The Business of Beaux-Arts: Architecture, Racial Capitalism, and Branqueamento in Belle Époque Brazil

The turn of the 20th century witnessed profound economic and spatial change in Brazil. Following the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade and the abolition of slavery (1888) during the Imperial era, leaders of the First Republic (1889–1930) outlined a program of national development that took aim at the physiognomy of Brazil’s capital city, Rio de Janeiro. Driven by the social Darwinist theory of whitening (branqueamento), municipal leaders viewed French classical architecture as an instrument for attracting European capital and immigration, thus hastening Brazil’s evolution into a ‘modern’ white nation. This article contributes a new understanding of architecture’s overlooked role in this pivotal chapter of Brazilian history, which scholars have previously studied through the lenses of urbanization, race science, and public health. Centered around the city’s Theatro Municipal (1904– 1909), an urban centerpiece resembling Charles Garnier’s Paris Opéra (1861–1875), this study follows the circulation of architectural methods codified at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts along global networks of goods, ideas, and capital, thus revealing a circulatory, rather than extractive, model of ‘racial capitalism’ during the Belle Époque. The resulting narrative argues that the architecture of ‘whiteness’ catalyzed highly uneven, racialized economic growth — while also spurring popular resistance — across the Global South, well before the familiar post-WWII era of developmentalism.