Reconstructing the daytime life of nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro's public spaces is laborious but fairly straightforward work. We find rich details, for example, in the narrative travel accounts and watercolor sketches that crowded the shelves of European bookstores after the post-1808 opening of Brazil's ports to foreigners in the wake of the arrival of the Portuguese royal court fleeing a French invasion of Iberia. Each dawn the streets began to stir with barefoot women of the religious sisterhoods collecting alms, some flanked by one or two enslaved servants. By six in the morning the sun had risen, and people began to tumble out of homes. The milkman led his cow on a rope, kneeling from time to time to fill his bucket. The streets soon surged with men and women carrying merchandise—bird cages, baked sweets, calicoes, live chickens, lard for cooking, and so on—on trays in their hands or in straw baskets on their heads. Many of them were escravos de ganho (slaves for hire) who plied the streets selling small items or their services throughout the day. From the city's homes, workers both enslaved and free emerged with wooden barrels or piles of soiled linens on their heads, heading for one of the city's public fountains. Teams of stevedores and porters met boats at the port and heaved boxes and sacks. At around four in the afternoon groups would gather at the bayside Largo do Paço, where, according to the French artist Jean-Baptiste Debret, “blacks, both slaves and free, went seeking customers for the sweets, baked goods and drinking water they sold” to passersby. Laundresses piled the stiff, sun-dried linens on top of their washbowls on their heads as the day ended. Members of a funeral procession bearing lit wax tapers might pass through the streets at dusk, gathering in front of a house before proceeding to church. The sun set behind the mountains, and the story, for the most part, ends there.Footnote 1
But what about the nighttime? Foreign travelers used aural references to evoke the urban clamor of Rio, filled with groups of enslaved workers and their “incessant chatter,” which they contrasted with the quiet after the church bells would toll, signaling curfew. A pair of visitors from the United States, writing in the 1830s, noted that slaves would rush to avoid breaking the 10:00 p.m. curfew, “and woe to him that is caught” by police on the street after that hour. They write, “Nothing could be more surprising to a stranger from the North … than to find the streets and the beautiful suburbs of the city almost as tenantless and silent as the ruins of Thebes or Palmyra.”Footnote 2
Travel writers and folklorists who walked readers through the paces of daily life in Rio, to the sounds of splashing fountains and street vendors’ cries, could not resist the dramatic appeal of ending their stories with frightened, barefoot workers scampering home. Unlike the daytime city, authors produced few narrative accounts of quotidian public life after dark. Yet the story of nineteenth-century Rio's daily life need not end at sundown. Paradoxically, interdictions against entering the city's public spaces at night generated both the notion that Rio's streets were empty and our knowledge that they were not. The curfew to which these travelers refer went into effect just after Brazil's independence as a series of police edicts and municipal regulations that criminalized the act of being in any public space after the toll of the evening church bells for most, but significantly not all, persons. These regulations held force for more than half of the nineteenth century, spanning most of the post-independence period of monarchical rule known as the Empire (1822–1889). To the extent that interdictions are an index of what people actually do, we can surmise that nineteenth-century Rio was alive after dark. And the archive bears out this supposition. Scattered throughout the police logs and municipal administrative documents from the late 1820s through the 1870s, when this curfew was in effect, are references to men and women—nearly all enslaved or free persons of color—apprehended for being in the streets after the evening church bells.
The police officials and bureaucrats who authored these documents were laconic in relaying this information to each other and, eventually, to us. Cumulatively, though, these memoranda and daily police logbooks are like glimpses through a tiny keyhole at nocturnal public culture before the era of Rio's famed nightlife, before there was supposed to be any. The curfew's history amounts to far more than a description of the city's after-dark lost worlds. This article will explore how the curfew established patterns and means of limiting the basic freedom to move about the city. Although no formally codified right to assemble or circulate in public spaces existed during the Empire, the customary ability to do so bore immense importance as urban public life intensified in the nineteenth century. Limiting this freedom in time did not halt all movement after dark but rather instituted a reign of selective policing. It was at night when both the fragility and the necessity of what jurists in Brazil called the “freedom to come and go” came into view. The daily transition between day and night enacted juridical changes that are invisible in the nation's Constitution, legal codes, or in any national statute, yet which fundamentally shaped the social categories that determined people's places in society in ways that historical research has yet to explore.
The rules that legally defined the nighttime did not come from any national-level law or founding document. Rio's nocturnal sociolegal world, instead, was the product of police edicts, on-the-ground policing practice, city ordinances, and the actions and practices of people as they used the darker hours for work, play, and resistance against oppression. In other words, this is a phenomenon of urban governance that forces us to look beyond the nineteenth-century nation-state to understand the exercise of power at a local level. This analysis gains inspiration, in part, from a recent generation of Brazilian historians who focus their studies of social and particularly labor history on the operation of what they call “municipal power.”Footnote 3 The day-to-day functioning of the postcolonial Brazilian city, intricately documented in executive and police records and neighborhood petitions, has traditionally formed the basis for works that trace local experiences but resonate little beyond that particular locale. This new scholarship has rediscovered local governing bodies like Câmaras Municipais (Municipal Chambers), the rules they produced, and their role in urban society, and has yielded new understandings of the broad themes that have brought Brazilian social history to the attention of researchers throughout the world interested in slavery, labor relations, and social inequality. For the Brazilian historians who have embraced this approach to studying urban life, labor, and power relations, it has presented a useful alternative to the focus on liberal citizenship that has dominated the study of postcolonial Brazil since the country's emergence from over two decades of dictatorship in the 1980s.Footnote 4 This new historiography usefully brings the analysis of equality, belonging, and rights down to the municipal scale. From this vantage, we can study what might otherwise look like inscrutable contradictions, in particular the coexistence of constitutional rights and freedoms alongside extreme and legally sanctioned inequalities and preemptive restraints on liberties.
