The Making of Modern Portugal [1 ed.] 9781443853699, 9781443850391

Citation preview

The Making of Modern Portugal

The Making of Modern Portugal

Edited by

Luís Trindade

The Making of Modern Portugal, Edited by Luís Trindade This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Luís Trindade and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5039-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5039-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Unmaking Modern Portugal Luís Trindade Chapter One ............................................................................................... 17 The Papers of State Power: The Passport and the Control of Mobility Victor Pereira Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 44 Weak State and Civic Culture in Liberal Portugal (1851-1926) Diego Palacios Cerezales Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 65 The States of Empire Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 102 Technological Modernization and Disuse in the Making of Contemporary Portugal’s Capital: Street Lighting from the 1840s to the 1960s Bruno Cordeiro Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 125 Liberal State and Images of Civil Servants Joana Estorninho de Almeida Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 149 Science, State and Society: The Emergence of Social Research in Portugal Frederico Ágoas Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 178 Time to Settle Down: Property, State and its Subject Elisa Lopes da Silva

vi

Table of Contents

Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 201 The Portuguese State and Modern Education: High School Management and Student Subjectification in the 1930s and 1940s Jorge Ramos do Ó Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 225 State, Church and Society: The 1911 Law of Separation and the Struggle for Hegemony over a Common Subject Diogo Duarte Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 249 The System of Nationalism: Salazarism as Political Culture Luís Trindade Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 270 ‘Portugal is Not a Poor Country’: The Power of Communism José Neves Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 290 ‘The Most Revolutionary Law Ever Approved’: Social Conflict and State Economic Intervention during the Portuguese Revolution (1974-1975) Ricardo Noronha Contributors ............................................................................................. 311 Index ........................................................................................................ 314

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book’s publication was supported by a research project funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Portugal): The Making of State Power in Portugal: Institutionalization Processes from 1890 to 1986 (PTDC/HIS-HIS/104166/2008). The authors would like to thank Miguel Cardoso for his work on the translation, edition and/or revision of different chapters of the book.

INTRODUCTION UNMAKING MODERN PORTUGAL LUÍS TRINDADE

National histories and introductory syntheses on peripheral countries published in the centre – like the present volume, a collection of studies on modern Portugal in English – usually respond to a state of ignorance about those countries and assign themselves the task of filling a gap. In the present case, however, Portugal is not exactly unknown outside the country, and is certainly not Terra Incognita in foreign, namely British and North-American universities. In fact, we can go as far as to suggest that most people in a country such as the United Kingdom are able to identify images of Portuguese history, geography and culture – or at least one of the three. From recognizable historical moments (especially related to its former Empire), through some key names in literature (perhaps cinema) and famous sportsmen, all the way to tourist destinations, to most people Portugal’s image, while not necessarily familiar, is far from exotic. Moreover, Portuguese studies in British and North-American academia are surprisingly lively given the country’s size and its standing in the world. In this sense, this book cannot claim to introduce a new topic or open a new field. This does not mean that more studies and publications in Portuguese studies would not be welcomed, nor does it suggest that there is no need to chart and explore new areas, although such a need is valid to Portuguese studies both outside and inside Portugal. The point, however, is that Portugal has been deemed relevant enough to require a theoretical background – produced both by Portuguese and foreign intellectuals and academics, along the lines of colonial and post-colonial theory – to frame the country’s historical narrative in a rather prominent place in world history. This conceptual inscription of the role of Portugal in the development of the modern world was far from obvious, or predictable. Most theories trying to come to terms with the Portuguese case within the world-system tend to situate the country and its history somewhere inbetween the seemingly better defined positions of centre and periphery.

2

Introduction

This took a number of different forms throughout the twentieth century, of which the two most influential are probably Gilberto Freyre’s LusoTropicalism (more than half a century ago) and Boaventura Sousa Santos’s deployment of the concept of semi-periphery (in the last decades), both situating the case of Portugal in a larger context, although through different narratives and indeed opposing methodologies and worldviews – not in the least because whereas Freyre provided a powerful narrative for Portugal’s exceptionality, Sousa Santos’s work is one of our best tools to think the country’s specificity within a larger frame. In fact, the former is an attempt to distinguish the Portuguese Empire from other European forms of colonialism – and ultimately establish an identity for that Empire’s most important colony, Brazil, as a multiracial society – by insisting on the willingness of the Portuguese colonizer to miscigenate with the natives from its overseas territories. And, according to Freyre, it was precisely Portugal’s in-betweeness in relation to Europe and Africa, which meant it shared the traits which supposedly characterized the peoples of both continents, that allowed for this singularity. Sousa Santos’s use of the term semi-periphery in relation to Portugal opposes such identitarian crystallization, by discussing the country as a specific case within the capitalist world-system. From this angle, Portugal should be seen as being in-between the main centres of capitalist exchange and industrial production, on the one hand, and the peripheral colonies – or the Third World, in the second half of the twentieth-century –, on the other. This rather singular status would put Portugal in a paradoxical position as both colonized (by England, before any other central Empire) and colonizer. Although Boaventura Sousa Santos’s aim is not to search for an identitarian originality – unlike Freyre’s Luso-Tropicalism – it is not difficult to imagine how renewed theories of Portugal’s unique place in the world can easily spring from the paradoxes of semi-peripheral inbetweeness. Such a position – both geographical and theoretical – has a direct impact on the images, and research, produced about Portugal both at home and abroad. In fact, if we look at the syntheses on Portuguese history and society produced or published in English, for example, it is apparent that what has caught the interest of scholars – and presumably of readers – has precisely been what distinguishes Portugal from other nations: sixteenthcentury maritime expansion and Empire – up to the colonial wars in the twentieth-century –, and the most dramatic moments in Portuguese modernity, such as Fascism and Revolution. It is hard to imagine how it could have been otherwise. Indeed, Portugal’s weight in the course of modern world history is negligible outside of these moments.

Unmaking Modern Portugal

3

And yet, this may be precisely what makes the approach to modern Portugal the reader will find in this book interesting to both those who specialize in Portuguese studies and history and those to whom Portugal only rings a few, very recognizable, bells, such as the names of Vasco da Gama and Salazar (or maybe Camões and Saramago), or events like the Carnation Revolution. For what the reader can expect to find in The Making of Modern Portugal is a portrait of a dynamic society, rather than a stable historical entity, whose formation is in fact strikingly close to the historical processes other modern societies went through. This is arguably an opportunity to redeploy the most traditional questions of identitarian inquiry (what’s the place of Portugal in the world?; how is Portugal’s identity distinctive?) in terms of the proximity and similarity – i.e., through comparatism – between the Portuguese case and the modern histories of countries in its vicinity. In other words, this book is not meant as a critique of a scholarly body of knowledge traditionally focused on what distinguishes Portugal but rather an attempt to complement that existing corpus by going beyond the most recognizable events in Portuguese history – which, in this case, means charting the country’s social structures and historical dynamics in greater detail. The Making of Modern Portugal constitutes the main output of a collective research project on the making of State Power in Portugal during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The project, funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation, FCT], entailed a series of initiatives, from conferences, workshops and meetings with project members to other publications. The book’s direct antecedent was a conference held in London in May 2011 – co-organized by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London and the Institute for Contemporary History of the New University of Lisbon –, where the majority of its contributors had the opportunity to present and discuss their work. The conditions provided by the project’s funding to work collectively for three years emerge here as more than just a practical aspect in the making of this book, as it had a decisive impact on its final outcome. In fact, only this opportunity to meet, discuss and develop ideas and research collectively could enable the combination of so many different historical contexts and methodological approaches within a single coherent work. In this sense, The Making of Modern Portugal does not present a linear narrative or offer a unified thesis about its subject. Instead, what the reader may find here is a map of tensions, an articulation of different perspectives, combined within a single set of problems, and framed by a

4

Introduction

shared commitment to problematization and a common engagement with interdisciplinarity. None of the twelve contributors would have been able to draw such a map and produce those articulations single-handedly. More than on modern Portugal as such, each one of them specializes in specific fields of historiography and the social sciences. This is, in part, another consequence of the impact produced by FCT on academic research in Portugal during the last two decades and of the ways in which it opened its debates to wider scientific communities. The problems under discussion in each chapter can thus be said to engage with the theoretical debates of different disciplines and research fields internationally as much as with the specific questions raised by the subject within Portuguese historiography and social sciences. It is important to stress these material aspects of the book from the outset because the quantitative and qualitative transformation made possible by FCT in the Portuguese research environment since the 1990s produced a dramatic change in the nature of historical and social knowledge in and about Portugal. In the particular historical and sociological fields discussed in this book, the debates have opened up conceptually, rather than along the internal logic of the country’s particularism and national identity. Moreover, a book like this seems to prove that the time of all-encompassing syntheses produced by individual intellectuals is over. Any such syntheses now have to be collective and any form of coherence rests on interdisciplinary consistency, i.e., on method, rather than on a stroke of genius capable of encapsulating the whole of Portugal under a single narrative or concept, however ingenious it may be. On the other hand, if historical and social knowledge now seems to be more comprehensive, that should invite us to establish more nuanced relations between the different disciplines and society as a whole, rather than trying to come up with new, even if better informed, Histories of Portugal, whose shortcomings are familiar enough: linear chronologies and an object (the Nation) all too well defined within its frontiers. In other words, the change brought about by this epistemological shift, of which this book is just an example, implies a radical turn that may allow us to go as far as saying that Portugal – as that stable entity with a specific identity – has ceased to exist, or is in the process of being unmade, and that the priority is now to study particular historical circumstances and specific social conditions. Both the structure of The Making of Modern Portugal as a whole and each chapter’s internal organization can be better understood as a consequence of this research context. For the book, following the project’s

Unmaking Modern Portugal

5

initial plan, is based on the intersection of two different sets of problems articulating each author’s specific field of study with a collective overview of Portuguese modern history. This allows for a double reading of the work. On the one hand, each author discusses a different aspect of social modernization or a specific political structure with nothing distinctively Portuguese about it: population, police, empire, technology, bureaucracy, social knowledge, rural life, education, church, nationalism, communism and economy. These topics, addressed in each of the twelve chapters, are best understood as part of debates beyond modern Portugal. The reader can focus on the way different chapters engage with different disciplines (e.g., studies on population, education, nationalism studies, etc.). On the other hand, however, the reader may also want to follow the thread weaved by the twelve chapters as a whole. The book, as previously suggested, does not provide a linear narrative or a coherent picture of Portuguese modernity. More than a comprehensive overview, then, all contributions to The Making of Modern Portugal share a common approach to their different objects whereby key institutions at work in the country’s modern history – some of those deep structures that constitute society and determine politics – are seen as dynamic processes, traversed by internal struggles. More specifically, each chapter equates State power and politics as the organizing dynamic around which all other phenomena revolve, directly or indirectly. Accordingly, rather than trying to describe stable structures, the book narrates processes of institutionalization that reproduce some of the most important aspects in the evolution of Portuguese society and politics during the last two centuries, as well as the inner tensions of that historical process usually known as modernity, through the perspective of State formation, as shaped by conflict. At this point, interdisciplinarity becomes more than just an eclectic approach, bringing different research methods together, to become a coherent practice in its own right. What is at stake in what appears, at first sight, a simple procedure – the opening of the State to its historical dynamic, the politicization of apparently stable social structures – is in fact the outcome of an intense dialogue between practitioners from different branches of historiography, sociology and political science, and one with decisive consequences in the emergence of a new narrative of modern Portugal, with a more nuanced articulation of change and permanence, structure and politics, or, to put it in the terms of a fundamental divide in the epistemological debates in the social sciences, between synchrony and diachrony. The book’s method can be synthesized as an attempt to analyse different State forms as parts of the social structure, which each chapter then articulates with the political dynamics taking place within that same

6

Introduction

social structure and simultaneously contributing to the transformation of the State. What is shared throughout the book – what the book can present in the mode of a narrative, but also as a tracing of narrative’s limits – is the notion that if the power exerted by State institutions constrains the evolution of social structures, the latter’s dynamic contributed to shaping the form of State power in the first place. To open the past of these institutions to the historical dynamic and the social tensions surrounding them may allow us to show that the State’s robustness is more precarious than it seems, caught in the ever-changing tug-of-war between institutions and society. This approach constitutes a double critique of both synchronic analyses of State structure (naturalizing the logic of institutions) and diachronic political history (naturalizing political agency). More decisively, the structure of The Making of Modern Portugal, as suggested above, will hopefully contribute to the critique and discussion of traditional national histories organized along linear chronologies and monist political narratives and of social analyses heavily reliant on identity and often insulated from external contexts. The book’s structure and the objects it deals with will therefore establish a dialectics between what can only be understood within specific contexts – State formation as a response to historical situations and social conditions – and the obvious relations with similar objects and processes occurring in the same period but in other geographical spaces and under different social conditions. To open Portuguese history and society to their inner tensions and external contexts is thus both simple and decisive: for while it merely recognizes the obvious – the affinity between the country’s modernization and a wider world history –, the obvious can here be used to frame the historical and sociological narratives about modern Portugal from a new perspective, simply and briefly synthesized as follows: while there is nothing particularly exceptional about Portugal, Portuguese society did go through specific historical processes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of particular relevance inasmuch as they are easily recognized as being part of a wider context. In short, to frame modern Portugal as a case study will contribute to de-naturalize those linear Histories of Portugal constantly in search of the country’s true identity and destiny. To focus on the making of political situations and social circumstances may thus allow us to unmake the dramatizations of identity. This does not mean that the history of modern Portugal was without drama, and to ignore it would elide a key element of Portuguese society during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one without which the stories told in these different chapters would remain

Unmaking Modern Portugal

7

virtually incomprehensible: Portugal, as every other European country during the same period, experienced a sharp awareness of being, on the one hand, a singular geographical entity with a distinguishable history, as well as, on the other hand, part of modernity, i.e., a historical period – and historical process – defined by an ideology of progress and by a belief in permanent political, economic and social development. But to recognize the historical effectiveness of a period’s temporal self-consciousness does not necessarily mean to treat those ideas as temporal categories of historical narrative. Similarly, it is possible to recognize a country’s geographical self-consciousness (the way it sees itself as a country), without falling into geographical determinism. In other words, to distinguish between a concrete perception (shared by many Portuguese in the last two centuries) and a rule ingrained in the historical process probably constitutes the kernel of this book’s critical approach. In fact, it can be suggested that what dramatizes Portuguese historical narratives is the inability to draw that distinction between a widespread social aspiration to progress and progress as a historical law. As a result, Portuguese historiography seldom manages to avoid a gap between what society was and what it felt it should be. This gap is what makes the perception of modern Portugal so dramatic and, as such, it constitutes a historical and social phenomenon in its own right: the persistent and widespread narrative defining Portugal as backward, pervading all kinds of discourse and giving shape to the country’s political unconscious, must be treated as a constitutive aspect of its modern history. It should be said that the idea that Portugal was lagging behind in the processes of modernization throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was, in itself, the recognition that Portuguese society was indeed part of that wider historical process. However, by narrating modernization as a linear and necessary process, historiography itself contributed to the formation of an ideology of progress following ideal examples (England, France, Germany and the United States – depending on the historical context) against which a small and peripheral country like Portugal would always be bound to fail. Portugal’s modernity could never live up to the expectations raised by the narratives of, for example, English economic development, French political freedom, or German cultural enlightenment. And yet, the dominant narratives of the country’s modern history were shaped by this teleological burden of historical determinism: political history narrates the succession of political regimes as a continuous road to freedom, whereby constitutional monarchy (1834-1910) overcomes absolutism, a process accelerated – or decelerated, from a conservative perspective – by the

