Vol. 14 · n.º 2 · December 2016 e-journal ofPortuguese History Table of Contents Volume 14, number 2, December 2016

[ARTICLES]

Procurators, Religious Orders and Cultural Circulation ...... 1 in the Early Modern : Printed Works, Images (and Relics) from Japan in António Cardim’s Journey to (1644-1646) Federico Palomo

Satirical Poetry and Religious Criticism in in the Late Eighteenth Century ...... 33 Rossana Agostinho Nunes

Tradition and Modernity in Portuguese Liberal Political Culture ...... 51 —On the Topic of the Constitution Sérgio Campos Matos

Local Responses to a Global Invasive Species...... 72 Varying Reasons for Controlling the Argentine Ant in the Archipelago (1850-2014) Ana Isabel Queiroz & Daniel Alves

[SURVEYS & DEBATES]

Two South Africans in the Portuguese Wars of Decolonization (1961-1975): ...... 93 It Could Have Been Better, It Could Have Been Worse Bruno Cardoso Reis

[BOOK REVIEWS]

Marques, André Evangelista. Da Representação Documental à Materialidade do Espaço...... 104 Território da Diocese de Braga (séculos IX-XI) Santa Maria da Feira: Edições Afrontamento/CITCEM, 2014 ISBN: 978-972-36-1389-6 Maria João Branco

Bethencourt, Francisco (ed.). Utopia in Portugal, Brazil and Lusophone African Countries .... 108 Bern: Peter Lang, 2015 ISBN: 978-3-0343-1871-6 Malyn Newitt

Meneses, Filipe Ribeiro de. A Grande Guerra de Afonso Costa...... 111 Alfragide: Dom Quixote, 2015 ISBN: 978-972-20-5877-3 Castaño

Martín Marcos, D.; Iñurritegui, J. M.; Cardim, P. (eds.). Repensar a Identidade: ...... 115 O Mundo Ibérico nas Margens da Crise da Consciência Europeia Lisbon: CHAM, 2015 ISBN: 978-989-8492-28-9 Alexander Ponsen

Feitler, Bruno. The Imaginary Synagogue: Anti-Jewish Literature ...... 120 In the Portuguese Early Modern World (16th-18th Centuries) Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015 ISBN: 9789004264106 Jean-Frédéric Schaub

Greenwood, Adrian. Through with Wellington...... 123 The Letters of Lieutenant Peter Le Mesurier of the 'Fighting Ninth' Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015 ISBN: 978-1-4456-5456-0 Fernando Dores Costa

Sales Souza, Evergton; Marques, Guida; Silva, Hugo R. (eds.). Salvador da Bahia: ...... 129 Retratos de uma Cidade Atlântica Salvador/Lisbon: EDUFBA, CHAM, 2016 ISBN: 978-85-232-1460-9 Luís Frederico Dias Antunes

Justino, David. Fontismo. Liberalismo numa Sociedade Iliberal...... 136 Alfragide: Dom Quixote, 2016 ISBN: 978-972-20-5933-6 José Miguel Sardica Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation in the Early Modern Portuguese Empire: printed works, images (and relics) from Japan in António Cardim’s journey to Rome (1644-1646)*

Federico Palomo1

Abstract

This study looks at different aspects pertaining to the circulation of texts, images, and objects in the context of the Early Modern Iberian empires. More specifically, it examines the functions of the procurators of religious orders, who travelled to Europe from the edges of the empires and assumed a privileged role connecting Europe with the Asian, African and American territories, in terms of written, visual and material culture. To this end, the study analyzes the Jesuit António Francisco Cardim’s expedition from Macau, in the furthest reaches of the Portuguese Empire, to Lisbon and Rome during the . This analysis seeks to understand the strategies through which the writings, images, and relics of the that he carried with him served as instruments to make the realities of Japan and Japanese Christianity present in metropolitan and/or Roman environments.

Keywords

Cultural circulation, procurators, António Cardim, Martyrs of Japan, seventeenth century.

Resumo

Este trabalho explora alguns aspectos relacionados com a circulação de textos, imagens e objectos no contexto dos impérios ibéricos da Idade Moderna. Em particular, examina o papel que, a tal efeito, desempenharam os procuradores das ordens religiosas, que se deslocavam até a Europa desde os confins imperiais, assumindo uma posição privilegiada à hora de conectar, desde o plano da cultura escrita, visual e material, o mundo europeu e os espaços asiáticos, africanos e americanos. Neste sentido, a figura do jesuíta António Francisco Cardim e a viagem que, desde Macau, na fronteira do império asiático português, fez até Lisboa e Roma durante a década de 1640, permitem observar estratégias nas quais os escritos, as imagens e as relíquias dos mártires do Japão que levou

*Abbreviations: AGI: Archivo General de (). ARSI: Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (Rome); ASPF: Archivio Storico di Propaganda Fide (Rome)—SOCG: Scritture Originali riferite nelle Congregazioni Generali; BRAH: Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia (). 1 Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. E-mail: [email protected]. This study has been undertaken as part of the research project Imperios de papel: textos, cultura escrita y religiosos en la configuración del Imperio Portugués en la Edad Moderna (1580-1668)—HAR2014-52693-P. Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Spain). I would like to thank Fernando Bouza and Cécile Vincent-Cassy for reading the text and for their generous comments. Thanks also to Matt Stokes for his care in translating this article into English.

Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation

consigo serviram de instrumentos para tornar presente nos contextos metropolitanos e/ou romanos uma realidade localizada no outro lado do planeta.

Palavras-chave

Circulação cultural, procuradores religiosos, António Cardim, mártires do Japão, século XVII.

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 2 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation

This study examines the role which procurators of religious orders, and friars who travelled to Europe from the furthest reaches of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, played in the circulation of texts, images and other material goods. It analyzes how, alongside other actors, they contributed to the dissemination, appropriation and consumption of those goods around the planet, and thereby assumed a privileged role in connecting Europe with Asian, African and American territories, in terms of written, visual and material culture. This study analyzes the figure of António Francisco Cardim and the editorial and artistic strategies which he developed over the course of his expedition to Rome between 1644 and 1646. Named as Jesuit procurator for the province of Japan in 1638, he travelled from Macau, at the edge of the Portuguese Empire’s Asian territories, to Lisbon and soon after to Rome. While in Europe, he carried out discreet but significant editorial activities with a clearly propagandistic tone, disseminating printed copies of several of his own writings about the Martyrs of Japan. As will be shown, the most notable is a thick quarto volume, Elogios or Fasciculus e Iapponicis Floribus (Cardim, 1646a), in which, alongside the Lives of the Jesuits who had been martyred in Japan, Cardim included a total of 87 engravings.2 The circulation of texts, images, knowledge, and objects across different parts of the Early Modern world is a field of research which has been of increasing interest to historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Without pretending to examine in detail the different historiographical questions about the dynamics concerning this phenomenon, it is important to point out the pioneering role of historians of art and material culture in this field. Alongside the so-called “visual turn” and “material turn,” which served as a foundation for many of the initial studies on conspicuous consumption and collecting, in recent years a global historical perspective has become more prominent, highlighting the importance of the circulation of luxury objects and artworks, but also other artifacts and natural products, in the processes of cultural exchange that occurred across the world during the Early Modern period, connecting places and facilitating the circulation of practices and knowledge. In this sense, as more Eurocentric conceptions have been left behind, there has been growing interest in reconstructing these objects’ trajectories, capturing the “global lives of things,” focusing on the lands they crossed, the transformations they underwent, and the different meanings and uses attributed to them at different times and in different places (Garritsen and Riello, 2016; North, 2012).3 Among many areas of interest, researchers have also been keen to place importance on the meaning of the

2 I look at Cardim’s Elogios in another study, which examines the discourse on martyrdom that he built up through texts and images (Palomo, 2014). 3 For Portuguese contexts, see (among others): Jordan Gschwend and Lowe, 2015; et al, 2013; Weston, 2013; Curvelo, 2010; Levenson et al, 2009; Alves et al, 2003-2005. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 3 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation circulation of books and written texts between different parts of the known world (Rueda, 2012; González Sánchez, 2007; Loureiro, 2007), contributing to the construction of European empires and, above all, to the development of (new) knowledge about the world. The very circulation of such knowledge—as well as the people and practices that helped to build it up—has transformed the viewpoint of the history of science which is no longer framed in strictly European terms or in terms based on the classical paradigm of modern science (Romano, 2014a). It has also framed the agenda of the recent historiography on religious missions (Castelnau et al, 2011; Wilde, 2011), which started decades ago with research on the dynamics resulting from the activities carried out by Catholic missionaries across the world. Many of the studies adopting such approaches have emphasized the role played by collectors, merchants, and other agents in the circulation and consumption of objects, texts, images, and so on, often playing the part of cultural intermediaries (Andretta et al, 2015). In this respect, it is fitting to look more closely at the role played by the procurators of religious orders in these processes. These procurators have rarely merited much attention from researchers; in the case of the Jesuits, existing studies have looked at those in Seville and Lisbon who were involved in missions to the Indies (Zubillaga, 2001; García Galán, 1995; Wicki, 1971). In part, research has also explored the business of those procurators who carried out their functions in loco, that is, in the college or province to which they belonged, and has highlighted the economic and material dimensions surrounding their activity, as they had to supervise the accounting of houses, colleges, and possessions, as well as the purchase of goods and, usually, provisions (Echarte, 2001; Alden, 1996: 298-318). It is only in recent times that research has appreciated their role in joining up the networks which the Society developed around the world, and through which medicinal plants, textiles, ornaments, and artworks were circulated, along with books, news and instructions, and funds which were transferred in gold and money or in the form of loans, donations and so on (Martínez Serna, 2009). There were, however, other forms of procuration. When analyzing the experience—little- known but common—of friars and clerics who travelled from the Indies to Europe, following most of the missionaries’ routes in reverse (Rubial García, 2012; Jeanne, 2013; Xavier, 2014), we find that often they were subjects—many of them born in colonial lands—who actually moved to Europe as procurators of their respective provinces and communities. Their relatively short journeys tended to be for well-defined objectives which required their presence in the royal court, among the Order’s superiors on the Peninsula, or before the Roman authorities. The trips could be made for altruistic reasons—representing the cause of the indigenous people to the royal authorities, for example—but also for reasons related to the interests of their religious

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 4 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation institute and, especially, the province they represented: from participating in the Order’s general congregations to requesting autonomy, from addressing conflict between criollos/casados and European settlers to intervening in legal conflicts with bishops, and from recruitment drives to promoting processes or to seeking money for evangelization purposes, to name just a few (Rubial García, 2012). Together with these matters, the procurators’ presence in the Old World also provided an opportunity to tend to other concerns. Many participated in the informal trafficking of objects, returning to the colonies with devotional and artistic objects which were commissioned by their own institutions or by individuals. They spent some of their time acquiring medals, Agnus Dei, rosaries, and smaller devotional pieces (which they could buy in bulk) in European cities, if possible in Rome, and also books, reliquaries, religious paintings, prints, and other artworks which they then sent, or took with them, to their home provinces, where they were held in very high esteem (Alcalá, 2007). Their role in the circulation of these types of products to American, Asian, and African lands is indisputable; but it is also important to question the place that these procurators occupied in what we could call a “reverse circulation,” from the edges of the empires towards the European world. Which objects, images and writings did they carry with them, and what and who were they intended for? How did the friars use them, and what role did they play in their strategies? What instruments were deployed to distribute them around Europe, and what value was attached to them? What were their meanings? In short, how did those with first-hand experience of colonial life succeed, through these objects, in making the colonial and missionary life present in metropolitan contexts, and in places like Rome, which became ever more central to the missionary world as the seventeenth century progressed? We can explore some of these questions through an analysis of the Jesuit António Cardim’s procuration and the propagandistic strategies he deployed over the course of his time in Rome. The next section will consider the context which surrounded Cardim’s voyage, touching briefly on the situation at the time and the matters which led him to travel to Europe. We will then examine his editorial activity over these years, situating it within his strategies as a procurator and emphasizing the importance he placed on printed works and images. Finally, an analysis of the prints which accompanied Fasciculus will help us to understand Cardim’s role in a complex game of appropriations, in which elements arising from pictorial and (already) hybrid culture, developed in the Portuguese Asian context, were incorporated into European artistic endeavors.

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 5 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation

From necessity to propaganda: António Cardim’s journey to Rome

António Cardim was born in Viana do Alentejo in 1596 into a family which had developed close ties with the Jesuits during the second half of the sixteenth century. His uncle, Fernão Cardim (c. 1548-1625), was a key figure in the Jesuit province of Brazil; his brother, João Cardim (1585-1615), earned a reputation as a holy man and as a model novice and student, a reputation which only grew stronger after his premature death.4 After entering the Order in 1611, shortly after his fifteenth birthday, António Cardim set sail for the Indian Ocean in 1618. He spent his first years in Asia in Goa, where he completed his studies in philosophy and theology. In the 1620s, he was sent to the Jesuit College in Macau, the headquarters of the Jesuit province of Japan (which included territories beyond the Japanese Archipelago). Cardim carried out his missionary activity in the kingdoms of Siam and Tonkin between the late 1620s and early 1630s. Upon returning to Macau, as well as being master of the novices and procurator in loco of the province, he carried out governance duties for the Order, as Rector of the College of São Paulo (1632-1636). He also served as Commissary of the Inquisition, until he was sent to Rome in 1638 (Franco, 1714: 485-491). His presence in Macau coincided with a particularly complex period for the Portuguese enclave, whose place in the political and commercial context of the region was under extreme pressure. The arrival of new European actors diminished the central role which the Portuguese had played for decades in the trade between China and Japan. The Spanish, based in Manila, were active participants in the region’s commercial networks from the end of the sixteenth century onwards (Tremml-Werner, 2015). The Dutch became ever more assertive in the first decades of the seventeenth century and posed a serious threat to the Portuguese. Added to this were the growing difficulties which the Japanese powers began to impose upon Portuguese tradesmen in Japanese ports, culminating in the complete closure of all ports in this country to the Portuguese and Spanish in 1639, while also putting those operating in places like Canton in jeopardy. The instability within the Ming Empire itself, from the 1620s onwards, also affected relations between the Portuguese in Macau and the Chinese authorities. Tensions mounted even further after the Manchurians took Peking in 1644, and during the ensuing period of political instability, which lasted until the dynasty consolidated its power in the 1670s. The complexity of the situation had continuous effects on the Jesuit presence in this part of the world: the expulsion of Christian missionaries from Japan in 1614 was probably the most significant event, as it marked the beginning of the end of a mission that had achieved considerable renown both

4 Two of Fernão Cardim’s brothers, Lourenço Cardim and Diogo Fróis, were also Jesuits. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 6 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation inside and outside Europe. Macau and Manila took in hundreds of missionaries who found themselves expelled from the Japanese Archipelago, and became particularly sensitive to the news arriving from Japan, highlighting the challenges facing a mission whose previous greatness had now become the story of the persecution of the European missionaries and their acolytes. For the Jesuits, the mission in Japan became an undertaking akin to their mission in England: one that was subject to political hostility and that was kept alive by a handful of missionaries forced to act covertly (Boxer, 1951; Elison, 1988; Harrington, 1993; Higashibaba, 2001; Paramore, 2009; Brockey, 2014: 375-410). The repression worsened and the number of death sentences increased, including executions in 1619, 1622, 1623, and 1638. The evangelization efforts in the Japanese Archipelago ended up acquiring a definite martyrial dimension, which was confirmed and strengthened by the beatification, between 1627 and 1629, of the 26 friars who had been crucified in Nagasaki in 1597. A war of (written) words between religious orders ensued, centered on the 26 martyrs and other missionaries who had suffered a similar fate after 1614; this dispute was in some ways a continuation of old ones, but these were now supplemented and amplified by the circulation of innumerable texts and images. Through these, the Jesuits and Franciscans, along with other orders (to a lesser extent), tried to capitalize upon the renown gained through martyrdom (Palomo, 2014: 174-178; Gomez-Géraud, 2003). As they abandoned all hope of re-establishing Christianity in the Japanese Archipelago, the Jesuits faced an increasingly difficult challenge in sustaining the province of Japan’s financial status, and even in guaranteeing its very existence. Previously, finances had relied on the Society’s active participation in the trade between Japan and China (Boxer, 1951: 91-136; Alden, 1996: 528-550). When this was cut off, the Jesuits partly compensated for the financial shortfall by trading with the kingdoms of South East Asia, in Tonkin, Siam and Cochin China (Brockey, 2014: 326-374). The mission in China, which had become a vice-province in 1619, exploited the Ming Empire’s political instability in order to expand a little, but this only increased the need for money and finance (Brockey, 2007: 92-107). The Jesuits in the vice-province of China made increasing demands for resources from the province of Japan, believing that they were in no short supply, and were intent on gaining institutional recognition from Rome; both of these factors only heightened the tensions in Macau itself between the Jesuits linked to the Chinese mission and those in the province of Japan. In this context, António Cardim’s period as procurator almost coincided with that of his co-religionist Álvaro Semedo, who had first moved to Lisbon in 1636, where he represented the Jesuits in China, and then later moved to Rome, where he remained until 1644. During the course of his travels, Semedo sought to strengthen the vice-province’s position, publicizing the

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 7 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation evangelization efforts in China and attempting to raise funds for it (Sebes, 2001; Brockey, 2007: 231-232). It is not impossible, in fact, that these two Jesuits crossed paths in Portugal, before Cardim began his journey to Rome, between 1644 and 1646. As procurator of the province of Japan, Cardim took part in the Order’s General Congregation in 1645, at which Vincenzo Caraffa was chosen as ’s successor. The Portuguese Jesuits Jerónimo Vogado, Bento de Sequeira, António Mascarenhas, and the future assistant of Portugal, Nuno da Cunha, were also in attendance, along with his predecessor João de Matos, both of whom were central to Dom João IV’s diplomatic efforts in Rome (Rodrigues, 1931-1950: III (2), 139). But it was not the General Congregation that brought Cardim to Rome. We can deduce some of his concerns through his correspondence with António Colaço, who, despite the Bragança revolt in 1640, continued as the procurator of the Portuguese Jesuits at the Court of Philip IV.5 In reality, Cardim was pursuing similar goals to those which had led Sebastião Vieira, also the procurator of the Jesuits in Japan, to Rome in 1623 (Brockey, 2014: 389-390). One important aspect of Cardim’s work with the Roman authorities was related to economic matters. As has been pointed out, the expulsion from the Japanese Archipelago placed the Jesuit province of Japan in a tricky position. General Vitelleschi himself, in a letter to Colaço, refers to the “grande aperto e necessidade” (“great hardship and need”) which the province was suffering “com a falta do comercio” (“with the lack of trade”). Therefore he urged the Jesuit procurator to ensure he collected a pension of 4,000 escudos, which was due to the province from the apostolic nunciature at the court of the Catholic king.6 Granted by Gregory XIII to finance the missions in Japan, this pension was subject to confirmation from the Pope and constituted an essential source of income for the province, although, in practice, it had not always been used for the province’s benefit. In correspondence with Colaço, both Vitteleschi and Cardim insisted on the need to secure the funds, even indicating how, and through whom, he should send the money to ensure its safe passage to Lisbon and then Macau.7 Economic matters were, in fact, given particular importance in Cardim’s report Pro Provincia Japponica, which he wrote in 1646 (Cardim, 1975). Addressed to the Father General of the Order, he recorded all the income relating to the Jesuits in Japan; the total, he wrote, was 11,290 escudos, of which only 4,590 escudos were regularly received (Cardim, 1975: 1626-1628). However, beyond these financial problems, the report also discussed the demands of the Jesuits

5 BRAH, 9/7331. 6 Mutio Vitelleschi, Letter to António Colaço (Rome, 04/01/1643), BRAH, 9/7331, unnumbered pages. 7 Mutio Vitelleschi, Letters to António Colaço (Rome, 01/09/1641; 25/01/1642; 28/08/1642; 04/01/1643; 16/08/1643; 28/12/1643; 08/05/1644); António F. Cardim, Letters to António Colaço (, 06/05/1644; Rome, 20/01/1645; 22/07/1645; 26/03/1646; 28/04/1646; 23/06/1646; 16/09/1646), BRAH, 9/7331), unnumbered pages. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 8 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation to establish an autonomous province in China, rather than to remain as a vice-province, and to establish their base at the College of Macau. In previous years, the mission in China had had a very vocal defender in Rome, Álvaro Semedo, who had branded the province of Japan as otiose and rich, alongside other arguments (Cardim, 1975: 1615-1617). In his account, Cardim refuted these arguments one by one. He argued that the College of Macau, despite its location on the Chinese coast, should remain linked to the province of Japan, just as the English Jesuits had establishments in . To those who questioned the very existence of the province, given that Christianity had almost completely disappeared from the Japanese Archipelago, Cardim said that there were still a few thousand secret believers who used their houses as churches, as the first Christians had done. Furthermore, he underlined the importance of the missions in Tonkin, Laos and Cochin China. Not only had they opened the province of Japan to new lands, but they had also recruited more neophytes, he argued, than the Jesuits had had in China since the beginning of their apostolic mission. Finally, he argued that breaking up the province of Japan was no less than an affront to , the founder of the mission, and to the memory of the Jesuits who had died there for their Christian faith (Cardim, 1975: 1617-1620). Bringing up the subject of the martyrs was no trivial matter. Their cause constituted a powerful argument, and having some of them recognized by the Church as martyrs was a central element of Cardim’s tenure as procurator and of the strategies which he enacted at the time. The matter could not be separated from economic or institutional questions. Furthermore, the beatification (in 1627 and 1629) of the friars executed in Nagasaki encouraged the Jesuits, Franciscans and other religious congregations to fight for new causes. Cardim himself, while in Macau, had promoted some of the investigative trials which had to be carried out by episcopal authorities before any cause could be taken to the papal authorities.8 However, Rome required Cardim to navigate far more complex paths through the Curia’s bureaucracy and administration; he had to try to garner support not only in institutions like the Sacred Congregation of Rites, but also in the Congregation of the Inquisition and, to a lesser extent, the Roman Rota. Cardinals, secretaries, promoters, commissaries from the Inquisition, auditors, and other officials linked to these authorities, all became involved, to a greater or lesser extent, at different times in a process which, since the Council of Trent and (even more so) after Urban VIII’s reforms (1625-1634), had become more protracted and tightly controlled in an attempt to guarantee the power of Rome, and the Roman Inquisition, in defining saintliness and its recognition within the Catholic world (Gotor, 2004).

8 BRAH, 9/7239c, fols. 366-385v and fols. 398-434v. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 9 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation

In this respect, Cardim had some success. At the very least, he managed to advance the case of Carlo Spínola and his companions, who had been killed in 1622, at the Congregation of Rites.9 At the same time, he attempted to promote the causes of Marcello Matrilli and Sebastião Vieira. He not only tried to gain the favor of the members of the Congregation of Rites, many of whose cardinals were also members of the Congregation of the Inquisition, but also sought support from other institutions and sources of power, including secular figures beyond the Roman world (such as the Spanish king), who could play an active supportive role in negotiations with the papal authorities.10 The composition of narratives about the martyrs was also very relevant to Cardim’s strategy; in 1644, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith received a manuscript of a report, in which Cardim recounted the martyrdom of the four Portuguese ambassadors who had been executed alongside 51 other Christians in Nagasaki in 1640.11 The facts told in the account, which had already been circulated outside , were discussed in one of the Roman consistory’s general meetings at the request of Cardinal Cesare Facchinetti, an old nuncio at the Madrid court. Cardim’s work was eventually sent on to the Congregation of Rites.12

“In the view of so many martyrs”: António Cardim’s publishing activity

Beyond manuscript texts, Cardim made considerable use of printed works to pursue his goals. In the nearly ten years he spent in Europe, between Lisbon and Rome, he undertook several publishing projects, and was responsible for the circulation of printed pamphlets and other texts, in Latin, Italian, and Portuguese, about the mission in Japan and its martyrs. He contributed to a genre of literature about the Japanese world, perceived as an exotic and fascinating region, which had aroused European readers’ interest since the sixteenth century. Along with the consumption of fans, lacquers and screens, there was a massive increase in the number of editions of letters, histories, and treatises which described Japan, and which, at the same time, recounted the progress of the evangelization efforts there. In the seventeenth century, due to the ongoing persecution of Christians in Japan, the interest and expectations which this

9 In 1645, he confirmed that the Pope had approved the request regarding the investigative trials carried out in Macau about Spínola. António F. Cardim, Letter to António Colaço (Rome, 22/07/1645), BRAH, 9/7331, unnumbered pages. 10 In the same letter, he asked Colaço to obtain from Filipe IV a letter of request to the Pope regarding Marcello Mastrilli, who had died in 1637, in which, he says, Sebastião Vieira should also be included. Ibidem. 11 Relação do glorioso martirº de quatro embaixadores Portuguezes da Cide de Macao cõ sincoenta e sete christãos mais da sua compª diferentes nas nações degolados pella fee de Xpo em Nangassaqui Cide de Japão, ASPF, SOCG, vol. 192, fols. 280-287v. Two copies in Italian: ibídem, fols. 288-305v and 306-310v. 12 ASPF, Acta Anno 1644-1645, Congregatio 316 (21/06/1644), fol. 132. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 10 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation literature had sparked rapidly developed into a taste for Lives, narratives, catalogues, and images which focused on martyrdom. In this sense, writings on Japan, and Cardim’s texts in particular, formed part of a narrative and visual tradition which had been feeding ideals about martyrdom, in both the Protestant and the Catholic worlds, since the mid-sixteenth century. Often arising from the heat of confessional controversies, the number of books, prints, paintings, and objects (such as relics) relating to those who had given their life for their faith multiplied. Martyrs began to play an important role in the formation of religious and even territorial identities (Vincent- Cassy, 2011; Lestringant, 2004; Lestringant and Moreau, 2003; Gregory, 1999). Already in 1643, before moving to Rome, Cardim published a first printed work, dedicated to Dom João IV of Bragança. This text included the aforementioned Relação of the death of the four Portuguese ambassadors (Cardim, 1643a), and was quite successful, being translated in that same year into French and Latin, and then subsequently republished in Rouen, Lille and Ingolstadt. These new editions were based on the Portuguese one and were sponsored by local Jesuits (Cardim, 1643b; Cardim, 1643c; Cardim 1644). Cardim himself promoted a new Latin version in Rome in 1646, and he included it in the Lisbon edition of his Elogios in 1650 (Cardim, 1646b; Cardim, 1650). During his journey to Rome, he also carried out a more personal project, commissioning a printed version of the Vita of his brother João Cardim, which had been written in Latin by the Flemish Jesuit (Alegambe, 1645). But, as noted, the majority of his publishing work centered on texts about Christianity in Japan and the Martyrs of Japan. In 1645, he commissioned the translation into Italian and the printing of the lengthy Relatione della Provincia del Giappone, which he himself had written. Like the annual letters, it recounted the activities of the Jesuits in the different parts of the Society’s Japanese province. Along with a detailed description of the catastrophes that Christianity underwent in Japan, Cardim added news about Macau and the missions in Tonkin, Cochin China, Laos, Siam, and the island of Hainan. He thus outlined a geography which, in the light of the controversies with the Jesuits in China, seems to have been highly intentional. This reinforced the missionary character of a province whose natural territory was not being restricted (to a “martyrial” Japan), but was in fact expanding (to other promised lands) (Cardim, 1645a). In the prologue to the reader, Cardim not only evoked the Jesuits who had been martyred in the enterprise in Japan; he also recalled that the Jesuit province of Japan was far more than the Archipelago after which it was named. Employing arguments similar to the ones used in the Informatio pro Provincia Japponica, he argued that this new geography did not mean that the province could not its original name, as, for example, the province of Venice had done (Cardim, 1645a: Al lettore. Preliminaries, unnumbered pages). It is possible that, in his

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 11 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation mind, the Relatione needed to counteract the propagandistic claims of Álvaro Semedo’s work about China, which had been published just two years earlier. After it had been printed in Spanish with the title Imperio de la China i cultura evangelica en él (Madrid, 1642), Semedo commissioned a new edition from Hermann Scheus’ press in Rome in 1643, translated into Italian with the title Rellatione della Grande Monarchia della Cina. It then went on to be printed again in Italian (Rome, 1653), French (Paris, 1645; Lyon, 1667), and English (London, 1655). The Roman edition of the Relatione, which Cardim dedicated to the recently-elected Pope Innocence X, was a small octavo volume, 160 pages long, printed at the workshop of the Roman printer Andrea Fei. Like the opuscule he had printed in Lisbon, this work was also printed in further editions, which show that it was quickly and widely received within European Jesuit circles. Two other editions were published in the same year just in Italy alone, with the same title: the first was produced at the ducal press of Via Condotta (), and the second in that of Filippo Ghisolfi (Milan), sponsored by Giovanni Battista Fedeli. In Tournai (Flanders), a French version was published in 1645 at the workshop of Adrien Quingué, translated from the Roman edition by the Jesuit François Lahier (Cardim, 1645b). The translation, revised by another Jesuit, Jacques de Machault, was printed in yet another edition the following year at the Parisian press of Mathurin and Jean Henault, being published alongside another piece about the province of Malabar and dedicated by Machault himself to the Archbishop of Tours, Victor Le Bourtillier (Cardim, 1646d). However, Cardim’s main publishing project during his journey to Rome was the production of three texts in Latin whose main aim was to underline the importance of martyrdom at the mission in Japan. Printed at the workshop of the Heirs of Corbelletti, all three were circulated in one quarto volume, although each had its own imprint. On the one hand, this comprised a new edition of Cardim’s text on the death of the four Portuguese ambassadors, now translated into Latin by Cardim himself and published under the title Mors felicissima quatuor legatorum Lusitanorum et sociorum quos Japponiae Imperator occidit (Cardim, 1646c). But it also included a new 80-page pamphlet, the Catalogus regularium, et secularium, a sort of register in which he recorded all the religious and secular people who had died for their faith in Japanese lands (Cardim 1646b). Finally, it involved a broader initiative from an editorial point of view, printing, under the title Fasciculus e Iaponnicis Floribus, the Latin translation of another of Cardim’s texts, which was already known at the time: the so-called Elogios. These, as we shall see, had previously circulated in manuscript form and, following the model of a menologia, brought together the Lives of the Jesuits—Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, but also Japanese—who had been martyred since the beginning of the missionary enterprise in Japan. As has already been noted, the majority of

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 12 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation copies of the Roman edition, included 87 chalcographic engravings and a map of the Japanese Archipelago (Cardim, 1646a).13 Before returning to Macau, Cardim even ordered a new joint edition in Portuguese, with just one imprint, of the three previous texts. The new volume, printed at the workshop of Manuel da Silva in Lisbon, in 1650, reproduced, from the same plates, the images from the Roman edition of the Elogios (Cardim, 1650). The texts that Cardim commissioned to be printed during his expedition found their first audience, unsurprisingly, within Jesuit communities. In fact, some of them were reproduced almost immediately in new editions in French, Italian, and Latin, sponsored by other Jesuits. Cardim himself assured António Colaço that the Fasciculus was “muito estimado de todos os nossos” (“highly esteemed by all our brothers”), also noting the many “mimos” (“compliments”) which he had received from the General of the Society “por este trabalho que tomei” (“for this task that I have undertaken”). 14 Cardim’s texts thus served to encourage others into the missionary vocation, which was the hallmark of the Society. The Fasciculus itself was presented to the reader as a “theatrum sanguinis” (“theatre of blood”) in which readers would learn about the terrible nature of Japanese tyranny and, above all, be led to admire the dedication of the Jesuit martyrs (Cardim, 1646a: 2). But, beyond the edifying purposes of Cardim’s texts, his wish to print them also corresponded to his interests as a procurator. The serious difficulties afflicting the province of Japan justified the need to make a claim for it to the Pope and, in turn, to raise funds and rally support from the high authorities in the papal curia, and also from the Roman superiors of the . He needed their support to justify and guarantee the preservation and identity of the province, to sustain it and, above all, to have its holy character recognized. The inclusion of the proverb Qui legitis flores, hos legite on the frontispiece of the Fasciculus seemed to give an indication of who the book was intended for. In the same correspondence with António Colaço, Cardim noted his intention to dedicate the volume to the Pope, in the hope that “a uista de tantos martyres, se moua a conceder nossa petição” (“on seeing so many martyrs, he will be moved to accept our petition”).15 It may be that Cardim was referring to a matter affecting the processes he was then negotiating in the Congregation of Rites, or simply to the need to obtain papal confirmation of the 4,000-escudo pension which was administered by the nunciature in Spain, as he noted in another text.16 What is certain is that

13 The presence of two copies without the engravings from the Roman edition at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (4v ss c58s; 4 Jes. 37 m) suggests that perhaps Cardim also commissioned a set of copies without images, making those which did contain images even more important. 14 António F. Cardim, Letter to António Colaço (Rome, 16/09/1646). BRAH, 9/7331, unnumbered pages. 15 António F. Cardim, Letter to António Colaço (Rome, 26/06/1646), BRAH, 9/7331, unnumbered pages. 16 Among the “remedies” which Cardim had proposed in his Informatio pro Provincia Japponica (1645), he included dedicating the volume of the Elogios, which was then being printed, to the Pope, in order to obtain the 4,000 escudos which were to be received from the Apostolic Camera through the nunciature in Madrid (Cardim, 1975: 1032). e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 13 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation

Cardim, who had previously dedicated his Relatione della Prouincia del Giappone (1645) to Innocence X, wanted, through this Latin edition, to reach circles inside and outside the Curia which could potentially intermediate in matters affecting the province and, especially, in the causes of the martyrs. The inclusion of so many images in the Fasciculus was probably another means of fulfilling that purpose. In September 1646, Cardim told Colaço that he had sent six copies of the book to Madrid, to be distributed to the nuncio and his officials.17 In reality, Cardim’s determination to make use of printing presses during his journey to Rome and Lisbon was a manifestation of a relatively common modus operandi. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many of those who, as procurators, moved to Europe from colonial and missionary regions in the Asian and Atlantic regions used their time in the Peninsula and in Italy to have their own writing printed, or that of their coreligionists in their home provinces (Rubial García, 2012; Xavier, 2014). Regardless of the principal aims of their editorial work, their strategies often allowed eventually for certain texts, written by those with first-hand experience of the Empire, to be circulated in metropolitan and Roman contexts. In many different ways, these writings brought together snippets from these other worlds, that is, information about the indigenous people, colonial life, and missionary activity. At times, printed works were a response to the need to have instruments that could be used for evangelization purposes. Due to the potential absence of printing presses in their home provinces—or simply because it was more convenient—grammar manuals, dictionaries, doctrinal works, confessionaries, and devotional texts in indigenous languages were often commissioned and, once produced, sent to colonial lands. One well-known case was that of the Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, who, during his time at the Madrid court from 1637-1643, ordered the printing of several of his own texts in Guarani (a grammar manual, a dictionary and a catechism). 18 Their audience was not the metropolitan public, but the people spread over the Reductions in Paraguay.19 Often, however, these were writings which, in one way or another, sought to further the interests of the home provinces in metropolitan and Roman contexts. With clear propagandistic traits, as in Cardim’s case, they asserted their and their brothers’ role in colonial and missionary regions, through chronicles, accounts, and treatises. But the use of printed works also often

17 António F. Cardim, Letter to António Colaço (Rome, 16/09/1646), BRAH, 9/7331, unnumbered pages. Cardim himself must have given copies of the texts as gifts, as shown by the annotation on the frontispiece (“Ex dono Authoris Ulysip. 10 Nov. 1648”) of the copy of the Relatione della Prouincia del Giappone now kept at the Biblioteca de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid (FLL 18832). Many thanks to Fernando Bouza for this information. 18 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, Tesoro de la lengua Guaraní (Madrid, 1639); Arte y Vocabulario de la lengua guaraní (Madrid, 1640); Catecismo en lengua guaraní (Madrid, 1640). 19 The royal license allowing for the texts which Ruiz de Montoya had commissioned to be sent to Paraguay, in AGI, Casa de la Contratación, leg. 5426, nº 79. Many thanks to Fernando Bouza for this information about the document. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 14 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation served to defend the concrete causes which had brought the procurators to Europe. Thus, the Franciscan friar Miguel da Purificação, on his expedition to the Peninsula and Rome from Goa between 1630 and 1640, printed the Relação Defensiva dos filhos da Índia oriental (Barcelona, 1640) and the Vida evangélica y apostolica de los frailes menores en Oriente (Barcelona, 1641). Both were used to support demands for autonomy addressed by the Franciscans in the province of São Tomé () to their Portuguese brothers, and the need for their affirmation in relation to other missionary orders (Xavier, 2014). Beyond the immediate reasons behind commissioning printed works, the texts which friars and procurators brought with them did not just allow them to increase the visibility of the colonial and missionary situations which they wanted to assert in metropolitan contexts. Many of these writings, in manuscript and printed form, also contributed to the construction and accumulation of knowledge—linguistic, geographical, natural, ethnographic, religious, and historiographical—about the Asian, African and American worlds in such European centers as Lisbon, Seville and Rome. When Jerónimo Mendieta and Miguel Navarro traveled from New Spain to Castile in 1570 to address issues in their province, they brought with them several texts by Bernardino de Sahagún on the natives’ “idolatries”. Addressed to Juan de Ovando and , these texts were not printed (Rubial García, 2012: 821-822). In the seventeenth century, it was in Rome that much knowledge about China was produced and accumulated; this was in large part thanks to , whose expedition to Rome as procurator of the mission in China led to the edition of De Christiana expeditione apud China (Augsburg, 1615), which was based on Matteo Ricci’s notes (Romano, 2014b). The hagiographical nature of Cardim’s texts differentiated them from those of people like Sahagún and Trigault. But they still introduced information and images which contributed to the framing of European perceptions of the Japanese world. The inclusion in the Fasciculus of a map of Japan, although based on previous maps, showed the geography of the Archipelago and of the Jesuits’ presence there.20 In turn, the successive narratives about the lives and martyrdom of the brothers in Japan implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) advanced a vision of the Japanese world that underlined, in a somewhat orientalist way, how tyrannical, cruel, and arbitrary the despotic and bloodthirsty governors were. At the same time, however, he put forward a parallel vision of indigenous holiness, represented by the tens of brothers of Japanese origin who, like the first Christians, had also died for their faith.

