In the undertaking to achieve “national salvation”, it was necessary to correct and combat romantic and liberal historiography; the new order demanded, also in the chapter on the production and reproduction of memories, the cast that would justify and illustrate politique d´abord [politics first], the submission of historical knowledge to the solicitations of political struggle.

Despite recognising Herculano as one of the great Portuguese historians, Sardinha did not find him innocent of culpable research, “so quickly did he let his sectarian mentality manifest itself that immediately a conflict was established between the historian and the facts, of which the História da Inquisição (History of the Inquisition) is an obvious witness assembled in order to beat the reaction, as Herculano himself so sincerely confesses”. The problem is that “scientific or objective methods of History do not marry, by their very nature, the puffed up panegyrics of the old days” and from there to “patriotic hyperbolism” if it had followed a phase in which “a systematic principle of free-criticism was substituted which made History a reason for permanent civil war” (De Vita et Moribus, 152-53). This was a conflict from which he did not exonerate either Herculano or Oliveira Martins, who he applauded in other areas (municipalism, organicism). In fact, if the theoretical programme was based on the Sorelian deconstruction of democratic mythography and on the Comtian belief of the perfectibility of the future in the name of sociocracy and the limited scientification of social know-how, the positive method, or rather the methodology of the French school of Langlois and Seignobos, would be contaminated by “stiff and sterile objectivity”, fruit of the “narrow materialism into which Intelligence descended and buried itself in the last century” (Questões de história, cit., 230-31).

Positivist methodology would thus not succeed in reaching the intimate meaning of history, a subjectivism that prognosticates and retrospects. Only the interpreter of nationalist science could achieve this, clothed in the garments of the priest of a philosophical anamnesis, not only to recover the possible memories of facticity but in order to scrutinise the transpersonal eternal truths. Integralist historiosophy, of which Sardinha is the most prominent theoriser, is thus situated on the threshold of a mystic gnosis in which heaven and earth communicate, following the well-worn Thomistic lesson, in the participation of the largest unit of divine creation in whose reading the sacralisation of the intellectual munus tries to justify itself (Archer, 1993:75). This meant that the epistemic status of the nationalist historian had to be granted the status of legatee of an interpretative tradition which did not merely exclude all others but claimed the place of univocal truth for a heteronymic view of history. And from there, for example, came the effort to rehabilitate the Holy Office and the Tribunal of the Inquisition as courts whose purpose was to guarantee both the preservation of the nation from modern estrangeirismo (foreignisation) and the chaste world view of the old social order.

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