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THE TEAM
CONTACT
Indeed, this troubled period marked Herculano’s consecration as a political intellectual (Saraiva, Herculano e o Liberalismo [Herculano and Liberalism], 23-24), to which his election in 1858 as an MP for Sintra clearly bears witness (although he did not accept this seat). However, his rise to central public figure in the political arena also resulted in a significant shift in tone of the criticism of his opponents, some of whom from the liberal field, who no longer constrained themselves within the limits of respect for Herculano’s literary authority (Macedo, “A tentativa histórica, xciii-xcvii). Coupled with this was the little intellectual influence he effectively had on king Pedro V and the early death of the monarch of whom he had often claimed to be fond (Cartas, I, 195-196; 203) - despite knowledge of some friction between them (Cartas inéditas, 87; 97; Mónica, D. Pedro V, 176-177). With such a decade of intense political activity (in stark contrast to his relative quietude between 1842-1850), Herculano began to experience a sense of boredom and weariness with literary and intellectual activities. In 1858, in the reign of Pedro V and while the Partido Histórico was in office, Herculano publicly announced that he had lost the drive that had inspired his previous historical studies and that he was looking forward to “the day when I can put down my quill and vanish into oblivion.”, further adding: “that will be the best day of my life” (“Do estado das classes servas” [“On the condition of the working classes”], 240-241).
Although all these experiences do not suffice to fully account for why Herculano moved to the countryside in his fifties, they provide a context for his decision . He had always had a somewhat anti- city and anti- Lisbon disposition and had always enjoyed being in contact with nature, having long acquired a taste for farming activities. In the late 1840s he had rented a small allotment near his house in Ajuda where he even produced some dairy products. Together with two friends, between 1855 and 1863 he became involved in a larger-scale farming venture in Serra da Arrábida [Arrábida mountain range]. In 1859, he purchased a rural property on the outskirts of Santarém, Quinta de Vale de Lobos where he would reside most of the time from the mid-1860s onwards and where he would engage more seriously in agricultural production (Nemésio, “O lavrador” [“The farmer”]). As noted ironically by Ramalho Ortigão, he stopped “making history to make olive oil” (cited in Nemésio, “O retiro” [“The exile”], xi). He styled this change as a kind of voluntary exile, thereby generating self-consciously a key reference for memories that would lead to his own mythification. But he also used this change as an opportunity to contribute, by way of example, to an agrarian, decentralised economic development model, which in the second half of the century had fewer and fewer advocates in Lisbon. This suggests that the “exile” did not sever his connections with the Portuguese public world, he merely altered his form of intervention in that world.
