History: In a much-discussed essay that was to preface his novel, El reino de este mundo (1949), the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier coined the term "lo real maravilloso", "the marvellous real".
His controversial thesis was, in essence, that the Latin American artist has no need to invent surrealist fantasies, at the time all the rage in Europe, since the history and cosmology of the New World are intrinsically marvellous. His novel, which chronicles the Haitian slave rebellion of Mackandal and the grotesque Negro monarchy of the ex-slave Henri Christophe, was intended as an illustration of this proposal. The term "lo real maravilloso" should not, however, be confused with the later vogue term "magical realism" which, broadly speaking, pushes literary invention in a diametrically opposite direction.
Anyone coming across Patrick Wilcken's Empire Adrift: The Portuguese Court in Rio de Janeiro 1808-1821 for the first time is bound to feel a certain sympathy with Carpentier's position. It is not merely the idea of a European monarchy fleeing invasion to set up court in a sub-tropical colony, and then remaining there for 13 years, that strikes the exotic note, it is the remarkable scale of this move. When, in November, 1807, the Portuguese royal family boarded their ramshackle fleet to cross the Atlantic, they took with them the entire state apparatus, from judges, ministers, courtiers and clergy to aristocrats, musicians and personal servants. In all, no fewer than 10,000 are estimated to have fled Lisbon, and in such indecent haste that entire crates of luxury belongings were abandoned on Belém Quay.
However, the more one reads Wilcken's detailed account of the episode, the more one realises that what he is telling is essentially a European story. At the start of the 19th century, Portugal was a small player caught between the two great superpowers of the day. Its Prince Regent, the indecisive Dom João VI, was forced to negotiate a course between naked Napoleonic ambition and a British imperial agenda which would stop at nothing to gain favourable access to South American markets. Horatio Nelson's recent destruction of the harbour and fleet of neutral Copenhagen might serve as a salutary lesson in regard to the dangers of appeasing Bonaparte, while to oppose the French dictat would mean the imminent occupation of the country. Faced with such a dilemma, the Bragança family chose flight, and in doing so, permanently altered the shape of South America. Anyone who has ever wondered why it was that the Portuguese half of the continent remained a single, giant country while the Spanish half fractured into 10 separate entities needs to pay close attention to this episode. Back in Europe, there followed the horrors of the Peninsular War, all the more chilling for the lack of anecdotal detail with which Wilcken alludes to them.
One of Wilcken's strengths is his ability to sketch in the various historical contexts with great economy. Over the various chapters one learns not only of the discovery and development of Brazil, of the imperial rivalries that constantly threatened the Portuguese empire, of the alliances and manoeuvres by which it remained intact, but of the relentless rise of the slave trade that in the last analysis sustained it. One of the more inspired chapter titles qualifies Imperial Rio as "A Subtropical Rome". But Wilcken is also a consummate portraitist, and one learns a great deal more of the machinations and ambitions of diplomats such as Lord Strangford and Antônio de Araújo, of the vacillations and dilemmas of João VI, and of the intrigues of royal relations such as Dona Carlota, wife of Dom João and sister of King Fernando VII of Spain. In comparison to the Braganças, the Windsors are really a model family!
What is perhaps most intriguing about the flight to Rio is that, even after the defeat and exile of Napoleon, João VI chose to rule his empire from the New World for a further seven years, until forced to return to Lisbon by a constitutionalist revolt. Even then, Dom Pedro, who as eldest was heir to the throne, chose to stay on in Brazil, and in the famous "Grito do Ipiranga" of 1822 proclaimed its independence from Portugal, thereby founding the only dynastic empire of the New World. If Wilcken's account has one flaw, it is that it doesn't give in outline the subsequent development of Brazil under Dom Pedro II, for this was arguably the most far-reaching consequence of the momentous decision of 1807.
The centre of gravity of the entire episode was always European, however, and Wilcken never loses sight of this essential point. One imagines that in the hands of Carpentier, the account would have located the marvellous real uniquely in the "tropical Versailles" which Rio de Janeiro temporarily became.
Empire Adrift: The Portuguese Court in Rio de Janeiro 1808-1821 By Patrick Wilcken, Bloomsbury, 300pp.£16.99