In the beginning, Rio was a castle. Or rather, a hill that gained this name after the Portuguese defeated the French and their Tamoio allies in a war for control of the spectacular region around Guanabara Bay. After surrounding the place with walls and fortifications, they brought there the stone marker of the city's founding, brought from the foot of Morro Cara de Cão, in present-day Urca, and the mortal remains of the founder Estácio de Sá (relics that are now in the Capuchin Church, in Tijuca).
Thanks to its strategic location, facing the entrance to Guanabara Bay, the first warehouses, the Governor's House, the Church and College of the Jesuits, the Church of São Sebastião – the city's first Cathedral – and an early Town Hall and Jail were built there starting in 1567.
Throughout the Brazilian colonial period, the Town Hall and Jail served as the headquarters of the municipal public administration. They were generally two-story buildings. The councilors and all the state bureaucracy were located on the upper floor, while the public jail was on the lower floor. All the city's money was kept there in a safe called a "burra," which could only be opened with three keys: each key was held by a councilor. People at the time said that the town halls were built with two floors to make things easier, because it was very common for someone from the upper floor to frequent the lower floor, or vice versa.
In a short time, Morro do Castelo would become saturated with new residents. Around 1620, the councilors decided to abandon it, and a new Town Hall and Jail was built on the land situated between Rua Direita (present-day Rua Primeiro de Março) and the old chapel of São José (present-day Igreja de São José).
The hill was eventually razed in 1922 by Mayor Carlos Sampaio, under the pretext that it had become a low-income area, full of dilapidated tenements and hindering airflow in the city center – but the press said that, in reality, the mayor believed in a legend that the Jesuits had hidden almost 100 tons of gold in secret tunnels, which were never found.
A mysterious fire
The new address was located in the region that was beginning to establish itself as the political and economic center of Rio de Janeiro. Around the Dom Manuel wharf, in Largo do Carmo (present-day Praça XV), several buildings of significant importance to Brazilian history were constructed. Among them, the small church dedicated to Our Lady of Ó shortly after the arrival of the Portuguese, converted into a chapel by Carmelite priests and later into the Church of Our Lady of Carmo, the cathedral that until 1976 was the site of some of the most important ceremonies in Brazilian history. From 1733 onwards, the square underwent several urban interventions, such as the construction of the Governor's House (the current Imperial Palace) and, on the opposite side, a large mansion belonging to the very wealthy Telles de Menezes family. In the middle of it all, decorating the new square, a huge fountain from Lisbon was the icing on the cake.
In 1752, the city councilors ceded the Town Hall and Jail for the installation of the Court of Appeal, intended to handle cases from the southern states of Brazil (until then judged in the court of Salvador, Bahia), and moved to the Menezes mansion. However, in 1791, a very mysterious fire destroyed all the documentation relating to the early days of the city, which had been transferred there, including property records and records of ground rent collection (a tax somewhat similar to our IPTU). The councilors returned to the old building, and of the immense mansion, only the tourist attraction now known as the Arco do Teles remains.
Tiradentes, the arrival of the Court, and the first Constituent Assembly.
At the end of the 17th century, Rio de Janeiro was experiencing turbulent times. The city was abuzz with news of the repression of the Minas Gerais Conspiracy and the arrival of the man chosen by the Portuguese Crown as the movement's "scapegoat": Ensign Joaquim José da Silva Xavier. Tiradentes was detained in his final days (after three years of interrogations, between the Palace and Ilha das Cobras) in the Town Hall and Jail. There, his sentence of condemnation was read, and it was also from there that he was taken in procession through the city streets to the gallows on a Saturday morning, April 21, 1792. The precise location of the hanging, however, is the subject of intense debate among historians to this day. But it was definitely not in front of the palace, as many believe.
