Criminal Law and Politics in the First Republic: An Analysis of the Court Cases Related to the Attempted Murder of Prudente de Morais in 1897

Abstract

On November 5th 1897, the then president of the republic, Prudente de Morais, escaped an attempt on his life. The foot soldier Marcelino Bispo de Mello was promptly identified as the perpetrator of the assassination attempt, but the alleged threat of a conspiracy to remove the president led to the arrest and subsequent prosecution of dozens of political opponents. Although this episode has been addressed several times in studies on the political, social and cultural history of the first decades of the Brazilian First Republic, it has been little explored from a legal perspective. In this article, I will analyze two models of court cases that represented the core of the legal disputes surrounding the assassination attempt – the habeas corpus and the criminal court case. As I will demonstrate, an analysis focused on these documents opens up a series of possibilities both to visualize the logics, concepts and procedures through which criminal law and politics were brought into relationship, and to understand the process of social construction of criminal law during the First Republic.