The country was also marked by a series of rebellions and revolutions against the ruling oligarchies, which culminated into the Revolution of 1930, when the Liberal Alliance, a force of urban middle-class, planters from outside São Paulo and military reformists composed mostly by junior officers (known as Tenetism), deposed ruling president Washington Luís (representative of the São Paulo oligarchies) and led to the ascension of Getúlio Vargas as president, heralding the start of the Vargas Era.

[2] The republicans made Deodoro president (1889–91) and, after a financial crisis, appointed Marshal Floriano Vieira Peixoto Minister of War to ensure the allegiance of the military.

[2] Because the monarchy had been overthrown by the Brazilian military, the history of the outset of republic in Brazil is also the story of the development of the Army as a national regulatory and interventionist institution.

The instability and violence of the 1890s were related to the absence of consensus among the elites regarding a governmental model, as the armed forces were divided over their status, relationship to the political regime, and institutional goals.

One group sought to limit executive power, which was dictatorial in scope under President Deodoro da Fonseca; the other was the Jacobins, radical authoritarians who opposed the paulista coffee oligarchy and who wanted to preserve and intensify presidential authority.

[2] Around the start of the 20th century, the vast majority of the population lived in communities that were essentially semi-feudal in structure, though accumulating capitalist surpluses for overseas export.

Because of the legacy of Ibero-American slavery, abolished as late as 1888 in Brazil, there was an extreme concentration of such landownership reminiscent of feudal aristocracies: 464 great landowners held more than 270,000 km2 of land (latifúndios), while 464,000 small and medium-sized farms occupied only 157,000 km2.

After the Second Industrial Revolution in the advanced countries, Latin America responded to mounting European and North American demand for primary products and foodstuffs.

As in most of Latin America, the economy around the start of the 20th century therefore rested on certain cash crops produced by the fazendeiros, large estate owners exporting primary products overseas who headed their own patriarchal communities.

In this context the Encilhamento (a Boom & Bust process that first intensified, and then crashed, in the years between 1889 and 1891) occurred, the consequences of which were felt in all areas of the Brazilian economy throughout the subsequent decades.

Known as coronelismo, this was a classic boss system under which the control of patronage was centralized in the hands of a locally dominant oligarch known as a coronel, who would dispense favors in return for loyalty.

In those circumstances, for lack of alternatives, along the last decade of the 19th century and the first of the 20th, a free press created by European immigrant anarchists started to develop, and, due to non-segregated conformation (ethnically speaking) of Brazilian society, spread widely, particularly in large cities.

The nationally oriented market economies of the South were not dramatic, but their growth was steady and by the 1920s allowed Rio Grande do Sul to exercise considerable political leverage.

By 1915 it was also clear that the Brazilian elites were dedicated to making sure Brazil followed a conservative political path; they were unwilling to embark upon courses of action, whether domestically (i.e. adopting the secret ballot and universal suffrage) or in foreign affairs (making alliances or long-term commitments), that could have unpredictable consequences and potentially risk the social, economic, and political power held by the Brazilian elite.

This course of conduct would extend throughout the 20th century, an isolationist foreign policy interspersed with sporadic automatic alignments against "disturbing elements of peace and international trade".

So he advised that the most logical way to proceed would be to follow the United States, which was working for a peace agreement but at the same time since the sinking of the RMS Lusitania was also preparing for war.

Further on, masses of industrial workers became unhappy with the status quo and began engaging in massive protests, mostly in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

However, as denunciations of corruption exacerbated internal problems in the state, President Venceslau Brás began feeling the need to divert public attention from his government; this goal could be accomplished by focusing on an external enemy and thus stoking a sense of unity and patriotism.

Soon after, the navy was ordered to capture Central Powers' ships found on the Brazilian coast, and three small military groups were dispatched to the Western Front.

From 1875 until 1960, about 3 million Europeans emigrated to Brazil, settling mainly in the four southern states of São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul.

In contrast, Brazil's indigenous population, located mainly in the northern and western border regions and in the upper Amazon Basin, continued to decline during this same period; largely due to the effects of contact with the outside world such as commercial expansion into the interior.

The central government, dominated by rural gentries, responded to falling world coffee demand by bailing out the oligarchs, reinstating the valorization program.

With manufacturing on the rise and the coffee oligarchs imperiled, the old order of café com leite and coronelismo eventually gave way to the political aspirations of the new urban groups: professionals, government and white-collar workers, merchants, bankers, and industrialists.

According to prominent Latin American historian Benjamin Keen, the task of transforming society "fell to the rapidly growing urban bourgeois groups, and especially to the middle class, which began to voice even more strongly its discontent with the rule of the corrupt rural oligarchies".

In contrast, the labor movement remained small and weak (despite a wave of general strikes in the postwar years), lacking ties to the peasantry, who constituted the overwhelming majority of the Brazilian population.

Junior military officers (tenentes, or lieutenants), who had long been active against the ruling coffee oligarchy, staged their own revolt in 1922 amid demands for various forms of social modernization, calling for agrarian reform, the formation of cooperatives, and the nationalization of mines.

The election itself was plagued by corruption and denounced by both sides: when the victory of Prestes with 57,7% of votes was declared, Vargas and the Liberal Alliance refused to concede defeat, sparking tensions in the country.

It was expected that a major battle would occur in Itararé (on the border with Paraná), where the federal troops were stationed to halt the advance of the revolutionary forces, led by Colonel Góis Monteiro.

The battle did not occur in Itararé since the generals Tasso Fragoso and Mena Barreto and Admiral Isaiah de Noronha ousted President Washington Luís on October 24 and formed a joint government.

At 3pm on November 3, 1930, the junta handed power and the presidential palace to Getulio Vargas; the new administration abrogated the 1891 Constitution, dissolved the National Congress and started to rule by decree, ending the Old Republic.