About Vida Nova

Vida Nova

Vida Nova was a Portuguese-language weekly newspaper published in Macau from 1909 to 1910. The Macao Public Library's Senado Library catalogue recorded it as a weekly with holdings of numbers 1 to 52 of 1909 and 54 to 100 of 1910, in three bound volumes. Its brief life straddled the greatest political event in modern Portuguese history: the revolution of 5 October 1910 that destroyed the monarchy and proclaimed the Portuguese Republic. Vida Nova was directed by Luís Gonzaga Nolasco da Silva, the president of Macau's Leal Senado, and it was his paper that gave Macau some of its first printed news of the revolution and his voice that defined one of the two rival republican camps that formed in the territory in the weeks that followed. The paper ceased in 1910, its second year. This profile is written in the past tense.

Identity and the surviving run

The title Vida Nova meant "New Life" in Portuguese — a name that suited a paper whose preserved history is the story of a regime change. It 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. The Senado Library held Vida Nova in three bound volumes, microfilmed on roll 46 of its foreign-language newspaper collection, and catalogued it as a weekly publication of 1909 to 1910. The preserved numbering — numbers 1 to 52 in 1909, a full year of weekly issues, and numbers 54 to 100 in 1910, with only number 53 missing from the shelf — described a regular, established weekly that published about a hundred issues in two years. For most of that short life it was one of a handful of Portuguese papers serving the territory's small Portuguese-speaking community; what lifted it out of bibliographic obscurity was the identity of its director and the accident of its dates, which placed it in Macau, with a printing press and an editor at the centre of power, in the autumn of 1910.

Direction by Luís Gonzaga Nolasco da Silva

Vida Nova was directed by Luís Gonzaga Nolasco da Silva, described by the historian Leonor Diaz de Seabra, in her study of the echoes of the First Portuguese Republic in Macau in the Review of Culture, as an influential Macanese personality: at the moment of the revolution he was president of the Leal Senado, Macau's municipal council and its most venerable Portuguese institution. The conjunction mattered. The director of the weekly was simultaneously the head of the territory's civic government — the man who would preside, six days after the revolution, over the solemn session at which Macau formally recognised the Republic. Vida Nova was therefore not an opposition sheet sniping from outside the administration; it was the paper of a man at the summit of Macau's Portuguese establishment who had decided, in October 1910, to commit himself and his newspaper to the new regime. Scholarship on the period consistently pairs the paper with its director — "Vida Nova, of Luís Nolasco" — in the formula used for the factional press of the time, in which a newspaper and its proprietor were a single political fact.

October 1910: first with the news of the Republic

The revolution of 5 October 1910 happened in Lisbon, and in the colonies it was instituted by telegraph. Macau in fact learned of it first from the press: a Hong Kong newspaper, the Hong Kong Daily Press, reproduced on 6 October a telegram from London headed "The Revolution has broken out in Lisbon," while the official telegram from the Provisional Government's Ministry of the Navy and Colonies, dated 6 October, reached the territory on 7 October. Vida Nova's documented moment came two days later. On 9 October 1910 the paper republished the content of that telegram in a news item entitled "A República em Portugal" — "The Republic in Portugal" — and the comments that its director, Luís Nolasco, attached to the news took, in Seabra's summary, an unequivocal position in favour of the Republic. The article's significant sentence, quoted by the historian, ran: "if the monarchy reveals itself impotent, as it has lately revealed itself, to realise its political-social function, out with it, and let the republic come." A weekly that had begun publication under the monarchy in 1909 thus used its columns, within four days of the news arriving, to pronounce the monarchy's sentence and to welcome its successor.

The recognition of the Republic in Macau

The formal act followed on 11 October 1910, when the Republic was solemnly recognised in Macau at a ceremony in the Leal Senado attended by the governor, Colonel Eduardo Augusto Marques — an avowed monarchist who had intended to resign on hearing of the republican victory and remained only on express orders from Lisbon — together with the Council of Government and of the Province, the members of the Leal Senado, the consular corps, the officers of the military garrison and the senior civil service. Luís Nolasco, Vida Nova's director, presided as president of the Leal Senado and saluted the new regime, declaring that the greatest responsibilities now lay with the new rulers and concluding, in the words preserved by the historians: "We have ceased to be subjects in order to be citizens. That is the great conquest." The republican flag was raised over public buildings and warships, the monarchy's flag lowered, and a twenty-one-gun salute fired from the Fortaleza do Monte, while a municipal police inspector with drummers and an infantry picket read the proclamation in the streets. Vida Nova's director was, literally, the master of ceremonies of the Republic's installation in Macau, and his newspaper was the new order's first printed voice in the territory.

