Acceso usuarios
Coimbra (Sé Nova), Portugal
In this article Maria Manuela Tavares Ribciro analyses how the Portuguese Republicans of the later nineteenth century drew inspiration from the ideas and the symbols of the Revolution of 1820 in Portugal. The subsequent liberal regimes located sovereignty in the Nation, which they distinguished from the People, who only shared in the exercise of sovereignty through voting. The will of the Nation was expressed through the elected deputies and was distinct from the will of the People and superior to it. Against this the Republicans set the revolutionary concept of the ‘Patrie’, distinct from the Nation and the direct embodiment of the collective will of the People. It was by drawing on the revolutionary concepts and symbolism of the 1820s that the late nineteenth-century Republicans articulated their claim that by setting up a republic, the People would re-invigorate the moribund liberal Nation by their direct, collective action and fashion a new and better Nation in its place.
