Monarchy and slavery in the political thought of Castro Alves

Our paper is cast to interpret the works of Castro Alves, the “poet of slaves”, held as one of the main figures of Brazilian abolitionism. For doing so, we analise his writings trying to recuperate the values and principles that gave sense to his abolitionism. As we will try to sustain, such values are better understood when we comprehend the images he builds of monarchy and slavery, images that offered him important foundations to think the political role of poetry and prose. A concern that motivates us is to identify which are the terms of the republican sensitivities (sensibilité républicaine, as Claude Lefort put it) of the second half of Brazil's XIX century, moment in which the bases of monarchy and slavery were already losing ground – Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, and the monarchy finally eroded in 1889.