The author’s other great passion is the people. The concept of the people underwent several modifications over the nineteenth century. The revolutionaries of 1820 adopted a very positive image of the people, equating it, particularly in the work of Fernandes Tomás, with “nation” and “public opinion”. This image, though, coexists with another, more critical, shared by Liberals and counter-revolutionaries, which sees in the people a innate propensity for disorder, confirmed in their eyes by the events of the French revolution. The people, as promoters of “excesses”, will furthermore be a recurrent image in Liberal discourse in Portugal (“Povo-Povos”, Ler História, 2008, 55, pp. 141-54).

In short, to the nineteenth-century intellectual class, from Herculano to Oliveira Martins, the popular classes, both urban and rural, deprived of any “material or moral interests” of their own (in line with the distinction made by Herculano between the plebe and the people), almost always played an undesirable role, being associated with outbreaks of violence and anarchy, to civil war and to Miguelism. This despite a paternalistic attitude, very common amongst the elites, favouring education and “the happiness of the people”. We find exceptions, on the radical wing of Septembrism, notably in José Estevão, or in Almeida Garrett’s Romantic vision of country people in his Romanceiro (idem, p. 149 and p. 151).

Republican discourse effects a semantic shift in the concept. The disorderly people of monarchist culture, excluded from active citizenship by the Liberal regime, is transmuted into the purest representative of the nation. In Arriaga the people divide into two types: the docile people – “always the most peaceful and respectful of order in Portugal” (História da Revolução de Setembro, vol. II, 1892, p. 407) – and the victimized people. This new way of regarding the people goes beyond party-political boundaries, due to two related phenomena: the nationalist environment at the end of the century and the process of “monumentalization of the people” (to use anthropological language) effected by ethnography at the end of the century by intellectuals of a Republican bent, such as Teófilo Braga and Consiglieri Pedroso. However, José de Arriaga is perhaps the author who contributed most to the myth of the people, who in his works acquire a unique set of characteristics, as “the heart of the nation”. Being “gifted with an admirable good sense […] they are the first to accept all that is good for the fatherland and for humanity. It is the class which has the most active national instincts” (idem, p. 587).

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