20 The Fasciculus also included a well-known folded map of the Japanese Archipelago, which closely followed the map made by Christophorus Blancus in 1617 from another manuscript copy produced by Inácio Moreira in the late sixteenth century (Cattaneo, 2014). e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 15 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation

The Latin edition of the Elogios (1646): Japanese images, Roman engravings

As already noted, it was the Latin edition of the Elogios that gained most importance among all the texts that Cardim printed in Rome. Before being printed, the text had circulated in manuscript form in both Asia and the Iberian Peninsula.21 Originally written in Macau in 1635, it was influenced by an environment in which the end of the mission in Japan had become ever more palpable (Brockey, 2014: 375-410). As he noted in the prologue ad lectorem, when writing the Elogios, he made use not only of the correspondence which his co-religionists had been able to send to the college in Macau, but also of eye-witness accounts from people who had seen executions and torture, as well as the trials which had been sent to Rome (Cardim, 1646: 1-2, 8). Addressed to the then General of the Order, Mutio Vitelleschi, the manuscript was particularly widely read within Jesuit communities. One of the many copies which circulated at that time, and which is kept today in the Library of the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid, reached Rafael Pereira, a father at the College of Seville, in around 1638.22 Diogo de Areda had written to him shortly before, from Lisbon, telling him about Cardim’s text, informing him that it had been read at the Society’s three institutions in Lisbon, and assuring him that he would soon send a copy.23 At the same time, the Jesuit Pedro de Novais, also in Lisbon, confirmed to him the reading “à meza” (“at the refectory”) of the “tratado que fez em Machao o Pe. Antº Cardim” (“treatise which Father António Cardim wrote in Macau”), noting that “do seu (que he mto.) e do mais que ha cabría fazer hũ tratado De gloria martirũ” (“from the large amount of information he included in the treatise, and from other texts, it was fitting to compose a treatise on the glory of the martyrs”).24 The project did not come to anything—at least, until the appearance of Cardim’s printed edition—but there were some who made use of the manuscript to compose their own works, which would be printed before 1646.25 In reality, the manuscript form lent the work an “open” character (Bouza, 2001), for this meant that it could be modified, turning it into a text that was composed in the course of Cardim’s travels. His journey through Goa, Lisbon and Rome allowed him to add to, and

21 On the circulation of manuscripts in Iberian contexts, see Bouza, 2001. 22 Elogios dos insignes e gloriosos martires de Japão da Companhia de JESV. Tirados dos procesos autenticos, cartas dos mesmos mártires, e testas. de vista. Pello Pe. Anto. Cardim, Ror do Collo de Macao da compa de Jesu. BRAH, 9/3692, fols. 56-65v. An earlier manuscript copy, produced in Macau in 1635, is now kept at ARSI, Jap.-Sin. 29 I, fols. 134-149. 23 Diogo de Areda, Letters to Rafael Pereira, in Seville (Lisbon, 05/01/1638 and 15/01/1638), BRAH, 9/3692, fols. 171 and 175. 24 Pedro Novais, Letter to Rafael Pereira, in Seville (Lisbon, 12/01/1638), ibidem, fol. 176. 25 Cardim himself mentioned Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, who echoed the Elogios in his Vida del dichoso y Venerable Padre Marcelo Francisco Mastrilli (Madrid, 1640). He also mentioned Bartolomeu Guerreiro and Bartolomeu Pereira, who used the Elogios in the Coroa de esforçados religiosos da Companhia de Jesus (Lisbon, 1642) and in the poem Paciecidos libri duodecim (Lisboa, 1640), respectively (Cardim, 1646a: 10). e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 16 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation perfect, the first version of the text written in Macau (Cardim, 1646: 8); the 75 relatively succinct Lives included in the copy which had made its way to Rafael Pereira in 1638 were thus transformed into a set of far richer narratives that traced the holiness and martyrdom of the 84 brothers and three monarchs included in the Latin and Portuguese editions of the text.26 We do not know very much about the printing process. In Cardim’s correspondence with António Colaço, he occasionally mentioned how the Roman edition of the Elogios was progressing. In June 1646, he noted that, after seven months spent obtaining the necessary licenses, he was printing “hum liuro dos Elogios dos nossos Martyres de japão, cada hũ com sua imagen” (“a book of eulogies to our martyrs in Japan, each one with their image”). The most characteristic feature about the Roman edition of the Fasciculus (or at least of many of the copies) was the inclusion of 87 engravings, each of which depicted one of the martyrs whose lives were recounted in the book. Each image came immediately before the account of the life and virtues of the martyr it depicted, and the circumstances of their death. The importance of the imago and iconic language in the culture of that time (particularly among the Jesuits) does not need to be repeated here, but, as is well known, visual culture was remarkably important both in the Jesuits’ intellectual routines and in their spiritual practices. These practices were organized around Ignatius of Loyola’s compositio loci, and found one of their best visual expressions in Jerónimo Nadal’s Evangelicae Historiae Imagines (Fabre, 1992). As already mentioned, the inclusion of engravings was undoubtedly linked to the aims that Cardim was pursuing with this edition. In any case, it gave the volume a specific touch which distinguished it from other of the day, in particular, texts on the Japanese world, which far more rarely made use of images. At that time, Nicolas Trigault’s De Christianis apvd iaponios Trivmphis (Munich, 1623) constituted one of the few printed works with a complete series of engravings depicting the punishments inflicted by the Japanese authorities on both the faithful congregation and the missionaries. The book incorporated a total of sixteen images of undoubtedly good quality, but they were far from the size of the collection that Cardim commissioned in Rome (Trigault, 1623).27 Cardim’s Roman edition not only included many more engravings, but also shared specific formal characteristics.

26 BRAH, 9/3692, fols. 56-65v. The copy kept in the archive in Rome, from an earlier date, only contains the lives of 64 holy men (ARSI, Jap.-Sin. 29 I, fols. 134-149). 27 There was also a French edition (Paris, 1624) which, along with the frontispiece, only included four engravings, three of which were different from the Latin edition. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 17

Figs. 1 and 2: António F. Cardim, Fasciculus e iapponicis floribus, Rome: Haeredii Corbelletii, 1646, Eng. 11 and 54. Biblioteca Histórica Marqués de Valdecilla, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM).

The engravings in the Fasciculus were inserted throughout the volume on separate sheets and with their own numbering, and, as noted, they preceded the account of the life and death of each martyr. The engravings follow on one from another, making up a sort of gallery of effigies or portraits. The model possibly came from profane works like Paolo Giovio’s Elogia virorum illustrium (Basel, 1575-1577) or Francisco Pacheco’s Libro de retratos (Cacho Casal, 2011). In any case, narrative elements in the Fasciculus engravings are scarce or non-existent. In a single scene, the martyr appears in the foreground, depicted full-length (and often with an almost imperceptible sense of movement), at the moment of his martyrdom, or simply ‘adorned’ with the instruments used for his execution. The prints do not show other people, and not one of them depicts the executioner, which was very often the case at that time in representations of martyrdom (Figs. 1 and 2) (Palomo, 2014: 178-185).28 This almost iconic formula for depicting martyrdom and the arrangement in series of paintings or engravings took various forms during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both in Iberian contexts and in other Catholic centers (Vincent-Cassy, 2011: 335-363). Within the Society, there were series such as the one found in the German engraver Johann Bussemacher’s Effigies, et nomina quorundam e Societate Iesu qui pro fide vel pietate sunt interfecti ab anno MDXLIX ad An. MDCVIII (, 1608) (Fig. 3). They were also found, for example, in the Jesuit novitiate’s recreational room in Rome, where a collection of portraits of Jesuit martyrs was arranged as if in a gallery (Bailey, 2003: 61-68). Their iconic

28 The only engraving that depicts other people is the opening one of the series, which depicts Francis Xavier (Cardim, 1646: print 1). Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation nature sought to move the viewer to contemplation, as the Jesuit Louis Richeôme noted when he described this gallery in his Peinture spirituelle (Richeôme, 1611: 153-240).

Fig. 3: Johann Bussemacher, Effigies, et Nomina Qvorvndam Societate Iesv qvi Pro Fide, vel Pietate Svnt Interfecti ab Anno MDXLIX ad An. MDCVIII (Köln, 1608). British Museum, 1848, 0911.464.

In truth, this model contrasted with other contemporary ways of depicting martyrdom, which were widely disseminated in both the Protestant and the Catholic worlds of that time. Characterized by their narrative nature and theatrical overtones, they had great emotive and dramatic potential, as they depicted characters and punishments in all their rawness in one or several scenes (Fig. 4). This kind of visual expression of martyrdom was quite common and already developing in the first cycles and repertoires of sixteenth-century Europe, such as Richard Verstegan’s Theatrum Crudelitatum hæreticorum (, 1587), Giovanni Battista Cavalieri’s Ecclesiae Militante Trumphi (Rome, 1585), Antonio Gallonio’s Trattato degli Instrumenti di martirio (Rome, 1591) and Circignani’s frescoes in the churches of Santo Stefano Rotondo and Thomas of Canterbury, both in Rome (Bailey, 2003; Noreen, 1998; Lestringant 1995).

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 19 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation

Fig. 4: Richard Verstegan, Théâtre des cruautez des héréticques des nostres temps, Antwerp: Adrien Hubert, 1588, p. 25. Gallica. Bibliothèque National de .

These more narrative and dramatized styles, however, were further removed from the portraits and the iconic nature of the prints in the Fasciculus. Cardim commissioned the engraver Pierre Miotte, who had been active in the Roman and Neapolitan printing worlds in the 1640s and 1650s and had worked on a number of religious and erudite texts. Miotte was collaborating at that time with other linked to the Society of Jesus, and was involved in the printing of some of Athanasius Kircher’s works, such as the Obesliscus Pamphilius (Rome, 1650) and the Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (Rome, 1645-46). Cardim himself had already worked with him on the Latin version of the aforementioned Vita about João Cardim, producing the portrait included at the beginning of the text. Miotte also engraved the image which opened the account Mors felicissima quatuor legatorum, which depicted in a notably narrative and gory way the execution of the four Portuguese ambassadors in Japan in 1640. Among the engravings included in Cardim’s work are two which bear Pierre Miotte’s signature: the first in the series, depicting Francis Xavier, surrounded by several people threatening him; and the image of the martyrdom at the pyre of the Jesuit António Pinto, who died in 1631 (Cardim, 1646a, prints 1 and 54). However, there are many similarities between the 87 engravings, both in their style and in the way that they depict, time after time, each type of martyrdom, sometimes verging on repetitiveness. We can reasonably assume that they were all made in Miotte’s workshop, with many pairs of hands working on them alongside the Burgundian master engraver. They probably had pictorial and iconographical references from the Society in Rome, which was rich in artistic projects centered on martyrdom: Circignani’s aforementioned cycles in the Churches of Santo Stefano Rotondo and Saint Thomas of Canterbury, later transferred to paper by Cavalieri; and the series of portraits in the novitiate’s recreation room at the Church and Seminary of Sant’Andrea del Quirinale, whose formal

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 20 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation characteristics, as noted, followed an iconic model similar to that used in Cardim’s volume (Bailey, 2003). But it is not impossible that Cardim had also wanted to introduce elements into his commission which referred to the Japanese world; some of the engravings in the Fasciculus, in fact, seem to have been inspired by depictions made by Christian painters of Japanese origin, whose work was not unknown in Jesuit circles in Rome. It is not easy to establish the connection between Cardim’s engravings and the Japanese paintings, given the mestizo nature of the latter. Nevertheless, some evidence pointing in that direction can be found in one of the three paintings on the martyrs of Japan which are kept in the Sacristy of the Chiesa del Gesù in Rome (Fig. 5).29 This painting, now located in Rome, was probably produced in Macau in the 1630s, possibly by the Chinese-Japanese painter Giocomo Niva (Ni Yicheng) (Curvelo, 2007: 385) or another master linked to the school of painting which developed from the end of the sixteenth century in the Japanese Archipelago under the Neapolitan Jesuit Giovanni Niccolò (1563-1626). Niccolò’s activity led to a number of local people receiving artistic training in western styles. But, far from just copying paintings and engravings, they started a whole stream of production with original hybrid forms, in which techniques, media, pigments, and stylistic traits from traditional Japanese art were combined with iconographic models and other elements originating from European painting. Intended to meet the devotional requirements of Japanese and Chinese Christians, this art form—kirishitan—was primarily religious, although some secular artworks were produced (Curvelo, 2007: 384-385; Curvelo, 2001; Bailey, 1999: 52-81).

29 Alongside the painting that is focused on here, two other pieces of Japanese origin are kept in the Sacristy of the Chiesa del Gesù. Both show scenes of collective martyrdoms in 1619 and 1622 (Curvelo, 2007: 384-387; D’Orazio, 2008; Mochizuki, 2014). e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 21 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation

Fig. 5: Anonymous Japanese Master, Jesuit Martyrs (c. 1635). Chiesa del Gesù, Rome. © Zeno Colantoni.

After 1614, Niccolò himself and some of the Japanese Christian artists moved to Macau, while others fled to Manila. For some time, they continued their artistic activity and the artistic forms they had developed in Japan, and their work was particularly well-received in areas like Spanish America (Curvelo, 2007). An environment like Macau, which had been particularly receptive to the news about the persecutions in Japan, favored the production of paintings on martyrdom, such as those preserved in the Chiesa del Gesù (Curvelo, 2007: 371-404). The painting in question, which is relatively large (110 x 220 cm), was originally a watercolor painted on paper. Only later was it repainted in oil, attached to a canvas and framed, such as it is now to be found today (D’Orazio, 2008). Produced in an unquestionably kirishitan style, the painting depicts 44 Jesuits who were martyred in different ways in Japan, beginning with the very first persecution. The painting is divided into three separate levels. The top, with the clearest tonalities, represents glory: amid the clouds, and flanked by two angels, rise the figures of Francis Xavier and the three Jesuits crucified in Nagasaki in 1597, who had been recognized as martyrs by Rome, Paulo Miki, John Soan de Goto and James Kisai. In the second level, in the middle, we see those who were burned at the stake, those who were decapitated and those who had to live in secrecy or exile. Finally, in the third level, at the bottom, we see those who were subjected to the so-called tormento das covas (being suspended upside down over a pit) (Fig. 5). We do not know when or how the painting arrived in Rome, although Cardim may himself have brought it over from Macau along with his writings and relics. He must at least have known about it. The painting, both because of the people it depicts (and those who are missing) and because of the forms of torture it evokes, must have been produced soon after 1633, in the years when Cardim lived at the Society’s college in Macau, before he was sent to e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 22 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation

Europe. The links between the painting and the engravings which Cardim commissioned in Rome are not so strong stylistically, although in some of the prints we can see stylistic traits which do not seem completely European, and even less so Italian. But the links are made most clear in some of the ways that martyrdom is depicted, from which we can speculate that the drawings used for creating the engravings were influenced by the watercolor at the Chiesa del Gesù. Both Cardim’s engravings and the watercolor share a figurative logic: the watercolor is organized as a gallery of effigies in which the martyrs are depicted in an individualized way, almost iconically and with little movement, but at the same time with a repetitiveness, almost like a series, in the way the different types of torture are painted. However, these were common elements at the time, and the similarities do not per se prove the existence of links between the engravings and the painting. What is more significant, for example, is that both series depict the Jesuits who were persecuted and died as a result of exile and imprisonment, or who died in secrecy, like Diogo Mesquita, Francisco de Critana and Mateus de Couros. Their deaths, with no explicitly violent elements, seemed to distance them from the concept of martyrdom, and therefore from galleries like Cardim’s engravings or the Gesù watercolor. We know that these people were the subject of an investigative trial, opened by the Bishop of Macau at the request of Cardim.30 The procurator also included these martyrs in his own works, making the harshness of everyday life—illness, privation, living unsheltered from the elements—a form of long-term martyrdom in itself (Palomo, 2014: 184-185). The Japanese painter depicted these characters, grouped together on the left and right of the watercolor, situating them in settings which represent helplessness, secrecy and exile (the shelter of a hut, on board a galleon, abandoned on a shore, for example). Some of these elements, depicted in a more stylized form, also appear in some of the Fasciculus prints, but, in this regard, the link between kirishitan painting and the engravings probably came about because of shared iconographical references which referred to the then common images of the death of Francis Xavier (Torres Olleta, 2009). In reality, the iconographical connections seem to be more direct when we look at the way in which the martyrs who died by beheading are depicted. The Japanese master opted for a relatively original formula when composing the portraits of João Baptista Machado and Agostinho Ota. He painted them kneeling, with their bodies straight and their hands clasped in prayer, worshipping. But what is most characteristic about both figures is the katana (sword) driven through the martyrs’ necks, evoking the way in which they had died (Fig. 6). Undoubtedly based upon European models, he adopted a solution which was to some extent previously

30 BRAH, 9/7239c, fols. 398-434v. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 23 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation unseen.31 In any case, he distanced himself from a far more common and explicit iconography, in which the executioner, about to deliver the fatal blow with a saber or sword, assumed a more prominent role in the scene (Fig. 4); the engravings in the Fasciculus closely reproduced the model used in the watercolor from the Chiesa del Gesù, both in the corresponding image of Machado, which is somewhat simpler (Fig. 7), and in the engravings of the other decapitated martyrs, Agostinho Ota, João Chungocu and Marcello Mastrilli.32

Fig. 6: Anonymous Japanese Master, Jesuit Fig. 7: António F. Cardim, Fasciculus, Eng. 17. Martyrs (c. 1635). Detail. © Zeno Colantoni. Biblioteca Histórica Marqués de Valdecilla, UCM.

A similar analogy, although even more explicit, appears in the images of the martyrs who were subjected to the tormento das covas. This punishment, which the Japanese began to use in the 1630s, had hardly been depicted at all when Cardim commissioned the Fasciculus engravings. There were only a few images depicting the martyrdom of the Jesuit Marcello Mastrilli, such as the one at the opening of Ignacio Stafford’s Life, which was printed in Lisbon in 1639. In that image, the torture is shown in the upper part of the image, in the background, with limited room for detail. The scene shows the victims from two different angles, surrounded by people (Fig. 8). Unlike this image, the engravings in Cardim’s volume showing this type of martyrdom—some

31 A rare example of a similar iconographical solution is the image of the bust of the Jesuit Vicente Álvares, included in Johann Bussemacher’s engraving (1606). A different iconography, although with some similar elements, was the one used to portray St. Peter the Martyr, depicted with a scimitar through his brain. This model is also found in the images of some of the Jesuits killed alongside Inácio de Azevedo in 1570. 32 Cardim, 1646: prints 22, 31 and 83. This way of representing the decapitated brothers is found later on, in some of the engravings included in Tanner, 1675: 212 and 220. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 24 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation twenty of them—seemed to closely imitate the Japanese master’s iconography; not only do the engravings adopt the same frontal perspective as the watercolor, but the artist also reproduced in detail the arrangement of the ropes and the wooden arches, the tethers around the martyrs’ legs and torsos, and the way they were portrayed (half profile, full-body, and so on). The images are almost identical to those in the painting of the Chiesa del Gesù (Figs. 9, 10 and 11).

Fig. 8: Inácio Stafford, Historia de la celestial vocación, missiones apostólicas, y gloriosa muerte del P. Marcelo Franco. Mastrilli, Lisbon: António Álvares, 1639. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.

Fig. 9: Anonymous Japanese Fig. 10: António F. Cardim, Fig. 11: António F. Cardim, Master, Jesuit Martyrs (c. 1635). Fasciculus, est. 57. Biblioteca Fasciculus, est. 58. Biblioteca Detail. © Zeno Colantoni. Histórica Marqués de Valdecilla, Histórica Marqués de Valdecilla, UCM. UCM.

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 25 The use of pictorial features originating from non-European regions was echoed in other ways in Early Modern Europe. The frontispiece of Antonio de Herrera’s Descripción de las Indias occidentales (Madrid, 1601), for example, incorporated, among a series of maps and a portrait of the author, eight vignettes with images recalling Mesoamerican pictograms (Rubial García, 2010: 125-126). Similarly, the engravings in Diego de Valadés’ Rhetorica Christiana (Perugia, 1579) occasionally echoed, with new meanings, elements from the native Central Mexicans’ codexes (Maza, 1945). The reception and reinterpretation of Chinese decorative forms in European porcelain, tilework, and other decorative arts was even greater, culminating in the eighteenth century in the somewhat more Orientalist taste for chinoiserie (Curvelo, 2013). In this sense, the probable influence of kirishitan work in some of the engravings which Cardim commissioned makes it clear that there was a certain amount of permeability, albeit subtle and limited, for the artists who turned to the ‘exotic’ of non-European visual forms. However, the hybrid nature of these forms, as in the Gesù watercolor, made that exoticism familiar, facilitating their reception and adaptation in the West.

Epilogue: Japan in the Alentejo

In the Portuguese edition of the Elogios, printed in 1650, António Cardim gave news of the relics of the Japanese Jesuit , James Kisai, in the pages devoted to his life and martyrdom. He claimed that they were kept at the Society’s college in Macau, but that a piece of one of his arms was being guarded in the Church of the Convent of Jesus in Viana do Alentejo (Portugal), in the chapel of Our Lady of the , where Cardim’s own parents were buried (Cardim, 1650: 35). Kisai was not just any martyr among the dozens of Martyrs of Japan: as already noted, he was one of the three priests crucified in Nagasaki in 1597, along with six Franciscans and sixteen other Japanese Christians. He was one of the protagonists in the episode which shaped the European imagination about Christian persecution in Japan. It is little wonder that, in 1629, he was recognized as a martyr by Rome, along with his co-religionists Paul Miki and John Soan de Goto. In canonical terms, he achieved a status that distinguished him from other members of the Society, allowing him to become an object of worship and veneration. This all suggests that the prized relic reached the Viana do Alentejo Convent through Cardim’s own efforts, and that it was part of the luggage he brought over from Macau at the beginning of his journey. By depositing it in the chapel where his parents Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation were laid to rest, he aimed to honor the memory of his family. But, above all, he wanted to mark out their memory, linking the family’s resting place to something which would become ever more symbolically and spiritually valuable over the course of the seventeenth century in the Iberian peninsula. The relics of the Martyrs of Japan, in fact, become highly sought-after and valued objects, being particularly important in churches, chapels, and private collections. In 1630, the canons of Manila asked André Palmeiro, the Society’s Visitor in Asia, to donate some relics, which, like the remains of James Kisai, would be kept in the college in Macau.33 In Mexico City, the Franciscan Felipe de Jesús, who was born there, would become extremely important after 1627, when he was made patron saint of the city. In 1636, a chapel was dedicated to him in the cathedral, in which was placed the font in which he had been baptized (Rubial García, 2010: 261-262). Bones and other objects linked to the Martyrs of Japan also made up the impressive collection which the Duchess of Aveiro, Maria Guadalupe de Lencastre, acquired in the seventeenth century, and which, after her death, the Dukes of Arcos donated to the Society’s college in Marchena and to the Convent of the Most Holy Conception in the same city (Baena Gallé, 2014). Beyond the importance for his family, Cardim’s decision helped to connect in a tangible way a small rural village in the Alentejo, as Viana was, with Japan. It thus opened itself up to a world thousands of miles away, in which the trials and tribulations of a martyred Christianity, projected across the world, led to a particular native Japanese holiness, whose remains could now be venerated in the remote south of Portugal. In a way, the relic which Cardim brought with him to Europe symbolized his endeavors as procurator of his province. Like other priests and friars who moved from Portuguese and Spanish imperial contexts to the metropolitan centers and to Rome, Cardim made use of the printing press as a fundamental part of his strategy aimed at the Roman authorities and the superiors of the Society of Jesus. The texts which he printed, most of which had come with him from Macau, were fitted to the needs and interests of his procuration. With them, he attempted to portray a specific vision of the mission—bloody, cruel and distant—with which to gain the favor of those at the top of the Roman hierarchies. Written and visual memories about the Martyrs of Japan thus became particularly valuable when trying to defend the very survival of the Jesuit Province of Japan, to guarantee its existence and to obtain recognition for its most worthy members. The engravings which he commissioned in Rome, and which he included in his most important editorial undertaking, were

33 BRAH, 9/6239, fol. 354.

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 27 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation intimately linked with such goals. In many of the engravings, albeit in a discreet and almost unnoticeable way, there are elements of the hybrid artistic world (kirishitan), developed by Christian painters of Asian origin, whose production circulated at the time throughout the Society’s circles in the Iberian Peninsula and in Rome.

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 28 Palomo Procurators, religious orders and cultural circulation

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Romano, Antonella (2014b). “(D)escribir la China en la experiencia misionera de la segunda mitad del siglo XVI: el laboratorio ibérico”. In Federico Palomo (ed.), La memoria del mundo: clero, erudición y cultura escrita en el mundo ibérico (siglos XVI-XVIII). Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid: 243-262. Rubial García, Antonio (2012). “Religiosos viajeros en el mundo hispánico en la época de los (el caso de Nueva España)”. Historia Mexicana, 61 (3): 813-848. Rubial García, Antonio (2010). El paraíso de los elegidos. Una lectura de la historia cultural de Nueva España (1521-1804). Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Rueda, Pedro, (ed.) (2012). El libro en circulación en el mundo moderno en España y Latinoamérica. Madrid: Calambur. Sebes, J. (2001). “Semedo, Álvaro”. In Charles E. O’Neill and Joaquín María Domínguez (eds.), Diccionario Histórico de la Compañía de Jesús. Madrid: Universidad Pontificia de Comillas: IV, 3552-3553. Torres Olleta, M. Gabriela (2009). Redes iconográficas: san Francisco Javier en la cultura visual del Barroco. Madrid-Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert-Universidad de Navarra. Tanner, Mathias (1675). Societas Jesu ad sanguinis et vitae profusionem militans, in Europa, Africa, Asia, et America […]. Prague: Typis Universitatis Carolo Ferdinandae. Tremml-Werner, Birgit (2015). “Spain, China, and Japan in Manila, 1571-1644”. Local Comparisons and Global Connections. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Trigault, Nicolas (1623). De Christianis apud Iaponios triumphis siue de grauissima ibidem contra Christi fidem persecutione exorta anno M DC XII vsq. ad annum M DC XX. libri quinq. Munich: Sadeler. Vincent-Cassy, Cécile (2011). Les saintes vièrges et martyres dans l’Espagne du XVIIe siècle. Culte et image. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez. Weston, Victoria, (ed.) (2013). Portugal, Jesuits, and Japan: spiritual beliefs and earthly goods. Boston: MacMullen Museum of Art. Wicki, Josef (1971). “Die Anfänge der Missiosprokur der Jesuiten in Lissabon bis 1580”. Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 40: 246-322. Wilde, Guillermo, (ed.) (2011). Saberes de la conversión: jesuitas, indígenas e imperios coloniales en las fronteras de la Cristiandad. Buenos Aires: Editorial SB. Xavier, Ângela Barreto (2014). “Fr. Miguel da Purificação, entre Madrid y Roma. Relato del viaje a Europa de un franciscano portugués nacido en la India”. In Federico Palomo (ed.), La memoria del mundo: clero, erudición y cultura escrita en el mundo ibérico (siglos XVI-XVIII). Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid: 87-110. Zubillaga, Félix (2001). “Procura de Misiones de la Compañía”. In Charles E. O’Neill and Joaquín María Domínguez (eds.), Diccionario Histórico de la Compañía de Jesús. Madrid: Universidad Pontificia de Comillas: IV, 3242-3244.

Received for publication: 3 March 2016 Accepted in revised form: 10 August 2016 Recebido para publicação: 3 de Março de 2016 Aceite após revisão: 10 de Agosto de 2016

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 32 Satirical poetry and religious criticism in Portugal in the late eighteenth century

Rossana Agostinho Nunes1

Abstract

In the late eighteenth century, the Catholic clergy, together with the dogmas and practices of their religion, were heavily criticized in the Luso-Brazilian world. Such criticisms, usually repressed as libertines, were not restricted to conversations but were also to be found in manuscript poems, most of which were anonymous. This article seeks to analyze two of these poems: O Hissope and Epístola ao Muito Reverendo Padre Frei José de Carmellos. Within the context of political and doctrinal fervor that existed in the late eighteenth century, both poems were banned, although their messages and political implications were far from being the same. Actually, the poems demonstrate different ways of thinking about religion and about the relationships both between religion and society and between religion and politics.

Keywords

Satirical poetry, Libertinage, Anticlericalism, Religious criticism, Political discourse.

Resumo

Ao final do século XVIII, eclesiásticos, dogmas e práticas da religião católica foram criticados no mundo luso-brasileiro. Reprimidas como libertinas, essas críticas não se limitaram a conversas, mas perpassaram alguns dos poemas manuscritos, em geral anônimos, que circularam no período. Este artigo tem por objetivo analisar dois desses poemas: O Hissope e Epístola ao Muito Reverendo Padre Frei José de Carmellos. No contexto de efervescência política e doutrinal de finais do Setecentos, ambos foram proibidos de circular, embora suas mensagens e implicações político- teológicas não fossem as mesmas, evidenciando diferentes formas de pensar a religião e a relação religião/sociedade e religião/política.

Palavras-chave

Poesia satírica, Libertinagem, Anticlericalismo, Crítica religiosa, Discurso político.

1 PhD student in Political History - UERJ/Rio de Janeiro-Brazil. Capes scholarship under the guidance of Dr. Lucia Maria Bastos Pereira das Neves (UERJ) and co-supervision of Dr. Guilherme Pereira das Neves (UFF). I also thank Capes for granting the PDSE scholarship that enabled me to conduct research at Portuguese institutions under the guidance of Professor Tiago Miranda while I was working at Évora University as a visiting researcher. E-mail: [email protected] Nunes Satirical poetry and religious criticism

Introduction

In the late eighteenth century, many poems circulated in Portugal, mainly in manuscript form: the mock-heroic poems O Hissope, O Reino da Estupidez and their respective responses; the epistle A Voz da Razão, Epístola a Marília, Epístola ao Muito Reverendo Padre Frei José de Carmellos, Cartas de Olinda a Alzira;2 satirical sonnets, some of which were attributed to Antônio Lobo de Carvalho, Manoel Maria Barbosa du Bocage, and many other poems existing in Portuguese archives. Usually anonymous, or composed under pseudonyms, these writings exposed the , the clergy and the devotional practices of the faithful to the barbs of satire. By taking as its theme various aspects of the religious reality in Portugal, satirical poetry was full of political and social implications. It is not easy to evaluate the extent to which these poems circulated. It is, however, known that they did. There are many copies of them to be found in different Portuguese archives. Furthermore, most of them were, at some time or other, persecuted or banned by the authorities, or criticized by contemporary readers. In fact, the authorities were afraid of them for the following reasons: some because they affronted religious dogmas; others because they weakened the legitimacy of the Catholic Church and its ministers. Even those verses which chose just one single person as the target for their satire were not to be allowed, since they represented an attack against the honor of others, which was a central element in the structure of modern societies. Satire was not completely forbidden in Portugal in the eighteenth century, but such texts had to respect one single rule: they could reproach vices in general, but not a single person. Many of these texts criticizing the Portuguese religious reality were, and still are, characterized by the fact that they belonged to a context of anticlericalism and , giving the false impression that they all shared the same language (Braga, 1901; Cândido, 1969: 153-160; Albuquerque, 1975; Moniz, 2003: 191). Some of these writings were recovered and published during the liberal disputes of the nineteenth century. O Hissope was first published in 1802, and reprinted in 1817; O Reino da Estupidez had its first edition in 1818; A Voz da Razão in 1822; Epístola a Marília and Epístola ao Muito Reverendo Padre Frei José de Carmellos were printed on different occasions in that same century.

