| Summary: | Republic and Republicans did not always mean the same thing, as can be seen in the use of these terms until the nineteenth century. This uncertainty of concepts has been noted in several linguistic and cultural areas. The current concept Republic emerged from deflections and semantic confrontations that can be located between 1750 and 1850. The study of the Portuguese case suggests that the term Republic, used in connection with various forms of government between the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, became, in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the opposite of Monarchy and synonymous of a form of government: the popular government. In the mid-nineteenth century, especially after the 1848 revolutions, the semantic scope of Republic might have been reduced again, tending to no longer designate just a form of government, but a very specific political and social formula: secular democracy, sometimes already socialist. It was in this context, in fact, that Republican came to mean the activist of the political movements that aimed such regimes, while the old term «Repúblico», in the sense of an exemplary citizen, fell into disuse.
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