Rocha, Justiniano José da (1812–1862)

Justiniano José Da Rocha (b. 8 November 1812; d. 10 July 1862), Brazilian political journalist, litterateur, and Conservative polemicist. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Rocha, a mulatto, was schooled in France and at the São Paulo faculty of law. He taught at the Colégio Pedro II and the military school in Rio, and represented Minas Gerais thrice in the Chamber of Deputies (1843–1844, 1850–1852, 1853–1856). He was also the first in Brazil to write and translate serial novels as a minor figure in the first Romantic generation. His greatness, however, lay in being the heir (and counterpoise) to the political journalism tradition associated with Evaristo da Veiga (1799–1837), the liberal who had dominated so many of the First Empire and Regency debates.

Rocha wrote polemics with a celebrated clarity and facility as the servant of the Conservative Party from its beginnings, writing or editing in the Rio press as the party's voice until the era of the Conciliação. He presided over O Chronista (1836–1839), O Brasil (1840–1852), as well as a number of more ephemeral periodicals, and from 1839 to 1862 he took the Conservative's part in pieces for the Jornal do Commércio. Protégé and partisan of Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos (1795–1850) and partisan of the saguarema reactionary leadership of the party in its years of struggle, Rocha is most justly remembered for his incisive analysis in the pamphlet "Ação; reação; transação" (1855).

See alsoBrazil, The Empire (First); Brazil, The Regency; Literature: Brazil.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

José Antônio Soares De Sousa, A vida do visconde do Uruguai (1944).

Raimundo Magalhães, Jr., Tres panfletários do segundo reinado (1956).

Ilmar Rohloff De Mattos, O tempo saguarema (1987).

Leslie Bethell and José Murilo De Carvalho, "Brazil from Independence to the Middle of the Nineteenth Century," in Brazil: Empire and Republic, 1822–1930, edited by Leslie Bethell (1989).

Additional Bibliography

Needell, Jeffrey D. The Party of Order: The Conservatives, The State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831–1871. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

Vasconcelos, Bernardo Pereira de. José Murilo de Carvalho. Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos. São Paulo: Editora 34, 1999.

                                            Jeffrey D. Needell