Antero de Quental, the Azorean poet who told Portugal why it had declined

On 27 May 1871 a 29-year-old Azorean stood up in the hall of the Casino Lisbonense, at number 10 Largo da Abegoaria, on the edge of the Chiado. Five days earlier he had opened a series of public lectures there. In the audience were deputies, writers and civil servants, and the organisers had set out tables for the press.2 sources2 sources

He began with his thesis, and said he was sorry to have to state it before an audience of fellow Iberians.1 source1 source

A little later he pointed to the press tables. The organisers did not ask anyone to agree, he said, only to discuss, and the journalists were there so that every word could be noted down and contradicted.1 source1 source

The speaker was Antero de Quental. Afterwards his friend Jaime Batalha Reis wrote to his fiancée: “My Celeste, I have just heard Antero. It was magnificent.” It was, he thought, the first time that the modern spirit had entered Portugal, and the first time anyone had proved that Catholicism was one of the causes, and the most terrible, of the decline of Portugal and Spain.1 source1 source

Within a month the government had shut the hall. Antero was already known for a literary quarrel and a book of verse. He would spend much of the next twenty years ill, and in 1891 he took his own life.3 sources3 sources

Antero Tarquínio de Quental was born on 18 April 1842 in his family's house on Rua do Lameiro in Ponta Delgada, now Rua do Castilho. The Quentals claimed descent from the first settlers of São Miguel and owned land on the island. His father, Fernando de Quental, had been one of the “bravos do Mindelo”, the liberal volunteers who landed with Pedro IV at Mindelo, near Porto, in July 1832 to fight the absolutist King Miguel.3 sources3 sources

His first teacher of note was the poet António Feliciano de Castilho, who lived in Ponta Delgada in the late 1840s; the boy was in and out of his house. In August 1852 Antero was sent to Castilho's Colégio do Pórtico in Lisbon. After more schooling in Ponta Delgada and Lisbon he went to Coimbra in 1856 and enrolled in law at the university in September 1858.2 sources2 sources

Writing to a German translator in 1887, Antero said that the intellectual and moral revolution he went through on leaving a remote province “immersed in its placid historical sleep” for the agitation of Coimbra was probably the most decisive event of his life. His Catholic education was swept away “in an instant”. He read Goethe's Faust and Hegel in French translation, and of the French writers he preferred Proudhon and Michelet.1 source1 source

In Coimbra Antero became a leader of the students. On 8 December 1862, at the prize-giving in the university's great hall, the Sala dos Capelos, the students walked out as soon as the rector, the Viscount of São Jerónimo, began to speak. Antero wrote the manifesto that explained the protest to the country; 314 students signed it, and the rector was later replaced.3 sources3 sources

In 1864 he led a larger walkout. From 30 April to 13 May students left Coimbra and lodged in Porto, in protest at a decision of the government of the Duke of Loulé. Antero graduated that year, and his first collection of political verse, Odes Modernas, came out in Coimbra in the summer of 1865.2 sources2 sources

Later that year Castilho wrote an afterword, in the form of a letter to the publisher, for Poema da Mocidade by the young Pinheiro Chagas. He praised Chagas and mocked the “Coimbra school”, singling out Antero's Odes Modernas and Teófilo Braga's Tempestades Sonoras. Antero answered with an open letter dated Coimbra, 2 November 1865: Bom-Senso e Bom-Gosto, “Good Sense and Good Taste”.3 sources3 sources

The letter was rude on purpose. Castilho's verses had no ideal, Antero wrote, and his criticism had no ideas, only enough words for a dictionary of synonyms. He reminded his old teacher that he had put up with him at the Colégio do Pórtico when he was ten. He would stand up when Castilho's white hair passed, but what lay under it earned neither admiration nor respect, and he signed off “neither admirer nor respecter”.1 source1 source

