Les horizons troubles de la politique de « colonisation » au Brésil : réflexions sur l’identité de la nation brésilienne à travers le prisme de la question migratoire (1850-1889)

The shaping of the Brazilian nation in the aftermath of the Independence achieved in 1822 was a crucial – and very thorny – issue in the 19th century. More specifically, with the brutal end of the slave trade in 1850, the imperial elites were forced to confront their representations of the Brazilian nation with the imperious needs to people the land reserves and replace a servile workforce that was doomed to disappear. Then, devising a colonization policy gave rise to many controversies and hesitations which testified to the identitarian tensions within the imperial society as well as to the widespread will to promote a European immigration, the remarkable surge of which from the 1870-80s onward appears as a determining element to understand the history of the contemporary Brazilian society