It was José de Arriaga that took upon himself the task of writing a history of the Liberal revolutions. Without ever abandoning his passionate and forceful style, he wrote in different ways according to the public he was addressing. For the educated classes, he wrote long and careful works, with detailed accounts of the events, drawing on a strong documentary base, as is the case with his with his studies of 1820 and 1836. For a more popular audience, though, he wrote more pamphlet-like works, as was the case with A Política Conservadora.

Meeting the Republican Party’s political need to discredit the two monarchist parties, the Progressive and the Regenerator Parties, and of course the Regeneration itself, Arriaga constructed a narrative according to which, after the Liberal movement of 1820 and the hiatuses of 1836 and 1846, the country ended up in the hands of the “moderate or conservative side”, which always managed to prevent the implementation of the “frankly democratic” reforms, “with the aim, simply, of strengthening the monarchy”, and with it “all the classes of the old regime” (A Política Conservadora, 1880, p. 456). In this his inaugural work of history, Arriaga makes insistent use of a term essential to the Republican discourse, namely democracy.

Teófilo Braga had presented the “democratic aspiration of the Portuguese people” as an ongoing characteristic since medieval times (História das Ideias Republicanas em Portugal, 1880). In the same way, Arriaga declares that “democratic government” is the only regime capable of fulfilling the aspirations of the “people”, identified with the “nation” and the “most numerous popular class”, and the “small-holders”, allied to the “other classes”, all seeking to “expand their kind” and fulfil “their legitimate development” (A Política Conservadora, 1880, p. 466). The Constitution of 1822, with its single chamber, restricted powers for the king, and the “sovereignty of the people”, represented the high point of democratic aspirations. After that, the nation never again had such an auspicious moment. It is 1879, and Arriaga concedes that the monarchy may still raise up the country, if it wishes, by the “formation of a democratic party of men who are honourable and sincerely love their fatherland”, a party such as emerged in 1820, 1836, and 1846 (idem, p. 490).

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