Inherent joy, spontaneity and creativity, characteristics to the Brazilian town, find their maximum expression in the Carnival. During four days, the country lives its more democratic moment, taking to the same footbridge and to the street to people of the most different socioeconomic and cultural levels.
It is the moment at which rich and poor they occupy the same space and they are amused in a celebration where the social inequalities are diluted in the carnival euphoria.
The Carnival is a so important date for the Brazilians that it divides the annual calendar in before and after the celebration.
The country pauses of North to the South to enjoy the celebration. Following the rates of each region - sambas, carnival marches, frevos, maracatus, axes music and many other carnivals invented and re-invented every year - Brazilian and tourists worldwide they are transformed into participants.
The Carnival began with the practice of entruejo Iberian portrayed by Debret painter in century XIX. Then the fashion was to throw water, flour and soot, soaking to the people surprised by the participants of the carnivals. Rotten eggs and spoiled vegetables were even thrown to which they happened. It had masked, comilonas and drunkennesses. With time the declivity of entruejo began.
Musically simpler customs, like “zé-pereiras”, that deafened by resounding of the drums with enormous cleaning rods, made up of stonemasons, blacksmiths, went disappearing to open the way to other more harmonious forms to enjoy the Carnival. Cordões, where the space for the participants was delimited by a cord - formed by black participants, was in fashion in the country since the beginning of century XIX.
The João cronista do River wrote that these came from the “celebration of Nossa Senhora do Rosary, at the colonial time (...) went out dressed kings, animal, pajes and guards singing and playing African and stopped with its enormous cordões in front of the house of the virrey singing and dancing”.
Later these cordões assumed a profane character and arrived to be known like “briguentos” (camorristas), partly because they also incorporated to the group the capoeiristas and by prejudices of the middle-class.
Cucumbis, song-dances afro and afoxés participated in addition in the Carnival, that in Rio de Janeiro was updated of more distant form of the African cultures of where they were born, coming near to the creations of already existing letter and music in from Rio de Janeiro urban means, trying a language and one more a presentation nearer the reality which they lived.
The Great Societies arisen in Rio de Janeiro in second half of century XIX already were created by richer social classes.
The parades took control of tuna allegorical cars, with paintings and sculptures made by artists of the School of Beautiful Arts, with disguises of luxury, operística music and letters of critical, social and political character.
Tenentes do Diabo (1861), Clube two Fenianos (1869) and Clube two Democratic (1867) was some of the names of the Societies that exerted an outstanding paper in from Rio de Janeiro Carnival. The dances were realized in those clubs, brightened up by military bands, where maxixe reigned (it forms Brazilian of music and dances that combines polca with lundu).
The Great Societies of Rio de Janeiro served from model to others in several states of Brazil, before the Carnival was transformed into a popular phenomenon of the street.