8

Introduction

Republic (1910-1926), interrupted by the New State’s dictatorship (19261974) and resumed by post-revolutionary parliamentary democracy (1976…); economic history organizes its narrative along the development of capitalism, a process within which the dictatorship’s corporatism and the 1974-75 revolution’s socialism necessarily appear as reactive or strange; finally, in cultural history the gap between the ideal model and the material conditions of Portuguese society gave way to a pervasive feeling of discomfort, which fills national identity with images of authenticity, roots and originality, on the one hand, and modernization and universalism, on the other. One of the most striking consequences of the narratives of the different branches of historiography is to transform the long twentieth-century New State’s dictatorship into an alien parenthesis in the overall narrative of historical modernity. Those narratives, however, impose their rule over the whole of the historical period by forcing political regimes to act as the true accelerators of modernization and tinging their emergence (and leaders) with the halo of messianism. The consequences of this are twofold. On the one hand, all historical phenomena take place as if there was no society, that is, concrete social conditions, in-between the initiative of individual agents and singular events. On the other hand, an enormous burden is placed over the State as the guarantor of – or, again, from a conservative perspective, an obstacle to – progress as historical necessity. This book’s contribution to the knowledge about modern Portugal can thus be seen as an effort to break with the narrative of modernization, freedom and national autonomy in its many different aspects, rhythms and tensions, and to include these disparate historical processes in a broader history. Still, given all sets of combinations The Making of Modern Portugal brings forth, one might be tempted to ask what new narrative about modern Portugal can we expect to get at the end of the book? Probably not a very coherent one. And yet, after reading these twelve chapters, one is left with a clear picture of a long-term, permanent effort by the State to govern its territory and population, a process through which State institutions never ceased to develop – as slowly, unsatisfactorily, frustratingly as it may have been – their techniques of government, forms of knowledge and control, that modern contradictory process where progress is paired with violence. The permanence of such an endeavour, one could go as far as saying, is the key aspect of this history, with the proviso that one must include its shortcomings as a constitutive part of it – and the general feeling of frustration, the acute awareness of the gap between models, ideals, discourses and aspirations, on the one hand, and

Unmaking Modern Portugal

9

social conditions and historical contexts, on the other, that seems to pervade all these narratives, must also be given its proper historical place. * The book’s narrative follows a somewhat chronological sequence from long-lasting processes of control and government (population, police, empire, technology, bureaucracy), through specialized forms of knowledge and institutions (the emergence of social sciences, State planning of rural life, education, the Church) to discourses both reinforcing the norm (nationalism) and in a conflictive relation with it (communism), all the way up to a specific event (a revolution), whose break retrospectively gives a sense to the period’s social and economic development. This structure critically reviews some of the key problems in the dominant narrative of Portuguese historiography and social sciences: the economy as a last instance cause; a chronology mainly organized along the succession of political regimes and institutional history; the isolation of institutions, ideologies and other sets of ideas and discourses. Simultaneously, the focus on the State in historical and social context will help relativize its status as a power apparatus, by stressing internal struggles, (political) shifts, (historical) failures, and (social) contradictions. In sum, modern Portugal emerges from the State, but it is made, i.e., it has agents, intentionality, and plurality. The dynamic presupposed in the process of Making of is, in this sense, what is properly political in this approach. The book starts with a chapter narrating the long history of passports as an example of those same two levels of analysis this introduction is trying to come to terms with: a double marker of internal State policy to control its population and of society’s relations with the world outside. In it, Victor Pereira introduces a set of key problems the reader will later find in subsequent chapters: the gap between the power of centralized State institutions – their material presence across the national territory –, and the efforts to effectively control the movements of the population. The problem of passports had a direct relation with several aspects of the country’s economy and State as it responded to the need of controlling the work force, making it available as rural labour, for military drafts or to colonize the Empire. The contradictions between these different “uses” of the population are especially apparent in the long liberal nineteenth century: in fact, the ideology of liberalism often found itself at odds with the political practices of liberal governments, not only because of the State’s inability to fully control the territory as a whole, but also due to the

10

Introduction

contradictory interests of the economic elites, namely the agrarian drive to fix the rural population to the land versus the call for migration from urban industrialization. The arrival of authoritarianism (1926-1974) opens an opportunity to retrospectively clarify the long trend of liberalism and its shortcomings and contradictions, when it reversed the liberal project by coercively keeping populations within the limits of the national border and socio-economic origin. Autocracy, after World War II, brings about another contradiction, for whereas State ideology and repressive practices try to isolate the population, external pressures to leave (European economic development, the colonial wars, etc.) escalate. The same historical process – a history of modernization through its shortcomings, or, the narrative of the gap between political aspirations and material policies – continues in chapter 2, where Diego Palacios Cerezales aptly argues that the difficulties to cover the territory with a police force are not only a good illustration, but indeed a cornerstone, of the whole process. The chapter’s thesis is intriguing and can perhaps be summarized in two closely connected elements. First, the presence of a police force would have been an indispensable tool to collect tax and, subsequently, develop all sorts of modernizing projects. Secondly, the absence of such a police force not only disabled the State as a tool of development but it also short-circuited the creation of bonds between citizens and the State, thus preventing the birth of a true civic culture. The difficulties felt by both constitutional monarchy in the second half of the nineteenth-century and the Republic between 1910 and 1926 (mainly due to local resistances by landowners and political caciquismo), thus trapped the State in a vicious circle: low budgets did not allow for the creation of a police force, while without a strong police force it was impossible to collect the necessary taxes for the deployment of more police (and other forms of State presence in the territory). Historically, the failure to create a liberal police never allowed the constitution of a true ‘public service’. When the police finally took hold of the whole territory, under twentieth-century authoritarian New State, it was already in the form of ‘political control’. The historical period of the New State, and particularly the post-World War II context – with the rise of the Third World as a historical subject and the emergence of liberation movements of decolonization – reveals a similar paradoxical combination between the shortcomings of State governance and the history of the Portuguese Empire: for it was only under the a dictatorial regime, and in the dramatic context of the Colonial Wars (1961-1974) – i.e., under a militarist policy – that the State finally managed to control its colonial territories in Africa and set basic colonial institutions to organize the also recent occupation of settlers. Here, too,

Unmaking Modern Portugal

11

this particular history goes back at least to the beginning of the liberal State in the first half of the nineteenth century. As Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo shows in chapter 3, the administration of Empire and the particular making of the colonial State interestingly experienced similar difficulties to those faced by State power in the metropolis: the inability to have more than a feeble, superficial (i.e. coastal) presence in the vast colonial possessions limited the Portuguese empire to a de jure, rather than de facto, situation. As in the previous chapters, we are confronted with a similar gap between political plans following those of the great colonial powers and the territorial presence of Portuguese colonialism, similar obstacles to implement a comprehensive tax system (with comparable political consequences), and a similar historical coincidence between the late emergence of effective State power and authoritarianism. The concept of technological disuse, deployed by Bruno Cordeiro in chapter 4, takes the large spectrum perspectives over State, development and territory to a more focused, and thus more nuanced, or dense, aspect of the question: street lighting in Lisbon from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. State impact over the territory may here seem less political, but it clarifies some aspects with important implications in the country’s conditions of government. To start with, it suggests that lighting was a process of governing the night. But it also shows that the capital was an exception within the country’s modernization process, as rural regions and smaller urban areas were experiencing very different rhythms of technological progress. This creates a problem for the standard narrative of the making of the modern country, as Lisbon tends to be seen as the synecdoche of Portugal as a whole. Furthermore, it goes on to show how the city itself was uneven, with different levels of technological transformation evolving according to the discrepancies between centre and periphery. The history of the State thus becomes something very different from a linear process of growth and modernization, however slow and filled with obstacles. The disparities between different State practices reflect a complex system of spatiotemporal differentiation dividing the country into multiple layers, whose interconnectedness contributes to reinforce the gap between modern aspirations and accomplishments. Chapter 5 inverts the perspective offered by previous chapters, from the centrifugal drive to act over populations and territories, to the centripetal practices, images and discourses produced by the State or on the State itself, from liberalism to authoritarianism. Joana Estorninho de Almeida uses bureaucracy and the images of civil servants to identify and describe a process through which the State becomes an autonomous site of social practices and classes in its own right. The chapter offers a detailed

12

Introduction

description of the making of the mechanisms creating the modern State/bureaucratic culture through which still another contradiction can be grasped: that between the open resistances to bureaucracy from all walks of society along with the generalized perception of the inevitability of bureaucratization. The weight of State institutions in social life was so crushing that the forms of representation of bureaucracy and its servants can be read as a metonymy not only of social modernization but also of the country’s political history as such. The forms used to represent bureaucracy, more generally, and the images of public servants in particular, can in this sense be seen as a projection of the changing status of modern politics due to its dependence on a growing public sphere and the development of photography and other spectacular forms of mass media. In short, the evolution of State representation from nineteenth century liberalism to the authoritarian New State follows the same hierarchical trends one can find in politics itself, whereby the State becomes publicly identified with its most recognizable leaders rather than its anonymous middle-rank functionaries. Other aspects of the history of State development as the narrative of an autonomous, self-referential set of institutions and practices continue to be explored in the following chapters. In chapter 6, Frederico Ágoas gives a close description of the emergence of the social sciences as a State practice in Portugal. In fact, the origins of social inquiry in the country drew from scientific methodologies and were developed within academia, but were initially sponsored by the State and designed for State purposes. In particular, the use of sociological inquiries and the early development of sociology as a discipline in the beginning of the twentieth century can be simultaneously described as still another combination of modern practices and as a tool of modernization – following the model of foreign countries experiencing processes of industrialization and urbanization – with the specific requirements of a country whose economy was heavily dependent on agriculture. Here too the history of the drive to assemble information on territory and population can be narrated in the context of the passage from nineteenth-century liberalism to twentieth-century authoritarianism, a narrative where the most conservative political regime coincides with the major leap in the constitution of modern forms of government. The dictatorship, with its conservative ideology about how the country was and how it should remain, used inquiries mostly to modernize the forms of government of a traditional society, rather than, as elsewhere, as a response to social and economic modernization, i.e., urbanization and industrialization. In other words, and closely following the tendency already visible in previous chapters, the specific form of Portuguese

Unmaking Modern Portugal

13

modernization is a compromise between foreign models and the specificities of the social structure. The twentieth-century long authoritarian experience can in this sense be seen as a form of conservative management: a combination between the forms of governmentality inherited from liberalism and conservative politics. The case of internal colonization described by Elisa Lopes da Silva in chapter 7 is a good example of this: the project to redistribute the rural population across the territory, moving people from the North to the South was, on the one hand, a suitable display of a vigorous technology of power, while its failure – for it fell through in its application – brings to the fore various forms of rural resistance as well the shortcomings of the Portuguese State – the gap between perceptions and accomplishments other chapters have insisted upon assumes here the form of a reflection on the limits of State power. The project in itself is significant inasmuch as it shows the weight of rural life in Portugal well into the twentieth century. So, while the constant persistence of plans for agrarian and social reform throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries encapsulates the most decisive political problem of Portuguese modernity, the specific project of internal colonization institutionalized by the New State was yet another example of a modern technique of government deployed in the name of social conservatism: the project to redistribute population in order to rationalize the resources of the territory (with properties in the North deemed too small, and estates in the South too large) through the promotion of family farms, an endeavour to not only optimize agricultural production but also to reproduce agricultural labour force, could then be used to substitute the ongoing proletarianization in the South by the creation of landowners. In Chapter 8, Jorge Ramos do Ó stretches the narrative of governmentality to the limit, by showing another key aspect of modernization – education – as a privileged site of social control. As before, the dictatorship emerges as the mere pinnacle of the historical formation of the liberal subject. What, according to liberal ideology (especially with the Republic), represented the main tool of emancipation and citizenship, can here be seen as the constitution of biopolitics and the perfect laboratory for new technologies of power. The chapter focuses specifically on secondary education to show how high schools became sites of an intensive production of discourses about its population. As with the inquiries on rural life analyzed in chapter 6, all aspects of the life and subjectivity of students were submitted to close scrutiny. Reports of all kinds gradually covered more areas of life and the more society became measurable and describable the more written discourses spread and colonized existence.

14

Introduction

Domination is here equated with writing, which, again, gives a more nuanced idea of how State power and political violence looked like, especially in the twentieth century and under the dictatorship. And yet, these technologies of power were to a large extent autonomous from the nature of political regimes and the context of social and economic development at each historical stage. In this sense, power and control here seem to reach a point where State institutions as such combine with semiautonomous ideological State apparatuses in the full constitution of modern power. Traditionally, the church – whose relation with the modern State is recreated by Diogo Duarte in chapter 9 – was the ultimate producer of ideology and power in a religious country like Portugal. In fact, the technologies of power used in modernizing areas like education or the social sciences necessarily clashed with the Catholic Church, an institution already in place, deeply ingrained in the country’s society and culture, and closely involved in its politics. More specifically, modern forms of biopolitcs seemed to have found a challenging opponent in the church’s dense territorial presence and firm control over souls. This would explain the high level of conflict between this particular institution and the State throughout all political regimes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is an important point, as it shows that the situation of the Catholic Church in Portuguese society was consistently dramatic during the whole period, suggesting that the Church had a problem with modernization as such, rather than a particular regime. By situating the religious question within the making of the modern State, Duarte manages to de-dramatize the relations between the Church and the Republican regime while at the same time expanding political struggle beyond the State (indeed, beyond all institutions), by arguing that there is no cause to speak of a religious war in the period between 1910-1926, as the clash between State growth and traditional society and its institutions (popular and institutional anticlericalism, the nationalization of Church property as aspects in the history of the Portuguese modern State) was intrinsic, although not exclusive, to the liberal process of social modernization, in its attempt to control population and consciousness. At this point, it may be possible to start thinking about the role of the State in the making of national identity and its specific forms political ideology. Like in any other process of national modernization, the making of the Portuguese State involved the constitution of forms of national consciousness ultimately shaped as nationalist ideologies. As Luís Trindade argues in chapter 10, Portuguese nationalism – the discourses defining the country and its people and narrating its history – replicates the

Unmaking Modern Portugal

15

tensions at play in the by now already familiar gap between the country’s self-image and the processes of slow but constant urbanization and industrialization from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, nationalism, as the dominant ideological form in Portuguese modernity, embodied the basic divide in the country’s social structure and the most decisive transformations occurring in its territory. In view of the frustrating experience regarding the development of an African Empire and modernization in a European context, early twentiethcentury Portuguese nationalism defined Portugal as intrinsically rural. Simultaneously, as the country was becoming urbanized and city streets exerted a mounting political pressure, nationalism characterized the Portuguese as a people of peasants. Here too the dictatorship, and the figure of its leader, come as the climax of an earlier process, by combining the most modern mechanisms at its disposal (the technologies of mass politics and mass culture) to insist on traditional forms: the more urban the country was, and the more it was defined by urban institutions (especially in the cultural sphere), the more it was invited to see itself as rural and premodern. From a certain perspective, the narrative of the making of the Portuguese modern State, from nineteenth-century liberalism to twentiethcentury authoritarianism and revolution, is interrupted in the last two chapters. This is either because a counter-ideology is shown as an alternative to the dominant forms of nationalism (the case of communism) or because an event radically questioning the relations between State and society occurs (the 1974-75 revolution). And yet, as José Neves shows in Chapter 11, Portuguese communism may have questioned the class structure of the State, but did not fully escape the nationalist frame through which power relations unfolded – let alone the need for the State as such. Communism can then appear as the Other in the relationship between the State and dominant national narratives in two ways: as a critique of existing State forms and as an alternative form of State. In the case of the Portuguese Communist Party, this led to a refusal of a key idea in authoritarian nationalism – that, because of its Empire, Portugal was not a small country – with an alternative negation that kept the same discursive structure of the nation intact: ‘Portugal is not a poor country’. The Communist Party thus plays the role of a special actor, in between society and the State, during the dictatorship and the revolutionary process. It aspires to represent an alternative State within those social groups (the workers in general and the proletariat in particular) left outside the “authentic” Portugal of dominant nationalism, while at the same time

16

Introduction

holding on to a belief in the development of the modern State (and the ideology of progress) in a Nation of workers. To end a book mainly focused on structures and based on fairly long periods with a revolution, spectacular and decisive as it may be, does not necessarily mean to fall under the spell of a history of events. The revolutionary period of 1974-1975, however, emerges here as more than just a closing to the book: as a social revolution, distinct from a coup d’état dethroning the dictatorship, it represented a moment of profound and radical questioning of social structures (not least since it also represented the end of the Imperial State) and an attempt to use the State to empower those historically left outside its formation – roughly those same social classes represented by communism as described in Chapter 11. To analyse, as Ricardo Noronha does in the last chapter, one of the most controversial processes within the revolution – the nationalization of the banking system – may also be seen as a narrative strategy: by challenging private property, the revolution tried to subvert the foundation of the liberal system and bourgeois society inaugurated in the nineteenth century, and a narrative of such an event can thus provide a new, retrospective, intelligibility to the whole process of The Making of Modern Portugal; the history the revolution allows to come forth (and tries to subvert) thus becomes, very distinctively, that of a close allegiance between the State and the country’s bourgeoisie, the formation of an oligarchy ruling over a system based on low wages, and one where the main economic, social and political transformation in modern Portugal, the shift from agriculture to industry (and from rural to urban society), was always dependent on the private interests of the dominant classes. This last episode in all its aspects – the end of the colonial war, socialist revolution and decolonization–, thus casts a retrospective light over the rest of the book, working as a confirmation of the extent to which what happened in Portugal throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was always heavily dependent on, and closely articulated with, international actors, tendencies and events. The 1974-75 revolution emerges, then, as a negative symbol, for its density and strength as a political event necessarily appears as an excess in a narrative of modernization and State formation characterized by the development of forms of discipline and control. The consequences are both historical and methodological: the event as an exceptional moment may not be representative or even decisive, but it is also what allows us to identify the norm and read the long-term logic of modernity and its social order.

