The twilight of Portuguese kingship between religion and secularism (1853–1910)

Abstract

By the end of the eighteenth century the replacement of traditional political theology by a model of a “civil religion”meant that the abstract entity of the nation came to occupy the former place of God as the summit of a political system that provides meaning for human interaction and social organization (Schmitt 2005; Ridolfi 2006). In its various shades, this type of sacralization of Leviathan was the politico-philosophical foundation of the establishing of the United States of America and the French Revolution, and consequently of the nineteenth century liberal states. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century the path of political communities towards MaxWeber’s irreversible “disenchantment of the world” has been made through the dialectic between the secularization of society and the sacralization of the State. Talking and thinking about secularization and sacralization can be too abstract an exercise. Therefore, it is important to take into account its effectiveness within the scope of Portugal’s time and space, which is the focus of this article. In 1820, with the royal family and court absent in Brazil since 1808 as a result of the Napoleonic invasions, Portugal went through a liberal revolution that triggered a process of dismantling and weakening the institutions of the Old Regime, including the Church. Between 1832 and 1834, Portugal experienced a civil war between supporters of two distinct conceptions of monarchy: traditionalist and liberal/constitutional, respectively led by the two brothers, sons of King João VI, Miguel and Pedro. The “war of the two brothers” ended with the triumph of the liberals who were responsible for implementing major secularizing measures such as the dismantling of Church assets and the extinction of religious orders (Paquette 2013; Faria 1987). However, taking into account the character of the majority of the country’s population at the beginning of the nineteenth century – rural, Catholic, and illiterate – historiography has been reticent to recognize any material conditions at the time that would be necessary for the development of a secularized culture (Neto 1998, 222). In reality, Portuguese liberals did not want separation from the Church, but its appropriation. And that was what happened: nationalization of the Church both in the material sense by taking possession of its goods and in the more subjective sense by the appropriation of the system of Catholic beliefs and values which formed the identity and edifying ground of Portuguese society (Ramos and Monteiro 2019).