Fontes Pereira de Melo, a politician

Abstract

To the majority of Portuguese people, Fontes Pereira de Melo was a politician who gave rise to a period, the period of fontismo, which was characterised by politics centred around the «demagogy» of public works and the «corruption» of elections. This image, created to a great extent by the generation of 1870, has managed to survive almost intact to the present day. But this group was not made up of a nucleus of sociologists who were able to coldly analyse a distant era. The work has to be considered in its context. It is true that the elections were organised in a peculiar way; it is true that the politicians were ridiculous; it is true that the official public speeches were grotesque; it is true that there was misery, illiteracy, oppression in the country; it is true that Fontes was arrogant. For the great majority of people, however, the memory of what had happened during the first half of the century was still recent enough for them to feel grateful for the Regeneration movement. Fontes dreamt of governing a rich and liberal country. From an economic point of view, the impediments to this were colossal. Politically speaking, the hurdles were no smaller. According to the principles, the king was supposed to reign only. In view of the absence of a political mechanism that guaranteed alternation of government, it was in fact he who chose the governments. The elections were supposed to be the key to the regime. But in a poor country the voters were pressionable. The hereditary peerage was essential in a liberal monarchy. But in Portugal the landed nobility had ceased to exist. Without electorate, without nobility, without parties, the regime had to function in the peculiar way in which it did.