Brazilian Machiavellians: dissimulation, political ideas, and colonial rebellions (Portugal, 17th-18th century)¹ 1 Study carried out under the project of productivity scholarship of CNPq "Tradições intelectuais e lutas políticas na América portuguesa moderna, séculos XVI-XVIII". The embryo of this article was the communication presented in the Colóquio internacional Maquiavel dissimulado: heterodoxias político-culturais no mundo luso-brasileiro, in UFF, in October 2011. I am grateful for the invitation of Rodrigo Bentes Monteiro, who believed in a footnote lost in an old article. Acknowledgements to Sérgio Alcides, Enzo Baldini, Giuseppe Marcocci, Ângela Barreto Xavier and Silvia Patuzzi for their vivid suggestions proposed during the debates. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of TEMPO who contributed for the repairing of omissions and inaccuracies.

The political theory on the power of the Catholic monarchy in Portugal, despite not seeing dissimulatory expedients with good eyes, could not prevent their use in face of the severity that assumed the resistance struggle of the subjects in America. In many of these situations, the use of dissimulation was supported, especially between 1640 and the mid-18th century. In the most important sphere of debates on the political problems of the colony - the Overseas Council -, the recommendation of the art of dissimulation was openly advocated but progressively condemned, once that, aparently, it was unable to diminish rebellions. The defense of dissimulation in The prince, even different from the Reason of State, guides the debates that take over the authors of política christiana, or Christian Politics, in the 16th and 17th centuries.

dissimulation; Portugal; Brazil colony