This article takes the political conflict over the overthrow of the Brazilian Empire as key to understand the intellectual production of the first decade of the Republic. I argue that the intellectual debate at the time was genuinely a political one, opposing two relational identities: "monarchists de plume", i. e. ex-aristocrats, converted into knights of the defeated regime, and Jacobins, members of ascending social groups, working out the destruction of the former status quo symbols and the legitimization of the new ones.
Brazilian First Republic; Political - intellectual debate; Political identities