The economic transformations which the new exigencies of capitalism brought to Brazil at the end of the second half of the nineteenth century caused the emergence of new urban sectors, the end of slavery, the utilization of free labor and the rise of a dynamic agrarian bourgeoisie. These in turn provoked a crisis of hegemony within the dominant classes in the final moments of the Empire which reached the sphere of political domination. Their loss of hegemony resulted in administrative inertia and the impression of a power vacuum since the coffee bourgeoisie was not yet able to exercise the direction of the State alone. With the advent of the Republic, it fell to the army to temporarily occupy power and to institutionalize the new regime, while the bourgeoisie was organizing itself to take charge definitively in a hegemonic form.