The Political History of Twentieth-Century Portugal

The political history of nineteenth-century Portugal was, for a long time, a neglected subject. Under Salazar's New State it was passed over in favour of earlier periods from which that nationalist regime sought to draw inspiration; subsequent historians preferred to concentrate on social and economic developments to the detriment of the difficult evolution of Portuguese liberalism. This picture is changing, thanks to an awakening of interest in both contemporary topics and political history (although there is no consensus when it comes to defining political history). The aim of this article is to summarise these recent developments in Portuguese historiography for the benefit of an English-language audience.

2012

To better understand the contemporary age, it has been necessary to study the relation between memory, national identity and political culture. On this field several studies have been produced that focus on the forms that the memory of the past ages has taken on the contemporary age. This thesis will study the representations of medievality that have been built in Portugal by the speeches and actions of contemporary agents. Major attention will be given to the national histories produced by historiographic and political speeches and to the development of memory and heritage politics by State agents. Although the mains focus of the thesis will be the 1930s and the 1940s, it will narrate several aspects of previous and later periods.

History Compass, 2012

This article aims to make a critical assessment and periodization of the studies undertaken in the field of the history of historiography in Portugal, taking into account the aims and concepts used by historians since the 19th century, and to suggest new lines of research. Up to the middle of the 20th century this was a quite marginal area of historical studies in Portugal. However, accounts of historians, and of their work, have always aroused interest. What guiding principles can we find in their self-reflexive exercises? What concepts do they employ? Work within the field has been constantly evolving (often under French influence), from fragmentary interpretations of historical thought to more recent prosopographical research and perspectives on national memory, not forgetting the institutions to which these historians were attached. But in contrast to other areas of historical studies, there were no great debates. While there were Portuguese historians gifted with a sharp critical sense, they rarely entered into polemics with their colleagues. How can we explain this absence of public debate? It can be argued that it is due to the small number of 'institutional' historians, and their connections with institutions and networks that were more or less closed.

This course offers an introductory survey to the history of the Portuguese world since the Roman occupation of the Iberian Peninsula to the revolution of 1974. Students will be taken into a voyage in time exploring topics such as the foundation of the Kingdom of Portugal in 1143, the building of the first global empire, and ensuing colonization and decolonization, and lastly the changes of regime that led to the Portuguese revolution of 1974. By the end of this course, students will be familiar with the history of the Portuguese world, and in particular how a small European kingdom became one of the most important European Empires, reaching a global scale, and playing a fundamental role in the broader context of world history. Then they will become acquainted with the difficulties experienced by European empires in the 19 th century leading to the process of decolonization and formation of new states in Africa and South America. In addition, by studying Portuguese history, students will also become familiarized with 20 th-century European history, in particular with forms of nationalism, republicanism, dictatorship, and fascism experienced during the period.

2020

Portugal in the 21st Century provides a thorough yet accessible picture of contemporary Portugal in the first two decades of the 21st century. It examines and elucidates Portugal's recent trajectory, its current position, and the main challenges it faces through an examination of the principal dimensions of cultural, economic, political, and social development in the country. Bringing together some of the foremost Portuguese experts in each of these areas, it draws on a diverse knowledge across the social sciences and humanities-including anthropologists, art historians, economists, historians, legal scholars, literary scholars, political scientists, biologists, and sociologists-to create a multidimensional portrait of contemporary Portuguese society. Key features: • Organised into nine substantive chapters-each of which covers a major area of Portugal's contemporary existence-from its national identity and political system to its economy, scientific, literary, and artistic production. • Opens with a general introduction providing historical context, and a chapter on Portuguese national identity. • Thematic chapters focus on social, political, economic, and cultural developments of the last two decades. This book provides a comprehensive, erudite yet accessible introduction to contemporary Portugal and is essential reading for students, scholars, and readers interested in Portugal, Portuguese and Southern European politics and culture, Iberian, or Iberian-American

