Moderates and radicals in the I Republic: from conciliation to terror (October 1970-August 1911)

Abstract

To establish the power of the State against the Carbonária Portuguesa, that,  after having a decisive role in the Portuguese republican revolution, wanted to keep its position of supreme guide as to the State authorities and the Portuguese Republican Party, was the only link between the two factions - the «moderate» and the «radical» (jacobine) - that integrated the Provisional Government of the I Republic. But, four months after the revolution, the Carbonária did not exist any more, at least in large urban centers, as a real political power, being replaced, as a popular basis organization, by a Party extension: the batalhões de voluntários (battalions of volunteers). From that moment the conflict between «moderates», that regarded revolution as «a political and economic rise of middle classes», and «radicals», that wanted an egalitarian and «democratic» republic, developed openly. The strategy of the «radicals» (at first in a weeker position), using «anticlericalism» and popular violence, placed the «moderates» in a politically important situation, in the end but, at the same time, prevented the republic's constitutional machine from working under the least satisfactory conditions.