Braga followed with a pamphlet of his own, and the quarrel became the Questão Coimbrã, the Coimbra Question. By one count it drew 44 further contributions; Castilho kept his promise not to reply in public. Antero later said the fight filled the winter of 1865 to 1866, and that when the smoke cleared Portugal had a group of 16 to 20 young men who were no longer Catholic or monarchist and talked of Goethe and Hegel.3 sources3 sources

Law did not interest him, and he called himself an insignificant lawyer. In the summer of 1866 he worked as a typesetter at the Imprensa Nacional in Lisbon, wanting to know the life of working men from the inside. In November he went to Paris to do the same job and came back in January 1867 disillusioned and unwell. On a second visit, on 2 August 1867, he called on Jules Michelet.3 sources3 sources

When revolution toppled the Spanish monarchy in 1868, he published Portugal perante a Revolução de Espanha, arguing for an Iberian union through a federal republic. He later called it a great illusion. In Lisbon he gathered a circle of friends, later called the Cenáculo, that included Eça de Queirós, Ramalho Ortigão and Jaime Batalha Reis. In the summer of 1869 he crossed the Atlantic to Halifax and New York.3 sources3 sources

The Cenáculo became the Conferências Democráticas do Casino Lisbonense. Their programme promised to raise the great questions of modern philosophy and science and to study how Portuguese society could be transformed politically, economically and religiously. Europe had just seen the fall of the French Second Empire and, that spring, the Paris Commune.3 sources3 sources

The Catholic paper A Nação called the speakers a dozen men led astray by liberal philosophy, preaching the doctrines that had brought disaster to France. What seems to have alarmed the government most was Adolfo Coelho's lecture of 19 June, which attacked Catholic teaching and the professors of Coimbra. The police commissioner present reported it, and the minister asked the Crown's attorney, João Baptista da Silva Ferrão de Carvalho Martens, for an opinion.1 source1 source

Martens argued that the lectures attacked the state religion and the constitutional Charter, and pointed to the destruction in Paris under the Commune. On 26 June, the day set for the next lecture, the Casino was closed on the orders of the Marquis of Ávila e Bolama, who headed the government, and a notice of the ban was posted on its door.2 sources2 sources

The veteran historian Alexandre Herculano supported the protest. Antero also published an open letter to the Marquis. He later claimed it was said to have helped bring the ministry down, though he added that it had been a caretaker government that could not last.2 sources2 sources

The lecture of 27 May was a sweeping history. In the Middle Ages, Antero argued, the Iberian peoples had been independent, inventive and free in their towns. In fifty or sixty years of the sixteenth century they fell into a dark, poor and ignorant world, and he named three causes: one moral, one political, one economic.1 source1 source

His remedy was to break with the past: free conscience and science against Catholicism, a federal republic built on democratic town councils against centralised monarchy, and free, cooperative labour as a gradual passage to socialism. Revolution, he said, meant peace and order, not war. He ended by comparing it to early Christianity: “Christianity was the Revolution of the ancient world: the Revolution is nothing but the Christianity of the modern world.”1 source1 source

Some of the argument has aged badly. He judged conquests by whether they “civilised”, and called the British conquest of India just on those grounds. Antero himself said in 1887 that the speech still showed “preconceived political ideas” and history written with a purpose. It is still reprinted; in 2008 the essayist Eduardo Lourenço prefaced a new edition and called it a landmark of critical modern thought in Portugal.3 sources3 sources

Antero's politics went beyond lecturing. In the early 1870s he founded workers' associations, wrote propaganda for working men and, as a follower of Marx and Engels, he said, brought the International Workingmen's Association, the First International, to Portugal. At the end of June 1871 he met emissaries of the International in secret. He was also among the founders of the Fraternidade Operária, a workers' association, but drifted away when his Proudhonian ideas were not adopted.3 sources3 sources

