António Sérgio dies in 1969: essayist, minister, exile, co-operativist

António Sérgio died at about seven in the evening on 24 January 1969, in the Red Cross nursing home in Lisbon. He was 85. Two days later his coffin was taken to the Prazeres cemetery, and the cortège turned into a civic and political demonstration. Riot police charged the crowd more than once along the way.2 sources2 sources

The historian of education Rogério Fernandes noted how many ordinary, anonymous people walked behind the coffin. The man they buried had never held a university post in Portugal and had been a minister for 73 days. His influence came from writing: eight volumes of Ensaios (Essays), published between 1920 and 1958, more than 300 articles in the review Seara Nova, and decades of campaigning for co-operatives.4 sources4 sources

Portugal had a new head of government. In September 1968 President Américo Tomás had replaced the incapacitated António de Oliveira Salazar with Marcelo Caetano, but the dictatorship Sérgio had opposed for more than 40 years was still in place.1 source1 source

António Sérgio de Sousa was born on 3 September 1883 in Damão, a Portuguese enclave on the west coast of India; it is now the Indian town of Daman, and Portugal held it until December 1961. His father and grandfathers were naval officers and colonial governors. From the age of three until nearly ten he lived in the Portuguese Congo, where his father was governor, and he said he never set foot in a school before he was ten.4 sources4 sources

Back in Lisbon he entered the Colégio Militar in 1894, spent a preparatory year at the Escola Politécnica and moved to the Naval School in 1901. In October 1904 the new midshipman sailed for Macau on the gunboat Lima. His first book, a collection of poems called Rimas, came out in 1908.2 sources2 sources

His family were close to the crown: his father was an honorary aide-de-camp to the king. Yet the young officer refused to be presented at court, and he disliked republican propaganda as much as monarchist politics. The revolution of 5 October 1910 made him a suspect. In a letter of 1923 to the poet Afonso Lopes Vieira he said he had spent three days “in the irons of the Republic”, held as a dangerous “talassa”, slang for a monarchist.3 sources3 sources

On 11 November 1910 he asked for, and was given, unlimited leave from the navy. He resigned for good in June 1915, as he noted himself a few months later in the students' Livre d'Or (golden book) of an institute in Geneva.2 sources2 sources

To make a living he worked from 1910 for an American firm that sold large reference works in Portuguese, which sent him to London and, in January 1913, to Rio de Janeiro. In the spring of 1914 he and his wife, Luísa, went to study at the Instituto Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Geneva, the school of education founded by the psychologist Édouard Claparède, and they returned as regular students for 1915-1916.4 sources4 sources

He had also been involved from the start in the Renascença Portuguesa (Portuguese Renaissance), a cultural society set up in Porto in 1912 to raise the culture of the people through lectures, books, popular universities and the review A Águia (The Eagle). In the first issue of A Águia's second series, in January 1912, the poet Teixeira de Pascoaes announced a programme he called saudosismo.2 sources2 sources

Sérgio wanted Portugal to reason its way out of its problems, and saudosismo looked to him like the sentimental, anti-rationalist patriotism he would fight for the rest of his life. In October 1913 A Águia printed his “Epístolas aos saudosistas” (Letters to the saudosistas), with Pascoaes's reply to “the two letters of António Sérgio” in the same issue. The quarrel ran into 1914.3 sources3 sources

The two men stayed civil. In a postscript to the same letter Sérgio sent the poet his “homage as a personal friend and literary dissident”. Pascoaes eventually stepped back from his claims, and the Lisbon group around Sérgio and the writer Raul Proença later carried the rationalist side of the argument into a new review, Seara Nova.2 sources2 sources

In March 1918 he founded his own review, Pela Grei (For the People), to form “a conscious public opinion”. On 21 December 1918, in the riots at the funeral of the assassinated president Sidónio Pais, he was badly wounded and needed surgery. The newspaper O Século reported that he had been hit by four bullets; Rogério Fernandes writes of a bomb blast.3 sources3 sources

