Pela Grei
Homens Livres was an editorial project created by integralists and democrats that produced two issues in December 1923. The group, understood as “one of the greatest surprises of the ideological and political meanders of the First Republic”, expressed the coupling of António Sérgio’s regenerative and supra-partisan elite fiction with the syncretism of dictatorial solutions that were in vogue.
Linked by the fear of Afonso Costa's salvific return, intellectuals and artists met at the National Library and prepared an independent magazine that would be a regenerative proposal for the country. The context was favoured by the involvement of many of the protagonists in the “Crime” manifesto, in support of maestro Francisco de Lacerda, and in the Seara Nova campaign, launched in March of the same year, revolving around a “national reorganization”. The truth is that the proposal came from António Sérgio and those close to him, and that the rapprochement process with the integralists was his.
Regarding the integralists, there was no naivety or ideological mistake. In the early 1920s, they had proven themselves in their fight against constitutionalism, the republican regime, and liberal democracy. In 1921 and 1922, Raul Proença dedicated a powerful essay to them in Seara Nova. But, on December 5, 1923, António Sérgio justified the unlikely alliance between republicans, monarchist integralists, and libertarians, binding them with the adjectives: “reformers”, “anti-conservatives”, “radicals”, “anti-plutocrats” 1.
Founded during Ginestal Machado's thirty-day government, the magazine did not survive the participation of some seareiros in Álvaro de Castro's government, namely António Sérgio, who headed the Education ministry. And a breath of dictatorship hovered over the project from the beginning: a part of the group longed for a temporary dictatorship to enact urgent reforms, or a national salvation dictatorship led by Norton de Matos, while others feared the risks of a fascist dictatorship.
At the root, they were united by the fight against plutocracy and partisanship, in the words of António Sardinha. In the ideological embrace, the opening text, by António Sérgio, presented the resources of triumphant populism - neither left nor right, and beyond the limitations of the two political camps, in the search for “new politics” and the meeting of “free men”.
Uniting them, in fact, was the crisis of demoliberalism, with the decay of the Republican Party, and the voluntarism of António Sérgio. In effect, the Homens Livres project emerged in the wake of his return from Brazil in 1922, and developed options that had shaped the magazine he directed between March 1918 and May 1919, Pela Grei – a “national resurgence”, sheltered by brief hopes in Sidonism. He then recognized the will to trace diagnoses that led to fundamental reforms, to be placed in the hands of an elite of wise men, immune to the passions of their time.
By proposing to exchange ideology for emergency, they also sought to update the Decadence/Regeneration debate. In fact, this ephemeral project combines two different readings of Decadence and Regeneration: the liberal path, with an Enlightenment heritage, whose beginnings date back to the 18th century, and that would be revised by the cause of the Republic, and the integralist and Maurassian path, of an “updating of tradition” that embodied the Estado Novo. In fact, Homens Livres sought to unite the two divergent lines on Decadence and Regeneration that had been emerging since the end of the 19th century: the nationalist and progressive line of the Republic and the nationalist and traditionalist, authoritarian, and anti-liberal line.
Cecília Honório
“Homens Livres ou a nova falange política”, Diário de Lisboa, 5/12/1923.↩︎
