor
that seemed as much a penal colony as a training ground. Bad food and poor sanitation
werehallmarksofPraiaVermelha.Theyhadothercomplaints:theirstipendsweremiser-
able, their situation seemed at least as much metaphor for the imperfect capacities of
monarchy as anything their imaginations could devise.
Fired up by the revolutionary ideas of their teacher Constant, inflamed by the return
fromEuropeoftheRepublicaniconandpamphleteerJoséLopesTrovão,thecadetswere
increasingly unruly. Wildly cheering Lopes Trovão's arrival from Europe from the ram-
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