A concise biographical overview

Jean-Philippe Bettendorff was born on August 25, 1625, in Lintgen, in the Alzette valley, into a wealthy and pious family. His father, Matthieu André Bettendorff, served as a local administrator (mayeur) in the surrounding area under the authority of the abbey of Saint-Maximin in Trier—the largest landowner in the region at the time. His mother, Marguerite Reinerts, died when Jean-Philippe was a teenager. He had an older brother, Nicolas, and a younger half-sister, Susanne (the latter from his father’s second marriage). Despite being born into a century of continuous war—the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and the Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659)—Bettendorff managed to acquire a solid humanist education. From 1635 to 1659, he lived in various towns along the long strip of land in Western Europe that marked the intersection of the Latin and the Germanic cultures. During this period he studied humanities at the Jesuit college in Luxembourg, philosophy at the University of Trier on the Moselle River, civil law at the University of Cuneo in Piedmont, doing the novitiate of the Society of Jesus in Tournai, the regencies in several Jesuit colleges in the Spanish Netherlands (Douai, Lille, Dinant, Luxembourg, Namur, and Huy) to acquire pedagogical skills and, finally, theology in Douai.

According to Bettendorff, he was fluent in six languages: Latin, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Spanish. Like most young Jesuits at that time, he wanted to be sent to the Orient (Japan and China); however, in spring 1659 he was assigned to the Mission of Maranhão, which was considered to be one of the most difficult. In autumn that year, shortly after his priestly ordination, Bettendorff set out for Portugal with a Flemish confrere from the Artois region. Along the way, the two young missionaries were confronted with the realities of their century. First, while they were still in Flanders, German mercenaries tried to attack them. Then, while waiting in Holland for a ship to set sail for Portugal, they had to remove their cassocks and celebrate mass in secret in this predominantly Calvinist republic—which, incidentally, they admired because of the cleanliness of its cities and the industriousness of its wealthy merchants. Finally, as they approached the port of Lisbon, the young religious could see in the distance the ships of the Moroccan corsairs, who sought to intercept the Portuguese caravels returning from South Asia, Brazil, or Africa. In the Lusitanian metropolis, the young Luxembourgish missionary learned Portuguese as well as Tupi, the most widely spoken indigenous language in Portuguese America.

On January 20, 1661, Bettendorff, in the company of his friend and compatriot Gaspar Misch, who had joined him in Lisbon a few months earlier, reached the port of São Luís—then the main city of the State of Maranhão and Grão-Pará—where they would both spend the rest of their lives. The two Luxembourgers were immediately sent to remote missions in the vast Amazonian floodplain: Misch to assist a Portuguese confrere near the fort of Gurupá, and Bettendorff to build a mission in the strategic area at the mouth of the Tapajós River (today, the city of Santarém). A few months later, an uprising of the Portuguese settlers led to the expulsion of most of the missionaries, including the superior, Father Antônio Vieira. Very quickly, Bettendorff stood out among the reduced group of Jesuits who had managed to escape exile. Indeed, from 1662 until 1693, he occupied, almost without interruption, the posts of rector of the two urban colleges and superior of the Mission.

In 1684, after a second uprising of settlers and merchants in São Luís, Bettendorff traveled to Lisbon, where as procurator he pleaded the cause of the Jesuit missionaries. This resulted in the introduction of a framework law, the Regimento das Missões (1686), which guaranteed the full autonomy of the missions under the authority of the priests, who were recognized as tutors of the native neophytes and catechumens. This regulation also provided the red thread for the Portuguese—and, from 1822, the Brazilian—authorities’ policies on the native peoples until the middle of the twentieth century. After returning to the Amazon, in 1688, Bettendorff sought to complete the consolidation of the Jesuit project in the region by introducing all the stages of religious formation, standardizing the catechetical discourse, imposing a shared daily regime for all missionaries, and rebuilding the urban colleges in Belém and São Luís.

Bettendorff was also involved in many other spheres. As a pragmatic economist, he prioritized the cultivation of cacao for export. As a talented artist, he propagated the Baroque style by painting altarpieces and by building churches and chapels. As a conscientious jurist, he examined the condition of the indigenous (índios) captured during the official expeditions and criticized the excesses committed against them by certain governors, captains, and soldiers. As an attentive ethnographer, he described some of the rites and customs of the indigenous peoples, especially those of the Tapajós. Lastly, as a zealous missionary, he wrote at least four catechisms in indigenous languages and founded spiritual brotherhoods for settlers in the main towns of the colony. Although the historical sources are biased (over-complimentary) about Bettendorff’s activities, they nevertheless allow us to perceive the pragmatic character of his multiple actions.

Thus, over the last four decades of the seventeenth century, the Luxembourgish Jesuit left an imprint on the formation of colonial society in the Portuguese Amazon. Bettendorff died of liver disease on August 5, 1698, in Belém, just one year after the death of his compatriot Gaspar Misch. The corpus of his writings—composed in Portuguese, Latin, and French—includes a detailed chronicle on the Mission of Maranhão, a bilingual Portuguese–Tupi catechism, and an abundant correspondence archived in Rome, Évora, Brussels and Luxembourg.²

The Portuguese Amazon in the seventeenth century

The second half of the seventeenth century, when Bettendorff was living in the Amazon region, can be considered as a time of profound crisis on account of the uninterrupted series of wars, epidemics, and violent conquests that affected large areas of nearly all continents. The Portuguese Empire, with its global network of trade routes and trading posts, was no exception. Thus, a long-lasting economic depression (1670–1700) accompanied the waning of the Lusitanian influence, especially in South Asia, and its subsequent concentration on the Atlantic space. There were several reasons for this development: first, the increasing competition from sugar and tobacco produced on the Caribbean islands under French, English, and Dutch dominion; second, the indebtedness of the Portuguese Crown as a consequence of quarrelling with the Castilians since the ascent of the Bragança dynasty in 1640; and thirdly, the eventual suppression of the long-tolerated and profitable smuggling of slaves to the Spanish colonies in South America. As a response, Portugal, like other Western European countries at that time, began to centralize and rationalize its administrative structures and launch new economic initiatives (Alencastro 2006, 71–74; Labourdette 2000, 343–423; Mauro 1972, 70).

In this context, it is necessary to highlight the policy of King Pedro II and his finance minister, Luís de Meneses, the Count of Ericeira. In the 1670s, they began seeking to promote domestic production (mostly of textiles and wine) in continental Portugal in order to equalize the trade balance, which was marked by an excess of imports and a decline in exports. The Crown also prioritized certain overseas possessions, in particular agricultural and silvicultural production in its two American colonies: Brazil and Maranhão.³ Yet Portugal’s economic recovery was compromised by another commercial depression, which followed the overproduction of sugar and tobacco in the 1680s and the suicide of Luís de Meneses in 1690 (Serrão & Marques 2001, 197–213 and 271–274; Bourdon 1994, 70–74; Chambouleyron 2010, 77–169).

Throughout this period, the Society of Jesus proved to be a loyal supporter of the Bragança dynasty, which came to power in 1640. Indeed, Father Antônio Vieira had even been one of the closest counsellors of João VI, the first Bragança king, before crossing the ocean in 1652 to re-establish the Maranhão Mission, which then comprised the entire Amazon region under Portuguese rule (Alencastro 2006, 80–81; Cardoso 2000). In 1655, Vieira obtained the official tutorship of the Society of Jesus over the colony’s indigenous populations and succeeded in extending the mission network by founding, according to Dauril Alden, more than fifty establishments (Alden 1996, 113). Dissatisfied with this Jesuit monopoly over the only workforce available (the indigenous people), the settlers expelled the religious in 1661. Some years later, the fathers regained some influence as they supported the new prince regent, Pedro—who would become King Pedro II—and his economic initiatives for the Amazon colony. In 1680, Vieira thus helped to conceive a law that made the labor force more accessible by declaring the indigenous people free, while simultaneously maintaining the fathers’ control over them. But growing discontent among the Portuguese settlers, who felt marginalized by the Crown’s policy, led to another uprising, and the Jesuits were expelled from São Luís in 1684. Subsequent negotiations in Lisbon resulted in the Regimento das Missões, a statute that granted considerable autonomy to the missions and regulated the annual allocation of indigenous laborers to settlers and authorities. Bettendorff was directly involved in these negotiations (Arenz 2022, 242–253; Perrone-Moisés 1992, 117–123).

The mission network and the indigenous populations

The main purpose of the missions in the Amazon region was to evangelize the indigenous populations and ensure their submission to a Catholic sovereign by confining them to a network of interconnected rural settlements. There, the natives lived as neophytes and catechumens under a regime of repetitive catechesis and compulsory labor. For example, in all missions, before going to work in the fields or in the pottery and carpentry workshops, the indigenous were obliged (even before dawn) to attend mass and listen to a brief catechetical instruction, which was repeated in the evening followed by certain baroque devotional practices (processions, litanies, and chants).⁴ One of the rules established by Father Vieira determined that:

Every day of the week, once morning prayer is over, a Mass will be said so that the Indians can hear it before going to their fields; and for this purpose, prayer will be held in time so that when the sun rises, Mass will at least begin, and when finished, the Indians will be taught aloud the ordinary prayers: namely Our Father, Hail Mary, the Creed, the Commandments of the Law of God, and of the Holy Mother Church; and the sacraments, act of contrition, and confession, generally the dialogues of the brief catechism, which contain the mysteries of faith.⁵

In order to maintain this convent-like way of life, preferably without any external interference, the fathers would set up the missions at some distance from the European settlements (small towns, farms, and forts), but always alongside the strategic natural axis constituted by the Amazon River and its numerous tributaries. According to their specific tasks, there were four main types of missions: a) the farms, or fazendas, which were attached to one of the two urban Jesuit colleges in Belém and São Luís (generally situated in the surroundings of these main towns); b) the villages exclusively designated to royal service (such as the saltworks on the Atlantic coast); c) the so-called aldeamentos de repartição (“villages of partition”), missions whose male labor force was annually inventoried and assigned to either external (settlers or authorities) or internal work; and d) the aldeamentos de doutrina (“villages of doctrine”), small establishments dedicated to religious instruction—especially of recently contacted groups, which were exempt from external labor for at least two years.⁶

The farms played an essential role in the subsistence of the urban colleges and the production of supplies for the missions in the distant backcountry, then known as sertão. The bigger ones possessed sugar mills, plantations of sugar cane, cacao trees and cassava roots, as well as facilities and pasture for livestock-breeding and small workshops for producing canoes, furniture, ceramics, or cotton cloth (Leite 1943, vol. 3, 249 and 279–280; Alden 1996, 421). The farms, run by the missionaries, concentrated most of the specialized labor force that was also urgently needed by the settlers (as farm workers) or the authorities (as rowers, auxiliary soldiers, or workers for the construction of public buildings). In this context, the Jesuits were repeatedly accused of accumulating wealth and retaining native workers for their own ventures (Souza Júnior 2012, 143–329; Neves Neto 2013, 17–109).