2 These poems were not translated into English. Therefore, I have translated them myself: The Hyssop, The Kingdom of Stupidity, The Voice of Reason, Epistle to Marilia, Epistle to the Very Reverend Father Friar José de Carmellos, Linda’s Letters to Alzira. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 34 Nunes Satirical poetry and religious criticism

However, the analysis of these texts should not be limited to seeking elements and features that enable us to identify them with a certain liberal and secular discourse developed during the nineteenth century. The defense of religious tolerance, the rejection of fanaticism, superstition and the Inquisition, the criticism leveled at the abuses of the clergy and the Church’s interference in political and social life, all aspects that were recovered in the nineteenth century, were already present at the end of the eighteenth century. But this does not mean that all those forms of discourse were equal to one another. Behind such labels as libertinage and anticlericalism, there were discursive constructions that conflicted with one another in many aspects, including the positions that were adopted in regard to the political and social role of religion. In fact, satirical poems formed part of the many political, religious, and ideological controversies of the eighteenth century. Most of them were recovered, given new significations, and deepened in the following century. These two moments were interlinked, but they followed distinct processes which must be analyzed in relation to their own specificities. In this sense, the satirical poems were written at a time when there was a profound reorganization of the political relationship between the Empire and the priesthood, manifested in the religious and regalist politics of Dom José I (1750-1777). They arose in a context that was permeated by the emergence of new values and concepts about religion and religiosity, including the philosophical writings of men like , Rousseau, and Baron d'Holbach, but also the discourse of Catholic thinkers, such as Antonio Pereira de Figueiredo, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, and the Abbé Fleury. Events such as the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 must also be considered. Finally, particular elements that were targeted in these seventeenth- century criticisms, such as the behavioral deviations of the clergy, must not be forgotten. However, the resumption, or rather the continued permanence, of these dimensions in the anecdotal and satirical verses of the eighteenth century was no longer limited to the simple desire of conserving or restoring a political and religious status quo which had been corrupted (Hansen, 1989). In some cases, these same elements were recovered by a discourse that aimed at creating a new religious society and even a new political one. Thus, the different languages expressed by the poems demonstrate the complexity and discursive plurality of the movement calling for a renewal of ideas about religion in the eighteenth century. They also indicate the political and social implications of this same movement. As John Pocock has remarked, the discourse that was created almost never appeared in a pure and isolated form: it tended to appropriate elements from other

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 35 Nunes Satirical poetry and religious criticism discursive constructions, often affording them new meanings (2003). This is also true for the satirical poems. In some cases, the difference was not in the elements that were manipulated, but in the way that this manipulation took place. The corruption of the clergy, for example, was a component of many different writings in that period. However, beyond this apparent uniformity, it is important to realize that not only did the meaning that was afforded to that notion vary, but so did its discursive arrangement. The idea of corruption among the clergy almost never appeared in isolation: there were other elements that accompanied it. Furthermore, the theoretical framework that underlay the criticism often differed from one case to another. It is, therefore, impossible to restrict these writings and their contents to labels such as anticlericalism or secularism, terms often used in the singular (Rémond, 1976; Abreu, 2004). The researcher must consider the specificity of these discourses and their respective arrangements within the political and ideological controversies that marked the proposals for reorganization issuing from the Portuguese religious society in the mid-eighteenth century. Few studies have been dedicated to analyzing the political and social implications of eighteenth-century poems (Starling, 2003). Historians often investigate their aesthetic and literary aspects, putting to one side their repercussions in the context of the political and doctrinal controversies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. We must therefore not only consider the political discourse of these verses but also insert them among a larger set of texts, thus broadening the field of research to include the intertextual and historical context (Skinner, 1999). In order to do so, this article will focus on two poems in particular: O Hissope and Epístola ao Muito Reverendo Padre Frei José de Carmellos. In 1803, the General Police Intendancy of Portugal, following orders received from the Minister of State, forbade the circulation of both texts. By then, however, they had already spread clandestinely throughout the kingdom.3 Despite these poems both receiving suspicious glances from the royal authorities, their contents were not identical. As will be seen throughout this article, their messages were not only different, but they also expressed diverging positions about the Catholic Church and the political organization of Portuguese society.

3 Lisbon, National Archives, Intendência Geral de Polícia, Contas para as Secretarias, livro 7, f.144-144v. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 36 Nunes Satirical poetry and religious criticism

Contents and authorship

O Hissope

This is a mock-heroic poem, satirically reporting a quarrel that occurred in between the bishop, Dom Lourenço de Lancastre, and the dean of the cathedral in the second half of the eighteenth century. The verses were probably written some time after 1770. The first printed versions were divided into eight cantos. However, in the manuscript copies, this number oscillates between six, seven, eight, or even nine cantos. The poem is based on the following plot: the dean, José Carlos Lara, had decided to offer the hyssop to the bishop every time he went to the church to exercise his functions. Since this utensil was used to sprinkle holy water on the congregation, the honor that lay behind the dean’s action was not insignificant. But their friendship had begun to fade, and José Carlos Lara stopped offering the hyssop to the bishop, who necessarily sensed the change. He considered the dean’s act to be a personal affront, so he decided to force him to maintain the old practice. With this aim in mind, the bishop called a meeting of the Cathedral chapter so that they could approve a final decision whereby the dean would be forced to offer the hyssop as he used to do. Lara appealed to the crown, but without success. A short while later, the dean died and was replaced by his nephew, Ignácio Joaquim Alberto de Matos. The new dean also disagreed with the imposed obligation. The bishop similarly tried to threaten him, but Ignácio Joaquim appealed to the crown, this time successfully. The royal court demanded an explanation from the bishop, who was afraid, and denied the existence of the Cathedral chapter’s imposition. This satire was written by Antônio Diniz da Cruz e Silva (1731-1799), a bachelor of law from the University of , and one of the founders of Arcadia Lusitana in 1756. A magistrate and a poet, Diniz had held numerous posts in the administration of royal justice.

Epístola ao Muito Reverendo Padre Frei José de Carmellos

This is a letter written in verse and addressed to a clergyman named José de Carmellos. Unfortunately, since we only have his name, it has not been possible to obtain any more information about this man. Unlike O Hissope, this poem does not narrate a particular event, nor does it describe a specific person. The whole text is constructed in

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 37 Nunes Satirical poetry and religious criticism defense of the natural of man (action and thought). And, in doing so, the author criticizes the clergy who kept the people in ignorance, and praises the American Independence and the French Revolution as models to be followed. The Epístola ao Muito Reverendo Padre Frei José de Carmellos, or Epístola for short, was first published in 1791 in London under the pseudonym of Ignacio de Sequeira Massuelos. Actually, the satire was written by the exiled Francisco Manuel do Nascimento (1734-1819), also known as Filinto Elísio. In 1817, this poem was reprinted in the fifth volume of his poetry, and, on that occasion, without any allusion to pseudonyms. This latter edition was printed in Paris, and the poet himself had participated in the selection of the writings that would be published in the volumes. The first printing of the verses of Filinto Elísio occurred in 1806. The Epístola was also published in this collection. In this case, unlike the 1817 edition, the pseudonym was maintained. In addition to Ignacio de Sequeira Massuelos, the poet had used other false names to sign his satirical works, including Clemente de Oliveira Bastos, Lourenco da Silveira e Mattos, José Pinheiro de Castello Branco, and Agostinho Soares de Vilhena e Silva (Andrade, 1999: 27; Braga, 1901: 268). The life of Francisco Manuel do Nascimento wasn't easy. In 1778, he was denounced to the Inquisition for having made heretical propositions. He did, however, manage to trick the familiar who had been responsible for his arrest, and successfully escaped.4 The day of his escape, July 4, was constantly recalled in his poems, since this was the date on which he was forced to endure the hardships of being exiled and began to criticize the political and religious situation of Portugal. Outside the Portuguese kingdom, the poet lived most of his time in Paris. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, he lived in The Hague for a brief period, presumably at the invitation of Antônio Araújo de Azevedo, a Portuguese representative at that court (Sané, 1808: 31).

Satirical poems, religious criticism, and political discourse

The poem O Hissope, a poetic representation of a controversy that occurred in the town of Elvas, in the late 1760s, between the bishop and the dean, did more than just recount a local conflict in verse. In his report of events, the poet attacked issues that were considered delicate within the Catholic Church, such as clerical vanity, the wealth of the clergy and the pious legacies that were left to the Church.

4 Lisbon, National Archives, Tribunal do Santo Ofício, Inquisição de Lisboa, processo 14048. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 38 Nunes Satirical poetry and religious criticism

The bishop was portrayed as a fat figure who used to spend a great deal of time in holy idleness, enjoying food, games and resting. Actually, both the Dean and the Bishop spent their time flitting between idleness and laziness.

A sweet peace reigned in the Holy Church; The bishop and the dean, both consenting To give and receive the blessed hyssop, Life in holy idleness they consumed. A good from Malaga, ham From the famous Montanchez, woodcocks, Partridges, the dove, the tender pigeon, The tea leaves from Beijing, and from Mecca The fragrant coffee served at sumptuous tables, Occupied most of their time; And the rest they spent, playing in exemplary fashion, Or sleeping, without feeling it. (Silva, 2006: 25-26)5

The clerical vanity was represented in an episode in which some monks wanted new clothes that would differentiate them from the common people. Ecclesiastic greed was also recalled at different points in the narrative. In one of those passages, the poet had written about the hope that some monks had of a possible increase in prices, an act that they astutely intended to justify as being an example of the divine will. Throughout the narrative, other aspects were also criticized. Antônio Diniz, highlighting the lack of intelligibility of the sermons, declared about them: “hunger only increases, causes sleepiness” (Ibid: 97). That was not all. The pious legacies and testamentary laws of Dom José I were not forgotten. The passage refers to the occasion when the dean went to the Franciscan convent to speak to the guardian about his conflicts with the bishop. The conversation took place in the convent garden, a rich and opulent space, adorned with statues representing ancient figures. Despite praising the perfection of that place, abounding in flowers and statues, the dean did, however, notice that there was no waterfall. The guardian promptly replied:

5 All the verses quoted throughout this article were translated into English by me, since there is no known English version of the poetic works presented here. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 39 Nunes Satirical poetry and religious criticism

This work will cost a lot of money (Answers the guardian) – and today the alms To feed the belly of so many friars, Who are ravenous, are just enough. Once, this convent was rich, But these new testamentary laws, Caused a huge reduction in their rents It is true that the holy exorcisms The blessing of the sorcerers and earthworms, The great and extraordinary privilege Of the brother or mother of friars, and other pious And holy institutes invented, Devoutly and subtly, by our forefathers, And which we, the people, have propagated With zeal and dexterity, mainly Among the devout female sex, Still sleeping from time to time. But all this is nothing, it's a trifle Compared with Purgatory! Lord, the purgatory and the holy souls Were the Potosi of the Franciscans! (Ibid: 103)

In order to understand these verses, it is also necessary to understand just how important the pious legacies were to the Catholic Church and to its congregation throughout the modern era. The doctrine of purgatory, which spread through the Church between the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, established the existence of a place where some dead people would be subjected to a probationary period for the expiation of their sins. The prayers and indulgences of the living could shorten the length of their stay. After leaving purgatory, the dead would pray for those who had helped them enter into paradise (Le Goff, 1993). During the modern era, the desire for the salvation of the soul and the fear of condemnation led to the development of a genuine market in salvation, from which the Catholic Church was the main beneficiary in material terms. In some cases, the heirs found

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 40 Nunes Satirical poetry and religious criticism themselves in financial difficulties due to the pious legacies that were inserted in people’s wills (Rodrigues, 2008). All this, however, began to change with the testamentary laws of June 1766 and September 1769, which formed part of the regalist policy implemented during the reign of Dom José I. These laws were intended to regulate the making of wills, limiting the number of legacies in favor of the soul that could be left to religious institutions (Araújo, 1997; Abreu, 2007; Rodrigues, 2008). Antonio Diniz da Cruz e Silva ridiculed the situation of religious orders in the context that they faced after the implementation of the testamentary laws, exposing the damage that such measures could cause to the finances of these institutions. In fact, the loss of revenue would not exactly endanger the existence of a religious order, but it would certainly affect its wealth and hence its luxury and ostentation. The image of the rich and beautiful garden, full of statues, vases and flowers seems to be used to emphasize this dimension. Despite the acidity of the verses, the attacks made on the religious institutions did not encourage a break with the religion itself. The poet did not target religious tolerance or the laws of nature. Nor did he question the papal power, the validity of the scriptures, paradise, the miracles, nor even the need for secular and/or regular monks. Neither the royal figure nor the political order of Portuguese society were criticized in his verses. Antonio Diniz painted a picture of the monks in which they appear mundane, lazy, greedy and vain, features that did not match the religious state that they aspired to. He similarly demonstrated his disagreement with certain pious practices that some monks attempted to inculcate into the lives of the faithful, such as exorcisms, and the act of blessing people apparently affected by spells, or even worms. In essence, the satire was manifested as part of a critical discourse developed during the eighteenth century, which sought to eliminate corruption among the clergy and certain religious practices that were classified as superstitious and suitably discredited. If we considered only the criticism that was made of the corrupt behavior of monks, the verses of Antonio Diniz would not seem to be moving very far away from those criticisms that had already been made, in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, by Baroque poets, such as Frei Lucas de Santa Catarina (1660-1740) (Graça, 1983). In the satire Sonho tam charro que se fez dormindo. Anatomia religiosa, sem mais cousa nenhuma (A dream so clear that was made sleeping. Religious anatomy with nothing else), Frei Lucas highlighted the deviations of Portuguese religious orders from what they

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 41 Nunes Satirical poetry and religious criticism should follow as the norm. The dismay was so great that the protagonist of the poetic narrative regretted: “I said to myself, is it possible that, among so many orders, there are none that pursue the purpose of religion? And of divine worship?”6 For him, all religious orders were more concerned with worldly affairs. This does not mean that the poem was greatly removed from the discussions that had been spreading across the Portuguese world in the mid-eighteenth century. In this context, the criticism was directed at exorcisms, the blessing of worms, and the multiplication of indulgences on behalf of souls in purgatory, suffered either alone or together, a feature that was also to found in other discourses interested in eliminating a number of aspects from Catholic religion that were regarded as superstitious. The passages in which the poet showed his sympathy with Pombal’s policies were also commonly found in other writings from that period (Teixeira, 1999). The mock-heroic poem O Reino da Estupidez (1784-1785), for example, joined both of these two dimensions together (Monteiro, 1982). Throughout the eighteenth century, a discourse was developed in Portugal that blended together criticism of the deviations practiced by the monks, the defense of the reforms introduced during the reign of Dom José I and an apology for a religion that was free from practices such as exorcism and witchcraft. O Hissope, and also the poem O Reino da Estupidez, belonged to a regalist conception of the State, which had been strengthened in the reign of Dom José I, but also to the emergence of a new religious sensitivity based on the parameters of early Christianity and on the principles of simplicity and evangelical austerity. But this was not the only discourse available in that context. The verses of the exiled Francisco Manuel do Nascimento belonged to another discursive arrangement. In his poetic compositions, Filinto Elísio also denounced both the corrupt ecclesiastic conduct that he observed and a piety that he thought was fanatical and superstitious. In one of his poems, he described a monastery in which friars and nuns were dancing. A brief note warned the readers: “one must forgive the original author, who perhaps only saw Friars and Nuns as bad. He would have spoken differently if he had known both of these religious groups, who are examples of virtue” (1817, v. 2: 42). In another poem, he wrote about the hypocritical character of a priest who used to live in luxury and was greatly pampered, despite telling his congregation that they should have only one dress if they wanted to be saved (Nascimento, 1999: 205-207). Not even the bishops escaped his satirical pen (Nascimento, 1817, v.1: 239).

6 Lisbon, National Archives, Manuscritos da livraria, nº 1054, f.86. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 42 Nunes Satirical poetry and religious criticism

Moreover, he condemned a piety that was based on external actions like processions, pilgrimages, and rosaries. The Inquisition, the court that had forced him into exile and taken away the goods that his father had left to him, was harshly criticized. He considered everything to have been an invention of the friars. For him, the institution was an "infamous court" that had placed "a gag / over the mouth of enlightened wisdom" (Nascimento, 1999: 178). His verses also included a defense of religious tolerance, a proposition that was part of the denouncement made against him to the Holy Office in June 1778. At that time, he would have said that the three prophets were correct.7 However, unlike other verses of the period, such as A Voz da Razão, Filinto Elísio’s poems did not question the validity of the Scriptures. This does not mean that his speech was considered to be less radical by his contemporaries. His criticism of the Church, for example, did not save the king. Epístola, a poem that was banned by the royal authorities because of its seditious nature, reveals this aspect of Filinto Elísio’s discourse. The first edition of Epístola appeared in 1791, at a time of political and ideological crisis brought about by the French Revolution. The later editions, from 1806 and 1817, did not change in their contents. In both editions, the prevalent tone was the defense of human freedom: the freedom to act, to think, and to express your ideas. For the poet, the word was an attribute that was innate to man. It was part of his rational nature. That is why, for him, Reason would punish the despots that “intended / to deprive the man who was born to be free / of the more complete of his , / free in his actions, in his concepts / and free to spread them wide / whenever social happiness did not impede him” (Nascimento, 1999: 380). Just as in the poems of Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage (1765- 1805), the despots were the clergy.

Fakirs, Monks, Bonzes, Dervishes, Fear the worthless signs of Despotism. [...] Fear, oh superstitious Quacks, The piercing arrows of science Reason is nigh: Don’t you hear the shrill and reinforced Trumpet of Reason, which sounds so close? (Ibid: 380)

7 Lisbon, National Archives, Tribunal do Santo Ofício, Inquisição de Lisboa, processo 14048. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 43 Nunes Satirical poetry and religious criticism

The priests, he claimed, put blindfolds on men, for they did not see the crimes and mistakes that these same priests had committed against those who believed in freedom. The ordinary men could do nothing: superstition prevented them from seeing the crimes perpetrated against their . But the philosopher could see further: he knew the truth, and because of that he was persecuted. For him, all men were born with the light of reason in their souls. But this light was hidden behind beliefs and fancies. Simple and pure morality had been overlaid with devotions, prayers and pilgrimages. The Gospel, he argued, mentioned nothing about rosaries, scapulars, brotherhoods, or papal bulls, all this “work of friars, as it is known in the world” (Ibid: 385). Although the main focus of his criticism was the abuse committed by the clergy against man’s natural freedom, or rather against a freedom that came from , for the poet, the kings were not entirely blameless. The kings were the ones who persecuted their loyal vassals at the behest of the clergy. The message was a strong one: “You supposed that you were kings; and slaves you were / to bonzes, through whom, foolishly, you persecuted / the purest, the most loyal vassals” (Ibid: 380). They were also guilty, he pointed out in another poem, of not withdrawing the friars from their kingdom, allowing them to enjoy the wealth of their population and to subject the people, and even the rulers, to the designs of Rome (Ibid: 386-387). In Filinto Elísio’s verses, the monarchs were represented as puppets in the hands of ecclesiastic hypocrites, interested only in achieving wealth and power. In this context, those who defended the truth and tried to open the eyes of the sovereign were pursued as heretics.

Those who tell the kings that the bonzes dull People to in order to have their goods To acquire powers and treats Are wicked and blaspheme the Scriptures: Those who defend the people’s rights, Or want to soften the steel scepter, The protector of Ignorance and Tyranny, Are more than Barabbas, they are ruddy Judas (Ibid: 381).

But Filinto Elísio did more than criticize the clergy or underline the culpability of the kings. On several occasions, he praised American Independence and the French

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Revolution in its early years. In his satirical verses, the France of 1791 was recalled as the place where Reason had already reached the throne and the post-independence United States was represented as the place where Freedom had defeated Tyranny.

Happy America! Courageous nation That broke free from the shackles of bondage! [...] Oh blissful! Oh good Americans! Because of your so fortunate example, Protective unfolding wings Do not visit and, committed, do not console With your flight disastrous empires, The poor oppressed people Reliant on the tyrant and foolish friars! (Ibid: 381-382).

Oh illustrious France, Queen of Nations, You tossed away the shameful mandate That to the press muffled the clear cry: You have redeemed it, now it sets you free (Ibid: 382). Happy people, who redeemed the forums Of freedom, to many divested! Only you are men (Ibid: 384).

In the discourse developed by the exiled poet, the criticism that was made of the worldly interests of the Portuguese clergy proceeded to defend a new political order which had, as its model, the United States after 1776 and France in the years 1790-91. The poet’s endeavors to reorganize the Portuguese religious reality seemed inseparable from a change in the political structures. It was necessary to eliminate not only the despotic clergy, but also the tyrannical king. And, for him, the monarchy became tyrannical whenever it ruled against the natural laws, depriving the vassals of their property, their freedom and their life. The Inquisition, the court that had persecuted people with royal consent, was also considered by the poet to be one of the dimensions of royal tyranny. His political aim, however, did not seem to be exactly the model of the Jacobin Republic, but a government whose throne was built upon Reason, which took the philosophers as its guide and was able to guarantee man’s natural freedom.

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The poetic compositions of Francisco Manuel do Nascimento bear the mark of his passage through the hands of the Inquisition and his subsequent flight from Portugal. The poet died in exile, singing about his homesickness, denouncing the violence of the Inquisition and regretting the Portuguese religious situation. In Portugal, the Epístola circulated as if it were a letter to the Inquisitor General. Filinto Elísio rejected this identity. In the 1817 edition, a note warned the reader that, against his wishes, it had been published in Portugal and that the ignorant minister that he spoke of in his poem was not the Inquisitor General. The Epístola's verses, he argued, did not portray any minister in particular, but simply all those who lacked knowledge (Ibid: 377). The criticism developed by Filinto Elísio in his poems was unusual among the Portuguese satirical verses that circulated at the end of the eighteenth century. The poems that described the lust of the clergy or that denounced their worldly interests were far more numerous and significant. In general, the criticisms were restricted to the realm of the Church, focusing on ministers, beliefs, and practices. Few poets defended a change in the political and social structures of the kingdom according to the models of revolutionary France and the United States after independence, as he did.

Conclusion

Both O Hissope and Epístola had, through the use of satirical language, criticized the political and religious situation of Portugal at the end of the eighteenth century. Both satires were banned in 1803, by the royal authorities. However, neither their messages nor their political implications were the same. Politically, the discourse developed by O Hissope shared a regalist conception of the state that was strengthened in the reign of Dom José I. For Antonio Diniz, both the clergy and the religious institutions should follow the early Christian Church’s parameters and search for evangelical simplicity and austerity. He used a discourse that: censured the clergy’s deviations, but without decrying its social and spiritual importance; condemned as hypocrisy a religiosity that was based solely on the manifestation of external actions, as shown by the false mystics and the false , people who had frequently acquired the reputation of great sanctity only because they had instilled this impression in others through their false appearance of piety; criticized the superstition expressed in the form of specific practices and beliefs, such as exorcisms, witchcraft and the act of blessing diseases; and defended an ecclesiastic community based on principles such as poverty, humility and

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 46 Nunes Satirical poetry and religious criticism simplicity, according to the models and teachings left by Jesus Christ and the first apostles. The revelation, the Bible, and the saints, all remained untouched. However, it is important to realize that even when the poems criticized specific episodes or searched for a reform of the clergy’s conduct, they nonetheless destroyed ecclesiastic reputations, contributing, either deliberately or not, to the process of delegitimizing the clergy’s image among the population. Which, ultimately, could reflect on the Catholic religion and the credibility of its teaching, since the clergy acted as the intermediary between the divine and the lay population. In 1777, the Lisbon merchant José Francisco Chaves, after having mentioned some inappropriate behavior on the part of the clergy, remarked, in a dissatisfied tone: “and they want us to be subordinated to one of these.”8 Within this framework, exposing the clergy’s deviations represented a threat to the legitimacy of the Catholic Church’s teachings; hence the problems behind O Hissope. Filinto Elísio did not limit himself to criticizing the behavior of the clergy or the practices that they engaged in, such as exorcisms. In his discourse, superstition (despite the fact that it incorporated these exorcisms) was related to a religiousness based on false doctrines that restricted man’s natural . His proposal for renewing and reforming this situation had, as its main models, the United States after its political independence, and the French Revolution in its early years. The conquest of freedom required both eliminating the influence of the Church in Portuguese political life and restructuring the monarchical power, which would have as its guide the philosophers of reason. In this sense, the criticism that he made of clerical despotism was inseparable from his rejection of the tyrannical monarchy, which was only concerned with satisfying the interests of Rome in detriment to human rights. Throughout his verses, the poet had revealed the perception that the Catholic Church’s discourse was a historical construction that obeyed certain purposes – to coerce and to intimidate the rural population – and promoted certain interests – greed and the maintenance in power of certain groups. Unlike Antonio Diniz in O Hissope, he delved more deeply into the proposals being made for the political and religious reorganization of the Portuguese kingdom at the end of the eighteenth century. If the two poems were so different in their messages about religion and its political consequences, why were they both banned by the royal authorities? It is hard to answer this question with any certainty. Nonetheless, it is possible to put forward some hypotheses. Even if they do not provide a conclusive answer, these hypotheses still help us to better understand what was at stake in that particular context.

8 Lisbon, National Archives, Tribunal do Santo Ofício, Inquisição de Lisboa, liv. 318/129º Cadernos do Promotor (1740-1761), f. 368. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 47 Nunes Satirical poetry and religious criticism

The first thing to be considered is the fact that modern societies were structured in accordance with a uniformity of opinions: merely speaking about something was as dangerous as speaking against it. Pina Manique, the General Intendant of the Police, was categorical in passing orders to his commissioners: he had always asked for discretion and secrecy in the execution of orders and the investigation of crimes. Whenever possible, public rumors should be avoided. Rumors, in any field, were considered to destabilize social harmony, since they could cause dissension and discord. The second dimension of the problem is related to the previous one: the perception that public opinion was based on a common voice. All that was commonly voiced should necessarily be true: the inquisitorial processes and their investigations had always repeated the formula that “it was common knowledge that…”, and the complaints and denunciations against those involved followed on from this (Ramos, 1995). In this sense, if it were commonly said that the clergy were vain, idle, greedy and useless to the republic, then this must be true. Controlling the common voice was not easy, because it implied restraining these rumors transmitted in conversations between students or between people walking along the Lisbon public promenades, or propagated in poems written to be read in taverns or even at literary gatherings, but which were soon copied and spread beyond the surroundings for which they were originally intended. Pina Manique was aware of this dimension of the problem, which he had considered even more serious in view of the troubled times that Europe was living though in the period after the French Revolution. For him, the French political chaos after 1789 was rooted in the lack of religiousness that had permeated the whole of the eighteenth century. Therefore, the fact that the rumors were about the Catholic religion, the very political and moral foundation of monarchical society, made them even more dangerous in the eyes of the Intendant. All of this led him to persecute not only the oral and/or written rumors, but also the practices of the clergy themselves, who ran away from their institutions, who were seen wearing secular clothes in taverns and gaming houses, or who walked along the public promenades accompanied by women, all of which created a general scandal. In the troubled times of the French Revolution, it was necessary to curb both those rumors that could undermine the legitimacy of the Catholic Church and its ministers and the abuses committed by these men, who, with their unruly practices, contributed to the emergence of yet more rumors, and, according to the Intendant, thereby strengthened the arguments of the philosophers who were opposed to religion; the same philosophers who, in his view, had plunged France into its revolutionary political chaos.

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References

Abreu, Laurinda (2007). “As relações entre o Estado e a Igreja em Portugal, na segunda metade do século XVIII: o impacto da legislação pombalina sobre as estruturas eclesiásticas”. In Problematizar a História – Estudos de História Moderna em Homenagem a Maria do Rosário Themudo Barata. Lisbon: Caldeidoscópio, 645-673. Abreu, Luís M. de (2004). Ensaios anticlericais. Lisbon: Roma Editora. Albuquerque, Luís de (1975). “O Reino da Estupidez” e a Reforma Pombalina. Coimbra: Atlântida. Andrade, Antônio da Guerra (1999). Dicionário de pseudônimos e iniciais. Lisbon: BN. Araújo, Ana Cristina (1997). A morte em Lisboa – Atitudes e Representações. 1700-1830. Lisbon: Editorial Notícias. Braga, Teófilo (1901). Filinto Elysio e os dissidentes da Arcádia. Porto: Livraria Chardron. Cândido, Antônio (1969). Formação da literatura brasileira. Vol. 1. São Paulo: Martins Fontes. Graça, Almeida R. (1983). Literatura e sociedade na obra de Frei Lucas de Santa Catarina (1660- 1740). Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda. Hansen, João A. (1989). “Positivo/Natural: sátira barroca e anatomia religiosa”. Estudos Avançados, 3(6): 64-88. Le Goff, Jacques (1993). O nascimento do purgatório. Lisbon: Editora Estampa. Massuelos, Ignacio de Sequeira [1791]. Epístola ao mto Revdo Sñr Fr. Jozé do Carmelo. London: s.n. Moniz, António M. de Andrade (2003). “A sociedade setecentista n’O Hissope de Cruz e Silva”. In Aníbal P. de Castro, José E. Pereira, Maria M. Delille and Teresa S. de Almeida (eds.), Alcipe e as Luzes. Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 189-206. Monteiro, Ofélia P. (1982). “Sobre uma versão desconhecida de O Reino da Estupidez”. Revista de História das Ideias, 4-II: 199-247. Nascimento, Francisco Manuel do (1999). Obras completas de Filinto Elísio, Fernando Moreira (ed.). Vol. V. Braga: Edições APPACDM. ____ (1806). Versos de Filinto Elysio. Vol. VII. Paris: Chez Barrois. ____ (1817). Obras completas de Filinto Elysio. Vol. I-II. Paris: Na Officina de A. Bobée. Pocock, John (2003). Linguagens do Ideário político. São Paulo: EdUsp. Ramos, Donald (1995). “A voz popular e a cultura popular no Brasil do século XVIII”. In Maria Beatriz N. da Silva (ed.), Cultura portuguesa na terra de Santa Cruz. Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 137-154. Rémond, René (1976). L'anticlericalisme en France de 1815 à nos jours. Paris: Fayard. Rodrigues, Claudia (2008). “As leis testamentárias de 1765 e 1769 no contexto das “reformas pombalinas” no mundo luso-brasileiro”. XIII Encontro de História Anpuh-Rio. Available at http://encontro2008.rj.anpuh.org/resources/content/anais/1212772170_ARQUIVO_Asl eistestamentariasde1765e1769-CLAUDIARODRIGUES.pdf, accessed on 08/10/2015. Sané, A. M. (1808). Poésie lyrique portugaise, ou choix des odes de Francisco Manuel. Paris: Chez Cérioux Jeune. Silva, António Diniz da Cruz e (2006). “O Hissope: poema herói-cómico”, Ana Maria G. Martin and Pedro Serra (eds.). Coimbra: Angelus Novus. Skinner, Quentin (1999). Liberdade antes do liberalismo. São Paulo: Editora UNESP. Starling, Heloisa (2003). “Visionários: a imaginação republicana nas Minas Setecentistas”. Revista USP, 0 (59): 54-71. Teixeira, Ivan (1999). Mecenato Pombalino e Poesia Neoclássica. São Paulo: EdUsp.

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Received for publication: 15 February 2016 Accepted in revised form: 9 August 2016 Recebido para publicação: 15 de Fevereiro de 2016 Aceite após revisão: 9 de Agosto de 2016

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 50 Tradition and Modernity in Portuguese Liberal Political Culture – on the Topic of the Constitution

Sérgio Campos Matos1

Abstract

How did the first waves of in Portugal relate to tradition and modernity? The focus of this article is on a topic that had much currency in the 1810s and 1820s, in Portugal as well as in Spain, being prominent both in Liberal discourse and public opinion, namely the Constitution. It was a concept used both within Liberal culture and by supporters of the Ancien Régime. It was a cause that mobilized public opinion towards political transformation, but it also embodied traditional values. To what extent were constitutions seen as instruments for framing politics? And what was the political function of historical constitutionalism?

Keywords

Tradition, modernity, Constitution, historical constitutionalism, liberalism

Resumo

Como se relacionaram tradição e a modernidade nas primeiras vagas do liberalismo em Portugal? Este artigo centra-se num tema que teve larga recepção nos decénios de 1810 e de 1820, em Portugal bem como em Espanha, proeminente no discurso liberal e na opinião pública da época: a Constituição. Foi um conceito usado pela cultura liberal e pelos partidários do antigo regime e uma causa que mobilizou a opinião pública no sentido da transformação política, mas que também corporizou valores tradicionais. Em que medida foram as constituições instrumentos de enquadramento político? Qual foi a função política do chamado constitucionalismo histórico?

Palavras-chave

Tradição, modernidade, Constituição, constitucionalismo histórico, liberalismo

1 University of Lisbon. E-mail: [email protected] Matos Tradition and Modernity

The problem I wish to address can be formulated in the following way: how did mythical tradition and modernity coexist in the early phases of the liberal political experiment? The focus of this article is on a topic that had much currency in the 1810s and 1820s, in Portugal as well as in Spain, being prominent both in liberal discourse and public opinion, the Constitution. Let us take two examples of the engagement of tradition and modernity in the most important constitutional texts in nineteenth-century Portugal, the 1822 Constitution and the 1826 Constitutional Charter. In the first, we read in the Preamble that “In the name of the holy and indivisible trinity,” the Constitutional Cortes express the conviction that “the public misfortunes that have so greatly been oppressing and still oppress it [the nation], had their origin in the disdain for the rights of the Citizen, and in forgetting the fundamental laws of the Monarchy” (Miranda, 2001: 66).2 The neglect of these fundamental laws – the former Portuguese Constitution – was thus taken to be the cause of the decline of the nation. However, these fundamental laws were partly related to a foundational myth, the bogus Cortes of , a tradition invented in the seventeenth century and popularized in 1632 in the context of resistance to , during which representatives of the Three Estates were alleged to have legitimized the first king of Portugal. The second example is from the highly significant Preamble to the Constitutional Charter granted by Dom Pedro IV in 1826. In the opening words, the monarch “By the grace of God. King of Portugal and the Algarves etc.”– that is, by divine impulse, like Louis XVIII, “souverain par la grâce de Dieu” in the French charter of 1814 – makes it known “to all My Portuguese Subjects that I am Pleased to Decree Give and Order to be sworn immediately by the Three Orders of the State, the Constitutional Charter […] which henceforth shall govern my Kingdoms and ” (Idem: 115). So, this Preamble still invokes providential legitimacy and the juridical status of the Ancien Régime – the Three Orders of the State –while the very first article defines the as a “Political Association of all the Portuguese citizens” (Art. 1).