Two rival republican camps: Vida Nova against A Verdade

Unity lasted days. In the weeks after the recognition ceremony there formed spontaneously in Macau two rival republican groups, each organised around its respective newspaper: Vida Nova, of Luís Nolasco, and A Verdade, of Constâncio José da Silva, the veteran journalist whose faction scholarship describes as the more radical. In what Seabra called a forceful war of words, each of the two groups claimed for itself the status of true interpreter of the thought and intentions of the Republic. Outside Macau, the Hong Kong Telegraph threw fuel on the fire, making bitter criticisms of Luís Nolasco's adherence to the new regime, which it called "a usurpation perpetrated by a handful of traitors." The rivalry was more than verbal vanity: the two camps embodied the division of Macau's republican elite between the establishment Macanese of the Leal Senado, grouped around Vida Nova, and the oppositional current around Constâncio José da Silva, court clerk Damião Rodrigues and the proprietor Fernando Celle de Meneses — a division that persisted through the First Republic and structured the territory's politics long after Vida Nova itself had ceased publication.

The religious question and the tensions of November 1910

The new regime's legislation soon tested the two camps. Lisbon's decree of 8 October 1910 on religious questions — the anticlerical settlement that expelled the Jesuits and extinguished the religious congregations — was officially published in Macau only on 19 November, and its application deepened the differences of opinion in the territory. In the Leal Senado, Nolasco's faction carried the question into debate: it agreed with the expulsion of the Jesuits and the Salesians but defended the permanence of the Franciscan and Canossian sisters, judging that the departure of those religious would cause grave consequences for education and charitable assistance in Macau, and a proposal was approved to ask Lisbon to postpone the sisters' expulsion — against the opposed vote of Constâncio José da Silva, Vida Nova's rival, himself then a councillor of the Leal Senado. Social tension rose through the same weeks: on 29 November 1910 units of the Macau garrison, principally sailors of the gunboat Pátria with soldiers and police, marched on the governor's palace with demands that included higher pay, the revaluation of the pataca and the repudiation of the religious orders resident in Macau. Vida Nova's last preserved issues appeared in the middle of this crisis of the Republic's first Macau autumn — the paper had announced the new regime, and its final numbers coincided with the regime's first local convulsions.

The end of the run in 1910

Vida Nova's preserved numbering ends at number 100 of 1910, and the Senado catalogue closes the title at that year. No source consulted records why the paper stopped: whether its director, absorbed in the presidency of the Leal Senado and the leadership of his faction, let it lapse; whether the factional struggle that it had helped to open made a single establishment weekly untenable; or whether money or printers failed it, as they failed so many Macau weeklies. What the record shows is the shape of the whole: a weekly founded in 1909 under the monarchy, which in October 1910 became for a few weeks the most consequential newspaper in Macau — the printed organ of the man who proclaimed the Republic in the territory — and which did not survive into the Republic's first full year. Its rival A Verdade, and the factional system the two papers embodied, lived on without it.

Preservation and record

The documentary record of Vida Nova rests on the Senado Library of the Macao Public Library, which preserved its hundred issues in three bound volumes on microfilm roll 46, as one of the 101 foreign-language newspapers in its collection, 86 of them Portuguese; and on modern historiography of the First Republic in Macau, above all Leonor Diaz de Seabra's study in the Review of Culture (issue 42, 2013), which quoted the paper's 9 October 1910 article and reconstructed its director's role in the recognition of the Republic, and Joaquim Grave dos Santos's study of Macau Freemasonry, which confirmed the two-camp structure organised around Vida Nova and A Verdade. Between the catalogue and the historians, the paper's outline — dates, frequency, director, doctrine and moment — is unusually complete for a two-year weekly. No website or continuing publication exists for the title.

Assessment

Vida Nova's historical weight is out of all proportion to its hundred issues. Most small colonial weeklies are names in a catalogue; Vida Nova is documented at the centre of the founding event of modern Macau politics, the arrival of the Portuguese Republic in October 1910. It carried the news of the revolution to Macau's readers with its director's unqualified endorsement, its director presided over the ceremony that installed the new regime, and it gave its name to one of the two factions around which Macau's republican politics organised themselves for a generation. As the printed voice of Luís Gonzaga Nolasco da Silva at the moment he told the Macanese that they had "ceased to be subjects in order to be citizens," Vida Nova remains a primary document of 1910 in Asia.