“O exército moderno é a nação armada”: o serviço militar obrigatório no Piauí e a fabricação de cidadãos soldados entre os anos de 1908 e 1928

Abstract

The main goal of this thesis is to investigate how compulsory military service operated in Piaui between 1908 and 1928 and the role it played in making “citizen soldiers” and in establishing the presence of the Army in this territorial space. This new social experience imposed by the National State on young Brazilians came to be seen as fundamental for national defense, but above all, by groups of the military and civilian elite, as a way of producing a new man and a new society. In this sense, the organizational reach of the Brazilian Army for the fulfillment of these “missions” was problematized, as well as the way in which social subjects, mainly those obliged to military service, behaved in the face of this new configuration. The research issues revolved around the way in which the Army was organized between the years 1908 and 1928 to meet the new institutional demands, having as a guiding principle of analysis, the experience lived by the Piauiense society in relation to the obligation of military service to all young citizens of serving age. Few academic works had compulsory military service as their main theme in the proposed scope: the studies were dedicated to more general issues, such as the analysis of discourses produced by military personnel about the role of the Army in the production of a new society, or they chose to analyze realities more specific by comparing national projects with local or regional realities. Much of this work was based on the instrumental nature of compulsory military service. The thesis proposal also follows this path, however, it considers the relevance of knowing the organizational conditions of the institution, its own logic, including at the local level, to better understand its actions in the social environment. Therefore, the organizational conception is conjugated with the instrumental conception. It should be added that the concept of imaginary citizen used in the thesis problematizes the existing distances between the idea of citizen produced by a generalizing civic morality, used by civil and military reformers and the current social orders experienced in social daily life. The study also uses a diverse documentary corpus composed of newspapers, reports, legislation, and mainly internal bulletins of the 25th Battalion of Hunters and habeas-corpus appeals filed by young people from Piauí who intended to release themselves from army service. Military service was conceived by its defenders as one of the instruments capable of erasing social boundaries and promoting the national civilizing process, through a “Nation in Arms” produced mainly in the barracks. The “citizen-soldier” resulting from this amalgamation process would constitute a “real national force”, of great importance for the solution of the Brazilian problems. It is about this manufacturing process that the chapters of the thesis deal with.