Bettendorff saw for himself how useful the chain of well-functioning farms along the river routes was for the missionaries. When he was appointed to the Tapajós mission in 1661, on his way upstream he stopped at the mission farms of Mortigura and Cametá. From the first of these he received manioc flour, the most important travelling provisions at that time, and from the second he obtained some live turtles, which were either captured in the river or bred at the farm (Bettendorff 1990, 159). Another report which he wrote in 1665—just four years after his arrival, when he had already become the rector of the central residence in São Luís—provides a general overview of the mission’s economic situation and details the productiveness of some of the farms.⁷ Bettendorff’s report begins with a description of one of the most relevant and prosperous rural establishments in the Maranhão captaincy:

Seven miles from the town, we possess a farm called Anindiba. It has a chapel dedicated to Saint Ignatius, where the [indigenous] servants attend divine services and instruction of the doctrine. The whole property occupies one square mile and is very fertile, ideal for manioc and sugar cane. It has many trees that can be cut easily. Four villages of Indians inhabit our property. At that farm, we have more than sixty servants, children, and adults altogether, to cultivate the fields. A curiboca or cafuzo, that is, a son of an Ethiopian [African] man and an Indian woman, who is our servant, administers the farm. The poor ones, although born more to sleep, eat, and drink than to work, provide us with manioc flour, enough for one year, maize, oil, and brandy, as well as cloth made of cotton, and other things.⁸

The report also mentions smaller properties in the outskirts of São Luís. One of them occupied an entire island of one and a half square miles on which “lives a fisherman with his wife and children, an Ethiopian [African], with an Ethiopian [African] wife, a daughter and other descendants, and also three servants, and he takes care of a herd of cattle, which includes 67 animals, some goats, about 30 pigs and chicken. The women are our laundresses and weavers.”⁹ The document continues presenting succinctly diverse rural scenes in farms and missions throughout the Amazon estuary and valley, revealing a clear concern with the precarious and constantly fluctuating supplies of manioc flour and fish for the Mission and for the Colony.¹⁰

In the official annual statistics (or Catalogus) that Bettendorff sent to the General Superior in Rome in 1671, he reports the existence of several small properties that had been donated by benefactors in Belém and São Luís. Just as they did on their farms, on these land strips the Jesuits produced a wide variety of food to sustain the residents of their urban colleges (mainly young students and novices, but also a growing number of elderly and sick missionaries) and, to a lesser extent, they produced commodities for export. Bettendorff emphasizes the production of salt (a royal monopoly) and animal products in Maranhão, and the production of sugar, cotton, and cacao, as well as manioc flour, in Pará. He also records that most of their indigenous workers in Maranhão were legal slaves, while those in Pará were officially free but obligated to live on the farms—just as those in the inland missions were.¹¹

In this context it is important to point out that the Jesuits never denied compulsory labor, and even allowed the enslavement of indigenous people under certain conditions. In this regard, they were largely in agreement with the settlers and the authorities on the exploitation of the native populations and their integration into colonial society. The crucial disagreement was over the interpretation and implementation of laws on indigenous labor. In January 1662, Father Vieira clarified his order’s position in Lisbon after being expelled from the Amazon region for categorically denouncing any kind of illegal indigenous slavery:

It is not my intention that there may not be any slaves; after all, I tried at this royal court [in 1655], as it is well known, and one can see from my proposal […] that a council of the greatest scholars should be established to discuss this item and that the cases of legal captivity should be defined by law. But because we [the Jesuits] are in favor of the legal cases and against the illegal ones, they [the settlers] don’t like to have us in that land and, therefore, they throw us out of it.¹²

In some ways, beyond being fierce competitors, the settlers and the missionaries were close and interdependent partners—at least as far as the regional economy was concerned. Every year, these two main agent groups not only divided the indigenous workers among themselves according to the legal provisions (albeit they frequently disagreed on the terms of allocation, treatment, and remuneration) but also produced and traded very similar commodities. Nevertheless, it was mainly traditional indigenous know-how that made possible the relatively stable production of food (primarily manioc flour, the main staple food) and the seasonal gathering of tropical rainforest products (especially cacao, clove bark, sarsaparilla, and copaiba oil). For this reason, in the early days of colonization, formal alliances with the most important indigenous groups—mostly speakers of Tupi languages—were vital for the European colonizers, because these groups acquainted the settlers with the unfamiliar tropical environment. To use a metaphor employed by Nádia Farage, certain indigenous peoples became the colonizers’ “bulwark of the hinterland” (Farage 1991).

This aside, from the mid-seventeenth century onward, the insertion of more and more indigenous groups into colonial society, primarily by confining and supervising them in the missions, was fundamental to the further economic development of the missionary establishments, as has already been emphasized. Bettendorff was (after Vieira) the Jesuit who made his voice most heard regarding the treatment of indigenous people in the colony. Unlike his predecessor, instead of insisting on the “freedom of the Indians,” the priest from Luxembourg used arguments that were less idealistic, resolutely advocating for the autonomy of the missions as legally recognized institutions.

The autonomy of the missions

In December 1686, King Pedro II enacted the previously mentioned Regimento das Missões, a law concerning the status of the missions and the governance of its indigenous inhabitants. Bettendorff, a graduate in law, followed the negotiations in the metropolis in his role as extraordinary procurator of the Maranhão Mission. He had traveled to Lisbon with a recommendation from the provincial superior in Brazil, although some of the older confreres, among them Vieira, had certain doubts concerning the ability of “that German father.” But thanks to the mediation of some influential Jesuits at court, Bettendorff was granted two receptions with the king. Later, his close relationship with the new queen consort, Maria Sophia of Neuburg, a German princess, facilitated his access to the royal family. Nevertheless, his most important ally was the royal secretary Roque Monteiro Paim, who not only kept Bettendorff informed but also conveyed his opinions to the extraordinary commission nominated by the king to solve the “Amazonian question”—that is, the disagreement between the Society of Jesus and the residents of the colony (Arenz 2010, 49–53).

The most controversial issues were the annual distribution of indigenous laborers among settlers, authorities, and missions, and the restoration of the missionaries’ temporal (civilian) power over the indigenous population. In both cases, the commission formulated two strategic compromises after hearing the representatives of the residents and the religious. Regarding the distribution of laborers, this became bipartite—between residents and villages—instead of tripartite. In addition, the periods of work outside the missions were extended and made more flexible to accommodate the seasonal harvests. As for the temporal administration of the priests, the residents’ representative insisted on its complete abolition, arguing that the Jesuits should dedicate themselves exclusively to evangelization. In response, Father Bettendorff categorically demanded the restoration of temporal power over the indigenous population, pointing out that “without the temporal administration of the Indians, the Mission cannot subsist.”¹³ After the new governor of the colony, Gomes Freire de Andrade, had been consulted, the “dual administration” (temporal and spiritual) of the missionaries was definitively restored.

The Regimento das Missões, which Mathias Kiemen considers to be a “masterpiece of legislation” (Kiemen 1954, 163), stemmed from these two compromises to “give a convenient form to the reduction of the Gentiles of the State of Maranhão, […], and to the distribution, […] for the good of their souls, and to advance the life of all by honest work.”¹⁴ The twenty-four paragraphs can be summed up under four main topics. First, it stated that the villages would have significant autonomy, guaranteed through the restoration of the “dual administration,” the appointment of two “Procurators of the Indians,” and the supervision of the entry of non-indigenous people. Second, the villages were to be regrouped in strategic locations, with a minimum population of 150 couples per village, thus ensuring the presence of enough workers and facilitating, if necessary, populational and commercial exchanges within the network. Third, services within and outside the villages were to be organized according to the annual inventory of the male labor force, which was to be divided so that one half remained in the missions and the other half was sent outside. Fourth, in exceptional circumstances, the settlers and the authorities would be able to request indigenous workers for urgent services, mainly as rowers (men), wet nurses, or helpers in the production of manioc flour (women).¹⁵

The compromises established by the Regimento das Missões were intended to satisfy the two groups that were most concerned. The law ensured that the settlers had more indigenous workers available (and for a longer period), while the Jesuits not only regained temporal administration but also managed to expand the autonomy of the missions. Although excluded from the negotiations, the indigenous people obtained through the autonomy clause the conditions under which they could conceive a certain normality of daily life based on the continuation and transmission of certain traditions. In addition, the complex ongoing process of cultural mediation between the indigenous population and the Jesuits was intensified, compelling them to create, despite the asymmetric character of their relationship, “shared codes” (terms or practices) that resulted in a certain convergence of their respective symbolic horizons.¹⁶ Furthermore, despite the obligatory confinement, the new law permitted more mobility and increasing interaction of the indigenous with other members of colonial society while working outside the missions.¹⁷

In all his writings, Bettendorff insisted in the strict fulfillment of legal regulations, especially those dealing with the status of the natives. In his final years, when he understood the difficulties inherent in making the new law work, the Luxembourger father vehemently denounced the

men who seek nothing but their own advantage, and employ the Indians at their will, since they [the indigenous people] never consented to be governed except by the laws of His Majesty, and, moreover, many of them were brought down to the missions by the priests of the Society of Jesus, or came by their own will, and they are where they want to be, for these lands belong to the Indians, natives to them, and no one can take them away from them without committing a great injustice, nor force them to work except in accordance with the laws of His Majesty, for neither they nor their ancestors committed themselves to more.¹⁸

Despite the difficulties in fully implementing the law, the Regimento das Missões remained in force until June 1755, when the indigenous were emancipated from guardianship and the religious removed from the temporal administration. It should be noted that the law of 1686 not only shaped the lives of the native peoples and fostered a specific ethnogenesis among them, but also shaped colonial society as a whole.

The production of cacao

From the end of the seventeenth century, rainforest products became very popular in Europe—as ingredients in remedies and for refining and preserving food.¹⁹ With some exceptions, such as cacau manso (cultivated cacao, differing from the “wild” or bravo variety), most of the native spices were gathered in the sertões and transported in canoes rowed by indigenous to the seaport in Belém, where they were shipped to the metropolis. In a certain manner, the native groups’ traditions of collecting plants, roots, and vegetal oils was established as a new production system, which also included strategic commercialization. This junction of traditional activities and mercantilist logic is comprised in the term “extractivism” (Droulers 2001, 71).

One of the most common services performed by indigenous laborers for the colonial authorities, private merchants, and religious orders was the gathering of cacao. Indeed, cacao was a key forest product, as it was very abundant in the vast sertões. The natives knew where to find the widely dispersed cacao groves, and how and when to collect their fruits. Bettendorff mentions the considerable concentration of cacao trees along the riverbanks of the Amazon and its many tributaries, especially in the western part of the basin in the valley of the Madeira River (Bettendorff 1990, 464).

