Sardinha’s theses triggered a violent intellectual reaction against the liberal university spirit and the growing de-Christianisation and laicisation of Portuguese society itself, and as a result university institutions soon opposed any idea he might have entertained of teaching. This radicalised even more the writer’s anathema to the humanitarian, pacifist and rationalist ideal which thrived in the universities.

However, the originality of these theses was hotly contested, first by Raul Proença in the pages of Seara Nova. The decisive influence in the embryonic phase, which converged with counter-revolutionary thought (De Bonald, J. de Maistre, Gama e Castro, Marquis of Penalva, Viscount of Santarém), might well have been found in Action Française, the movement led by Charles Maurras, and its programme for a Retour à la terre (Jules Méline), which felt, in its radical Barresian mistrust of the city which perverts the ancestral virtues of the common rural “people”, a fundamentalist anathema to “decadent”, “pornographic” urban and cosmopolitan literature, fruit of the educational institutions and the liberal and representative politics of the Third French Republic of which it was the correlative aesthetic and artistic expression. As an antidote he launched the theme of the regeneration of the “race”, a topic Social Darwinism was exploring so effectively and which was so dear to the nationalist racism that denounces in the anonymity of a society of “artificial” men the rupture with the divine pact and with their Catholic and Ultramontanist roots. He revealed an obsessive pet hatred of Semitism and of all those groups which filled him with fear such as Protestantism and Free Masonry, which he held up as the all-powerful architect of the constitutional system - “Yesterday Liberalism, today Democracy, are nothing but the façades of a hidden power that, in the political underground, manoeuvres it at its pleasure” (Ao ritmo da ampulheta, 1925; 50).

Following this path, Sardinha became one of the most read and commented on authors in the forums of the anti-liberal and anti-Jacobin right: “the history of Portugal, at the beginning of the last century, the 19th, cannot be understood in so many of its contradictory aspects without knowing in detail the history of the secret societies, its inspiration” (ib., 208).

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