Jesuits Expelled from Brazil

In 1759 the Portuguese crown, under its powerful minister Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, later known as the Marquis of Pombal, expelled the Society of Jesus from Brazil and the rest of its empire. The order had been the most influential missionary presence in colonial Brazil for more than two centuries. Its removal reshaped education, religious life, and the fragile position of Indigenous peoples under Portuguese rule.

The Jesuits had arrived in 1549 with the first governor-general, Tomé de Sousa, and quickly became central to the colony. They founded schools and colleges, ran extensive agricultural estates, and gathered Indigenous communities into mission villages known as aldeias. Their leaders, among them Manuel da Nóbrega and António Vieira, often clashed with colonists who wanted Indigenous labor. The Jesuits argued for limits on enslavement, though they also sought to convert and reorganize Indigenous societies, and the mission system itself imposed heavy cultural change and labor demands. Their wealth and autonomy also bred resentment.

Tensions sharpened in the 1750s. The Treaty of Madrid (1750) between Portugal and Spain redrew colonial borders in South America, and its terms affected Jesuit missions in the Guaraní territories. The resulting Guaraní War, in which Jesuit responsibility was exaggerated by their critics, strengthened Pombal's suspicion that the order was a state within the state. He was an enlightened absolutist who wanted to centralize royal authority, expand commerce, and reduce the power of the Church.

In 1755 and 1758 Pombal's government issued laws that stripped missionaries of temporal power over Indigenous villages and declared Indigenous people free in law. After the attempted assassination of King José I in 1758, in which the Jesuits were accused of complicity without convincing evidence, the crown moved against them. A decree of 1759 confiscated their property and ordered their removal. Many were arrested and shipped to Portugal, where some were imprisoned for years, while others were deported to the Papal States.

The consequences were mixed. The crown replaced the mission system with a policy known as the Directorate, which put Indigenous villages under lay directors and encouraged Portuguese language and intermarriage. In practice, many directors exploited Indigenous labor and land, and historians generally see the Indigenous communities as having lost their most consistent, if paternalistic, defenders. Education also suffered, as Jesuit schools closed and replacements were slow to appear. Pombal's campaign helped spur other Catholic monarchies to act, and in 1773 Pope Clement XIV suppressed the order worldwide. It was restored in 1814.