News of Constitutions

Abstract

This article examines the spread of constitutionalist ideas in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the 1810s and early 1820s. Successful pro-constitutionalist mobilization in early 1821 raises questions of how residents of Rio learned of constitutionalist projects taking shape elsewhere in the Atlantic world, most notably that of the Spanish Constitution of Cádiz written in 1812. By examining the record of efforts both to prevent the spread of news from Spain and to disseminate and interpret the constitution written there, especially by Hipólito da Costa (1774-1823) in his London-based Correio Braziliense, this article examines how encounters with news of the Spanish constitution transformed Luso-Brazilian understandings of constitutional government. As Costa’s readers learned, the constitution written in Cádiz in 1812 was a turning point not because it offered a model to be adopted wholesale but rather because it illuminated constitutionalism as a political path forward in an era of trans-Atlantic crisis.