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Brazil's national emblems were born of a single Republican moment — November 1889 — but the colours that frame them are Imperial. The green-and-yellow flag kept the lozenge of the 1822 monarchy and overlaid it with a celestial sphere charting the night sky of Rio de Janeiro on the morning of the Republic's proclamation, crossed by the Comtist motto Ordem e Progresso. The coat of arms, designed in the same weeks, surrounds the new star-field with branches of coffee and tobacco — the two crops that financed the nineteenth-century empire.
| Country | Federative Republic of Brazil (República Federativa do Brasil) |
|---|---|
| Coat of arms adopted | 19 November 1889 (Decree 4 of the Provisional Government); current form by Law 5,389 of 23 February 1968 |
| Flag adopted | 19 November 1889, four days after the Proclamation of the Republic |
| Designers (flag) | Raimundo Teixeira Mendes, Miguel Lemos, Manuel Pereira Reis, Décio Villares |
| Flag colours | Green, gold, blue, white |
| Motto | Ordem e Progresso (Order and Progress) |
| Number of stars | 27 (26 states + Federal District) |
Coat of Arms — A blue circular shield with the Southern Cross and the stars of the federation, framed by coffee and tobacco branches.
The Brazilian coat of arms differs from most European national arms: it is built not from a feudal shield but from a circular medallion in the late-nineteenth-century neoclassical style. At its heart, a blue field carries the Southern Cross (Crux) and 27 silver stars arranged exactly as they appeared in the night sky over Rio de Janeiro on 15 November 1889 — the date of the Proclamation of the Republic.
A large five-pointed gold star encloses the blue medallion. Behind the shield rises the hilt of a ceremonial sword, point upward, emerging through the lower edge. The composition is supported by two crossed branches tied at the base: a coffee branch on the dexter side (the viewer's left) and a tobacco branch on the sinister side (the viewer's right), recalling the two staple exports of the imperial economy.
A blue ribbon at the bottom carries the inscription REPÚBLICA FEDERATIVA DO BRASIL on the upper band, with 15 DE NOVEMBRO and 1889 on the lower bands — the date of the Republican Proclamation.
Each silver star on the inner blue field represents a constituent of the Federation. The original 1889 design carried 21 stars — one for each of the provinces inherited from the Empire plus the federal capital district. The arms were updated as new states were created:
The current canonical 27 stars are configured to depict the celestial sphere as observed from the capital at 08:30 on 15 November 1889, the time when the imperial government formally fell.
1822–1889 — Imperial arms. The Empire of Brazil bore a green shield with a gold armillary sphere (inherited from Portugal) charged with the cross of the Order of Christ, surrounded by a wreath of nineteen silver stars representing the provinces, all crowned by the imperial crown of Pedro I.
19 November 1889 — Republican break. Four days after Marechal Deodoro da Fonseca proclaimed the Republic, the Provisional Government issued Decree 4 establishing entirely new arms designed by the engineer Artur Zauer in the neoclassical Positivist style favoured by the Republican founders.
1968 — Castelo Branco reform. President Castelo Branco's Law 5,389 standardised the colours, the proportions of the branches and the typography of the inscription, fixing the version still in use today.
1992 — Tocantins. The 27th star was added by Law 8,421 to integrate the newly created northern state.
Flag — Green field, gold rhombus, blue celestial sphere with the Southern Cross and the white scroll Ordem e Progresso.
Brazil's tricolour heritage begins not with the Republic but with the Empire. When Pedro I proclaimed independence on the banks of the Ipiranga on 7 September 1822, his court painter Jean-Baptiste Debret designed an imperial flag: a green field charged with a gold rhombus (lozenge), and at the centre a shield bearing the imperial coat of arms.
The colours were dynastic, not territorial:
The lozenge form was inspired by Napoleonic French heraldic style, then prestigious across Europe.
When the Republic was proclaimed on 15 November 1889, a transitional flag inspired by the United States was raised for a few days. But the Provisional Government swiftly reconsidered: on 19 November 1889, by Decree 4, it adopted a new design that preserved the green field and gold rhombus of the Empire (signalling territorial continuity) but replaced the imperial arms with a wholly new central element — the blue celestial sphere bearing the Southern Cross, the stars of the federation, and the motto Ordem e Progresso.
The design team was composed of Positivist intellectuals:
The blue circle is a celestial sphere — a representation of the night sky as it would have appeared to an observer in Rio de Janeiro on 15 November 1889 at 08:30, the moment when the imperial government formally fell. Pereira Reis selected the exact star pattern by reconstructing the local sidereal time on that morning.
The constellations and individual stars depicted include the Southern Cross (Crux), Sigma Octantis (the South Celestial Pole star, representing the Federal District), Centaurus, Canis Major, Hydra, Triangulum Australe, and others. Each visible star is matched to a federal unit, with the larger and brighter stars assigned to the more populous states.
The white band across the sphere bears the motto ORDEM E PROGRESSO (Order and Progress) in green letters. It is an abbreviation of the celebrated formula of the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857), founder of Positivism:
L'amour pour principe et l'ordre pour base ; le progrès pour but.
(Love as principle and order as basis; progress as goal.)
Brazilian Positivism was an unusually influential intellectual movement in the 1870s–1890s — far more so than in Comte's native France. Its adherents dominated the Republican founding circles and the new army general staff. The choice of motto was a public profession of Positivist faith — and a deliberate secularisation, replacing the Imperial motto Independência ou Morte ("Independence or Death") which had carried explicit references to Pedro I.
Each of Brazil's 27 federal units has its own coat of arms and flag. Most were designed during the First Republic (1889–1930) and reflect a regional iconography of natural resources, indigenous heritage, and Republican ideals. A selection of the most distinctive:
Most Brazilian state arms follow a common pattern established in the 1890s under the influence of Positivism: a circular or oval shield in a neoclassical frame, with natural products of the state (sugar cane, coffee, palm trees, gold ore) and a mural crown or laurel wreath. The standardisation was less formal than in Portugal but no less consistent — a quiet declaration that the new Republic broke with European medieval heraldic conventions.
The colours were inherited from the Imperial flag of 1822 designed by Jean-Baptiste Debret. Green stood for the House of Bragança of Emperor Pedro I, and yellow for the House of Habsburg-Lorraine of his wife Empress Maria Leopoldina. After 1889, the Republic kept the colours but reinterpreted them as nature symbols — the green of the Amazonian forest and the gold of the country's mineral wealth.
Ordem e Progresso (Order and Progress) is a Positivist motto inspired by Auguste Comte's principle «L'amour pour principe et l'ordre pour base ; le progrès pour but». The Brazilian Republican founders, many of them Comtist Positivists, chose it to express the secular and rationalist ideals of the new regime.
The stars on the blue celestial sphere depict the night sky over Rio de Janeiro at 08:30 on 15 November 1889 — the morning of the Proclamation of the Republic. Each star represents a state or the Federal District; the number has grown from 21 in 1889 to the current 27 stars (after the creation of Tocantins in 1988).
A committee of Positivist intellectuals: Raimundo Teixeira Mendes, Miguel Lemos, the astronomer Manuel Pereira Reis and the painter Décio Villares. They preserved the green field and yellow rhombus of the Imperial flag and replaced the imperial coat of arms in the centre with the blue celestial sphere and the positivist motto.
A coffee branch (on the dexter side) and a tobacco branch (on the sinister side) — the two staple agricultural exports that drove Brazil's nineteenth-century economy. They are tied at the base by a blue ribbon bearing the name of the Republic and the date 15 November 1889.
Last reviewed by the Emblema Mundi editorial team on 14 June 2026.