Ramalho Ortigao and the Generation of 1870

The generation that came into intellectual ascendancy in around 1870 is usually associated with literary figures, such as the novelist Eqa de Queir6s, the poets Antero de Quental and Guerra Junqueiro, and the historian Oliveira Martins, but this generation also exerted a political influence which was to extend far into the twentieth century.* The republic of 1911, whatever the external circumstances attending its rise and fall, is ideologically a product of this generation, which first attempted the Europeanization and modernization of Portugal. The first generation of liberal emigrants had brought back to the political ideas and literary techniques of Romanticism, which here had set the tone perhaps longer than in most other European countries. In the decade of the sixties, with the advance of Darwinism, the decline and fall of the Second Empire in France, the final triumph of the Italian Risorgimento, political turmoil in Poland (not to mention the United States), and also (in 1864) the joining of Coimbra to the European railway network, the new i.e. the doctrines of realism in literature, positivism in philosophy, and various shades of radicalism in politics, could not fail to mould the thinking of the younger generation, all the more so in a small country that for centuries had been a political satellite of England and intellectually dependent on France-to realize how dependent, one must read Eqa de Queir6s' famous essay O Francesismo, in which the initial statement: Portugal 6 um pals traduzido do frances para o verniculo is modified by the author himself to read: Portugal 6 um pais traduzido do frances para o caldo. Jos6 Duarte Ramalho Ortigdo (18361915), here named in connection with the men of 1870, was a relatively late convert to their ideas, and in later years, specially after the tragic events of 1908, he reverted to more traditionalist views

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