The Town Hall and Jail maintained its functions until 1808, with the arrival of the Portuguese Court, which had strategically fled the advance of Napoleon's troops in Europe. The colony's politicians were left with no choice but to pack up their belongings and vacate the building, shamefully making room for the royal "servants." Renamed with the stupendous name of Antechamber of the Ladies-in-Waiting, it gained a passageway connecting it to the Palace – and there was another one connecting the administrative headquarters to the Carmo Convent, where Queen Maria I resided. A sort of Brazilian Hong Kong. The City Council was transferred to the Church of the Rosary, and common prisoners were thrown into the Aljube, a prison for priests administered by the archbishopric that, in addition to clergymen, also held detainees, believe it or not… divorced women.
After the Proclamation of Independence in 1822, the Town Hall and Jail resumed its parliamentary functions, becoming the stage for intense debates surrounding the first Brazilian Constitution. So intense were the debates that Dom Pedro I, who had been following the tumultuous sessions from a balcony of the Palace, one day lost his patience, dissolved the assembly in December 1823, and granted the first Brazilian constitution on March 25, 1824.
Despite retaining absolutist aspects, such as the Moderating Power exercised solely by the monarch, the first Brazilian Constitution was considered one of the most liberal of its time, surpassing even some European constitutions and, above all, more advanced than what the constituents were proposing. The Magna Carta of 1824 reflected classical liberalism in the organization of the state and in the declaration of individual rights, but maintained the slave-based socioeconomic structure, highlighting the complexity of the Brazilian reality of the time. From May 6, 1826, the General Assembly of the Empire was installed on the upper floor of the Town Hall and Jail. Among various decisions, the Golden Law was promulgated there on May 9, 1888.
The construction of a myth
With the Proclamation of the Republic in 1889, the Parliament and the Constitution of 1824 were dissolved, and a new Constituent Congress was established, this time in the former imperial residence of the Paço da Quinta da Boa Vista, in São Cristóvão. After the promulgation of the republican Constitution of 1891, the Chamber resumed its activities on December 18 of the same year, in the good old Town Hall and Jail. But the building was already quite deteriorated. In 1914, the parliament moved to the Monroe Palace, a pavilion designed for the 1904 Universal Exposition in the USA, and later reassembled in what is now Cinelândia, where legislative work was conducted until the construction of the new headquarters, the Tiradentes Palace, in 1926.
The overthrow of the monarchy generated years of great instability in Brazilian politics, with uprisings caused by different reasons, such as the Canudos and Contestado wars and the Vaccine and Chibata revolts. Thus, the idea of building a new headquarters for parliament followed a logic of strengthening the young republic, mainly in rescuing the image of Tiradentes as a Brazilian civic martyr.
From its location, where the old Town Hall and Jail once stood, to the name of the palace and the precise location of the 4,5-meter-high statue of the greatest of the national myths, placed in front of the building, everything was meant to conspire to solidify public opinion around republican advancements.
There was also a need for practical order. The Monroe Palace needed to be vacated to become part of the architectural complex of the International Exhibition of the Centenary of Brazil's Independence, held in 1922. Initially, the City Council operated from the headquarters of the National Library. In 1921, parliamentarians approved a project by architects Archimedes Memória and Francisco Couchet for a "City Council Palace," which was intended to be sensational and forever erase the city's colonial memory.
National mobilization
By order of the Chamber's Board of Directors, all states in the federation were to participate in the project through donations. In addition to financial contributions, furniture came from Santa Catarina, Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais, and São Paulo, as well as 50 tons of plaster produced in Rio Grande do Norte.
Technical innovations characterized the work, such as the use of mortar with resistance equivalent to that of stone and national iron reinforcing bars, used for the first time in the country. By the standards of the time, the construction was completed in record time and at a cost of about 15,000 réis – half the cost of the Pedro Ernesto Palace, the seat of the City Council. Inaugurated on May 6, 1926, after four years of construction, the Tiradentes Palace is inspired by the standards of the Parisian Belle Époque. The decoration includes abundant use of noble materials, such as leather, velvet, and hardwoods. The former Justice Commission Room is decorated with furniture made from repurposed material from the demolition of the Old Jail.
