The confrontation between tradition and modernity: the proclamation of the republic in Portugal

Abstract

We have enjoyed the pleasure of discussing the proclamation of the Republic in Portugal in a variety of ways. The most profound work impressing us through the multiplicity of perspectives was that of the researcher Alice Samara (2010). It raises several explanatory hypotheses for different understandings of the Republic, according to the perspectives and the moments by which the regime and the republican idea are looked at. Also recently, an excellent article by Jorge Pais de Sousa on Afonso Costa has been published, which gives us the possibility of understanding the Republic from a point of view almost unidentified so far (SOUSA, [s.d.]). Our perspective does not seek to make a critical, piecemeal judgment of legislation and political and party behaviour during the sixteen-year regime between 1910 and 1926. It concludes with the victory or defeat of republican thought; we are interested in focusing attention throughout the period perceiving and explaining the Republic - before and after the proclamation - as a result of the confrontation between the social group's leaps to modernity, to the new, to the different, and to the group that maintains the existing reality of tradition and conservatism.