The plot of personal relationships and power: the case of two engineers who became politicians in the First Republic (1889-1906)
political patronage, engineers, reciprocity.
Our work addresses the topic of personal relationships as a form of political articulation in the city of Rio de Janeiro during the First Brazilian Republic. In this perspective, we have as object of investigation the networks woven by Francisco Franco Pereira Passos (1836-1913) and André Gustavo Paulo de Frontin (1860-1933), two engineers who consecrated themselves as technical staff and held political positions in the period. Thus, our main problem is to understand how the commitments built through exchanges between covenants marked by some level of asymmetry and linked by personal and affective bonds, have given power and prestige to these engineers. For this, we adopted the years 1889 and 1906 as a chronological cut, a broader panorama that begins at a time of great political instability at the beginning of the Republic and ends at the great urban reforms of the city of Rio de Janeiro at the beginning of the 20th century. In this way, we intend to verify the hypothesis that these two engineers operate powerful patronage networks in the city of Rio de Janeiro as professionals with a technical profile in this period.