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THE TEAM
CONTACT
Before the end of the century, Arriaga produced a “Prologue” to the Catálogo dos Manuscritos da Antiga Livraria dos Marqueses de Alegrete, dos Condes de Tarouca e dos Marqueses de Panalva e pertencente à sua actual representante, a Condessa de Tarouca (1898). He saw in the archive and library of these noble families “two true literary monuments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”, “which allow us to understand the intellectual production of those two centuries” (“Prólogo”, p. xvi). Given that the Republicans had a low opinion of the intellectual gifts of the aristocracy under the Ancien Regime, Arriaga’s enthusiasm for this library is curious, reflecting perhaps his own aristocratic origins.
At the beginning of the twentieth century the he wrote the Oitenta anos de Constitucionalismo Outorgado (1905), whose intention, like A Política Conservadora, is merely propagandistic. However, twenty years had passed since then, and the anti-monarchist discourse had hardened: now only a Republic could cleanse Portuguese society of the evils it was suffering.
In 1907 he worked on a book of a different kind: As Civilizações do Oriente e do Ocidente, an ambitious project of which only the first volume (The Civilizations of the East).
In 1911 he published his last book, dedicated to “Dr António José de Almeida, distinguished Republican and Democrat”: Os Últimos Sessenta Anos da Monarquia: Causas da Revolução de 5 de Outubro de 1910. Finally the Republic had triumphed, and with it the “democratic principle”, as the culmination of a fierce battle against the “monarchist principle” (Os Últimos Sessenta Anos, 1911, p. 8). Many had fallen for the “national revolution”. Arriaga, who had emphasized the peaceful nature of the revolution of 1820 now paid homage to “the heroism, abnegation and patriotic love of Buíça and Costa” (idem, p. 227), the assassins of D. Carlos and the crown prince. The author had nothing new to write in this little book, but the legitimation and consolidation of the new regime called for a repetition of the Manichaean discourse which associated the monarchy with darkness and the Republic with light, and Arriaga was outstanding at that.