From the 1670s, cacao was definitively the most important product in the region that was being exported to Lisbon. The Jesuits, who were among the first to become aware of the success of this commodity in the European markets, started to cultivate it systematically and even involved the settlers in this venture. In a letter from 1677, Bettendorff informs the General Superior, Giovanni Paolo Oliva, that he had introduced the cacao tree, common in the captaincy of Pará, to the coastal plain of neighboring Maranhão:

Three years ago [1674], I planted twice a thousand cocoa trees, of which more than a thousand became trees. Apart from the flowers, they are already producing fruits, called cocoa, from which chocolate is made. All the residents of Maranhão are very pleased with this help for their lives and their businesses, which, thanks to my care and zeal, was brought to them from Pará to Maranhão. To some I gave fruits, each of which contains at least forty-six grains, and the same number of trees [seedlings]. By continuing to share with all these people, they will be well off in the future or at least live comfortably. Six trees and, at most, ten give one arroba each year, as the measure is called [here]; one thousand trees yield a hundred arrobas [of grains], which are sold for more than a thousand cruzados. This year, I intend to plant at least six thousand trees as a source of income for the Mission. May God favor their growth, for it is for his greater glory that they will be planted.²⁰

In another report, written one year later, Bettendorff clarifies that his initiative of planting the cacao trees and, in particular, his decision to involve the settlers was in response to a request from “the Governor to satisfy the wish of the Most Serene Prince [the future King Pedro II].”²¹ Many other letters in his official correspondence as superior refer to cacao as one of the most valuable products for the sustenance of the mission and the colony.²² His successor, the Italian-born Father Pedro Luís Consalvi, stressed Bettendorff’s role in the cacao enterprise by informing the General Superior that “in a very innovative way, Father Rector planted cacao, from which is made the beverage known as chocolate.”²³

The steady growth of demand for cacao in Europe even motivated the colonial authorities to transfer the capital of the colony from São Luís to Belém on the ground that the harbor in the Amazon estuary provided better access to the cacao-producing forests and plantations (Magalhães 2001, 8; Bettendorff 1990, 648). However, the production and export of cacao were not as successful as Bettendorff's letters from the early 1670s claimed. Fluctuations in the colonial market and the climate affected this relatively new economic activity. For example, in 1691, Father Aloísio Conrado Pfeil mentioned a crisis stemming from the lack of cacao and clove bark for export after some bad harvests.²⁴ Furthermore, the settlers continued to complain about the perceived over-commitment of the Jesuits to the cacao trade, reminding them of their spiritual obligations. With regard to this growing discontent, Dauril Alden explains that the

Jesuits, along with the other Orders active in the Amazon, produced some cacao on their own plantations, but they depended primarily upon their Amerindian charges in the interior missions to collect it. Such reliance brought the fathers into direct conflict with vested settler interests. (Alden 1996, 546).

These tensions point to the increasing prospects of profit from cacao and explain the interest of settlers, authorities, and religious orders in increasing its quantity by adapting the once wild-growing tree to rational plantation methods. Referring explicitly to the experience of the Spanish in their colonies, even the regent Dom Pedro insisted in 1675 that cacao should be cultivated in the Amazon region “as it is done in the Indies of Castile.”²⁵ Nonetheless, as mentioned previously, the continuity of seasonal gathering in the sertão missions linked indigenous practices and knowledge with the far-reaching intercontinental trading system that developed around cacao. Father Bettendorff was fully aware that this profitable and extensive business was a means to making the mission self-sufficient.

Lastly, severe epidemics made cacao production extremely precarious. Two outbreaks of contagious disease, in 1661–1662 and 1695–1696, depopulated entire aldeamentos. Besides the high level of mortality, a considerable number of indigenous workers fled the missions during these periods (Neves 2013; Bettendorff 1990, 214–216 and 587–588). Despite these near-regular catastrophic interruptions, however, in general the economy developed advantageously. Therefore, in 1697, at the very end of the seventeenth century, Bettendorff wrote that a ship bound for Portugal could only be loaded with one-third of all the “sugars, tobaccos and, particularly, clove bark and cacao” that had been piled up in the ports of São Luís and Belém (Bettendorff 1990, 648–649). This brief mention reveals, on the one hand, the extent to which agriculture (sugar, tobacco, and cultivated cacao) was intermingled with extractivism (clove bark and wild-growing cacao) around the turn of the eighteenth century and, on the other hand, how far the Amazon region was from being a miserable and precarious periphery—a position that has long been conveyed by historiography.²⁶

Conclusion

The intense agency of indigenous populations inside and outside the missions is clearly noticeable in most of the reports written by Jesuit authors, although the priests tended to emphasize inconstancy and rusticity when writing about their native catechumens and neophytes. In this context, it is important to highlight the role of Father Bettendorff, a missionary from Luxembourg who became a central figure in consolidating the Jesuit missionary network in the second half of the seventeenth century. His lengthy chronicle, and many of his more than fifty official letters, reveal his evident interest in juridical-political and socioeconomic issues and thus testify to his historic contribution to the development of the Amazon region in the first century of Portuguese colonization.

Autonomous missions, which gave protection (at least to some extent) to indigenous groups and their traditional way of life, and cacao production, which sustained (also to some extent) the multiple activities of the religious orders, helped to make the network of missions a crucial socioeconomic and ethnocultural framework that encompassed the vast Amazon basin and its diverse inhabitants. In a certain way, Father Bettendorff’s origins and formative years in a multicultural environment in the “old world” predetermined that this multitalented missionary would become a key agent in this historical process in the “new world.”

References

1. Alden, Dauril. The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, its Empire and Beyond, 1540–1750. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
2. Alencastro, Luiz Felipe de. “L’économie politique des découvertes maritimes.” In L’autre rive de l’Occident, edited by Adauto Novaes, 67–81. Paris: Métailié, 2006.
3. Arenz, Karl Heinz. “Do Alzette ao Amazonas: vida e obra do padre João Felipe Bettendorff (1625–1698).” Revista Estudos Amazônicos 5, no. 1 (2010): 25–78.
4. Arenz, Karl Heinz. “Casca de cravo, óleo de copaíba e raiz de salsaparrilha: especiarias amazônicas em tratados médico-botânicos da Europa (séc. XVII e XVIII).” In Anais do X Simpósio de História – ANPUH-Seção Pará [2016], edited by Davison Hugo Rocha Alves, and Thiago Broni de Mesquita, 529–542. Belém: Paka-Tatu, 2017.
5. Arenz, Karl Heinz. “Valente para servir”: o padre João Felipe Bettendorff e a Amazônia portuguesa no século XVII. Belo Horizonte: Caravana, 2022.
6. Bettendorff, João Felipe. Crônica dos Padres da Companhia de Jesus no Estado do Maranhão [1698]. Belém: Fundação Cultural do Pará Tancredo Neves/Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, 1990.
7. Bourdon, Albert-Alain. Histoire du Portugal. Paris: Chandeigne, 1994.
8. Cardoso, Ciro Flamarion. “La forêt, les Indiens et l’Amazonie portugaise.” In Pour l’histoire du Brésil: hommage à Katia de Queirós Mattoso, edited by François Crouzet, Philippe Bonnichon, and Denis Rolland, 171–180. Paris: Harmattan, 2000.
9. Chambouleyron, Rafael, Karl Heinz Arenz, and Vanice Siqueira de Melo. “Ruralidades indígenas na Amazônia colonial.” Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi – Ciências Humanas 15, no. 1 (January 2020): 1–22.
10. Chambouleyron, Rafael. Povoamento, ocupação e agricultura na Amazônia colonial (1640–1706). Belém: Açaí, 2010.
11. Droulers, Martine. Brésil: une géohistoire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001.
12. Farage, Nádia. As muralhas dos sertões: os povos indígenas no rio Branco e a colonização. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra/ANPOCS, 1991.
13. Farías, Eduardo Arcila. Comercio entre Venezuela y México en los siglos XVII y XVIII. México: El Colegio de México, 1950.
14. Kiemen, Mathias Charles. The Indian Policy of Portugal in the Amazon Region: 1614–1693. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1954.
15. Labourdette, Jean-François. Histoire du Portugal. Paris: Fayard, 2000.
16. Leite, Serafim. História da Companhia de Jesus no Brasil, vol. 3 & vol. 4. Rio de Janeiro/Lisbon: Instituto Nacional do Livro/Livraria Portugalia, 1943.
17. Magalhães, Joaquim Romero. “Le Portugal et les dynamiques de l’économie atlantique du XVe au XVIIIe siècle.” In Le Portugal et l’Atlantique: XVe–XXe siècles, edited by Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 3–10. Lisbon/Paris: Centre culturel Calouste Gulbenkian, 2001.
18. Mattos, Yllan de. “Regimento das Missões do Estado do Maranhão e Grão-Pará, de 21 de dezembro de 1686.” Revista 7 Mares 1, no. 1 (2012): 112–122.
19. Mauro, Frédéric. Des produits et des hommes: essais historiques latino-américains XVIe–XXe siècles. Paris/La Haye: Mouton/École Pratique des Hautes Études, 1972.
20. Meier, Johannes, and Fernando Amado Aymoré. Jesuiten aus Zentraleuropa in Portugiesisch- und Spanisch-Amerika: ein bio-bibliographisches Handbuch, vol. 1. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2005.
21. Mello, Maria Eliane Alves de Souza e. “O Regimento das Missões: poder e negociação na Amazônia Portuguesa.” Clio – Revista de Pesquisa Histórica 27, no. 1 (2009): 46–75.
22. Montero, Paula. “Índios e missionários no Brasil: para uma teoria da mediação cultural.” In Deus na aldeia: missionários, índios e mediação cultural, edited by Paula Montero, 31–66. São Paulo: Globo, 2006.
23. Neves Neto, Raimundo Moreira das. Um patrimônio em contendas: os bens jesuíticos e a magna questão dos dízimos no Estado do Maranhão e Gráo-Pará (1650–1750). Jundiaí: Paco Editorial, 2013.
24. Neves, Tamyris Monteiro. “A ira de Deus e o fogo que salta: a epidemia de bexigas no Estado do Maranhão (1695).” Amazônica – Revista de Antropologia 5, no. 2 (2013): 344–361.
25. Norton, Marcy. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.
26. Perrone-Moisés, Beatriz. “Índios livres e índios escravos: os princípios da legislação indigenista do período colonial (séculos XVI a XVIII).” In História dos índios no Brasil, edited by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, 115–132. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992.
27. Serrão, Joel, and António Henrique de Oliveira Marques (eds.). Nova história de Portugal, vol. 7. Lisbon: Presença, 2001.
28. Souza Júnior, José Alves de. Tramas do cotidiano: religião, política, guerra e negócios no Grão-Pará dos setecentos. Belém: ed.ufpa, 2012.
29. Vieira, Antônio. Sermões escolhidos: texto integral. São Paulo: Martin Claret, 2004.

