Pela Grei

Pela Grei magazine was published between March 1918 and May 1919, during the double crisis of demoliberalism and war. Contemporaneous with the Sidonist dictatorship, it is a testament to the levels of its mentors’ enthusiasm and disillusionment with the political moment. In fact, the initial adherence to Sidonism was as passionate – grounded on the conviction of the “national resurgence” that would restore the Republic to its true nature – as it was frustrated in the realization of the path towards dictatorship.

Despite being the organ of the Liga de Ação Nacional, a civic league that was unaligned with political parties, Pela Grei does not entirely overlap with it, nor with its protagonists. While the project had limited influence, the project survived the magazine’s short life and the few hundreds of published pages published if we recognize its “rebirth” in Seara Nova. Within the framework of the recurring historical tension between Decadence and Regeneration, the magazine's program is that of “national resurgence” based on the reform of the elites, non-partisanship, and a government of wise men. Consequently, the Nation demanded the formation of a collective opinion that went beyond the “political passions” and vices of the oligarchy, that could create a “national politics”, and the intellectual elite in which the authors place themselves was ready for the mission.

In this context, the policy of promoting economic and political stability is central to the project. In addition to texts focused on topics such as the reform of the elites or the education system, the magazine presents a set of economic proposals owed to Ezequiel de Campos’ ingenuity: from the agrarian revolution to the modernization of industry, the articulation of the internal market, and the tax structure reform.

In the search for a true “national politics”, Pela Grei would choose a third way, that was neither reactionary and Catholic, nor republican and “Jacobin”. Not even the evolution of Sidonism, after the initial contradictory mishmash, could accept it without discomfort, given that its authors do not distance themselves from “true Democracy” and its construction, nor do they align themselves with messianism. They couldn’t also resoundingly reject it, given its traits of nationalism, the rejection of individualistic atomism, the overcoming of the class struggle through solidarity and cooperation, all in the name of a nation that appears very close to the “organic whole”.

Whether one emphasizes aspects of the magazine's connection with the "90s generation" that, without aiming to destroy the liberal state, combined an "unresisting" and ambiguous liberalism with totalitarianism, as Fernando Farelo did in 1981, or whether one underlines its reformist desire and insists on António Sérgio's loyalty to "republican democracy", as João Medina did in 1984, Pela Grei plunged into the despair of war, the country's backwardness, the threat of unsustainable debt, and the imminence of chaos, but with a proposal for "resurgence" that combined reform and reaction.

In this context, it is worth highlighting not only the risks of the ideological fluidity of post-war liberalism in its relations with the extreme right, but also the Dictatorship’s ideological opportunism in the appropriation of commonplaces from the intellectual elite – from the place of the Nation, to the rejection of parties and “political passions”, to cooperation between classes.

Cecília Honório