An Itinerant Liberal: Almeida Garrett’s Exilic Itineraries and the Evolution of His Political Thought

This paper examines the evolution of Portuguese liberal poet and politician Almeida Garrett’s political thought following the overthrow of the short-lived liberal regime in 1823, which forced him into exile—in Britain, France, and the Azores—until 1833-34. It focuses on how his exposure to, and engagement with, different “national” political (and literary) traditions imbued his political thought with new inflections, priorities, tenets, and preoccupations. In London and Paris, he interacted with other exile communities and these interactions shifted his understanding of Portugal’s place in Europe after the independence of Brazil and the prospects of “liberalism in one country”. In particular, the paper will focus on several important texts which reflect his new political sensibility: the newspapers he edited in England in the 1820s, his extended tract Portugal in the Balance of Europe (1829-30), in which he discussed “a system of Southern liberty” (not simply Portuguese or Iberian) for the first time, and, finally, his introduction to the major reform legislation which he co-authored with Mouzinho da Silveira (1832-34). In general terms, the paper seeks to show how Almeida Garrett understood Portuguese liberalism’s prospects in pan-European and Atlantic terms, and how he distinguished between a Mediterranean and Ibero-Atlantic liberalism and a Northern variant. The reforms he proposed in the 1830s reflected the influences assimilated during longs period of exile, cross-fertilized decisively with other national and supra-national experiences, especially those drawn from exiles from other Southern European and Atlantic revolutions in the early 1820s.