Tradition and Modernity

I start from the principle that modernity is only affirmed in relation to a particular tradition. As a Mexican historian rightly observed, “without tradition there is no modernity” (Zermeño, 2010: 67). We find many signs of an awareness of this necessary

2 About the engagement of tradition and modernity, see also António Manuel Hespanha (2015). e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 52 Matos Tradition and Modernity relationship. Gumersindo Laverde, a liberal intellectual and Spanish romantic, wrote in 1860: “It is principally tradition that gives us our sense of greatness and progress.’3 For nineteenth-century liberals, tradition was the bearer of a view of the future and of progress. However, since the beginning of the twentieth century, aesthetic and political vanguards have made it their intention to extinguish tradition. A well-known example is Futurism, which nursed the idea that cultural and aesthetic creativity set out from zero, from a rupture with everything that is past and with all the world’s memory (including libraries, archives and academies). But obviously that break is meaningless without whatever was behind it – the very profundity (or superficiality) of the rupture can only be understood by knowing what went before. There is an excellent example of this relationship between the appeal of innovation and the entrenchment of tradition in the modernist magazine Contemporânea (1922-26), on which Portuguese and Spanish modernists and traditionalists collaborated, including Fernando Pessoa, António Sardinha, Gomez de la Serna, etc. On the one hand, it aimed to be modern and cosmopolitan, open to new arts and aesthetics; on the other hand, its contributors included Lusitanian Integralists, traditionalist Catholics, and supporters of the organic monarchy. The Latin word traditio means what is transmitted, the cultural heritage of the past. Modernitas is a word coined between the eleventh and the twelfth centuries, by which the present expresses its superiority over the past (Zermeño, 2010: 56). What we call modernity corresponds to multiple historical experiences – “multiple modernities,” to use the term coined by an authority on the subject (Eisenstadt, 2007). Since the middle of the nineteenth century, cultural modernity has been related to an awareness of crisis, associated with vanguards, with the appeal of the new, of speed, of attitudes critical of society and of bourgeois modernity – the latter being related to scientific and technical progress, and scientism (Calinescu, 1999). For his part, Ortega y Gassett distinguished epochs of continuity – “cumulative epochs of perfect homogeneity between what it inherits and itself”–and epochs of rupture – “eliminatory and polemical epochs” (Ortega y Gassett, 1923: 24-26). Where should we situate nineteenth-century Portugal in this regard? As in other European countries, the nineteenth century was a time of rupture and continuity. We know that history is made of both change and continuity, but there are moments when events are concentrated and accelerated, in which the speed of change increases. Liberal modernity embraces an idea and a sense of acceleration, an acceleration that can be converted into a “model of experience” in which “all history is transformed retrospectively

3 El Mundo Pintoresco, 4-12-1860 (Hernandez, 2015: 440). e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 53 Matos Tradition and Modernity into a temporal sequence of increasing acceleration” (Koselleck, 2003: 69). This is evidently related to the subject of technical – and moral – progress, but this acceleration also embeds itself in our accumulated experience of the past. How did nineteenth-century intellectuals understand modernity? It was a modernity linked to their experience of change, a sense of crisis, and frequently with the idea of revolution – the French Revolution and those that followed, especially that of 1848 (though revolution could also be understood not as a rupture but as an evolution). Those Portuguese historians who had the greatest impact on the public – Herculano and Oliveira Martins –referred to the liberal revolution as a rupture in the historical tradition, but the liberal elite, and after it the republican elite, legitimized their exercise of power by invoking the historical tradition. It should be noted that the notion of what is modern involved (and still involves) ambiguities. For example, when Herculano discusses the origins of Portugal in the Middle Ages, he speaks of a modern nation that emerged in the twelfth century through a process of “revolution and conquest” (as opposed to a traditional and mythical conception of an ancient nation, Lusitania), a nation that since the fifteenth century had been identified – in his view erroneously – with Lusitania and the Portuguese as Lusitanians (Herculano, 1980 [1846]: 82-83). In other words, Varnhagen rejected Indianist origins of Brazil. But, if there is in Herculano an apology for liberal modernity, it is also a fact that he concerns himself with rooting that modernity in the medieval institutions in which its origins lay, the local councils (concelhos) and the parliaments (Cortes).

I wish that we could reconnect modern to ancient liberty. I love ancient things; but I don’t love worn-out things. From what I know, from studying the institutions of our Middle Ages one finds there almost all the principles of liberty that are believed to have been discovered in our times […] (Herculano, s.a.: 309)

And he understood the cult of national memory as a means of reinvigorating the decayed present, a past acting on the present:

In the midst of a nation in decline but rich in traditions, the need to recall the past is a sort of moral magistracy, it is a type of priestly duty. Those who are able and know how should exercise those duties; because not to do so is a crime. (Herculano, s.a. [1st edn 1843]: 13-14)

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For his part, Oliveira Martins in his Portugal Contemporâneo (1880) shows that he is well aware of the weight of the Portugal of tradition, which he calls “historical Portugal,” and of which, in the nineteenth century, Dom Miguel and Miguelismo would be a typical expression. This “historical nation” resisted the imported liberal system as being “foreign” (Martins, 1953, I, p. 61). But an interesting point that has not been noted is that Oliveira Martins questions the “intellectual and moral progress” of his time (namely Fontismo and its “material improvements”), pointing out not only profound disagreements on matters of political economy, but also a “decline in character” and the “denationalization in culture.” Himself a man of European culture, who recognized a certain cosmopolitan character in the nation, he nevertheless lamented the break in the “intellectual tradition,” the loss of literary quality in the language (he forgets here the innovative work of his friend Eça de Queiroz, amongst others), and the dominant influence of French culture (Idem: 23). However, is not the critical devaluation of the present and the exultation of the past a regular theme amongst traditionalist currents? Undoubtedly, but not only. A critical attitude towards the present and the mythification of a particular past run transversely through many different political orientations. The historical legitimization of the nation and its rootedness in the past necessitates enhancing the value of the vigorous days of its origins. When the nation is seen as an instrument of modernity – and that is the case up until our own times – it is understandable that an insistence on the question of “nationalization” (making Portuguese once again) versus “denationalization” was not confined to currents of opinion among the liberals, the republicans, or even many socialists. We find this concern in Eça de Queiroz, in Teixeira de Pascoaes, in Jaime Cortesão, but we also find it among the traditionalists, such as the Lusitanian Integralists. And not just in Portugal, but also in Brazil, in Spain, or in Italy, we find the call for nationalization (Matos, 2013). The political vocabulary of liberal culture in its formative period also expresses this close relationship between modernity and tradition in a particularly significant way. In it, there remain certain ambiguities with regard to its most fundamental concepts: constitution, parliament (Cortes), regeneration (with the sense of rebirth). It is a historicist lexicon mobilized in order to construct a different present. The future to come should be inspired upon an idealized vision of a distant past. In liberal and republican historical culture, there still remained ancient mythical traditions, which were less consensual since they generated lively public debates: the constitutional tradition of the Cortes of Lamego (whose apocryphal proceedings were sometimes identified with the fundamental laws invented in the

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 55 Matos Tradition and Modernity seventeenth century), the myth of the Lusitanians, the miracle of Christ’s appearance at the Battle of , the navigational school at Sagres. Some of these traditions – notably the Cortes of Lamego and the supposed Sagres school – were often cultivated with the intention of highlighting the pioneering and exceptional character of the Portuguese nation and its historical experience. And they were employed by authors with the most varied cultural backgrounds, whether traditionalists or liberals, or even republicans and socialists. Some of these traditions still shaped the historical conscience in the Portugal of the nineteenth century. How did the first waves of liberalism in Portugal relate tradition and modernity, that is, a view of past experience and a vision for the future? In order to reflect on this issue, I have selected the topic of the Constitution. It was a cause that mobilized public opinion towards political transformation, but it also embodied traditional values. Alongside the Cortes – also called the ancient parliaments – it became the place for a prolonged debate on the legitimacy of power. Because of the multiplicity of meanings they could carry, the Constitution, as well as Parliaments, were concepts with a long political history that could play an important role in the age of revolution and change. The deployment of these concepts at a time of crisis for the old colonial system and the old regime secured a sense of modernity, but they were also well anchored in a political heritage that reached back to the Middle Ages. I will focus on the first one, the Constitution. How closely was this concept related to historical traditions and also to modernity? And what was the political function of the so-called historical constitutionalism? Under the old regime, politics was, at least theoretically, the preserve of the monarch and of small circles of power, whether at a national (Secretaries of State, counselors, etc.) or a local level (only the leading figures took part in the election of local councils). At the time of the liberal revolutions, there was a commitment to broadening the field of political activity, with the nationals of each state suddenly becoming citizens. But, in Portugal, it has to be admitted that a liberal public opinion, in the modern sense, only appeared after 1808, growing in importance later with vintismo and afterwards, in the course of the debate on the succession to the king, Dom João VI (Monteiro, 2013: 65). The first Portuguese liberal constitution, of 1822, was regarded not only as a foundational law, but, like the Cadiz Constitution, was explicitly referred to as a Political Constitution. In the conservative Constitutional Charter of 1826, the Kingdom of Portugal is designated as “the Political Association of all the Portuguese Citizens” (Miranda, 2001: 59

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 56 Matos Tradition and Modernity and 115).4 These qualifications were formulated through a long, unending process of expanding the field of politics. In the nineteenth century, this involved fierce debates and conflicts, a slow widening of popular suffrage, and a slow growth in the schooling and literacy of the population, accompanied by an extraordinary growth in the political press and the exercise of public opinion (Tengarrinha, 2013, 322-324).

Nationals and Citizens

The modern concept of the citizen emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century in the age of revolutions (Rosanvallon, 1992) and in the Ibero-American world, deriving especially from the French occupation of the Iberian Peninsula, although asynchronously in Spain and its former colonies (Aljovín de Losada, 2009). In the first Portuguese constitutional text (1822), all Portuguese were considered citizens (Art. 21), but not all Portuguese enjoyed the rights of citizenship. There were no property requirements affecting the right to join the electoral roll for the Chamber of Deputies, but a series of legal and practical restrictions meant that the overwhelming majority of Portuguese nationals could not exercise their right to vote in these elections. For example, the Constitution stated that, in the future, only men who were over the age of twenty-five and literate could vote. At a time when more than 80% of Portuguese could not read or write, the great majority of the population could not enter the political nation: they could neither vote nor stand for election (Art. 34, I). The 1812 Cadiz Constitution and the 1791 French Constitution had distinguished between nationals and citizens. Of these, only citizens were allowed to exercise political rights. In Spain, political rights were denied to those who were of African origin, women, foreigners, convicts, those without visible employment, domestic servants, and debtors. As had been the case with the first experiments in Portuguese Liberalism, the Cadiz deputies invoked historical traditions, which they claimed as the source of their rights and liberties. As in the Portuguese period of vintismo (1820-23), in Spain the nation was linked to the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion, which led to limitations on the freedom of expression, and to forms of intolerance (Pérez Ledesma, 2009, and Silva, 2014). The concept of the citizen was also defined in relation to another identity-based point of reference, the political nation, an ideal nation that can be seen as the result of representation (Lorente, 2010, 31). In one of his law manuals, Coelho da Rocha asserts that

4 In the 1838 Constitution, the same was to be said, not of the Kingdom, but of the Nation. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 57 Matos Tradition and Modernity the title of citizen should be restricted to the “members of the political community,” that is, those able to occupy elected public positions. In this way, we see that the liberal tradition distinguishes civil rights, which are derived from natural rights, from political rights, which are restricted to those in society who have attained a certain level of wealth and education.5 Furthermore, the concept of the citizen was marked by a political conflict, as the res publica was not composed only of virtuous citizens. For Mouzinho da Silveira, there was also the “criminal” citizen, who asserted “his private good against the public good – either by being a courtier to the Sovereign or by being a courtier to the people” (Silveira, s.a.: 714). Alongside the restrictions on the exercise of citizenship – also evident in the distinction between active citizen and passive citizen, introduced by Sieyès and to be found in the 1826 Constitutional Charter – we find politics as an ideal of virtue. And one of the greatest virtues was patriotism (‘loving the homeland’), which was taken, alongside a respect for religion and obedience to the constitution, to be one of the principal duties of the Portuguese (Art. 19 of the 1822 Constitution). But politics was not all virtue. In the periodical press at the time of the first liberal experiments, there appeared critical references to the “deceitful politics of the Court” (O Compilador, 1821), to “political fanaticism” (Punhal dos Corcundas, 1823) or to “political vices” (O Amigo da Ordem, 1820) (Verdelho, 1981: 182-83). At a time when the conflicts between revolution and counter-revolution were very heated, it is not surprising that the very concept of politics should be touched by that confrontation, in an increasing pathos that would lead to the harsh repression of liberals during the reigns of Dom Miguel (1828-34) in Portugal and of Fernando VII in Spain (particularly between 1823 and 1833, after the fall of the three-year-long constitutional regime), and during the civil wars that took place in both Spain and Portugal. We should note the polarized debate between the supporters of Dom Pedro and Dom Miguel, immediately prior to the Portuguese Civil War of 1832-34, on the subject of the legitimacy of each of the possible successors to Dom João VI. On both sides, the proponents were very harsh and each excluded his adversary from the field of politics. Note the terms in which the supporters of liberalism expressed themselves. The factional politics promoted by the supporters of Dom Miguel, the usurping faction, were regarded very negatively, as not only were they opposed to the national interest, but they were also alien to the very nation itself and to constitutional legality. The

5 M. A. Coelho da Rocha, Instituições do Direito Civil Português, 1848, quoted by Ramos, 2009: 289. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 58 Matos Tradition and Modernity ascension to the throne of Dom Miguel by illicit means was regarded in Portugal and in European circles as a “political tragedy,” since the Miguelistas had rebelled against their legitimate king, Dom Pedro (Manifesto dos direitos...: 21). But it was also in the name of the nation – a nation that was “essentially monarchical” and identified with the Roman Catholic religion and a society composed of estates – that the legitimists rose up against the “democratic faction,”6 which they reduced to a mere military faction, a group of “degenerate Portuguese’, alienated from the body of the nation. For the liberals, by contrast, the nation was a self-determined political principle conceived as a whole, having an autonomous will (Matos, 2008: 116-117). Thus, both the liberal and the absolutist camps employed a contested notion of European politics within the scope of which national politics operated. There are four notable aspects to the prolonged controversy about the legitimate successor to Dom João VI, which took place in 1826, and is still insufficiently studied: 1) the awareness that this was a confrontation not only at a national level, but also at the European level; “European politics” was at stake; 2) for the most part, the opposing “parties” used a common political vocabulary, despite their different meanings: homeland, kingdom, nation, faction, citizen, Cortes, ancient constitution, etc.; 3) in either of the guidelines – the liberal and absolutist – the opponents were excluded and considered cliquish and were therefore strangers to the political unit that was the nation; and 4) they invoked not only the laws of succession as practiced throughout Portuguese history and established by the Fundamental Laws (at the mythical Cortes of Lamego), but also the will of the nation – the free approval of the Portuguese, through national consensus (Manique, 1872: 48 and 53). Homeland (patria) and nation became the reference points of identity which tended to occupy the space until then filled by the monarch, as the basis of sovereignty. Homeland and nation were also political points of reference. In Spain, from 1812 onwards, the nation became the key concept around which the different theories of the state and the constitution were formed (Varela Carpegna, 2012: 12-13). Even before the first liberal experiment, amongst the topics discussed by the intellectual elite in opposition to the existing order, pride of place went to the Constitution and the parliament (Graça and J. S. Silva Dias, 1980: 570, 590-91).

6 “Manifesto do Senhor Dom Miguel Primeiro” (1832), Manique, 1872: 159. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 59 Matos Tradition and Modernity

Old and New Constitutions

In Roman law, a constitution referred particularly to the laws of a prince. The concept was used to designate legal discipline: for example, Bluteau gives the meaning as a “statute” or a “rule” (Bluteau, 1713, 485-486), while a Castilian dictionary of the same period gives the verb “to constitute” the meaning of “to establish, ordain, institute […] laws and rules for the regulation and government of a Kingdom, Republic or Community” (Hespanha, 2004: 68). And if, in Castile, in the second half of the eighteenth century, there had already built up a sense of “historical accumulation” (Portillo, 2009: 375), in the era of liberal revolutions, the word “constitution” gained new meanings. In the context of the work of the constituent assembly during the French Revolution, the idea of constitution corresponded, as Georges Gusdorf suggests, to a “demand for rationality,” and a collective foundational contract for a new order,” one that involved not only a real change of practice, but also “a change in the human condition” (Gusdorf, 1978: 197). A new political order, involving a new concept of both sovereignty and political authority, required, from the viewpoint of legitimacy, a different type of reasoning. Borrowing the conceptualization of , this new concept of national sovereignty can be seen as the replacement of the legitimate domination “of a traditional character” by a rational legitimacy (Weber, 1995 [1922]: 289). But, in the case of Portugal, and perhaps of Spain, the dichotomy between these two types of political legitimization may not be so obvious. For the liberal revolutions in the Portuguese and Brazilian world, as in the Spanish world, the relationship between tradition and modernity, between the old and the new, took on particular features. To what extent did this particularity have to do with the fact that the Portuguese revolution took place while the king Dom João VI and his court were in Brazil? François-Xavier Guerra and, more recently, Javier Fernández Sebastián have emphasized that the revolutions in the Spanish world were not made against the monarch, but rather in favor of an absent monarch, which distinguishes them from the French and American revolutions of the North Atlantic (Fernández Sebastián, 2010: 187). Something similar happened in the Portuguese case, though the absence of the monarch was voluntary rather than forced. In fact, the Portuguese liberal revolution was not made against the monarch – rather it needed the monarchy to legitimize itself by invoking a much more distant medieval past, a time when the Portuguese were allegedly happy with their monarchs, whose power was tempered by the action of the Cortes and the municipalities.

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A point that shows the strong similarities between the Spanish revolution and the one taking place in Portugal and Brazil is evident in the recourse to a national memory of the origins of the state and the way that these were instrumental in the construction of certain ideas of the political nation. In fact, it has been noted that Spanish constitutionalism based itself specifically on its Catholic character, very obvious in its confessional nature. Although open to external influences, it based itself on an inherited political culture marked by a tradition of pacts, neo-scholasticism, and (Fernández Sebastián, 2010: 214). In Portugal, this type of constitutionalism was influential in the seventeenth century, with the forging of the apocryphal acts of the Cortes of Lamego and the revolution of 1640, traditionally seen as a form of restoration. It was based on a contractualist theory that harked back to a much earlier time “without usurpation or tyranny” (Cunha, 2000/2001: 308), since it looked to a mythical tradition of foundation allegedly situated in the twelfth century at the time of Portugal’s autonomy from Leon and Castile, the Cortes of Lamego. It should also be noted that, both in Portugal and in Spain, the confrontation between the liberal revolution and tradition also took the form of civil wars with a dynastic component (the existence of legitimist branches personified in Dom Miguel and Dom Carlos), giving rise to lively debates on the historical and juridical legitimacy of the contenders to the throne. The historical argument had a relevant role on both the liberal and the counter-revolutionary side. In the liberal Manifesto to the Portuguese in August 1820, the present time is not greatly differentiated from the more distant past. If there is a distancing, it is in relation to the near past, a time when the courts and the ancient constitution had fallen into disuse. It conveys, then, the idea that to restore the ancient constitution, under the aegis of religion, the throne and the homeland, would equate to recovering the lost collective contentment (Tomás, 1982 [1820]). The idea was not new: it had been laid out by Rocha Loureiro in London, in 1814.7 In France, too, in the early days of the National Assembly, there were those who took the constitution to be a restoration of the earlier order, fairer than that of the Ancien Régime (Gusdorf, 1978: 194). But the majority of the deputies were in favor of producing a new constitution and, as we know, the dynamic behind the elaboration of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen departed from the idea of preserving an earlier constitution. In Portugal, that same alternative of an old constitution or a new constitution presented itself. Moderate liberals such as Fernandes Tomás tended to emphasize the

7 J. B. Rocha Loureiro O Portuguez, vol. I, nº 6, Oct. 1814, p. 480 (Dias, 1980: 592). e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 61 Matos Tradition and Modernity engagement between the present time of revolution and the past, in order to see the revolution as a restoration. But the acceleration in the political experiment imposed new meanings on these key concepts in the political sphere: the constitution and the parliament (Cortes) (Matos, 2015, 235-241). In the Constituent Assembly, radical deputies, such as Margiochi, were to signal a break with the past: the new Constitution would have nothing to do with the ancient fundamental laws. That is, it was a case of constructing a constitution from scratch. In the Constituent Assembly of 1821, there was a fierce debate on the ancient fundamental laws and on the medieval Cortes. At stake was not only the political problem of the role of parliament, but also the question of the vocabulary being used (fundamental laws, ancient constitution, new constitution, Cortes), and of course the historical veracity (or otherwise) of the Cortes of Lamego. While some deputies still saw the ancient Cortes as the basis for general prosperity and contentment, and associated the newly-elected Assembly with these principles, others saw clear differences between the ancient and the modern parliamentary institutions. They argued that the ancient fundamental laws did not comprise a true constitution since they did not define the sovereignty of the nation (how power should be exercised, the rights of the nation, the obligations of citizens); also that they varied a great deal (meaning that they could not shape an effective constitution); and that, according to these laws, the three branches of power – the executive, the legislature and the judiciary – were concentrated in the figure of the monarch. Besides, the Cortes of Lamego had merely established the rules of succession to the throne. For the deputy Inácio da Costa Brandão, in the medieval Cortes “there was no national representation, since you could not call the assembly of proxies of a few supplicant folk national representation’. For this reason, he underlined the modernity of what the Constituent Assembly was doing and objected to the language adopted in the Preamble:

Let us speak frankly and plainly as befits the Representatives of a free Nation […]; let us say that we are going to make a new Constitution, because our ancient Constitution, made at a time when the rights of man and of Nations were unknown or disdained, is insufficient to secure for us the dignity, and contentment to which we have a right.8

Another example came from the radical deputy, Margiochi:

8 Inacio da Costa Brandão, cf. Diário das Cortes Gerais e Extraordinárias da Nação Portuguesa, 126, 13-07-1821: 1531-32. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 62 Matos Tradition and Modernity

We are going to make a new Constitution, with which our fundamental laws and everything that has happened under this Monarchy have no relation. Our ancestors had no idea of this division of powers that we are going to establish today, or of many other things. Their Cortes were summoned mainly for the business of the Exchequer. As a consequence, no great importance should be given to the fundamental laws of our Monarchy. Furthermore, I judge these fundamental laws to be very questionable; I don’t know if we have in the Cortes of Lamego many things by which we can make this comparison.9

The present undertaking was thus regarded as a novelty, making a break with the past. As Fernando Catroga has noted, it was from the time of the Manifesto do Supremo Governo do Reino aos Portugueses (October 31, 1820) and the Martinhada (November 11-17, 1820) that the modern concepts of sovereignty and the principle of representation were adopted, thereby subordinating the idea of summoning the Cortes in the old manner (Catroga, 2013: 281) – a measure that had been proposed by the government of the Kingdom and promptly challenged by their liberal opponents.10 But there were those who were inclined to invoke the ancient Constitution, amongst them the moderate leader Fernandes Tomás, who was surprised that they should question the Cortes of Lamego, and came out in their defense (Diário das Cortes… , nº 126, 13.07.1821, 1527). What ancient constitution was it upon which the early Portuguese liberals retrospectively projected their collective contentment? It was the traditional law, the , the fundamental laws of the Kingdom, which had been approved by the supposed first Cortes assembled in Lamego in 1143 (which regulated the succession to the throne and had been supposedly created by the aristocracy and by representatives of the people in a foundational assembly also held in Lamego). They were, then, the product of a confluence of the aristocratic principle and the democratic principle, of the king and the people. They formed the basis for a limited monarchy, in which the royal power was tempered. For Almeida Garrett, these principles of a tempered monarchy had been inherited from the peoples of Northern Europe. The idea of fundamental laws as the regulating mechanism of power, and as representative of the will of society, was adopted by European theoreticians, such as

9 Diário das Cortes Gerais e Extraordinárias da Nação Portuguesa, 122, 09-07-1821: 1478. 10 Cf. “Manifesto”, Documentos para a história das Cortes Gerais da Nação Portuguesa, t. I 1820-1816, Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1883, 80-83. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 63 Matos Tradition and Modernity

Pufendorf, Burlamaqui, Woff, and Vatell (Castro, 1986: 612). Developed by Spanish political culture, they would gain favor amongst the enlightened men of the seventeenth century and later amongst the royalist and conservative liberals of the nineteenth century. They did not correspond to the formal requirements of the liberal or democratic constitution, but rather described a traditional, but unsystematic form of legislation. In this respect, they came close to the English constitutional system, to the “flexible constitution” to which English jurists refer (Miranda, 1997: 130). As a matter of fact, in England, the seventeenth-century theory of the ancient and immemorial Constitution was also turned into an instrument of resistance and a justification for the revolution of 1688 (Pocock, 1987 [1957]), and it would prevail in nineteenth-century constitutional history. But historical constitutionalism had deep roots in a medieval Church tradition, later espoused by the neo-scholastics of the seventeenth century: the doctrine of the popular origin of royal power, complemented by an idea of a pactum subjectiones and of the lawful resistance to unrestrained power (Merêa, 1923: 230-31). In France, too, the topic of Fundamental Laws was invoked in vague terms to designate ancient political laws that placed obligations upon subjects, but also represented moral limits to the royal power. They were described as the ancient French constitution, at times used to combat the new constitution which was to be adopted in 1791, for example, by the traditionalist de Maistre (Gusdorf, 1978: 193). In Portugal and Brazil, at the end of the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth century, an analysis of the concept of a constitution reveals the absence of a rupture with the world of pre- modern tradition (Neves, 2009: 345). In Portugal, this idea of an ancient constitution was rather consensual, while the 1822 Constitution was far from being so. It became a key topic in the political confrontation between its supporters and its detractors. In the months following the military coup in Porto, in August 1820, groups of people held demonstrations in the main square, demanding a Constitution (Alves, 2014: 50). The metaphors associated with it – such as “the majestic edifice of the liberal constitution” – clearly show the relevance it acquired. We could also see this relevance in monuments, prints, toponymy, etc. The same happened with the Cadiz Constitution, and, even in Italy, where it was compared to a “majestic pyramid” (Obras constitucionais...: 7). Equally significant was the fact that, on the triumphal arch created in the Rossio, in Lisbon, there should be inscribed the word “Constitution’, and there was a project to erect a monument celebrating the fundamental law in the place where today there is a column topped by a statue of Dom Pedro IV (Pinheiro, 2000: 18). Criticisms of the constitution mostly appeared after the

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 64 Matos Tradition and Modernity heyday of the 1820 revolution (Verdelho 1981: 288). And, in early 1823, in the anti-liberal armed rebellion that he led in the north of the country, the Count of Amarante shouted “Death to the Constitution” (Lousada and Ferreira, 2006: 37). As we have seen, modern Constitutionalism was not seen as being above politics; rather, it was a central topic in the political debate between liberals and Miguelistas (absolutists) and, of course, in political culture in general. Nor should it be forgotten that, in the political culture of early liberalism in Portugal and Spain, the elites were well informed about the European and American constitutions, which they read attentively. For example, in an anonymous text dated 1821, alongside a defense of the interests noted in the political regime of the United States, there was interwoven a criticism of mixed monarchical governments in which there coexisted both the aristocratic element and the democratic element, in confrontation with one another. This was true of England, in which the oligarchic interests of the great landowners and capitalists came to dominate (Reflexões sobre o pacto social... 1821, pp. 73-74). However, this radical democratic criticism of the English system did not prevent this author from judging that the system of national representation adopted in Europe had its origins in its northern peoples, “enthusiastic lovers of liberty and equality,” who had then spread across the continent. Another critic of the 1822 Portuguese Constitution was Garrett, for whom it had erased the aristocratic principle, which seemed to him a mistake that had led to democracy degenerating into “illegal demagogy” (Garrett, s.a. [1830]: 208-09). And, for Herculano, it was democratic and “very nearly republican, but completely inapplicable to the country” (Herculano, s.a.: 296). Herculano had a very negative view of democracy, which he identified with the “tyranny of the plebs,” plebs standing in contrast to the people (Saraiva, 1953: 144). The moderate Constitutional Charter, however, at least at the time of the fight against the regime of Dom Miguel and the Civil War, was more consensual. Across liberal Europe the idea that the Portuguese case was a good example of a constitutional monarchy gained currency. But evidently the Charter also had its critics, more vocal in times of crisis, who included republicans such as Teófilo Braga, and other figures such as Eça de Queiroz and Oliveira Martins. Coming back to the initial questions: though they excluded the large majority of the nationals from political rights, the two most relevant constitutional texts in Portugal, the 1822 Constitution and the 1826 Constitutional Charter, became fundamental political points of reference. When the 1822 Constitution was restored, in 1836, the two were claimed by opposing political currents, that is, by radical liberals (and later republicans) and

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 65 Matos Tradition and Modernity by moderate liberals, respectively. They were totems that, throughout the nineteenth century, represented the separation between the supporters of constitutional monarchy and its more radical critics. Can we say of historical constitutionalism – the “ancient constitution” – that it was seen as being above politics? It is true that it was “nationalized’, that it belonged to historical memory, and also to a mythical tradition. But it had been instrumentalized by political opponents for their own ends, in order to legitimize their claim to power. While the radicals tended towards a break with the ancient constitution, the moderate liberals tried to legitimize their political program of a temperate monarchy by referring to the antecedent of the “ancient constitution.” However, there was a large consensus on the topic at the Extraordinary Cortes in 1821, which led to the approval of the preamble of the 1822 Constitution. Even by the end of the nineteenth century, some republican intellectuals such as Teófilo Braga still referred to the “fundamental laws” as a root of Portuguese democracy. But the theme of a constitution also had an undeniably forward-looking and utopian meaning. One example was Sinibaldo de Mas’s idea that Portugal and Spain should negotiate a constitution for a future Iberian state. Certainly, some republicans accepted the authenticity of a mythical tradition that formed part of constitutionalism, historically; José de Arriaga, for example, accepted the Cortes of Lamego. However, was that tradition not a retrospective utopia? A final example of the close relationship between tradition and modernity, of the presence of the past in the present, is the theory of an ancient democratic origin to the Iberian monarchies. Discussion of the egalitarian idiosyncrasy of the nation was very frequent in nineteenth-century Spanish historiography, among liberals as well as among conservatives. As Guizot noted, the concept of democracy was common to all political factions: “It is the sovereign word, all the parties invoke it and want to appropriate it as a talisman” (Guizot, 1849: 7). Juán Donoso Cortés and Menendez Pelayo wrote about the Spanish monarchy as being a democratic one. For instance, Menendez Pelayo saw Spain as “the most egalitarian land in Europe […] the only country in which [the rights of the people] have never been negated” (Fernández Sebastián, 2002: 221). The first liberals invoked an ancient and virtuous constitution, by which the people supposedly enjoyed agency through the Cortes, which functioned as a national pact between the monarchs and the common people. In French liberal political culture, Portugal was often seen as a good example of a constitutional, liberal and modern state in nineteenth-century Europe.

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The notion that the Portuguese monarchy had been representative and constitutional, with some elected kings (Afonso Henriques, Dom João I, Dom João IV), along with the idea that democracy had ancient roots in Portugal, became commonplace over the course of the nineteenth century. As in Spain, these topoi formed part of a popular theory of history that was widely employed by republican historians and politicians. Let us take two examples. For Teófilo Braga, “the fundamental bases of modern democracy” were laid at the Cortes of 1641, with the “principle that only the Cortes could deprive the kings of their authority or invest it in them, because sovereignty was a delegation subordinated to the tacit requirement for the exercise of justice” (Braga, 1983 [1880]:19). And for the Senator Carneiro de Moura, in 1919,

In Portugal, apart from the seventeenth century, when a central power was established, the people always governed. […] Everyone remembers that the Portuguese people (…) always reserved the right to choose the king, or head of state that best pleased them11.

What meaning had this democratic and contractualist theory assumed? It guaranteed that the present prolonged the past. And while history seemed to head in the direction of democracy, the idea had already been found in the remote past, in the mythical times of origins. This was also the social function of historical constitutionalism: the assurance of temporal continuity. In the political vocabulary of early liberal culture, before and immediately after the liberal proclamation of August 24, 1820, there remained an ambiguity in the way of referring of the constitution and the Cortes, although this ambiguity tended to resolve itself with time. Take, for example, the debate on the preamble to the 1822 Constitution, between a legitimacy that was providential and traditional, and a rational legitimacy. Even so, the term Cortes as used to describe the parliament, did not disappear until 1910, while in Spain the parliament is still called by this name to this day.

11 Diário do Senado, 24, 14-02-1919: 6. By the second half of the twentieth century, historians influenced by a Marxist training or by material from the Annales movement emphasized a reading of the liberal revolutions as bourgeois revolutions, a break with the past. And some entertained the idea that, at decisive moments, when the groups in power weakened, it was the people who held firm and secured national independence. In this respect, they were the heirs to a contractualist and republican narrative. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 67 Matos Tradition and Modernity

Conclusion

In the dominant historical narratives of the nineteenth century, the liberal revolution was frequently understood as a break with tradition. Republicanism inherited this reading, making 1820 a significant moment in establishing modern democracy, although, in reality the concept of democracy was little used at that time. However, as we have seen, in the political vocabulary of early Portuguese liberalism the term constitution, while having the power to mobilize, with a firm eye on the future, also carried with it a historical and mythical tradition – historical constitutionalism in the Iberian Peninsula and in Latin America–which was associated with a centuries-old historical experience. Obviously not with the immediate past–the centuries of the absolutist state – but with a distant past, in which the Cortes and the concelhos represented the nation and tempered royal power; a past in which an assumed Gothic constitution consecrated, as the basis of government, the power of an assembly, including the election of moderated royal power, limited by the Cortes.12 For practical and pragmatic reasons, liberal modernity was, in the end, tied to the heritage of a political culture profoundly rooted in the political ideology of the second scholasticism, with restrictions on royal absolutism. The rational legitimacy that dominated the liberal system was still tied to a traditionalist (or even providential) legitimacy. The present was tied to the past.

