From Revolution to “Vintismo”. Political economy and heritage language among the Portuguese émigrés in Paris
Following the Setembrizada (10th-13th September 1810), a large community of Portuguese liberals followed the retreat of the Napoleonic army until Paris, where most of them settled for various decades. As engaged observers, they experienced the final breakdown of the Empire, the Restoration, the 1820s liberal upheavals in Spain and Portugal (the so-called Vintismo) and the ensuing repression. Among them, a group of intellectuals led by Francisco Solano Constâncio, José da Fonseca, Ignácio Roquete, the poet Francisco Manuel do Nascimento, and the publisher Jean- Pierre Aillaud, took a series of initiatives to spread information and promote public discussion about European politics, acting as mediators between France, Europe, the Portuguese diaspora and their homeland. Translation was the main tool they employed to circulate the ideals of liberal constitutionalism, mutual education, laissez-faire, agricultural and manufacturing improvement through the spread and application of scientific and technological innovations. Constâ ncio is famous for translating into French the works of Ricardo, Malthus and Godwin. But, through the journals he contributed to found and manage (O Observador Lusitano em Paris, the Anais das Ciências, das Artes e das Letras, and O Contemporâneo), he offered to a Portuguese readership reviews and large excerpts of these and other economic works, as well as of treatises of agriculture and statistical studies. On the other hand, these intellectuals professionally engaged themselves in the production of scholarly and practical grammars, monumental and concise bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, conversations guides, anthologies of Portuguese literature and multilingual editions of European classics like Les Aventures de Télémaque and Lazarillo de Tormes, traditionally used as tools for language teaching. The paper offers a comprehensive interpretation of the connection among these initiatives.
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Keywords: Portuguese economic thought, translation, linguistics, constitutionalism
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