At a constitutional moment when this postcolonial Atlantic port city still in the grip of slavery tried to balance public security with individual freedom, Rio's selective curfew was part of the broader, troubled history of the rule of law. Everywhere in the region, the Spanish and Portuguese Empires’ successor states enacted modern legal codes and national charters based on the rule of law and equal justice for all, dispensing with colonial distinctions between classes and ethnicities. Newly independent nations confronted the conundrum of how to maintain the rule of law in the face of perceived security threats from both outside their borders and, moreover, from within.Footnote 5 In postcolonial Brazil, as elsewhere, the ideal of the rule of law meant not just consistency but also universality in its application, and restraints on the arbitrary exercise of state power. Yet, as historians of Brazilian slavery have shown, by the 1830s a dual system of justice emerged that aimed to protect private property and public order, which rendered absurd the idea of equality and revealed the ideal of the rule of law as flawed, at best, in its real-world application.Footnote 6 As some scholars have noted, recognition of this miscarriage of the rule of law in postcolonial Latin America, and beyond, can easily devolve into a tendency to pathologize the Global South as innately corrupt and lawless. While we might be confounded by the seeming paradox of postcolonial authorities’ willingness to suspend the law alongside their tendency to “fetishize” it, this contradiction can itself provide precious insights. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper urge us to dispense with the idea that there “is something the matter with contradictory legal phenomena within one political regime. We should be able to acknowledge that the ideal of universal law—that laws are to be exactly the same for every subject—is itself a creation and one that ‘contradicts’ the inequalities everywhere present in social life at all times.”Footnote 7 In the Global South and elsewhere, communities constitute themselves by making law, and the “dialectic” of obsession with the law and “lawlessness” arises from the multiplicity of “discontinuous, overlapping sovereignties” simultaneously in force.Footnote 8 While most commentators on these “contradictions” have implicitly understood them as national phenomena, it is at the local level where the jurisdictional questions that created them most elaborately come into play. Rio's residents recognized the authority of national and provincial bodies of law, but also of municipal ordinances, police edicts and practices, and judges’ rulings; in addition, women, enslaved people, and minors all fell under personal jurisdiction.Footnote 9 Only by examining this history of everyday authoritarianism at the level at which municipal power functions can one see the threads that make up the “horizontal tapestry of partial sovereignties” in postcolonial Brazil.Footnote 10 It is at this level of analysis that daily temporality becomes visible, and where one can observe the night emerging as a modern political formation and a juridical category.
The curfew overtly discriminated between social classes and was only applied to enslaved persons, those who could be mistaken for slaves such as free persons of African descent, and, on occasion, foreigners. The well-off were explicitly exempted and lighter-skinned people appear to have been implicitly so. Brazil's first Constitution (1824) made all non-enslaved males born in Brazil, whether born free or not, into citizens guaranteed equality before the law. Although all citizens were supposed to be able to exercise liberal political and civil rights freely irrespective of their ethnicity, a stark color line divided those who enjoyed the freedom to move around in and make use of the city from those who did not.Footnote 11 Though people of color in nineteenth-century Rio faced the indignities of racial animosity and a constant threat of illegal enslavement or re-enslavement, all residents, including those of African descent, generally enjoyed a customary right to move about the city by day. After dark, simply circulating or assembling in the streets became a crime, and the night vested the newly professionalized police with emergency powers.
Yet even those men and women whom the selective curfew targeted consistently took to the streets after dark. Police records from throughout this period show incidents of men and women arrested after dark, or “fora de horas,” (after hours), to use the police language of the day. It is clear that the regulations and edicts designed to curtail public socializing and circulation after dark failed to do so.Footnote 12 Most people who carried out nocturnal activities did so illegally or because they had obtained an exception. What, this article asks, were the social, cultural, and legal effects of this nightly suspension of freedom of movement, this nightly state of emergency? And what is revealed when we take seriously the nighttime not simply as backdrop but as a category of analysis in itself?
Put another way, what if we make urban time instead of urban space the focus of our analysis? Urban histories of Brazil have dwelled on stark distinctions between house and street, which more recent and critical histories have questioned and complicated. Studies of cultural ferment in the city's bohemian haunts, radicalized port workers in the marine districts, the singular social life of Rio's famous beaches, and spaces of resistance and rebellion on public squares have brought about a rich appreciation of how important contests over urban terrain have been to the social and political history of not just Brazil but Latin America, the Atlantic World, and indeed the Global South.Footnote 13 Regimes of time deserve analytical attention too, though, since they delimited people's actions and behaviors in ways that differed from the already amply studied contests over city space.
“Night” is absent from the indexes of classic works on penology, the history of crime, and cultural history. Surprisingly, even studies of nightlife take for granted that modern urban commercial entertainment occurs after dark, taking the darkness as a backdrop but not subjecting it to analytical thinking.Footnote 14 Historians have examined attitudes toward and folktales about the night that show how life after dark has been a perennial concern in Western culture.Footnote 15 Most analytical works of history that examine the night are sweeping, macrohistorical endeavors. They make the case for the relevance of the study of everyday urban temporality, in part by showing the transhistorical importance that night has held in both popular and elite cultures, and in part by making clear what is lost in analytical specificity and depth when we consider daily temporality across centuries and continents.Footnote 16 Some studies of the world's cities during the long nineteenth century show a keen awareness of the night as a privileged time for the genesis of cycles of repression in particular places. Their authors, however, have had their sights set on other historical problems—such as gender-based violence, popular religiosity, or Afro-diasporic culture—and so have not made the definition of the night a part of the historical problem to be solved.Footnote 17 Still, these works have positioned us to pose the deeper analytical questions about time that have been asked so effectively about other seemingly natural phenomena, questions that have created large and enormously enlightening subfields of history: such as the study of sex and gender, or the senses. As the historian Joan Scott showed in her classic essay on the study of gender, inquiring into the implicit understandings and uses of a taken-for-granted social category can provide “new perspectives on old questions,” such as, in this case, how social inequality is reproduced and how political rule is imposed and experienced.Footnote 18
In pondering the nighttime restrictions selectively imposed on nineteenth-century Rio's residents, one feels the gravitational pull of those theorists whose writings have bridged the sovereign exercise of state power on the one hand, and the “state of exception” on the other. This legal-political phenomenon was systematically theorized first by Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) and more recently by Giorgio Agamben, and it was debated by those wary of the reactions to the 9/11 attacks on the United States.Footnote 19 How can we understand systemic arbitrary justice within a constitutional order that holds the rule of law as its paramount value?Footnote 20 When a government implements a state of exception, in the words of one commentator, “the dam of individual liberties breaks and a society is flooded with the sovereign power of the state.” Agamben shows how these conditions stem from a troubling paradox built into the rule of law: “The state of exception is the point at which the law provides for its own suspension.”Footnote 21
Such thinking on states of exception illuminates the sociolegal history of the night because it lays bare the circular logic of authoritarian power; Agamben's point of departure, after all, is Carl Schmitt's definition of the sovereign as “the one who decides on the state of exception.”Footnote 22 Agamben points toward a “tendency in all Western democracies” in which “the declaration of the state of exception has gradually been replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government.”Footnote 23 The exceptional, in other words, readily becomes normal, and the sovereign does not even need a specific law or an actual emergency to invoke it.Footnote 24 This “permanent state of emergency” lies at the heart of modern governance, even for democratic states. Agamben writes, “Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system.”Footnote 25
Theorists of the state of exception, then, have given us the critical language with which to speak of the regime that took effect each night in nineteenth-century Rio, when guarantees of equal justice coexisted with repressive rules that applied to selected persons in the city's public spaces. Yet despite their apparent resonances with the nighttime suspension of rights, studies of states of exception tend to take for granted the national level at which civil and political rights are both secured and suspended. They provide little guidance for understanding specifically how “municipal power”—the cluster of sources of authority that function at the level of the city—structures and delimits urban lives.Footnote 26 The blanket of the rule of law is full of holes not only because the law legislates its own exceptions but also because the law provides multiple jurisdictions: the national versus the local, and also municipal authority versus seigniorial or patriarchal privilege.Footnote 27 Municipal authorities imposed a curfew in nineteenth-century Rio in a context of fragmentary and lumpy sovereignty divided between individual households, slave owners, and various municipal authorities. Slave owners and municipal police each did their part to enact the nighttime repression of people of color, whether enslaved or free, and to decide to whom it would apply.