CHAPTER ONE THE PAPERS OF STATE POWER: THE PASSPORT AND THE CONTROL OF MOBILITY VICTOR PEREIRA

Introduction John Torpey is one among many authors to have proposed a gloss to the definition of the State put forward by Max Weber. The renowned German sociologist defined the State as a ‘human community’ that claims ‘the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force’ (Weber 1946, 78). Drawing on that definition, Torpey calls attention to the fact that ‘States have successfully usurped from rival claimants such as churches and private enterprises the “monopoly of the legitimate means of movement” – that is, their development as States has depended on effectively distinguishing between citizens/subjects and possible interlopers, and regulating the movement of each’ (Torpey 2000, 1-2). Control over population mobility is a pivotal element in the process of State-building. According to James Scott, the ‘State has always seemed to be the enemy of “people who move around”’ (Scott 1998, 1). Indeed, individuals move to flee from the State, and the latter, in turn, aims to sedentarize the population so as to guarantee two elements that are indispensable to its formation, expansion and defence: taxes and soldiers (Tilly 1985). The peasants studied by Scott move to non-State spaces, the mountain areas, where agents of the State are rare and where it is easier to evade State control (Scott 2009). This movement goes against the grain of the State’s actions, which are geared towards settling populations, given that a stable population is more easily governed and exploited. From the perspective of the “penetration” of society and its control by States, John Torpey chronicles the history of the passport, the document that has become essential for thousands of individuals to move across

18

Chapter One

borders but also within their own countries. In China, to this day, population mobility, and more specifically that of Chinese peasants, is strictly controlled by authorities within the frame of the Hukou system, which includes various types of permits. The passport is part of the written identification documents that were created and imposed on populations by States aiming to exercise ‘domination at a distance’ (Noiriel 2006, 20). State agents wanted to ascertain the exact identity of individuals who fled the clusters of inter-knowledge of peasant societies. Passports issued by States from the sixteenth century onwards, and particularly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Denis 2008), partook of a will to surveillance of the population, the latter being henceforth expected to carry papers to be presented to public authorities. By way of these papers issued by the bureaucratic apparatus, the State, along with its agents, knowledge and instruments, carries out a ‘colonization of the life-world’ (Noiriel 2005), imposing the State’s presence at the heart of all social relations (Bourdieu 2012), thus eliminating or restricting other forms of social regulation. The State’s penetration by means of papers (passports, identity cards) met with various and powerful forms of resistance, to be sure, but it was just as much met with adherence. As some works by Foucault have suggested, the State – and, more generically, political domination (Hibou 2011) – does not operate strictly by way of violence and repression but also by building on the populations’ desires, resorting to ‘insidious leniencies’ (Foucault 1975, 360) and fulfilling a ‘desire for the State’ (Hibou 2011, 79). In Portugal, violence and adherence were intertwined in the exercise of State power, just as resistance was used by the State to strengthen itself. In the case of passports, resistance was strong: suffice it to recall that for extended periods, the majority of the population left the country without a passport. Some border villages specialized in the smuggling of individuals. To leave the country without a passport was part of the peasant ‘moral economy’, according to which the State had no right to prevent strategies for the reproduction of agricultural property (Silva 1998). If the purpose of this document was to control population mobility and subject it to the interests of the social strata that had the most influence over political power, both centrally and locally, it further legitimated itself in the name of protecting the population. On the one hand, the documentation needed to move was supposed to protect populations from drifters, bandits or other population groups perceived as dangerous. Accordingly, a large portion of the legislation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries concerning passports stipulated that anyone could ask a stranger to produce their papers and, if they had none,

The Papers of State Power

19

they could report them to the authorities. This disposition did not result simply from a supposed “State weakness” in the nineteenth century or from the scarcity of police forces outside of the two major cities in the country. It was also a way for populations to protect themselves from strangers, a means of drawing a line – indeed, a frontier – between “us” and “them”, “nationals” and “foreigners”. Passports also offered protection to nationals abroad, allowing them to identify themselves, to prove their nationality and seek assistance from their State of origin. Foreigners being, in most countries, individuals with limited (political, social and, at times, even civic) rights, protection afforded by the State of origin is, in certain configurations, primordial (Dufoix 2010). On the other hand, the demand for a passport was presented by the State in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a way of protecting emigrants from smugglers, from ship crews, and from future employers abroad. The passport was then, allegedly, synonymous with a sheltered journey, a safe and well-paid job upon arrival, consular protection, etc. This perspective sprung from a paternalistic view of the popular classes: described as gullible, uncritical, and easily manipulated. The authorities, following this line of reasoning, merely wanted to protect emigrants from themselves. Emigration was depicted as both an illusion and a mistake, a trap which only the naïve would ever step into. However, this reactionary rhetoric – in the sense given to this term by Albert Hirschman (Hirschman 1991) –, grounded on the notions of the perverse, futile and risky nature of emigration, elided the misery prevalent in Portugal at the time, the exploitation of rural and industrial wage labour, local oligarchies, the lack of political and trade union freedom. It also occluded the weakness of the State’s intervention in the well-being of the populations (health, schooling, social security; a feeble intervention when compared to the social measures taken in Germany and the Scandinavian countries, which were also predominantly agricultural, to limit emigration towards the end of the nineteenth century (Kuhnle 1981; Khoudour-Castéras 2008)) and the scarce presence of the Portuguese State abroad, close to the emigrant populations. In short, the discourse of protection over a rash people boiled down, to a large extent, to a form of legitimating practices and apparatuses that curtailed the population’s freedom so as to defend the interests of employers (medium and large rural landowners and, later on, small and medium industrialists that employed a peasant labour force). Following in the footsteps of Torpey, in the present chapter we will sketch a history of the State’s penetration in society by way of the imposition of the passport, its uses as well as the forms of resistance this process was faced with. We shall see how passport control was articulated

20

Chapter One

with various means of governing populations – governmentalities, in Foucault’s phrase – and came to be an essential instrument in the exercise of power.

The passport in the times of mercantilism One of the earliest references to a passport in Portugal occurs in 1645, five years after the Restoration of independence from Spain.1 A charter by King João IV prohibits ‘any person, of any rank, quality and condition whatsoever, to leave this Kingdom without a permit or passport signed by me’. Anyone who failed to comply would be subject to ‘the penalty of banishment and, what is more, will lose any estate, goods and honours they may hold in the Kingdom’.2 The wars of Restoration, in Portugal and in its overseas territories, led the king to hold fast to a population that was extremely reticent to participate directly in the Kingdom’s “liberation” from Castilian rule (Costa 2011). But this law should be seen beyond this contextual aspect, as part and parcel of a wider movement in European governmental practices. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European kings – and also Asian monarchs (Mengin 2005, 279) – multiplied laws to prevent the emigration of their subjects. According to Saskia Sassen, in the reign of Louis XIV, Colbert ‘made it illegal for residents to leave France and went so far as to institute the death penalty for those leaving illegally’ (Sassen 1999, 12). Mercantilist thought, dominant at the time among governing elites, despite their heterogeneity (Spector 2003), sees international trade as an extension of war and the population as the main source of a country’s wealth. This translates into the formula: the more subjects a king has, the more powerful he is. If the king loses subjects to another sovereign, he grows weaker. By losing subjects, he loses workers – at times skilled workers –, soldiers, prestige and might within an international system where States are in permanent confrontation (Tilly 1985), whether in war or in the plane of international trade, perceived as a zero-sum game at the time. Hence, departures not authorized by the monarch are seen as treason: the loss of a resource that makes the enemy stronger. In 1655, Severim de Faria states: ‘The greatness of kings lies in the multitude of the people, and a scarcity of subjects breeds the prince’s lack of reputation’. For Faria, ‘it is clear that wherever there are plenty of people there will be plenty of agriculture, plenty of arts, plenty of trade and plenty of soldiers, which are

 1 2

Between 1580 and 1640, Portugal was under the rule of the Spanish crown. Charter dated 6 September 1645.

The Papers of State Power

21

the four things on which the greatness, the power and the happiness of a Kingdom are built’ (quoted in Cardoso 1997, 69). A numerous population is, firstly, synonymous with military might. Secondly, an abundant population is a source of added fiscal revenue.3 Lastly, a capable population is seen by mercantilists as a source of wealth, since it ensures an abundant labour force and, consequently, a sizeable agricultural production. Michel Foucault has described this logic of ‘mercantilist governmentality’, anchored on the low cost of an abundant labour force (Foucault 2004, 7071). Through access to cheap cereals, cities can be supplied at a low cost, keeping workers’ wages at an equally low level. And it is thus that products become competitive at the international trade level. It becomes possible, then, to export and import gold, the core element of the king’s wealth, to which the subjects’ interests are to be subjugated. As we can see, this mercantilist system is based on an abundant labour force, on its sedentariness as well as on the control over its mobility. A control – or, at least, the attempt to control – that the passport will render possible. However, between the law and its enforcement there is often a chasm. And that is as true in seventeenth century as in the centuries to follow. To paraphrase the sociologist Michael Mann, the State may pass laws in an authoritarian mould (despotic power, in Mann’s formulation) but the State does not possess the infrastructural power – compliant agents and efficient instruments – to enforce its will (Mann 1984). As will happen with a large portion of the legislation from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries that prohibited and punished illegal emigration, the 1645 charter will be reiterated in subsequent years. This reiteration, oftentimes accompanied by an increase in the length of prison sentences, was a sign of the half-hearted commitment of the administration, of the resistance of the population, of the guile of smugglers and carriers. Rather than accepting emigration and facilitating access to passports, laws punished clandestine departures even further. The chief limitation of the plethoric legislation on passports is its imprecision with regards to the various modalities for obtaining the document. Its issue by the king, by way of the secretariat of State, is arbitrary. Furthermore, it can only be obtained in Lisbon, a testimony to the ongoing centralization process. Those who wish to try their luck in the Brazilian Eldorado that emerges towards the end of the seventeenth century have to find their way aboard a ship, and count on the crew’s complicity.

 3

On the question of fiscal revenue within the Portuguese modern State, see chapter 2 in this book.

22

Chapter One

The desire to control the mobility of the population becomes even more pressing during the consulship of Pombal, with the creation of the Intendência Geral da Polícia da Corte e do Reino [General Intendancy of the Police of the Court and Realm] in June 1760. Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo (later to become Marquis of Pombal) aimed to emulate the ‘police States’ that had been created in France and in the German States. In these States, the Police, perceived as ‘the necessary means for maintaining the peaceful order of the political community and fostering its strengths with a view towards the happiness of all’ (Sennelart 2001, 475), tends to ‘dissociate itself from justice, and to transform itself into a technology for the management of the material interests of society’ (Sennelart 2001, 476). Indeed, Pombal’s law aims to separate ‘contentious justice and the police of the Court and the Realm’.4 This administrative reform is aimed at securing public order, rationalizing and tightening the government of the population and enhances the nation’s wealth. One of the key concerns of the text is the war against idleness, debauchery and vagrancy: ‘because the destitute beggars, when they have the age and bodily strength to be of service to the Kingdom, are the soil of a host of disorders and a scandal to all cautious people’.5 To beg for alms one needed a permit, which was granted only to those physically unfit for work.6 Once able-bodied beggars were put to work, and idleness and delinquency quashed through both pre-emptive and punitive action on the part of authorities, the wealth of the Kingdom, its reputation and the wellbeing of its population were bound to improve. This repressive action went hand in hand with an in-depth knowledge of society, the knowledge deemed necessary for a more efficient government of the population. A large portion of the articles of the law of June 1760 lay out the exact knowledge the administration was expected to acquire on the population and its movements. Foreigners and nationals that visit Lisbon are expected to communicate their arrival within twenty-four hours of their entry into the city. Ship captains that cross the harbour-bar into Lisbon must also keep a passenger manifest, to be handed to the General Intendant. Anyone who enters the Kingdom should make their presence known and present ‘passports or personal letters of legitimation’. Travellers are expected to inform the magistrate before whom they appear as to where they come from, what they do, where they are heading and which route they will take. The magistrate then gives them a bill of entry, which lays out the

 4

Law of 25 June 1760. Idem. 6 On the consistent will to repress ‘false beggars’ see Castel (1995). 5

The Papers of State Power

23

traveller’s destination as well as their route. Without this document, or with one containing erroneous or forged information, travellers should expect to be arrested and their fate placed in the hands of the General Intendant, who has the authority to cast them out from the Realm or to sentence them to five years of forced labour. In the process of issuing passports, a distinction is made between noble and plebeian applicants. To obtain passports, in the case of persons of higher rank, these are to be issued by the secretaries of State, or by the Police General Intendant, in this Court; and in the other territories in the provinces by the commissioner of the same Intendant. The latter can also, within the court and in their own neighbourhoods, grant tickets to persons who do not hold a noble rank bestowed by my Court, and to those of inferior rank, in which should be included the legitimate reasons they may have to leave the Realm.

But how to enforce such a regulation given the meagre means the State had at its disposal at the time? This law set out what was to be done but it does not follow that those dispositions were scrupulously applied across the territory. The effort to enforce this law entailed the involvement of all nationals, all individuals imbued with ‘a zeal for the common good’. Anyone was to demand of travellers that they produce their bill of entry. If they failed to comply, it was the duty of the national to report or bring the drifters to the proper authorities. In a rural society, based on interknowledge, “strangers” are indeed easily spotted. With this legislation, the State harbours the intention to keep a close watch on the population and its mobility, to penetrate society so as to maintain order, to impose obedience on all its subjects and to govern them in accordance with the higher interest of the King. Only a few weeks later, in August 1760, a charter is promulgated which clarifies some of the less clear-cut points in the June law. This charter establishes internal passports, which would only be abolished in 1863. Indeed, ‘any person wishing to leave the court and the city of Lisbon will be forced to obtain a passport, to be issued by the ministers of the neighbourhoods in which they reside, by their respective clerks (...). The same procedure will be followed in all judicial districts of these Realms for any persons in need of departing from them’. If certain strata of the population receive special treatment (estate and farm owner may circulate freely and tradesmen may obtain year-long passports), this measure implies a more significant tutelage of the State over the population, and is a sign of the State’s will to penetrate society, and to identify individuals. However, one must bear into account that these projects can only be rather imperfectly implemented. One must not conclude that the State had the

24

Chapter One

infrastructural power needed for a tight control over the mobility of the population.

Passports and the contradictions of Portuguese liberalism (1834-1910) In the troubled period that ran between the 1820 Revolution and the end of the Old Regime in 1834, laws on passports go through a number of changes, in line with a set of wider political shifts. Between 1832 and 1834, the structures of the Old Regime are to a great extent dismantled and replaced by a new State apparatus. The ministry of the Realm is created in 1834 and an administrative code is promulgated in 1836. It is within this new frame that the control of mobility will henceforth be inscribed. However, one should highlight another key text that was to bear an enormous weight on the way in which the State will relate to population movements: the 1826 Constitutional Charter, in force from 1826 to 1828, from 1834 to 1836 and, finally, from 1842 to 1910. The Charter establishes the right to emigration: § 5 of article 145 guarantees that ‘anyone can remain in, or leave, the Kingdom, as they see fit, taking their possessions with them; as long as the due police procedures are followed, and no harm is caused to others’ (quoted in Miranda 1984, 126). The right to freely leave one’s country sprung from several schools of thought – the Salamanca school of natural right, in the sixteenth century, liberal and Enlightenment thought – which were at odds with mercantilism as well as, more generally, with the primacy of the State over individuals, defending as they did the primacy of the social contract. Within these currents, the right to emigration is held as a natural right of man, a fundamental part ‘of the citizen’s liberty’ (Zolberg 1994). Individuals should only remain in the country of their birth if they so wished. States could not stand in the way of individuals in pursuit of a better life elsewhere. In the sixteenth century, Francisco de Vitoria defended the right to migration, arguing that States could not prohibit it since ‘as everything was common in the dawn of times, each one can go wherever he fancies and has the right to be welcomed there and treated with dignity’ (Picq 2009, 265). During the period of the wars of religion that swept Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the right to emigration was also championed by religious minorities and contemplated in some of the religious truces signed over that period. Mobility allows homogeneous political and religious bodies and enables the flight of persecuted minorities (Rawls 2006, 93). In the eighteenth century, several

The Papers of State Power

25

Enlightenment authors also underlined the right to emigration, arguing it allowed individuals to flee from the rule of bloodthirsty and unfit tyrants. In his philosophical dictionary, Voltaire writes, with more than a hint of irony: In many countries, attempts were made to prevent citizens from leaving the place in which fortune brought them to this earth. The reasoning of that law is clear: this country is so rotten and ill-governed that we prevent all individuals from leaving it, for fear that they should desert it (Voltaire 1964, 173).

