A língua portuguesa ao serviço da missão: a proposta da sociedade de geografia de Lisboa para uma missionação luso-brasileira

By the end of 1919, the Lisbon Geographical Society presented a long report with several proposals for the colonies, including some measures related to the religious missions. The report addressed the idea of a Luso-Brazilian mission that could develop the bonds among the Portuguese-speaking peoples in Portugal, Brazil and the Oriental Patronage. It should promote the Portuguese civilization through its common sense of belonging to the Catholic religion and to the Portuguese language and history. This text resumes that report and seeks to understand to what extent the Geographical Society tried to use the Portuguese language and historical past in order to promote a civilising mission project that implicated the transmission of a set of historical, social, and cultural values, within the context of new international dynamics for colonial development and of imperial strategies' reforms in the aftermath of the First World War.