On 10 January 1875 he was named to the committee drafting the programme of the new socialist workers' party, and that year he ran the Revista Ocidental with Batalha Reis. He formally joined the Partido dos Operários Socialistas in July 1877 and stood for parliament as its candidate twice: in October 1879 and August 1881, according to the Azores government's chronology, or in 1879 and 1880, according to the Imprensa Nacional's biography.2 sources2 sources

In 1874 he fell gravely ill with what he called a nervous illness from which he never fully recovered. Later biographers describe a manic-depressive illness. Enforced idleness and the prospect of death, he wrote, put him face to face with “the great problem of existence”. He read Schopenhauer and Hartmann, and wrote and destroyed many poems.3 sources3 sources

Portuguese doctors could not help. In June 1877 he went to Paris to consult the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who prescribed a water cure at Bellevue; he went back for more treatment in 1878. Neither worked. He also took in the two young daughters of his Coimbra friend Germano Meireles, who died in 1877, and brought them up as his own.2 sources2 sources

In 1881 he left Lisbon for Vila do Conde, a small northern town near Porto, where he lived for most of the next decade with the girls. Oliveira Martins was close by in Porto and Alberto Sampaio in Famalicão. These were the calmest years of his life, and he wrote his last sonnets there.1 source1 source

Antero had taken up the sonnet as a student in Coimbra when, he said, nobody wrote them any more, and named Camões's sonnets as his “gospel of feeling”. In 1886 Oliveira Martins collected them as Os Sonetos Completos, in five sections dated from 1860 to 1884. Antero called the book “the autobiography of a thought” and “the memoirs of a conscience”.3 sources3 sources

The early sections are love poems and political verse. From 1874 the poems turn to death, night and nothingness. The last group moves towards a mystical peace: “Na mão de Deus, na sua mão direita, / Descançou a final meu coração” (“In the hand of God, in his right hand, / my heart at last has come to rest”).4 sources4 sources

Wilhelm Storck, who had translated Camões into German, translated a selection of the sonnets in 1887 and asked for some biographical notes. Antero's reply, dated Ponta Delgada, 14 May 1887, is the main account of his own life. Teófilo Braga, publishing it after Antero's death, called its facts vague and exaggerated. In 1889 Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro painted the portrait now in the Museu do Chiado.3 sources3 sources

On 11 January 1890 Britain sent Portugal an ultimatum over its claims in Africa, and the country rose in anger against Britain and its own government. In Porto a Liga Patriótica do Norte was formed, and on 6 February its founders chose Antero, a name trusted across the political factions, as president.2 sources2 sources

At a public session on 7 March 1890 he told the League that its founding would be “the first stone of the building of the restoration of the national forces”. Portugal, he said, was not truly independent, politically or economically. The party leaders soon saw a rival in the League, and Antero resigned rather than let it become a tool of their ambitions.3 sources3 sources

He decided to settle in São Miguel with his adopted daughters, and sailed on 5 June 1891. His first letters were cheerful. By mid-August his health was worse, and some of his family were cool towards the girls. On 26 August he moved into the house of his friend José Bensaúde.2 sources2 sources

The accounts differ slightly on the hour. The Azores government's chronology gives 8 pm; the Imprensa Nacional's biography, based on Ana Maria Almeida Martins, gives 7 pm. Four years earlier he had told Storck he hoped to die “in the peace of the Lord”.3 sources3 sources

Antero was the acknowledged leader of the writers later called the Generation of 1870, among them Eça de Queirós, Teófilo Braga, Oliveira Martins, Ramalho Ortigão and Batalha Reis. Five years after his death they wrote about him in a memorial volume, Antero de Quental: In Memoriam (1896). Eça, who had also drawn him as the activist Damião in an unfinished novel, called his essay “A genius who was a saint”.1 source1 source

The Causas, with its question of why Portugal fell behind the rest of Europe, was reissued in 2008 with a preface by Eduardo Lourenço. The sonnets were translated into German in his lifetime, and a second edition added Storck's German versions and some Italian ones. Until the late 1990s his face was on the green 5,000-escudo banknote.3 sources3 sources