Imperial Bakery or Republic Bakery? Tensions between law and factuality in Machado de Assis´s narratives
Constitutional Law. Law & literature. Alibi legislation. Proclamation of the Republic of Brazil. Machado de Assis.
As his characters, Machado de Assis witnessed great changes throughout the end of the 19th century in Brazil influenced by liberal theories, in its legal-political sense. The challenges of an ongoing historical process and the impact of everyday events, triggered, in Machado de Assis, the construction of a fictional voice that will use tales, chronicles and even novels to report the tensions between facticity and normativity. Using irony, good humor and even fantasy, his denunciations raised against legislative omissions involving enslaved people, as well against the use of scientific and liberal ideas, belonging to the global community, in the constitutional formation of Brazil. The potential of these narratives, even if distant from the formal legal sources, reveals, between the lines, a significant load of historicity and reflection for Brazilian constitutional law.