Understanding the constitutional precept of the state of siege is essential to understanding the democratic political structures. If, on the one hand, it is a mechanism for the society s protection, thus broadening the limits of the state authority for a quick action in exceptional situations, then on the other hand it can be a legitimizing instrument of arbitrariness and interventionist abuses. The frequent declarations of state of siege during Brazil s First Republic can indicate the vicissitudes that used to permeate the state powers and the attempts to consolidate the federative republican regime in the country. Given that the normative juridical phenomenon of the state of siege can be seen as a linguistic phenomenon, the current work analyses the constitutional institution during the aforementioned period, based on the language theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Pierre Bourdieu and their culturalist bias. Discourses on the state of siege produced by the three branches of the federal powers - mostly registered in the annals of the Constituent Assembly, the Senate and the House of Deputies, presidential messages and Supreme Court decisions - have been examined. The study of these materials is structured in three parts - the first, dedicated to the making of a new constitution, the second, concerning the solidification process of the constitutional rules and the third, dealing with the 1926 constitutional reform - and leads to the conclusion that the disputes on the meanings of state of siege were characterized by linguistic relations of symbolic power and that this institution worked as a means to configure the political and juridical institutions of the First Republic.