Politics and parties between 1851 and 1861

Abstract

In this summary of the course of party politics in the first years of the Regeneration, the author starts from the assumption that the Saldanha's April 1851 proclamation was an important landmark for Portugal's political development in the nineteenth century. The 1850s can be analysed as years with a particular historical character - a decade with its own identity. This derived from the political development of the Portuguese party system, which during these years featured centrist, centripetal pressures. Consensus was ubiquitous, the establishment's proposals enjoyed a fundamental unity, and the bloco central (political centre) was a recurring attraction - a conciliatory entity that was ideally non-party, but was more advocated in theory than actually put into practice. Two summaries precede the synopsis of the party political process from 1851 to 1861. In an introduction, the author provides an overview of Portuguese politics in the years before the Regeneration (1834-1851), and summarises the reasons for Oliveira Martins' famous metaphor for those founding years of liberalism, «reinado da frase e do tiro» (roughly, «reign of expression and firing»). The second summary provides context by listing schematically the components that defined the Regeneration's new operational model; some of these were bases of the political culture, and others concerned the elimination of some practices that had previously prevented the liberal political machine from working well. The main part of the article is in the form of a historical narrative, and describes party political developments during the years 1851-1861. It is divided into eight points, which correspond to sub-periods. Lastly, as justification for the relevance of the chronology used an epilogue that is more experimental than conclusive sketches the new party political alignments of the 1860s, in the light of the events of 1861. These introduce new problems for historical study of the nineteenth century Regeneration. They mark the end of a cycle - the almost uncontested prevalence of the centripetal political dynamic that has rightly been identified as characteristic of the 1850s, the founding phase of the regenerator period.