Municipal Ordinances and Local Governance in the Brazilian Empire: São Paulo, 1845–89

Municipalities, the basic building block of the Brazilian state, were governed by a set of ordinances that bounded and limited what their administrators considered to be appropriate behaviors and standard practices of their citizens.  From public health to public morality, from business enterprise to consumer behavior, the ordinances created detailed blueprints for the daily interactions of citizens on physical, economic, and social levels.  Indeed, it was the responsibility of municipal councils to identify and report on the major challenges facing their communities each year, and to propose solutions to these challenges.  Alterations and additions to municipal ordinances was the principal means used by municipal councils to satisfy this responsibility.  These collected ordinances guided appropriate behaviors and standard practices of their citizens, intervening periodically with new provisions to correct or remedy a new challenge.

The curious element of this practice is that municipal governments under the Brazilian Empire (1822-1889) had little autonomy within which to work.  Merely administrative, they held no legislative authority and were subjected to routine provincial oversight in all matters of governance.  It was up to the municipal councilors to write the ordinances that provided the legal boundaries of community responsibilities, but these ordinances had to be submitted to the provincial authorities for approval to give them the weight of law.  Still, they were crafted by local administrators in accordance with local needs.  As such, they represent the most significant expression of autonomy in Brazilian community governance.  This paper compares the municipal ordinances of several municipalities in the province of São Paulo, Brazil, across the nineteenth century to generate an understanding of the local, legal view of the ideal municipal comportment in the half century from 1845 to 1889.