How Salazarism was the political face of the social hierarchy

The first question that is asked in relation to the Salazar dictatorship has to do with its long duration. Salazar was head of government for 36 years. Today, in a democracy, it is something unimaginable. It is as if, in 2012, Mário Soares had been prime minister without interruption since 1976. Obviously, the first explanation lies in the dictatorship. Other autocrats, by the way, achieved long periods of power in the 20th century: in Spain, General Francisco Franco headed the government for 39 years, between 1936 and 1975; In Cuba, the communist dictator Fidel Castro remained in power for almost fifty years, between 1959 and 2008, leaving it only to be succeeded dynastically by his younger brother.

The compression of public life, through press censorship and the prohibition of any opposition, facilitated these long political domains. But repression was not always enough to maintain dictatorships. It was seen, for example, in Eastern Europe in 1989 or during the Arab “Spring” in 2011: in both cases, dictatorships much more brutal than Salazar’s fell in the face of changes in international relations, economic difficulties and large popular demonstrations. Therefore, it is necessary to examine another aspect of the Salazar dictatorship: its relationship with Portuguese society.

Salazarism was always based on the dictatorship. This dictatorship sometimes seemed “moderate”, because, as Manuel de Lucena explained, it was thoroughly “preventive”. The Estado Novo was, as Salazar liked to say, a regime “strong” enough not to need to be violent. Everyone in Portugal was at the mercy of power. In a small and poor country, with a centralized and dirigiste State and a weak civil society, it was not difficult to promote respect for the “established powers” ​​without great repressive expenses. Especially since Salazar did not intend to found, like other dictators, a new society, without social classes or racially pure.

Salazar was thus able to take advantage of the traditional disciplinary effect of the Church, the State and the established hierarchies, which the political repression respected. As a PIDE inspector, who also served in the GNR, recalled, the main abuses he witnessed did not occur in the PIDE, but in rural GNR posts. The worst violence fell not on law students for political reasons, but, as in other Portuguese regimes, before and after the Estado Novo, on the poor.

Many people contributed, regardless of their ideological preferences. It is true that the regime’s decision to maintain itself by force made it the only path for those who wanted to exert influence or pursue a career, be it in politics, administration, the judiciary or the armed forces. But with Spain’s civil war (1936-1939) at hand, and then World War II (1939-1945) across the continent, Salazar seemed to many people, including among the leftist opposition, preferable to other alternatives.

In 1940, with France defeated, England isolated, and the Soviet Union collaborating with Hitler, some of the former left-wing Republicans even proposed a pact to Salazar. Even the communist militants detained in the “penal colony” of Tarrafal, in Cape Verde, the same thing happened to them. In 1945-1949, the number of opposition militants removed from university chairs, revealing the intolerance of those postwar years, also shows the accommodations that had been possible in previous years.

Not by chance, the Estado Novo provided staff to all the parties of the new democracy from 1974. Until the V Provisional Government of Vasco Gonçalves, in August 1975, it had the right to a representative of the Estado Novo, in the person of Professor José Joaquim Teixeira Ribeiro, deputy prime minister and former Salazar corporatism theorist. Salazar was not ignorant of the political preferences of the people around him. About Minister Duarte Pacheco, he commented to Franco Nogueira in the 1960s: “A lot of left, but since he had a lot of ambition for power, he adapted easily.” All this allowed Marcello Caetano, when it suited him in the 1950s, to insist on the idea of ​​the heterogeneity of the “political currents” within the Estado Novo: there would be everything in the regime: “liberals” and “nationalists”, “ republicans” and “monarchists”, all housed under a Salazarist leadership characterized by “eclecticism and empiricism” (in his correspondence, Salazar also uses “eclecticism” to define the regime).

Today, for those who live in a democracy, the Salazar dictatorship may seem monstrous. But Salazarismo managed to appear, at various times, simply as the organization of the Portuguese social and intellectual elites –based on an autocratic and centralized administration, backed by the Catholic Church and the Armed Forces, and on the political subordination of the population, already practiced by all previous regimes.- to manage and develop the country.

The dictatorship intended and could resemble a regime of notables, where power belonged to the most educated and from a good family, and corresponded to the hierarchy of technical merit and social prestige, in a system in which they co-opted each other. The National Union served to keep up to date the lists of notables destined to occupy the immense government positions in the administration (mayors, parish councils), in the justice system and in the business fabric (Grémios, Casas do Povo, etc.).

Before the ruling class, there was a society that was not yet industrialized and had little schooling, highly segmented between regions and between activities, where only the middle classes were more or less unified by education, and where the Catholic Church was the only organization of masses. . In 1960 manual workers still made up 71.2% of the active population (agricultural workers were 41.1% and industrial workers 31.3%). The upper middle class represented 11.4% and the lower middle class 15.5%. It was in these middle classes where the elite of Salazarismo was recruited.

Salazar could thus hope that it would not be seen in Portugal, as “in other countries” it was “obvious”, a “separation between the ruling class and society in general”. In other words, the political elite of the dictatorship was also the social elite of the country. During the First Republic, this was not clear. It is true that the leaders of the Portuguese Republican Party (PRP) also came from the middle classes and had the academic credentials that had become requisites for political power. But their hostility to Catholicism, in a Catholic country, and the refusal of “good society” to recognize any authority in them, had made them strange.

Unlike the PRP leaders, the Salazaristas managed for a long time to make their power appear simply as the political face of the social hierarchy. For this reason, the attitude of the majority of the population was, as perhaps expected, less of resistance and more of “clientization”: towards those whom they were accustomed to seeing as their natural superiors – because of their heritage and genealogies, because of their qualifications. academic and intellectual resources, or because of the positions they held in institutions, tried to establish contacts and exploit relationships to obtain protection and obtain favors. Even the political police, as historian Duncan Simpson has recently suggested, did this.

In the last edition of the program And the rest is history, I spoke with João Miguel Tavares about the man who saved the most lives in all of history, thanks to the invention of vaccines: Louis Pasteur. Listen to the podcast here.

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rui ramos historian, university professor, co-author of the podcast E o Resto é História [ver o perfil completo].