Even though not a professional historian, António Sardinha’s work inspired a counter-revolutionary historiographical view which, with a few slight differences mainly in his idea of the “peninsular alliance” and related empirical research, would remain in effect throughout the Estado Novo. He was a poet, pamphleteer, publicist and editor of the most important doctrinal organ (the review, Nação Portuguesa, 1914-1938) of Integralismo Lusitano (Lusitanian Integralism), monarchic radicalism and the anti-modern, anti-republican reaction during the long critical years of the crisis caused by Liberalism and the representative systems it presaged in a certain way after the void of the First World War.

Thus, history and historiography were pretexts for the doctrinal fight and argumentative energy in which António Sardinha opened up and in part explored mythematic surfaces which nationalist historiography, as a rule later aligned by the Estado Novo dictatorship, would cultivate for over half a century. It is therefore in this sense, that of the announcer of a traditionalist and Catholic order which proclaimed the need for a radical revision of history and in the light of its dogmatic interpretation as a nationalist science, that its critical digression is supported by its characteristic historicism and the historiographical conception that structures it.

In line with aesthetic fin-de-siècle currents, notably literary symbolism and psychologism (P. Bourget, the uncommon spread of the Russian novel, G. Le Bon and the Psychologie des Foules [The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind] showing the irrationality of the masses), which in the neurosis of the late 19th century proclaimed the end of rationalism and, arguing for the secularisation of the Republic of Letters, nurtured a nostalgic longing for the divine and for rationalist apostasy and in particular for the historiographical essayism, organicism and decandentist diagnosis of an Oliveira Martins, Sardinha claimed that the original integralist thesis was a kind of pan-psychological view of history (an “internal view”, cf. ‘Questões de História’, Nação Portuguesa, II, n.º 5; 230-40; À sombra dos pórticos, 2ª 1961, 85) as opposed to the materialist and secular spirit of the 19th century, whose hegemonic historiography was, in one reading of it, “entirely perverted by the Jacobin mentality”, redeeming itself in a “party history in which the secular vision of the Patria appears diminished and sullied by the revolutionary preconceptions of a whole century of ruin and death” (Na feira dos mitos, 2ª, 1942; 37).

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