In recent decades several historians have stressed the importance of studying the relation between historical memory, national identity and political culture for a better understanding of the contemporary age. Numerous studies have been conducted in this field, focusing on the forms that the memory of past ages has taken in the contemporary period, as well as the history of the modes and contexts of production of historiography and of their effects on collective memory. The memory of Middle Ages has received particular attention, given its importance to the nation-building processes since the beginning of the nineteenth century and also its large impact on artistic, cultural and literary trends. As part of this tendency, the purpose of my thesis is to study the relation between medieval studies and political discourse in contemporary Portugal, focusing particularly on the period between 1890 and 1947. From the search of multiple historiographical works, as well as discourses and texts issued by the political power in order to institute politics of memory, I intend to demonstrate to which extent there was an ideological instrumentalization of the memory of the Portuguese Middle Ages. The fulfillment of this objective will contribute to a better understanding of how political action in the present and speeches about the past – from historiography to other practices of memory – are related within the emergence and consolidation of modern politics, of History as a subject and of a sense of national identity. In this paper I intend to present the contents and structure of my doctoral thesis project to my colleagues at the Forschungskolloquium Vormoderne. For me to profit with the discussion of the project, in the Kolloquium I will present three examples of authors that I have already worked and that I consider essential to the understanding of the topic. After giving a short theoretical background about the debate concerning medieval studies and medievalism, I will give a brief context of the political importance of the Middle Ages to the period which I am studying, with some notes about the people, dates and events of the medieval and contemporary periods in Portugal. I will also briefly describe the structure and methodology which will be employed at the project. At the end of the paper, I will give more detailed biographies of the three authors that I will present in the Kolloquium: Joaquim de Oliveira Martins, António Sardinha and Vitorino Magalhães Godinho.

Asked to write an overview of the history of Portugal to be included in Joana Vasconcelos's catalogue for La Bienale di Venezia, 2013, I wrote this piece aimed at an audience with little or no knowledge of Portugal.

2016

In recent decades, the study of historiography, historical memory and the uses of the past has become a subject of increasing attention in academic circles. Medievalism in particular, commonly understood as the representation or use of the Middle Ages in the post-medieval period, assumes here an significant role, given the importance of the medieval epoch in Romantic historical culture and in nation-building processes since the nineteenth century. However, medievalism has still been scarcely analysed in the Portuguese context, lacking a study that encompasses its multiple dimensions, from historiography to politics of memory. This dissertation aims to fulfil this gap, by exploring the various representations of the Middle Ages in Portugal between the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on three major topics – writing of history, artistic heritage and historical commemorations –, we will demonstrate how certain concepts, institutions, figures, events and works of Portuguese medieval history were narrated, reworked and celebrated, in the light of decadentist discourses about the nation and the Western world and of Portugal‘s political evolution in this period. International research on the topic will allow the making of comparative analyses and the understanding of the transnational dimension of Portuguese medievalism, inserted in the major cultural trends and political ideologies that influenced the various depictions of the medieval epoch in this period. In the end, we will show that an essentially Romantic view of Portuguese history persisted through the twentieth century, dichotomically presenting the Middle Ages in a positive light in comparison with a Modernity identified with civilizational and spiritual decline.

2008

The practice of book reviews unfortunately has very few roots as yet in Portuguese academic circles. There have been many important works that have had no critical reviews at all. The realization that my recent book on Dom José was afforded a critical analysis less than a year after its publication, and what is more in a review written by António Hespanha, to whom I am connected by so many ties, is something that therefore gives me cause for celebration. The fact that his commentary is centered on only one of the book’s dimensions, that it is made in parallel with a commentary on another work, written by José Subtil, and that it has as its fundamental axis the criticism of some of the theses that I put forward, discussed in opposition to those of the other work being reviewed, in no way diminishes my satisfaction. In his preamble, Hespanha notes that, whereas Subtil is influenced by Foucault and Bourdieu and “leans more towards a symbolic-oriented narrative”, I myself am “more given...

Historisk Tidskrift, 2007

The Oxford Handbook of PORTUGUESE POLITICS, 2022

Why publish an Oxford Handbook of Portuguese Politics? In the mid-1970s, the military coup that put an end to the Estado Novo regime in Portugal attracted significant international attention. Almost overnight, social scientists and journalists from all over Europe and the United States arrived in Lisbon and placed the country on the roadmap of comparative pol- itics. The Portuguese democratic transition put a final nail in the coffin of the age of empires and initiated what Samuel Huntington famously called ‘the third wave of democratization’, which would later spread to the rest of Southern Europe, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and parts of Asia and Africa. Since then, Portugal has joined the European Union, becoming an advanced economy and one of the countries classified with ‘very high human develop- ment’. In time, as Portuguese democracy became consolidated and Portugal became ‘just another case’, international attention from social scientists waned. For all its similarities in terms of economic and political development with most advanced industrial democracies, Portuguese politics contain remarkable specificities that make the country an interesting laboratory for several pivotal problems assailing contemporary democracies and which warrant closer inspection.

