In the second half of 1924, loosely coordinated military revolts broke out in multiple Brazilian states, seeking to unseat President Artur Bernardes. In most cases, the rebels were defeated when they faced the government forces head-on. But one detachment of the revolt, led by army captain Luís Carlos Prestes, did not surrender. It adopted guerrilla-like tactics and, for the next two and a half years, traversed the Brazilian interior with the hope of destabilizing the federal government.
This campaign, known to us as the Prestes Column, is the subject of Jacob Blanc’s latest monograph. After a first chapter devoted to historical contextualization, the book is divided into two parts. Chapters two through six focus on the revolt itself, while chapters seven to ten chronicle how the Prestes Column was memorialized in Brazilian culture, from 1924 to the present day.
The highlight of the book is Blanc’s reconstruction of the revolt. He has amassed an impressive set of sources on the Column, never-before-analyzed in combination with one another: unpublished documents produced by the rebels, Brazilian military archives, British and American consular reports, text-searchable newspapers, often-neglected local publications, and oral testimonies collected by journalists in the 1990s. These sources enable Blanc to discuss, more profoundly than scholars before him, the Column’s troubled relationship with the communities it encountered during its trek—a trek often marked by gratuitous violence, forcible requisitions of supplies, and armed conflict with local potentates. Brazilian and Anglophone readers alike will appreciate Blanc’s admirably concise account of the Column’s journey, as well as the excellent maps.
Although Blanc goes further than other historians in discussing interior communities’ responses to the Prestes Column, one is left wishing he had gone further still. We learn, for example, that the Column had more support in the state of Maranhão than anywhere else (74–80), but Blanc does not tell us why. An explanation might have yielded powerful insights on the diversity of socioeconomic conditions throughout Brazil’s interior, and how this diversity conditioned local responses to the Column. Blanc also leaves the door open for future historians to explore, with untapped local sources such as criminal case files, the extent to which Prestes’s men disrupted the social structure of the communities they passed through.
The book’s second half will appeal most to readers concerned with historical mythmaking and the politics of memory. The Column’s epic quality, Blanc shows, was promoted by publishers trying to sell newspapers in the 1920s (114–116; 137–140). Afterward, “two main groups, each offering a competing path for modernizing Brazil,” sought to associate themselves with the now-popular myth of the Column’s heroic struggle: the Brazilian Communist Party, led by Prestes from the 1930s to the 1960s, and conservative army officers, many of whom had themselves fought in the Column (6). It remains somewhat elusive, though, why the Brazilian reading public proved so receptive to the messianic image of Prestes as the “Knight of Hope.”
For readers interested in the structural causes of military officers’ discontent with Brazil’s First Republic, and how to situate the revolts in the broader political crisis that would bring down the regime in 1930, Blanc’s treatment may be too cursory (27–31). Although material in English on this topic is regrettably limited, some might find it useful to pair Blanc’s book with Boris Fausto’s classic work on the subject, published in the fifth volume of the Cambridge History of Latin America.
Readers should also watch out for inaccuracies in this book, among them: Congress’s “official news organ” was not the Diário Oficial da União (63). The authenticity of the 1926 “Regionalist Manifesto” cannot be taken for granted (81). Prestes was convicted, but not “arrested several times,” by the post-1964 military dictatorship (207–208). Brazil’s struggle for independence caused thousands of deaths and certainly did not happen “bloodlessly” (23).
Overall, though, this will remain an indispensable volume for Brazilian and Anglophone readers interested in the Prestes Column, and instructors will find in it a useful work to discuss historical mythmaking and the “invention of tradition” in a Latin American context.