This repression was defined by its exceptions, and these likewise evade the conceptual framework constructed to comprehend how power functions on a national scale. To understand the urban night as a sociolegal invention means to unearth the common roots of the “sovereign exemption” and racial inequality. Alexander Weheliye criticizes Agamben for failing to account for instances of the production of “bare life”—the Italian philosopher's coinage to signify a condition of rightlessness—like imprisonment, torture, and particularly slavery that are actually part of the normal legal order. Racial violence “does not necessitate a legal state of exception in order to fabricate the mere life of those subjects already marked for violent exclusion; in fact, we might even say that this is its end goal.” Weheliye joins those critics of Agamben who have noted that “the state of exception does not apply equally to all, since the exclusion of and violence perpetrated against some groups is anchored in the law.”Footnote 28
During Brazil's formative postcolonial century, the country's legal order had to bend around the existence of humans who were not considered legal persons. Nighttime restrictions on spatial mobility and the racial logic of access to the city predated the nineteenth century, yet a professionalized police force only existed in Rio from the 1820s on, and with it, for the first time, came the potential to enforce a selective nightly lockdown. The curfew—the emergence of nighttime restrictions unprecedented in their draconian reach, and if not the manpower fully to enforce it at least the political will to try—created of the nighttime a sociolegal category that effectively altered the material world each evening at sundown: an artisan's tool, after dark, became a weapon; a person of African descent became a presumed slave and public enemy abroad in the city streets, who posed a potential danger to society that eclipsed his or her rights. Each night at sundown, the law allowed for its own suspension, and police held the power to decide—ironically just as visual perception became more difficult—who deserved to be arrested, searched, and flogged. One achieved access to the city by way of exceptions to restrictive rules. With its extraordinarily large populations of enslaved workers and free persons of color, post-independence Rio de Janeiro at nightfall provides a useful way of thinking with, but also beyond, the concept of the state of exception. The ways in which people conformed to or defied the curfew, or indeed allowed for exceptions to it, present us with a new view of the individual, the city, and the postcolonial state coming into being.
The curfew generated little, if any, public controversy, at least among the scribbling classes. It was discussed occasionally and matter-of-factly in newspapers, and later in folkloric literature. It appears in the fiction of the century's end set in the early Empire, serving to highlight how different daily life had been in an earlier age.Footnote 29 Jurists and political essayists of the early and mid-Empire who so prolifically wrote on a plethora of other subjects, from corporal punishment to habeas corpus to maritime law, did not concern themselves with the nightly curfew. Its theoretical marginality itself is telling, and the paucity of juridical writing directly addressing the curfew has also meant that anyone studying its imposition and effects must rely on arrest records. There are certainly other stories to tell about life after dark in nineteenth-century Rio, but the social and legal history of the curfew provides a promising start toward understanding this as yet unknown nocturnal world. The artifacts of the criminalization of being in the streets after dark reveal the creation of the night as a socio-juridical category and the process of a “social and cultural system defining itself.”Footnote 30
THE TOQUE DE ARAGÃO
In the decades after Brazil's independence from Portugal in 1822, Rio de Janeiro, the vice-regal capital of colonial Brazil and then the seat of its national government, simultaneously experienced the great surge of African slavery, also felt in the United States and Cuba, and the onset of urban modernity. Rio grew from colonial outpost and underpopulated entrepot to busy port city and Imperial Court of the new Brazilian monarchy. The authorities and institutions convened to govern and police the city confronted not only intermittent political turmoil but also the vexing problem of slavery. An immense proportion of the city's population—nearly half in 1821—were considered chattels and enjoyed no effective form of formal legal personality or rights and lived under the bitterly divided jurisdictions of both their masters and public authorities.Footnote 31 The census taken in Rio in 1849 showed the city's slave population was higher than anywhere else in the Americas, around four times larger than that in New Orleans. Until the 1850s, most enslaved residents of Rio were African-born, from the west-central part of the continent. Tax records from the 1840s indicate that an average of 3.6 enslaved residents belonged to each household, and, in 1849 there were approximately 110,000 in the city. By 1864, that number had grown to around three hundred thousand.Footnote 32
Brazil had the world's largest concentration of persons of African descent outside Africa itself, and free or freed persons of color were a distinctive presence in the capital city. In 1849, Rio was home to 10,732 freed persons (about 60 percent of them women, who could more easily arrange for their manumission), 116,319 free persons, and 78,855 enslaved.Footnote 33 Throughout most of the century, free persons of color shouldered the burden of proof to demonstrate their free status to avoid being treated by arresting police or private citizens as enslaved.Footnote 34 Even persons captured in Africa illegally after the 1831 treaty outlawing the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and removed from ships in Brazilian waters, were subjected to twelve years of compulsory labor despite their designation as africanos livres (free Africans).Footnote 35 A rich historiography demonstrates the general “precariousness of freedom” for former slaves and free persons of color in Brazil, in both legal and socioeconomic terms.Footnote 36
In this context, when the Emperor of newly independent Brazil named the first Intendente Geral da Polícia—the rough equivalent of a chief of police—this official had broad powers and complicated directives: to maintain order and “public tranquility” in a rapidly growing city that was the showcase and Imperial Court of the new nation, where the extent of the police's power vis-à-vis the Municipal Chamber, the judiciary, and slave owners was in continual dispute.Footnote 37 The question of just how to bring about “public tranquility” was more ambiguous still because, despite Brazil's large enslaved population, its national government never passed its own version of the slave codes instituted elsewhere in the Americas.Footnote 38 Because the 1824 Constitution made no mention of slavery, the criminal jurisdiction over enslaved people living in Brazil fell, by default, to their masters and the police. Municipal Chambers, the local governing bodies for all incorporated cities and towns in Brazil since colonial times, passed city ordinances (posturas) that regulated commerce and managed public works, health, and safety.
