‘Boris Fausto opened the history of Brazil to the present’ – 04/22/2023 – Ilustríssima

[RESUMO] Renowned researcher Angela de Castro Gomes comments on the contributions of Boris Fausto, who died in the 1992s, to Brazilian historiography. In the 1970s, Boris stood out for studying republican Brazil, when historians generally dealt with more distant periods, such as the colony and empire, and for highlighting methods, oral reports, and themes, criminality, unusual at the university at the time, the that produced a groundbreaking understanding of the country’s past, she says.

In the mid-2000s, historian Angela de Castro Gomes received an invitation to participate in the Intellectuals of Brazil project, a partnership between UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais) and the Perseu Abramo Foundation.

As historian Heloisa Starling, one of the coordinators of the initiative, explained, Angela would have the mission of organizing a book on Boris Fausto, at that time one of the most prestigious names in this field of study.

In addition to a long interview, in which he recalls his personal trajectory and his academic career, the work, released in 2008 with the title “Critical Readings on Boris Fausto”, would contain essays on some of the historian’s most relevant books.

Angela replied to Starling that yes, she would organize the book, as long as the honoree agreed. The former head professor of Brazilian history at UFF (Universidade Federal Fluminense), now retired, soon called Boris, whom she had known for almost three decades, and explained the concept of the project.

With the refined irony that characterized him, perhaps a legacy of Jewish humor, the historian did not hesitate: “Okay, so you can organize me”.

Author of decisive studies for Brazilian historiography, such as “Urban Work and Social Conflict” (1976) and “Crime and Daily Life” (1984), and of memorialistic works, such as “Business and Leisure – Stories of Immigration” (1997 ) and “O Brilho do Bronze” (2014), Boris Fausto died on Tuesday (18) at the age of 92, in São Paulo, a city of constant presence in his texts published in books and newspapers.

Boris and Angela met in the late 1970s, at very different points in their careers. Arriving at the age of 50, he was already a name of projection among historians. “The Revolution of 1930” (1970), his first book, was seen in the following years as an obligatory reference by colleagues at USP and other universities.

Furthermore, at that time Boris was organizing the third volume of the General History of Brazilian Civilization (HGCB) collection, comprising four volumes that accompanied much of the republican period, from 1889 to 1964. It was quite a responsibility, since the first volume, dedicated to the colonial period, and the second, on the monarchy, had been coordinated by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda in partnership with Pedro Moacyr Campos.

Angela was a few steps down. Turning 30, she was a researcher in the early stages of her career, who had started working a few years earlier at the CPDOC (Center for Research and Documentation of Contemporary History of Brazil) at the Getulio Vargas Foundation.

On a visit to the CPDOC, in Rio, during that period, Boris learned of a text by Angela on the 1934 Constituent Assembly, the assembly that had decided to keep Getúlio in power. The historian took a typewritten copy to São Paulo (times when personal computers were almost a mirage) and was so impressed that he decided to publish it in the collection he organized.

“The HGCP was ‘the’ collection of Brazilian history. Most of those who published in it were renowned names. I was a young researcher at the time, I never imagined seeing my text there”, she recalls.

The publication contributed to Angela’s successful career from then on. It was a gesture never forgotten by her, but just a point when we observe the vastness of the influence exercised by Boris in the generation of historians of which she is a part and in the following generations.

Boris “produced inflections in Brazilian historiography”, according to Angela, and none had as much impact as his willingness to bring republican Brazil into the study of history. It would be frivolous to say that he was the first to do so, but he was probably the one who caused the most wide-eyed eyes in academia to research the 20th century with methodological rigor.

The synthesis of the historian and, in a certain way, disciple is precise: “Boris Fausto opened the history of Brazil to the present time”.

Until the 1970s, she says, this was a period little explored by historians, who emphasized the need for greater temporal distancing. “The country’s historiography was basically Colonial and Empire, a ‘real historian’ dealt with these periods. Working with the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s was a social scientist’s thing, not a historian’s”, she says. “There were practically no texts that reflected on this period after the Revolution of 1930, especially between 1930 and 1937. It was an absolute bibliographic void.”

Boris’ background and circle of interlocutors may help explain why he was so decisive in opening this new frontier. He had previously graduated in law and worked for 26 years as a legal consultant at USP. As a “late historian”, his expression, he assimilated interdisciplinarity exercises well.

Although he came up against the main theses of Marxist interpretation, he was close to the historian Fernando Novais, a “quality Marxist” according to him. Novais was an exception, however. Boris was a historian who felt more at home, in intellectual terms, among names from political science and sociology, such as Francisco Weffort, Lourdes Sola, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Leôncio Martins Rodrigues.