12 It was from the second half of the seventeenth century onwards that a “democratic” reading of the first Gothic constitution became widespread (Álvarez Alonso, 2000: 6). e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 68 Matos Tradition and Modernity

References

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Hespanha, António M. (2005). “Direitos, constituição e lei no constitucionalismo monárquico português”, in Themis. Revista da Faculdade de Direito de Lisboa da UNL, VI. 10, 7-40. Hespanha, António M. (2015). “À quel point est‐il moderne le droit de la modernité?” Tempo e história. Ideias políticas. Estudos para Fernando Catroga, Coimbra: Almedina /Fundação E. de Almeida, 431-442. Koselleck, Reinhart (2003). Aceleración, prognosis y secularización, Valencia: Pre-Textos. Lorente, Marta (2010), La nación y las Españas. Representación y territorio en el constitucionalismo gaditano, Madrid: Ediciones UAM. Lousada Mª Alexandre and Ferreira, Mª de Fátima Sá e Melo (2006). D. Miguel, Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores. Manifesto dos direitos de sua Magestade Fidelíssima a senhora Dona Maria Segunda e exposição da questão portuguesa, London, Richard Taylor, 1829. Manique, Francisco A. C. de Pina (1872). Portugal desde 1828 a 1834, Lisbon: Tip. de Sousa & Filho. Martins, J.O. Oliveira (1953) [1880]. Portugal Contemporâneo, vol. I, Lisbon: Guimarães. Matos Sérgio Campos (2008). “Nação”, Ler Historia, Lisbon, nº 55, 2008, 111-124. Matos, Sérgio Campos (2013). “Patria, nación, nacionalización – el caso português en el siglo XIX”, Nación y nacionalización. Una perspectiva europea comparada (eds. F. Archilés et al), Valencia: PUV, 25-48. Matos, Sérgio Campos (2015). “Uma legitimação histórica da política”, Tempo e história. Ideias políticas. Estudos para Fernando Catroga, Coimbra: Almedina /Fundação E. de Almeida, 431-442. Merêa, Paulo (1923). A ideia da origem do poder real, Estudos de História do Direito, Coimbra: Coimbra Editora. Miranda, Jorge (2001). O constitucionalismo liberal luso-brasileiro, Lisbon, CNCDP. Miranda, Jorge (1997). Manual de Direito Constitucional, t. I, 6th edn, Coimbra, 1997. Monteiro, Nuno (2013). A vida política, História Contemporânea de Portugal: 1808-2010 (eds. A. Costa Pinto and Nuno Monteiro), vol. I, Madrid, Fundación Mapfre/Ed.Objectiva, 37-74. Neves, Lucia and Guilherme Pereira das, (2009). Constituição – Brasil, Diccionario político y social..., Madrid, Fundación Carolina-Sociedade Estatal de Commemoraciones Culturales e Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 337-351. Obras constitucionais de Espanha e Nápoles depois de terem jurado a constituição os seus antigos soberanos Fernando VII e Fernando IV, Lisbon: Impressão Régia 1820. Ortega y Gassett (1923). El tema de nuestro tiempo, Madrid: Calpe. Pérez Ledesma, Manuel (2009). “Ciudadania y revolución liberal”, A Guerra da Independencia e o primeiro liberalismo en España e América (ed. José Mª Portillo Valdés et al.), : Univ. de Santiago de Compostela, 103-127. Pinheiro, Magda (2000). O liberalismo nos espaços públicos, Lisbon: Celta. Portillo Valdés, José M. (2009). Constitución. España, Diccionario político y social del mundo iberoamericano (ed. J. Fernández Sebastián), Madrid: FC/SECC/CEPCF, 374-382. Pocock, J.G. (1987). The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ramos, Rui (2009). Ciudadano – Portugal, Diccionario político y social del mundo iberoamericano (ed. J. Fernández Sebastián), Madrid: FC/SECC/CEPCF, 282-292. Reflexões sobre o pacto social e acerca da constituição de Portugal por um cidadão português. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1821. Rosanvallon, Pierre (1992). Le sacre du citoyen, Paris, Gallimard. Saraiva, A. José (ed.) (1953). Herculano, Herculano desconhecido, Porto: Ed. Sen.

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Silva, Cristina Nogueira da (2014). “Tolerância religiosa e direitos da religião católica no constitucionalismo espanhol e português, primeira metade do século XIX”, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, 44-1, 65-88. Silveira, Mouzinho da (s.a.). “Liberalismo e cultura política”, Obras (ed. Miriam H. Pereira), vol. I, Lisbon: Fundação C. Gulbenkian , 712-715. Tengarrinha, José (2013). Nova história da imprensa portuguesa das origens a 1865, Lisbon: Temas e Debates/Círculo de Leitores. Tomás, Manuel Fernandes (1982 [1820]). Manifesto aos Portugueses, A revolução de 1820 (ed. José Tengarrinha). 2nd ed., Lisbon: Ed. Caminho. Verdelho, Telmo (1981). As palavras e as ideias na Revolução Liberal de 1820. Coimbra: INIC. Weber, Max (1995). Économie et société, Les catégories de la sociologie, vol. I, Paris: Plon. Zermeño, Guillermo Padilla (2010). La cultura moderna de la historia. Una aproximación teórica e historiográfica. Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico.

Received for publication: 2 February 2016 Accepted in revised form: 16 July 2016 Recebido para publicação: 2 de Fevereiro de 2016 Aceite após revisão: 16 de Julho de 2016

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 71 Local responses to a global invasive species. Varying reasons for controlling the Argentine ant in the Madeira archipelago (1850-2014)∗

Ana Isabel Queiroz 1 Daniel Alves2

Resumo

A formiga argentina (Linepithema humile Mayr) é identificada na Madeira em meados do século XIX, sendo este o seu primeiro registo fora da região Neotropical, de onde é originária. Ideias e respostas aos impactos desta espécie invasora constituem o argumento desta narrativa histórica, baseada em publicações científicas, livros de viagens e diários, documentos oficiais e notícias de jornais da época. Diferentes razões fundamentaram a tomada de medidas de controlo em diferentes episódios da praga. Esta espécie foi percecionada como uma praga urbana e uma praga agrícola durante um vasto período. Recentemente, ao nível local, ela é considerada uma ameaça para a biodiversidade nativa.

Palavras-chave

História Ambiental, Respostas Societais, Formiga Argentina, Espécies Invasoras, Madeira

Abstract

The Argentine Ant (Linepithema humile Mayr) has been present in Madeira since the mid-nineteenth century, when its first occurrence outside the Neotropical Region was recorded. The varying ideas and responses over time to the impacts of this invasive alien species constitute the argument of this historical narrative, based on scientific publications, travel books and diaries, official documents and newspapers. Different reasons have justified the various control measures implemented in the course of repeated outbreaks. This species has long been perceived as an urban and plant pest. Recently, at the local level, it has been considered a threat to the native biodiversity.

*∗This work was supported by FCT – the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology [UID/HIS/04209/2013 and IF/00222/2013/CP1166/CT0001]. Special thanks are due to Sofia Maul, António M. Franquinho-Aguiar, Alberto Vieira and Mário Boieiro. 1 Institute of Contemporary History, FCSH, NEW University of Lisbon. Avenida de Berna 26-C, 1069-061 Lisbon, Portugal. E-mail: [email protected]. 2 Institute of Contemporary History, FCSH, NEW University of Lisbon. Avenida de Berna 26-C, 1069-061 Lisbon, Portugal. E-mail: [email protected].

Queiroz & Alves Local responses to a global invasive species

Keywords

Environmental History, Societal Responses, Argentine Ant, Invasive Species, Madeira

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Introduction

Many plant and animal species, originating from distant locations, were introduced successfully into the Madeira archipelago, just as they were into many other islands in the temperate regions of the world, as the settlers intentionally brought in new crops and livestock in order to guarantee their livelihood. Beyond satisfying their basic needs, plants and animals were introduced not only in order to diversify the diet, but also for aesthetic reasons and subsequently to provide goods for trading purposes. A number of unwanted organisms, such as weeds and plant pests, also arrived accidentally on the island, spreading to wherever they could find suitable ecological conditions for their establishment. Madeira was uninhabited until 1425, when the navigator João Gonçalves Zarco founded a Portuguese settlement on the main island, the captaincy of . Woodlands were extraordinarily extensive and vigorous, which motivated the first settlers to call the island Madeira – i.e., the Portuguese word for “wood”. But the native forest (laurissilva) was unable to resist grazing and over-cutting for very long, at least on the southern slope, which soon became covered with fields of wheat, and vines, among other crops. and cattle breeding were possible in this region, due to its favorable climatic conditions, its plentiful supply of water, and its fertile soil. From the sixteenth century onwards, Madeira became a regular stopover on the transatlantic trade routes. In the nineteenth century, it was also converted into a place of rest and recovery from tuberculosis for a (mostly British) foreign community, who began to settle in the city of Funchal as early as the seventeenth century. They supplied the local market with imports, traded local goods (especially wine and sugarcane liquor), and invested in agriculture (particularly in the vineyards) and the local handicrafts (for example, in wickerwork and embroidery) (Câmara, 2002; Vieira, 2003). The environmental history of Madeira is, to some extent, the tale of the efforts made to control or eradicate invasive, non-native species. That was certainly the case in the 1870s and 1880s, when the vines were attacked by the phylloxera plague, and the sugarcane by the fungus Conyothurium malasporum (Câmara, 1998). Despite its subsequent spread worldwide, the Argentine Ant (Linepithema humile Mayr) made its first known appearance outside South America in this region (Wetterer et al, 2009). Through the reclassification of a few ant specimens stored at the British Natural History Museum (London), a recent study established the first occurrence of the species in Madeira (Wetterer et al, 2006). These specimens had been collected before 1858, by Thomas V. Wollaston, an English

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 74 Queiroz & Alves Local responses to a global invasive species entomologist who visited Madeira numerous times, from 1847 onwards. This occurrence predates even that of other specimens collected in Buenos Aires (Mayr, 1868). “Think globally, act locally” is a phrase that is often repeated in environmental activism and international politics, and it is one that has proved useful in the academic field of environmental history: “no historical phenomenon, even if occurring on a worldwide and global scale, can be understood without observations made at a local or regional level in terms of empirical analysis. It is also at a local level that the effects of global phenomena are identified and can be studied” (Polónia, 2015: 66). Among the academics from different fields who study the global circulation of plant and animal species, historians can contribute to the understanding of the local responses to invasive species over time (Crosby, 1986; McNeill, 1994; Grove, 1996). Although there is an extensive scientific literature on the Argentine ant’s spread worldwide, only a few papers have mentioned the outbreaks in the Madeira archipelago, which on several occasions have presented the islanders with a very serious challenge. This paper focuses on the local perceptions and responses to the invasion of this ant species, registered in scientific publications, literary writings, newspapers, and official archives. It also examines the invasion and control measures undertaken in the Madeira archipelago, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Basically, it aims to answer the following research questions: • When did the outbreaks first start? • Who was affected by the outbreaks? • Which have been the most affected areas? • How have people come to regard the invasion of this ant species over time? • What are (and have been) the arguments used to implement control measures?

Methods

Local responses to the Argentine ant’s invasion, from the nineteenth century onwards, highlight the population’s perceptions, the extent of scientific knowledge about this subject, and the control measures undertaken. To be able to study these responses, despite their wide time span, data had to be brought together from different types of sources. Qualitative discourse analysis, combined with quantitative approaches and digital methods, produced a chronological narrative that focused on critical impact periods.

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Data for qualitative and discourse analysis were collected from travel accounts, written during the second half of the nineteenth century by British travelers who had stayed in Madeira. These accounts were compared to, and complemented by, an exhaustive search of the scientific literature. In addition, local newspapers, dating from the time of previously identified outbreaks, were analyzed. These included local reports, small news articles and advertisements, with information about the traditional or popular control measures taken by the locals. The citations included in this paper have been translated from the original texts in Portuguese. Although it is known from other sources that there were other official attempts to control the Argentine ant, the Madeira Regional Historical Archive only saved data on the control measures taken between 1920 and 1947, by the Entomological and Pathological Services of the Madeira Agrarian Station (Serviços Entomológicos e Patológicos/Estação Agrária da Madeira). Comprehensive records for the period from 1929 to 1938 include information about the services rendered to precise locations (e.g., the street address or the estate’s name), the people making the request, the date of the control measure and the plant pests found in situ (Serviços Entomológicos e Patológicos, 1929). The records from 1930, 1933, and 1935 run from January to December; the ones from 1929, 1934, and 1938 do not comprise the entire year; and no records were found for the years 1931, 1932, 1936, and 1937. The name formiga (the Portuguese word for ant) is one of the common names used to identify the pest. However, the specific identification was inferred from other sources describing the Argentine ant as a pest in Madeira at that time (Grabham, 1924; Sarmento, 1937). These data were analyzed within a Geographic Information System, which contributed to the study of the spatial dimension of the invasion in the city of Funchal.

Results and discussion

Ants at home at the end of the nineteenth century

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, people became aware of the damage that an introduced ant species could cause to their territory. Auguste Forel, who identified specimens collected on the main island, wrote: “to my surprise Mr. Schmitz twice sent me from Madeira the typical Iridomyrmex humilis Mayr [the Latin name then assigned to the Argentine ant] from the Neotropical fauna, which is already a house and land pest in

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Madeira” (Forel, 1895: 230). This finding was a harbinger for what would, very soon, be described as a true invasion:

[I]n Funchal and its outskirts the ants have been a real pest and public calamity for a few years now. Millions invade everything – fields, kitchen- gardens and gardens, especially the houses – where the sideboards, cabinets, commodes, tables and even the beds are invaded; places are not protected from anything that can arouse their appetite. (Schmitz, 1896: 55)

In the nineteenth century, the city of Funchal was a pebble beach, with a few seaside streets and many grand estates scattered around the hills. On his arrival, the foreigner would have a panoramic view of how the urban area was arranged: “[I]t looks white and brilliant, house above house, and street above street, climbing up the mount side; and outside the city, still on higher terraces, are the cottages and ‘quintas’ or country residences” (Blackburn, 1860: 11). These ‘quintas’ afforded

much fascinating matter to one who loves gardens and gardening (…) The most favored zone for ‘quintas’ is that which extends from a mile to two miles from the center of the town – the distance, owing to the configuration of the terrain, generally appears greater than it is in reality – and many very fine examples are to be met with within this radius. (Koebel, 1909: 174)

The ring of beautiful estates around the narrow streets of the old town hall housed the wealthiest merchants and the foreigners visiting the island. The British community dedicated particular care to these areas, especially in the arrangement of the outdoor green spaces, which were used to plant specimens from different parts of the world. The love of botany found a perfect setting for its physical materialization in the physiographic conditions of Madeira. Given the demand, the renting of ‘quintas’ became a flourishing business: “[l]odgings in Madeira are plentiful and good. For a family, the most comfortable plan is to take a Quinta, that is to say, a house with a garden, standing in the suburbs of the town. The price asked for the season of six months varies according to their size, from £50 to £200” (Hadfield, 1854: 71).

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Meanwhile, the Argentine ant found, in this archipelago, a suitable habitat in which to multiply, causing a widespread feeling of unease. Schmitz talked about damages that

are incalculable: some houses and even splendid estates, expressly built for wealthy foreigners who wish to spend the winter season in Madeira, find themselves infested in such a way that they are abandoned after vain efforts directed against the terrible invaders and do not find tenants; not to mention the losses suffered by crops, grapes, fruit trees. (Schmitz, 1896: 56)

In the first two decades of the perceived invasion (1890−1910), the ant was mostly considered as a terrible urban pest and described, in the travel books, as a local problem:

[t]he island, however, is suffering to an increasing extent from the ravages of a peculiarly voracious species of ant (…) They are often unpleasantly common in houses, and are much given to haunt sugar basins and other receptacles of sweet stuffs. Even in death they contrive to annoy, as one may reflect grimly on watching them drown in the cup of morning tea. (Koebel, 1909: 206–207)

In 1896, the ant’s invasion was already arousing the attention of the local newspapers. On February 25, a news article made reference to the study of Ernest Schmitz. On March 13, a letter from a foreign resident, Baron Charles van Beneden, mentioned the discomfort caused by the presence of ants at his “quinta,” and suggested “several recipes to kill ants” and to prevent them from invading the “furniture” and “gardens”. Furthermore, the newspapers advertised formicides, sold through a shop in Lisbon (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, 25 February 1896: 2; 13 March 1896: 2; 15 March 1896: 1; 11 October 1896: 2; 26 October 1896: 2; and 6 November 1896: 2). At Funchal town hall, the authorities were also debating possible measures to control the ant’s invasion of the city’s parks and gardens. In August, 1896, the municipality instructed one of its officials to contact the Lisbon Municipal Council, in order to receive “instructions on the devices used to extinguish ants” in the capital. One month later, the same official proposed buying one of these devices. The source text is vague, but it probably refers to a sprayer, later advertised in the same newspaper (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, 7 August 1896: 1; 11 September 1896: 2; 11 October 1896: 2).

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The Argentine ant was not the first ant to invade the city of Funchal. Outbreaks of other invasive species can be traced back in time. The entomologist O. von Herr described a new species that, he thought, could be native to the island. It was, after all, the African tropical species Pheidole megacephala, described by Fabricius, in 1793. Ants

creep up the table legs, along their edges, upon the tables themselves, and even into chests of drawers, boxes, etc. Being extremely small, they can get in through the smallest cracks and holes. You may kill thousands on thousands, and yet perceive no decrease of them; they are continually replaced by new hosts in the rear. (Heer, 1856: 212–213)

Personal notes on invasions of unidentified ant species can also be found, as well as testimonies to their impact on people’s welfare in Madeira. In 1851, Edward Harcourt mentioned that

[t]here are several species of ants: a very minute one which pervades the houses is highly destructive; it is next to impossible to preserve any specimens of birds or insects from its ravages. You eat it in your puddings, vegetables, and soups, and wash your hands in a decoction of it (Harcourt, 1851: 125).

Describing her honeymoon in 1853, the Englishwoman Isabella de Franca also remembered that “[a]nts are a perfect nuisance; nothing can be kept from them unless surrounded by water” (Franca, 1970: 115).

A plant pest in the first half of the twentieth century

The damage caused by ants to vineyards and fruit trees dates back to 1895, when it was considered “one of the greatest evils that currently threatens our agriculture” (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, 27 August 1895: 2; 4 September 1895: 1). But the relationship between aphids and ants was only revealed to the public in 1903: “[i]t is mainly trees that are invaded by woolly aphids that are most attacked by ants. Since it is known that the woolly aphid is the ant’s cow, and that ants are greedy about the sweet honey-like liquid they excrete.” Advice was given to those who worried about the invasion of ants: before all else, they

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“should combat or exterminate the woolly aphids” on the trees (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, 30 September 1903: 2). In 1905, another article insisted on the extermination of the woolly aphids “because ants are very greedy over them and only seek those trees in order to satiate their constant appetite” (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, 2 October 1905: 2). In 1908, the newspaper that had issued the first warning expressed concern about the possible combined impact of these various plant pests on the fruit trees. It was difficult for the fruits from Madeira to compete with the fruits from other regions, in the international market, particularly those from the . It was highlighted that “the invasion of ants, of coccidia and other insects” tended to “plague the trees and damage the fruits,” which in turn was responsible, according to the author of this article, for “Madeira’s fruit declining rapidly in both quantity and quality” (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, 31 May 1908: 1). Similar concerns were officially expressed in the years that followed. In 1910, a republican revolution overthrew the monarchy in Portugal, leading to a change in the structure of the local authorities and the reorganization of the administrative services. The Junta Agrícola da Madeira governed agricultural policy in the archipelago, between 1911 and 1919. The economic development strategy recommended for the region, at that time, was to foster the production of fruit, wine and sugarcane. Besides soil and water, the territory had excellent weather conditions. Yet, the same temperate and humid climate that benefited these crops also favored the proliferation of plant pests, especially fungi and insects. Michael Comport Grabham emphasized the Argentine ant’s status as a plant pest, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, declaring to his British compatriots that: “[t]he Madeira experience of the Argentine ant certainly justifies the American opinion that we have in this pest an agent of destruction comparable to the Colorado beetle or the Cotton Boll weevil” (Grabham, 1919: 8). Grabham understood, from his personal experience, the partnership between this ant, the scale insects and the mealybugs that live in the sugarcane: “the fostering influence of the new pest [the Argentine ant] became at once manifest in the startling increase and activity of the cane parasite” (Grabham, 1924: 262). The ant was playing the role of the villain.

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Killing ants by any means

Although, until the end of the nineteenth century, the advertisements in the press included products available at shops in Lisbon, in the decades that followed, the focus turned to shops in Funchal, which promised to perform “wonders” in the fight against ants and other pests. Until 1910, references to specific brands of insecticides were unusual. There were some advertisements for “Lyzol,” a product with a composition that was based on benzene and gypsum (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, 30 September 1903, 2) and “Ballikinrain”, “a preparation (...) intended to exterminate ants, wasps, cockroaches, etc.” Although the discourse was already very commercial, guaranteeing that “there is nothing better for the full removal of these disgusting insects,” or that “one of the [product’s] specialties is to get rid of ants in fruit trees” (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, 21 November 1907: 1), the propaganda focused on the product’s chemical compounds. Advertisements talking about “nicotine sulphate,” “copper sulphate” or simply a kind of “honey to destroy ants, cockroaches, wasps and rats,” appeared almost every year, normally at the beginning of winter and in spring (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, 11 November 1904: 1; 14 December 1904: 2; 31 December 1904: 3; 16 May 1908: 2; 14 March 1909: 4; 4 April 1909: 3; 9 May 1909: 3). The homemade recipes were based on sulphates. In 1906, it was assured that “one of the best ways to destroy the ants is to mix together equal shares of borax powder [sodium borate] and sugar and to pour this mixture on the invaded sites” (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, 9 May 1906: 2). A couple of years later, the press published another solution which had “proven satisfactory” in the control of “ants and other insects that attack the gardens’ plants.” The recipe included “half-a-kilo of copper sulphate well dissolved in 5 gallons of water” and a “half-a-kilo of calcium oxide dissolved in 5 gallons of water.” These solutions should then be mixed together, again dissolved in water and applied “three times a week: the ants and other insects disappear quickly.” Afterwards, it should be enough “to water every two months” (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, July 9, 1909: 2). The recipes could also be imaginative and include “natural” solutions like “rotten lemon, or water in which lobsters or crabs have been boiled”, which would “put the ants to flight,” or so it was said (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, 2 October 1905: 2). During winter, the farmer should take the “opportunity” to carry out some preventive “work against coccidia, ants, phylloxera, nymphs of other insects, etc.” He should use “a wire mesh glove, Sabaté [sic] system, or

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 81 Queiroz & Alves Local responses to a global invasive species another coarse and resistant fabric” to remove “from the trunk and branches of the vines, the old and dry shell that serves for nothing but to shelter the tree’s enemies that wait there for the return of spring to invade” the plants once more (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, 24 December 1906: 1). Farmers could also combine the two methods, “first taking care of cleaning the tree, which can only be achieved by gently scraping the bark without hurting the plant,” using “steel mesh gloves (Sabaté gloves),” and then “washing the trunk with an iron sulphate solution” (Jornal da Madeira, 25 June 1935: 1). To reinforce the benefits of a particular recipe, the press would publish alleged scientific discoveries, associating a particular researcher’s name with the description of the recipe. This was the case with “Dr. Matiffat,” an expert who supposedly “conducted various experiments to put an end to the ants,” concluding that “the easiest, most inexpensive and non-poisonous method that produces best results is as follows: spray with a solution of sodium hyposulphite (1 kilogram of hyposulphite in 10 liters of water) all the spots ants have as their usual places of visit.” It was guaranteed that “with these sprays, repeated every 15 days, you will be completely free of ants” (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, 28 December 1910: 3). Clearly, this recipe did not differ much from the ones suggested previously, but the semblance of a scientific discourse certainly helped in convincing the public. Commercial companies used a similar approach for selling insecticides (including formicides), in order to improve the advertisement of these products’ advantages and benefits. However, they often ignored the possible impact that these products might have on the environment and public health. The first decades of the twentieth century were a transition period, as far as commercial offers were concerned. International brands redirected their expenditure to advertising these insecticides, in an attempt to dominate the market. Nevertheless, it was still possible to find drugstores that sold “insulating pulp for ants on trees” (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, 2 August 1930: 3) and similar generic products, like “pulp and paper to isolate the trees from the ants” (Jornal da Madeira, 13 June 1935: 4; 29 June 1935: 3). Tanglefoot was one of the most active brands. Its advertisements, which announced “the best and cheapest American insecticide”, could sometimes occupy almost a third of the page. It promised to “kill flies, mosquitoes, moths, cockroaches, butterflies, ants and many other insects” (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, 10 May 1930: 3) and “guaranteed its quality, its efficiency and the fact that it challenged all other competition” (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, May 27, 1930: 4). Although the message and size of the commercial could vary, the discourse was very similar to that found in the case of other brands. For

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 82 Queiroz & Alves Local responses to a global invasive species example, the “FORMICIDE MARVIS” was advertised as the one that “radically makes ants disappear” (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, 7 April 1935: 3). As a result of other social concerns, the advertisements sometimes included a scientific or medical guarantee of the product’s harmless effects on men and pets, occasionally even asserting that it was beneficial for their health. The “FLIT” brand claimed that it was the “most POWERFUL of pesticides” and that people could vaporize it “without the slightest fear, inside closets, drawers and wardrobe” (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, 19 June 1930: 2). Besides being a “ruthless destroyer of all domestic insects and parasites,” it also guaranteed costumers that it did “not stain or erode”, and that, although it had “a smell,” that could even be “enjoyable for many people”, it would disappear “quickly” (Jornal da Madeira, 22 June 1930: 3). Produced by the Standard Oil Company, FLIT contained 5% DDT, which is now known to be highly dangerous. In 1930, Tanglefoot promised a high-value cash prize “to the honorable doctor who presented himself and could prove that the spraying of the liquid ‘Tanglefoot’ was harmful to human health and pets,” and another prize to anyone who could prove “that the marvelous ‘Tanglefoot Powder’ does not exterminate ants and cockroaches,” (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, 5 August 1930: 3). The same brand announced that it “was chosen in Lisbon from among all other similar products for use in Sanatoriums for the National Assistance of Tuberculosis” (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, 27 May 1930: 4), associating itself with a leading institution that was a major reference in the Portuguese medical services at the time. The product created sticky barriers, where insects became trapped—the action was strictly mechanical. The “Whiz Fly Fume” (a brand with a suggestive skull as its logo) guaranteed that it was “the great destroyer, the uncompromising enemy of the FLIES, MOSQUITOES, BED BUGS, FLEAS, ANTS, COCKROACHES, and their larvae and eggs,” and that it could also “protect your health and your well-being and preserve your clothes from damage caused by moths” (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, 25 May 1930: 5). The local responses in Madeira were not far removed from the global ones. Several methods to control the Argentine ant were also suggested by American entomologists. These comprised the use of repellents and poisons, such as sticky barriers, zenoleum powder on the floors of infested houses, “ant tapes” made by soaking ordinary cotton tape in a corrosive sublimate solution, and sweetened arsenical solutions (Newell and Barber, 1913). Due to the impact of these poisons on bees, the Spanish entomologist Font de Mora reported his preference for homemade insulator rings, with non-toxic substances (resin and fish oil), that prevented ants from climbing up the fruit trees. Still “these glues have the

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 83 Queiroz & Alves Local responses to a global invasive species disadvantage of remaining fresh for a short time, allowing the ant to move after very slightly drying, and serving in many cases as support points for ants that ventured to continue on their way” (Font de Mora, 1923: 77–78). France, Italy, and Portugal adopted legal instruments to compel owners to eliminate the Argentine ant from their lands, using mainly arsenical poisons (Chopard, 1921; Paoli, 1922; Silva Dias, 1955).

Control measures taken by agricultural agencies

The outbreaks that occurred in the first half of the twentieth century affected the sugarcane plantations, vineyards and orchards. Even when fruit trees were isolated or few in number, the owners were compelled to act against this uncontrolled proliferation. Archive documentation shows that the plant pathology services were very active in fighting existing plant pests. Each control intervention was paid for in accordance with the pest in question and the extent of the treatment given, justified by the manpower and materials used in the process. In the four municipalities of the south coast, residents requested interventions from the plant pathology services from 1929 to 1938. These interventions took place predominantly along the coastline, a large majority of which (97%) were located in the municipality of Funchal (Figure 1a). The same location registered frequent calls for ant control intervention, in different years and different months of the same year. Some of these locations, in the city, were subject to persistent invasion and the treatments applied in each intervention could not solve the whole issue at once. In some of these interventions, other pests are also referred to, for example scale insects, mealybugs and aphids, which, as mentioned above, have a beneficial interaction with these ants. Locations from 1930, 1933 and 1935 were projected onto an adjusted map of the city of Funchal (“Planta do Funchal,” 1938), showing the dispersion of interventions both within the urban area (overlapping the street map) and external to the urban area, in that period (Figure 1b). The streets nearest to the shoreline (the oldest part of the city) required fewer control measures. A ring of locations is distributed in areas immediately above the beach neighborhood, where houses with back gardens and quintas were the family homes typically built from the eighteenth century onwards. Small orchards were integrated into the residential area without a clear distinction between rural areas (cultivated fields) and urban areas (buildings) (Quintal and Groz, 2001).

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Assuming that the area of pest control measures is indicative of the range of the Argentine ant’s invasion at that time, a terrestrial area of the minimum convex polygons, drawn from the sites, was calculated for the periods 1929-1938 (all data available), 1930, 1933 and 1935 (Figure 1c). The range of 1930 is similar to the cumulative range of 1929- 1938 (20.43 km2). Over subsequent years, the invaded area apparently decreased and the number of locations subject to pest control was clearly beginning to fall. The local department of the national board for the promotion of fruits (“Junta Nacional de Frutas da Madeira”) played a major role in the fight against plant pests in the 1940s (Pereira, 1940: 658). Nonetheless, the Argentine ant was still a major concern: [m]easures are needed not only for saving our fruit trees and agriculture in general but also for the great benefit of men and animals. Although the ant has weakened its advances because it has become more acclimatized and more widespread, its extermination should however not be disregarded (Pereira, 1940: 457). In 1947, the species was considered “the most serious problem for agriculture and perhaps the most serious problem for the whole economic life of Madeira” (Schultze-Rhonhof, 1947). In August, 1949, “the Argentine ant remains a pest that most concerns the fruit growers and gardeners (…) the scourge’s adverse effects are felt most severely in the orchards, the vineyards and the garden crops that usually suffer attacks from these scale insects” (“A formiga Argentina,” 1949: 257).

Living with ants, or not at all?

Amid the chorus of negative perceptions, there were, nonetheless, some voices that found the presence of the Argentine ant beneficial. Among the utility services, the ant’s presence was seen as a sign that there would be atmospheric changes, predicted with the sensitivity of a barometer predicting rain and heat, leading to “the precipitate abandonment of hives due to the danger of asphyxia and insolation”. Moreover, the species was considered an effective predator of the larvae of wasps (Pereira, 1940: 457). The Argentine ant also controlled another plant pest, the Sesamia nonagrioides (synonym, Nonagria sacchari)— larvae of this moth live inside the stalks of sugarcane, opening galleries and promoting the fermentation of tissues (Silva and Meneses, 1940: 292–293). In 1930, the local newspaper recalled the impact of this pest in the first decades of the century, referring to these ants as “evils that always bring some benefit.” It “happened that, faced with this ant, the sugarcane

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 85 Queiroz & Alves Local responses to a global invasive species bug, its fierce enemy, was forced to retreat, and so, due to the rarity of the bug, it seemed to be a time when agriculture would finally break free of such a harmful parasite.” The ant, however, “lost its warrior qualities of the early days, and over the last fifteen years in various parts of Madeira the Nonagria sacchari has returned to occupy reed areas” (Diário de Notícias da Madeira, August 13, 1930: 1). People have regularly combated outbreaks using every possible means and product available; however, the inhabitants of Madeira are still bothered by ants. They have failed to control them in public facilities, homes, gardens, orchards and natural habitats. The products that are now used, besides being less dangerous to all other living beings (including humans), have shown increased efficiency, minimizing the impact of the outbreaks in urban and agricultural lands. Instead of repellents, formicide baits are now used to fight the entire colonies (Britto, 2016). These attract the worker ants, who then carry the deadly food to the nest and share it with the other animals, including the immature forms and the queen. In Madeira, there are at least two active pest control companies. Extermínio (which literally means “extermination”) has existed since 1990, performing interventions in private homes and enterprises. It includes four species of ants in its pests guide, including the Argentine ant (http://www.exterminio.pt/pt/pest/pest-141). Rentokil mentions some habits of the Argentine ants, which make their proliferation a serious problem for society: “the worker ants follow long trails to a food source, so their nests are not easy to find; they prefer sweet foods, but they also eat living or dead insects, meat, cereals and rotten fruit; they drive all the ants of other species out of their area.” (http://www.rentokil.pt/formigas/especies-de-formigas) Additionally, it warns its customers about the losses that they can suffer due to these ants: "they contaminate food and other products that will then go to waste, costing you money and resources (...) [i]nfestations in places such as hospitals and nursing homes can spread pathogens and alarm patients or residents and endanger hygiene standards (...) if your reputation suffers, your profits also suffer when customers are placed in the presence of ants." (http://www.rentokil.pt/formigas/como-acabar-com-as-formigas). In the last few decades, the scientific knowledge gathered about the Argentine ant distribution has shown new locations of its occurrence in the Madeira archipelago. The Argentine ant has not been restricted to the coastal areas and it has colonized natural habitats (Wetterer et al., 2007; Queiroz and Alves, 2016). In the 1990s, it was identified in mountainous areas, such as the deep valley of Curral das Freiras. In the last two decades,

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 86 Queiroz & Alves Local responses to a global invasive species scientists and conservation authorities have identified the presence of the Argentine ant in the region’s nature reserves included in the EU Natura 2000 network: on Deserta Grande (2003), which is uninhabited and has been designated as a nature reserve since 1990; on the west end of the main island, and on its adjacent islet, both of which are included in the nature reserve of Ponta de São Lourenço. Recently, it was found in large numbers on the small islets surrounding Porto Santo, namely on the Ilhéu de Cima, in the area of distribution of the high priority terrestrial mollusk species. These surveys show that the invertebrate communities are less diverse in the areas that have been heavily invaded by the ants (AAVV, 2014). Furthermore, ornithologists in Madeira have noted that the ants have been attacking young nesting birds, biting the bird’s mucous membranes (eyes, mouth and nasal cavity), which could have deadly consequences, especially during very dry years (Boieiro and Menezes, 2014). This behavior has also been described in the literature, since 1920, where the victims have usually been domestic animals, reared in henhouses and hutches (Chopard, 1921). The Argentine ant has been responsible for damage to the native biodiversity all over the world. The species is included in the Spanish Catalogue of Invasive Species (Royal Decree 630/2013, of August 2; last modified on June 17, 2016), but no control measures have so far been taken for conservation purposes. In the Canary Islands, the Official College of Biologists warned about the presence of thousands of specimens of this species on the islands of El Hierro and La Palma, revealing that “because they are geologically younger islands with simpler wildlife ecosystems,” the “invasive species are more ecologically aggressive” (“La hormiga argentina (Linepithema humile) en la isla de El Hierro,” 2011). In La Palma, the Argentine ant has been identified in banana plantations, associated with Dysmicoccus grassii, a scale insect that represents a major phytosanitary problem in the Canary Islands (Hernandez et al, 2015). A few years ago, the Balearic environmental agency published a full study on the Argentine ant in the territory (Gomez and Espalader, 2005), and, more recently, it promoted a study that focused on the S’Albufera des Grau () (Abril and Gomez, 2012), in order to evaluate the distribution and degree of invasion of this species in the protected area. There, the Argentine ant was not found in natural areas, far from urban centers, and no control measures were proposed. This ant has displaced the indigenous ant species in northern California (Human and Gordon, 1996) and south-eastern (Rowles and O’Dowd, 2006). It is consistently better at foraging for food than other species, and its interspecific aggression contributes greatly to its competitive success. Furthermore, the Argentine ant

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 87 Queiroz & Alves Local responses to a global invasive species does not disperse seeds in the same way as the native species of the Cape region (South Africa) do. This is an important ecosystem service on which many plants depend to recover from the effects of fire, such as the endemic proteas of this region in South Africa. Consequently, 20% of this “Fynbos” flora is threatened by the invasive Argentine ant (Argentine Ant Invasion in Fynbos, http://www.proteaatlas.org.za/antarg.htm). Is the Argentine ant also threatening the biodiversity of the Madeira archipelago? Which species are being affected? Scientists and nature conservation authorities are concerned about this possibility, so that they have designed a few control campaigns to be undertaken on the islets of Porto Santo, in Ponta de São Lourenço (Madeira) and on the Desertas islands (Boieiro and Menezes, 2014), approved and financed by EU funds for nature conservation.