Municipal authorities in nineteenth-century Rio regulated the nighttime city through ordinances and criminal interdictions, and they addressed the population's shared need for safe passage in providing public illumination, the first truly public service other than (but linked to) policing. Professionalized police forces did not formally exist, either by day or by night, until the nineteenth century, but nighttime patrolling has deep roots in Ibero-American history. In medieval Europe, guards and “armed notables” kept an eye on city gates by day, and at night unarmed guards patrolled to watch for fires, intruders, and other dangers. The Philippine Ordinances, the body of Portuguese law that was compiled in 1603 and held force in Brazil into the nineteenth century, stipulate rules for recruiting and controlling night patrols. In Lisbon and other large towns, men were subject to a public safety labor draft.Footnote 39 Nocturnal policing in colonial-era Rio de Janeiro included not just night patrols but also capitães de mato, or “bush captains,” men tasked with catching runaway slaves in the areas surrounding the cities.Footnote 40
When the Portuguese aristocrat and freshly appointed Intendente Geral de Polícia Francisco Alberto Teixeira de Aragão (1788–1847) issued his curfew edict on 3 January 1825, it came from both a long tradition of nighttime restrictions and the necessities of the growing city. The “Toque de Aragão” (Aragão's Curfew), which remained in force for fifty-three years, made it a crime to be on the streets after the evening church bells.Footnote 41 Its first article asserts the authority of police patrols to stop and search people and to apply coercive force: “All, with the exception of no person, who are found by any Patrolman, Guard, or Soldier of the police force, must obey when they are ordered to do so” and submit to being “questioned, searched, and presented to some Authority.” Failure to comply “shall be considered resistance for the purpose of being able to use force against those who are disobedient; and even violent means can be employed if required.” Six of the nine articles that follow lay out the parameters of the curfew and penalties for breaking it: fines for free persons, fines and flogging for the enslaved:
After 10 o'clock at night in the summer, and after 9 o'clock at night in the winter, until the dawn no one shall be exempt from being frisked, and stopped by the Police Patrols, and even before that hour if the person is under suspicion of carrying weapons or instruments to break into doors and rob houses. And so that everyone knows that it is 10 o'clock at night in the summer and 9 in the winter, the bells of the São Francisco de Paula Church and the São Bento Convent shall toll for a half hour without interruption, so that no one can allege not knowing the time.
Although the curfew edict required that “all, without exception” submit to police stops, it then warned that patrolling officers had to enforce these restrictions selectively: “The Patrols must be given precise instructions not to abuse this measure, and it must not be applied to well-known persons or persons of integrity.”
The Toque de Aragão applied an ancient public security tactic, one tried and tested in Rio itself during the colonial period, particularly during moments of heightened concern about public order. In 1808, two months after the arrival of the Portuguese royal family in Rio, the police intendant Paulo Fernandes Viana had passed an edict prohibiting the operation of shops, taverns, and gambling houses after 10:00 p.m., so as to avoid “gatherings of idlers” and slaves shirking their work.Footnote 42 While Aragão's curfew was no innovation, it was part of a new process of modernization of the police rather than the preservation of old disciplinary methods. Tellingly, in addition to imposing the curfew, the edict also provided formal payments for police in exchange for their services; they had previously been remunerated mostly as privately funded bounty hunters or haphazardly through prizes or shares of seized property. Likewise, it drew into systematic, rule-bound policing the ancient idea of unequal justice. It sorted city residents into categories, each deserving their own treatment in ways that would have been clear to both those imposing the curfew and those subject to it. While the edict stipulates specific rules for enslaved people, it barely mentions the treatment of freed or free persons of color. In its subtext, however, their position rings out clearly. The discretionary power accorded to police, the usage of the word “blacks” (pretos) as implicitly synonymous with “slaves,” and the presumption of slave status for people of color meant that the edict built selective policing into the modernization of Rio's police force. It established temporally designated legalities in Rio's public spaces, where the exceptions were as important as the rules themselves.
The curfew effectively made a person a presumptive criminal when out in public after dark, but its regulations extended to the thresholds of houses and especially businesses that attended to the city's poor. One of its articles reads: “After the evening church bells have stopped ringing, it is prohibited to linger without an obvious motive on corners, squares, public streets; to whistle, or to give any other signal. This prohibition extends to blacks and people of color even before this hour, but after it becomes dark.” It targeted not only those out in the city's streets but also those in its interior, private, yet public spaces, particularly Rio's many taverns and small shops: “Every person, who after the church bells is found in a shop, tavern, bar, or gambling house, shall pay [a fine]…; if the person is a slave (s)he shall be taken to the [slave prison called the] callabouço … and punished by whipping.” The whipping would likely have been public, a practice only outlawed in 1886.Footnote 43 The edict decreed punishment for sellers and tavern keepers who allowed “at night, or in the daytime, inside or in the doorways of their shops or taverns, the gathering of people who are not buying anything, especially blacks.”