Indeed, legal obstacles to emigration allowed absolutist States to increase the ‘great sacrifices’ (Zolberg 1989, 413) imposed on their populations: fiscal burden, on the one hand, and conscription, on the other. Finally, liberal thought – also far from monolithic – defends the right to emigration in the name of the primacy of the individual’s interest before the State. Each individual should choose whatever they believe to be in their best interest and States should respect that right. From the free initiative of each would ensue, through the workings of the invisible hand, the wellbeing of all. This right to emigration established itself at the close of the seventeenth century, with what Aristide Zolberg called the ‘exit revolution’ (Zolberg 2007). Obviously, some restrictions were admitted: criminals should not evade justice, and young males should contribute to the military defence of the nation. This revolution, alongside other liberal principles, arrived in Portugal in the early nineteenth century and was embodied in the 1826 Constitutional Charter. It represented a clear break with the Old Regime, in which emigration was a privilege rather than a right. However, all the regulations and actions of the ministry of the Realm in matters of mobility are marked by a deep contradiction. If, on the one hand, this constitutional, political and philosophical imperative must be respected, on the other hand, the authorities, for a host of reasons, wish to prevent people from leaving the country and thus never fully liberalize the concession of passports. A significant part of the texts aiming to restrict emigration recognize this contradiction. Two distinct aims were often at odds with each other. On the one hand, it was commonly repeated that the freedom of citizens should be respected, including the freedom to leave the country. On the other hand, there was a suspicion and fear that individual freedom would outweigh the Nation’s interests. Or rather, the freedom of the popular classes could outweigh the interests of a fraction of the elite that holds significant political power: the agrarian bourgeoisie (Pereira 1981).

26

Chapter One

This fraction of the elite had a decisive weight in an electoral system with a censitary suffrage and in which only a minority had access to the governing and administrative elite. This slice of the population was one of the key segments of public opinion that politicians and agents of the State had to indulge. The solution to this contradiction was to suggest the passport not as an obstacle to emigration – which it was – but rather as a guarantee for emigrants, subject as they were to various forms of exploitation. Emigration should be restricted – by way of (in)adequate legislation, regulatory devices or administrative practices – for the emigrants’ own good. The rhetoric of protection enabled the government to bypass constitutional limits. It was not a case of curtailing the right to emigration. It was, instead, a way of safeguarding the wellbeing of emigrants and, more generically, of the population as a whole. While it is true that nineteenth-century emigrants were the victims of various forms of exploitation – from legal or illegal middlemen (emigration agents, recruiters, smugglers), transporters (ship captains and crew), employers –, the chief goal of the State’s actions was not their protection. Indeed, many of the vices denounced by Portuguese elites with regards to the Portuguese working abroad were also to be found in Portugal. Child labour, the sale of children and low salaries also existed inside the country’s borders. On the other hand, the purpose of these legal dispositions was to protect the interests of the agrarian bourgeoisie. The economic and political power of this faction of the elite was grounded on the existence of an abundant labour force in the fields. This excess of labour force meant low wages, favourable contracts with tenants or housekeepers, political ascendancy over a population caught in a situation of dependency. Besides, emigration was frowned upon by this segment of the elite because in some cases it blurred the rigid lines of social stratification (Martins 1998, 126-127), as some among the “Brazilians”7, upon their return to the country in possession of a sizeable patrimony, attempted to integrate the middle and upper classes. The construction of a new Portugal, of a Portugal that should redefine itself in the wake of its loss of Brazil, further legitimated the attempts to restrict emigration. Up until the 25 April 1974, Portuguese emigration was obstructed so as to favour the sending of colonists to Angola and Mozambique. A large portion of public discourses will contrast common destination countries for emigrants (Brazil, United States, France), described as infernal places, with the African colonies depicted as new Eldorados, in accordance with Portugal’s perceived historical mission.

 7

Derogatory designation of Portuguese emigrants returned from Brazil.

The Papers of State Power

27

Difficulties in emigration were exaggerated (as emigration to Brazil was reduced to white slavery and emigration to France to scheming smugglers and slums) while the hardships of African colonization were elided (hygienic and sanitary issues, high mortality rate among settlers, natural riches falling short of expectations) (Castelo 2007). Be that as it may, emigration flows to Africa were consistently lower than those heading to the Americas or, later on, to other European countries, this in spite of various legislative and procedural measures geared towards incentivizing African colonization (passports to the colonies become free in 1896, for instance) and towards discouraging emigration. The liberal State which was then being erected also attempted to hold on to an important segment of its population: male youth. Indeed, young men were the main target of the legislation on emigration. While an individual’s right to choose their residence is recognized, this right is limited by the citizen’s duties towards the nation, the first of which was to take part in the country’s defence. Legislation on the modalities of conscription underwent several changes in the nineteenth century. Yet, there is a running thread: military service, albeit not universal, lasts several years: 5, 6 or 7. Not all citizens are equal before the law. Recruits are chosen by drawing lots. During certain periods, youngsters can pay for a substitute or pay their way out of army duty. This legislation favours the well-off, who can thus legally avoid military service. For those who are unable to legally bypass conscription, emigration is the primary solution. However, a number of laws hinder the departure of young men. They are obliged to pay a (rather steep) deposit or pay for a substitute when their number is drawn and they become eligible to obtain a passport. In 1859, these prerequisites were demanded of any males of 14 years or over. Authors such as Oliveira Martins would come to perceive clandestine emigration as a form of resistance to military service and to the economic sacrifice it entailed for the youngster and his family. In the nineteenth century, another contradiction emerges in matters surrounding passports, a contradiction that followed from the struggle between the various factions of the economic, social and political elites. Some interests, favourable to emigration flows, champion the liberalization of passports or, even, the suppression of this document. Interests tied to international commerce, to maritime transportation and to the banking system, for instance, support this measure, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century. In the beginning of the latter, for example, trade associations mobilize for the abolition of passports, which they deem a humiliation to the Portuguese, a remnant of

28

Chapter One

the Old Regime, and an anomaly in the context of the Western world, where several countries had already eliminated the need for such a document. In 1905, through a petition, the Associação Comercial de Lojistas de Lisboa [Lisbon Retailers Trade Association], with Republican leanings (Alves 2012), demands the abolition of passports arguing that the ‘current state of things cannot persist, as it is absurd and harmful’. Legislation on passports is, according to this same association, ‘plainly adverse to the economic interests of the country and extremely pernicious from the point of view of our international standing’.8 Other trade associations, using a discourse influenced by economic liberalism, make the case that the mobility and circulation of individuals was in the country’s best interests. They also underline the fact that passports do nothing to protect emigrants or travellers. They are, so the argument went, but a source of income for the State and, above all, for the Civil Government clerks who, accordingly, mobilized to prevent the abolition of the passport and a subsequent loss of income (part of the revenue from the purchase of passports is distributed among civil government clerks). And thus one of the contradictions of the policy on emigration during a portion of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries comes into view. Benefitting from the existence of a numerous and lowpaid labour force – as agriculture and, later, industry employed a labour force in a situation of multiple occupation activity – a segment of the elite refuses emigration and calls on the State to limit it by way of passports. On the other hand, interests tied to international trade and the financial and banking systems – benefitting from emigrant remittances – champion the freedom of emigration and the abolition of passports. This contradiction, to a great extent, will be solved through a form of window dressing. On the one hand, public discourses, legislation and bureaucratic actions condemn and attempt to hinder emigration, both legal and undocumented. However, in practice, there is a tolerance towards both legal and clandestine emigration, which are never effectively repressed (Pereira 1981; Baganha 1988, 440). The mobilization of trade associations does not result in the abolition of the passport, as was the case in some European countries. While emigration is free, this document is still a prerequisite to leaving the country. The purpose is clear: to block the exodus of a rural and illiterate population. Indeed, to leave the country by sea one would need to go to the civil

 8

Petição da Associação Comercial dos lojistas de Lisboa, 24 July 1905, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Ministério do Reino/Direcção-Geral da Administração Politica e Civil, lot 5405, box 13.

The Papers of State Power

29

government, which in some regions, where the transportation network is extremely deficient, was in itself an expensive and laborious task. Furthermore, one would need to hand in the required documents (such as criminal record or documentation regarding one’s military status), which entailed other dislocations and bureaucratic procedures. In these dealings with civil servants, which are asymmetrical power relations, it was not uncommon for applicants to be forced to bribe clerks. Given the complexity of the process, which allows for a wide discretionary power on the part of civil servants, enabling the latter to receive payments under the table, passports agents become (onerous) middlemen between the applicants and the administrative structure. Rather than protecting the population, the requirement of a passport opens up a supplementary field of action to all the agents that prosper in the shadow of the State’s voluntary opacity (Cabral 2006). From 1834, the ministry of the Realm promulgates a series of documents that seek to impose the uniformity of passports and prevent young males from obtaining them illegally. As early as 1835, during the period in which the foundations of the liberal State were being laid, a decree imposes passport models, which were to be used by all travellers. In the wake of the civil wars (1828-1834), with guerillas loyal to D. Miguel and Absolutism still active in certain parts of the country, the mobility of the population is seen, through a conservative lens, as subversive: it is deemed necessary ‘to put an end to the audacity with which wicked men, who disturb the peace and public safety, roam the provinces’.9 This legislation follows the administrative reform designed by Mouzinho de Albuquerque. The prefects, sub-prefects and municipal administrators took the place of the Police General Intendant in granting passports, the first having the power to issue any kind of passport (both internal and for travelling abroad), the second, only internal passports valid for 3, 6 or 12 months, and the last transit passports and security cards to foreigners entering the country with a passport. After the September revolution10, in 1836, these procedures are somewhat modified. It falls on the general district administrators (later to be called civil governors) to grant passports for leaving the country by sea while municipal administrators are responsible for all remaining types of passport (internal and for departure through frontier posts, as well as passports for foreigners). For the most part, this disposition remains unchanged until 1863, and in the meantime was reiterated by the 1842

 9

Decree of 15 January 1835. The September Revolution of 1836 reinstated the 1822 Constitution.

10

30

Chapter One

administrative code. In 1863, two important documents are promulgated. The first one, on 31 January, puts an end to internal passports. National and foreign citizens may circulate freely within the national territory. Indeed, internal passports had become contradictory with the expansion of transportation networks promoted by the government after 1851, with the formation of a national economic space (Justino 1988), and with the relative pacification of Portuguese society (Cerezales 2011). This process of liberalization is completed with new regulations on the issuing of passports on 7 April. This regulation aimed to fuse into a single text the various piecemeal laws and regulations that had accumulated over the years. To obtain a passport with the civil governor, the applicants must be over 25 or have their military status in order, to prove they are not criminals, or to have their parents’ permission, when under 25, or from their husbands, in the case of married women, and to present, in the case of emigrants hired abroad, the ‘service provision’ contract or the ‘receipt proving they had paid for their passage’.11 This last requirement was supposedly aimed at protecting Portuguese workers in Brazil and avoiding what in Portugal was referred to as “white slavery”. However, and above all, it was aimed at blocking the exit of emigrants to Brazil (Pereira 1990, 736). At the end of the nineteenth century, a period in which the circulation of people and capital increases, there is a glaring contradiction in the granting of passports. On the one hand, some of the obstacles to the mobility of the affluent classes are removed. In 1896, foreigners, and among them wealthy tourists, no longer need a passport to enter the country. On the other hand, in 1907, a law which some deemed ‘outrageous’ (Pereira 1990, 736), exempts any Portuguese leaving the country or travelling to the overseas territories from obtaining a passport. The goals of this law were to foster the flux of travellers using the Lisbon port on their way to South America, to promote tourism to, and the colonization of, the overseas territories en route to “pacification”. However, an exception is made for individuals labelled as emigrants, a category which is defined as those that ‘travel in third class, or for a similar price, and with food and conditions analogous to it’.12 When this law was discussed in the Chamber of deputies, this prerequisite, inspired by a 1901 Italian law on emigration (Douki 2011), is not defended as a way to hinder emigration but rather as a means for the State to gauge the emigration flow,

 11

Regulamento geral de polícia para o trânsito no continente do reino e nas ilhas adjacentes, entrada de viandantes e sua saída para o estrangeiro, 7 April 1863. 12 Law of 25 April 1907.

The Papers of State Power

31

quantify it and devise the means necessary to provide support for it. Henceforth, the price of the passport is set at 7$00 réis – some deputies wanted it to be free of charge, as in Italy, since emigrants were poor – an amount that was thought not to present an obstacle. Indeed, in previous laws, the price of passports was set rather high, to discourage emigration. In 1905, the Commissioner of the Special emigration police, created in 1896 to fight against clandestine exits, recognized as much: the passport, a document that should serve as a protection and guarantee for all the country’s subjects abroad, has become a pretext for the exacting of an extremely burdensome tax, all the more revolting since it mostly falls on destitute individuals, as emigrants tend to be. Suffice it to recall that in no country in Europe, regardless of the regime to which the departure of national citizens is placed under, do the fiscal demands on this matter amount to even half of what is asked in Portugal.13

The Republic: breaks and continuities The Republicans that came to power in 1910 aimed to regenerate the fatherland, and to instil patriotism and civic consciousness in the Portuguese population. They would soon face an outbreak of emigration that reached its high point in the years 1911-1913, with a yearly average of 80 000 departures (1912 being the highest point, with 95 154 exits). While this migratory outbreak is, to a large extent, a result of the international migratory context (Italian emigration to Brazil began to diminish at the end of the 1890s and would henceforth shift predominantly to the United States and Western Europe), one can nonetheless read a political meaning into this movement. A few decades earlier, Oliveira Martins had presented emigration as ‘a barometer of national life, its oscillations registering the pressure levels of metropolitan well-being’ (Martins 1956, 207). And Republicans themselves had used mass-scale emigration at the end of the nineteenth century as ammunition in their critique of the Monarchy, a testimony to its inability to hold on to a population that was forced to flee the country in search of a decent life. Legislation on passports, namely the 1907 law, had been attacked by Republicans who, through the voice of Afonso Costa, described it as

 13

Relatório do comissário geral da polícia de imigração enviado ao conselheiro do secretário geral do Ministério do Reino, 16 August 1905, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Ministério do Reino/Direcção-Geral da Administração Politica e Civil, lot 5405, box 13.

32

Chapter One

‘despicable’. In 1911, the Republican leader put forward his thesis on emigration. In that work, Afonso Costa argued that in only a few years, Portuguese emigration will cast off its painful, pathological demeanour, and take on the features of a normal, eminently fruitful, phenomenon, closely bound, in both its origins and functions, as well as in its movement, to the very life of the nation. For the time being, we are still in the presence of an emigration that is essentially a cause for embarrassment and which is, without a doubt, a testimony to our profound physiological misery (Costa 1911, 74).

Two years later, in the face of a steep rise in emigration, Costa offered a solution for the exodus: The best remedy for emigration is for us to be prepared to administer the country as pure democrats, to democratize it, to demand from the poor as few sacrifices as possible, from the middle segment of the population a little more, and from the wealthy a larger portion than what they have so far contributed to public expenses, which is too little; but in none of these cases should sacrifices be more than they can bear. (Costa 1976, 280).