A sensational palace
A committee formed by the president of the City Council, Arnolfo Azevedo, and members of the Superior Council of Fine Arts, held a competition to select 11 artists to produce the sculptures for the facade and interior, as well as the statues of Tiradentes and the two Winged Victories in the front courtyard. Made of bronze, the figures were placed on stone pedestals seven meters high.
In total, 17 bronze posts surround the building. Six 12-meter-high neo-Greek-inspired columns adorn the entrance, which is surrounded by various pieces of statuary laden with symbolism. To the observer's left, at the top, is a representation of the Proclamation of Independence and, on the opposite side, that of the Proclamation of the Republic. At street level, two other figures make reference to the order (left) and progress (right) of the national flag.
The main room of the palace, the Barbosa Lima Sobrinho Plenary Hall, is 22 meters in diameter and 18 meters high. The dome is composed of a vaulted stained-glass window of approximately 120m2, the first 100% produced in the country, by the renowned Italian stained-glass artist César Formenti. The artwork reproduces the Brazilian sky at the exact moment of the Proclamation of the Republic, at 9:15 am on November 15, 1889.
The decorative panel behind the presidential table, painted by Eliseu Visconti, is particularly noteworthy. It depicts, in life-size, all those present at the signing of Brazil's first republican constitution in 1891. In addition to being a stained-glass artist, he was also responsible for the beautiful mosaic floors of the palace, along with his son, Gastão Formenti.
Just below the stained glass window, eight panels by the brothers Rodolpho and Carlos Chambelland depict thematic events. The smaller ones deal with the territorial formation of Brazil. The larger panels, on the other hand, deal with the periods of the catechization of the indigenous people, the colonial period, the monarchical period, and the republican period.
In the Main Hall, the ceiling, in the form of arches and vaults, features paintings by João Timóteo da Costa, in which the nation is represented as a woman surrounded by ten female figures, which would represent the great national dates.
The seat of the National Congress
From then on, the Tiradentes Palace served as the headquarters of the Chamber of Deputies and the site of the inauguration ceremony for the Presidents of the Republic. Washington Luís was the first to assume the presidency there, followed by Getúlio Vargas, who in 1937 established the Estado Novo (New State) and made the building the headquarters of the infamous Department of Press and Propaganda (DIP), an instrument of censorship and propaganda of the Vargas dictatorship.
With the redemocratization of 1945, the Tiradentes Palace resumed its legislative activity (and presidential inaugurations). In 1947, US President Harry Truman gave a speech in the House's plenary, the same year that writer Jorge Amado, elected two years earlier by the PCB (Brazilian Communist Party), had to leave office after the party was outlawed. The palace also served as a gathering point for the March of the Hundred Thousand, a crucial event in the protests against the Military Dictatorship, in June 1968.
Resolutions of great impact on Brazilian society were discussed and voted on in the plenary session of the Tiradentes Palace, such as the approval of the first vacation law for workers; the inauguration of Carlota Pereira de Queirós in 1933 as the first female federal deputy in Latin America; the Law of Freedom of Religious Worship, proposed by then-deputy Jorge Amado for the 1946 Constitution; and the creation of Petrobras in 1953.
The last session of the Federal Chamber in the palace was held on April 14, 1960, a week before the inauguration of Brasília. With the change of the federal capital, the building became the headquarters of the Legislative Assembly of the State of Guanabara (ALEG) until 1963, after which the institution moved to the Pedro Ernesto Palace in Cinelândia. In 1974, the merger of the states of Guanabara and Rio de Janeiro created the new Legislative Assembly of the State of Rio de Janeiro (ALERJ), which moved to the old Tiradentes building in 1975.
The last legislative session of the Alerj (Rio de Janeiro State Legislative Assembly) in the Tiradentes Palace took place on July 1, 2021, when parliamentary work was transferred to the former Banerj building, the Lúcio Costa Building, renovated at a cost of R$ 165 million. Since then, the Palace has been used for ceremonies and special sessions. The project that envisioned its adaptation as a new cultural space for the city never went ahead.
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