Introduction

Talking about historical relations between Brazil and Luxembourg might at first seem a bit strange; here are two countries, continents apart, with breathtaking differences in size and population: Brazil is 3,290 times bigger in size, with a population that is 338 times larger than Luxembourg’s. When I arrived in Brasilia in 2017 to work in the capital of the fifth-largest country in the world, I was greeted with open arms and warm welcomes. What I found the most astonishing was that links with Luxembourg could be found nearly everywhere in Brazil, from the state of Rio Grande do Sul in the far south to the state of Amapá in the northern Amazon River delta. I set out to discover and document some of these connections, many of which are still alive today. My visits took me to the places where a Luxembourg presence is still visible and where there are testimonies—historical and contemporary—as well as a number of descendants of the Luxembourgish immigrants. Let me take you on a Brazilian journey from north to south, and through the centuries.

The first two stops on our Brazilian voyage will be among familiar faces. Indeed, extensive research has been done on João Felipe Bettendorff, the Luxembourg-born Jesuit who played an important role in the lower Amazon region of the senventeenth century. His own published work is considered as the classic description of this region and is extensively quoted by historians, biologists, anthropologists, and so on. Numerous Brazilian publications have focused on some of the things that Bettendorff first described to the Portuguese and European world. Even though he has not been translated, he ranks among the key historical figures of his time. Much is already known about him, so I will not dwell upon this here.

The same holds true for the centenary presence of ARBED, through its Brazilian subsidiary Belgo-Mineira, which today remains an important part of the largest steel company in the world: ArcelorMittal. The history is known, well-researched, and remains alive in the memories of the descendants of the Luxembourgers who went to Brazil to work for the company, and it is well-documented in the company archives in Sabará. This presence continues to contribute greatly to the economic success of ARBED’s successor company.

In this brief article, I have chosen to highlight some of the lesser-known history of the nineteenth-century Luxembourg immigration to southern Brazil. This topic is particularly interesting given that the descendants of these immigrants have taken on numerous prominent positions in Brazil. They have also become increasingly visible and relevant in Luxembourg. My hope is that these sketches will inspire readers to look into this topic further, to consult the excellent archival sources quoted in the text, or to conduct their own research and delve even further into this segment of history.

The places on the map (Figure 1) correlate, from north to south, with three different periods of immigration from Luxembourg:

1. In the second half of the seventeenth century, João Felipe Bettendorff was active from Parintins to São Luis, throughout the states of Amazonas (AM), Pará (PA), and Maranhão (MA).

2. BelgoMineira/ArcelorMittal has been active in the Monlevade area, in the state of Minas Gerais (MG), since 1921.

3. In the nineteenth century, immigrants settled in the states of Espirito Santo (ES), Paraná (PR), Santa Catarina (SC), and Rio Grande do Sul (RS), stretching from Luxemburgo to Walachai.

1. The presence of a few Luxembourgish missionaries has been documented in the history of Portuguese Brazil. Among them one stands out: João Felipe Bettendorff (b. 1625 in Lintgen). He lived in the Amazon from 1661 and died in 1698 in Belém do Pará. For some time, he was the Jesuit superior in the Amazon, in the historical Estado do Maranhão e Grão-Pará. During his travels, Bettendorff founded several mission stations, as far away as Parintins, in today’s state of Amazonas. One of these was established in 1661 on the Tapajo River and later became the city of Santarém, in the state of Pará. In 1698, he wrote a reference work on the history of the Lower Amazon—Crônica da Missão dos Padres da Companhia de Jesus no Estado do Maranhãoa—a region roughly encompassing today’s states of Pará, Amapá, and Maranhão. Testimonies of his presence are to be found in Santarém (see Figure 2), where he is remembered as the founder of that large city on the Amazon, midway between Belém and Manaus. In-depth research about Bettendorff’s life and his work has been done by Professor Karl Heinz Arenz, who published extensively on this subject.²

2. Further south, we jump forward a few centuries and arrive in more recent times. From the 1920s, several hundred engineers and technicians from Luxembourg brought their know-how to Minas Gerais in order to build and operate the first modern Brazilian steelworks. This substantial investment by ARBED created what would become Luxembourg’s largest economic diaspora in the country’s history. The comprehensive interactive project “colonia.lu” created by Dominique Santana is packed with historical details and oral histories of Luxembourgish economic migrants to the steel industry towns of Sabará and João Monlevade.⁴

One of the first Luxembourgish honorary consulates was opened in Belo Horizonte, and the successive directors of BelgoMineira, the ARBED investment in Brazil, became the honorary consuls. They functioned as heads of the company and as honorary representatives of Luxembourg’s government at the same time. This greatly improved the lives of engineers and technicians from Luxembourg and Europe, as the consuls authorized their entries, exits, passport renewals, and so on. During the Nazi occupation, this community assisted the Luxembourg government in exile and even hosted a historic visit by Prince Jean in 1942 (see Figure 3). The honorary consulate still continues to serve the interests of Luxembourg as well as the local historical community, though today it is no longer linked to ArcelorMittal.

The close economic connection remains alive as documented by two State visits, first by Grand-Duc Jean in 1964 and later by Grand-Duc Henri in 2007, in which they visited ArcelorMittal and the Luxembourg community in Minas Gerais. The steel industry’s strong link with Luxembourg continues to this day; BelgoMineira is still an integral part of the ArcelorMittal corporation, many emblematic buildings of the new futuristic capital Brasilia contain steel produced in these mills, and some of the descendants of those pioneers live in Belo Horizonte while others have spread throughout Brazil.

3. The major immigrations in the nineteenth century also brought Luxembourgers to Brazil. During my stay in Brazil, I was able to visit many communities of descendants of Luxembourgish immigrants from the nineteenth century. What struck me most was their strong emotional relationship with Luxembourg, which stems from their respect for their ancestors and the hardship they lived through when they immigrated to this faraway country in order to provide their descendants with a better life than they would have had in Luxembourg in those times. This feeling unites all of them. But first, some historical background about the country that actively invited these European immigrants.

The politico-historical context of nineteenth century immigration to Brazil

On September 7, 1822, Dom Pedro, the Brazilian Prince Regent and son of the Portuguese King Dom Joao VI, proclaimed himself Emperor of Brazil (Dom Pedro I), and cut the links to Portugal, declaring Brazilian independence. Independent Brazil bordered the new states which had emerged from strong Spanish colonies that had provided Spain and the rest of Europe with riches. The first Spanish settlements dated from the early 1500s (for example, Buenos Aires from 1536 and Asuncion from 1537). After the collapse of Spanish rule in South America during the Napoleonic period, new states emerged from the old vice-kingdoms. On Brazil’s southwestern borders these states were Argentina (1816) and Paraguay (1811). On the Brazilian side it was all jungle, inhabited by the native population. In the eyes of the Brazilian emperor, there was therefore an urgent need to counteract possible territorial claims by these neighbors. This was best done by sending immigrants there to settle and secure the borders of the independent Brazil (Jochem 2024). This immigration gave rise to today’s three federal states in the south: Paraná (Curitiba), Santa Catarina (Florianopolis), and Rio Grande do Sul (Porto Alegre).

However, these areas of southern Brazil, like most of the rest of the country, were already well populated before the arrival of the first Europeans in the region, Portuguese immigrants from the Azores Islands who had settled along the coast of today’s Santa Catarina around 1750. Indigenous villages of the Guarani, Kaingang, Xokleng, and other peoples still existed along the coast and the rivers, although their populations had steadily been declining since the arrival of the first Europeans in the 16th century. The indigenous people were victims of large-scale exploitation, slavery, removal, and disease, particularly at the hands of the bandeirantes slavery expeditions originating in São Paulo (Green & Skidmore 2021).

The idea of creating incentives for Europeans to settle in the country’s vast spaces was probably also inspired by immigration policy in the United States (Santos 2004, 67). There had been initial efforts in Brazil even before independence. The Portuguese King Joao VI, who fled from Napoleon to Rio de Janeiro in 1807, saw that the small local population was not enough to develop an economic output on a European scale. In November 1808 he issued a decree (Decreto de 25 de novembro de 1808), based on an old Portuguese law, to allow people to clear land (sesmarias). This was the first formal policy of encouraging immigration to certain regions in Portuguese Brazil.

The immigration policy launched by Dom Pedro I foresaw European immigrants settling in so-called colonias and lasted from 1824 until 1830 (Costa, De Souza & Dos Anjos Barros 2019). At that time, the opening up might have been influenced by the emperor’s wife, Dona Leopoldina, who was Archduchess Maria Leopoldine of Austria, daughter of Emperor Franz I. European immigrants came mostly from the Austrian Empire, especially from Trento (Italians) and from German areas (Pomerania, both sides of the Moselle River, Luxembourg and the Hunsrück, the neighboring Eifel, etc.).

In the areas of Luxembourg, the Eifel, the Moselle, and the Hunsrück, recruiters became active, calling on the local population to emigrate. This gave rise to a “Brazil fever” (Wey 2005). Among these emigrants were veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, who were of particular interest for Brazil because they could help secure the borders if the need should arise. The emigrants from the Hunsrück, the Eifel, and the Trier area were joined by some individuals and families from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and from the old Duchy of Luxembourg; the areas on the eastern side of the Sauer and Our rivers were transferred to Prussia at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The emigrants followed promises (of free land, and so on) and together they went, either on foot or by boat on the Moselle and the Rhine rivers, to Bremen and to Hamburg. Upon reaching Brazil in Guanabara Bay, Rio de Janeiro, they underwent health controls and were then sent to the southern border states, usually by ship.

Starting in the late 1820s, a small number of emigrants from Luxembourg were among these settlers in the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, and Paraná. Research indicates that 80% of Luxembourgish immigrants arrived in these three states, of which more than 50% arrived in Santa Catarina (Steiner & Loyo 2022). In the following pages I do not endeavor to present a complete study of this immigration, a vast topic in itself. Nor do I claim these lines to be a scientific treatise. The chapters that follow will in part present fragments, like pieces of a mosaic; stories and histories of individuals and places linked to the Luxembourgish immigration and other presences in Brazil. I therefore offer a contribution which helps to give context and background to the emigration from Luxembourg in the early nineteenth century.

Much has been written in Brazil about these immigrants, however, it is mostly limited to very detailed biographies of individuals, as well as detailed information about the villages they founded. Most of these very valuable publications reflect the perspective of genealogists. Often, these publications have been written by descendants, and thus benefit from invaluable firsthand information. However, this also means that circulation is limited and there is no translation into other languages. This body of work would merit in-depth consideration by social historians and anthropologists, as it deals with a unique phase in the history of early Brazilian colonization that is most distinct from the earlier and later Portuguese population, which in the south also has regional particularities.

Early Luxembourgish settlements

The Luxembourgish immigrants founded and co-founded villages in several states:

Rio Grande do Sul

Mathias Mombach arrived in 1829 and built the first house in Morro Reuter (Figure 4). He died there on November 7, 1878, at the age of ninety-one. Mombach was one of the very first Luxembourgers who came to this state. He not only represents an ideal immigrant from the Brazilian perspective back then, but his life reflects important events from that time in the south of the country, especially in the mountain ranges around the valley of Sinos, not far from Porto Alegre.

