Libertarian Heterodoxy

This monthly magazine, published in Lisbon between February 1916 and July 1917, was the work of a small group of people committed to libertarian propaganda, notably Emílio Costa, Adolfo Lima, Severino de Carvalho, and later César Porto. It stood out for its heterodoxy with regard to the majority of the contemporary Portuguese libertarian movement, taking up positions of great independence in the crucial matter of the Great War.

While most argued for intransigent neutrality, facing the transformation of war among States into social revolution, Germinal’s editorial group, owned by the Grupo de Estudos Sociais Germinal cultural association, that promoted popular courses in class associations, defended ‘interventionism’ on the side of France and England against the central empires. The magazine, subtitled ‘monthly publication dedicated to workers’, provided continuity to a newspaper of the same name and owned by the same group, where the confrontation between ‘guerristas’ and ‘non-guerristas’ had already been felt. Notwithstanding, the polemic reached its full intensity in the new periodical, after the translation and publication in issue nr. 3 of the so-called ‘Manifesto of the Sixteen’ – an interventionist declaration signed by 16 internationally renowned libertarians, including Kropotkin, Cornelissen, Jean Grave, and Charles Malato, that had just been published in the Parisian La Bataille newspaper (14/04/1916). The problem of war was thus a constant throughout most of the periodical, and in every issue we find either open polemics, generally debating with the A Aurora newspaper, from Porto, even when the title and the opponent’s names – generally referred to as ‘the majority’ – aren’t explicitly mentioned (particularly Neno Vasco and Manuel Joaquim de Sousa) or covert allusions on the subject.

In any case, the more than five hundred published pages cannot be summarized with that one matter; in a certain way, it is of secondary importance if we consider the incredibly vast area of interests covered by the magazine, highly focusing on topics of pedagogy and teaching, that can be contextualized in the framework of reformation of mentalities that had originated in the 18th century, but also dealing with the illustration and propaganda of libertarian ideas, from a gradualist perspective. The work of the Germinal group seems to have echoed later, in a very different context, with the editorial group of the magazine A Ideia, founded in Paris in 1974, and especially João Freire, who even acknowledged the continuity between both publications (A Ideia, nr. 49, Out. 1988, p. 62).

António Cândido Franco