Conclusions

The narrative of the Argentine ant’s impact on nature and society is an ongoing story, not only in the Madeira archipelago, but anywhere where it has found the conditions it needs to proliferate. Over time, different assessments of the situation have determined the actions of different regional entities. Ranging from individual responses to interventions by the Funchal Municipal Council, from the agricultural supervisors to environmental departments, from several layers and sectors of the general public to their administrations, all have had the Argentine ant on their agenda. At the beginning of its transatlantic journey, the Argentine ant was regarded as a particular nuisance due to its role as an urban pest. This evaluation has since been replaced by a major economic concern over the losses that this plant pest has caused in the last 100 years. Currently, new control measures are being implemented, in protected areas, due to concern over the conservation of nature. Islands are known to be environmentally, socially, and politically vulnerable territories. But it is, after all, surprising how such a tiny dark creature, with a harmless appearance, can mobilize so many resources and energies.

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Figure 1 – Spatial analysis of the recorded control measures for ants taken by the plant pathology services: a) interventions from 1929 to 1938 on the island of Madeira (all data available); b) locations and the invasion range in Funchal per year vs. the total invasion range (1929-1938), with a 1938 map of the city in the background; c) chart of the number of interventions, number of locations and the invasive range per year, in Funchal.

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Received for publication: 14 January 2016 Accepted in revised form: 10 August 2016 Recebido para publicação: 14 de Janeiro de 2016 Aceite após revisão: 10 de Agosto de 2016

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 92 Two South Africans in the Portuguese Wars of Decolonization (1961-1975): it could have been better, it could have been worse.

Bruno Cardoso Reis1

Abstract

The two books reviewed in this article offer testimonies by two South Africans with direct experience of the Portuguese Wars of Decolonization. Al Venter is the only foreign war correspondent with direct experience in the field in all three theaters of operations of the Portuguese late colonial wars. Brigadier General van der Waals was the Vice-Consul and de facto military attaché in Luanda from 1970 to 1974. Both books show that South Africa was the foreign power most directly involved in these conflicts and with most vital interests at stake. It has, consequently, every reason to pay the closest possible attention to them. Both books also show that, despite the close cooperation in the field between South Africa and Portugal, especially after 1968, the mainstream South African view of these counter-insurgencies was often very critical of the Portuguese war effort.

Keywords

South Africa, Portugal, counter-insurgency, Angola, Mozambique

Resumo

Os dois livros analisados neste artigo oferecem testemunhos escritos por dois sul- africanos com experiência directa das guerras portuguesas de descolonização de 1961-1975. O texto de Al Venter representa o testemunho do único correspondente de guerra estrangeira com experiência directa no terreno dos três teatros de operações das guerras coloniais portuguesas. O outro é da autoria do general de brigada van der Waals, vice-cônsul e adido militar de facto da África do Sul em Luanda no período 1970-1974. Ambos os livros são reveladores do facto de que a África do Sul foi a potência estrangeira com a maior participação directa e mais interesses vitais em jogo nestes conflitos e tinha, consequentemente, todas as razões para lhes prestar a máxima atenção. Ambos os livros também mostram que, apesar da estreita cooperação no terreno entre África do Sul e Portugal, especialmente depois de 1968, o ponto de vista dominante entre os sul-africanos relativamente a estas guerras de contra-guerrilha foi muitas vezes muito crítico do esforço de guerra português.

Palavras-chave

África do Sul, Portugal, contra-insurreição, Angola, Moçambique

1 ICS - University of Lisbon. E-mail: [email protected] Reis Two South Africans

Al J. Venter, Portugal e as Guerrilhas de África - As guerras portuguesas em Angola, Moçambique e Guiné Portuguesa, 1961-1974. Lisbon: Clube do Autor, 2015.

Willem S. van der Waals, Guerra e Paz: Portugal/Angola, 1961-1974. Lisbon: Casa das Letras, 2015.

The two books reviewed in this article offer testimonies by two South Africans with direct experience of the Portuguese Wars of Decolonization. Al J. Venter is a war correspondent, born in 1938, with decades of experience covering conflicts across Africa and beyond. Venter claims to be the only (foreign?) war correspondent with direct experience in the field of all three theaters of operations of the Portuguese late colonial wars: Angola (1961-1975), Guinea-Bissau (1963-1974) and Mozambique (1964-1974). He penned the almost six hundred-page-long Portugal e as Guerrilhas de África covering these three late colonial counter-insurgencies. Brigadier General Willem S. van der Waals is a military officer with decades of personal involvement with Angola both before and after independence. More specifically, van der Waals was Vice-Consul and de facto military attaché at the South African Consulate in Luanda from 1970 to 1974. Van der Waals’ book Guerra e Paz: Portugal/Angola, 1961-1974 is based on his official reports from Luanda and access to other documents in the South African military archives, even if unfortunately these are not quoted or properly referenced. Both authors are therefore part of a small group of South Africans with deep knowledge of the former Portuguese colonies who were influential in shaping the way these wars were perceived in South Africa. Not surprisingly both authors have known each other for decades, and, in fact Al Venter’s Ashanti Press published the first edition of van der Waals’ book in English in 1993 with the title Portugal's War in Angola 1961-1974. The authors also make references to, and use, each other’s material – namely photos – in their respective books, and therefore, not surprisingly, they provide a broadly similar picture of these wars, albeit with some differences in their approaches and writing styles. Regardless of the specificities, both books show that South Africa was the foreign power with the most direct involvement and the most vital interests at stake in these conflicts and had every reason to pay the closest possible attention to them. Both books also show, perhaps to the surprise of some, that, despite the close cooperation in the field between South Africa and Portugal, especially after 1968, the mainstream South African view of these counter-insurgencies was often very critical of the

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Portuguese war effort. They also reveal significant gaps in their knowledge both about metropolitan Portugal and its colonial history. The two books are at their strongest when providing a record of their author’s direct experiences of the Portuguese counter-insurgency campaign in Angola, and also, in the case of al Venter, of the campaigns in Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. Unfortunately, van der Waals, in particular, opted to include a very long introduction explaining the context of the conflicts. This might be justified in the original version of these books, given the limited knowledge of English-language readers about the context of these late colonial conflicts, as well as about Portuguese colonial history in Africa, but, in the Portuguese translations reviewed here, the introduction should have been significantly shortened. It takes van der Waals one hundred pages to reach the year 1961 when the first late colonial insurgency started in Angola. This means that those looking for a specific section on the role of South Africa in the war in Angola in van der Waal’s book will have to wade through many pages before they get even the first limited piece of information on this subject (van der Waals, pp. 237-238; pp. 342-354), when they are informed that intelligence cooperation in loco started in 1963, and that the broader cooperation only intensified, from 1966 onwards, after the first infiltration of SWAPO nationalist insurgents from into South African-controlled , via the South of Angola. Furthermore, the introductory pages about Portuguese colonial history are largely based upon outdated publications. This leads to a number of mistakes or, at the very least, rather questionable statements. For instance, and to start in a period of some relevance for these late colonial counter-insurgencies, van der Waals follows the old (and now largely discredited) official line that the MPLA was founded in 1956 (p. 107). Van der Waals also makes reference to Portugal becoming a member of NATO as a positive factor in the course of the campaigns, but, if this is not a mistranslation, then it is a mistake. Portugal was a founding member of NATO back in 1949, well before 1961. And, more to the point, NATO solidarity was limited and certainly did not extend to the continued provision of significant military equipment for these conflicts overseas, or, in NATO-parlance “out-of- area”. Van der Waals does, in fact, then point out that only France really provided vital equipment to Portugal without any caveats, not least helicopters, which are vital in a counterinsurgency campaign. But this is not because, as van der Waals (p. 241) puts it, “Portugal becoming a member of NATO made the guarantee of military support viable.” Instead, it happened in spite of this, and because of de Gaulle’s pursuit of a more autonomous foreign policy, which led him out of NATO military command structure and

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 95 Reis Two South Africans led to a rapprochement with Portugal. But perhaps this misperception by van der Waals should be seen primarily as revealing of the extent to which apartheid South African elites felt isolated internationally, even relative to Portugal. Still, the real difficulty in obtaining supplies of vital equipment for Portuguese campaigns overseas from most of the country’s NATO allies, despite attempts to do so as far back as 1957, was in fact a major reason why South African support became increasingly indispensable, and impossible to resist, despite Salazar’s traditional reservations regarding Pretoria’s hegemonic intentions in Southern Africa. Regarding the official Portuguese counter-insurgency guidelines, van der Waals rightly points to the strong influence of French counter-insurgency doctrine. But this was not, as van der Waals claims (pp. 203-04), due to a very large number of Portuguese officers participating in French operations in Algeria – something that France would not allow and Portugal could not afford. Small missions of Portuguese officers were sent to Algeria (and to the École de Guerre in Paris) in the short period between 1959-1961 to learn, emulate, and adapt French counter-insurgency doctrine. The key point is that this was not simply a way for the many to carry out scattered in loco observations, but a deliberate doctrinal emulation and development on the part of a few, very influential, Portuguese officers. Al Venter’s book is more up-to-date in terms of these more generic or contextual references, but it is still not error-free in terms of the wider context of the war, or above resorting to Wikipedia as a reference (p. 95). It is difficult, for instance, to give credit to Venter’s claim (p. 96) that, because as he puts it black Africans fought alongside whites after the initial shock of the bloody 1961 Angolan uprising, this resulted in racial prejudice being rapidly put aside. But again the relatively multi-racial nature of the Portuguese troops, even of its officers, was something that definitely caused an impression in Apartheid era South African, and is a point to which these authors make frequent reference. But the lack of rigid or legalized racism in the Portuguese colonies, in contrast to South Africa, does not mean that it did not exist. After all, even South Africa eventually used black troops recruited in Angola. Venter’s book suffers from not being clearly structured in a conventional sense, as illustrated by the fact that what would seem to be the logical concluding chapter of this volume on “Why Portugal lost the wars in Africa” appears in the middle of the book (pp. 216 ff.).

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Al Venter’s book is a rewarding read even when he seems to get some things wrong. And this is not just simply a matter of his captivating journalistic style. For instance, Al Venter (pp. 236-238) quotes from, and concurs with, van der Waals’ book about the origins of the military coup in Portugal on April 25, 1974. Both van der Waals and Al Venter echo rumors heard in Luanda, including those allegedly spread by the Commander- in-Chief replaced by General Costa Gomes, in 1968, that the latter was secretly a Communist, as “proven” by his involvement in the 1961 attempt to force Salazar out of power. And that Marcelo Caetano –Salazar’s replacement as head of government in 1968 – was a dangerous Portuguese de Gaulle ready to give up the colonies. Last but not least, these sources that they quote also claimed that the coup of the 25 April 1974 had been in the making since 1972. What is the problem with these views? No credible sources show the existence of a network of disgruntled young officers before late 1973. And, while the involvement of Costa Gomes in the failed pronunciamento led by the Defense Minister General Botelho Moniz in April, 1961, is not open to question, this had nothing to do with a Communist conspiracy. Instead, it involved almost all the top Portuguese military leaders that had been loyal to the regime for decades. And this thesis begs the question why would Costa Gomes go on to basically win the war in Angola (insofar as you can win against an insurgency with cross-border support), a point about which these often skeptical South Africans have no doubts. Still, it is impossible to disagree that General Costa Gomes was an enigmatic figure. And even if these views about the remote Communist origins and long-term planning of the April 1974 military coup are probably wrong, and in any event almost impossible to prove, they are still highly revealing of the kind of tensions, linked with the conduct and the end-game of these late colonial wars in Africa, which were emerging within senior Portuguese military and political elites, years before the 1974 coup brought them spectacularly into the open. In fact, this growing division at the very top of the Portuguese civil and military elite is a powerful explanation of the April 1974 military coup that brought an abrupt end to almost half a century of the authoritarian regime of the and more than a decade of counter-insurgency campaigns designed to stop the decolonization of Portuguese Africa. Venter (pp. 240-41) also goes back to the old idea that Portuguese officers were poorly paid and tries to provide data to this effect, even comparing their salaries with those of British and French officers, who apparently earned twice as much in a similar post. But this kind of comparison seems to ignores the significant subsidies that Portuguese officers posted overseas and operating in war zones received. More

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 97 Reis Two South Africans importantly, it ignores the very low average Portuguese wage, as well as the difference in the cost of living between a country like Britain or France and Portugal. The first official Portuguese minimum wage came with the revolutionary labor legislation enacted after the military coup of April 1974, and no one disputes that it represented a significant increase relative to the average wage until then. This new minimum wage was 3,300 escudos. In 1974, a captain was earning 10,400 escudos. Portuguese officers were not poorly paid, given the country they were living in, and certainly not in comparison with the majority of the population earring close to the minimum wage. Still, Portuguese officers, evidently and perhaps understandably, felt that putting their lives on the line deserved better salaries – and seem to have made clear their discontent to Venter. This recurrent complaint clear reflects a very real and significant undercurrent of dissatisfaction. The key problem with making this the main trigger of the military coup of April 1974 is that this seems to have been a recurrent complaint of professional (and conscripted) officers for a long time. Not only was it not something new, but military officers had been given a pay raise by Caetano in 1974 in a desperate attempt to address the inflation resulting from the post-1973 oil crisis and to try to calm corporate complaints that he feared (correctly as it turned out) might become politicized. But this pay raise gave the junior and middle-ranking officers more deeply involved in the conspiracy to overthrow the regime an additional argument to convince waverers, by pointing to this belated increase in their salary as a dishonorable attempt to bribe them. The key trigger of the 1974 coup seems to have been much more what many professionals perceived as a challenge to their esprit de corps and their career prospects in the form of an understandable, if inept, attempt by the Caetano government to turn conscript officers into professionals in order to address the growing shortage of professional junior officers need to carry on the war and lead they large numbers of conscripts without a loss in military effectiveness. As noted by the authors, less than half of the places in the Military Academy were being filled by 1973. A recurrent, indeed key theme in both books is the erosion of the professional cadre of officers who found themselves on repeated tours of duty in these campaigns year after year, and the very real problems created in terms of training and leadership that this shortage of sufficient professional officers created for the effective conduct of a counter-insurgency campaign that is always greatly dependent upon the quality of junior and mid-level officers. The greatest strengths of Al Venter’s book are his reportages undertaken in the company of Portuguese troops, resulting in a rich sample of testimonies, not least from

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South African and Rhodesian military officers who were also present in the field and often very critical of the Portuguese war effort. As a classic example of war reportage, Venter’s book gives us an idea of what the war actually felt like in the field from the Portuguese side, including the troops’ living conditions. Namely Venter (pp. 36-38) points pertinently to the massive and largely successful effort required for creating logistical lines across many thousands of kilometers, and their vital importance in maintaining morale through the regular supply of mail and food. Venter (pp. 114 ff.) then goes on to offer his readers some vivid portraits of people involved in the conflict. This is the case with the conscript Captain Alçada in Angola, a lawyer and a former student of Marcelo Caetano in his time as a law professor, so committed to the grandiose vision of the Greater Portugal overseas that he volunteered for a second tour of duty in Angola, leading a company of commandos. According to Venter, Alçada believed that the solution to these conflicts was to be as ruthless as the adversary, namely making prisoners an offer they could not refuse – change sides or die. Or, as he put it to Venter, ‘the secret was in getting your hands dirty’ (pp. 123-26). For those who might think that these books written by white South Africans are blindly apologetic of the Portuguese wars in Africa, it will come as a shock to find not only that are they sometimes critical of Portuguese military effectiveness, but that they are also very blunt about what they saw as frequent torture of prisoners by PIDE, but also complaints about abuses by the Portuguese military against the civilian population – especially in the case of Mozambique, namely with populations resisting resettlement being killed and reported as insurgents despite the absence of guns. This testimony is all the more relevant because they do not show any particular hostility towards some of these torturers, such as the converted insurgent Alfredo or the PIDE Agent Óscar Cardoso, whom they portray as very effective, so there is little reason to question the veracity of their testimony (Venter, p. 167, passim). A fascinating cameo painted by Venter (pp. 247 ff.) is that of Captain Bacar, who led a company of locally recruited commandos in Guinea-Bissau. Bacar was one of the many Fula Muslims recruited by the Portuguese military, but he clearly stood out. Bacar was awarded the highest Portuguese decoration for outstanding leadership and bravery in combat, and literally became the stuff of legend. And whether or not all his exploits were true, this episode is revealing of the perceptions that existed in the field, and does makes a great read. Bacar’s death a week after Venter had been allocated to join his company also makes it clear that, in real wars, even heroes die because of simple mistakes or sheer bad luck – in Bacar’s case he apparently slipped in the swampy terrain so typical of Guinea-

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Bissau while throwing a short-fuse grenade in response to an ambush, and then opted to cover it with his body at the very last second to save his men. The most important conclusion that we can draw from both these books is that these South African observers, while not ideologically prejudiced against the Portuguese wars in Africa (in fact, quite the opposite), were, however, often very critical of what they saw in the field. This is especially true in the case of the war in Mozambique, ironically conducted by the most right-wing Portuguese Commander-in-Chief, Kaúlza de Arriaga. But Mozambique was, of course, the closest and potentially most threatening campaign to the territorial heartland of South Africa (and ), and consequently the one most closely watched by the South Africans. And increasingly these South African did not like what they saw from the late 1960s onwards, in contrast with the case of Angola, where they tended to make a positive evaluation of General Costa Gomes and his deputy in the new frontline in the East of the country, General Bettencourt Rodrigues. Perhaps the most scathing criticism of Portuguese counter-insurgency in Mozambique came from the former commander of the Malayan SAS and Rhodesian Selous Scouts, Colonel Ron Reid-Daily (Venter, pp. 420 ff.) He believed that Portuguese troops in Mozambique were incapable of maintaining the tactical discipline needed for effective ambushes or long-range raids. They also lacked basic bush skills. Reid-Daily saw this partly as a lack of adequate training and partly as a lack of sufficient numbers of professional officers providing good leadership. All this was reflected, according to Reid-Daily, in an approach to the war based on minimizing risks to the point of actively avoiding contact with the enemy. Venter echoes this criticism, but points in their defense to their lack of experience of the region – something that came naturally to many Rhodesian or South African soldiers born and raised in rural Africa –as well as to their lack of adequate equipment for greater mobility or effective long-term raids. In short, Rhodesian and South African officers wanted the Portuguese conscripts to perform in these wars in a way that they were not trained or equipped to do. Van der Waals, moreover, does points out that, in Portuguese doctrine–with strong French influences – they were meant to have a primarily defensive presence in a given sector (quadrícula). It is also important to underline that the Rhodesian and South African officers, not least van der Waals (p. 329 ff.; p. 342), are more complimentary of the Portuguese conduct of the war in Angola, pointing to efforts to make even conscript troops more offensive- minded, and to use them in conjunction with special forces in multiple ambushes and long- term raids, in particular making the most of locally-recruited black Portuguese troops or

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GEs and Flechas (the latter were paramilitary special forces under direct control of the fearful Portuguese secret service PIDE/DGS). As they also point out, some aspects of the Angolan model started to be exported to Mozambique, but this was a case of too little, too late. Both authors – and, given his background, van der Waals’ testimony (p.309 passim) is especially significant in this respect – are critical of the great difficulties in achieving integrated command, pointing to the deep rivalry between the different services and report a strong elitism in both the Air Force and the Navy that made relations with the Army they were supposed to be supporting often difficult. They do give Marcelo Caetano some credit for trying to reinforce jointness of command both at the metropolitan level and by giving greater powers to the Commanders-in-Chief in each theater of operations. This should not be seen, however, as a specific problem faced by Portugal. Rather it was the South African and Rhodesian military that were exceptional in being relatively young and facing an imminent unconventional threat. As a result, they were less constrained by the centuries of organizational tradition that existed in more established armies, like the British, the French, or the Portuguese, in which the problem of how to improve jointness of command is still being discussed today. And even in the case of South Africa there have been references to division and tensions, if not necessarily along the traditional lines, then between the military proper and the intelligence powerhouse that was BOSS. No less interesting is the fact that these Southern African allies of late colonial Portugal were also critical of the ability to develop an effective comprehensive approach, even though this was so central in Portuguese doctrine, given the absence of adequate civilian personnel and resources. Again, this problem of how to translate doctrine into practice, especially in its more socio-economic aspects, was not a problem that was unique to Portugal; rather, it was a recurrent complaint in these late colonial counterinsurgencies, similarly diagnosed for instance in French Algeria. It was a more acute problem in the more remote areas of these vast empires, like the arid regions of the South of Angola, of Cuito Cuanavale, tellingly known as Terras do Fim do Mundo – literally the end of the world. Van der Waals and Venter recognize that this huge remote region was understandably of marginal importance for the Portuguese, while being vital for South Africa for the protection of “their” Southwest Africa (Namibia). This was, of course, the region that saw the beginning of closer cooperation and the sharing of resources and capabilities between South Africa and Portugal. Al Venter (pp. 375 ff.) did encounter effective officers even in this remote region, not least in their strong commitment to winning over locals, such as

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Captain Vítor Alves, who, to Venter’s amazement, would become one of the leading figures in the military coup of April 25, 1974. The value of van der Waals’ testimony lies in being more closely aligned with the official views of the South African military and the military discourse of the time, including an appendix (van der Waals, pp. 426 ff.) devoted to counter-insurgency doctrine and vocabulary. This makes for a less lively book than Venter’s. Van der Waals’ book has also lost some of its novelty if compared with the first edition in English in 1993, when it provided a glimpse into South African archives that were then closed. This is much less true now, because recent publications by historians with access to Portuguese, South African and Rhodesian/Zimbabwean archives have provided a much clearer view of what is still a controversial topic – the real nature and depth of the Portuguese-South African- Rhodesian military cooperation in the so-called ALCORA framework.2 This being said, even in the case of the less revealing book by van der Waals, we once again have relevant information that does not seem to have made it to mainstream accounts of the war. The most significant example is that van der Waals (p. 273) reports that, according to South African intelligence, the anti-aircraft portable missile Strella that was being used to great effect by the PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau was being provided to the MPLA in Angola, and to FRELIMO.

***

Are the points made by these authors to be taken at face value? The answer is, evidently, no. It is not because they provide direct testimonies of these campaign or because they are foreigners that they are necessarily right. After all, if Rhodesians were such good judges of how to conduct effective counter-insurgency in the African bush, why did they not resist more than five years after the retreat of the Portuguese troops, when Rhodesia/ became the new frontline of anti-colonial insurgency in Southern Africa? Last but not least, these books show that even close allies of the Portuguese regime had a pessimistic view of the way the war was going, especially in Mozambique (and also,

2 Luís Barroso, Salazar, Caetano e o “Reduto Branco”: A Manobra Político-Diplomática de Portugal na África Austral (1951-1974) (Lisbon: Fronteira do Caos, 2012); Aniceto Afonso and Carlos Matos Gomes, Alcora: O Acordo Secreto do Colonialismo (Lisbon: Divina Comédia, 2013); Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses and Robert McNamara, “The Origins of Exercise ALCORA, 1960–71”, The International History Review, Vol. 35, No. 5 (2013), 1113– 1134; Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses and Robert McNamara, “Exercise ALCORA: Expansion and Demise, 1971– 4”, The International History Review, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2014), 89–111. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 102 Reis Two South Africans but with less immediate consequences, in Guinea-Bissau). And yet even South Africans in close contact with the reality of the Portuguese wars in Africa and who had actually met some of the key players in the military coup of the 25 April 1974 – Vítor Alves and Otelo were points of contact for Al Venter – were surprised by this revolutionary event. Venter’s comments about Otelo and Spínola, in particular, make it clear that outsiders’ views can have major limitations, with Otelo being described as a great political intellectual and Spínola as a visionary thinker (Venter, pp. 272 ff.) The inability of South Africans to understand the political dynamics on the Portuguese side of the equation is less surprising if we take into account that their knowledge of metropolitan Portugal ranged from very limited to non-existent. And these Portuguese officers were evidently not going to confide their involvement in a coup, or even the full depth of their discontent to foreign correspondents or foreign military officers, much less from South Africa. In conclusion, those without prior knowledge of metropolitan Portugal and its colonial history should treat these two books with some caution. The translation into Portuguese of both the books should have been more scrupulous: at certain points, it makes a number of passages difficult to understand. It is also regrettable that the Portuguese edition of these books was not used as an opportunity for the authors, in particular van der Waals, to engage directly with some of the more recent literature on these topics, and in particular about the ALCORA framework of cooperation between South Africa, Portugal, and Rhodesia. ALCORA is the missing elephant in the room in these two books.3 Yet, if their limitations are taken into account, the two books are a useful addition of a significant foreign perspective to available sources in Portuguese, but they are also a reminder that foreign points of view cannot be confused with the real or full picture of these wars.

Received for publication: 18 August 2016 Accepted in revised form: 20 October 2016 Recebido para publicação: 18 de Agosto de 2016 Aceite após revisão: 20 de Outubro de 2016

3 Van der Waals makes literally one guarded and brief reference to ALCORA at the very end of his book (p. 342) but unfortunately still feels bound by the need for state secrecy. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 103 Marques, André Evangelista. Da Representação Documental à Materialidade do Espaço. Território da Diocese de Braga (séculos IX-XI), Colecção Teses Universitárias, nº 6, Santa Maria da Feira: Edições Afrontamento/CITCEM, 2014, 448 pp. ISBN: 978-972- 36-1389-6

Maria João Branco1

This is an innovative and original book, especially if we consider that it addresses questions that are seldom dealt with by Portuguese Historiography and moreover in ways that are also unlikely to be a subject of study for PhD theses, which is what the present work originally was. As the author himself explains in the introduction, the thesis, which won the CITCEM prize for the best PhD thesis of 2012, began with his intention to study the evolution of the occupation of the territory of Braga and its social profile during the defining period from the ninth to the eleventh century. But soon the object of his study became the documentation itself, as the author realized that the mere work of systematizing the different categories of documents and the information that they offered, classifying the several different types of property and proprietors that he found, and combining this with a truly interdisciplinary approach to the human, physical, social, and symbolic landscape and the power structure of the region he wished to study was in itself a thesis. This book is therefore much more of a theoretical and methodological proposal for a new form of approaching the question of the construction, colonization, and social shaping of a landscape (any landscape, and in the most complex sense of the term) than it is a regular monographic work about a region, which the title might lead us to believe at first sight. The work by André Marques is consequently and, above all, a bright, rigorous, and erudite essay on the methodological possibilities for studying the social appropriation of the territory, when observed from the perspective of an in-depth critical study of the written documentation concerning the territory of the Diocese of Braga from the ninth to the eleventh century, and perceived through the eyes of the discourse reflected in the evidence from those centuries that has been preserved until today.

1 Nova University of Lisbon. IEM – Institute of Medieval Studies. E-mail: [email protected]

Branco Marques, André Evangelista. Da Representação

The book’s structure reflects the author’s critical preoccupations, and it may also be read as a journey along his own personal research path, looking at the way in which his methodological approach eventually developed into his personal model. The introduction to the book, as well as its lengthy first part (“Uma proposta de análise do espaço altimedieval a partir de fontes escritas”) are both very clearly designed to introduce the reader to the careful critical steps taken by the author in handling, organizing, and systematizing the evidence, and to the production of the database which derived from this. Very conscious of the legacy of which he is an avowed (the field of studies traditionally addressed as “construção social do espaço” or the social construction of the territory), this first part provides the reader with the author’s own critical assessment of the work of his predecessors, in order to then explain his awareness of the difficulties lying along the path that he wished to follow. In this respect, André Marques’ work also serves as a model for all those interested in researching in this field. The first part offers a very complete analysis of the state of the art for this field of studies, but further adds to this an awareness of how abstract our reconstitution of these objects of study can be, and therefore accepts the uncertainty and risk which always come with it. Marques’ path through the representation of the territory that the documentary evidence displays seeks to provide a “bottom-up” approach, as it has, at both its starting and end point, the terminology used in the actual documents from the period. The exhaustive dissection of the possibilities deriving from his critical approach to the documentation afforded him a fuller understanding of the concepts and conceptions of the forms of organization of the space that are reflected in the terminology used by the scribes and mirrored in the descriptors of the surrounding reality, at the same time as he was involved in the process of constructing another reality of his own by elaborating a written record for the sake of the eternal preservation of the memory of the placea particular kind of memory. The construction of the database derives directly and obviously from this extensive preparatory work. The two main categories that he defines—Documents and Elements— explain precisely how he conceived the perception of the documentary construction of the social construction of the space he was analyzing. The construction of the framework for the development of the database and the ensuing results enabled him to then proceed to what is the second part of the book. The last part of his book, consists in the attempt to exemplify, for the region of Braga, how the theoretically sound, but practical model he has been designing can work when applied to the practical field of attempting to understand

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 105 Branco Marques, André Evangelista. Da Representação the evolution of what historians of his nature like to call the social appropriation of the space, combining such results with the social evolution of the region and the relationship between emerging “central” powers and traditional “local” ones. The second part (“A representação documental do espaço bracarense altimedieval”) therefore consists in an analysis of the materials relating to the territorium of Braga, in their typological and semantic function, and it does so in two chapters, with major subdivisions. In the first chapter, “Os três filtros,” André Marques dissects the three layers which he identifies as fundamental for understanding the conditions and characteristics of the production of the documents on which he bases all of his study and his conclusions: a) the documentary corpus, and the study of its transmission traditions; b) the construction of an intelligible discourse in the writing of documents, whether one is studying the formulaic parts or the descriptive ones; and, finally, c) the study of the terminology itself as a reflection of, and as a mediator between, the material “reality” and its representation. The second chapter provides us with a description of the results derived from the previous work and enables us to envisage the several different types of unit of settlement, defined and divided by the author into: 1) Units for the articulation of the space; 2) Units for the organization of the space; 3) Ecclesiastical units; 4) Landscape units; and, finally, 5) Forms of property. This second chapter is important for understanding what the author explained in the first part of the book. Through a careful reading of his observation of the occurrences, recurrences, and context of every “unit” which the author analyzes, the reader can infer the relative importance of each of them and starts to envisage much more clearly why André Marques chose the expression “Prosopography of Space” to characterize the model he developed from the evidence he had available to him. In fact, what we are faced with is precisely the breakdown into types, categories, and classes of the “units” for the social articulation and organization of the space, and, when we combine these with the forms of property, we start to enjoy a much fuller understanding not only of the social landscape of the region under scrutiny, but also of the ways in which this is linked to the other important coordinate for this study: time. And consequently we can start to visualize the evolution of the landscape and its social, physical and symbolic “shape”. After the conclusion, which is not too extensive or conclusive, as one would expect from such a book, the author provides the reader with two annexes, one of a toponymic nature, and a second more extensive one with the cartography derived from his treatment of the data inserted in the database.

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The extraordinarily detailed and accurate cartography presented in this last annex illustrates the possibilities deriving from the results of the author’s work, and is, in itself, a major contribution to our understanding of the whole territory and its design. If any criticism may be made of what is otherwise an exemplary work for anyone wishing to follow in his footsteps and a work that will become a classic of its type, it is that we end our reading of this book wishing to know a little more about the “wider framework” in which this landscape is inserted and in which it evolves, and curious to go just one step further into the world that the spatial lexicon of his spatial prosopography leads us into. Just like any traditional prosopography, it is designed to help us understand the logic of the development of certain groups and social strata in the territories and of the men involved in them. But this must also be included among the perspectives that André Marques has in store for us in the future.

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 107 Utopia in Portugal, Brazil and Lusophone African Countries, Francisco Bethencourt (ed.), Peter Lang (Bern, 2015). ISBN 978-3-0343-1871-6

Malyn Newitt1

This collection of essays grew out of a symposium organised at King’s College London by Francisco Bethencourt. The symposium brought together historians and students of literature and the different approaches of these two branches of scholarship, and the different language which they use to convey their ideas are a feature of the volume. A reader approaching this topic should certainly start with Bethencourt’s introduction “The Power of Utopia” and his masterly essay on “The Unstable Status of Sebastianism.” As can be seen from these and the other essays in this collection, the term “Utopia” has been used to describe everything from imagined ideal societies, to religious ideas of eternal life, to the rhetoric of charismatic leaders, Anarchists, and Neo- malthusians. It is used to describe the visions of totalitarian dictators as well as those of liberals and radical revolutionaries. In short, it seems, that any form of idealism can be considered as a manifestation of Utopia. Fairy tales and imaginative children’s literature are forms of Utopian literature, as are the worlds imagined by the writers of science fiction. “Utopian” has even been a term used to describe the work of some architects and town planners. Utopian thought, apparently, can be a process, or a dialectic, even a dance, and need not have any concrete form at all. As Maria-Benedita Basto puts it, “utopia is a dialectical movement creating heterogeneous relations between past, present and future” (p. 183). It can be the aspiration to create a new generation of men (as in Helena Buescu’s essay on the Isle of Love in Camões Lusiadas) and need not concern itself with a reformed and idealised society at all. Leaders who can be placed somewhere on the spectrum of charismatic through to messianic litter the historical record. In this way even bandits and pirates become harbingers of alternative societies and Carnaval becomes a glimpse of another world order. This may well raise the thought in the mind of the sceptic that “Utopia” is an umbrella term that is too wide to have much meaning, and it is perhaps typical of the

1 King’s College London. E-mail: [email protected] Newitt Utopia in Portugual pragmatic British, who traditionally have been deeply suspicious of ideologies, that the term “Utopian” has come to be synonymous with the “impossible.” “Sebastianism” is repeatedly referred to throughout the book and in many ways is a phenomenon specific to the Lusophone world. It ranges from the political movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which apparently really anticipated a return of king Dom Sebastião, to anticipations of the arrival of a charismatic leader and to religious messianism in general. Here the excellent essay by Nancy Naro takes the topic to nineteenth century Brazil and the violent and disturbing movements among the peoples of the backlands. The appeal of Sebastianism is always to people who are disenfranchised, exiled or powerless. It is the politics of a society in which ways to challenge the elite are otherwise non-existent. Sebastianism is not so much a call to rebellion or reform but a process that delegitimises the ruling elite. It is soft dissent as opposed to outright opposition. Sebastianism began with the need felt by many Portuguese to delegitimise Spanish rule and became a way by which people adapted to imperial decline and foreign occupation. It came to form a streak of unreality in the mentality of the Portuguese and historians will find that the idea that Portugal had a “universal mission,” which formed part of the “Sebastianist” vision of António Vieira in the seventeenth century (described in Patricia Vieira’s essay) echoed in the colonial rhetoric of Salazar in the twentieth. That Marxism has always been tinged with Utopianism is fundamental to understanding its appeal. In José Neves’s essay, the Communist festivals in twentieth century Portugal became an “anticipation of a postconflictual age” (p. 220), while for António Vieira, as for Marxists two hundred years later, “to know the future is the path to humanity’s emancipation” (p. 74). This certainty was the lure of Marxism as well as of religious prophesy. Literary Utopias, like those of More, Swift, or Morris, have always presented a critique of contemporary society but there is often only a small step from this kind of Utopia to the sort of dystopia imagined by Huxley or Orwell. This transition occurs when the ideas of dictators for a new society and a new world order come under close inspection or when people are forced to examine the implications of the supposed perfect society. Manuela Lisboa quotes Saramago, “if there was no death, there could be no resurrection, and if there was no resurrection there would be no point in having a church” (p. 146). Living for ever, like the idea of enjoying complete leisure, turn out to be profoundly

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 109 Newitt Utopia in Portugual dystopic – as are the imaginings of Anarchism and Neo-malthusians, as Diogo Duarte shows in his essay. This book raises questions and challenges the reader on every page. It offers an open door to an intellectual world that may not be familiar to many English readers. Sadly the deliberately obscure language used in some of the essays in this book makes their content largely inaccessible to readers who have not been initiated into the freemasonry of literary criticism. Nevertheless this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and literature of the Portuguese-speaking world. As Manuela Lisboa writes, “Portugal’s self-narrating grand récit has repeatedly anchored itself in the hope of utopian never-never dreams: metaphysical (Catholic) salvation; everlasting empires; kings returned from the dead; and more recently European Union geese with an infinite supply of golden eggs” (p. 166).

