Teófilo Braga, the Azorean scholar who led the Republic’s first government

In October 1910, in the weeks after the monarchy fell, the photographer Joshua Benoliel followed the new head of government around Lisbon. In one picture Teófilo Braga, aged 67, sits on the open bench of Carris tram number 261 in a bowler hat, a walking stick in one hand and a fold of papers in the other. The city archive, which holds the negative, places the tram at the Praça da Estrela.3 sources3 sources

The weekly Ilustração Portugueza printed the photographs on 24 October with an interview by the journalist Rocha Martins. One caption has Braga asking when the tram will leave for the stop nearest his ministry. The other says that, as in his days as a plain professor, the head of government prefers the tram to grander means of transport.1 source1 source

Martins pressed him: surely a head of government needed a carriage? Braga allowed one, as long as it was “without show”, to take him between home and ministry, partly so that he could escape being greeted in the street.1 source1 source

Braga had not helped to plan the revolution of 5 October 1910. He learned on the day itself that the republicans had chosen him to lead their Provisional Government. The Museu da Presidência, the museum of Portugal’s presidency, puts the choice down to his prestige as a scholar and as the theorist of Portuguese republicanism.1 source1 source

He had been making the case in print for forty years. His bibliography runs to more than 300 titles by the museum’s count, and to 360 by that of the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe: poems and folk tales, philosophy and politics, and a history of Portuguese literature that he kept reworking for almost fifty years.3 sources3 sources

Joaquim Teófilo Fernandes Braga was born in Ponta Delgada, the main town of São Miguel in the Azores, on 24 February 1843. He was the seventh child of Joaquim Manuel Fernandes Braga, who taught at the town’s liceu, the state secondary school, and Maria José da Câmara Albuquerque.2 sources2 sources

His mother died in 1846, when he was three. Life with his stepmother, whom the presidency museum describes as austere and distant, left wounds he wrote about later. Even his name was partly his own doing: he added Teófilo to it in 1853, when he started primary school.1 source1 source

He wanted to write from the start. At 15 he published his first poem, “A Canção do Guerreiro”, in A Estrela Oriental, a newspaper in the nearby town of Ribeira Grande, and founded a literary paper of his own in Ponta Delgada, O Meteoro. The next year came O Santelmo, a fortnightly on which he was also the typesetter.1 source1 source

At 16, with the backing of a local patron, the Visconde da Praia, he published his first book of verse, Folhas Verdes (1859). At 18, his secondary schooling finished, he sailed for the mainland and the University of Coimbra. He never went back to the Azores, though he stayed attached to the islands for the rest of his life.2 sources2 sources

Braga enrolled in law at Coimbra in the academic year 1862–63. He finished the course in the summer of 1867 and took his doctorate the next year with a thesis on the forais, the charters of medieval towns, dedicated to his brother João Maria, who had died in Mozambique in 1866 on a military campaign. In April 1868 he married Maria do Carmo Xavier de Barros Leite, whom he had met as a student.1 source1 source

Coimbra made him a poet with a programme. Visão dos Tempos (1864) was an epic of humanity influenced by Victor Hugo’s Légende des siècles, and it was well received in Portugal, Italy and Brazil. Tempestades Sonoras followed the same year.2 sources2 sources

In 1865 António Feliciano de Castilho, the reigning authority of Lisbon letters, wrote an afterword to Poema da Mocidade by the young poet Pinheiro Chagas. It praised Chagas and disparaged the “literary school of Coimbra” of Antero de Quental and Braga.1 source1 source

Antero replied on 2 November 1865 with an open letter, Bom-Senso e Bom-Gosto, that attacked Castilho’s authority and the “school of mutual praise” around him. Braga followed with a pamphlet of his own, As Theocracias Litterarias, signed in November 1865 and printed in Lisbon. The row became known as the Questão Coimbrã, the Coimbra Question.3 sources3 sources

The pamphlet was personal. Braga set Castilho beside Goethe and said the difference between them was the one a zero makes as a denominator. Castilho, he wrote, wanted in the last quarter of his life to proclaim himself the supreme arbiter of literature and to impose his courtiers on posterity.1 source1 source

