Arriaga extends this discourse. According to him the country fell into decline with the reign of D. Manuel, and this is was due essentially to the Church, which he, a “weak king”, did not oppose. In locating this “fall”, Arriaga follows the interpretation of the German historian, H. Schaefer, rather than Herculano, for whom it coincided with the introduction of the Inquisition and the Jesuits during the reign of D. João III (Historiografia, 1998, pp. 206-15).

From D. Manuel’s reign onwards, he argues, Portugal is in the hands of two foreign interests: the Pope and Spain (História da Revolução Portuguesa, vol. 1, 1886, p. 17). In 1580 Spain took over the country with the support of the Inquisition and the Jesuits, who dominated culture, took control of the University and reduced the country to “ignorance”. Nothing changed with the Restoration of 1640. Portugal continues on its “pathway of prayers”, with its “autos-da-fé”, its “convent soups, processions, sung masses, terces and sermons” (idem, p. 150). Only Pombal was able to change this state of affairs, by his daring policies as a great reformer.

Arriaga, in his anticlerical zeal, practically reduces the evolution of Portuguese history to the crushing influence of the Church. Antero de Quental, in his famous Causas da Decadência dos Povos Peninsulares [Causes of the Decline of the Peninsular Peoples] (1870) also indicts post-Tridentine Catholicism, but combines it with two other factors (Absolutism and the Conquests). As a historian – which Antero was not at all – Arriaga makes an exaggerated simplification of the problem, the explanation for which certainly lies in his militant Republicanism.

His História da Revolução de Setembro, in three thick volumes, has a different feel to the História da Revolução Portuguesa de 1820, since he regarded the September Revolution (1836) as inferior to that of 1820. It was object of a critique, over a hundred pages long, by the monarchist writer Marques Gomes, called A verdade histórica e a história da Revolução de Setembro por José de Arriaga (1894). Marques Gomes undertakes a minute examination of Arriaga’s book, making numerous corrections to what he regarded as erroneous interpretations, as well as to facts he thought lacked documentary evidence, some of which he classifies as “fantasies” (A Verdade Histórica, 1894, p. 507). In the field of interpretation, Marques Gomes objects particularly to the importance Arriaga gives to the “democratic spirit” in Portugal in the nineteenth century (idem, p. 548). His critique was pointed, for its rejection of Arriaga’s dramatization of history, and courageous, since Republican opinion was monopolizing public opinion in an unstoppable way.

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