In line with his interventions in the Chamber of Deputies against the law of 1907, Afonso Costa’s position was that ‘the first reform to be carried out in our legislation is the abolition, pure and simple, of passports. To enter and exit the territory of the Republic should be declared free, both for national and foreign citizens’ (Costa 1911, 177-178). Besides this abolition of the passport, the Republican leader supported a better followup of emigrants, particularly illiterate ones, who should be offered protection by the Portuguese authorities. This protection entailed not only providing education to the Portuguese in Portugal but also to emigrants and their descendants through a network of Portuguese schools abroad. Yet this reform was not put in place by any of the various Republican governments. The passport remained the cornerstone of the State’s intervention in the field of emigration. The right to emigration was not explicitly included in the 1911 Constitution (Pereira 2011, 44). And, despite having been criticized by Republicans at the time of its foundation in 1896, nor were the police in charge of repressing emigration ever extinguished. The frantic change of governments did not favour a legislative change in terms of the rules and procedures for issuing passports. The ministers of the Interior tweaked a few details, by way of circular letters, but only in 1919 did a significant document modify the regime on passports. On 10 May 1919, Decree 5 624 promulgates new regulations on emigration and defines new rules for issuing passports. The split between the Portuguese that did not need a passport to leave the

The Papers of State Power

33

country and emigrants, who needed to apply for one, is re-established. Furthermore, passports are not free of charge: they cost 6$00 for men over 14 years old and 10$00 for women or men under 14. These prices are evidence of the will of Republican governments to privilege a masculine emigration – synonymous with remittances – and to hamper the emigration of family units.14 Emigrants are also forced to pay added taxes (such as a boarding tax), which encourages undocumented emigration. Anyone wishing to obtain a passport must meet the set requirements with regards to their military situation and possess due authorization from their parents, husbands and legal guardians, in the case of minors or married women. Some categories of the population are not allowed to leave the country at all: individuals over 60 years old who have no work contract, those whose physical condition renders them unable to work and earn a living, single women under 25 years old and not accompanied by their parents, legal guardians, relatives or “respectable” people, migrants leaving behind them unassisted underage children, and children under 14 years old unaccompanied by their parents. The actions of emigration and fare agents providing boat fares or assisting would-be emigrants in obtaining a passport with the civil government are now regulated. These agents must now have a license to practice, must pay a fee and should refrain from kindling ‘public excitement (over) emigration, as well as from deceitful and malicious propaganda in the individual or collective recruitment of emigrants’.15 As this quotation suggests, emigrants are always perceived as gullible creatures, devoid of critical thought, easily misled by false promises. In the following year, the liberal period on the matter of passports, at least as far as the rich were concerned, comes to an end. Decree 6 912 extends ‘to all national and foreign citizens the requirement of a passport to enter or leave the territory of the Republic.’16 Far from having put an end to passports, Republicans once again imposed it on anyone crossing the borders.

The New State: the refused passport Between 1926 and 1933, Portuguese emigration undergoes a seachange. On the one hand, the cycle of massive transatlantic migrations is interrupted. In the wake of the Immigration Act of 1924, in the United

 14

The rates would increase in 1924, from 30$00 to 50$00. Decree n. 5624 of 10 May 1919. 16 Decree n. 6912 of 9 September 1920. 15

34

Chapter One

States, which created a quota system (Portugal having a quota of merely 503 emigrants) and of protectionist policies on Brazilian work in the early 1930s, we see a very steep decline in Portuguese emigration. From 43 186 emigrants in 1929, we come to a mere 6 033 in 1931. In the 1930s, not once did departures go beyond the 18 000 mark. In 1943, emigration reaches its lowest point in the contemporary era: 893 emigrants. On the other hand, Portuguese emigration is no longer merely transatlantic but also European. As we have seen, emigration is mostly perceived as a transatlantic phenomenon. Accordingly, surveillance is focused primarily on maritime exit points. Passport controls were rather slack on land exit points. Only during the Republic, in the face of the threat of monarchic invasions (and through the actions of Paiva Couceiro, a monarchist officer), are land border outposts subject to a tighter control. While the years of transition from the military dictatorship to the New State are a period of emigration drought, the subject is not forgotten and several modifications are made to the existing legislation. While there was no reference to emigration in the 1911 Constitution, the 1933 Constitution (Araújo 2007) stipulates: ‘The State has both the right and the obligation to coordinate and regulate economic and social life from above, in view of the following goals: (…) to foster the population of the national territories, to protect emigrants and to discipline emigration’ (Miranda 1984, 262). In the articles on fundamental guarantees, where several liberal principles are stipulated, even if they were not at all protected under the Dictatorship (Cruz 1988, 51), the right to emigration is absent. Indeed, the New State is the regime, from 1834 onwards, in which the right to emigration was least respected and in which legislation and practice concerning emigration movements were the most restrictive. This animus towards emigration, however, did not prevent its numbers from reaching their highest point towards the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s (1970 being the peak year, with 183 205 people leaving the country). But those departures were for the most part illegal. In what constitutes a clear sign of the restrictions on the freedom of emigration, matters related to mobility are gradually passed onto the hands of the political police forces (of which there many – at times concurrently – between 1926 and 1933, the date of the creation of the Polícia de Vigilância e Defesa do Estado [Police for the Surveillance and Defence of the State] (Ribeiro 1995)). The issue of mobility is tied to that of subversion. Those wishing to leave Portugal and those entering its territory are perceived as potential threats to order. The establishment of the dictatorship restricts individual freedoms and, among them, the right to exit the country and to choose to live in another. The nationalist and corporative

The Papers of State Power

35

regime stresses national unity – the single-party was in fact called União Nacional [National Union]. The Portuguese are forced to remain in their homeland, to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the (dictatorially imposed) national interest and all foreign things are looked at with suspicion. Once emigration begins to follow a path towards democratic countries such as France, the fear of a spread of revolutionary ideas into Portugal grows within certain sectors of public opinion close to the dictatorship and to the political police. In the wake of World War II, once hostilities came to an end and the process of reconstruction of European countries was underway, the Portuguese government foresees the beginning of a new emigration flow, and a new structure is created within the Ministry of the Interior: the Junta de Emigração [Emigration Council]. This institution is founded through Decree 36 558, dated 28 October 1947. Its function was to manage emigration, and for that purpose the Junta is given the monopoly on the issuing of emigration passports. Henceforth, civil governments are only to issue ordinary passports, also known as tourist passports. The Council fully replaces the various intermediaries in the field of emigration, such as tourism and passport agents. No intermediary can now operate between the emigration applicant and the State, for which they will be subject to the charge of enticement to emigration. Furthermore, no advertising of employments abroad is allowed on Portuguese territory. Emigration is thus partially nationalized. Emigration applicants should go the municipal council to fill in the necessary paperwork in order to obtain an emigration passport. The Municipal Council, in turn, sends the application to the Emigration Council, in Lisbon, which decides whether the passport is to be granted or not. The Emigration Council, which did not have enough staff to handle every request – a shortage which did not result from a lack of resources, as the granting of passports afforded it a steady profit year after year – was scrupulous in issuing emigration passports. The Council’s chairman between 1949 and 1968, a military officer, used a string of subterfuges to block legal emigration, by creating regulations which in fact prevented a large portion of the Portuguese population from gaining access to a passport (Pereira 2009). Overall, arbitrariness was a common trait in the issuing of passports under the New State. The means and procedures for obtaining a passport were opaque, leaving a wide berth for discretionary power on the part of the Emigration Council agents. The granting system as a whole was devised to prevent the popular classes from leaving the

36

Chapter One

country and to submit their mobility to the scrutiny of the agents from the Ministry of the Interior. The 1944 Decree that regulates passports established a distinction between the different types of passports, the two main ones being the common passport and the emigration passport. The first could not be granted to ‘industry workers or rural workers’17, or to anyone wishing to emigrate. In the two articles on emigration passports, there was merely a reference to previous legislation, with no indication of which precise document one should consult. Given that this Decree was opaque, another one followed in the space of a few months, with a view to clarifying matters. It offered little or no clarification. The establishment of the Emigration Council did not make the “rules of the game” any less obscure. The Decree explicitly stated that no steady rules could be fixed for the time being. It took fifteen years for a new text to lay out the rules for obtaining a passport. For the duration of those fifteen years, the Emigration Council operated in the absence of any clear guidelines for issuing passports. While the subsequent 1962 Decree did stipulate those requirements, it failed nonetheless to include some of the procedures that the Council did in fact routinely demand. For example, there is no mention of the information bulletins that mayors were expected to fill in to grant or deny passports to emigration applicants. Also, it was standard practice for the chairman of the Emigration Council to add new prerequisites that came into effect following a mere administrative order from the Minister of the Interior. A 1969 report acknowledged the need for a re-examination of the legal and administrative regulations currently in force on matters of emigration, so as to discontinue as swiftly as possible the anomalies and contradictions of the existing system – an overlap in legal and procedural norms, promulgated at different times and in view of distinct goals, with administrative provisions whose practical reach is surprisingly equivalent to those same norms.18

The Emigration Council develops a mercantilist viewpoint on emigration: the latter should be restricted because, so it was argued, Portugal has a shortage of labour power. In fact, emigration removed the surplus of labour power which sustained the economic and political power of the owners of large and medium estates in the North of the country, as well as its small and medium-scale industry (Pereira 2012). Emigration

 17

Decree n. 33918 dated 5 September 1944. Report “Estudo dos problemas da emigração” from the deputy Minister of State for the Presidency of the Counsel, 9 June 1969, IAN-TT/Presidência do Conselho de Marcelo Caetano, box 921. 18

The Papers of State Power

37

pushed wages up, and reduced the rural populations’ dependency on the local notables. The Emigration Council was always careful not to get on the wrong side of the provincial elite. The Council attributed a significant role to municipalities in the administrative process dealing with legal emigration. In practice, they carried out the function of delegation offices to the Council: they received emigration applicants and supplied them with the list of documents required to obtain an emigration passport. However, the power of municipal clerks did not mean that the municipal council’s role was that of a neutral agent, a compliant handmaiden to the central State. Municipal agents could in fact, by either expediting or slowing down the procedures, through their discourse or by demanding hidden retributions, easily discourage legal emigration applicants (Cutileiro 1977).19 Many among the undocumented emigrants arrested in Portugal, Spain or France confessed to having emigrated illegally because they had been told by municipal agents that they did not meet the legal requirements needed to obtain a passport or because they had been asked to pay an exorbitant fee. The Municipal Councils held an even more important resource in the regulation of legal emigration. The Emigration Council did not recruit workers for temporary or definitive emigration without the municipality’s previous accord. Mayors either took or did not take on the organization of recruitment depending on their personal agendas, their views on the local economy or on public order. This choice was also articulated with the views of other notables, or framed within a clientelistic logic: an emigration passport was a highly valuable privilege that local oligarchs could arrange for their clients, thus cementing their power. In Alentejo, for instance, Municipal councils used temporary emigration as a way to employ rural wage-labourers during the periods when there was no work for them in the large landed estates and also as a way to prevent social unrest caused by lack of work. The subjection of passport granting to the interests of the rural notables from the north and central regions of the country prompted criticism even within the State apparatus itself. For the sectors that defended the modernization of the economic fabric and for those that thought undocumented emigration and its consequences (illegal border crossing which became a run-of-the-mill fait-divers in the pages of French newspapers, the growth of slums in France, etc.) painted a damning image of Portugal, the liberalization of passport granting was a priority. In other words, the barriers to the issuing of passports only contributed to

 19

On municipalities in the New State, see Paulo Silveira e Sousa, “Caciquismo e poder local na literatura sob o State Novo”, in Oliveira 1996, pp. 325-341.

38

Chapter One

clandestine emigration and lined the pockets of smugglers. For some senior clerks, the liberal granting of passports would circumvent the main harmful effects of emigration: the “dramas” of clandestine emigration, Portugal’s bad press in other countries, the sedentarization of emigrants abroad, who, because they were undocumented and in debt (to smugglers), did not return to the country, cutting their ties to both families and nation. By emigrating with passports, emigrants did not need to incur a debt and, if they failed to find a job abroad, could easily return to Portugal. However, the chairman of the Emigration Council was always adamant in his refusal to facilitate the legal procedures for the granting of passports and continued to create new regulations to limit the number of individuals that could gain access to proper documentation. The chairman stated that if access to a passport was easier, most of the individuals from the lower classes would emigrate, leaving Portuguese employers to face a shortage of workers and the Armed Forces deprived of soldiers. The conservative stance of the Emigration Council, which ran against the grain of the modernizing economic policy pursued by Marcello Caetano (Pereira 2009), led the government to extinguish the institution in 1970. The Council was then replaced by a Secretariado Nacional de Emigração [National Secretariat on Emigration], which, being formally a part of the Presidency of the Council, was under the supervision of the Ministry of Corporations. The view of the emigrant as worker became prevalent, replacing the view of the emigrant as a threat to public order. The emigration passport was no longer issued by the Ministry of the Interior. However, in the years 1970 to 1974, emigration was still predominantly clandestine. Emigrants left the country without obtaining passports. Emigration policy remained ambivalent. While passports were not granted to emigration applicants in Portugal, those that found a way to leave the country could gain access to the precious document abroad. Indeed, while in the 1960s undocumented emigrants were forced to return to Portugal – their passport being valid only for returning to the country – in order to regularize their situation and obtain an emigration passport, from 1970 onwards, with Decree 347/70, clandestine emigrants were able to obtain tourism passports valid for a period of five years. The process of granting of passports was thus moved abroad and the distinction between an emigration passport and a tourism passport became less clear-cut.

Conclusion After the revolution of 25 April 1974, the emigration passport, often considered a “second-rate” passport, was abolished. All Portuguese citizens

The Papers of State Power

39

could obtain a passport, which was the same for everyone (with the exception of specific passports such as diplomatic ones). With Portugal’s entry into the European Economic Community and the Schengen area, the issue of passports gained a European scope. To circulate within the Schengen area, passports were now unnecessary and, as they were gradually homogenized for reasons of security, or so it was argued, allowed for a rather fluid circulation across the planet and through its various checkpoints, namely in airports (Bayart 2004). Be that as it may, this free circulation of European citizens has as its corollary the closing down of Europe to non-European migrants. For the Portuguese authorities, and namely for the Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras [Border and Alien Service], created in 2000, the passport became first and foremost an instrument in the control of the entry of non-European foreigners. To be sure, immigration into Portugal does not date from the end of the twentieth century and the issue of the passports of foreigners wanting to enter into Portugal had already had its own dramatic episodes (such as the actions of the Portuguese Consul in Bordeaux, who granted visas to thousands of Jews just before the full invasion of France by the German army (Chalante 2011)). Yet, with the Europeanization of immigration policies and the common effort against the entry of non-European populations, passports and visa systems became one of the key instruments in the regulation of migration flows into Europe (Rodier 2012). So much so that for descendants of European emigrants in South America, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese passports became valuable documents, a way to travel more easily, to possibly flee from the political turmoil that has regularly afflicted that sub-continent, to benefit from better protection abroad and, in certain periods, to breach the walls which Fortress-Europe has erected against immigrants from the South.

Bibliography Alves, Daniel. A República atrás do balcão. Os lojistas de Lisboa e o fim da Monarquia (1870-1910). Lisboa: Cosmos, 2012. Araújo, António. A Lei de Salazar. Coimbra: Tenacitas, 2007. Baganha, Maria Ioannis. “Social Marginalization, Government Policies and Emigrants’ Remittances, Portugal 1870-1930”, in Estudos e ensaios em homenagem a Vitorino Magalhães Godinho. Lisboa: Sá da Costa, 1988. Bayart, Jean-François. Le Gouvernement du Monde. Une critique politique de la mondialisation. Paris: Fayard, 2004. Bourdieu, Pierre. Sur l’Etat. Paris: Seuil/Raisons d’Agir, 2012.

40

Chapter One

Cabral, Manuel Villaverde. “Despotismo de Estado e Sociedade Civil Real em Portugal: distância ao poder, comunicação política e familismo amoral”, in Razão, Tempo e Tecnologia. Estudos em homenagem a Hermínio Martins (eds. Manuel Villaverde Cabral, José Luís Garcia e Helena Mateus Jerónimo). Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2006. Cardoso, José Luis. Pensar a Economia em Portugal. Digressões históricas. Lisboa: Difel, 1997. Castel, Robert. Les Métamorphoses de la Question Sociale. Une chronique du salariat. Paris: Fayard, 1995. Castelo, Cláudia. Passagens para África: o povoamento de Angola e Moçambique com naturais da metrópole (c. 1920-1974). Porto: Afrontamento, 2007. Cerezales, Diego Palacios. Portugal à Coronhada. Protesto popular e ordem pública nos séculos XIX e XX. Lisboa: Tinta da China, 2011. Chalante, Susana. “O discurso do Estado Salazarista perante o Indesejável (1933-1939)”, in Análise Social 198, 2011. Costa, Afonso. Estudos de Economia Nacional, vol. I. O problema da emigração. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1911. —. Discursos Parlamentares, 1911-1914 (Compilação, prefácio e notas, A.H. de Oliveira Marques). Amadora: Bertrand, 1976. Costa, Fernando Dores. “Formação da Força Militar durante a Guerra da Restauração”, in Penélope 24, 2011. Cruz, Manuel Braga da. O Partido e o Estado no Salazarismo. Lisboa: Presença, 1988. Cutileiro, José. Ricos e Pobres no Alentejo. Uma sociedade rural portuguesa. Lisboa: Sá da Costa, 1977. Denis, Vincent. Une Histoire de l’Identité, France, 1715-1815. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2008. Douki, Caroline. “Protection sociale et mobilité transatlantique: les migrants italiens au début du XXe siècle”, in Annales HSS 2, 2011. Dufoix, Stéphane. “Un Pont Par-Dessus la Porte. Extraterritorialisation et transétatisation des identifications nationales”, in Loin des yeux, près du cœur. Les Etats et leurs expatriés (eds. Stéphane Dufoix, Carine Guerassimoff, Anne de Tinguy). Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2010. Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et Punir. Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. —. Sécurité, Territoire, Population. Cours au collège de France (19771978). Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2004. Froissart, Chloé. “Le Système du Hukou: pilier de la croissance chinoise et du maintien du PCC au pouvoir”, in Les études du CERI, 149, 2008.

