The celebrations evoked a Romanticised Camões as "a symbol of all the aspirations of the Portuguese nation, its glories and tragedies" (in the words of Teófilo Braga), a paradigm of the "heroic age" of the nation that had since fallen into insurmountable social, political, and financial instability; at the same time, the celebrations were highly politicised by the Republican cause, then highly in vogue amongst the country's intellectuals.