Mathias Mombach was born in Echternach on March 10, 1787, to Apollonia Reuter and Johann Mombach. He fought in the Napoleonic armies from 1807 to 1813 and took part in the campaigns in Calabria and Sicily, Russia, and Saxony. In August 1813, he was injured in a battle, which marked the end of his military career (Schaack 1909–1910). Back in Echternach, Mombach was recruited by one of the emigration agents who traveled the countryside and sold passages to Brazil. Dom Pedro I wanted European war veterans, mostly from the Napoleonic wars, to settle in southern Brazil in order to defend the borders.

Mombach arrived in the German colony of São Leopoldo on the Sinos River in the state of Rio Grande do Sul on March 18, 1829 with his wife Anna Maria Dietrich. From there, he moved straight into the mountains and was the first to settle the hamlet of Walachai in a remote valley in the township of Reutersberg (Morro Reuter).⁵ Today, Walachai is a lively village that, among other things, has a thriving shoe factory. According to the mother of local historian João Benno Wendling, it was said that Mombach spoke French better than German. Wendling’s grandmother reported that she had to learn French words like “malheur, plaisir, misérable” (Wendling 2013, 47).

Because of his military skills, Mombach came to play a role in the war of secession which took place in this southern province of Brazil. During the Farroupilha Revolution (1835–1845), he joined the head of the Imperial and the “Legalists” militia in the colony, led by Dr. Hillebrand. The German colonists were not interested in the revolution; they wanted to live and work in peace. In the wake of this unrest, they organized themselves against the bandits who were terrorizing their colony. The best known, according to reports, was a certain Antonio Joaquim da Silva, “Menino Diabo” (“devil child”), so called because of his small stature. Wendling describes how Mathias Mombach was an ensign in a militia unit that hunted this bandit’s group. At one point, Mombach recognized the bandit and caught him with his militia near the town of Baumschneis (Dois Irmãos). During a shootout, the bandit was injured in the leg and Mombach, being a good soldier, gave the order to transfer him to the town of Dois Irmãos to face trial there. Menino Diabo was locked up and guarded, but relatives of his victims killed him during the night (Wendling 2003, 75–76).

German-Luxembourg immigration historian Felipe Kuhn Braun and other local historians quote this story repeatedly and in detail. Mombach’s great-granddaughter Teresa Henrich also wrote about him, and probably embellished the story quite a bit. Nevertheless, Mombach must have been a local personality because, according to a contemporary report, the Argentine statesman, one-time foreign minister, historian, and poet Juan María Gutierrez, visited him in 1844. Here is how Gutierrez remembered the visit to Mombach’s home: “The main pieces are made of cedar wood and are arranged for defense against wild Indians. As I entered these rooms, I sensed a scent that I soon identified: it came from cedar wood, the only material used to build this type of ark, dedicated to the protection of an old man (Mombach). Soldier of the Emperor Napoleon and now lieutenant of Emperor Dom Pedro II. Half a block from the building, a very clear stream flows over the stony ground. Anyone who is near the house will find everything they need in Ensign Mombach’s realm: rifles, dogs, the company of one of his children. And just a few steps away there is a black tiger, a wild boar, a deer to choose from.”⁶ Mombach’s death was reported in this way: “He died at a very old age in little Wallachia, already a widower, under the care of his son Shang (João).”⁷

Santa Catarina

The State of Santa Catarina, founded in 1738 by secession from the state of São Paulo, went so far as to create its own immigration authority from 1840 onward (Piazza 1982, 79). European immigration had begun even earlier, when the Brazilian government founded the Colonia São Pedro de Alcântara in Santa Catarina in the coastal mountains in order to settle “German” emigrants there. The areas for the German and Italian immigrants were located in the mountain ranges above Florianopolis, and in the Itajaí and Rio Negro valleys.

In November 1828, 635 emigrants arrived there, of which 523 had traveled from the port of Bremen and 112 from the “Legião Alemã,” a German mercenary force that was stationed in Rio and was no longer needed there (Piazza 1982, 85). No Brazilian historians mention Luxembourgers, but there were a few who were already part of the first group. In Brazil, anyone who spoke a Germanic language was considered a German. The numbers of Luxembourgish immigrants were never very high, but the few who came did not go unnoticed. They were documented by local historians, such as Aderbal Philippi. His publications are an important source for this article (Philippi 1995). In the local history museum of São Pedro de Alcântara, a room is dedicated to these first Luxembourg immigrants.⁸

The first Luxembourgish immigrant was probably Peter Steil from Mertzig, who arrived in Santa Catarina on August 17, 1828. He settled in the river valley in Tijucas. In November 1828, 276 more immigrants from the Brig Luiza disembarked in Desterro, today’s Florianopolis, including Joannes Kirbag from Berburg, Nicolas Wild from Garnich, and Mathias Roden from Heisdorf. Immediately afterward, in 1829 or 1830, Nicolas and Georg Mannes arrived there from Echternach. They count among the very first settlers of São Pedro de Alcântara.

Another family with an interesting history is the Schwindens. Their experience helps us better understand the situation and lives of the first European settlers. They came to Santa Catarina as part of the “German” immigration from 1829 and 1863 to the colonies of Santa Isabel, Vargem Grande, and many other localities in the greater Florianopolis area. The Rancho Queimado colony accepted the following settlers on July 19, 1862: Mathias Schwinden (twenty-eight years old), his wife Margretta Schwinden (thirty-three years old), and their children Johann, Mathias, and Johann Peter Schwinden (ten, six, and three years old). The eldest son, Mathias Schwinden (thirteen years old) did not arrive in Brazil until July 16, 1863 because he got lost in Antwerp when the family embarked in 1862.

Upon the family’s arrival in 1862, Mathias Schwinden received the first piece of colonial land in Estrada de Lages, on the Taquaras River, from the Directorate of Public Lands and Colonization of the Ministry of Agriculture, Trade and Public Works of the Imperial Government of Brazil. The Taquaras district belongs to the municipality of Rancho Queimado, a region that had been familiar to the drovers of livestock of Campos de Lages since the 18th century.

As soon as they arrived, they immediately set about planting the first fields of corn, cassava, beans, and sugar cane, which were sold in the region that now forms the Florianopolis metropolitan area, as well as in the cities of Bom Retiro and Lages. But they had to face many difficulties in their new land. The frequent attacks by indigenous people in the region created a situation of permanent insecurity. In addition, these lands were not very fertile and were littered with rocks. This situation led the Schwinden family to decide on a new direction and move to a less “problematic” area. At that time, there were still more indigenous people living in Santa Catarina than there were immigrants.

Another factor that made life in the colony difficult was the geomorphology of the region, which consisted of very steep terrain that made it difficult to grow crops. The Schwindens sold their land and moved to Sul do Rio, a town in the municipality of Santo Amaro da Imperatriz in the fertile plain of the Rio Cubatão, closer to the coast (Fraga 1998). Another descendant, Nicolau Schwinden, was a tropeiro, a trader and cattle driver, and leader of caravans that sold goods along the all-important domestic trade routes. These traders were of enormous importance; they made cross-regional trade possible because they traveled along the old routes between the coastal area and the inland plateau. Later, he also ran a slaughterhouse.

I came upon another interesting Luxembourg descendant during a visit to the botanical garden in Rio de Janeiro. I noticed a name, Dr. Paulino Reitz, whose monument I had previously seen in the town of Antônio Carlos, SC (see Figure 5). Reitz was a very interesting personality. He was of Luxembourgish descent through his mother, Anna Wilvert, the Brazilian-born daughter of Joseph Wollwert/Wilwert (b. 1843 in Heiderscheidergrund), who emigrated at the age of eighteen with his family from Kocherei, Marnach, on board the ship Massilius and settled in São Pedro de Alcântara. Like many in southern Brazil, Dr. Paulino Reitz (b. September 19, 1919, in Antônio Carlos, SC; d. November 19, 1990, in Itapema, SC) believed that his ancestors were German. He was a priest and a botanist, and he was considered the world specialist for bromeliads in his time; some varieties also bear his name. He founded the Barbosa Rodrigues Herbarium in São Leopoldo, Rio Grande do Sul, and was director of the botanical garden in Rio de Janeiro from 1971 to 1975, where he had the Bromeliad House installed. He then served as director of the Environmental Foundation of Santa Catarina (FATMA). He has received the United Nations Global 500 Prize for his scientific work.

Espirito Santo

In 1858, in addition to those three states in the south, a group of more than 50 people immigrated to the state of Espirito Santo, where they founded the small village of Luxemburgo, located in the district of Santa Leopoldina, nestled deep in the coastal mountains (see Figure 6). They too did not forget their origin, and they settled on lands reserved by the local authorities for European immigration and named for their home regions and countries (France, Switzerland, Tyrol, Pomerania, etc.) as documented in the Arquivo publico do Estado do Espirito Santo.⁹ At the time, there was a state company in Brazil that was making land available to newly arrived immigrants (Steiner & Loyo 2022).

The purpose of this article is to briefly describe Luxembourgish immigration to Brazil, and therefore I include this unique later immigration because it created a single coherent community that even carries the name of the country. I do not want to dwell on later immigrations, though it is worth noting that another big wave of emigration took place in Europe in the years 1855–1864. During this emigration from Luxembourg, a larger number of emigrants chose to go to the United States, which then occasionally led to siblings separating and emigrating to different countries. Today, some descendants of Luxembourgish immigrants in Brazil have direct relatives in the United States Midwest.

The descendants of the immigrants today

In the south of Brazil, elements of the migrants’ language have survived, and we can sometimes hear Luxembourgish at village festivals and family gatherings, where people celebrate and pay homage to the courage of their ancestors. Some cultural elements have also remained, even though the Hunsrück language and culture were very strong. But we have to be honest, some foods and traditions are regional and were shared historically in the region of the old Duchy of Luxembourg and beyond the Moselle, the Sauer, and the Our.

The most recent “discovery” of a large diaspora in southern Brazil, as well as the increased attention given to the better-known community in the United States Midwest, partly result from a temporary law (2008–2018) that allowed the descendants of Luxembourgers who had emigrated to reclaim the nationality of their ancestors. The procedure for applying for Luxembourgish nationality created a big boost in genealogy studies, and many Brazilians were surprised by the fact that their ancestors were not German, as they had always thought. A number of descendants of Luxembourgish immigrants, some of whom, in past centuries, had been prominent in society, politics, or religion, had never found out that they were of Luxembourgish descent. A new awareness has been created due to the results of genealogical research. During the process of applying for the nationality of their ancestors, many applicants traveled to Luxembourg and discovered the land of their forebears for the first time. This has created new bonds for the future.

Today, several tens of thousands of Brazilians, descendants of Luxembourgish immigrants, cherish their roots and identify with this unknown homeland of their forefathers. They are making great efforts to adopt more cultural elements to complement the few that were passed down by the immigrants, who were few in number and could not help but partially merge these elements with some of the traditions of the much more numerous German immigrants from neighboring regions, such as Trier and the Hunsrück. Thus, Luxembourg has become their newfound spiritual homeland, next to Brazil. The Luxembourg-Brazilians are connecting with each other through social media and creating a multitude of exchanges about all things Luxembourg.