The Papers of State Power

41

Hibou, Béatrice. Anatomie Politique de la Domination. Paris: La Découverte, 2011. Hirschman, Albert. The Rhetoric of Reaction: perversity, futility, jeopardy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Justino, David. A Formação do Espaço Económico Nacional. Portugal: 1810-1913. Lisboa: Vega, 1988. Khoudour-Castéras, David. “Welfare State and Labor Mobility: the Impact of Bismarck’s Social Legislation on German Emigration before World War I”, in The Journal of Economic History 68/1, 2008. Kuhnle, Stein. “Emigration, Democratization and the Rise of the European Welfare States”, in Mobilization, Center-Periphery Structures and Nation-Building. A volume in commemoration of Stein Rokkan (ed. Per Torsvik). Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1981. Mann, Michael. “The autonomous Power of the State: its origins, mechanisms and results”, in Archives Européennes de Sociologie 25, 1984. Martins, Hermínio. Classe, Status e Poder e outros ensaios sobre o Portugal Contemporâneo. Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 1998. Martins, Joaquim Oliveira. Obras Completas. Fomento rural e emigração. Lisboa: Guimarães Editores, 1956. Mengin, Françoise. “Legs Coloniaux et Formation de l’Etat dans le Monde Chinois”, in Legs Colonial et Gouvernance Contemporaine, vol.1 (ed. Jean-François Bayart). Paris: Fasopo, 2005. Miranda, Jorge. As Constituições Portuguesas. Lisboa: Livraria Petrony, 1984. Monteiro, Nuno Gonçalo. Elites e Poder: entre o Antigo Regime e o Liberalismo. Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2007. Noiriel, Gérard. “Etat-Providence et “Colonisation du Monde Vécu”. L’exemple de la loi de 1910 sur les retraites ouvrières et paysannes”, in Etat, Nation et Immigration. Vers une histoire du pouvoir. Paris: Gallimard, 2005. —. Introduction à la Socio-Histoire. Paris: La Découverte, 2006. Oliveira, César de (ed.). História dos Municípios e dos Poderes Locais. Dos finais da idade média à União Europeia. Lisboa: Círculo de Leitores, 1996. Pereira, Maria Halpern. A Política Portuguesa da Emigração 1850-1930. Lisboa: A Regra do Jogo, 1981. —. “Algumas Observações Complementares sobre Política de Emigração”, in Análise Social 108-109, 1990.

42

Chapter One

—. “A Primeira República e a Política de Emigração”, in Um Passaporte para a Terra Prometida (ed. Fernando de Sousa et alii). Porto: Fronteira do Caos, 2011. Pereira, Victor. “Ineficiência, Fragilização e Duplicidade. Modos de governar no Velho Estado Novo (1957-1968)”, in Ler História 56, 2009. —. “Emigração e Desenvolvimento da Previdência Social em Portugal”, in Análise Social 192, 2009. —. La Dictature de Salazar face à l’Émigration. L’Etat portugais et ses migrants en France (1957-1974). Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2012. Picq, Jean. Une Histoire de l’Etat en Europe. Pouvoir, justice et droit du Moyen Age à nos jours. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2009. Rawls, John. Paix et Démocratie. Le droit des peuples et la raison publique. Paris: La Découverte, 2006. Ribeiro, Maria da Conceição. A Polícia Política no Estado Novo, 19261945. Lisboa: Estampa, 1995. Rodier, Claire. Xénophobie Business. A quoi servent les contrôles migratoires? Paris: La Découverte, 2012. Sassen, Saskia. Guests and Aliens. New York: The New Press, 1999. Scott, James. Seeing like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. —. The Art of Not Being Governed. An anarchist history of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Sennelart, Michel. “La science de la police et l’Etat de bien-être (Wohlfahrtsstaat) en Allemagne”, in Histoire raisonnée de la philosophie morale et politique (ed. Alain Caillé). Paris: La Découverte, 2001. Silva, Manuel Carlos. Resistir e Adaptar-se. Constrangimentos e estratégias camponesas no noroeste de Portugal. Porto: Afrontamento, 1998. Spector, Céline. “Le Concept de Mercantilisme”, in Revue de métaphysique et de morale 39, 2003. Tilly, Charles. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime”, in Bringing the State Back In (eds. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschmeyer, Theda Skocpol). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Torpey, John. The Invention of the Passport. Surveillance, Citizenship and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Voltaire. Dictionnaire Philosophique. Paris: Flammarion, 1964.

The Papers of State Power

43

Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation”, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (eds. Hans Heinrich Gerth, Charles Wright Mills). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946. Zolberg, Aristide. “The Next Waves: migration theory for a changing world”, in International Migration Review 23/3, 1989. —. “Un Reflet du Monde. Les migrations internationales en perspective historique”, in Le Défi Migratoire. Questions de relations internationales (eds. Bertrand Badie, Catherine Withol de Wenden). Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1994. —. “Exit Revolution”, in Citizenship and Those Who Leave. The politics of emigration and expatriation (eds. Nancy Green, François Weil). Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007.

CHAPTER TWO WEAK STATE AND CIVIC CULTURE IN LIBERAL PORTUGAL (1851-1926) DIEGO PALACIOS CEREZALES

‘The Police in England, the Gendarmerie in France and the famous Civil Guard in Spain’, wrote a Portuguese commentator in 1863, ‘they all protect the citizenry in their respective countries. That is how it should be’. Portugal didn’t then have any national police force, but the necessity of some improvements in policing was a common theme in the Portuguese public debate. Therefore, he was confident that Parliament would soon legislate for it (Lenoir 1863, 21-22). Since 1867, scattered police forces were created for the main cities, and yet, even if Portugal was a rural country – 86% of the population lived in villages with less than 10 000 inhabitants –, the deployment of a gendarmerie did not come until half a century later, after the Republican revolution of 1910. This, in the general context of the institutional development of contemporary continental Europe, was a very late date indeed. A comparison with other European countries in this respect highlights the singularity of the Portuguese case. Different varieties of gendarmerie had taken root in most of Europe since the beginning of the nineteenth century. The French original model, of a centralized military police specialized in rural patrol, was first exported during the Napoleonic Wars: Bavaria and Prussia adopted its own forces in 1812, followed in 1814 by the Low Countries, Piedmont, Tyrol and the Austrian Lombardy. The Spanish Civil Guard, in turn, was created in 1844. After the suppression of the 1848 revolutions, Vienna’s government deployed its gendarmerie all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In addition, in the newly unified Italy of the 1870s, the Carabinieri, already in place in Piedmont, became one of the main tools for the administrative homogenization of the country (Emsley 1999, Luc 2002). During the second half of the nineteenth century, gendarmerie forces were a common feature of the European landscape. This has usually been

Weak State and Civic Culture in Liberal Portugal (1851-1926)

45

linked with political centralization, which in turn has been understood under different lenses (Berkley 1970). Some commentators equate centralization with authoritarian imposition and with the stifling of local life, while some others stress the role of the central State’s institutions in the disarticulation of parochialism and the construction of a national social and political arena, accompanied by the concomitant emergence of a participative political culture.1 According to the latter interpretation, the penetration of State institutions into the countryside allowed for the gradual transformation of the political cultures of isolated populations, their conversion from locally-minded and dependent subjects into citizens that fully exercise their civic and political rights (Molina and Cabo 2009, Weber 1976, Almond and Verba 1963). Both readings have some empirical backing. It is thus difficult to measure the specific impact of gendarmeries in nineteenth-century social and political life, which also depended on other aspects of the State’s presence in the territory and within communities. All over Europe, the gendarmeries’ effect was combined with that of political representation, courts, fiscal apparatus, schoolteachers, communications, and all the pieces of the State’s infrastructural power that became a usual feature of postrevolutionary administrations.2 The few comparative studies on gendarmerie forces do not address how their deployment affected civic culture, but have, rather, stressed their role in social pacification. Morrison compared US’s Alaska and Canada’s Yukon during the gold rush and, according to him, the Royal Mounted Police allowed for a less violent civil interaction on the Canadian side of the border (Morrison 1974). That very same idea was a common theme in Portugal during the final years of the nineteenth century: the Portuguese army officers who sometimes were deployed as police compared their country with Spain and discovered that on their side of the border 20 soldiers were needed to police a rural fair and prevent brawls, while in Spain two civil guards were generally enough (Machado 1888).3 Although they are difficult to measure, it is reasonable to assume that the presence and operations of a gendarmerie will always produce effects on social and political life. Clive Emsley notes that, had France not deployed such a force, it was ‘unlikely that there would have been a descent into anarchy and/or constant revolution’, also remarking that ‘[...]

 1

For the stifling thesis in the Spanish case, see López Garrido (2004); for a critical appraisal, see Gerald Blaney (2005). 2 On the notion of infrastructural power, see Mann (1989); Giddens (1985). 3 A retrospective memoir of the border differences in “A GNR rural e a sua influência na conducta das populações” in O Soldado 2, December 1940, p. 3.

46

Chapter Two

none of this is to imply that if [the gendarmes] had not been present, French society would still have developed precisely in the way that it did’ (Emsley 1999, 145). It is safe to suppose that, in Portugal, the absence of gendarmerie during the longstanding Constitutional Monarchy (1834-1910) left specific traces in several aspects of the political development of the country: in the strength of the presence of the State, in the relations between local and national elites, as well as between the local elites and the popular classes and, finally, in the configuration of civic culture. As various studies on social trust suggest, the existence of enforcement agencies – able to monitor compliance and to punish free riding – enhances the possibilities of cooperation, generates legitimacy and boosts the production of public goods (Levi 1996 and 1997, Braithwaite and Levi 1998). Contemporary studies in Portuguese political development reveal that in quantitative terms and internal organisation, the nineteenth-century Portuguese civil administration was not very different from its European counterparts, only slightly smaller and more centralized in the capital (Almeida 2007). Yet, in qualitative terms, it is easy to grasp that without the support of a gendarmerie force, the territorial presence of the civil administration was weaker. As Martens Ferrão – a key but unsuccessful reformer – said in 1862: ‘lacking in strength, risking their lives if they intended to do their duty’ the government officials, court magistrates and tax collectors had less resources in their everyday negotiation with the locally powerful and the communities.4 On the other hand, the civic culture of today's Portugal presents a number of characteristics, such as a deep mistrust in public officials, widespread fear of speaking against the authorities, and what a leading sociologist calls ‘generalized distance to power’, all of which make Portugal one of the less socially and politically mobilized societies of Western Europe (Cabral 2003). The widespread ‘disinterest in politics’ and ‘lack of civic manners’ was already noted by late nineteenth-century commentators, and contrasts with the long constitutional history of the country, with an almost uninterrupted parliamentary life from 1834 to 1926 (Soares 1883). In line with the literature on social trust, this text proposes that the deficits of the State's infrastructural presence during the 60 years of Constitutional Monarchy, epitomized by the lack of gendarmerie, may partly account for this result. In addition, once this deficit was overcome during the Republic (1910-1926), the gendarmerie served Salazar's long-

 4

Marténs Ferrão, DCD, no 92, 14 June 1862, p. 1645.

Weak State and Civic Culture in Liberal Portugal (1851-1926)

47

lasting dictatorship, becoming not a tool of civic integration, but one of authoritarian control. In order to explore the link between the weakness of the State during the nineteenth century – that is, its inability to gain autonomy from social elites – and the non-participatory political culture of much of the Portuguese population, this text follows the configurations of elite power that prevented the formation of a gendarmerie for half a century and reinforced the landed elites’ patronage and control over the peasant poor. It also explores how this configuration weakened the fiscal capabilities of the Portuguese government, preventing it from improving its penetration in society and from providing education and other social services that could have empowered the lower classes.

Liberal Portugal and the reconstruction of the State After defeating the Absolutists in the 1832-1834 civil war, Portuguese Liberals sought the consolidation of their power and, with that in view, they rebuilt the State, devising new structures for social control, recruitment and tax collection. The territory was divided into districts, inspired by the French départements, and a government-appointed civil governor was placed at the head of each of them.5 Yet, the following two decades were crippled by an ongoing political crisis, constitutional changes and renewed civil war, all of which impeded the consolidation of the new institutions. Amidst those struggles, the government created several forces, such as a Corpo de Segurança Pública [Public Security Corps] for every district and a citizens’ militia called the Guarda Nacional [National Guard]. The trouble was that arming these organizations also meant arming the same factions that took part in the internal strife of those years (Palacios Cerezales 2011). As one civil governor recalled later, ‘some of the Public Security Corps became true guerrillas’ (Mascarenhas 1859, 6). The general disarmament of the population and the disbandment of both the National Guard and the Public Security Corps allowed for the political life of the country to enter into a more peaceful phase, even if it also meant that from then on the Army would play a central role in the policing of Portugal. Since 1842 there were no police forces outside Lisbon and Porto, but the centralising drive that marked Portuguese liberalism also meant that most of the policing duties were to be performed by the central government delegates. Locally elected municipal authorities were only responsible for



5 For the detail of this projects and its many internal modifications, see Silveira (1997); Manique (1989); Tengarrinha (2002).

48

Chapter Two

administrative policing duties such as inspecting food markets and enforcing local regulations. Public order and criminal policing were all in the hands of the national government provincial delegates, the civil governors. In the two largest cities, Lisbon and Porto, those governors relied on a professional police force, the fully militarized Municipal Guard, whose main duties were patrolling the streets, policing popular gatherings and providing muscle for the enforcement of judicial warrants and sentences. For the rest of the country, instead of creating a national police force, the Ministério do Reino [Home Office] entrusted the policing authority to a top-down hierarchy of delegates under the supervision of the civil governor: an administrator in every municipality – usually recruited among the locally rooted gentry – and one regedor [sheriff] under him in every parish. In addition, the parish sheriffs were assisted by a number of cabos de polícia [constables], one for every eight houses.6 One commentator, who believed that the country was organized following the prescriptions of the administrative code, calculated that in 1844 there were 4 000 parish sheriffs and 30 000 constables all over the country, and formally the system could appear as a vast and powerful panopticon, a pyramid of power running top-down from the heights of the home office in Lisbon to the most remote mountain parish (Macedo 1984, Costa 1935, Catroga 2006, Moutinho 2001). In fact, ‘the rays of central power are weak and colourless as they reach the extremities’, in the words of Aveiro’s civil governor in 1858.7 The vast number of parish sheriffs and constables were a theoretical proposition never put in place. In addition, those men were part-time non-professional police, and they were not trained, armed, paid, uniformed, or even integrated in a well-defined command structure. Constables had no working schedule and were not paid for their services; instead, they were at the orders of the administrator whenever he needed them, and only for services within the parish in which they lived. Parish constables were supposed to serve on a voluntary basis. In addition, the spirit of the law assumed that these voluntary offices would be held by the socially prominent, but the gentry very often refused to serve.8 As there were not many volunteers, the administrator could force any citizen to serve as a police officer for a year. Sometimes, ‘appointing

 6

A similar system had been organized in 1810 by the absolutist Intendência Geral de Polícia, but only for the city of Lisbon, Lousada (1998). 7 Relatório sobre o Estado da Administração Pública (REAP), Imprensa Nacional, Lisboa, 1858, Aveiro. 8 REAP, 1864, Beja.

