Livros cerrados não fazem letrados: A Mesa do Desembargo do Paço e a Censura na Corte joanina (1808-1821)

Abstract

Censorship was one of the most characteristic instruments of power maintenance in the societies of the Ancient Regime. In the Luso-Brazilian world, it was modified and reformed according to the political contours of the projects established by the crown and by the different conjunctures that took shape in the external scenario. In 1808, with the transference of the Portuguese Court to Brazil, the censorship institution called Mesa do Desembargo do Paço was established in Rio de Janeiro. Under the jurisdiction of this tribunal, was established the examination of printed works that came to light at the Royal Typography (Impressão Régia) or which entry was requested at Customs. Form of repression, which kept the literate elites and the denser part of the population apart; form of control, which prevented the access to the most varied texts by a significant portion of the subjects, leaving them oblivious from direct contact with the literature, and doctrines, and proposals of the writers of the moment; form of evaluation and criticism, correcting stylistic and spelling errors and policing publications destined to circulate through Her Majesty’s domains. The action of the censors symbolized, in itself, a characteristic tension of the period, when the diffusion of the Enlightenment and the fear of the “pernicious French principles”, as they appear in several documents, represented a danger to the established political and social order and to religious orthodoxy. In this sense, the present dissertation intends to investigate censorship from a perspective that considers it as a social element common to the established order, the Ancient Regine. Therefore, in the chapters that follow, we focus first on the state of the art of historiography, surveying and analyzing the studies that took the Mesa do Desembargo do Paço as an object and also its institutional trajectory in Portugal. Second, about the establishment of this court in Rio de Janeiro, from 1808 to 1821. And, finally, regarding the agents responsible for monitoring printed works, the censors, following their trajectory and strategies for ascension and social maintenance on the imperial board.