The new Luxembourger double nationals living in Brazil today actively request cultural activities in order to strengthen this link, such as language classes and information about traditional activities. St. Nicolas’s day, Luxembourg’s main holiday for children, is now celebrated again by our honorary consuls with Luxembourg ancestry among the descendants’ communities in the three southern states and elsewhere. Some traditional foods brought over by the first immigrants have survived, other recipes are being revived, and new ones are appearing (see Figure 7). Traditional cookery classes take place, and a folk-dancing group named “Feierwon, mir wölle bleiwe wat mir sin” has been founded in Curitiba (see Figure 8). A network of ten honorary consulates all over Brazil has been put in place, which is also serving the new Luxembourgish citizens.

A new tendency, albeit fairly small, has developed in the form of a “reimmigration.” Having received their Luxembourg nationality, some families have already moved to Luxembourg to start a new life for themselves and their children in the home country of their ancestors. The multilingual society of Luxembourg is an immense challenge, which they are facing with courage. This big step is different, of course, but in a way not that different, from the one their ancestors took when they moved to a new world in southern Brazil.

This newfound closeness between the Brazilian Luxembourgers and the land of their ancestors has created another interesting dynamic: during the election campaign of 2023, some active members of the descendants’ community used the impressive number of citizens with double nationality, who all have the right to vote, as a reason to invite Luxembourgish politicians from all parties represented in parliament to visit southern Brazil and present their party programs.

This population of “new and old” Luxembourg-Brazilians, their cultural needs, and their search to identify with modern Luxembourg society is indeed worthy of scientific research and should interest historians and sociologists alike. I encourage the reader and future traveler to Brazil to look for Luxembourg’s heritage and cultural activities in the presences that are to be found among the descendants of these nineteenth century immigrants all over Brazil.

References

1. Arenz, Karl Heinz. De l’Alzette à l’Amazone: Jean-Philippe Bettendorff et les jésuites en Amazonie portugaise (1661–1693). PhD diss., Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2007.
2. Bley Júnior, Waldemiro. Genealogia da família Bley. Curitiba: Self-published, 1987.
3. Cavallaro, Glacy Weber Ruiz. “Imigrantes luxemburgueses em São Pedro de Alcântara.” In 1829: São Pedro de Alcântara, páginas de sua história, edited by Toni Jochem, and Daniel Silveira. São Pedro de Alcântara: Casa da Cultura, 2020. Accessed September 2, 2021. https://www.facebook.com/groups/123925132899781/permalink/141285447830416
4. Costa, Luiz Rosado, José Eduardo Melo De Souza, and Lívia Cristina Dos Anjos Barros. “Um historico da política migratória brasileira a partir de seus marcos legais (1808–2019).” GeoPantanal 14, no. 27 (2019): 167–184. https://periodicos.ufms.br/index.php/revgeo/article/view/9733
5. Fraga, Nilson Cesar. “Schwinden: uma família de imigrantes.” Blumenau em Cadernos 29, no. 6 (1998): 36–46.
6. Green, James N., and Thomas E. Skidmore. Brazil: Five Centuries of Change, 3rd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
7. Jochem, Toni Vidal. São Pedro de Alcântara. Primeira colônia alemã em Santa Catarina. Accessed January 28, 2024. http://www.tonijochem.com.br/col_saopedro.htm
8. Krieger, Carlo, and Jean Ensch, “Clerfer Auswanderer in Südbrasilien.” De Cliärrwer Kanton,édition spéciale (2023): 51–65.
9. Kuhn Braun, Felipe. Mathias Mompach, o general caçador de Farrapos. 2013. Accessed July 9, 2023.
10. Moyen, François. A história da Companhia Siderúrgica Belgo-Mineira: uma trajetória de crescimente consistente (1921–2005). Belo Horizonte: ArcelorMittal S/A, 2007.
11. Piazza, Walter Fernando. A Colonização de Santa Catarina. Porto Alegre: Editora Pallotti, 1982.
12. Philippi, Aderbal João. São Pedro de Alcântara. A primeira colônia alemã em Santa Catarina. Florianópolis: Editora Letras Contemporâneas, 1995.
13. Santos, Sílvio Coelho Dos. Nova história de Santa Catarina. Florianópolis: Editora da Ufsc, 2004.
14. Schaack, Charles. Les Luxembourgeois, soldats de la France, 1792–1815. Publication de la Section Historique de l’Institut grand-ducal de Luxembourg 57 & 58. Diekirch: Imprimerie J. Schroell, 1909–10.
15. Steiner, Carlos Eduardo, and Dieter Loyo. “A imigração luxemburguesa em Santa Catarina no século XIX,” in Páginas da colonização: Estudos/subsídios históricos sobre a Colônia Alemã Santa Isabel–175 anos de Fundação, edited by Toni Jochem, and Jonas Bruch, 2022. Accessed January 29, 2024. http://tonijochem.com.br/artigos-paginas-da-colonizacao/
16. Wendling, João Benno. A história de Walachai. Porto Alegre: Companhia Rio-grandense de Artes Gráficas, 2013.
17. Wey, Claude. “Die Beziehungen Luxemburgs mit Portugal und Brasilien vom 17. Jahrhundert bis 1960,” Lëtzebuerger Journal 60, March 26 and 27, 2005.

Further reading

1. Arquivo publico do Estado do Espirito Santo. Vitoria: Registro de entrada de imigrante.
2. Decker, François. Feulen 963–1963. Luxembourg: Sankt-Paulus-Druckerei, 1963.
3. Ensch, Jean. “L’émigration à travers les actes notariés.” Nos Cahiers 2/3, 2000.
4. Fendrich, Henrique. A família de Nicolau Becker. Rio Negro, Mafra e Itaiópolis. Curitiba: Edited by the author, 2017.
5. Hennico, André. Messancy-Généalogie 1665–2002. Longueil & Québec: A. Hennico, 2003.
6. Hering, Maria Luiza Renaux. Colonização e indústria no Vale do Itajaí: o modelo catarinense de desenvolvimento. Blumenau: Editora da Furb, 1987.
7. Lenfers Ventura, Alexandre A. Trajetória da colonização luxemburguesa em Santa Catarina. B.A. thesis, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 2023.
8. Mombach, Mathias. n.d. Genealogy; Accessed January 3, 2024. https://www.ancestry.com/genealogy/records/mathias-mombach-24-1m2nv9q
9. Muller, Jos. “Die Amerikaauswanderer der Gemeinde Hosingen im 19. Jahrhundert”. In 150 Joer Houser Musek. Luxembourg: n.d.
10. Veber, Fábio, ed., Atlas interativo dos imigrantes luxemburgueses no Brasil. https://www.cidadanialuxemburguesa.com.br/atlas

Introduction

In the aftermath of the First World War, in reaction to the major constraints associated with the post-war crisis and the dissolution of the Zollverein, the Belgian–Luxembourgish steel conglomerate Aciéries Réunies de Burbach-Eich-Dudelange (ARBED)—today, ArcelorMittal—established in 1911, launched an ambitious expansion plan with the aim of becoming an important player in the international steel market. In 1920, the sales company Comptoir Métallurgique Luxembourgeois (Columeta) was created to commercialize ARBED’s outputs worldwide. In the same year, the Syndicat du Brésil was created with the purpose of carefully preparing overseas investments for ARBED. In 1921, ARBED established and invested in two subsidiaries in South America: Companhia Siderúrgica Belgo Mineira (CSBM), in the state of Minas Gerais, and Talleres Metalurgicos San Martin (TAMET), in Buenos Aires.

The establishment of the Belgo Mineira in December 1921 was technically a venture by foreign European investors and the Companhia Siderúrgica Mineira, established in Sabará in 1917 by Cristiano Guimarães and Amaro Lanari, who were both well-connected and highly influential mineiros from the Ouro Preto elite (Lourenço Neto 2013, 374). At that time, the lack of a qualified local workforce provoked a massive movement of hundreds of Luxembourgish migrants to Brazil to build a colossal steel plant and a surrounding industrial town called João Monlevade, which became the cradle of the Brazilian steel industry. This fostered the emergence of the so-called Colônia Luxemburguesa and a century of migration trajectories between both regions.

This chapter briefly traces this unique history of migration between Luxembourg and Brazil, revealing the multidimensional interconnections between technological, corporate, social, and cultural transfers in a world of growing nationalism and increasing immigration restrictions, and at a time when modernization processes and commercial networks were extending across the globe.

By diving into the nucleus of this migrant community to examine it from various angles, this chapter focuses on the creation and development of the Colônia Luxemburguesa, its ambiguous relationship with its residents’ home country and Brazilian society, as well as its current legacy and remembrance work. Aiming to unearth these historical transatlantic steel ties by actively involving the public in the process, the transmedia project A Colônia Luxemburguesa, developed in the framework of my PhD research, creates a dialogical relationship between corporate archives and different microhistorical, bottom-up perspectives captured through oral history interviews and collected ego-documents. Ultimately, it uncovers the puzzling portrait of the so-called Colônia Luxemburguesa and its remembrance work,¹ and it analyses the consistent use of corporate diplomacy² strategies to ensure the success of the company and the colony in the host society.

Situating the “imigrante Europeu” in the historical context of Brazil’s colonial heritage

In 1817, almost a century before the arrival of ARBED in Minas Gerais, a French industrialist named Jean-Antoine-Félix Dissandes de Monlevade³ settled in the vast mining area of Minas Gerais. There, he lived in a colonial house, the Fazenda Solar, and “owned” approximately one hundred slaves who worked either as domestic servants or in the exploitation of iron ore for his Catalan forge. Jean de Monlevade lived with his family in a casa-grande(his Fazenda Solar), and his slaves were bunked in an adjacent senzala, in line with the colonial hierarchical standards extensively described by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1934).

In the context of the abolition process in Brazil, which started with the “Law of the Free Womb” in 1871 and culminated with the formal abolition of slavery in 1888 (Machado et al. 2021), the businesses of the Monlevade family were no longer profitable, and the descendants decided to end their industrial activities and seek new opportunities in the cities. After the death of Jean de Monlevade in 1872, the local steel forge of Monlevade, which had fallen into disrepair, was sold to the Companhia Nacional de Forjas e Estaleiros. That company went bankrupt in 1897, and the property was passed to a Brazilian bank until 1920, when Gaston Barbanson, the president of ARBED, acquired this vast and abandoned territory (Moyen 2006, 35).

