The economic transformations which the new exigencies of capitalism brought to Brazil at the end of the second half of the nineteenth century caused the emergence of new urban sectors, the end of slavery, the utilization of free labor and the rise of a dynamic agrarian bourgeoisie. These in turn provoked a crisis of hegemony within the dominant classes in the final moments of the Empire which reached the sphere of political domination. Their loss of hegemony resulted in administrative inertia and the impression of a power vacuum since the coffee bourgeoisie was not yet able to exercise the direction of the State alone. With the advent of the Republic, it fell to the army to temporarily occupy power and to institutionalize the new regime, while the bourgeoisie was organizing itself to take charge definitively in a hegemonic form.

The centennial of the founding of the Brazilian Republic, which coincides with the bicentennial of France's republican revolution of 1789, has not aroused the same debates as the French Revolution. The extent to which France's eruption represented a bourgeois revolution has been much questioned. Indeed, bourgeois revolutions everywhere have been subject to greater scrutiny and skepticism. This debate has excited much less passion in Brazil.

Most historians have viewed the Brazilian Republic's birth as a rather unimportant event—and a failure. It was neither bourgeois nor a revolution. Rather, the overthrow of the Emperor on November 15, 1889 was a palace coup that replaced one authoritarian rural regime with another. According to this interpretation, no social change occurred as the population stood by “beastlike.” Historians often argue that although the army, which launched the coup, was able to maintain some autonomy in policy formulation for five years, it soon succumbed to the revived agrarian export elite, leaving behind few positive achievements. Yet at the time, the London Statesman declared that the overthrow of the Brazilian monarchy to be the world's most significant event in a very busy 1889. Historians are now starting to echo this sentiment, reasserting the importance of the early 1890s. Décio Saes, for instance, asserts that the 1889-1891 period marked the advent of the “bourgeois state” which confirmed on the political level the transformation set into motion by the emancipation of slaves in 1888.

Brazil came late to republican government. By 1889 Brazilians had witnessed almost a century of tumultuous politics in neighboring republics. The aspirations of the 1817 and 1824 separatists had been transformed as order and progress, the positivist creed, chased away the specter of social reform. In some ways Brazil itself had changed profoundly during the empire; yet in others it remained deeply rooted to its colonial past. The tension between tradition and change, between old alliances and new possibilities, highlighted the proclamation and consolidation of Brazil's republic. Political transition provided opportunity for widely differing groups to seek preeminence. The myth of a uniquely Brazilian peaceful transition to republicanism is shattered as we witness the power struggles that began on November 15, 1889. But one hundred years later it is the image of lost opportunity, the failure to seize the moment created by abolition, the absence of the povo from the process, that impresses those who experience another transition in Brazilian republican history.