About O Liberal

O Liberal

O Liberal was a Portuguese-language weekly newspaper published in Macau from 1919 to 1924. The Macao Public Library's Senado Library catalogue recorded it as a weekly whose preserved run reached number 199 of 1924, held in five bound volumes. A standard Portuguese cultural history of Macau described it as an "independent republican weekly," and modern scholarship on Macau's republican movement has established the two men who ran it: it was directed by Constâncio José da Silva, the veteran Macanese journalist who had been publishing newspapers since the nineteenth century, and its secretary was Domingos Gregório da Rosa Duque, the republican soldier-journalist who went on to found O Combate in 1923. O Liberal belonged to the cluster of Portuguese political weeklies that appeared in Macau in the unsettled years after the First World War, in the last phase of Portugal's First Republic. It ceased in 1924, and this profile is written in the past tense.

Identity and character

The title O Liberal meant "The Liberal" in Portuguese. The paper was published in Macau, the territory on the western side of the Pearl River Delta that Portugal administered until December 1999, when it became a Special Administrative Region of China. Its character was fixed in a single phrase by the Biblioteca Breve cultural history A Influência da Cultura Portuguesa em Macau, published by Portugal's Ministry of Education in 1984, which, surveying the territory's twentieth-century press, listed "«O Liberal» (1919–1924), semanário republicano independente" — an independent republican weekly — in the sequence of the era's notable titles, between the religious paper Religião e Pátria, begun in 1914, and A Pátria. The description mattered: in the Macau of 1919, to be a republican paper was to take a side in the still-unsettled order created by the Portuguese revolution of 5 October 1910, and to be an independent one was to claim freedom from the two organised republican factions whose rivalry had structured the territory's politics since 1910.

Founding in 1919 and the direction of Constâncio José da Silva

O Liberal was founded in 1919. The date is given both by the Senado catalogue, whose holdings begin in that year, and by modern scholarship: Joaquim Grave dos Santos, in his study of the presence of the Grand Orient Lusitanien Uni — Portugal's principal masonic obedience — in Macau between 1906 and 1930, published in the Chroniques d'histoire maçonnique in 2022, recorded that O Liberal was "founded in 1919 and directed by Constâncio José da Silva." The founding came at a charged moment. Portugal's First Republic was entering its most unstable years, shaken by the Sidónio Pais dictatorship of 1917–1918, the monarchist rising of 1919 in the north of Portugal, and chronic ministerial collapse; in Macau, the republican elite organised around the masonic lodge Luís de Camões and the Leal Senado was the territory's political class in waiting and in office by turns. A new republican weekly, directed by the most experienced journalist in the territory, was a factional instrument as much as a news organ — the standard form of political action in the Macau of the period.

Rosa Duque, the paper's secretary

O Liberal's secretary — in the usage of the Portuguese press of the time, the officer who ran the paper's office and much of its production — was Domingos Gregório da Rosa Duque. Grave dos Santos's study reconstructed his remarkable career. Rosa Duque had fought as a sergeant on the barricades of the Rotunda in Lisbon during the republican revolution of 5 October 1910. He was subsequently deported to Angola, and then to Macau, where he was reinstated in the army with the rank of captain. In Macau he was initiated in 1916 into the masonic lodge Luís de Camões nº 383, taking the symbolic name Sócrates. The study described him as one of the great figures of the republican press in Macau: first as secretary of O Liberal under Constâncio José da Silva, and then, in 1923, as founder of his own republican weekly, O Combate, of which he was editor-in-chief and director. O Liberal was thus the apprenticeship and the platform from which one of Macau's most combative journalists launched himself — a paper whose office connected the nineteenth-century veteran who directed it with the twentieth-century militant who kept its books.

The surviving run, 1919 to 1924

The Senado Library held O Liberal in five bound volumes, microfilmed on rolls 47 to 49, and catalogued it as a weekly. The preserved numbering ran: numbers 1 to 35 in 1919; numbers 36 to 52 and a restarted 1 to 35 across 1920; numbers 36 to 52 and 1 to 36 across 1921; numbers 1 to 96 in 1922; numbers 97 to 196 in 1923; and numbers 197 to 199 in 1924. The pattern is informative. In its first three years the paper's numbering is consistent with a weekly appearing about fifty times a year, with the count restarting awkwardly between volumes. In 1922 and 1923, however, the preserved numbering reached 96 and then a further hundred issues — roughly double the earlier rhythm — indicating that in those years the paper appeared markedly more often than once a week, whatever its formal catalogue description, before the run ended abruptly at number 199 in 1924. A total approaching two hundred numbered issues in the library's keeping, across five volumes, made O Liberal one of the substantial political weeklies of post-war Macau.