The Fazenda Solar and the activities of the French migrant Jean de Monlevade played a crucial role in Belgo Mineira’s corporate storytelling and were purposely instrumentalized as a successful example of continuing European “pioneerism” in the region of João Monlevade. As such, in the corporate storytelling, Jean de Monlevade’s legacy lays the perfect foundation for Belgo Mineira’s “pioneerism” with the settlement of the Colônia Luxemburguesa in the early twentieth century.⁴

Situating the history of this transatlantic migration in the broader context of the region’s colonial heritage helps us to see the continuity of colonial power structures in the evolution from free slave labor to remunerated industrial workers in João Monlevade—or the evolution “da Senzala à Vila Operária,” from the slaves’ barracks to the industrial village.⁵ Until its emancipation as a municipality in 1964, João Monlevade was the private property of the steel company and every aspect of the employees’ lives was fully controlled by the company’s senior executives. Today, João Monlevade remains a central industrial hub, with a population of approximately 86,000 inhabitants and where the main economic activities revolve around steel production.⁶

In João Monlevade, this migrant community thus forged its own tropical version of Luxembourg, a microcosm surrounded by iron-ore mountains in the heart of the vast mining area of Minas Gerais, building its social and hierarchical structures on the foundations of the region’s colonial heritage.

Life under “Mother Belgo”

As a member of the Colônia Luxemburguesa and an employee of Belgo Mineira, you adopted the company values and policies as your own, and “Mother Belgo” was the overarching figure from which you would seek guidance and refuge. This blurred the lines between being an autonomous person and being a form of capital that could be cultivated. Hence, as a member of the “Belgo family,” you had to live the policies and values of the company.

The hierarchical structures of the “Belgo family” were not merely implicit. On the contrary, they can still be felt in the streets of João Monlevade—so explicitly that the verticality of the society is perfectly aligned with the verticality of the valley. The director of the steel plant and the European engineers lived at the top of the valley slopes, the technicians and foremen in the middle, and the workers by the river.

The fourth chapter of the interactive documentary clearly demonstrates how all the houses, the different leisure clubs, and even the church played crucial roles in strategically and systematically segregating the “Belgo family” according to the professional ranking, gender, ethnicity, and social class of each community member.

A Colônia Luxemburguesa: A Participatory Transmedia Project on Steel-Framed Migration from Luxembourg to Brazil (1921–2022)

A Colônia Luxemburguesa (www.colonia.lu) is an interactive experience and a journey of discovery in which, steeped in myth and history, we are confronted with many stories told from various angles and across different platforms.⁷ What is behind Belgo Mineira’s corporate storytelling? Are we able to find the truth in the midst of all those divergent stories?

This transdisciplinary project was developed in the framework of my doctoral research (Santana 2022). It is an inventive digital public history experiment involving the creative use of digital technology, transdisciplinary co-design techniques, and public engagement. Through this unprecedented collaboration between the University of Luxembourg (Centre for Contemporary and Digital History–C2DH), Samsa Film, and the Centre national de l’audiovisuel (CNA), we are creating new synergies between scientific research and the world of film and new media.

This 360-degree transmedia project, whose narrative transcends various mediums and platforms, gracefully combines, firstly, the project website www.colonia.lu with an interactive documentary, an interactive map, interactive profiles, and an online crowdsourcing platform with, secondly, two physical and fully participatory platforms called “[L]aço kiosks,” located in Luxembourg and in Brazil. The wordplay [L]aço (laço=tie; aço=steel) literally means ties of steel. Positioned in the public space, close to the target communities, the [L]aço kiosks’ main purpose is to unearth transatlantic steel ties that were woven over a century in collaboration with the communities themselves. It is this mutual exchange—this trading zone between the communities and our various platforms—that is drawing a multifaceted picture of the Colônia Luxemburguesa.⁸

References

1. Freyre, Gilberto. Casa Grande & Senzala. Rio de Janeiro: Maya & Schmidt, 1934.
2. Lourenço Neto, Sydenham. “Estado e Empresariado no Nascimento da Questão Siderúrgica Brasileira.” Saeculum Revista de História 29 (2013):365-382. http://periodicos.ufpb.br/ojs/index.php/srh/article/view/19828
3. Machado, Maria Helena P. T., Da Cru Brito, Luciana, Da Silva Viana, Iamara and Flávio dos Santos Gomes (eds.). Ventres livres? Gênero, maternidade e legislação. São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2021.
4. Moyen, François. A História da Companhia Siderúrgica Belgo-Mineira. Uma trajetória de crescimento consistente (1921–2005). Belo Horizonte: Arcelor Brasil S/A, 2007.
5. Santana, Dominique. Intertwined Destinies & Strengthened Ties: “A Colônia Luxemburguese.” A Participatory Transmedia Project on Steel-framed Migration from Luxembourg to Brazil (1921–2022). PhD diss., University of Luxembourg, 2022.

Global structures and local networks

The history we are interested in here must therefore be seen through the lens of global mobility and as being marked by strong colonial and social hierarchies, which existed before the First World War (Hoerder 2012). We consider the links between Luxembourg, Brazil, and the Portuguese colonies in Africa to be part of this colonial globality. In the following paragraphs, we will focus on a few examples of how scientific and economic networks enabled Luxembourgers to take part in the colonial economies of Brazil, Angola, and Mozambique before 1940. While Mozambique and Angola were official colonies of Portugal until 1975, Brazil was an independent state from 1822 onward—but the country remained colonial in the sense that the living conditions and modes of social and political participation there were clearly marked by colonial relationships, with persisting differences between Brazilians of European ancestry and indigenous people and descendants of slaves. In view of more recent migratory movements between Luxembourg and Portugal, it is surprising that before 1940 the links between the two countries were less significant than those between Luxembourg and Brazil. The mass immigration of Portuguese workers and people fleeing the dictatorship did not begin until the mid-1960s.

Particularly for a small country like the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg (with a population of 296,000 in 1935), it can be very revealing to approach global and colonial history through the prism of individual biographies that allow to understand the workings of certain networks. We will see that the main link between Luxembourg, Brazil, and the Portuguese colonies in Africa was not Portugal, but Belgium. Through a micro-historical approach (i.e., by tracing individual paths), we will try to understand the political and economic channels through which the network of Luxembourgers has been able to operate throughout the Portuguese-speaking world. We will thus draw attention to certain elements of Luxembourg’s involvement in (post)colonial relations and processes of global economic exploitation. The present article must, however, be considered as a first attempt to highlight this hitherto largely neglected research field.

The life histories presented here are part of a broader field of mobilities and places embracing Luxembourgers who emigrated to France, the United States, the Belgian Congo, Algeria, etc. The common elements in these life histories are the importance of work and economic migration. The mobility of the people in question reflects a global mindset that allowed them to go beyond their national borders or identities. Adopting a methodological nationalist approach by focusing on “Luxembourgers” might therefore seem paradoxical. We must bear in mind, however, that these migrations are part of a much wider context of European migrations overseas while at the same time relying on a narrow network of local and national ties. The examples make it possible to look at these different levels and to recognize the overlapping relational structures that constitute the migration networks.

The historiography of the last fifty years shows the contribution that a micro-historical approach can make to understanding global history. Bernd Hausberger has highlighted the explanatory potential of “global life courses” (globale Lebensläufe) as an epistemological contribution to understanding the historical complexity of the world (Hausberger 2006). Micro-history thus tends to understand the globality of the world through particular cases. “Games of scales”, that is, systematic switching between different levels of analysis (global, national, regional, local, individual, company, etc.) always aim for a more complete understanding of history and of the global relationships throughout time (Revel 1996).

Going to Portuguese Africa through Belgium

A figure who links Luxembourg with both Africa (Mozambique) and Brazil is Édouard Luja. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Luja lived and worked in both of these parts of the Portuguese-speaking world. It is likely that Luja’s personal relationships with his compatriots living in Belgium played an important role in his recruitment for various jobs overseas. The importance of the personal links between certain Luxembourgers living in Belgium and Belgian economic decision-makers—some of whom had attended the same schools or universities or had family ties dating back to the period before the separation of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg from the Kingdom of Belgium in 1839—is a common factor in explaining what appears to have been a veritable chain of migration through Belgium.¹ In 1835–1836, when the majority of the population of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg (except in the capital city) was taking part in the Belgian Revolution that had begun in 1830, two young Luxembourgers who had studied at the Free University of Brussels (ULB), Jean-Jules Linden (1817–1898) and Nicolas Funck (1816–1896), were hired by the Belgian government and the National Museum of Natural History in Paris to collect plants in Brazil. Linden went on to make a fortune as one of Europe’s leading orchid merchants (Ceulemans 2006). It was his son, Lucien Linden, who had taken over the family business (L’Horticole coloniale) at the end of the nineteenth century, who hired the young Édouard Luja in 1897–1898 to harvest plants in the independent state of Congo for the 1900 Paris World Fair (Wey 2016).

Luja’s first contact with the Portuguese-speaking world came when he went overseas again between 1900 and 1902, to the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. Half a century later, when he published a travel account in the Bulletin de la Société des naturalistes luxembourgeois, he explained:

The Zambezi Company, whose head office is in Lisbon, hired me to go and explore its vast concessions in Mozambique from an agricultural point of view. (. . .) The Zambezi Company is a chartered company whose purpose is to explore, exploit and develop the immense territories that the Portuguese Government has granted it on a long lease in its Mozambique colony.²

Luja worked for one of the very large companies colonizing Mozambique. He was involved in establishing Portugal’s modern colonial domination in this part of Africa. The Companhia da Zambezia was a Portuguese company, but it had been created with international capital through the merger of a French and an English company in 1892. It was active mainly in large-scale farming in the Zambezi region.³

Luja had been hired to acclimatize plants, in particular rubber-producing trees, in this part of Portuguese-speaking Africa.⁴ After returning to Europe in 1902, he was hired by a Belgian company and worked as manager of a coffee plantation in the Belgian Congo from 1903 to 1913. From 1913 to 1921, he was employed in Luxembourg at the museum of the Société des naturalistes before leaving for Brazil to work for ARBED (Aciéries Réunies de Burbach-Eich-Dudelange) and Belgo-Mineira. Luja’s entire career thus revolved around Belgian companies. The episode with the Zambezi Company was an exception, although it is likely that it was his contacts in Brussels—according to his own account, he had been recruited by the Portuguese company in Brussels—that enabled him to be recruited.

In the case of other Luxembourgers who were later active in Portuguese colonial Africa, the link with Belgium is much clearer. They worked directly for companies incorporated under Belgian law. In 1917, Pierre Jentgen (1884–1959), who had studied law in Paris and spent two years as a lawyer at the Luxembourg bar, became manager of La Luinha, a company in Angola, where he supervised cocoa plantations. La Luinha was an agricultural and industrial company founded in 1906 in Brussels. At that time, Jentgen had already been living in Angola for two or three years, where he had been trying to set up his own small trade company.

