Norton de Matos, the improbable republican: Portugal and the Empire from Afonso Costa to Salazar.

This thesis examines the political role of Norton de Matos (1867-1955) in the context of the Republican constellation in Portugal between 1910 and 1955. As well as focusing on Norton's role in politics - even when he assumed colonial positions -, this study privileges his contemporaneous writings rather than the many retrospective analyses, and compares his voice with that of many others in Portugal and the Empire, and elsewhere. We have tried to understand how a liberal like Norton de Matos, coming from a monarchist background, used his colonial credentials to enter Republican politics, taking up the issue of "cocoa slavery" and joining the Portuguese Anti- Slavery Society. Moving close to Bernardino Machado, the "Young Turks", the masonry, and the "Democratic" faction of the Portuguese Republican Party led by Afonso Costa, he gained the position of Governor-General of Angola. He brought to the Africans -whose legal definition as "indigenous" he pioneered in 1913 - freedom of labour and lay education despite compromising with mission schools and forced labour. His political stamina became evident in his handling of the tensions between colonial and metropolitan elites, and was further enhanced when he returned to Portugal as Minister of War. We discuss, in particular, the political significance of his most ambitious project, to turn tens of thousands of Portuguese - poor, illiterate, and coming from rural areas with few Republican sympathies - into citizens and soldiers of the Republic. This undertaking, which enabled the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps to fight in France alongside the British, embodied all the audacity and the problems inherent in his megalomania. On his return to the capital, in the summer of 1917, after difficult negotiations with Lloyd George, his prestige made him a serious contender to Afonso Costa, even though he shared with him the burden of the unpopularity of the war. During the Sidónio Pais dictatorship they both went into exile, but they would meet again at the peace conference in Versailles. Unlike Afonso Costa, though, who never returned to active politics, Norton de Matos would serve as the post-war Republic's most notable and controversial High Commissioner, in Angola. After the fall of the First Republic, and two further periods of exile, Norton de Matos made the necessary compromises to return to Portugal, where he combatted the Military Dictatorship and Salazar's New State. When, in 1931, he was able to unite the opposition around the Republican-Socialist Alliance, he put himself forward as a paradigm of the First Republic; it was with this status that he joined the anti-fascist fronts of the 1940s, which culminated in his candidacy for President of the Republic, in 1948/49. The way in which he was able to build bridges between different generations of the opposition, while simultaneously resisting the pressure to break with the communists at the height of the cold war, was a sign of his political talent, the analysis of which can help to enrich the debate over the plural and multipolar reality that was Republicanism in the first half of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]