Weak State and Civic Culture in Liberal Portugal (1851-1926)

49

someone parish constable meant creating a new political foe’.9 Nominations for policing service were in effect a kind of punishment, and during the election process the political opponents’ supporters could be appointed constables ‘and receive orders to guard their own houses in order to prevent them from campaigning’. In the 1880 election, ‘in Vila Nova de Gaia 580 parish constables were named; in Vila do Conde, 605; in Sintra, 638, and most of them because they opposed the government’.10 Given the refusal to serve by the socially prominent, added to the coercive nature of the nomination and the elasticity of the corporal’s obligations, the administrators used their power to nominate constables to reinforce their own patronage networks.11 As a result, the parish constables used to be conscripted from the ranks of the politically less powerful, usually workingmen ‘who lost their subsistence wages every time they performed a policing service’.12 The quality and reliability of this police were low. As a former civil governor put it, ‘the constables provide a valuable policing service… that is, when they themselves were not arrested for stabbing someone in a tavern’.13 The provincial civil governors yearly reports repeat the same idea: the system was ‘a simulacrum of police’; the constables were workingmen with no motivation and they did not even trust them enough to grant them arms permits.14 Parish constables had no influence over the rest of the population and, as fiscal authorities often complained, whenever open conflicts erupted they were prone to side with the people they were close to (Roma, 1857).15 The constables’ shortcomings as police officers meant that whenever the authorities needed to capture a criminal, police a rural fair, a seasonal market or a court, or to keep civil unrest in check, they requested military support. During the whole nineteenth century the military were the central piece in the policing of the Portuguese provinces. This was a constant

 9

REAP, 1865, Portalegre. Idem, 1860, Horta. DCD, 16 Jan 1880, p. 461; more cases in DCD, 6 Jul 1897; But the practice can traced as far back as 1844 (Macedo 1984). 11 Um liberal (1858, 87). 12 REAP, 1858, Castelo Branco. 13 Conde de Cavalheiros, DCP, 27-04-1878, 598. 14 REAP 1864, Funchal; REAP, 1864, Braga; REAP, 1862, Coimbra. Cf. Bulhões (1867, 124); Mendonça (1866, 25). In Spain a very similar organisation was established in 1844, but the simultaneous deployment of the civil guard meant it played a rather secondary role in the policing of the country; cf. Morales Villanueva (1980, 80-81). 15 AMR-ANTT, L 38 nº 904 (3ª rep.), letter of 23 July 1888. 10

50

Chapter Two

reality, even if neither the military nor the civil governors were keen on the army being used as police. The army only performed policing duties at the civil authorities’ request, but the latter complained that, once the military received their orders, they didn’t have a say on how the policing operations were conducted. For the civil governors, the military as policemen were not flexible enough and, as their network of barracks was not designed for policing purposes, they often arrived too late.16 For the military, in turn, acting as “vile policemen” was not their true mission. They resented the fact that the regiments were subdivided into policing detachments, which meant that they could hardly be trained for external and colonial war: ‘the esprit de corps vanished’ and ‘discipline suffered’ (Salgado 1862, Sá da Bandeira 1866). According to Fontes Pereira de Melo, the most prominent Portuguese statesman of the second half of the nineteenth century, this arrangement meant that Portugal did not have ‘either a true police or a true army’ (Coelho 1877).

Criminality and conflict The absence of a national police and the ineptitude of the constables and the army as police forces did not mean that crime was widespread in the Portuguese countryside. The existing data do not allow for meaningful comparisons, but contemporary commentators usually agreed that crime rates were low (Vaz 1998). In addition, political violence, violent patronage and highway robberies that had been usual in the aftermath of the civil wars of the 1830s and 1840s sharply diminished during the 1850s. When the infamously violent political patron João Brandão stood trial in 1869, after twenty years of impunity, his methods had already ran their course and, as a civil governor had said some years before, ‘assassination was no longer the law of the land’ (Sobral 1990). Criminality and social conflict in rural Portugal presented a range of regional differences, the main cleavage splitting the smallholding Portugal of the Algarve and the north of the country, on one side, and the Alentejo, the large landed estates region south of the Tagus river, on the other. In the former, most of the population were small proprietors, while in the latter there was a very substantial share of landless peasants.17 The civil governors in smallholding Portugal praised the poor illiterate peasants’

 16

REAP, 1858, Beja. This distribution of the land and the question of North-South cleavage are addressed in Chapter 7 in this book. 17

Weak State and Civic Culture in Liberal Portugal (1851-1926)

51

gentle manners, attributing the low criminality rates to their religiosity.18 Some were worried about local customs, which included moral economy practices that violated private property rights – such as the collective use of private fields (gleaning and grazing) after harvest, or the free appropriation of fruit that had fallen from the trees – but those problems only concerned some larger landowners and, despite their incidence in the economic prospects of the more entrepreneurial peasants, did not amount to a crime (Cabral 1974). There were some fears about wandering gypsies, and the populations often took part in fiscal and food riots, but there were no highway robbers or other security worries. In the Alentejo, in turn, the roads were also safe, but the landowners were concerned with the floating population of landless workers that could not find an occupation during winter, and who very often settled in groups within the larger estates and asked for charity, threatening to set fire to the properties in case they did not get roof and food (Oliveira Martins 1956). These men, known as malteses, were seen as the main menace to private property, but they did not pose a serious threat to social order. While in neighbouring Andalusia, in Spain, anarchist rural associations flourished, in Portugal these men were not politically organized. What is more, the malteses could not be chased from the region, because their hands were needed during harvest season and proprietors feared a shortage of labour force. In fact, during winter, private charity was often combined with small-scale public works projects launched by local councils to employ this proletarian population, fixing it to the region until the next harvest (Cabral 1974, Cutileiro 2004). Despite some agrarian interests calling for better rural policing, in most of the Portuguese countryside neither criminality nor social struggles were a major concern. Only the populous railway construction sites and some manufacturing towns, such as Covilhã and Setúbal, became unruly places routinely policed by military forces. The governors tended to explain the low levels of criminality through the underdeveloped nature of the Portuguese countryside: their only fear was that modernity would sooner or later corrode the foundation of this peaceful existence and that, in the near future, some form of rural police force was going to be badly needed. In the absence of social struggle and criminality, the regional elites’ demand for policing was voiced in a low tone.19 But the State does not just provide policing, it also benefits from it; the absence of gendarmerie

 18 19

REAP, 1863. For a sense of the rural proprietors’ voice, see Pacheco Pereira (1983); Cabral (1974).

52

Chapter Two

also meant that the Portuguese State had a weak infrastructural power. The limits of the policing model from the State’s point of view were made apparent in 1846, and again in 1861 and 1862, during the tax riots that erupted in most of the smallholding countryside. The fiscal clerks had to flee from their offices and in towns without military barracks the people who flooded in from the rural parishes burned the fiscal and recruitment documentation before the troops had arrived (Cerezales 2007, Miranda 1996). Afterwards, judicial investigation was virtually impossible, as a law of silence was in force among rural communities (Idem).20 The provincial civil governors, the military officers and the tax collectors, all agreed that the policing system was in need of reform. Most of the commentators equated policing with modernity and civilization and looked to France and Spain as models, asking for the creation of a Portuguese gendarmerie (Gonçalves 2011). Martens Ferrão, of the leading Partido Regenerador [Party for Regeneration], became the foremost advocate of a Portuguese gendarmerie during the 1860s. According to him, such a force was vital, not only for improving the policing of the provinces, but also for invigorating the whole presence of the State institutions all over the country. Without the backing of a police force, ‘the judiciary could hardly work’. The inhabitants of remote parishes would never testify against violent rural bosses or the instigators of tax riots if there was no police force to protect them from retaliation. Tax collecting was also a difficult task. Tax assessors ‘risked their lives’ in the course of their duty, and were unable to ascertain the real value of the assets of powerful landholders. In contrast, patrolling gendarmes would eventually become very familiar with the people and the wealth of their assigned area, and were thus a valuable source for fiscal assessment, a significant improvement on the local elites the government had had to rely on – who had the most interest in hiding their wealth. Even if Martens Ferrão accepted that during major fiscal riots such as those of 1861 and 1862 the recourse to the army could not be dispensed with, he was adamant that were there a gendarmerie, most of those riots ‘would have not developed from their initial stages’. The whole public service needed the constant support of an organized police, as ‘the lack of force made administration impossible’.21

 20

Further references to the law of silence in Roma (1857). Marténs Ferrão DCD nº 92, 14 Jun. 1862, p. 1645. On the violent rural bosses Sobral (1990). 21

Weak State and Civic Culture in Liberal Portugal (1851-1926)

53

Gendarmerie projects Martens Ferrão became the head of the Home Office in 1866 and for the following year he proposed a very ambitious administrative reform, including a redrawing of the administrative districts in order to reduce their number and save money, the creation of a civil police for the major cities and that of a rural gendarmerie which, like the Spanish one, was to be called Guarda Civil [Civil Guard].22 Those new forces would be paid for by the reduction of expenses allowed by the administrative reform and by a new indirect tax. The Portuguese Civil Guard was projected as a national force that would incorporate the municipal guards that already existed in Lisbon and Porto. The force would patrol roads and railroad stations, police rural fairs and markets, look after rural properties, woods, and rivers, act as judiciary police, capture criminals and deserters, help the needed, repress smuggling and enforce administrative law. Like its counterparts in France or Spain, the projected Civil Guard would be part of the army, and it would fall under the purview of the Ministry of War for organization, discipline and inspection, while the Home Office would fund it and organise the policing activities. The civil governor would coordinate the activities of the guard within his district, without having to deal with the military, and he should organise the cooperation between the Civil Guard and the judiciary and fiscal authorities.23 The projected force was going to have 3 089 men, which meant a density of 0.037 men/km2, higher than that of the Spanish Civil Guard (0.027) and the French gendarmerie (0.035) during the 1860s.24 The creation of the rural Civil Guard and urban Civil Police were seen as an organic part of the general administrative reorganization of the country. We can speculate that the creation of the Portuguese Civil Guard could have changed the Portuguese rural landscape, just as the gendarmeries had done in the rest of Europe. The administrative and tax reforms were approved by parliament, but they met with widespread opposition from the cities that lost the privilege of being district capitals, from the smaller town councils that were merged with larger ones and from the merchants and proprietors that were forced to pay the new taxes. They campaigned against the government by means of

 22

The civil guard proposal in DCD 06-Feb-1867: 350 “Proposta de Lei sobre a organisação da Guarda Civil em todo o reino”, art.º 16, Diário de Lisboa, nº 31, 8 Feb 1867. 24 The numbers, for France: Emsley (1999); for Spain: López Corral (Madrid, 1995). 23

54

Chapter Two

public meetings and demonstrations in the main cities, while in the smallholding countryside the rural populations rioted against the fiscal machinery once again. The representatives of large landowners, who at times had asked for a rural police, now criticized the project, making it apparent that they did not want to pay for it. Eça de Queirós, who was beginning his successful career as public writer and was then working in a newspaper financed by Eugénio de Almeida, an important agrarian entrepreneur, had written in February 1867 in favour of a modern police. He had cited the European policing standards as a hallmark of the civilization he wanted for Portugal: ‘the scarce police we have is capricious and lethargic, dependent on patrons and friendships (…) we want organized police (...), people who, day or night, ensure our security, our property, our estates’ (Queirós 1985a, 5-55). One month later, when the government proposed the new gendarmerie and police, the tax implications overshadowed the concern with ‘civilization’ and, following the positions of the newspaper’s owner, he now vehemently condemned the project: ‘the gendarmerie [was] unnecessary in a peaceful and free country such as Portugal, as it would only be employed by the government ‘to act against the people’ (Idem). The campaign reached its peak during the so-called Janeirinha revolution of January 1868, which resulted in the demise of the government, the undoing of the reforms, the abolition of the new taxes and the shelving of the project for a Civil Guard. Amidst this general retreat, the only administrative novelty that subsisted was the urban civil police, which was put on its feet in Lisbon and Porto first, and then in the rest of the provincial capitals, during the 1870s and 1880s. The suspension of both the Civil Guard project and the new administrative code meant that the unpaid and unarmed parish constables remained the formal police in the countryside for the rest of the century, while the more demanding operations continued in the hands of the Army.25 For the four following decades, military writers, civil reformers, members of parliament and journalists again and again cited the same reasons for the creation of a gendarmerie that had justified the 1867 project (Soares 1883, Chelmicki 1878, Machado 1888, Queirós 2001). Nevertheless, even if both government and parliamentary opposition usually agreed that some kind of rural police was a necessity and that the

 25

For a quantification of the army services policing rural fairs and markets, Palacios Cerezales (2008).

Weak State and Civic Culture in Liberal Portugal (1851-1926)

55

parish constables were a deficient institution, they also agreed to delay the creation of this force until the fiscal deficit was reduced.26 The weakness of the State and its failure to provide basic services such as education and justice became an important concern for every Portuguese reformer. While Spain and Italy improved the literacy levels of their populations during the second half of the nineteenth century, Portugal lagged behind and entered the twentieth century with a record 70% illiteracy rate (Reis 1993). The Spanish progressive jurist Rafael de Labra expressed his surprise at the neighbouring country: the Portuguese lived under one of the most liberal constitutions of Europe and the government respected civil liberties and the freedom of the press. Simultaneously, the government was unable to perform the most basic administrative duties ‘as if administration was impossible in Portugal’ (Labra 1887, 256).

Penetration deficit and fiscal weakness The Portuguese political elites always blamed the State’s shortcomings on the lack of resources. Portugal was a poor country, public debt was one of the highest in Europe and public finance was always on the brink of collapse. The trouble is that ‘lack of resources’ was a universal explanation for everything the State didn’t carry out. The political elites had options, and they spent public revenue in the policies of their choice. As the economic historian Jaime Reis proved in the case of the low investment in primary education, budgetary shortage alone was not a good explanation (Reis 1993). At any rate, it cannot fully explain the recurrent failure of the gendarmerie projects. In addition, there was potential for an increase in fiscal revenue if the State overcame the technical and political resistances to agrarian taxation, a purpose towards which the gendarmerie could have played a key role. During the second half of the nineteenth century the government never collected more than the 5% of the GDP, while richer countries collected between the 7 and the 11%. [see table below] The resistance to the taxation of rural property, the result of an alliance between small and large landowners, was difficult to overcome both technically and politically. Technically it would mean the development of the infrastructural power of the State, a cadastre, which in turn needed the commitment of economic resources and the backing of force to prevent the riots every fiscal operation provoked, as had happened during the partial attempts to measure the rural produce in 1861-62, 1867-68 and 1874

 26

DCD, 28 Apr 1883, p. 1298, and again in DCD, 11 Apr 1898, p. 791; DCD, 19 Jun 1893, pp. 28-29; Idem, 12 Apr 1899, pp. 9-10.

Chapter Two

56

(Branco 2003, Palacios Cerezales 2007, Silveira e Sousa 2007). After the suffrage extension of 1878, the bigger rural landowners even improved their political position, because they were able to control the votes of most of the illiterate and dependent rural poor, who worked for them or rented their lands. In theory they might have welcomed the idea of a gendarmerie for the policing of their property, and yet the absence of social struggles and criminality meant that they were not pressed, which in turn meant they refused to pay for it. Finally, they also profited from the inability of the State to monitor the distribution of rural wealth.27 Fiscal burden in Europe (1851-1913), fiscal revenue as share of the GDP

18511859 18601869 18701879 18801889 18901899 19001913

Portugal

Spain

Italy

France

3,5

7,8

n.e

8,4

United Kingdom 9,4

3,6

10,6

7,9

8,4

7,5

4,0

9,5

10,6

9,8

6,3

4,4

8,6

13,3

13,1

7,0

4,9

8,9

13,7

11,8

7,3

5,5

9,3

11,8

10,8

8,2

Source: Rui Pedro Esteves “Finanças Públicas” in Pedro Lains y Álvaro Ferreira da Silva, Nova História Económica de Portugal, Vol. 2. Lisboa: ICS, 2005, 325.

The weakness of the State was made apparent again in 1888. In order to overcome the international agrarian price crisis, the government tried to gather information for a development plan through a general agrarian survey. Many rural proprietors feared a fiscal use of the information and, therefore, non-collaboration and riots were widespread. Two people died and the results of the survey were very incomplete.28

 27

For a view of the landowners’ changing attitudes in refusing to offer fiscally sensitive information and eagerly proposing reforms, see Moraes (1889, 10). 28 Ibid., 5.

