Note 132 — Chapter XIX · FREETHOUGHT IN THE REMAINING EUROPEAN STATES

9. Portugal in the same period, despite the anti-clerical policy of the famous Marquis of Pombal, made no noticeable intellectual progress. Though that powerful statesman in 1761 abolished slavery in the kingdom,132 he too failed to see the need for popular education, while promoting that of the upper classes.133 His expulsion of the Jesuits, accordingly, did but raise up against him a new set of enemies in the shape of the Jacobeos, “the Blessed,” a species of Catholic Puritan, who accused him of impiety. His somewhat forensic defence134 leaves the impression that he was in reality a deist; but though he fought the fanatics by imprisoning the Bishop of Coimbra, their leader, and by causing Molière’s Tartufe to be translated and performed, he does not seem to have shown any favour to the deistical literature of which the Bishop had composed a local Index Expurgatorius.135 In Portugal, as later in Spain, accordingly, a complete reaction set in with the death of the enlightened king. Dom Joseph died in 1777, and Pombal was at once disgraced and his enemies released, the pious Queen Maria and her Ministers subjecting him to persecution for some years. In 1783, the Queen, who became a religious maniac, and died insane,136 is found establishing new nunneries, and so adding to one of the main factors in the impoverishment, moral and financial, of Portugal.