In December 1816, armed with Haitian guns, Bolívar returned to Venezuela. ‘I decree full liberty to all slaves,’ he declared, launching a war of elimination of his own, uniting armies of creoles, ex-slaves,
In June 1821, Bolívar won the decisive battle at Carabobo that expelled Spain from Caracas and was then elected president of a new republic called Gran Colombia. Exhausted, drawn, greying, he admitted, ‘I am consumed by the demon of war, determined to finish the struggle.’ As he explained, ‘My doctor often told me my spirit needs to feed on danger. This is so true. When God brought me into the earth, he brought a storm of revolutions to feed off. I am the genius of the storm.’
In Spain, a revolution had undermined the rule of King Fernando. Now the storm-born Liberator crossed over snow-capped Andes and tropical jungles to attack the Spanish in Peru. Sharing the tribulations of his troops, he defeated the Spanish at Bombona and contemplated Chimborazo, just as a very different Liberator was declaring the independence of Brazil in a splurge of dysentery.
The other Liberator would never have conquered a half a continent nor spoken to a god on a volcano – and he was neither a revolutionary nor an abolitionist. In fact, he was a Braganzan prince and the owner of thousands of slaves, and the liberation of Brazil could not have been more different.
Prince Pedro was playful and informal, keen on singing and playing guitar, usually dressed in a boater, white cotton trousers and a striped jacket. Nine years old when he arrived in Rio, he relished the city’s hedonistic informality, chatting to passers-by in the streets and plunging in semi-disguise into its bars and bordellos; he also took a French actress as his mistress. Unlike his father King João, Pedro had adopted the Brazilian taste for washing. But while he counted himself a sort of liberal, he beat his slaves and revelled in his sexual mastery over enslaved women, whom he often spotted and bought in the street.
João remained in Brazil and negotiated his son’s marriage to an Austrian Habsburg. Kaiser Franz had already married one daughter to Napoleon; now he agreed to marry Marie Louise’s younger sister, Leopoldina, a fair, slim, dutiful and cheerful twenty-year-old, to the louche Pedro, nineteen at the time. Metternich was exasperated by the negotiations – ‘The Portuguese are the slowest people in the world!’ – and then by the archduchess herself: ‘I’ve never seen a more spoilt and foolish child … If I was her father, I’d beat her.’
Leopoldina, close to her sister Marie Louise, was excited by the adventure of Brazil, learning Portuguese, studying botany and the works of the travelling naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, though her views were romanticized. ‘Europe has become unbearable,’ she wrote, while Brazilian ‘savages’ were ‘children of nature not yet corrupted by luxury’. Sensing the ‘corruption’ of Brazil, she declared, ‘I’ll conduct myself with all possible modesty,’ eschewing ‘any literature that excites sensuality’.
As she arrived in November 1817 to popular excitement, King João had just put down a revolt in Pernambuco and sent away Pedro’s French actress. After a wedding night when she was undressed by her mother-in-law and sisters-in-law, Leopoldina was shocked by the pettiness of the palaces, the stink of her ill-washed father-in-law and her husband’s coarseness.
Pedro swore blindly, sketched pornography, loathed his ‘bitch’ of a mother, urinated off verandas, defecated in full view of his troops. ‘I am entranced by the country,’ Leopoldina wrote bravely. ‘I spend my days making music with my husband.’ But to her sister Marie Louise, she admitted, ‘In all honesty, he speaks his mind with a certain brutality; he’s accustomed to doing exactly what he wants,’ but ‘he loves me tenderly’. She added, addressing the woman who had survived Napoleon: ‘You are indeed right, true happiness doesn’t exist.’ The couple’s attitudes to their slaves were different: ‘She was always very kind when she passed us slaves,’ recalled a slave at their country house. ‘He was arrogant, walked around with a silver-topped cane and beat us.’ She was perpetually pregnant and depressed.