It was perhaps the interdiction against going into the streets that drove slaves and people of African descent into taverns and small shops to avoid flogging and socialize away from the public gaze. Authorities worried constantly about “Africans” and “blacks” in shops and taverns, and the archive shows that they did indeed frequently congregate in these small commercial establishments, both by day and by night, since, contrary to the law, many apparently remained open after curfew.Footnote 44
Over time, authorities tinkered with the curfew and enacted subsequent edicts and ordinances that limited nighttime movement. Rio's police chief ordered a new curfew in 1831 in response to a wave of political turmoil, changing the time from 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. to sunset, which usually came at around 6:30 p.m., but applying it only to slaves and sailors. Police did, in fact, carry out the instructions first made official in Aragão's edict, both immediately after its publication and over the following decades. Numerous cases in Rio's police records during this period include people caught “walking around in the street after hours” (“andar na rua fora de horas”) who were arrested, sent to jail, subjected to whipping (when the people arrested were enslaved), and forced to labor on the Imperial Court's many public works: building roads, maintaining public squares, and building and repairing the city's fortifications.Footnote 45
No statistics exist to indicate how many people the police arrested for breaking the curfew, but we can count the numbers recorded in sporadic, narrative police reports. Of the 224 persons arrested during just one week in 1831, for example, thirty-four were apprehended for violating the curfew, as opposed to thirty-five for vagrancy and twenty-five for weapons possession, the other most common categories. In 1862 and 1865, curfew violation was the single most common reason for arrest, followed by vagrancy. In both of those years, about a quarter of all arrests were curfew violations. Throughout this period, police arrested more slaves than free persons for breaking the curfew.Footnote 46 As with any type of criminal statistic, we cannot know whether a relative prevalence of police stops indicates the frequency of actual behavior or disproportionate persecution. Rio's major newspapers indicate the likelihood that those who were effectively immune from the curfew frequented Rio's streets after dark; advertisements appear daily for evening classes and theater performances and the arrival of ships, for example, documenting the functioning of the city “after hours.”
The police archive breathes some life into the spotty numeric data, showing how police targeted and harassed people of color after dark. An official communication from a district magistrate to the police chief raised alarm about “public gatherings of blacks,” “especially at night,” and insisted that “all of these blacks that are found” be “apprehended and taken from wherever they are, whether in the streets or in a tavern, and the taverns that let them in should be criminally prosecuted.”Footnote 47 References in police records to individual arrests rarely exceed one sentence.Footnote 48 Such cases were adjudicated on the street and never reached a court of law; the suspects were never put through the criminal procedures that would have generated more than a few lines in a daily police logbook.
Each night, church bells filled the air with the unifying sound of moral and political authority and of the spatial and moral centrality of the church to the community. Even without the ambient urban noise of today, the reach of the bells in this hilly and relatively windless city would probably have been only a one mile or so. This “speaking architecture,” to borrow the term the art historian Niall Atkinson used in his study of civic bells and urban political power in Renaissance Florence, tells of the curfew's spatial focus: the center of the city, but not its rural hinterlands.Footnote 49 Rio's streetlamps were likewise concentrated in the central neighborhoods, even as they proliferated in the decades when the curfew was in effect. The nighttime as a legal phenomenon was a space demarcated by sound but mitigated by light. Authorities endeavored to illuminate the darkness and extend the time for work and leisure for some, even as they reinforced the day and night divide for others. As Rio's residents navigated the city, they would have known about its different temporal regimes and the spatial as well as the racial unevenness with which the curfew was applied.
AFTER HOURS
The curfew was never intended to keep the streets empty after dark. Instead, the Toque de Aragão sought to control Rio's population while accounting for the need to differentiate between classes of people who shared the city's public spaces. In other words, this rule was imposed not despite Rio's nascent nocturnal public life but because of it. The night was a time of work and production, and of leisure activity, too, but one when, as we have seen, the presumption of the need to move about the daytime city freely gave way to the anticipatory and officially sanctioned fear of anyone who did not appear to be “of integrity.”Footnote 50 The fear of arrest and physical violence, in turn, would have structured the decisions that workers who needed or wanted to use the city's public spaces at night had to make.
Rio's authorities controlled the city's daily rhythm through criminal interdictions, and also through a myriad of rules that segmented the day and limited activities in time. As the historian Mark Smith has shown in his study of the antebellum U.S. South, one did not have to labor beside a ticking factory clock to have an awareness of mechanical time. Church bells and the imposition of a time regimen enforced by the whip could serve similar purposes.Footnote 51 Mechanical clocks were a rarity in Rio, but the city had long since abandoned the natural cycles of “sun time” as the principal means of determining and imagining daily time and regulating and measuring the work day. Keeping time was paramount in the South Atlantic's premier commercial port, for both navigation and commerce. Municipal regulations concerning the opening and closing times of public markets and taverns, the entry and departure of ships in the harbor noted in the daily newspapers, and of course the echoing church bells that signaled the nightly “shutting in” were all measured in hourly time.
The time discipline imposed on the workday was neither purely task-oriented nor purely clock-oriented, but rather combined both.Footnote 52 A multiplicity of temporal regimes ruled nineteenth-century Rio. A brief survey of the types of labor that kept the city functioning makes clear that the daily rhythm of work extended beyond the period “from sun to sun,” to use a nineteenth-century astronomical expression for daytime. The only national census taken during the Empire in 1872 shows that a miniscule proportion of Rio's 37,576 enslaved persons were involved in artisanal or industrial production.Footnote 53 The others worked according to schedules determined by various factors. Ships arrived mostly but not exclusively during the day; carriers, who performed one of the principle types of physical labor in demand in nineteenth-century urban Brazil, met the vessels whenever they arrived. For fishermen, the tides, not the sun, determined the start and end of the workday. When night fell, lamplighters made their rounds, lighting and then, before sunrise, extinguishing the whale oil and gas lanterns in the city's central streets.
