Boris Fausto, one of Brazil’s greatest historians, dies – 04/18/2023 – Politics

In 2014, historian Boris Fausto released the book “O Brilho do Bronze”, a diary written over the months following the death of Cynira Stocco, with whom he had been married for nearly five decades.

In an excerpt, Boris comments on an interview with Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns. “At one point he says: ‘I’m prepared for death, but I’m in no hurry.’ For my part, I’m in no hurry either. Will I ever be prepared?”

Prepared or not, one of the greatest historians in the country, author of fundamental books for understanding Brazil in the 20th century, died this Tuesday (18th) at the age of 92 in São Paulo. The wake will be on Wednesday (19).

In June 2021, he had suffered a stroke (cerebrovascular accident), but had a reasonable recovery in the following months.

“O Brilho do Bronze” is the culmination of the author’s memoirist phase, which began with “Negócios e Ócios: Histórias da Imigração” (1997) and extended to “Vida, Morte and Other Details” (2021), with productions by other genres between them. These are books in which Boris unites reminiscences of family life, the Jewish community and daily life in São Paulo, as well as reflections on various themes, from finiteness to football.

Though written with precision and grace, it was not the works of this period that set him apart. His first book, “The Revolution of 1930” (1970) influenced his generation of historians and the ones that followed. It didn’t take long for it to be seen as a classic, just like “Crime and Daily Life” (1984), a pioneering study of criminality in São Paulo.

He was able to delve deeper into the research for this book thanks, among other factors, to his experience as a lawyer, his first breadwinner. Boris Fausto, today almost synonymous with a historian focused on Brazilian issues, did not directly dedicate his youth to this field of study. He was, as he used to say, a late historian.

Born in São Paulo in 1930 (precisely the theme year of his most celebrated book), he was the eldest son of a family of Jewish origin. His parents, Simon and Eva, had two other children, Ruy, who became a prestigious philosopher, and Nelson, a physician with a successful career in the USA.

A traumatic episode affected his childhood—indeed, his entire life. When he was 7 years old, his mother began to feel sick on a beach in Santos and died moments later. A coffee dealer, a middle-class immigrant from São Paulo, Simon handed the boys over to be raised by Aunt Rebeca, their mother’s sister.

The aftershock brought the brothers even closer together. They spent hours playing soccer in the backyard of their house on Avenida Angélica, in Higienópolis, with Boris as their goalkeeper. The passion for Corinthians comes from that time, a counterpoint to rationality in personal life and career. His great idol was midfielder José Augusto Brandão, who played for the alvinegro team in the 1930s and 1940s.

He had been interested in literature since he was a boy, and his studies in traditional schools in São Paulo also sharpened his curiosity for politics. This combination led him to study law — he believed he would receive a broad education in the humanities; moreover, there were few career options in the late 1940s, when he entered college in Largo de São Francisco.

Without enthusiasm for the course, he devoted himself more to political issues than to legal ones. Alongside his brother Ruy, he emphatically adhered to Trotskyism, “a childhood illness contracted in adulthood, which lasted ten years”, as he said in a long interview in the book “Critical Readings on Boris Fausto”, organized by also historian Ângela de Castro Gomes .

Some decisive facts for Boris’ trajectory are concentrated in the first half of the 1960s. In 1961 he married the educator Cynira Stocco Fausto (1931-2010), with whom he had two sons, Sérgio, who would become a political scientist and superintendent from the Fernando Henrique Cardoso Foundation, and Carlos, an anthropologist dedicated to researching indigenous peoples.

The following year, Boris was approved in a competition for state attorney and soon received an invitation to work as a legal consultant at USP. Until then, he shared a law office with colleagues from San Francisco.

With intellectual interests that legal activities did not satisfy and stimulated by Cynira, he began to study history at the same university in 1963. .

It was, on the other hand, a period of growing apprehension. A few weeks after the military coup, Boris learned that he was being sought by the police because of his past as a Trotskyist militant, although by then he had already distanced himself from the dogmas of the left. He decided to perform at the Dops and was jailed for three days.