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 110 Meneses, Filipe Ribeiro de. A Grande Guerra de Afonso Costa. Lisbon: Publicações Dom Quixote, 2015, 527 pp. ISBN: 978-972-20-5877-3

David Castaño1

This book is part of a long process of research that Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses, a Professor from the Department of History at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, has been devoting to the First Republic and to the Portuguese participation in the First World War. The author of União Sagrada e Sidonismo: Portugal em Guerra, 1916-1918 (Lisbon, 2000) and Afonso Costa (Lisbon, 2010), Ribeiro de Meneses has emerged both as a practitioner of political history based on the narrative genre and as a skilled biographer (in addition to his biography of Afonso Costa, he also wrote Salazar: A Political Biography, New York, 2009, Lisbon, 2010, and São Paulo, 2011). Using an extremely wide set of primary sources contained at national and international archives (Military Historical Archives, Ministry of the Interior Archives, Historic and Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, National Library, Mário Soares Foundation, Archives of the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Liddell Hart Military Archives, National Archives and Politisches Archiv des Aswärtigen Amts), which enabled him to compare official documents and private correspondence with press articles, memoirs, diaries and personal testimonies from the chosen period, this study also uses the most recent historiographical contributions dedicated to the Portuguese First Republic and the Great War, not forgetting Oliveira Marques’ pioneering work dedicated to the man who marked the early years of the Portuguese republican regime. The title suggests that this is a work devoted to the study of the Portuguese participation in the Great War or, alternatively, to the study of the war waged by Afonso Costa in order to take the country into the first major conflict of the twentieth century. However, in the introduction, Ribeiro de Meneses explains that this book is not a history of the Portuguese participation in , nor a political history of this period. His intention is to narrate and interpret the path followed by Afonso Costa at a crucial moment in Portuguese contemporary history. More specifically, the author analyzes the political behavior of the leader of the Portuguese Republican Party (PRP) over a range of situations

1 IPRI (Portuguese Institute for International Relations) – Nova University of Lisbon. E-mail: [email protected] Castaño Meneses, Filipe Ribeiro de. A Grande Guerra which, in his view, reveal ambiguities and contradictions that are difficult to explain. In this way, he seeks to overcome the view (which he considers to be incomplete) that Afonso Costa’s political erosion is to be explained by the consequences of his efforts to promote Portugal’s military participation on the European front. Nevertheless, in this large volume (527 pages), the actions of Afonso Costa are somewhat diluted by long passages contextualizing the complex internal, colonial, and external environment, relegating the thoughts, intentions, actions, and omissions of this Republican leader to a secondary level in various parts of the book. In the introduction, Ribeiro de Meneses identifies a number of situations and decisions that he later intends to clarify. These are set out in chronological order and the reader is led to believe that the book's structure will follow this same sequence: Costa’s position in relation to the movement in favor of interventionism; his role in the crisis that befell Bernardino Machado’s government; his refusal to lead the executive after the coup of May 1915; his behavior during the diplomatic crisis that led Portugal into war; his insistence on the constitution of the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps (CEP) and its submission to the European front; his role in the fall of the first government of the “União Sagrada”; his uncomfortable relationship with his own party during his last government; and, finally, his silence during exile. However, the book is divided, once again in chronological order, into six main chapters in which these issues are not afforded any particular emphasis and end up not being distinguished from the other subchapters. For example, Afonso Costa’s position on the Great War is only analyzed by the author on page 56, following a brief description of the situation of the Portuguese Republic in 1914 and the beginning of the war and after an examination of the debate between the interventionists and the supporters of neutrality, a description of the military preparations for a possible military expedition and the author’s careful dissection of Bernardino Machado’s attitude towards the war. Instead, the analysis of all of these aspects could have taken the position of the central figure of the book as their starting point. Basically, the author’s great efforts to provide a credible contextualization tend to disregard the actions of the person who was largely responsible for sending troops to Europe, as he himself confirms. In this regard, we should note that Ribeiro de Meneses shows how, despite the fact that, at the beginning of the conflict, Afonso Costa was not among the major proponents of interventionism, he took immediate action to obstruct the sending of artillery pieces without artillerymen, and he proved to be an advocate of the direct

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 112 Castaño Meneses, Filipe Ribeiro de. A Grande Guerra involvement of Portuguese military forces alongside the allies on European battlefields, i.e., sending them into the “eye of the hurricane” (197). Ribeiro de Meneses maintains that this obsession had its genesis in the idea (among other factors that are presented by several historians who have studied this issue and are also taken into consideration throughout the book) that only this level of commitment to the allied war effort would enable Portugal, in the first place, to have access to the grains and other raw materials that were indispensable for guaranteeing the efficient functioning of the economy, and, secondly, to participate in the Peace Conference and ensure the country’s access to its fair share at a later date when the winners presented the accounts of the war to those that lost. As we know, this strategy was defeated, and, as its chief architect, Afonso Costa was to suffer the consequences of this failure. But the great challenge of this book is precisely to discover other reasons for the political fate of Afonso Costa. Let us then turn to the central theme of this work and to the decisions and behaviors exhibited by Afonso Costa during these years. What stand out above all else are the omissions and the absences. In several passages, Ribeiro de Meneses refers to criticisms that were directed towards Afonso Costa by other interventionists, namely Jaime Cortesão, about the lack of propaganda, and points to several occasions at critical periods in the national political life when the leader of the democráticos was absent. In some cases, the author indicates the reasons for such absences and silences, but the reader is led to think that, after all, Afonso Costa, a prominent anticlerical, was a cultivator of Sebastianism and saw himself as a messiah: the only one able to make a success of the radical project. It turns out that while, for moderate and conservative republicans, royalists and Catholics, Afonso Costa was considered a radical, for some sectors within his party and other leftist groups, the democratic leader was believed to have contributed to the failure of the revolution and the radical project that he had started as Minister of Justice in the provisional government. Quoting Oliveira Marques, Ribeiro de Meneses states that for Afonso Costa the Republic was not an end in itself, “but only a first necessary step for the implementation of a ‘full socialism’, the ‘socialism of the future’” (15). This statement deserves further development. Why are there no references in the book to the way that Costa regarded and accompanied the events taking place in Russia? On two occasions, reference is made to the victory of the Bolsheviks and to the end of the eastern front (372, 389), but no allusion is made to Afonso Costa’s positioning in relation to this remarkable historical fact. Despite the great differences between the two countries that marked the western and eastern limits of the European continent, there were certainly some factors that linked them together.

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 113 Castaño Meneses, Filipe Ribeiro de. A Grande Guerra

One was the lack of bread. It happens that, in Russia, bread was presented as a synonym for peace, while in Portugal the same commodity was presented as a synonym for war. The book raises pertinent questions and finds some answers, revealing, however, that there are still many paths yet to be followed and many topics to be studied in order to break new ground in the already distant land of the history of the First Republic.

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 114 David Martín Marcos, José María Iñurritegui, and Pedro Cardim, eds. Repensar a identidade: O mundo ibérico nas margens da crise da consciência europeia. Lisboa: CHAM, 2015. ISBN: 978-989-8492-28-9

Alexander Ponsen1

The past two decades have witnessed a flourishing of research on the period of Iberian union from 1580 to 1640 and relations between the Spanish Monarchy, Portugal, and their overseas territories.2 Historians have devoted relatively less attention to the subsequent period, however, as the two polities emerged from that union in an altogether transformed political environment in Europe and beyond. By the second half of the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic, France and England had all become major competitors on the continent and overseas. The crisis compelled the Spanish and Portuguese to implement a series of major institutional reforms in an attempt to preserve their political and economic power. It also provoked a period of intense internal reflection as Spaniards and Portuguese re-articulated notions of individual and collective identity across the Iberian Peninsula and the overseas colonial world. In Repensar a identidade: O mundo ibérico nas margens da crise da consciência europeia, the editors have assembled a collection of essays that approach the broad theme of identity from a variety of distinct angles and contexts. Wary of the potential pitfalls inherent in the

1 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. E-mail: [email protected] 2 For a small sampling of this recent historiography, see Fernando Bouza, “Portugal en la política internacional de Felipe II,” in A União Ibérica e o Mundo Atlântico, edited by Maria de Graça Ventura, 29-46 (1997); Pedro Cardim, “Los portugueses frente a la Monarquía Hispánica,” in La Monarquía de las Naciones, edited by Antonio Álvarez-Ossorio Alvariño and Bernardo José García García, 355-383 (2004), and Portugal unido y separado: Felipe II, la unión de territorios y el debate sobre la condición política del Reino de Portugal (2014); Pedro Cardim, Tamar Herzog, José Javier Ruiz Ibáñez and Gaetano Sabatini, eds. Polycentric Monarchies: How did Early Modern Spain and Portugal Achieve and Maintain a Global Hegemony? (2012); Xavier Gil Pujol, “Spain and Portugal,” in European Political Thought, 1450-1700: Religion, Law and Philosophy, edited by H. A. Lloyd, G. Burgess and S. Hodson, 416-457 (2007); Serge Gruzinski, Les quatre parties du monde: Histoire d’une mondialisation (2004); Santiago Martínez Hernández, ed., Governo, Política e Representações do Poder no Portugal Habsburgo e nos seus Territórios Ultramarinos, 1581-1640 (2011); José Antonio Martínez Torres, “‘There is but one world’: Globalisation and Connections in the overseas territories of the Spanish Habsburgs, 1581-1640,” Culture and History Digital Journal 3, 1 (2014): 1-15; Jean-Frédéric Schaub, Le Portugal au temps du comte-duc d’Olivares (1621- 1640); and Portugal na Monarquia Hispânica, 1580-1640 (2001); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Holding the World in Balance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian Overseas Empires, 1500-1640,” American Historical Review 112, 5 (2007): 1359-1385; Rafael Valladares, Castilla y Portugal en Asia (1580-1680): Declive imperial y adaptación (2001), and La conquista de Lisboa: Violencia militar y comunidad política en Portugal, 1578-1583 (2008). Ponsen Repensar a identidade nebulous concept of “identity,” the editors carefully define their approach at the outset.3 They explain in the introduction that the volume’s component essays examine how various Iberian actors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries attributed meaning to themselves and their activities, and differentiated themselves from others, either on an individual or broader collective basis. In addition to addressing questions of national or religious identification, often privileged in such studies, the authors also seek to highlight other interrelated aspects of belonging including corporative, jurisdictional, ethnic and linguistic attributes, and not only those of Portuguese and Castilians, but also of Aragonese, Catalans, and Basques, as well as of Iberian settler groups overseas. The editors rightly regard identity not as an essential or fixed reality, but as a contested, historically situated mode of differentiation. They regard it as shaped in large part by the agency of actors themselves, but also through dynamic relationships between self-identification and categorizations imposed by others. Five central, and occasionally overlapping, themes guide multiple authors’ analyses. First is the theme of vizinhança/vecindad and naturalidade/naturaleza, legal categories that defined an individual’s belonging on the level of the municipality and kingdom. A second major theme relates to the use of genealogy or historiography in reshaping individual or collective aspects of identity. A third distinct theme is the projection and substantiation of national character and virtue through political theory. Fourth, several studies examine the importance of the comparative status of the various Iberian kingdoms. Finally, a fifth major theme is the reconfiguration of relations between the king and his vassals in the peninsula and overseas. In Chapter 1, Ângela Barreto Xavier examines the presence of foreigners in Portugal, particularly diplomats and merchants, from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. In particular, she traces the development of the categories of vizinhança and naturalidade, which defined the rights and privileges reserved for those individuals officially recognized as members of the municipality or kingdom. João Figueirôa-Rêgo, in Chapter 2, explains how seventeenth century Portuguese noblemen commissioned genealogists to substantiate their claims to purity of blood and social standing, and to gain royal honors, favors, and privileges. Such practice was also mobilized, he notes, to prove loyalty to the Braganza dynasty in the wake of Portugal’s separation from the Spanish Monarchy in 1640. In Chapter 3, Jon Arrieta Alberdi analyzes a 1643 text by Portuguese jurist João Salgado de Araújo. Araújo’s allegorical work took the form of a letter by a Basque

3 For a penetrating critique of the category, “identity,” which the editors of this volume cite, see Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond Identity,” Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1-47. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 116 Ponsen Repensar a identidade nobleman to a counterpart in Navarra, which criticized an Aragonese for his support to the Castilians in their suppression of the ongoing Catalan Revolt. Araújo’s intent was to publicize what he saw as the legitimate grievances of several Iberian kingdoms under the Habsburg yoke and to ensure the permanent separation of Portugal from the Spanish Monarchy. In the following chapter, Pedro Cardim examines a 1645 text by Braz da França, a Portuguese resident in Italy, purporting to relay the contents of a letter by the Duke of Alba to Philip IV about how to recover Portugal. Cardim describes how the term “nation” was used frequently in the text, a relatively new phenomenon, and how the text possessed echoes of the idea, common in arbitrismo of the day, that with all the acquisitions of new territories and subject peoples the monarchy’s body politic had grown too large to remain healthy. In Chapter 5, Antonio Terrasa Lozano examines a 1666 text by Don Bernardino de Rebolledo y Villamizar, a soldier, diplomat, man of letters, and member of Spain’s Council of War, in which he urged an end to the two-and-a-half-decade-long war to recover Portugal. Together, the analyses of Arrieta Alberdi, Cardim and Terrasa Lozano display some of the range of themes and discursive forms mobilized in debates over the governance of the two monarchies and their future in the wake of Portuguese Restoration. Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, in Chapter 6, examines the efforts of various authors to rewrite the history of the origins of the Spanish people in the context of the crisis of the monarchy after the separation of Portugal, the Catalan Revolt, and amidst the rise of Spain’s northern European competitors. In their revisionist histories, writers like José Pellicer de Ossau y Tovar and Francisco de Seijas y Lobera reached back into antiquity to extend the origins of the Spanish beyond “historical time,” or to argue that ancient Hispanic peoples had migrated to America and that before the arrival of Columbus the kings that had previously ruled that land were of ancient Hispanic origin. These arguments projected new visions of a national imaginary and aimed to reinforce Spain’s claim to legitimate sovereignty in the New World. In the following chapter, Héloïse Hermant analyzes the propaganda war between Juan José de and the favorites of the regent Mariana during the minority years of Charles II. Members of each faction identified themselves as “true Spaniards, lovers of the patria,” and vilified their opponents as traitors and heretics. Juan José de Austria, Hermant explains, hoped to see Spain “rise from its ashes” by reorganizing the relation between the king and political community, or patria terrestre, and creating a more integrated public space. In Chapter 8, Maria Fernanda Bicalho explores the development of new discourses about the links uniting the king of Portugal with his vassals overseas, especially in Brazil. Bicalho also analyzes the redefinition of

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 117 Ponsen Repensar a identidade collective, communitarian identities among different elite groups in Brazil, above all the landed, slaveholding class, and affluent Portuguese peninsular-born merchants. Although focused on ’s arguments legitimating British overseas, and only touching on Iberian notions of identity obliquely, Eva Botella Ordinas’ contribution in Chapter 9 is significant in explaining how advocates of England’s nascent empire justified and distinguished its claims to overseas dominion in contradistinction to those of Spain. She describes how, in the context of confrontations between England and the Spanish Monarchy for sovereignty in America, Locke’s writings helped redefine the concept of property and modified the law of nations all while forging a British imperial identity based jointly on commerce and improvement of the land and nature. In Chapter 10, José María Iñurritegui examines the 1694 treatise, Verdad Política, by Catalan jurist Miguel Francisco de Salvador. If Iberian writers are virtually absent from discussions of Europe’s leading political theorists of the day, Iñurritegui shows Salvador to have been a formidable thinker as proven in his sophisticated analysis of the concept of balance of power, based primarily on the notion of “the interest of states.” In Chapter 11 David Martín Marcos shifts the focus from political theory to analyze the writings and actions of a Portuguese diplomat, João de Almeida Portugal, the Second Count of Assumar, at the court of Archduke Charles in the early eighteenth century. Martín Marcos describes how the Spanish came to see Assumar as an independent ally, in part through the general confidence he managed to transmit and in part through his capacity as diplomat in offering a Portuguese military alliance. As Martín Marcos explains, Assumar proved a prime example of Portuguese self-representation forged during the context of a major European conflict—the War of Spanish Succession. In the following chapter, Saúl Martínez Bermejo explores the life and work of Rafael Bluteau, who, although born in England and having spent many of his formative years in France and Italy, developed a great love and respect for Portugal and eventually became one of the most influential promoters of Portuguese science and language. Martinez Bermejo makes explicit the fluidity of Bluteau’s identity, and describes him as an “intra-European go- between” who valued precisely his own ability to master the cultural and linguistic norms of the several countries where he lived.4 In the book’s penultimate chapter, Tamar Herzog questions the traditional view that notions of vecindad and naturaleza—which she has analyzed extensively in her previous work on Castile and Spanish America—were not present in Portugal and its overseas

4 On “go-betweens” see, Alida Metcalf, Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil: 1500-1600 (2006). e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 118 Ponsen Repensar a identidade territories.5 In so doing, Herzog combines reference to the earlier scholarship of Bartolomé Clavero in arguing for a shared juridical culture between Castile and Portugal rooted in an ancestral “Hispanic custom” (consuetudo hispaniae)—that developed before their separation and intensified when both kingdoms incorporated ius commune—with her own research on eighteenth century Portuguese overseas administration to suggest that the two Iberian powers used remarkably similar criteria of identification and belonging.6 Herzog casts well- founded doubt on the predominant interpretation and offers a series of questions to guide future research on the subject. Xavier’s contribution in Chapter 1 lends strong support to this new approach. In the final chapter, José María Portillo Valdés and Julen Viejo Yharrassarry explore the moral philosophy of Spanish authors of the late eighteenth century who theorized the notion of “self-love” in an attempt to reconcile modern philosophy with Catholic theology and affirm the unique virtue of Spanish identity in the context of Spain’s apparent decline. Fernando de Ceballos, for instance, was critical of “commerce” as a guiding principle of social organization, seeing it as antithetical to “charity.” Providing an interesting complement to Botella Ordinas’ essay in this volume, Portillo Valdés and Viejo Yharrassarry explain how, from the Spanish perspective, Great Britain was transformed into a representation of these criticized fundamentals, accused of “irreligion” and a destructive form of “self-interest” inferior to that higher, more virtuous notion of self-love promoted by Spanish writers like Juan Bautista Muñoz. While the editors have organized the essays in this volume chronologically, a logical choice, they could well have arranged them by theme instead to more clearly display the relationships between each essay and the extent to which they contribute to common historiographies. In addition, as the editors note, the emphasis on elites leaves less room for discussion of how the lower strata of Iberian society grappled with their own questions of self-identification. These minor points aside, the book represents a major contribution to the scholarship on Iberian identities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The authors have successfully demonstrated that this often-overlooked period straddling the Baroque and Enlightenment was a profoundly transformative one as individuals and collectives across the Iberian world rearticulated of notions of identity after the separation of Portugal from the Spanish Monarchy. This volume will no doubt serve as a benchmark for future research on the topic.

5 Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (2003). 6 For Clavero’s work see, “Lex Regni Vicinioris: Indicio de España en Portugal,” Boletim da Faculdade de Direito de Coimbra, 58, 1 (1983): 239-298. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 119 Bruno Feitler. The Imaginary Synagogue: Anti-Jewish Literature in the Portuguese Early Modern World (16th-18th Centuries), Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015, 216 pp. ISBN13: 9789004264106

Jean-Frédéric Schaub1

In an already extensive bibliography, this book by Bruno Feitler offers new possibilities for analysis. His research is conducted in parallel with the work of other researchers from his generation, such as Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano, Claude Stuczynski and François Soyer. The book consists essentially of four parts. A study and a typology of the writings that have been hostile to Jews and conversos; a synthesis of the elements that made up the negative portrayal of Jews and conversos in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; a presentation of the evolution of these phenomena during the eighteenth century; and, finally, an edition and translation into English of the Sermam no Auto da Fé written by Friar Antonio de Sousa on the occasion of the auto da fé held in Lisbon in 1624. Through a remarkable iconography drawn from the private library of Mr. Roberto Bachmann in Lisbon, this book provides us with the opportunity to see the richness and diversity of the printed production on this particular topic in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. A chapter is also devoted to an analysis of extraordinary objects: the medals and certificates on parchment (not paper) that distinguished the judges of the Portuguese Inquisition and their relatives. Bruno Feitler’s analysis is centered on the production of anti-Jewish and anti- Semitic doctrines in the territories of the Portuguese empire in early modern times, but it does not ignore the texts that circulated these ideas and the practices that constantly took place in relation to such issues in the Portuguese and Spanish societies themselves. Both before and after the period during which the two crowns were united (1581-1640), ideas circulated intensively. Always attentive to the circumstances, Bruno Feitler does not fail to observe the coincidence of the sacrilege attributed to the conversos, committed in the Santa Engracia sanctuary in Lisbon in 1631, and the scandal of the sacrilege perpetrated in the Calle de la Infanta in Madrid in 1632. This was the time when converso merchants from Portugal were flying to the aid of Filipe IV’s (Filipe III of Portugal) finances and when

1 Mondes Américains-EHESS-PSL. E-mail: [email protected]

Schaub Bruno Feitler. The Imaginary Synagogue those opposed to the policy of the Count-Duke of Olivares, in both Lisbon and Madrid, were beginning to maneuver openly. The world of the printers and publishers knew no borders between the two societies at that time. Therefore, to take a famous example, Francisco de Torrejoncillo’s treaty is not excluded from the study proposed here. However, the specificities of the Portuguese case are clearly marked. The first is the well-known time lag. Everything happened late in Portugal: forced conversions, the date of the establishment of the Inquisition, the last autos da fé against the conversos continuing well into the 1730s. The corpus of the Portuguese texts differs from the literature generally studied for the Spanish case: the number of sermons written on the occasion of autos da fé that were sent to the printers in order to guarantee their long-lasting influence on the audience and readership a posteriori. From this point of view, the collection that has Roberto Bachmann assembled, and the research center he has created for those who wish to study this subject, were essential contributions for the work of Bruno Feitler. Using the data that Edward Glaser collected, he draws the greatest advantage from this source, which reflects the ceremonial and sacrificial dimension of public convictions while seeking to understand the pedagogical intentions of clerics engaged in a fantasy fight against a nonexistent Jewish threat. Nor does he forget the contribution of the increasingly important Italian translations of texts on the Mediterranean Jewish world, especially the Ottoman Empire, after 1650. Among the most interesting themes in Bruno Feitler’s work is the doctrinal idea that conversos had nothing Jewish about them, in the sense that they did not inherit anything from the Jews of the Old Testament. They not only ruined the first covenant by denying the second one. But they were ambivalent and heretical to Christian beliefs and practices. They were even likely to exhibit an atheist profile. The Inquisition and the authors involved in the anti-Jewish doctrine sought to deprive the conversos both of their Christian present and their Jewish past. They lived in this in-between world that Yirmiyahu Yovel and Natalia Muchnik have recently analyzed so well. Bruno Feitler’s conclusions also contain something that is essential for historians: his position on the question of the chronology of anti-Semitism. On the one hand, as we know, events in Portugal took place "later" than in Spain. And, from this point of view, the Portuguese case could fuel the idea that anti-Semitism – like racism – should be included in a later chronology of the early modern period. But, on the other hand, the book shows exactly the opposite, namely that, in the sixteenth century, doctrine laid the foundations for a natural definition of Jews according to their genealogically transmitted physical traits

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(especially male menstruation), while the eighteenth-century persecution focused exclusively on suspicions of heresy. In other words, arguments of a racist nature preceded strictly theological arguments over time. This conclusion contradicts those authors who continue to claim that racial doctrines only emerged in Europe in the final phase of the early modern era. During and after the government of the Marquis of Pombal, it was prohibited to publish (or republish) lists of people who had been convicted by the Inquisition. This was a very important legal standard, since it sought to break away from the socially disseminated idea that parents transmitted their own sins to their children. In other words, the Portuguese Enlightenment brought an end to the definition of a default part of nature, whereas the earlier period, from the sixteenth century onwards, produced all kinds of variations on the strength of blood as a vector of human qualities, both good and bad. Overall, Bruno Feitler’s is a book that will be very useful for those studying the history of anti-Jewish doctrines in European history, with particular emphasis on the Portuguese dimension of the phenomenon.

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 122 Through Spain with Wellington. The Letters of Lieutenant Peter Le Mesurier of the 'Fighting Ninth'. Adrian Greenwood (ed.). The Hill, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Amberley Publishing, 2016, 272 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4456-5456-0

Fernando Dores Costa1

Published in this book are the letters transcribed by the copier of the correspondence of Peter Le Mesurier, an ensign and lieutenant in the British Army between 1808 and 1813, which the editor tracked down to a “local library in Wigan.” Adrian Greenwood is also the author of the introduction, notes, and the brief explanatory texts inserted between the letters themselves. The first letter bears the date of Ramsgate, 12 September 1808, and the last was written in Vedante near Bayonne, on 20 November 1813. They were transcribed by Gordon Rigby. The young officer, who originated from Guernsey, was born on 30 October 1789, into a secondary branch of the Le Mesuriers, “an old Channel Islands family” that “provided the army with many officers” (3). However, “Peter's branch of the family were very much poor relations,” living in “a modest home” called Les Beaucamps or Les Beauchamps. His mother’s maiden name was Rachel le Cocq (3-4). Peter was quite capable of writing in fluent French, the language that he used in certain phrases in some of his letters, in order to make it more difficult to understand their contents, which shows that he foresaw the possibility of their being read by other eyes. In Spain, he took care to hire the services of a Spanish teacher. Having been advised by British officers in Lisbon to buy a horse to travel along the difficult Portuguese roads, he preferred to march alongside the soldiers. But, like others, he was also to recognize that: “we have but little comfort on a March in Portugal” (166). He was not in harmony with many of the other officers: he had “a touching naivety and horror at the behaviour of his fellow officers,” remarks Greenwood (2). It is likely that Le Mesurier, “unlike many young officers, never received any regular additional income from his family” (4), but he did, however, receive (or tried hard to receive) not only the letters, but the parcels that were sent to him by his family. Furthermore, he wrote from Travanca in December 1811 that we “have not drawn pay since September which will

1 Institute of Contemporary History – Nova University of Lisbon. E-mail: [email protected] Costa Through Spain with Wellington oblige me to draw again on my Father” (82). Such help was, in fact, planned, and in September 1813 he wrote to his brother about the need for them to send him a “great coat” and more clothes and boots (196). The sustenance of officers was, in fact, a task that was shared between the royal military administration and the families themselves. As the editor mentions, the letters were written from a large number of different places associated with the period of the Napoleonic Wars. Le Mesurier was present in the 1808 Corunna campaign, took part in the disastrous expedition to Walcheren (at the mouth of the River Scheldt) in 1809, and in November of that same year received orders to depart for , where he was to be found at the time when the 1810-1811 campaign began in Portugal. At this point, he was ordered by his doctor to return to England (“I am reduced to a skeleton” 50), where he remained for some time due to illness. He was sent back once more to the Peninsula in August 1811, where he remained until his death at the end of the 1813 campaign, shortly before the end of the war, after being shot twice in the chest. Shortly before this, he dreamt about returning home to England where he would have the chance to meet “Nephews and Nieces unknown to me pretty numerous, as I understand a newcomer is expected shortly. It would give me great pleasure to take a peep in the Nursery this winter, but I suspect we shall have other kind of work” (201). His letters were written in a familiar style, and, as he was not a high-ranking officer who would have been freed from such matters by his servants, he stressed many details of the military life of the common soldiers and their main concerns: lodgings, transportation, prices, pay, promotions. After having initially rejected this hypothesis, he ended up buying his “lieutenancy” (36), a choice that Greenwood considered strange because, at that time, there would have been a possibility of obtaining such a promotion without any payment. In fact, the post of “ensign” was obtained on 13 August 1808, without having to buy it, “the need for officers during the Peninsular War was sufficiently high that most infantry ensigncies were free” (5). In the letter dated 27 February 1810, he reviews his career path (43) and reveals his unease in relation to the attitudes of his fellow officers: “Those Gentlemen do not consider that a Sub must be a good economist to live decently &, like Uncle John, I like to have old Cloths on my back. All my red coats go once, sometimes twice, to the Rightabout, but I always keep one for les Dimanches & les jours de Fetes, &c” (44). Conflicts arose in relation to problems of apparently minor importance, such as the one that led to a captain being called upon to remove a horse from the kitchen where Peter used to prepare his

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 124 Costa Through Spain with Wellington meals (47). Le Mesurier was a man from the English periphery: the visit that his mother paid to London was an extraordinary event. At a certain point, his father mentioned his “selling out of the Army” (60), but Peter’s response was that he would stay for another year and then leave, something that did not, in fact, happen. His regiment was the 9th Foot, and Greenwood provides us with details about its most fundamental features (5, 61-62). In 1813, it was possible to detect a certain tension between Peter and his brother, , who complained about the great amount of work that he had to do in his business activity. Peter replied that, in his own activity, the rule was “poorer in the Pocket but richer in Honor” (197), which was the reverse of the business world. He reproached him: “It will therefore be your interest to treat me like un gallant homme doit faire,” (a phrase that is, in fact, mistranslated in the footnote). In mid-September 1808, he was given orders to embark as part of the reinforcements for the troops that were already to be found in the Peninsula. The 9th Foot regiment was already part of John Moore’s expedition. He sailed in a fleet that he calculated to be composed of about 150 ships, and they witnessed the passage of the fleet transporting Junot’s troops after the “affair of Lisbon,” or, in other words, the famous “Convention of Sintra.” Relations with the Spanish immediately turned out to be difficult: the Xunta de did not allow the British to disembark, and later in the letter that he wrote from Astorga on 26 November 1808, he stated that “[w]e hear nothing but what the Spaniards are pleased to tell us, which in general proves to be untrue. They seem to care very little about who is to be their King” (18). He arrived in Lisbon on 22 August 1811 (73). What he wrote about the city was in agreement with the comments made by many others: the dirt, the number of beggars, the health risk from the garbage. He dined with the “Sick Gents at Belem”. But, by 9 September, he was already in Coimbra, having travelled there by sea, via Figueira da Foz, and thereafter marching through Montemor-o-Velho and Tentúgal, both plundered by the French. He could see the hills of Buçaco in the distance. He bought “a Mule” that “cost us One hundred Dollars, owing to the scarcity of every thing in this unfortunate country.” Mobility was limited because of the “great scarcity of Mules” (171). But Peter was delighted by certain places in Portugal:

“We passed through Miseralia, a Village in the valey of the Mondego. The Scenery about this place is without exception the finest and most Romantick I ever saw.” (82)

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“We are encamped on a beautiful spot of ground, the River Tua in our front abounding in fine Trout and our Tents shaded by Olive trees. The Town is about a Quarter of a mile on our Right, the country round well cultivated; abundance of Rye and Barley, the former nearly ripe.” (167)

Such an experience is now rather shocking, particularly because today this landscape is fast disappearing before our very eyes. Wellington headed for Ciudad Rodrigo, and Marmont caused him to retreat. Le Mesurier was in the Portuguese city of Guarda on 1 October 1811. He then marched to Celorico and Castelo Bom, passing by the site where the Battle of Fuentes de Oñoro had taken place, and where he could see the soldiers’ graves, the bones of horses, and also the “trou de loup.” But “the greatest pleasure was the Letter I received from my Elisabeth” (78). Between 1812 and Napoleon’s first capitulation, the Portuguese soldiers were a crucial component of Wellington’s army (Costa, 2013). We find them mentioned in Le Mesurier’s letters. For example, when he remarked that we “displayed English and Portuguese flags” (185). The 1812 campaign was classified as a “Fiddle,” when he mentioned that Wellington “would not like to play a Second Fiddle” in the 1813 campaign (163). In this way, Le Mesurier illustrated the spread of an undeniably negative assessment of Wellington’s actions during that year within his army. “Wellington's losses on the retreat were due to the same mixture of circumstances which had beset Moore,” we are reminded by the editor Greenwood (144). Peter Le Mesurier wrote on 29 December 1812 that during this retreat “some Reg.ts were in the utmost state of insubordination, that Off.rs lost all command over their Men,” and also that their hopes had been raised of “leaving this Country shortly, for it depends entirely on the Russians.” In this way, we can see that he was not unaware of the importance of spending some time away from the fighting in the Peninsula (145). It was natural that the men should be discontent, since they would already have formed the idea that they were pieces in a game that they did not understand. In March 1813, Peter gave notice that there were already expectations of a peace in the near future and that the officers were already discussing their continuation in the service of the Portuguese (160). The final phase of the Peninsular War could be avoided, it was thought at that time. “Our Paper intelligence leads us to hope that the French are in an

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 126 Costa Through Spain with Wellington awkward situation (…) I expect we shall move shortly to ease this part of the Country” (163). He presents us with the reaction (cynical or disappointed by the loss of business?) of some of the provincial nobility towards their departure, but one which was opposed to that of the “camp”: “Some of the Gentry appeared verry sorry to loose such good company for we spared them as much as lay in our power in not cutting their corn, &c: However, those who had suffered in the least, prayed for being freed from such great Thieves – the appellation they honor us with” (166). As he was writing at the “camp near Palencia” on 7 July, and while the French were retreating, good news arrived from the centre of Europe. In Gibraltar, there were again various signs of a difficult relationship with the Spanish: a regiment that had been sent to was not allowed to disembark there; “We have very little to hope for from the Spaniards” (41); the border was being fitted with explosives; regiments were placed on alert to embark for Cape Verde and to wait there for “the India fleet” (40). He managed to have “a sight of his Lordship” Wellington (80), who passed through the camps without any distinction, being disguised in such a way as not to be identified, and when he spoke he never stopped in order to avoid pointless encounters. He highlighted the size of the fleet that sailed from England to Gibraltar, passing by the “Rock of Lisbon” (37), as well as stressing the presence of the Algerians in the Straits (47). He praised the “Patience” that he had gained “when I was Ill” and which proved useful for the “uncommonly slow” recruits at drill (62). The honor of entertaining a colonel that it was planned should “dine with us” (160). He attended a procession at the convent – “most ridiculous.” He reported on the mechanization expressed in the maneuvers that were already being made without any commanding voice (164); the men who re-enlisted, receiving £16/16s. and who got drunk; the lack of bread; and the Spanish, who would not accept paper money (he did, however, manage to cash a bill of exchange); the troops of Portuguese women who followed the army “with the Bagage” (170). It is most impressive to note how the consumption of wine and tobacco was regarded as favorable to one’s health. He refers to “the wine necessary to reestablish my health” (63) and writes, I “Smoke two or three Sigars a day, which I think are most excellent things for health” (80). Later, he mentions the consumption of tobacco, the soldier’s comfort, of which there was a shortage due to the war with the USA (164). The book has a good index.