The definition of a national collective memory has undoubtedly been one of the most important ways to legitimize authoritarian regimes . The Portuguese dictatorship was no exception and in this process the Middle Ages were one of the most important historical periods in order to create an image of the national past from which the new regime would be legitimate successor. Since the first Romanticism, the medieval period had been a major source of inspiration for various Portuguese political tendencies. If the first generation Liberals considered the Middle Ages the source of the national constitution and freedoms, for the authors of the ‘1870s generation’ the medieval period (until roughly the beginning of the 16th century) represented the period of the nation’s greatness, in contrast with the decadence of the following centuries. This dichotomous view (rise/ decline) indelibly influenced Portuguese historiography during the following decades, including authors of distinct intellectual and political fields. The establishment of the Republic (1910), and in particular the effects of the participation in the Great War (1916-18), contributed to the idea among integral monarchists and Catholics that it was necessary to return to whatever in the past had made Portugal’s glory, eliminating the mistakes of past centuries and in particular those committed by the demo-liberal regimes. As stated by the historian David Lowenthal, the recovery of missing and subverted values or institutions from the past usually happens in ‘hard times’ and it is often a remote past that better legitimizes and strengthens the present against a subsequent drift or corruption . The establishment of the military dictatorship in 1926 echoed the concerns of several of these right-wing political and intellectual sectors with connections to integral monarchism and Catholicism. The Integralismo Lusitano, one of the groups that had been heavily shaken by the death of its chief ideologue António Sardinha in the previous year, had already risen as an ideological movement in early 1926 and shortly after would resume its political activism, suspended since the Pact of Paris . António Sardinha’s ideas, apologist of a corporatist and monarchical medieval Portugal, were central to the process of historical revisionism undertaken by the integralists. The assumption, shared by many historians, that the historical memory of the Estado Novo in its early stages was deeply influenced by monarchist and legitimist currents linked to Integralismo Lusitano , will serve as the starting point for this presentation. Since 1914 the integralists, through their official periodical Nação Portuguesa, explained their political alternative to a demo-liberal Republic that threatened institutions like the Church and Monarchy, embraced a French-influenced parliamentarism and allegedly turned away from the values of national tradition. These values had, according to the integralists, reached their highest purity and originality at the late Middle Ages, when the municipalist and corporatist monarchy reached its peak and started the overseas expansion. According to the Integralist thought, the parting of these values was the result of a long historical process initiated by humanism, aggravated by the Protestant Reformation and 18th Enlightenment, culminating in liberal, socialist and anarchist disorders of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which caused the political, moral and social decadence of Portugal. It is my aim in this paper to demonstrate how the Middle Ages were politically exploited during the first years of the Portuguese dictatorship. Writers, historians, scholars, thinkers and politicians of integralist and Catholic background, or influenced by these, took part in this exploitation, divulging a vision of the medieval period with great impact on national memory and on the establishment of ideological values supported by the Estado Novo. The celebrations of the double centenary of the Foundation and the Restoration of Independence in 1940 represent the zenith of this nationalist construction of historical memory, as has been emphasized by several historians who have studied the event. To study this process , I used a range of sources of integralist authors, in particular articles by João Ameal and Manuel Múrias in Nação Portuguesa, as well as other historiographic (the works of Alfredo Pimenta and Manuel Cerejeira ), pedagogic (Antonio Mattoso’s schoolbooks) or openly political works, such as speeches and conferences. I was especially interested to know which main ideas these texts contained about the Middle Ages as a historical period and about their role in Portugal’s history.

2023

This article provides an overview of the advancements in discussions surrounding Portugal's imperial history. It begins by introducing the scholarly developments of recent decades, both during and after Salazar's dictatorship, highlighting their areas of focus and their impact on the perception of Portugal's imperial past. The subsequent section explores a series of civic engagement initiatives that challenged the commemorations of the imperial past, specifically addressing recent public events and the resulting controversies. Finally, the concluding section reflects on the evolving and current understandings of the Portuguese Empire, while advocating for a more critical dialogue regarding Portugal's history within academic circles and society as a whole.