Macau's republican press milieu

O Liberal appeared in a territory whose Portuguese public life was organised around a handful of institutions and two rival camps. Since October 1910, when the Republic had been formally recognised in Macau at a ceremony in the Leal Senado, two republican groups had faced each other, each organised around a newspaper: Vida Nova, directed by Luís Gonzaga Nolasco da Silva, president of the Leal Senado, and A Verdade, belonging to Constâncio José da Silva. Scholarship on the period describes the more radical opposition faction as gathered around the lawyer and journalist Constâncio José da Silva, the court clerk Damião Rodrigues and the official and proprietor Fernando Celle de Meneses, while the more conservative republicans grouped around other figures of the same small elite — an elite in which the masonic lodge Luís de Camões, successively numbered 309 and 383, served as a place of aggregation for Macanese natives and expatriate officials and officers alike. Political newspapers were the weapons of these factions. O Liberal, founded in 1919 by the director of the older factional paper A Verdade, was a late product of that system: by 1919 the factions of 1910 had aged, new men such as Rosa Duque were rising through the lodge and the press, and an "independent" republican weekly was a claim to stand within the republican camp but outside its inherited quarrels.

Constâncio José da Silva: a career across five decades

The director of O Liberal was, by 1919, already a figure of Macau press history. The National Library of Portugal's record names Constâncio J. da Silva as the publisher of O Independente, the political, news and commercial newspaper that had served Macau since the late 1860s. In October 1910 it was his paper, A Verdade, that covered the proclamation of the Republic in Macau in a festive tone, and in mid-December 1910, as the historian Leonor Diaz de Seabra recorded, he published an article asserting his newspaper as the only one defending the Republic while contesting the political, military and governing powers in Macau, in language that contemporaries accused of being insulting and radical. He sat as a councillor of the Leal Senado, where in the debates over the Republic's religious decrees he voted against his rivals' proposal to ask Lisbon to postpone the expulsion of the Franciscan and Canossian sisters. That the same man was still founding and directing a new weekly in 1919, with the young Rosa Duque as his secretary, made O Liberal a bridge between two generations of Macau republicanism: the generation that had made its name in the polemics of the monarchy's last decades, and the generation that would fight the dictatorship of the 1920s.

The end in 1924

O Liberal's preserved run ended at number 199 in 1924. No account of its closure survives in the consulted record, but its end fell in the terminal crisis of the Portuguese First Republic: two years later, the military coup of 28 May 1926 destroyed the Republic and installed the dictatorship that became the Estado Novo, under which Macau's opposition press was tamed and censorship institutionalised. O Liberal's own secretary had already read the moment: Rosa Duque left the paper's orbit to found O Combate in 1923, and it was in O Combate, not O Liberal, that the republican cause in Macau made its last defiant gestures of the decade. O Liberal thus closed, quietly, at the end of the political world that had created it — the world of factional republican weeklies arguing over a republic that had less than two years to live.

Preservation and record

The documentary record of O Liberal rests on the Senado Library catalogue, which preserved its run in five bound volumes on microfilm rolls 47 to 49 as one of the 101 foreign-language newspapers in the collection, 86 of them Portuguese; on the Biblioteca Breve cultural history of Portuguese influence in Macau, which fixed its dates and its character as an independent republican weekly; and on modern masonic and republican historiography, above all Grave dos Santos's study of the Grand Orient Lusitanien Uni in Macau, which established its founding in 1919, its direction by Constâncio José da Silva and its secretaryship of Rosa Duque. Together those sources rescue the paper from the catalogue anonymity that covers most of Macau's small political weeklies. No website or continuing publication exists for the title.

Assessment

O Liberal was the last newspaper of one Macau press generation and the first platform of another. Directed by Constâncio José da Silva, whose career reached back to the nineteenth-century O Independente, and staffed by Domingos Gregório da Rosa Duque, who within four years founded O Combate and became the defining republican journalist of 1920s Macau, the independent republican weekly published through the First Republic's final crisis and left a preserved run of some two hundred issues in the Senado Library. Its history, recoverable from the catalogue, the cultural histories and the scholarship of Macau republicanism, makes it a documented link in the chain of the territory's political press between the revolution of 1910 and the dictatorship of 1926.