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The decision to make a transcription that was too close to the original spelling instead of developing the abbreviations in full – for example, “W[illia]m” would be preferable to “Wm:” (including the colon) – is a questionable one. The editor tried to identify the current names of the various places referred to, but there are several omissions, as, for example, “Castelo Born” (77), which was not identified as “Castelo Bom.”

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 128 Salvador da Bahia: retratos de uma cidade atlântica. Evergton Sales Souza, Guida Marques and Hugo R. Silva (eds.). Salvador, Lisbon: EDUFBA, CHAM, 2016, 343 pp. ISBN: 978-85-232-1460-9 (EDUFBA) 978-989-8492-35-7 (CHAM)

Luís Frederico Dias Antunes1

The publication of the book Salvador da Bahia: retratos de uma cidade atlântica, displaying “images” of Bahia between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, is the result of a work of discussion among many researchers from different academic and scientific institutions, both in Portugal and abroad. These experts participated in several multiannual projects funded by the Marie Curie Actions International Research Staff Exchange Scheme and the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. The editorial coordination of this scientific work was the responsibility of Evergton Souza, Guida Marques and Hugo Silva. The absence of an introductory note to the most important studies about this topic hampers clarification of the goals and the structure of the book. As a matter of fact, we could benefit from an essential overview of both the social history of slavery and the economic history of Bahia, as well as all its imperial connections, which would lead us to understand what distinguishes Bahia from the other cities of the Portuguese empire, taking their real dimension into consideration. In short, what distinguished Bahia as the capital of the State of Brazil? First of all, Salvador da Bahia was, along with Goa, the great port hub of the empire, in that it was the key element linking goods, men and ideas from Asia, Africa, America and Europe; secondly, in social terms, it was a slave-holding city, with an eminently black and brown-colored African and indigenous population; finally, it was a gateway for the intensive domestic slave trading activity that fed the sertão and the Bahian Recôncavo region. However, in much of the book, the authors chose to study and emphasize the features that Bahia had in common with the kingdom of Portugal, especially everything that brought its conduct and customs closer to those of the upper echelons of Portuguese (and subsequently European) society. A much smaller space is occupied by essays on the singularities of Bahia: the role of the brotherhoods as associations representing the social

1 History Center, Lisbon University. E-mail: [email protected] Antunes Salvador da Bahia expression and inclusion of the African population, both slaves and freemen, during the colonial period, advocating their causes and interests and sponsoring the “Creolization” of the Africans; the difficulties faced by recently emancipated individuals in the labor market; the strategies for overcoming the problems raised by the dividing lines between slavery and freedom; the issues related with the re-appropriation of African ethnicities; the complexity of the identity-based terminologies developed in slave traffic and in servitude; and the way that these terminologies tended to play a fundamental role in the lives of both the enslaved black people and the emancipated Africans. The book is divided into three parts, each of which has three chapters. The first part studies Bahia’s strong dependency on the Portuguese crown, chiefly with regard to fiscal, political and social matters, and it also points out the role played by communications within the Empire. In her text, Guida Marques begins by developing the idea presented by Catarina Madeira Santos in her work about the city of Goa as the “key to the Estado da Índia.”2 Likewise, she seeks to question the shaping of Bahia’s central status as the capital city, within the framework of its interdependence with Atlantic Africa and with the Portuguese crown in the seventeenth century. In this respect, Guida Marques has produced a fundamental text on the process of building Bahia as the “head of the State of Brazil,” during the seventeenth century, through the speeches and representations that projected it and, very often, imagined it. It was a central interface of territories, interests and businesses that, as an essential instrument of colonization, was also used as an element in the representation of Portuguese sovereignty, linked to the figure of the king. The author has accurately portrayed the mercantile foundation of Bahia, as well as the undeniable importance of slavery and the massive presence of Indians and Africans in the city. The chapter by Pedro Cardim and Thiago Krause studies the leading role played by the main local authorities in Bahia, the people who established an interface with the court through the administrative communication network, and who, within the municipal framework, were valuable, not so much because of the fees they earned, but more because of the prestige that they obtained by “showing up and showing off.” Hence, the authors resume the discussion of the meaning of being a vassal of the Portuguese crown in the context of the overseas empire. Cardim and Krause build up a text with a great deal of interesting information that enables us to portray the Bahian municipal elite, and illustrate the way in which they related to the crown, through the study of the correspondence exchanged between the city senate and its permanent representatives, who, in Lisbon,

2 Catarina Madeira Santos, “Goa é a chave de toda a Índia.” Perfil político da capital do Estado da Índia (1505-1570). Lisbon: CNCDP, 1999. e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 130 Antunes Salvador da Bahia sought to defend their interests before the crown. The matters most frequently discussed were, in ascending order: the city’s political and administrative autonomy and its authority to enforce the law in specific cases; immediately afterwards, matters relating to the representation of Bahia in the courts of Portugal; then, illustrated by specific references, the relationships with native and African peoples; the comparison with the privileges enjoyed by other municipalities, both in the mother country and in the rest of the Empire, in order to achieve a position of identical dignity; and, finally, the issue of the population’s African origins and the increasingly bitter disputes that took place over sugar and the lack of currency. Obviously, the conclusion drawn from the study on the correspondence exchanged between the Bahia city senate and its representatives in Lisbon was that “the demands are not very different from those that feature the main Portuguese City Councils of that time” (p. 89). In the last chapter of the first part, the text by Avanete Sousa is indeed intriguing. She starts her study with two epithets used in documents of the time – “Head of State” and “Emporium of the Universe” – to illustrate the economic centrality and the capital status of seventeenth-century Bahia. The author’s intention is to paint a picture of the truly cosmopolitan dimension of Salvador da Bahia throughout the eighteenth century. However, Avanete Sousa limits her analysis of Bahia to the subject of the city’s relations with the Atlantic world: she thoroughly scrutinizes the connections maintained with the production of tobacco and sugar in the Recôncavo and subsequently with its domestic trade; she presents the extent of the inter-regional exchanges, including those taking place in the realm of internal commerce and mostly using slaves as merchandise; she presents data on the bulk of the transatlantic traffic of slaves from Africa, and shows this to be the most important activity in the city, economically speaking, i.e., she essentially studies Bahia’s overseas trade. As far as the connections of Bahia with the Indian Ocean and the Far East are concerned, there are no more than two minor references. The almost total omission of any references to the Asian dimension of the Portuguese empire belies the “universal” image of Salvador da Bahia’s commerce, and it is a reason for my great perplexity, since the whole of the historiographical process that began in the 1970s is completely overlooked, in particular the work by Amaral Lapa. The second part of the book focuses on the role played by the Church within the framework of a city that claimed to be the capital of Portuguese America. Most of the texts seek to highlight the institutional aspects that make it possible to track the processes of

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 131 Antunes Salvador da Bahia power consolidation and social ascension followed by a clerical elite existing at the city’s religious institutions. Thus, Evergton Sales Souza and Bruno Feitler debate the city of Bahia as an “ecclesiastic metropolis” within the framework of the Portuguese Empire, scrutinizing the Church chiefly by studying the historical evolution of the episcopal see. Essentially, the text highlights the local elite’s social prestige and the representation of colonial power, which was not only to be found in publishing activity, but also in the architecture of buildings and in the works painted in the cathedral, the very place where the bishop exercised his jurisdiction. In the second chapter, the text by Hugo Ribeiro da Silva studies the issues related with the Cathedral Chapter of Bahia and its clergy. His essay seeks to understand and answer a set of questions related to a cathedral chapter overseas. In particular, he examines the organic structure of the Cabido (chapter), its utility, the identity of the clergymen and the means by which they gained access to and participated in the cathedral life, the origin of their revenues and the development of their careers. Specifically, the Cathedral Chapter of Bahia was distinct from others in matters relating to the origin and management of income. There were huge restrictions placed on the actions of the bishops, not only because overseas prelates were not able to manage the income from their dioceses (since for their livelihood they received nothing more than a côngrua (a contribution) paid by the crown), but also because the right to determine ecclesiastical benefits belonged to the King, as well as the livelihood of the parish churches and cathedrals, through the Royal Treasury. Moreover, when compared to other Chapters, namely those from the mother country, the differences were not very significant. This important study highlights the idea that the cathedral chapter, just like other European institutions, was one where power was negotiated and exercised so as to consolidate the social hierarchy that existed within an organ belonging to “an almost elite.” In the third chapter, the essay by Lucilene Reginaldo on the register of the members of the Irmandade do Rosário das Portas do Carmo (1719-1826) presents the brotherly associations that were created by slaves and those who were emancipated within the framework of the Portuguese overseas empire, providing a unique reflection on the black identities that existed in colonial Bahia and their role in shaping religiosity all over the Bahian region. After analyzing the brotherhoods of black people based on the social status and the geographic origin of their members, the author recognized the primacy of Angolas and Creoles throughout the history of the Irmandade do Rosário das Portas do Carmo, even when the slave traffic was geared towards the coast of Mina, in the eighteenth and

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 132 Antunes Salvador da Bahia nineteenth centuries. She comes to the conclusion that “this privilege” granted Angolas and Creoles the best positions, especially as leaders of the brotherhoods devoted to the cult of the Rosary in the Bahia archbishopric. Her research focuses on the way in which the Irmandade do Rosário das Portas do Carmo operated and the role that it played during the colonial era as an institution for the representation and inclusion of the African population, both slaves and freemen, by sponsoring their causes and defending their interests. This also involved studying the “process of the Creolization or Ladinization of Africans” (p.220), namely the change in the status of Africans and the creation of Creole elites that managed to achieve their own social and economic ascension, coming to occupy important positions in the Brotherhood, and perhaps even in the colonial administration, with special attention being drawn to the role of women, who constituted the vast majority of its members (72.1%). Some of them, regardless of their legal status (i.e. their condition of being free, emancipated or slaves), could play important roles in the Brotherhood, as judges, representatives and majordomos. By giving greater prominence to a valuable documentary collection of African people, the text by Lucilene Reginaldo not only points out the Atlantic, African and Bahian features of the most influential black brotherhood in Salvador, but it also underlines its huge relevance for the development of Bahian Afro-Catholicism. The third part of the book studies individual trajectories from the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, showing us the strategies that people adopted for asserting their own identities, as well as various kinds of Atlantic interactions that either resulted in the assertion of principles and of the Catholic doctrine or led to the re-appropriation of African ethnicities. Thus, in the first chapter, Giuseppina Raggi starts by defining quadratura and by describing its technical specificities in Salvador; then she recovers the historical context of the origin of this parietal art, locating it in Bologna and Lisbon; and, finally, she reflects upon its use, in the early eighteenth century, by the different social elite groups seeking to turn the interiors of churches and nobler buildings in the city into spaces with a powerful and symbolic visual impact that were important for the assertion of identities. Obviously, it was the king and his court who were the most frequent commissioners of such greatly expensive decorations and scenic works. In Bahia, most commissioners were to be found among a set of affluent tradesmen, united by ties of kinship to the traditional Bahian families, civil servants and church dignitaries, who sought to transmit a dignified image of themselves. The essay by João Reis starts by presenting us with some important documentary evidence: the paintings of the eighteenth-century Salvador da Bahia that highlight the black and brown colors associated with slavery, flecked here and there with

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 133 Antunes Salvador da Bahia white. From the late seventeenth century onwards, but mainly during the eighteenth century, most of the captives entering Bahia were sent to the sugarcane fields and the sugar mills in the Recôncavo, while others went to the sugar mills and mines in the southeast of Portuguese America, although there were still many thousands that ended up staying in Salvador. Of course, slave labor reached huge proportions in the city, with many working in domestic service or making their ganho (wage-earning) on the streets, turning Bahia into the “capital of the black Atlantic.” In the mid 1830s, about 60% of the city’s slave population had been born in Africa, while about 80% of the whole population was black and mulato. Showing great flexibility, but nonetheless insisting on accuracy, João Reis provides a very clear explanation of the complexity of the identity nomenclatures that were forged in the course of trafficking and slavery, and shows how these fitted into the daily lives of enslaved Negroes and emancipated Africans. He draws attention to the aspects related with the negotiation of identities, centered around the idea of African nations, in the Catholic brotherhoods, in the Candomblé yards, and among the Islamic groups, thus demonstrating that very fluid ethnic divisions were created in these processes. It is exactly in relation to this matter and in the framework of a scientifically coordinated work that the importance of João Reis’ text is to be understood: it operates rather like a hinge that supports and connects the excellent research by Lucilene Reginaldo and Gabriela Sampaio. Finally, Gabriela Sampaio’s research takes us to the labor world of the former enslaved individuals, in the late nineteenth century. A profound expert on the post-abolition period and on the problems that still arose from the fine line between slavery and freedom, Gabriela Sampaio has managed to reconstruct and attach visibility to the complex life paths of two hitherto unknown emancipated Africans: Benedito Cardoso and Benedito Lopes Viana. The author seeks to highlight the reconfigurations of the overseas business that existed between Brazil and Africa after the end of trafficking, as well as its economic and social consequences in the Portuguese America, by emphasizing four fundamental aspects: acknowledging the commercial and cultural ties that emancipated Africans legally maintained with traders and other residents in Lagos, as well as other ports on the coast of Mina; clarifying the economic motivations of the numerous journeys they made in Brazil, accompanied by their female wage-earning slaves; providing information on their participation in the trade of certain African products, some of them used in rituals, thus allowing for the possibility of legitimate work and a livelihood for emancipated Africans, and moreover, as stressed by the author, bearing in mind that they themselves underwent this trading experience when they were still slaves; and identifying the very diverse

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 134 Antunes Salvador da Bahia networks of relationships, including those of ethnic and religious origin, with members of the African communities in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro. Salvador da Bahia: retratos de uma cidade atlântica is an asymmetric book, not because of the quality of the texts – although the essays by Guida Marques, Lucilene Reginaldo, Gabriela Sampaio and João Reis stand out – but instead due to the difficulty of finding a guideline that may provide the work with a clear internal logic. The proposed aim of understanding the city of Bahia as a social, political, economic and symbolic construction, through a series of portraits that “are not intended (…) to deplete all the dimensions of the city” (p. 9) is not only seductive, but also offers a certain accountability for the publishers of this scientific work, in that they are obliged and committed to choosing the portraits that best identify Bahia in the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Obviously, in this context, the selection of themes and the choice of texts are matters of great importance. The essays collected together here almost exclusively debate Bahia and its port in the Atlantic context, some of them focusing on the relationships with the crown and the Portuguese elite. There is no harm in this. However, the book neglects the actual imperial character of Salvador. It ignores all the implications of economic, social and political relationships maintained by Salvador with Asia and the African lands beyond the Cape of Good Hope, namely Mozambique, in East Africa, as well as with the Malabar and Coromandel coasts in India, and with Macao, in the Far East. In short, the texts are important contributions to our understanding of Salvador da Bahia between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, but the book does not fully live up to the overseas, multi-continental character of the port and the city, which was not just a mere port of call for the ships of the Carreira da Índia on their journeys from Asia to Lisbon, or vice-versa, nor just a simple warehouse with multiple influences and oriental products. Instead, the Brazilian presence in Asia was dynamic and lively, just as it was in terms of the Atlantic aspect of the Portuguese Empire.

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José Miguel Sardica1

In very different cultural, political, institutional, social, and economic eras – and given the traditional Portuguese tendency of identifying large chronological time-spans with key names that fostered and came to symbolize them – the Marquis of Pombal, Fontes Pereira de Melo, and Oliveira Salazar may have been the three most relevant Portuguese historical figures over the last three hundred years. This is undoubtedly an oversimplification, because no leader rules alone, and the complexity of societies (even in the first case, before the coming of the contemporary age) calls for a historical analysis that is broader than the mere identification of a given time-span with a single biography. But the fact that the nation’s collective memory, common sense, and historical discourse have indeed recognized “Pombalism,” “Fontism” and “Salazarism” (notwithstanding their effectiveness and their liberal or anti-liberal nature) as major ideological and political projects is important enough not to be ignored. And some other “isms” might also be referred to, having been overlooked either because they existed during shorter periods of time, or because they are much more recent and thus still lack the temporal distance that will eventually filter some of them into the pages of future history books. António Maria Fontes Pereira de Melo (1819-1887) was the most important nineteenth-century Portuguese politician – and also the inspiration, the symbol and the essence of an era, a project, an ideology, and all other words describing the period of the so-called “Fontism”. Fontism is a key study theme, given its central place in the consolidation of the Portuguese state and society throughout the period of monarchical constitutionalism, and because it corresponded to one of the longest and most important national growth cycles until the present day. Despite this, the bibliography on the times and events of the four decades (c. 1850-c. 1890) during which Fontes was, according to Ramalho Ortigão’s famous characterization, a synonym of “Regeneration” and the “only ruling principle” in Portugal is not greatly abundant. There are, of course, several works,

1 Faculty of Human Sciences, Catholic University of Portugal. E-mail: [email protected]

Sardica David Justino, Fontismo and not only the ones produced in recent years, that cover some aspects of the Fontist era, namely the capitalist economy and the bourgeois society and their effects on growth and national backwardness or on the political and party system of the Regeneration period, and even a biography on Fontes Pereira de Melo, systematizing the most decisive deeds of his political work. This said, though, Fontism and the Regeneration are still less studied than other periods and themes before and after those central years (such as the liberal revolution and the political struggle of the first half of the nineteenth century, and the crisis of the monarchy from 1890 until 1910). This is why the academic community should praise David Justino’s most recently published book, bearing the provocative title of Fontismo. Liberalismo numa Sociedade Iliberal [Fontism. Liberalism in an Illiberal Society]. David Justino needs no formal presentation, either in Portuguese academic circles, where he has made himself a longstanding authority in the fields of sociology and economic history, or outside them, because of the various public and political offices that he has held – ranging from member of parliament and spokesperson of the Social Democratic Party to adviser to the Presidency, and from Minister of Education to President of the National Council of Education. His PhD thesis, written between 1983 and 1985, publicly presented in 1987, and published in 1988 under the title A Formação do Espaço Económico Nacional. Portugal, 1810-1913 (2 vols.), was a groundbreaking quantitative and qualitative research about the country’s economic, commercial, and financial structure, and about society’s characteristics and atavisms throughout the nineteenth century. This time covering a shorter historical duration, his new book on Fontism actually stems from some unexplored leads and unanswered questions kept on hold since A Formação do Espaço Económico Nacional –chiefly those that are more closely related to sociology. The years went by, however, and (as is revealed in the opening pages of the book, as a sort of motivational departure) Justino’s ministerial work allowed him to detect and witness clearly Fontist-like behavior in several very recent Portuguese Prime Ministers, so that all the different circumstances came together to carry a decade-long reflection on that theme, which is now published in this new work. The book is not a biography of Fontes Pereira de Melo, nor is it a historical description of the Fontist accomplishments and their positive or negative impacts on the country’s social and economic development. Its central goal is simply to “understand and explain the general context of political strategies and actions, and not their consequences;” in other words, it aims to discover “why some political options were adopted and not others, why priority was given to specific investments and on what grounds there came to

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 137 Sardica David Justino, Fontismo exist the conditions that would allow for the continuity, for at least four decades, of a project of social change identified, for better or for worse, with that peculiar name Fontism” (p. 15). One of the distinctive and most positive marks of the book is indeed how the word and the thing “Fontism” have been made to enter into dialogue and to interrelate with two other contemporary words and things: “Regeneration” and “Liberalism.” Deeming any “excessive personalization between Fontes and Fontism” (p. 30) to be reductionist, Justino seeks to demystify the idea that Fontism was an all too sudden and original project, in an all too sudden and original era, unleashed by Saldanha’s 1851 military pronouncement. Actually, the ideological ingredients of Fontism, and even some unsuccessful early attempts to foster “material” or “moral” improvements, date back to the first half of the century and to a wider and yet to be fully recognized process for the “reconfiguration of the liberal ideology,” which dominated the Portuguese (and other) agendas between 1820 and 1851. What was this reconfiguration? Simply put, it was the replacement of the founding theory of liberalism, centered around the conquest of liberty, laicism, and the constitutional principles of national sovereignty, with an entirely new version, one that was in tune with the challenges put forward by the new post- revolutionary international capitalism: to guarantee the material and moral improvement of established liberal societies, heralding “progress” as the guiding principle of political options and as the leitmotif of the cultural construction of modernity (p. 82). This popularization of the ideology of progress was thus a true pre-Fontism, or a Fontism avant la lettre – meaning that Fontism was nothing more than the name and the content given by the Regeneration period to the era of economic progress and social stability that had been pursued even before 1851, only to become a reality after the middle of the century. In the book, the time context is always more important than the specifics of the man who gave his name to it. Fontism, as a temporal synonym of Regeneration, was the Portuguese name for the “Age of Capital” started in the 1850s. The book unfolds, offering contributions to understanding the period’s conceptual density and complexity. David Justino links or includes with Fontism (or even includes within it) all manifestations and outcomes of the above-mentioned “ideological reconfiguration”: “Liberty,” “order” and “progress,” this latter idea encompassing “belief,” “science” and “teleology,” all forging a holistic project of “civilization” which signified the triumph of a (possible) “modernity” in the best years of the Portuguese nineteenth century (pp. 39, 45-46). The introduction makes it clear what the theoretical angle of the book will be (a “historical sociology of ideas,” pp. 18-19), as well as its central goal (to study Fontism as a by-product of the

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 138 Sardica David Justino, Fontismo reconfiguration of the liberal ideology), and even its key working hypothesis (to explore how there was always a “difficult relationship between the liberal ideology and the illiberal culture of Portuguese nineteenth-century society,” p. 18). But only in the last pages of the text does the author provide his own full definition of the book’s keyword: “Fontism, as a cultural political project based on a liberal ideology reconfigured by the idea of progress, represents the first expression in Portuguese society of an imagined modernity striving to contravene traditional atavisms and to demystify the ever-present idea of decadence” (p. 455). David Justino attaches great importance to the concept of “ideology,” exploring it through various authors of historical sociology and also through eighteenth and nineteenth-century liberal writings, leading him to diverge from some existing appreciations of Fontism that refer to its “de-ideologizing” character (pp. 30-33). But if Fontism was more a case of a reconfiguration of an ideology, rather than simply a new ideology, maybe the controversy is non-existent. The “de-ideologization” invoked by some studies on the Regeneration period does not mean the absence of ideology, but rather the reduction (beginning in 1851) of what had previously been felt (until the 1840s) and denounced as an excessively ideological, revolutionary and overly noisy burden shared by political agents, and the ensuing search for a more pragmatic, realistic, utilitarian and progressive political mood, craving much more concrete steps on the road of progress, rather than any impalpable rhetoric about liberty. While Fontism was ideologically liberal and programmatically set on achieving progress, the public policies of material improvement were its most visible aspect and instrument of action. A superficial analysis of the work and times of Fontes Pereira de Melo could well remain fixed only on this aspect – and it was, in fact, this rather simplistic outline that Fontism’s prime critic, J. P. Oliveira Martins, bequeathed to posterity. In its entirety, David Justino’s book is also a critical dismantling of Martins’ reading, using new materials and interpretations to go into greater depth about two key aspects that some more recent historiography has also been echoing. The first aspect is that public works were not merely a materialistic end in themselves, but rather a means of increasing the speed of circulation, multiplying commerce and the general exchange of goods and ideas, making society more integrated and further broadening the territorial spread of the State. A civilizational project of modernity is much more than just the mere counting of railroad kilometers, however much Fontes used to be portrayed (as seen in the image chosen for the book cover) as a sort of

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 139 Sardica David Justino, Fontismo walking and indomitable locomotive! The second aspect is that Fontes – a man of action, more than a prolific writer – did think about liberal development and actually sketched out an integrated and wide-ranging ideological project, based not only on “material improvements,” but also on “moral,” “social” and “intellectual” ones, because, without the latter, no progress could ever be solid and durable. That is why the old dichotomy between “materialism” and “idealism” (pp. 66-68), introduced by , made official by Oliveira Martins, and then repeatedly echoed by all the political purists and the intelligentsia criticizing Fontes, actually obscures our full understanding of the latitude of the Fontist progress … and also makes it more difficult to identify the many reasons, societal or cultural, why in the end, after four decades, it ultimately failed. After a first chapter, in which the general aspects and goals that characterized Fontism are presented, there are a further six chapters explaining and developing the book’s argument, with the seventh and last one being a conclusive recapitulation that opens up new and previously uncharted research paths. Fontism and its surrounding context (namely its progressive potentialities in relation to the question of social barriers) can best be understood by dividing it into smaller and more specific segments. David Justino chose to do this by exploring five specific questions, which correspond to Chapters 2 to 6 of the book. Chapter 2 is the least innovative one, though its theme should never be neglected. Re-quoting two of his previous works and reviewing selected literature about a longstanding historiographical controversy, the author recalls and explains one of the leading contradictions of the Fontist model: the fact that it was, in theory a free-trade model, but yet protectionist in practice and in its concrete customs policy. In the nineteenth century in Portugal, at a time when the State was not only beset with a chronic financial deficit, and thus permanently in need of further fiscal revenues, but also encumbered with an uncompetitive economic elite, and thus always dependent on the domestic market, any lifting of customs barriers – theoretically defensible in richer countries like England – would have been disastrous. That was the reason why the protectionist option grew, pragmatically, as a sheer necessity and as a reflection of the many limitations emanating from a society and from an economy in which openness and progress reduced, but did not entirely suppress, the lingering insufficiencies in structural competitiveness. Resorting to literary sources – contemporary authors such as Almeida Garrett, Alexandre Herculano, Camilo Castelo Branco and Júlio Dinis – Chapter 3 deals with the

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 140 Sardica David Justino, Fontismo romantic criticism leveled against Fontism. Contrary to what occurred in other countries in the nineteenth century, Portuguese romanticism was neither an exacerbated nationalistic ideology nor an expression of a revolutionary anti-capitalism, but rather a manifestation of a critical conservatism in the face of what was seen as the exaggerated materialistic and rationalistic face of progress. As such, this criticism denounced its turbulent whirlpool, its seemingly irreversible dynamics, and the way that the Fontist modernity affected an idealized pax rustica… which was actually the cause of much social immobility. The writers who criticized Fontes were not pure reactionaries, though. A well-balanced form of material development was desirable: the question thus lay in the “moral” counterparts to that “material improvement.” One could imagine that the above-mentioned protectionism was the economic translation of a widely disseminated and well-grounded nationalist discourse – all the more so since the romantic intelligentsia strove to delve into and teach the founding myths and defining ingredients of the Portuguese nation. As is shown in Chapter 4, despite the fact that Fontism coincided with a period that lay in between imperial cycles (after the loss of Brazil and before the African adventure at the end of the century) and that could have led to a potential nationalistic shock, nationalism was very much absent from the Fontist set of ideas (p. 205). The exploration of this argument in the book serves to characterize the social and cultural faces of Fontism. The nineteenth century was an era of deep-felt nationalism all over Europe, resulting from the furious pace with which nations and states were being (re)constructed through revolutions, wars, territorial conquests, unifications and border transformations. Furthermore, there existed, in many regions of the continent, communities that were divided by religion, language, race, space, history or tradition. By way of contrast, Portugal was an old and homogenous nation-state, geographically peripheral, politically irrelevant and unthreatened by nineteenth-century international conflicts. That is the reason why, throughout that century, there never were any large nationalistic shocks – at least in those decades separating the struggle against the French during the Napoleonic wars from the anger against the British resulting from the 1890 ultimatum. If there was a problem in Portugal, as David Justino suggests, it was not one of “national unity” but rather one of “backwardness in comparison with the development displayed by the majority of the European countries” (p. 209). And it was in fighting backwardness that Fontism could afford to be cosmopolitan, since the urgent challenge was to let the Portuguese nationality grow stronger and converge towards the concerted identity of those more prosperous nations. Only such progress and such Euro-enthusiastic

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 141 Sardica David Justino, Fontismo aspirations could serve as the instruments and driving forces that would oblige the real country to shed its most typical structural characteristic – civic indifference, anomie and alienation. It is by repeatedly addressing questions from this angle that Justino explores what is hinted at in the second part of the book’s title – namely that Fontism was a liberal project based on, or thrust upon, an “illiberal” society. Illiberal does not mean absolutist, though the “” reaction was a powerful impediment to the country’s modernization during the first half of the nineteenth century. The illiberalism of the liberal society lay in its persistent illiteracy, in the meager skills and education of its human resources, in the large pockets of poverty and in the insurmountable dualism, or separation, between rural and urban areas (or, more precisely, between Lisbon and all the rest of the country), all problems that no elite generosity and good will could solve by itself, since it required mobilizing and integrating the nation’s peripheries. Chapter 5 focuses on the failure of what was then deemed a key instrument for unleashing “moral” or “social” improvements, awakening a sleeping nation and equipping it with the required tools for understanding progress and becoming a collaborative part in it. That instrument was the school, the educational system, which was flooded with rhetoric and was as grandiloquent as it was lacking in results. Fontism was very much in tune with the “trilogy of purposes” (pp. 327-328) that underlay all nineteenth-century pedagogies: public instruction meant individual freedom, a new moral order, and thus a renewed sustainability for liberal regimes based upon a strong middle class. The problem was, however, that the available money was always insufficient to satisfy the political will and to implement the somewhat excessive array of educational reforms. Good intentions came up against a poor, rural and illiterate society, for whom education and schooling was an option that meant fewer ‘assets’ being put to work in the domestic and family-based economy. Though real – and constituting a genuine blockage to the full success of Fontism – civic indifference or alienation were not total. At the various key moments in the nineteenth century studied by David Justino in Chapter 6 (the last one already during the Regeneration period, in the early 1860s), local people rose up, sometimes resorting to violence, against the modernity that was invading their rural households and their family life. Even though it remained incomplete, Fontism did, nonetheless, implement large-scale reforms – in the areas of taxation, land ownership, real estate, weights and measures, military recruitment, and administrative and judicial centralization – setting in motion a long and multi-layered process for the “reconstruction and territorialization of the State.”

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And this endeavor affected the very core of the relationship between modernization, conflict and protest, naturally meeting with popular resistance, since it “aimed at the safekeeping of traditional rights and institutions, while at the same time promoting potential and ever greater intervention in the life of local communities” (p. 390). These reactions, while partly countering the idea of total civic immobility at the local level, were not just outbursts prompted by some economic crisis, sudden crop shortage or hunger, but genuinely critical stances taken against progress. This should mean that progress was, in fact, happening and that the influx of Fontist reforms was indeed changing the country. Without listing the numerical results of the 1851-1890 growth cycle – which was not the author’s purpose in writing the book – David Justino does, however, demonstrate in Chapter 7, how these four decades were crucial and positive in terms of national change. It just happens that the change was not greater (in fact it was cut short in some of its expressions) because of the deeper country that it was aimed at. That is why the book’s closing thesis, which the author promises to further explore in a future publication, states that the Fontist progress was, after all, the unfolding of a “confined modernity” – which meant not debating its existence, but rather enquiring into the reasons why it became circumscribed to “some social niches” and was unable to attain a “national scale” (p. 459). This situation is as pertinent nowadays as it was historically, because it continues to resurface among the concerns of many politicians and analysts to this day: has the Portuguese problem always been, from the nineteenth century onwards, one of having good elites and a bad society? Did society remain “illiberal”, and in many ways isolated and backward in relation to the more cosmopolitan, enlightened and enterprising political center, because Fontism did not change it, or was Fontism unable to change it because society had always been, and continued to be, isolated and backward? And in the end, in 1890, did the Fontist model go bankrupt because of this severe social and cultural dualism or because the financial mechanisms of Portuguese growth collapsed? Here are some questions requiring a more in-depth future study of that particular civilizational and modernizing project called Fontism – looking at what it sought to be, what it was and what it was unable to achieve. David Justino’s work, stemming from four decades of research into the Fontist era (and into the nineteenth century in Portugal as a whole), is thus a very important and (from now on) an essential contribution to this theme. The exploration of the roots and effects of what he calls the “illiberal society” will certainly be on the agenda of much future research. Regardless of the book’s undeniably great merits, it should, nonetheless, be said that it

e-JPH, Vol. 14, number 2, December 2016 143 Sardica David Justino, Fontismo might perhaps have been fruitful to focus on one particular aspect that is absent here: the biography of Fontes Pereira de Melo himself. It is true that the author works on the premise that Fontism is not reducible to the figure of Fontes. No ideology or project can ever be attributed to just one single person. But if the reconfiguration of the liberal ideology (whence the impetus came for progress, together with the search for its appropriate instruments) had already happened before and without Fontes Pereira de Melo, the fact remains that it was him, and his specific and individual way of interpreting progress and of implementing policies accordingly, that molded the Regeneration and gave his name to the era. Some (or many?) characteristics of “Fontism” would not have been the same without Fontes. And the dialectics or interaction between the milieu and the man are not to be forgotten. All in all, the reader is faced with a book that is filled with rich and dense information, in which every aspect of Fontism is covered in a suitably critical fashion, shedding light on how this particular project was both the heir of a reconfigured, post- revolutionary liberalism and the major expression of a top-down modernizing era, transforming the country for the better, even if the country remained aloof to, and largely unaware of, the work that was done. And while it is necessarily a history book – specifically one of historical sociology – this large volume is also a critical introduction to problems, tendencies and characteristics (such as the chronic national deficits, the State’s lack of authority, the rigidity of public expenditure or the budgetary shortages) that still condition the present and the future of Portugal, in its attempts to preserve (or search for) liberty, order and progress.

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