Revérbero Constitucional Fluminense, press and constitutionalism at Court in the Independence

Abstract

The research aims at shedding light over the specifics of political propositions and state and nation projects in the process of Independence, all of which recurrently varied according to moment, geographic space and the social place from which they were circulated. Our starting point shall be the analysis of one of the main newspapers from the Court's opinion press in the period ranging from 1821 to 1822, the Revérbero Constitucional Fluminense, published by Joaquim Gonçalves Ledo and Januário da Cunha Barbosa. Our objective is to understand the frontiers and belongings that characterized its political identity, defined amidst public space transformation and the affirmation, by means of biased and diverse manners, of a political culture based on the principles of liberal constitutionalism. By doing so, we intend to establish the ways in which the notion of sovereignty and the many varieties of constitutionalist and liberal thought at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century took place in the newspaper´s discourse.