Les Lumières au Portugal

José Augusto França : The Portuguese enlightenment. This term normally signifies a precise period — the Marquis of Pombal's government (1750-1777) — but one must go back further, to the 1720s, to find symptoms of a rational and empirical mentality, perceptible in courses of «experimental philosophy » and in attacks on baroque forms of behaviour. La Véritable méthode d'étudier (1746) by L.A. Verney, a Portuguese priest of French parents, was the culminating point of this movement. The catastrophe that destroyed Lisbon in 1755 gave Pombal an absolute power that enabled him to establish his «enlightened despotism », in which the reconstruction of the town was to play a historical and symbolical role. The programme of the new Lisbon was both ideal and pragmatic and was the only lasting success of «Pombaline » policies, before the enlightened spirit came to dominate Portuguese social practice among the middle-class «Jacobins» of 1820 and in the republic of 1910.França José-Augusto. Les Lumières au Portugal. In: Dix-huitième Siècle, n°10, 1978. Qu'est-ce que les Lumières ? pp. 167-177