In 1922, the Dutch consul, who was responsible for defending the interests of Luxembourgers, along with the Portuguese authorities, suspected Jentgen of being a German agent; he was therefore arrested and put in jail. He was released following the intervention of another Luxembourger, Pierre Miny (1883–1958), who had become director of the Agricultural Service of the Belgian Congo after carrying out research missions for Belgian companies around the world, notably in Angola.⁵ Upon release from jail, Jentgen was expelled from the Portuguese colony. In 1928, he went on to begin a brilliant career, first as a prosecutor in the Belgian Congo and then as a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Colonies in Brussels.⁶

Other Luxembourgers also worked for Belgian companies, or companies financed by Belgian capital, in Portuguese Africa; among them was Léon Colbach, who, shortly before the Second World War, worked as a diamond prospector for the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola (DIAMANG), which had been set up with Portuguese, French, American, and Belgian capital. The Société Forestière et Minière (Forminière), a subsidiary of the Société Générale de Belgique, was a shareholder in DIAMANG and was in charge of prospecting in Angola after the First World War.⁷ It should be noted that Pierre Miny, mentioned above, worked for the Forminière since 1925 (Staner 1968).

There were also more direct economic interests in Portuguese Africa, as shown by the case of the Luxembourg company Société coloniale luso-luxembourgeoise (Granducol), which was active in Mozambique from 1932 to 1942. Granducol was incorporated under Luxembourg law and its main shareholder was the Grand Ducal family, which held 87% of the shares. Prince Félix, husband of Grand Duchess Charlotte, and Prince de Schwarzenberg, brother-in-law of the grand duchess, sat on the board of directors together with company executives who had worked in the Belgian Congo. With no experience in the field, lacking the necessary capital, and underequipped with machinery, Granducol acquired a reputation for poor agronomic practices in the Namialo region. During the Second World War, the German occupiers tried to take control of the company, prompting the Luxembourg shareholders to sell the concession to a Portuguese firm (Dinerman 2006; Fortuna 1993, 130–132).⁸

In 1934, Granducol’s board of directors was made up of the Belgian Anatole de Bauw, a recognized expert on cotton plantations in the Belgian Congo, and the above-mentioned Luxembourger Pierre Miny. The board was chaired by the Luxembourger engineer Nicolas Cito (1866–1949) who, after directing the construction of the first railway in the Congo between 1892 and 1903, had a long career in railway companies in which the Société Générale de Belgique was a shareholder. In 1913–1914, he inspected the feasibility of modernizing the railway line between Beira and the Zambezi in Mozambique (Lederer 1989). Nicolas Cito, appointed Honorary Consul of Luxembourg in Belgium in 1927 after his definitive return to Brussels, was the Luxembourg colonial figure par excellence who ensured that many Luxembourgers found work in sub-Saharan Africa. His role as intermediary, like that of Pierre Miny, for Luxembourgers who worked in Angola and Mozambique seems to have been crucial. An analysis of the individual biographies of Luxembourgers who left for Portuguese Africa shows that interpersonal relations via the economic, scientific, and political center of Brussels were central to the establishment of this colonial migration.

Brazil: the special case of Édouard Luja

The fact that these migratory movements were not limited to the African continent, but also included South America, has already been hinted at above. With Jean-Jules Linden and Nicolas Funck, we have encountered two Luxembourgers who were already travelling in Brazil in the nineteenth century. More important in this context, however, is Édouard Luja, who arrived in Brazil in 1921 and worked for a steel company that asked him to study ways of cultivating rapidly growing trees, such as eucalyptus, for use as fuel in the factories. Luja’s arrival in Brazil came at a time when the Luxembourg steel company ARBED had important Belgian shareholders, in particular the Société Générale de Belgique. The fact that the company in question was called Compagnie Sidérurgique Belgo-Mineira, even though it was mainly engineers of Luxembourgish nationality who managed it, is revealing. This confirms once again the importance of the concrete political and economic links between Luxembourg and Belgium in the overall reflections on the integration of Luxembourgers into colonial globalization. The economic importance of the Belgo-Luxembourg Economic Union (UEBL) for the development of Belgo-Mineira is well known and is also relevant in the case of Édouard Luja—though we will not go into detail here on this well-documented history.⁹

Luja arrived in a Brazil that already had numerous links with Luxembourg. In 1924, the memory of several waves of emigration from Luxembourg to Brazil—in 1828, 1850–1860, and especially at the end of the nineteenth century—had not been forgotten. Ties remained between families scattered across two continents.¹⁰

Having returned to Europe in 1924, Luja went back to the Belgian Congo for the last time between 1928 and 1931, where he ran coffee plantations. After returning to Luxembourg permanently with his wife and daughter in 1931, Luja worked for a time at the Museum of Natural History (now the Naturmuseum). He died in 1953 at Limpertsberg in Luxembourg-City.

We have tried to present here a very partial history of the links between Luxembourg and the Portuguese-speaking colonial world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of course, studies also exist on mass migratory movements from Luxembourg during the same period, mainly to Brazil (Krieger 2021; Wey 2010; Even 1993; Gonner 1889). Reading this literature confirms the intuition—which is more or less self-evident, especially in a landlocked country like Luxembourg—that the preconditions and concrete modalities of migration processes are to be sought in larger political-territorial and socio-economic contexts. In the nineteenth century, the German emigration channel was important—and the links between Luxembourg and German colonialism and its globalizing effects would merit a more in-depth study.

Conclusion

We have tried to show how personal networks played a crucial role in establishing the migratory routes of the travelers presented above. The role played by a number of Luxembourgers in the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique is less well known than the emigration of Luxembourgers to Brazil in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. These migrations to Africa are, however, partly in line with the same logic. Since Portugal did not have the capital needed to set up companies to exploit the natural resources of the African colonies in the early and mid-twentieth century, it had to agree to open up the colonial companies to foreign capital. It was thus, in a way, forced to continue until the interwar years the policy of the globalization of capital that had predominated before the First World War, while other colonial empires could afford to adopt the imperial protectionist policy that was being put in place in the 1920s and 1930s (Enders 2016).

This particular economical context, where Belgian capitalism played an important role in Luxembourg’s economy, explains why Luxembourgers from the fringes of Belgium were able to take advantage of personal relationships with managers and decision-makers of Luxembourgish origin in Belgian companies to obtain positions in the Portuguese colonial empire and in Brazil. It should not be forgotten that all the journeys described above—even if, as in the case of Édouard Luja, they were presented as voyages of exploration—took place in a context of economic exploitation and in the service of major private companies. Despite the fact that these companies were not capitalized in Luxembourg (with the ambiguous exception of Granducol), many Luxembourgers were involved in the expansion of the Belgian economy around the world and personally benefited from the economic and social links between Belgium and Luxembourg. Édouard Luja’s career would have been unthinkable without his links with Brussels: his recruitment as a “plant hunter” in the nineteenth century, as well as his job for ARBED, were closely linked to the expansion of Belgian capitalism overseas. As part of the UEBL, Belgian companies that were active overseas recruited massively in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

By combining the micro-historical biographical approach with a historico-structural perspective, an analysis at different levels (global capital, personal and economic networks, and national politics) makes it possible to understand interesting dynamics. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the links between Luxembourg and the Portuguese-speaking world were marked not by the frank and sincere friendship so often evoked in political discourse, but by complex economic relations between the dominant and the dominated, and unequal power relations. Luxembourgers were part of the colonial elite, as the biographies presented here reveal. Recalling the particular colonial context also helps to qualify and challenge this dominant discourse today.

References

1. Ceulemans, Nicole. Jean Linden: Explorer - Master of the Orchid. Brussels: Fonds Mercator, 2006.
2. Conrad, Sebastian. Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
3. Dinerman, Alice. Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Revisionism in Postcolonial Africa. The Case of Mozambique, 1975–1994. London & New York: Routledge, 2006.
4. Durieux, André. “Jentgen (Jean-Pierre-Désiré)”, Biographie belge d'Outre-Mer T. VI (1968): 547–550.
5. Fortuna, Carlos José Cândido Guerreiro. O Fio da Meada: o Algodão de Moçambique, Portugal e a economia-mundo (1860-1960). Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 1993.
6. Enders, Armelle. Histoire de l’Afrique lusophone. Paris: Chandeigne, 2016 [1993].
7. Even, Pierre. “Die gescheiterte Beforter Brasilien-Emigration im Jahre 1828.” In Beaufort im Wandel der Zeit, Vol.2, 93–98. Beaufort: Administration communale, 1993.
8. Gonner, Nicolas. Die Luxemburger in der neuen Welt: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Luxemburger, verbunden mit Rathschlägen für luxemburger Auswanderer und einer Karte der Vereinigten Staaten mit den luxemburger Ansiedlungen: Festschrift gelegentlich der fünfzigjährigen Unabhängigkeit des Großherzogthums Luxemburg. Dubuque: Luxemburger Gazette, 1889.
9. Hausberger, Bernd, ed. Globale Lebensläufe: Menschen als Akteure im weltgeschichtlichen Geschehen. Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2006.
10. Hoerder, Dirk. “Migrations and Belongings.” In A World connecting: 1870–1945, edited by Emily S. Rosenberg, 435–592. Cambridge & London: Havard University Press, 2012.
11. Krieger, Carlo. Le Luxembourg et le Brésil: 110 ans de relations diplomatiques / Luxemburgo e Brasil: 110 anos de relações diplomáticas. Lago Sul: Ambassade du Luxembourg au Brésil, 2021
12. Lederer, André. “Cito Nicolas.” Biographie Belge d'Outre-Mer T. VII-C (1989): 83–88.
13. Luja, Édouard. “Récit d'un voyage au Mozambique (1900–1902).”Bulletin de la Société des naturalistes luxembourgeois 44, no. 55 (1950): 213. [Digitized by the National Library of Luxembourg, https://persist.lu/ark:70795/2921r3/pages/213/articles/DTL2854
14. Revel, Jacques, ed. Jeux d'échelles: la micro-analyse à l'éxpérience. Paris: Editions de l’EHESS/Gallimard/Le Seuil, 1996.
15. Rosenberg, Emily S. “Introduction.” In A World Connecting 1870-1945, edited by Akira Iriye, and Jürgen Osterhammel, 3–25. Cambridge & London: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
16. Staner, Pierre. “Miny, Pierre.” In Biographie belge d'Outre-Mer T. VI (1968): 741–742.
17. Trausch, Gilbert, ed. Belgique-Luxembourg: les relations belgo-luxembourgeoises et la Banque Générale du Luxembourg (1919–1994). Luxembourg: Banque générale du Luxembourg, 1995.
18. Wey, Claude. Photographs by Édouard Luja in Congo and Brazil, temporary exposition at National Museum of Natural History, Luxembourg 14.5.–26.6.2016.
19. Wey, Claude. “Luxemburg und die luso-brasilianische Welt: ein typologischer Ansatz zu den Beziehungen Luxemburgs mit Portugal und Brasilien vom 16. Jahrhundert bis 1970.” In Aufbrüche und Vermittlungen: Beiträge zur Luxemburger und europäischer Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte / Nouveaux horizons et médiations: contributions à l'histoire littéraire et culturelle au Luxembourg et en Europe, edited by Claude D. Conter, and Nicolas Sahl, 269–290. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2010.