Coelho Netto; Civic Education; Nationalism

During the first decades of the Republic, the national question was at the heart of discussions among Brazilian intellectuals. Understanding literature as a mission and themselves as responsible for the future of the nation, several intellectuals were predisposed to think about the nation and to propose their models for the success of the country. One of these intellectuals was Henrique Coelho Netto (1864-1934), journalist, chronicler, politician and immortal of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, nominated for the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1933 and elected by his peers as Prince of Brazilian Prose writers. Starting from Benedict Anderson's concept of imagined nation, we sought, at first, to understand what the nation idealized by Coelho Netto was, which would be based on four mainstays: politics, education, sports and culture. From this, we aim to analyze the importance of civic education for the success of the nation idealized by the author. For such purpose, we chose the book Breviário Cívico, published in 1921 with the support of the National Defense League, in which the writer deals with several topics that he deems important for his civic catechism, presenting notions about politics, family, patriotism, citizenship, defense of republicanism, and a liberal notion of the individual forged in a virtuous Christian perspective. Our methodology will use the analysis of the discourse present in the work to seek to understand the model of nation present in the book and how the Breviário Cívico would contribute to the construction of the coelhonettian nation.