Six years later, when the country was under the strong repression of AI-5 (Institutional Act No. 5), the scare was greater. A neighbor of Boris and Cynira, who had sheltered militants from the armed struggle, feared that she was being watched by men from Oban (Operação Bandeirante), an investigation unit created by the Army —yes, she was.

The neighbor went to ask the couple for help and ended up arrested, as well as Boris. “I was hit with rifle butts, kicked and thrown into the back of a C-14 [caminhonete muito usada pelos agentes da repressão]”, he told in the interview for the book “Critical Readings on Boris Fausto”.

The only reason he wasn’t tortured, he believes, is thanks to architect Rodrigo Lefèvre. After being beaten a lot, the member of the ALN (Aliança Libertadora Nacional) was so weakened that he was unable to offer resistance. Upon seeing Boris, Lefèvre told Oban officials that he was not involved in the armed resistance, an assertion that saved him after hours of distress.

It was a minor episode compared to so many situations with people killed or tortured at that time, but enough for Boris to feel the threat of the “revolution”, as the Armed Forces refer to the 1964 coup. his conclusions about another revolution, this one without quotation marks, the Revolution of 1930.

Until then, a view prevailed that Boris calls in his book the “theory of the dualism of Latin American dependent societies”, a simplification, according to him, defended by theorists of the Communist Party. Authors from this group saw the movement of 1930, which brought Getúlio Vargas to power, as a revolution of the bourgeoisie or the middle classes.

By dedicating himself to this period for his doctorate, Boris realized that reality was much more complex. The end of the Old Republic was mainly the result of conflicts within the regional oligarchies, a tension that had been building up in the 1920s.

The final passage in the introduction to “The Revolution of 1930” should serve as a warning to historiography as a whole. “As the hard lessons of history break more slowly than one imagines an ideological carapace formed over time, perhaps this work can contribute, indirectly, to the process of rupture.”

Faced with the repercussion of the book, probably Boris’ best known, at least that shell was broken.

In the following years, promoted to the position of professor in the department of political science at USP, he expanded the range of subjects addressed in his studies. His research on labor movements in the period from 1890 to 1920 resulted in the book “Urban Work and Social Conflict”, a work also taken as a reference, but which did not resist time as well as “The Revolution of 1930”.

Wide-ranging books followed, such as “História do Brasil” (1994), a brick of almost 700 pages chosen by the Jabuti award as one of the best of the year in the didactic category, and “Making America – Mass Immigration to Latin America “, of which he was the organizer.

In others, however, Boris adopted the methods of microhistory —instead of comprehensive narratives, the researcher significantly reduces the scale of observation of his object. This field includes works such as “Negócios e Ócios” (1997), winner of the Jabuti award in human sciences.

Also under this more closed lens, Boris released “O Crime do Restaurante Chinês – Carnaval, Futebol e Justiça in São Paulo in the 1930s” (2009) and “O Crime da Galeria de Cristal” (2019), books that reaffirm his interest in complex crimes, in contexts (immigration wave, for example) that help to explain a period in São Paulo.

In the shorter texts for the press, Boris chose to comment on politics and the country’s recent history. At Sheetwhere he was a columnist from 1998 to 2003, wrote a memorable article about the 30 years of AI-5.

By the way, he was always an attentive newspaper reader. His maternal grandfather, who was blind, asked him to read the reports in the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo. Boris was only 5 years old.

Just as he lost his illusions with Trotskyism, Boris has shown in recent decades disappointment with the PSDB, which he had been enthusiastic about when it was founded in 1988. “The PSDB has become a conglomerate that has very little to do with what it was,” he said. to UOL in 2018. Interestingly, the middle brother, Ruy, a great Marxist scholar, also experienced party disenchantment. He had been a PT voter, but was disappointed with the acronym.

The book “Life, Death and Other Details”, released by Boris in 2021, was largely driven by Ruy’s death the previous year. The youngest Nelson had died in 2012.

The work is full of childhood memories, especially of the coexistence of the brothers. At the end of the text “A Tribo”, Boris wrote: “The football trio from Avenida Angélica disappeared many years ago. Only the solitary goalkeeper remains who waits for the match, without any hurry”.