Os oficiais do povo

This paper broaches the National Guard’s officers in the present State of Minas Gerais in the special city of Mariana. The National Guard was a militia created by liberals during the Regency and participated actively in the institutional life of Brazil in the National State’s formation process in eighteen hundred. So, this paper intends to show the officers’s election of civic militia as a test mechanism of officers’s social prestige, in the period between 1831 and 1850, trying to research about the social microcosmos of individuals enlisted in association spirit of Empire territory and State’s legitimacy.