When speaking of “inflections”, Angela is also referring to the fonts used by Boris. For the production of “Urban Work and Social Conflict” (1976), whose object is the working class in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo from 1890 to 1920, he resorted several times to the so-called “oral history”, an unusual procedure among historians of the time.

In the research for “Crime e Cotidiano – 1880-1924”, he spent months consulting judicial processes in the former general archive of the Court of Justice of the State of São Paulo, in Vila Leopoldina. Another unusual feature. The theme of criminality also sounded unusual at that time. In Angela’s assessment, “Boris, in a way, paved the way for other historians to work with everyday history”.

This is a book that, in the words of sociologist Sérgio Adorno, “remains, more than current, contemporary. It speaks of a contemporaneity that, while introducing the new, updates the old”.

Over the years, “Trabalho Urbano…” and “Crime e Cotidiano” have gained the status of historiographical references, but they still do not come close to the influence achieved by Boris’ debut work.

When “The Revolution of 1930” was released, in 1970, the view of the Communist Party’s theorists prevailed on that movement, which brought Getúlio Vargas to power. They interpreted it as a revolution of the bourgeoisie or the middle classes. By dedicating himself to this period in 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 throughout the 1920s.

“Of course, in ‘Revolution of 1930’, he is dialoguing with interpretations that already existed. Barbosa Lima Sobrinho [em ‘A Verdade sobre a Revolução de Outubro’, de 1933] already associated 1930 with the dispute between elites. But Boris goes there, researches in detail, shows the documents”, says Angela.

“It’s not an opinion, it’s not a version. It arrives at what we call factual truth, something that produces a consensus in a community of historians at a given moment.”

First book published by the historian, “The Invention of Labor” benefited from the doors opened by Boris, especially with “The Revolution of 1930”. Commitment to the “present time”, using sources and methodologies in relation to which many university professors were wary, is a central aspect of Angela’s debut work, which analyzes the behavior of Brazilian workers in the 1940s.

In 1987, a year before being published as a book, the ideas of “The Invention of Labor” were presented by Angela as a doctoral thesis. Boris was at the head of the stall.

In an article published in Sheet on December 31, 2007, Boris took advantage of the imminent turn of the year to discuss the future and the imagination. “As the poet Drummond, in a beautiful verse, recalled that ‘the last day of the year is not the last day of time’, perhaps it is worth imagining what the future has in store for us, thought collectively”, he wrote.

Thus, in the last paragraphs, he devoted himself to asking questions of the future. “Is the world heading towards China’s hegemony or towards various points of polarity, including the United States, China itself and, who knows, the European Union? In a few or many decades, Brazil will not only grow but become socially fairer, not needing to pack ourselves in the dubious indicators of purchasing power that tend to hide our visible and embarrassing needs?”

Later on: “Will effective global measures be taken to prevent climate change and the devastation of the planet or will discussions in privileged forums drag on while humanity walks towards the abyss in a longer or shorter term?”.

His doubts remain relevant, but they are not especially original. In fact, Boris’ sensibility was in the opposite direction, that is, in asking the right questions of the past, as befits great historians. More exactly to the very recent past, to the “present time”, to republican Brazil.

In the 1960s, for example, he questioned himself: was the 1930 Revolution really a bourgeois revolution, as defended by Marxist authors such as Nelson Werneck Sodré? A few years later: how does criminality help us understand the changes experienced by the population of São Paulo at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century?

Questions put at the table, the historian would go in search of answers with perseverance and method, resorting to documents and other reliable sources, whether or not those consecrated by the academic community of the time. And so, as Angela says, Boris left us “an absolutely innovative history of Brazil“.

Boris Faust

He was born in 1930, in São Paulo, into a family of Jewish origin. He was a legal consultant at USP and, later, a professor in the university’s political science department. His book “História do Brasil” (1994), published in 11 languages, won the 1995 Jabuti Prize in the textbook category. In addition to history works, such as “The Revolution of 1930” (1970), he released books with a memorialistic tone, such as “Life, Death and Other Details” (2021). He died on April 18, aged 92.

Angela de Castro Gomes

Born in Itaperuna (RJ), in 1948. He graduated in history from UFF (Fluminense Federal University) and received a master’s and doctorate in political science from Iuperj (University Research Institute of Rio de Janeiro). He released books such as “The Invention of Labor” (1988), “Citizenship and Labor Rights” (2002) and “1964 – The Coup that Overthrew a President, Put an End to the Democratic Regime and Established the Dictatorship in Brazil” (2014), this one in co-authorship with Jorge Ferreira. She is a retired full professor of Brazilian history at UFF.