The largest number of enslaved persons in nineteenth-century Rio labored in domestic service, and the reliance on enslaved workers for all kinds of tasks brought domestic slaves into the streets around the clock. They ran errands, delivered messages, carried goods, gathered water, and disposed of household waste. Masters appeared to have ignored the curfew in sending enslaved workers into the streets at night, sometimes intentionally in search of the cover of darkness. On several occasions in the municipal records in 1842, for example, the enslaved were detained, and their masters fined, for illegally dumping garbage on the streets after the evening church bells.Footnote 54 The selective application of the curfew allowed for some negotiation. In that same year, an enslaved woman named Ermelinda was arrested for being out after hours and, making matters worse, throwing water in the street that had been used to wash feet. She was detained for several weeks in the Public Warehouse (Depósito Público), a judicial depository for property that was either unclaimed or under legal dispute, until her master paid a fine.Footnote 55 In 1878, a freed domestic worker named Ana Maria de Jesus, in a legal complaint she lodged against her employer for unpaid wages, used as evidence of her onerous working conditions the fact that her job required her to gather kindling and remove trash in the street “after hours.”Footnote 56 She understood the risks of being in the streets at night: the humiliation of body searches, arrest, possible flogging, and even re-enslavement, which was a common occurrence.Footnote 57 The interdiction against being out at night added yet another element of danger to the jobs of the enslaved and people who might be incorrectly identified as slaves.
Perhaps above all, the prevalence of people of African descent who performed odd jobs in the streets as vendors and tradesmen, and women street traders called ganhadores (or sometimes negros de ganho), determined both the rhythm of daily labor and the perceived need to control workers “after hours.” Ganhadores do not appear separately in the census returns, but by all other accounts, in the mid-nineteenth century they were one of the most characteristic features of Rio's urban landscape. They were mainly enslaved workers (although later in the century most were freedpersons) who depended on permission from a guarantor to walk the streets selling goods or performing services for cash.Footnote 58 Labor discipline was entangled with the continual conflict between the state and slave owners over their human chattels. A master could give written permission to his or her slave to be out after dark, an exemption that the police appear to have honored. Such a note could prevent a flogging, but non-enslaved or freed persons of color who were subject to the curfew but often lacked a patron to vouch for them did not benefit from such protections.Footnote 59 The curfew did not necessarily prevent people from carrying out their work after dark in the city's public spaces. It did, however, redistribute the perceived risk of having Rio's most oppressed workers walk the streets during the day by coercing them to return at sunset; some of the burden of this risk fell upon on slave owners and guarantors, but most of all it rested on those who could be accosted, searched, and flogged by the police for breaking the curfew.
THE DEATH OF JOSÉ NABO, AND THE AFTER-DARK LIFE OF THE CITY
If some types of labor might be required after nightfall (like that of midwives), others were explicitly needed only after dark: in particular the workers who lit, tended, and extinguished the public lanterns that spread throughout the city center in the course of the century.Footnote 60 After the Viceroy introduced public illumination to Rio in 1790, while it was still under Portuguese colonial rule, the process of installing whale oil-burning street lanterns began. This service was funded and controlled in turns by the police, the Municipal Chamber, or a series of government ministers. In 1827, the city's public spaces had 620 lanterns, whose installation was contracted out to a private company.Footnote 61 Classified announcements in Rio's daily newspapers reveal that already in 1830 streetlights had become a common feature of the landscape, which readers used as a reference to instruct their interlocutors about where to go (“the house with the streetlamp”) to explain a meeting place, exchange information about something for sale, or return a lost item to its owner.Footnote 62
Rio converted to gas lighting beginning in the 1850s. Public illumination fell within the purview of the police, who took most of the responsibility for its management.Footnote 63 In 1851, when the city signed a concession contract with a private entrepreneur to light the city with gas, the lanterns already numbered in the hundreds. By 1857, the city's urban districts had nearly three thousand gas lanterns, and someone had to tend to them.Footnote 64
Unlike during colonial times, when public lighting was strictly a private affair, the government controlled the illumination of the city streets, a service that depended heavily on captive labor. For this work Rio relied on enslaved workers (rented from their private owners) and workers captured from the illegal slave traffic and sent into forced labor, the so-called africanos livres. In the words of one contemporary, “The lamplighters were slaves, who as a rule slept on the sidewalks, covered with oil, which was one of the saddest spectacles in the city.”Footnote 65 The archival record does not reveal the numbers of lamplighters working at any given time, but administrative records show how the public illumination service functioned from the period of its expansion in the 1830s onward. The city was divided into districts, each assigned to an overseer responsible for approximately six “servants” for every eighty lanterns. According to an 1830 government contract, “Illumination shall begin as quickly as possible in all districts of the city before it becomes completely dark, and the lanterns must stay lit until dawn or until the appearance of the moon.”Footnote 66 A partnership between the police, the administrators of the africanos livres, and the Public Illumination Service was firmly established by the 1840s. Scores of documents refer by first name to an africano livre “who is suitable to perform service in Public Illumination.”Footnote 67
If by the 1830s Rio's lampposts became references that city residents often called upon to find their way, and fixtures in the popular urban imagination, so did the workers who made their rounds each evening to light and then extinguish the lanterns on top of them. Lamplighters could, and in fact were forced to, move about the city after dark. They led the city through the transition from day to night. We can reconstruct their roles in the first century of public illumination through a combination of folklorists’ writings and popular imagery, and the perfunctory bureaucratic documents assigning them tasks and accounting for their labor.Footnote 68 This material generally reveals little about lamplighters’ lives or how they themselves used the city.
In 1848, however, two lamplighters were accused of murder.Footnote 69 Police led Pedro Congo, an African-born enslaved man, out of the cell where he was held in Rio de Janeiro's House of Correction for interrogation. He affirmed during his questioning that he was a slave who lived in the city center in the home of a man named only as Mister (Senhor) Paranhos while his master traveled overseas, and that he worked as an ascendedor de lampiões, a lamplighter; he lit the whale oil lanterns on a single street in the city center. When he had tended to the flame for the last time at about one in the morning and his nighttime work was done, he explained, he walked with three fellow lamplighters, also slaves, to the Oil Warehouse to rest, hours after the evening church bells would have signaled the start of curfew.
On this day, Pedro Congo testified, rather than proceeding straight to the Oil Warehouse, he and one of the other men paused at the door of a small shop located along his route because something caught his eye: he saw a “pardo” (brown-skinned man) named Francisco positioned “half in and half outside the door.” The two lamplighters went closer to the store, when Francisco said he and another man known as “Vira Mundo” had killed the cashier and shop assistant there, José, commonly known as “José Nabo,” or Joe Turnip. Francisco offered both lamplighters “ten bucks and asked them to keep quiet.” Francisco and Vira Mundo had been heard on the street corner the night before, according to Pedro Congo, plotting to murder José and rob the shop. Pedro's testimony continues: After discovering this murder and being paid off to keep silent, he and his partner Antonio proceeded with their nightly rounds. They returned the lanterns and rope used to light the streetlamps, they extinguished the lanterns, and finally they went back to the warehouse, where they probably spent the rest of the night.
