Alphonse de Beauchamp and the history of Brazil: writing of history, historiographic quarrels and readings of the past in the nineteenth century

Abstract

This research presents some notes about Alphonse de Beauchamp's work reception and, specifically, his Histoire du Brésil, published in Paris in 1815, in the time of Brazil's elevation to United Kingdom of Portugal and Algarves. Accused by Robert Southey of plagiarism concerning his History of Brazil's first volume (1810), Beauchamp had his reception in the Brazilian historiography of nineteenth century marked by accusations of plagiarism. These accusations were also not rare in his intellectual career in France, where he was frequently named "plagiarist". Our research seeks to elucidate which were the conceptions of plagiarism in that time and how, from the transformations of the history concept, the different Luso-brazilians audiences reacted to Beauchamp's book. The permanency of pre-moderns references of the history concept parallel to the rise of the modern concept, contributed to a series of historiography debates, among other things, those related to the plagiarism.