This article establishes a historical context to the political conceptions and plots which led to the Brazilian imperial constitution of 1824, such context beginning with the notion of "civil empire" as it appeared at the time the Portuguese realm and empire were reorganized in their policies and administration in the eighteenth century. The text shows that, when Peter the first was crowned, a modern interpretation was made of an old institution, the religious consecration of kings, in order to establish political subordination on the basis of Men's universal reason. This study allows a better understanding of why independent Brazil was first of all an empire, not a kingdom, and also of the profound political and moral sense attributed to the poder moderador (a "power to moderate") given the emperor by the 1824 constitution.
natural right; Enlightenment; power of empire; constitutional monarchy; power to moderate