As police interrogated lamplighters involved in the case one by one, details emerge about the rhythms of their nightly work and the various forms of syncopation that they introduced to these patterns. We learn from this testimony that each of these enslaved lamplighters worked a stretch of urban territory encompassing not much more than a few blocks and a public plaza. And each night after they walked along their designated streets and squares lighting and tending to the lanterns, they went back to the warehouse, but not always directly. Some stopped to drink water at the public fountain at the Largo do Paço, a major meeting place in the center of a large, public square. Some explained in elaborate detail the circuitous routes they took before finally coming to rest in the warehouse. One said that when his work was done, he stopped at the murdered José Nabo's shop, which doubled as a tavern, “because he wanted to drink something, and he knew that shop and the cashier.” This group of enslaved nocturnal workers had a special relationship with the shop and with José Nabo, its shopkeeper. The two lamplighters who “were closest friends with José, often used to sleep there in the back of the store during the day, and to sew his clothes for him.” In fact, José Nabo's shop served as a major meeting point for the neighborhood; one of the suspects testified that he “went to the shop almost every day, sometimes in the daytime and sometimes at night.”
The case also reveals the ways the two accused, Francisco and Vira Mundo, moved through the nocturnal city. Francisco, nineteen-year-old free pardo, lived in the kitchen of a nearby casa de pasto, a sort of proto-restaurant, near José Nabo's store, performing odd jobs there in the day and probably sleeping on the floor at night. Both of the accused were among the frequent clientele of José Nabo's shop. When asked if he knew Vira Mundo, Joaquim, another enslaved lamplighter implicated in the murder, said that “he knew him for a long time, and that he always used to walk around looking very dirty, and that after he heard that this robbery had taken place, he started to walk around all spiffy and with his clothes pressed.” Vira Mundo, when questioned, testified that he had known the murdered José for four years, that he frequented the tavern, and that he often bought items there on credit.
Vira Mundo and Francisco protested their innocence, but, as with too many of these precariously preserved manuscript police investigation records, there seem to be no surviving records of the outcome of this case. Yet, for the purposes of this analysis, the judge's verdict is less important than the details revealed along the way. Lamplighters plied the streets every night technically breaking the law; they made their rounds of the city during the hours when normal rules were suspended and the enslaved and persons of color would be flogged for being caught in public. It seems that, ironically, the urban residents who best embodied the use of the resource of darkness were the very ones whose job it was to illuminate the city, to render it useable for members of that privileged minority allowed to be in the streets at night. Although lamplighters’ nightly labor was circumscribed, the testimony in this murder case makes clear that they made numerous independent decisions along the way about their routes, peripheral activities, and companions.
THE FREEDOM TO COME AND GO
The ability of Vira Mundo and Francisco to move about the city at night, to make friends with tavern-keepers, and to improvise new routes back and forth in their nightly rounds should not simply be taken as evidence to restate a truism about the relative freedom of urban slavery. The intense social interaction and relative freedom of urban as opposed to rural slavery have become an accepted and sometimes unspoken supposition underlying much historical writing on the subject, for Brazil and throughout the Atlantic World.Footnote 70 This historical debate is complicated, though, when we consider not only urban space but also urban time. The relative freedom of urban slavery stopped at nightfall. Moreover, for free persons of color, the nighttime exacerbated their precarious condition and imposed risks and limits on their ability to move around and gather in public.
It is unsurprising that in a city so dependent on captive labor authorities imposed rigorous social control measures on its enslaved residents, with little controversy or debate. Even as the institution of slavery lost legitimacy in the course of the mid-nineteenth century, the general view of slaves as public enemies, seeking to upend the social order, prevailed in the law as it was applied in the courtrooms and on the streets.Footnote 71 It is notable here that the curfew treated some slaves as freepersons and some freepersons as slaves. This legal confusion was useful; it effectively reconciled the ubiquitous presence of rightless workers with the needs of a modernizing commercial center and the high-minded liberal constitutional principles of the new nation.
Independent Brazil's founding document, the Constitution of 1824, guaranteed “inviolable” civil and political rights that “shall apply equally to all,” as well as the right to property and freedom of religious practice, albeit qualified by questions of morality and “respect” for the “state.” The freedoms of movement and assembly, expressed as the “freedom to come and go” (“liberdade de ir e vir”), are only directly addressed in the Constitution as a right to leave the country. Not until the first Republican Constitution in 1891 were Brazilians guaranteed the freedom of assembly. Nor did the Constitution of 1824 explicitly grant the right to Habeas Corpus, the principle evoked when one's freedom of movement is threatened with violence or coercion.Footnote 72 In short, that constitution did not guarantee the freedom to move about, or gather in, the city's public spaces. On the contrary, the Brazilian national Criminal Code of 1830 specified interdictions against and punishments for “illicit gatherings”Footnote 73 and “gatherings that become suspicious for public order,” and, “prohibits nighttime gatherings of five or more persons that do not have a recognized and justified purpose in streets, city squares, and roads.”Footnote 74
Although far from being settled law, the free association and comings and goings of the enslaved and free poor, by both day and night, generated much concern in Brazil's capital in the decades after independence.Footnote 75 Local authorities’ approach to governance turned on their control of individuals’ physical movements in Rio's public spaces. Historians have documented a surge in arrests of people of color in the 1810s and throughout the following decades for “gatherings” (ajuntamentos) and for batuques, a form of Afro-Brazilian drumming and dance.Footnote 76 The city's most marginal laborers, enslaved and freedpersons and the free poor, for their part claimed their slice of urban terrain and their customary right to make use of it, and to move around in and through it.Footnote 77 In numbers impossible to recover, fugitives from slavery had an important impact on the governance of the freedom to come and go. To use the historian Sidney Chalhoub's evocative term, Rio's “hideout city” (cidade esconderijo) within a city sheltered those fleeing captivity. Hidden in plain sight among a mixed population of enslaved and free people of African descent, through their ability to move around the city and in and out of it, runaways tried with at least temporary success to pass as free as they sought work or housing. Rio provided a refuge, but the other side of this coin was that authorities and slave owners acted with a pronounced distrust of people of color.Footnote 78
Although both enslaved and free persons had to circulate in the city as a matter of logistical necessity, slave owners and police did subject persons under their control to surveillance in the daytime, too. The Municipal Chamber produced great volumes of rules that governed urban commerce and public order in ways that inhibited the freedom not just to come and go but also to shout, whistle, or drink in a tavern. Municipal ordinances addressed everything under the sun. They did not, however, specify restrictive rules that only applied in daytime, and although they sanctioned many kinds of behavior, all that was not explicitly prohibited was permitted. By contrast, local authorities prohibited every sort of movement and gathering in public after nightfall. It was then up to the police, slave owners, and elite guarantors to grant exceptions. The customary right to come and go, de facto although not de jure, was established during the dark hours when the law had nothing straightforward to say.