The first issue of Seara Nova came out in Lisbon on 15 October 1921. Its group included Raul Proença, Jaime Cortesão, Raul Brandão, Aquilino Ribeiro and Luís da Câmara Reys, and it called itself a review “of doctrine and criticism”. It began as a fortnightly with a print run of 8,000 copies. Sérgio was in Brazil, running a publishing house, when it was founded. The review's online archive counts him among the founders, but he joined its editorial group only in April 1923.4 sources4 sources

In December 1923 the reformers got their chance. Álvaro de Castro formed a government on 18 December with Sérgio as Minister of Public Instruction. Decrees he signed, published in the official gazette on 29 December, created a Portuguese Institute for the Study of Cancer, the origin of today's Portuguese Institute of Oncology, and a Junta de Orientação dos Estudos, a board to award state study grants and fund research.5 sources5 sources

He left office on 28 February 1924, after 73 days. The idea survived him: in 1929 the Military Dictatorship set up a similar body, the Junta de Educação Nacional, and many of the young scholars it sent abroad thought of it as Sérgio's creation.2 sources2 sources

The coup of 28 May 1926 ended the First Republic. Seara Nova stopped appearing between August 1926 and April 1927, saying it could not live with “the censoring pencil of the officers”. In January 1927, to avoid arrest, Sérgio left the country.3 sources3 sources

In Paris he joined other exiled republicans, among them Afonso Costa, Álvaro de Castro and Jaime Cortesão, in the League for the Defence of the Republic, known as the Paris League. Sérgio wrote its founding manifesto, “Ao País” (To the Country), published in July 1927. It called for reform of parliamentary institutions, the economy and education. The League also campaigned against a large loan the dictatorship sought through the League of Nations, which Lisbon finally turned down in 1928 because of the conditions attached.2 sources2 sources

He earned his living in publishing, by teaching private pupils and, from about 1930, as a dialogue director at the Paramount studios at Joinville, adapting early sound films into Portuguese. In a letter of February 1932 he described leaving home at 7.30 in the morning for the studios, teaching until 10.30 at night and correcting the proofs of the third volume of his Ensaios on the Métro.1 source1 source

An amnesty let him come home in 1933. On 10 July that year he was arrested because he was with a former lieutenant-colonel, Aragão, when the police captured him, and was released the same day. On 27 August 1935 the PVDE arrested him again. He was held in the Lisbon penitentiary, the infirmary of the Limoeiro jail and the Aljube, and on 21 December 1935 he was put across the border, banished for an indefinite period. He went to Madrid until another amnesty brought him back in 1936.2 sources2 sources

The first volume of Ensaios came out in 1920, while he was living in Brazil; the eighth in 1958. Across more than 35 essays they cover history, culture, religion, politics, philosophy and science. Most were written against someone, though without the personal abuse common in Portuguese polemics.3 sources3 sources

In the first volume he reread the chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara's account of the Portuguese capture of Ceuta, in Morocco, in 1415. Against the traditional picture of a knightly blow struck at Islam, he argued that the merchants of the ports wanted the African and Eastern trade that reached Ceuta, and Morocco's grain. Later he drew a line he returned to again and again, between a “policy of transport”, living off trade, and a “policy of fixation”, settling the land and creating wealth by work.1 source1 source

He never called himself a historian. He wrote history, he said, quoting Goethe, because “to write history is a way of freeing ourselves from the past”. What held his work together was a method more than a doctrine, an attitude that, in a phrase of the philosopher Vasco de Magalhães Vilhena quoted by Augusto Fitas, affirmed “the primacy of reason” in every field. The philosopher João Príncipe calls it an “open rationalism” that valued practice, human work and technique.3 sources3 sources

The method made enemies. He quarrelled with Carlos Malheiro Dias over King Sebastião and the cult of his return in 1924 and 1925, with António Sardinha over the seventeenth century, a dispute ended only by Sardinha's death, and with followers of Henri Bergson in the 1930s. In 1941 the censors had the first volume of his História de Portugal withdrawn from sale.3 sources3 sources

