The political party life in the early years of Regeneration

Abstract

This article sets out to investigate the history of the political «parties» of the monarchical constitutionalist period in Portugal. Divided into two parts, the text begins by drawing a generic portrait of the Portuguese political party reality during the Regeneration era, establishing an inventory of the principal traits of the so-called «parties of notables»: priority focused on the electoral and parliamentary struggle, and not on mediation between the society as a whole and the sphere of government; rudimentary and informal internal organisation in general; fluidity of the party programme contents; delicate internal discipline and unity; commitment to a personalised and closed system of political agents, with the aim of self-preservation of a limited elite of notables in the likewise restricted circle of power. Subsequently, once this generic context that covers the whole Regeneration period has been outlined, the article goes on to provide some indications as to the identifiable specificities of political party life in the early years of Regeneration (which correspond roughly to the 1850s), juxtaposing them with the innovations that the crystallisation of the alternation model was to introduce, albeit with limitations, from the 1870s onwards. The research centred on the reconstitution of the organisational and programmatic history of the «partialities» that occupied the Portuguese political scene in the early years of Regeneration: the so-called «national party», progressive and anti-Cabral, the «historical progressive dissidence» (rebaptised the Historical Party after the clarification of the political party system of the summer of 1856), the «progressive regenerators» (known as the Regenerator Party from 1856 onwards), the Cartista Party (internally divided between the «cabralista» and the «avilista» factions and the adventurism of José Bernardo da Silva Cabral) and, finally, the Legitimist Party, which actively took part in the elections of the second half of the 1850s. The second part of the text also establishes a picture of the moire significant party press organs in the 1850s in attempt to identify the connection between the political partiality of each of the principal organs of written opinion that were published at the time. In closing, the article makes reference to the signs which chronologically demarcate the Regeneration period from the 1870s onwards, in that they were landmarks in the evolution of the monarchical parties towards greater organisational consistency and stability, paying particular attention to the novelties introduced by the Progressive Party, founded in 1876, and the incidence that the establishment of a system of alternation had in the better organisation of the parliamentary parties.