The government of the Portuguese king develops all the national forces which were embryonic in the colony--art, law, literature. He founds the Bank of Brazil, establishes a military academy, a national library, and a botanic garden; he fosters agriculture and immigration. His new domain seems to have transformed the mediocre monarch. Under the influence of his queen, Charlotte, eager for power and display, he longs to extend his dominion over Uruguay and Paraguay, perhaps even to reconstitute, to his own profit, the vice-kingdom of La Plata. He seizes upon French Guiana, which remains in the power of Brazil until 1817.
But such vast plans as these do not strengthen the hands of the monarch. The Court, silent and extravagant, does not please the Brazilians, and the King favours the Portuguese merchants by an extreme prodigality. He creates a new nobility, that of the "sons of the King," and its influence in the palace and its insolent display soon weary the colonists. The old _régime_ is still extant; a parasitical bureaucracy, recruited among the Portuguese, weighs heavily on the destinies of Brazil.
A revolution in Portugal in 1820 invites the King to return to Europe to accept the Constitution put forward by the revolutionary _junta_ of Lisbon. The monarch leaves his son, Dom Pedro de Alcantara, { 182} in Brazil, and quits the country. It is said that on bidding Dom Pedro farewell he cried: "Before long Brazil will separate from Portugal; if it is so, crown yourself before some adventurer gets hold of the sceptre."
The Lisbon Parliament wished to destroy the reforms of João VI. in Brazil, and to transform a monarchical nation into a feudal colony, but the Brazilian deputies then in Portugal protested and emigrated to England. A revolution at Pernambuco in 1817 had raised the standard of nationalism. The manifesto or _Preciso_ of the revolutionaries formulated the complaints of the colony. "There is no longer any distinction," said the victorious patriots, "between Brazilians and Europeans; all consider themselves brothers; as descendants of the same origin, as inhabitants of the same country, as believers of the same religion."
Journalism, in its infancy, was propagating constitutional ideas both in the north and in the south. Jacobin declamation and romantic ideology created a powerful movement in the taciturn colony. Governmental _juntas_ were appointed in the provinces. Portuguese and Brazilians struggled for political and social domination, but a Lusitanian army, in spite of popular protest, imposed the oath of fidelity to the Constitution which had been promulgated for the metropolis by the distant Cortes.