Laicization and religious question in Portugal (1865-1911)

Abstract

The religious question is one of the nodal points in which the contradictions that originated the society emerging from the slow destruction of the «Ancien Regime» in Portugal are more accentuated. The author analyses how the laical militancy in the last decades of the 19^th century and the early 20^th century has regarded the religious question. He starts showing how the traditonal political anti-clericalism has been absorbed by a strategy that culminated in the laicization laws of the República; then, he analyses the secularization of symbolic practices. The laical project aimed at transforming, in an organised way, both the social institutions and the collective conscience, which required the dechristianization of ideas and behaviours, as well as the socialization of either a new moral and a new politico-social symbolics.