TIRADENTES AS A REVOLUTIONARY HERO
Very few individuals paid much attention to Tiradentes until the end of the Nineteenth Century. There can be no question that he emerged as a hero when Brazilian republicans sought heroes to legitimize their new regime. Though the new republic was largely the product of a military coup d'état, its makers understood that lack of legitimacy and founding fathers would render it weak and unstable. Even prior to the coup d'état of 1889, many republicans began to fabricate symbols that could legitimate a republic. Their two heroes consisted of José Bonifácio, an intellectual they crafted into the father of Independence along with Tiradentes. In many respects, Bonifácio had strong claims as the architect of Independence, but republicans seemed determined to fashion a cult around the leader of the 1789 revolt in Ouro Preto. They began to plan construction of a monument to him in the 1860s in Ouro Preto and began to celebrate April 21 as a holiday in Rio de Janeiro in the 1880s. Though there was considerable debate about what he looked like and what he represented, most republicans were commited to promoting a cult devoted to him.
In the end, any truth about Tiradentes was subordinated to the man as a representation of the link between Brazil and the French Revolution and as a representation of a republican hero. He became the martyr who stood up for Brazilian Independence against the tyranny of Portugal, a man who was not afraid to die for a just idea. By the end of the 1880s, he had become the symbol of the struggle between monarchy and republicanism.
No one really knew what he looked like. This early portrait by Julius Kaukal painted him as someone who might have lived in France at the time of the French Revolution. It was reconstructed from ethnographic accounts of the rebel. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, sculptors and painters began to represent
him as Jesus Christ. He was always represented with sandals, long hair, a beard, and a robe,
just as many of the most significant painters associated with the western tradition had
represented Jesus of Nazareth. 
Indeed his visage was not unlike some of the most important
representations of Jesus in Minas Gerais, those of the crippled sculptor Alejaidino, or "the
little cripple." The representation was aimed to link Tiradentes, a man whose head and body
parts were displayed all along the road from Ouro Preto to Rio de Janeiro after his trial and
execution with the more famous martyr of Christendom, thereby conferring a legitimacy and
a heroic status on the controversial figure. The symbol was a convenient one for men who
feared revolutionary violence, for it emphasized the violence of Portugal, the monarchy, not
individual revolutionaries. Thus, Tiradentes was a symbol of a universal movement, not a
symbol of class struggle or social divisions.
By the time of the formation of the republic, Tiradentes was also linked to the cause of abolition, although at the time he was alive, he and his fellow conspirators had no intention of freeing the slaves. The point was not to reflect history in any meaningful or faithful effort but to link Tiradentes with the program of many republicans and Positivists, a program which emphasized the tradition of Independence, Abolition, and Republicanism. In imagining Tiradentes in this particular way as a hero, republicans removed any ambiguities about his historical role and managed to gloss over the fact that the monarchy had abolished slavery.
In 1965, just one year after the military took control of the county for decades, the
government passed a law making Tiradentes the civic patron of the Brazilian nation. At the
time of the celebration of the Bicentennial of the French Revolution in Brazil, most attention
was focused on him and the conspiracy planned in Minas Gerais. Even in this ad published
in 1989 by a French company, Rhone-Poulenc, Tiradentes is linked to the French Revolution.
 Amnesia
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