Menores fora da lei: um breve recorte histórico sobre a menoridade no contexto jurídico brasileiro: 1890-1940.

This essay analyzes the issue of minority in the context of political and social formation in the beginning of the Republic in Brazil, in particular, through sources such as the scope of laws of the Codes: Penal of 1890 and Minor1927 that corroborate for the understanding of legal changes that were part of how the republican government idealized the modern society that emerged in that period of wide social, political and cultural transformations. This paradox of laws for the protection of minors, in the context of the construction of the Brazilian public and democratic environment at the turn of the nineteenth century to the twentieth, reveals a period in which elitist discourses on the poorest minor mass by the legal and authoritarian resources of laws, configured the bases of state authority over the main characteristics of man belonging to a mass society, especially popular, that is, isolation, lack of social relations and consciences and legal rights formulated for the full development of childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]