Back from Madrid, Sérgio put more and more of his energy into co-operatives. In 1937 he published an introduction to the co-operative programme of the French economist Charles Gide, and in 1948 his Confissões de um Cooperativista (Confessions of a Co-operator). According to two younger followers, he told them that, of everything he had done, his theory and defence of co-operativism was what he expected to last.1 source1 source

His thinking changed over time. He started from Gide's “co-operative nation”, in which consumer co-operatives would take over the economy in three stages. He ended with Georges Fauquet's idea of a co-operative sector alongside the public and private ones, open to every kind of co-operative, farmers' co-operatives included. In 1951 he designed and ran the Boletim Cooperativista, and in December 1955 he was the main force behind the founding of Unicoope.2 sources2 sources

On Saturday afternoons his small house in the Travessa do Moinho de Vento, in Lapa, built to a design by the architect Raul Lino, filled with younger visitors: Agostinho da Silva, Álvaro Salema, Natália Correia, José-Augusto França and the co-operative pioneer Fernando Ferreira da Costa. His wife, Luísa, was the host.2 sources2 sources

After the Second World War Sérgio took part in nearly every open campaign of the opposition. In February 1947, with General Norton de Matos, Mário de Azevedo Gomes and Bento de Jesus Caraça, he wrote demanding an inquiry into the Tarrafal prison camp. When Norton de Matos withdrew from the 1949 presidential election, Sérgio founded the Directório Democrato-Social with Azevedo Gomes and Cortesão. In 1953 he chaired the Comissão Promotora de Voto, which sought guarantees for honest voter registration and counting.2 sources2 sources

His last campaign was the boldest. According to the historian David Raby, the idea came from Henrique Galvão, a dissident officer held in Peniche prison, who suggested to General Humberto Delgado on 25 October 1957 that he stand for president. Delgado had backed the coup of 1926 and served the regime for three decades. Galvão then contacted Sérgio, who became the main organiser of civilian support for Delgado. Sérgio already believed that a dissident officer was the way to split the regime; one opposition group had even proposed him as a possible candidate.3 sources3 sources

Delgado's campaign in May and June 1958 drew huge crowds, above all in Porto on 14 May. After the vote of 8 June the official count gave the regime's candidate, Rear-Admiral Américo Tomás, 758,998 votes and Delgado 236,528. The opposition contested the figures.2 sources2 sources

On 26 November 1958 a government note announced that Sérgio, Cortesão, Vieira de Almeida and Azevedo Gomes had been detained because their signatures appeared on “subversive manifestos”. Sérgio said the real reason was that they had invited the British Labour politician Aneurin Bevan to lecture in Portugal. They were freed two days later.2 sources2 sources

After that he went quiet. His wife died on 29 February 1960, and through the 1960s he gave up almost all public activity.2 sources2 sources

Five years after his funeral, the revolution of 25 April 1974 ended the dictatorship. The Constitution of 1976 gave co-operatives a sector of ownership of their own alongside the public and private sectors, as Sérgio had argued. Today's text calls it the co-operative and social sector and, in Articles 80 and 82, tells the state to protect it.2 sources2 sources

The first constitutional government named its new co-operative institute after him, the Instituto António Sérgio do Sector Cooperativo, and its first president was his disciple Fernando Ferreira da Costa. Its successor, the Cooperativa António Sérgio para a Economia Social (CASES), looked after his archive and library and awarded the António Sérgio Prize. In September 2026, after the state withdrew from it, its members voted to dissolve it.4 sources4 sources

Seara Nova, the review he helped turn into a voice of the democratic opposition, published 1,604 issues between 1921 and 1984, and the Museu do Aljube noted in 2020 that it was still being published. In 2019, for the 50th anniversary of his death, exhibitions on his life opened at the Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores and in the parliament building at São Bento.3 sources3 sources