Braga and Antero became leading figures of what was later called the Generation of 1870. Braga was among the signatories of the Casino Conferences of 1871 in Lisbon, a series of public lectures meant to bring the philosophical and social debates of Europe to Portuguese readers. His friendship with Antero later soured almost into enmity.1 source1 source

Doors closed on him. He was passed over in a competition for a chair at the Polytechnic Academy of Porto in 1868 and again at the University of Coimbra in 1871. The press, says João Palma-Ferreira in his preface to the Imprensa Nacional edition of Braga’s literary history, drew a sanitary cordon of silence around him.1 source1 source

He went on publishing. In 1867 came the Cancioneiro and the Romanceiro Geral, collections of folk songs and ballads with a history of popular poetry, and in 1869 the Cantos Populares do Arquipélago Açoriano, songs of his own islands. The first volume of his História da Literatura Portuguesa appeared in 1870, partly, he said, to help a friend who did not want to lay off the workers in his print shop during a sudden slump.2 sources2 sources

Between 1869 and 1872 he published eleven volumes of literary history to near total silence. When the critics did take notice, they were savage. The historian Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira Martins attacked his method in 1869, and Antero and Pinheiro Chagas joined in later.1 source1 source

Martins granted that Braga had begun philosophical history in Portugal, but thought his daring undid it. Braga explained Portuguese literature by race: a popular element he called Mozarabic, which had produced the town charters and the ballads, set against an aristocratic one that imitated foreign fashions, from medieval French epics to English constitutionalism. Palma-Ferreira finds the scheme exaggerated, rigid and of its time, but credits it with the first attempt to put the subject in order.1 source1 source

In 1872, at 29, he finally won a university post, though not in law. He took the chair of Modern Literatures at the Curso Superior de Letras in Lisbon, the forerunner of today’s Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, and taught there for more than five decades.2 sources2 sources

Positivism gave Braga a theory of history in which the monarchy was a stage to be left behind: the republic, he argued, would prevail as part of a natural order. He co-founded the review O Positivismo, which ran from 1878 to 1882, and wrote Traços Gerais de Filosofia Positiva (1877) and Sistema de Sociologia (1884).3 sources3 sources

Politics followed from the theory. He held federal republican views from 1875, and in 1878, as a candidate for deputy, set out his principles: freedom of conscience, teaching, the press, worship and assembly, the right to property, and freedom of industry, trade and contract. Soluções Positivas da Política Portuguesa (1879) and a history of republican ideas in Portugal (1880) followed.2 sources2 sources

In 1880 he turned an anniversary into a political event. With the writer Ramalho Ortigão he coordinated the third centenary of the death of Luís de Camões, the national poet, on 10 June 1880. The festivities, modelled on the civic festivals of the French Revolution, were held all over the country, and Braga presented Camões as the symbol of national identity.2 sources2 sources

The remains of Camões and of the navigator Vasco da Gama were moved to the Jerónimos Monastery in Belém, which became a national pantheon. Republicans used the occasion to present themselves as the alternative to the monarchy, and the presidency museum counts the centenary as a landmark in the spread of republican ideas. Braga set out the theory behind it in 1884, in an essay on centenaries as an “affective synthesis” of modern societies.2 sources2 sources

At home there was grief. His first son, Joaquim Teófilo, died at birth in 1869. Within a few months in 1886 and 1887 tuberculosis killed the other two: Teófilo, aged 13, and Maria da Graça, aged 16.1 source1 source

On 11 January 1890 Britain demanded that Portugal withdraw its forces from lands in central Africa it had hoped would link Angola and Mozambique. Braga criticised the ultimatum in public, and the republicans used the national humiliation against the monarchy. He then drafted the programme of the Portuguese Republican Party, approved on 11 January 1891. It imagined a federal republic built from the bottom up: municipalities would choose provincial assemblies, and federations of provinces would send representatives to a national assembly.4 sources4 sources

That federal dream did not survive the Republic’s arrival: the Constitution of 1911 created a unitary state with some local decentralisation. In January 1910, nine months before the revolution, Braga joined the party’s political directorate.2 sources2 sources

