Diário de Lisboa
- Gomes da Costa
The reviewed opening of “Gomes da Costa” welcomes the general’s elevation to marshal-general as an act of justice with historical resonance. It dismisses anxieties associated with the current political moment. This is the newspaper’s evaluative introduction; the rest of the article and the portrait caption are outside this partial reading.
Partial reading: the principal heading and its opening paragraph only; the subsequent argument and portrait caption are not transcribed.
Translation
Gomes da Costa
The elevation of General Gomes da Costa to marshal-general of the Army is a political event that deserves separate notice, both for the sense of justice it signifies and for the historical recollections it occasions, setting aside all the anxieties that the frenzy of the present hour might arouse in minds of feeble reflective power.
Context
A coup leader removed from power
Gomes da Costa helped lead the May 1926 military coup and headed the government from June 17 to July 9. His removal that summer makes the later honour politically striking: military prestige and possession of executive power had become separate things.
An honour grounded in military service
The formal promotion decree, dated September 30, cited extraordinary service in Africa and France. The September 25 newspaper thus discusses the promotion before that surviving decree, framing recognition of the general through his longer military career.
Separating historical recognition from current conflict
The writer explicitly asks readers to put present political anxieties aside. That is the argument’s central move: judging the honour as justice to a soldier while dismissing objections associated with the immediate struggle for power.
Original
Gomes da Costa
Gomes da Costa
A elevação do sr. general Gomes da Costa a marechal-general do Exercito, é um acontecimento politico dos que têm de registar-se áparte, não só pelo criterio de justiça que significa, mas ainda pelas evocações historicas a que dá ensejo, postas de banda todas as preocupações que o desvairio da hora decorrente determinaria, em espiritos de flebil potencia congeminadora.