The imposition of a curfew during certain hours and for certain people conditioned the daily work and leisure routines of the city's most socioeconomically vulnerable and reminded people every day that some were more equal than others. In a letter published in the newspaper Correio do Rio de Janeiro in 1823, João José Pereira, a free man of African descent, complains:
I have heard that every free man who has born on Brazilian soil is a citizen, as are his sons and slaves who are able to obtain their emancipation. But how is it, Mr. Editor, that when a Black man is given a military insignia and the corresponding honors related to his rank or his service in the Militia, or in the Church, or in Letters, how is it permitted that this man should be with his wife and children in his box in the Opera theater being liberally subjected to rude indiscretions and the greatest insults, when the poor man just wants to enjoy and educate himself in that opera house?… Is equality an empty word?Footnote 79
As the night was “colonized” for pleasure activities as well as for work and for worship, this letter to the newspaper editor expresses eloquently its author's understanding of citizenship rights in the post-colonial Brazilian city and the freedom to enjoy unfettered and equal access to it.Footnote 80 In the day and at night, the freedom to come and go was only an implicit constitutional principle; the day-to-day rules of conduct issued in the form of police edicts and compiled in city ordinances are what established, and moreover limited, these freedoms. Municipal authorities’ ability to suspend the freedom to come and go eclipsed the national-level public law's will and ability to guarantee it.
CONCLUSION
Rio's police revoked the curiously prolonged curfew with the stroke of a pen in 1878.Footnote 81 Considering the many lives this regulation had touched, it ended with little fanfare. By the late 1870s, the city had ample public lighting and an active and growing entertainment culture.Footnote 82 Perhaps the end of the Toque de Aragão attracted so little attention from newspapers and chroniclers because it seemed inevitable. A curfew, after all, can be reasonably seen as a premodern mechanism of urban governance, because it takes for granted the stark separation between day and night—the absence of commercial life after dark, for example—and because it conflicts so violently with the liberal freedoms of movement and association that characterize the modern era.Footnote 83
Just as striking as the unbroken length of time during which the Toque de Aragão was in effect is the absence of commentary on it and the general lack of recognition of the active, albeit clandestine, street life that brought people into the city's public spaces after the curfew bells to work and to socialize. Evidence of both the curfew's powerful effects and the many violations of it is present but must be creatively teased out of the archival record that documents the day-to-day policing of the city. As I have noted, jurists also found the matter unworthy of their paper and ink. Why were both the curfew and the countless curfew-breakers so invisible to some observers? Perhaps so few remarked on the curfew because it seemed so mundane. It formed part of the urban landscape like the streets that people passed through and, moreover, like the rivulets, walls, and granite hills that they had to cross or circumvent. It is possible, too, that the curfew and the men and women who violated it over five decades have remained largely hidden from historians’ view because they were the products of municipal regulations that may have seemed, incorrectly, to offer little help in answering weighty questions with trans- or supra-local repercussions. Furthermore, urban historians have been primarily preoccupied with space and have not taken seriously the element of time in examining the perennial themes of the contestation over power and the production and reproduction of social inequality, even though it is precisely the rhythm of daily life that appears most vividly when we chose to delve more deeply into the question of “municipal power.” The police and the Municipal Chamber established rules about opening and closing times and a curfew; nowhere in those same police records that document police accosting curfew-breakers does there appear a single arrest for entering forbidden territory in the city's public spaces.
As a case study in the invention of the urban nighttime as a social and legal phenomenon, Rio de Janeiro under the Toque de Aragão is far from exceptional despite its unusually long duration. Studies of other cities have mentioned, although always in passing, the existence of municipal regulations that criminalized the act of being out in the streets after dark in the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries; these places include New Orleans, Lisbon, Washington, D.C., and London, not to mention other cities in Brazil.Footnote 84 In the modern, industrializing era, nighttime curfews were a resource available to authorities in cities throughout the world, and one for which they did not hesitate to reach.
Those decades during which the Toque de Aragão was in force coincided with a particularly interesting global moment for taking time seriously as the world underwent a transition from living by the sun to living by the watch and stood on the cusp of a global move to standardize time. This process culminated in 1884, with the adoption of Greenwich Mean Time and in the 1910s with the implementation of daylight savings time and a system of time zones. The global standardization of time reveals a widespread understanding of the socially and politically constructed and manipulable nature of daily time and how it is calculated and regulated. As the historian Vanessa Ogle has shown, the standardization of time (in the creation of time zones, for example) felt necessary to national leaders in the late nineteenth century to allow the world's vast multiplicity of local times to converse with each other; to ensure safe and efficient rail travel; to facilitate telegraphy; and for certain types of commerce and the emerging practice of financial speculation to function. This process was far from uncontested; local times meant the comfort of daily routines and adhering to them meant resistance to various forms of imperialism. What resulted from this period's push toward standardization was not a truly standardized globe but a “pluralistic” one.Footnote 85 And, I would add, this “temporal pluralism” occurred at the very local level, too.
The changing rhythm of the workday, along with changing social expectations and mores, brought about a nocturnal public culture in Rio by the middle of the nineteenth century. The curfew was still in effect then, and police patrols routinely stopped people on the streets “after hours.” The night, for some, became a time of leisure, as opposed to the daytime as a time of work. As counterintuitive as it may seem now, if we return to the mid-nineteenth century, we can see that the imposition of a curfew and the “nocturnalization” of urban public life formed two sides of the same coin.Footnote 86 Although the curfew might seem like a holdover from an ancient form of social control, the sociolegal distinction between day and night created, or at least made possible, a multilayered modern city.