On 5 October 1910 the Republic was proclaimed in Lisbon, and the Provisional Government was formed the same day at the city hall, with Braga as its president. Braga was head of state and head of government at once, and his ministers governed without a parliament until a Constituent Assembly was elected on 28 May 1911 and met on 19 June.3 sources3 sources

Among his ministers was the Minister of Justice, Afonso Costa, whose Law of Separation of 20 April 1911 cut the ties between the state and the Catholic Church.2 sources2 sources

Braga threw himself into the fight over the new regime’s symbols. The government approved a green and red flag on 29 November 1910, and when champions of the old blue and white, the poet Guerra Junqueiro among them, argued back in the press, Braga led its defence. In his time the Republic adopted both its flag and its anthem, A Portuguesa.2 sources2 sources

The Constituent Assembly approved the Constitution on 21 August 1911, and Braga signed it. Three days later the assembly elected Manuel de Arriaga as the first President of the Republic and Braga ceased to act as head of state. A decree of 3 September 1911 formally discharged his government.4 sources4 sources

That year his wife died. He had always been solitary, and after 1911 he withdrew further into his books.1 source1 source

He was called back once. On 14 May 1915 a revolt in Lisbon brought down the dictatorship of General Pimenta de Castro, and Manuel de Arriaga offered his resignation. Under the Constitution of 1911 the president was chosen by Congress, the two houses of parliament sitting together, and not by the voters.5 sources5 sources

On 29 May 1915 Congress accepted Arriaga’s resignation and, at six in the evening, voted for his successor. Braga received 98 of the 102 ballots, one went to Duarte Leite and three were blank. He reached the Congress building at seven, was cheered in the chamber and the galleries, and gave his pledge of honour.3 sources3 sources

He took a narrow view of the job. The presidency museum says he accused Arriaga of meddling illegitimately in events, and his message to Congress, read out that evening, set out the alternative.2 sources2 sources

The Constitution backed that view. It gave the president no veto over laws and, until a revision in 1919, no power to dissolve parliament. Under Braga the Democratic Party governed, led by José de Castro, and general elections were held on 13 June.3 sources3 sources

On 6 August 1915 Congress elected Bernardino Machado as his successor, two months before the term ran out, as the Constitution required. Braga handed over on 5 October 1915, after a little over four months in office.2 sources2 sources

The state commissioned his official portrait from the painter Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro in 1917. After the coup of December 1917, the new president, Sidónio Pais, is thought to have had it taken down from the wall at the Belém palace.1 source1 source

He went back to his desk. The disappointments of the Republic’s first years, the presidency museum says, drove him to books and writing. He lived almost as a recluse in his house in the Travessa de Santa Gertrudes in Lisbon, working on the new edition of his História da Literatura Portuguesa, which came out in volumes from 1909 to 1918.3 sources3 sources

He died on 28 January 1924, about a month before his 81st birthday. He was given a state funeral and the government declared a day of national mourning. He was buried in the chapter house of the Jerónimos Monastery, the old national pantheon, near the poets Almeida Garrett, João de Deus and Guerra Junqueiro.3 sources3 sources

In February 1926 the city renamed his street after him. In 1966, when the long-unfinished church of Santa Engrácia was completed as the National Pantheon, his remains were moved there with the five others from the Jerónimos chapter house: the former presidents Sidónio Pais and Óscar Carmona and the three poets.3 sources3 sources

Much of his scholarship has dated. The preface to the edition of his literary history published by Imprensa Nacional, the state press, calls it a polemical work even today, full of exaggeration and rigid schemes, and also the first attempt to lay out the whole subject. His collections of folk songs, ballads and tales still draw scholars: a doctoral thesis of 2000 at the Nova University of Lisbon examined his work on the oral ballad tradition.2 sources2 sources

Some of his public work is part of everyday life. After the centenary of 1880, 10 June became a holiday, first in Lisbon and then across the country, and it is still one of Portugal’s compulsory public holidays. The green and red flag he defended in 1910 is still the national flag.4 sources4 sources

His republic did not turn out as he had planned. The federal state of his 1891 programme never came, and the parliamentary regime he served as president fell to a military coup in May 1926, two years after his death.2 sources2 sources