Weak State and Civic Culture in Liberal Portugal (1851-1926)

57

The inverse relation between the political power of the agrarian proprietors and the strength of the State was reflected in the under-taxing of agrarian wealth: in the 1890s agriculture represented 41,5% of the GDP (for 62% of the labour force), but the taxes on agrarian wealth were less than 9% of the fiscal income, and only 25% of the direct taxes (Lains and Ferreira da Silva 2005, Mata 1993). When, in 1893, in the face of a great fiscal crisis, the government proposed a fiscal reform, Parliament prevented it from affecting landowners, who were already under-taxed and controlled the election (Aguiar 2004). In 1899 a new land tax reform was introduced, but the government withdrew it ‘in order to prevent new riots’.29 The alternative to obtaining resources from the wealthy landowners was to gather them through the taxation of commerce, so the State only reinforced its control of smuggling by creating a Fiscal Guard in the 1880s, which was a militarized customs police in charge of patrolling the borders and the coast. The Fiscal Guard reinforced a taxation model that, aware of the landowners’ resistance and political power, preferred to collect indirect taxes instead of taxing the sources of wealth. In 1909 a survey was conducted among the agrarian associations concerning their preferences regarding rural policing. They rejected any ‘national’ force. Instead, they wanted a militarized but municipallycontrolled rural guard: ‘nobody is to believe that we are going to pay for a guard serving the interests of [the government]’ (Santos 1909, 12). The numerous projects for the creation of a gendarmerie that were proposed between 1850 and 1910 were not backed by a strong enough political will. In the absence of social struggles or widespread rural criminality, the big landowners preferred to maintain their wealth and their local power away from the government’s eyes, and were not willing to pay for a force that would have allowed the State to overcome some of the technical and political limits to taxation. The State was locked in a vicious circle. The absence of a gendarmerie was both an effect of, and a cause for, the lack of resources. The government could not raise the money to pay for a gendarmerie, but it also was unable to do so precisely because it could not count on one.

The GNR, the Republic and the Fiscal reform The proclamation of the Republic by the 1910 revolution in Lisbon changed the political balance of forces in favour of the urban elites. In order to consolidate their control over the territory and to republicanise the

 29

DCD, 5 June 1899.

58

Chapter Two

country, one of the first measures the provisional government took was the creation of a gendarmerie force called the Guarda Nacional Republicana [National Republican Guard, GNR]. For the first time, the Portuguese State embraced the whole territory with its own national police. The original blueprint for the GNR projected a 5 000-strong force organized in six battalions, each of which was in charge of a region. A reserve garrison was stationed in the battalion’s main headquarters, but most of the force was deployed in small detachments of 2, 4 or 6 men all over the region. As the new policing service was also of local interest, local councils had to pay for the housing of those men. Most of the force was directed to rural patrolling, but in Lisbon and Porto there were also urban garrisons and cavalry squads, which, in fact, revamped the old Municipal Guard, which had been dismissed because of its past monarchical fervour. During 1911, the first rural companies were deployed in Portalegre, Évora and Beja, all of them in the large landed estates region of Alentejo. In September every single municipality of those districts had at least one small detachment. The GNR arrived amidst a surge of labour militancy among the landless peasants, which were mobilized by the political opportunities opened up by the republican revolution (Cabral 1989, Pereira 1983). Trade unions and strikes, unknown before 1910 in the Portuguese countryside, became widespread, and the deployment of the rural units in the rest of the country, only complete by 1919, roughly overlapped with the map of social unrest (Palacios Cerezales 2011). In addition, the deployment of the GNR allowed for a general change in the moral economy of Alentejo, and the landowners used the gendarmerie to evict the landless “vagrant” peasants that used to collectively exact charity and lived on their properties during winter (Cabral 1974, Oliveira Martins 1956). As one leading deputy from Alentejo explained, until the advent of the GNR his household used to offer refuge to 50 men every winter, who menaced to set fire to the property if he did not feed them. Since the arrival of the GNR he ‘only had 12 vagrants living on his lands.’30 The GNR also allowed for an important increase in the rural tax burden. Between 1900 and 1910 landowners had paid only one fourth of the total of direct taxes. In 1913 – the year the republicans momentarily succeeded in balancing the historically unbalanced Portuguese finances – the landowners’ share rose to one half of the direct taxation. For many commentators, there was a trade-off. As one spokesman phrased it, the services they now received from the GNR had made the net increase in

 30

Brito Camacho, DCD, 26 February 1912.

Weak State and Civic Culture in Liberal Portugal (1851-1926)

59

taxation bearable31. With the GNR, the Portuguese government and the Republic itself made their presence felt in every small village at least once a week. The new force soon modified some routines in the exercise of local power. The guards had to cooperate with local authorities, but they only obeyed their own chain of command; they belonged to a centralized national organization that represented the Republic and, as dutiful bearers of the Republican promise of national resurgence, they did not easily give in to local power balances. The arrival of the gendarmerie could have become a tool for the nationalization of the peasantry. But this was a difficult task if we take into account that in some northern regions the GNR – which only was deployed there between 1914 and 1919 – could be resented as an alien urban imposition over a catholic conservative peasantry. In addition, the Republic’s intense social and political struggles prevented the gendarmerie from settling into an operational routine: in 16 years Portugal experienced two monarchist military invasions, three successful political uprisings, the military mobilization for the Great War, one short-lived civil war in 1919, and a dozen attempts at coups d'état (Wheeler 1978). Furthermore, the labour movement organized in a powerful anarchist union – the ideological option common to countries where the people did not expect anything good to come from the State – that launched several general strikes (Cabral 1989, Medeiros 1978). The GNR also became a political actor, the armed vanguard of the more radical republicans (Lloyd-Jones and Diego Palacios Cerezales 2007). When the Republic finally fell in 1926, the new military dictatorship reduced the size of the GNR and most of the rural patrolling was called off. The GNR only resumed rural policing in the 1940s, but now under Salazar’s dictatorship. During the long authoritarian regime, which lasted until 1974, the main role of the GNR was not public service but political control. A balanced study of the attitudes and relationships between the GNR and the rural populations during Salazarism is yet to be done. There is no doubt that some useful services were well received by the people, but in many regions the population refused to speak with the guards and often hid in their homes when they saw the GNR patrolmen arriving (Riegelhaupt 1979). A coercive regime which dismissed the notion that the Portuguese could be capable citizens was not a fertile soil for the gendarmerie to play a nationalising role.

 31

DCD, 5 January 1912.

60

Chapter Two

Conclusion The low rates of social struggle and crime in the Portuguese countryside during the second half of the nineteenth century meant that the agrarian elites were not interested in shouldering the cost of a gendarmerie. Instead, they preferred to maintain their local power without government supervision and prevented the State from increasing their tax burden. In turn, a State without gendarmerie that did not provide security, justice, or first-line assistance in the wake of catastrophic events, was a State unable to gain legitimacy or to mobilise the majority of the population. The weakness of State penetration in Portugal meant a very feeble socialization of the population within a national civic culture. Most of the population remained bound to local affiliations, illiterate, incapable of reclaiming their rights when dealing with the bureaucratic apparatus and politically inactive or dependent on the patrons who mediated between the local community and the State. This also had cumulative effects: the absence of a gendarmerie made rural taxation difficult, and the taxation deficit did not allow the State to pay for other public services such as education. In addition, the absence of a gendarmerie also made it easier for the social elites to control the workings of the justice system. This very weak Liberal State was unable to provide the majority of the population with access to the conditions of full citizenship. We can propose therefore that the failure in the creation of a gendarmerie force during the nineteenth century had a lasting effect in the present persistence of a “parochial” and “subject” civic culture, instead of the “citizen” civic culture we could have expected after long decades of liberal and representative governments. When, after 1910, social struggles began to make the landowner elites worry about their ability to maintain social control, they conceded to pay for a gendarmerie and the GNR was created. But this force arrived during the crisis of Portuguese liberalism, and the subsequent long-lasting dictatorship reinforced the “subject” civic culture so shared by many Portuguese to this day, even after nearly 40 years of democracy.

Bibliography Almeida, Pedro Tavares de. “A Burocracia do Estado No Portugal Liberal (2ª Metade Do Século XIX)”, in Burocracia, Estado e Território (ed. Pedro Tavares de Almeida and Rui Branco). Lisboa: Editorial Notícias, 2007.

Weak State and Civic Culture in Liberal Portugal (1851-1926)

61

Almond, Gabriel, and Sidney Verba. La Cultura Cívica. Estudio Sobre La Participación Política Democrática En Cinco Naciones. Madrid: Euramérica, 1970 [1963]. Berkley, George E. “Centralization, Democracy, and the Police”, in Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology & Police Science 61, 2, 1970. Blaney, Gerald. “La Historiografía Sobre La Guardia Civil. Críticas Y Propuestas De Investigación”, in Política y Sociedad 42, 3, 2005. Braithwaite, Valerie, and Margaret Levi (eds.). Trust and Governance. New York: Russel Sage Foundation, 1998. Branco, Rui. O Mapa De Portugal. Lisboa: Horizonte, 2003. Bulhões, Miguel Lobo de. La Réforme De La Administration Civile Au Portugal. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1867. Cabral, Manuel Villaverde. Materiais Para a História Da Questão Agrária Em Portugal - Séc. XIX e XX. Porto: Inova, 1974. —. “O Exercício Da Cidadania Política Em Perspectiva Histórica (Portugal E Brasil)”, in Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 51, 2003. —. Portugal Na Alvorada Do Século XX: Forças Sociais, Poder Político e Crescimento Económico de 1890 a 1914. Lisboa: Presença, 1989. Catroga, Fernando. “O Poder Paroquial Como Polícia No Século XIX Português”, in Lei e Ordem. Justiça Penal, Criminalidade e Polícia. Séculos XIX E XX (ed. Pedro Tavares de Almeida and Tiago Pires Marques). Lisboa: Horizonte, 2006. Coelho, F.J. Pinto. Contemporâneos Ilustres. Lisboa: s.e. 1877. Costa, Alberto de Sousa. Páginas De Sangue; Brandões, Marçais & C.ª. Lisboa: Guimarães & Ca., 1935. Cutileiro, José. Ricos E Pobres No Alentejo: Uma Sociedade Rural Portuguesa. Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 2004. Chelmicki, General. Esboço Sobre a Defesa De Portugal. Paris: Lallément Fréres, 1878. Deutsch, Karl W. Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundation of Nationality. Cambridge [Mass.]: M.I.T. Press, 1975. Emsley, Clive. Gendarmes and the State in Nineteenth Century Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Giddens, Anthony. The Nation State and Violence. East Sussex: Polity Press, 1985. Gonçalves, Cândido Gonçalo Rocha. “A Transformação Liberal Do Sistema Policial Português, 1861-1868”, in Linguagens e Fronteiras Do Poder (ed. José Murilo de Carvalho, Miriam Halpern Pereira, Gladys Sabina Ribeiro and Maria João Vaz). Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 2011.

62

Chapter Two

Labra, Rafael María de. Portugal Y Sus Códigos. Estudio De Política E Legislación Contemporáneas. El Pueblo Portugués, La Legislacion Lusitana. Madrid: Eduardo de Medina Editor, 1877. Lains, Pedro, and Álvaro Ferreira da Silva. Nova História Económica De Portugal, Vol 2, Século XIX. Lisboa: ICS, 2005. Lenoir, Lelio. Portugal em 1862. Lisboa: Imprensa de J.G Sousa Neves, 1863. Levi, Margaret. A State of Trust. Florence: IUE working papers RSC 96/23, 1996. —. Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. López Corral, Miguel. La Guardia Civil. Nacimiento Y Consolidación (1844-1874). Madrid: Actas, 1995. López Garrido, Diego. La Guardia Civil Y Los Orígenes Del Estado Centralista. Madrid: Alianza, 2004. Lousada, Maria Alexandre. “A Cidade Vigiada. A Polícia e a Cidade de Lisboa no Início do Século XIX”, in Cadernos de Geografia 17, 1998. Luc, Jean Noel (ed.). Gendarmerie, État et Société au XIXe Siècle. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2002. Lloyd-Jones, Stewart, and Diego Palacios Cerezales. “Guardians of the Republic? Portugal’s GNR and the Politicians During the ‘New Old Republic’, 1919-1922”, in Policing Interwar Europe (ed. Gerald Blaney). Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. Macedo, António Teixeira de. Traços De História Contemporânea. Lisboa: Rolim, 1984. Machado, Joaquim Emygdio Xavier. Ensaio Sobre a Organisação da Guarda Civil em Portugal. Lisboa: Typographia das Novidades, 1888. Manique, António Pedro. Mouzinho Da Silveira. Liberalismo e Administração Pública. Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 1989. Mann, Michael. The Sources of Social Power, Vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Mascarenhas, João Rodrigues da Cunha Aragão. “Districto de Beja”, in Relatórios sobre o Estado da Administraçao pública nos districtos administrativos do Continente do reino e ilhas adjacentes. Para 1858. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1859. Mata, Eugénia. As Finanças Públicas Portuguesas da Regeneração à Primeira Guerra Mundial. Lisboa: Banco de Portugal, 1993. Maya, Ten. Fernando. Notas Sobre a Cavalaria na Actualidade. Porto: Livraria Portuense, 1887. Medeiros, Fernando. A Sociedade e a Economia Portuguesas nas Origens do Salazarismo. Lisboa: A Regra do Jogo, 1978.

Weak State and Civic Culture in Liberal Portugal (1851-1926)

63

Mendonça, Miguel Francisco de. O Progresso do Exército, ou Alguns Pensamentos Sobre o Sistema Militar Dum Povo Livre. Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 1866. Miranda, Sacuntala de. Quando os Sinos Tocavam a Rebate. Notícia dos Alevantes de 1869 na Ilha De São Miguel. Lisboa: Salamandra, 1996. Molina, Fernando, and Miguel Cabo. “The Long and Winding Road of Nationalization: Eugene Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen in Modern European History (1976-2006)”, in European History Quarterly 39, 2009. Moraes, Paulo de. Inquerito Agricola: Estudo Geral da Economia Rural da 7a. Região Agronomica, Executado pelo Commissario Especial da Mesma Região Paulo de Moraes em Cumprimento do Decreto de 30 de Dezembro de 1886. Lisboa: Imprensa nacional, 1889. Morales Villanueva. Las Fuerzas de Orden Público. Madrid: San Martín, 1980. Morrison, William R. “The North-West Mounted Police and the Klondike Gold Rush”, in Journal of Contemporary History 9, 2, 1974. Oliveira Martins, J. P. Fomento Rural e Emigração. Lisboa: Guimarães Editores, 1956. Palacios Cerezales, Diego. “Estado, Régimen Y Orden Público en El Portugal Contemporáneo (1834-2000).” Madrid: PhD Thesis, Complutense, 2008. —. “O Princípio de Autoridade e os Motins Antifiscais de 1862”, in Análise Social XLII, 182, 2007. —. Portugal à Coronhada. Protesto Popular e Ordem Pública nos Séculos XIX E XX. Lisboa: Tinta da China, 2011. Pereira, José Pacheco. “As Lutas Sociais dos Trabalhadores Alentejanos. Do Banditismo à Greve”, in O Século XIX Em Portugal (eds. Maria Filomena Mónica, Maria de Lourdes Lima dos Santos). Lisboa: GIS, 1983. —. Conflitos Sociais Nos Campos do Sul de Portugal. Lisboa: Publicações Europa-América, 1982. Queirós, Eça de. Da Colaboração No “Distrito De Évora”, Vol. I. Lisboa: Livros do Brasil, 1985. —. Da Colaboração No “Distrito De Évora”, Vol. II. Lisboa: Livros do Brasil, 1985a. —. Uma Campanha Alegre (De as Farpas). Lisboa: Livros do Brasil, 2001. Reis, Jaime. “O Analfabetismo em Portugal: Uma Interpretação”, in O Atraso Económico Português. Lisboa: INCM, 1993.

64

Chapter Two

Riegelhaupt, Joyce. “Os Camponeses e a Política no Portugal de Salazar – O Estado Corporativo e o Apoliticismo nas Aldeias”, in Análise Social XV, 59, 1979. Roma, Carlos Morato. Considerações Sobre as Questões Urgentes da Governação Publica e em Especial Sobre a dos Caminhos De Ferro. Lisboa: Typ. da Revista Universal, 1857. Sá da Bandeira, Bernardo de Sá Nogueira de Figueiredo. Memória Sobre as Fortificações de Lisboa. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1866. Salgado. “O Exército”, in Revista Militar XIII, 1862. Santos, Luís Aguiar. Comércio e Política na Crise do Liberalismo. Lisboa: Colibri, 2004. Santos, Maria José Moutinho dos. “A Regedoria na Segurança Urbana”, in Cadernos Bonfim 1, 2001. Santos, Pedro Ferreira dos. Organização Prática em Portugal da Polícia Rural. Lisboa: s.d., 1909. Silveira, Luís Nuno Espinha da. Território e Poder. Nas Origens do Estado Contemporâneo em Portugal. Cascais: Patrimonia, 1997. Soares, Gustavo D. Nogueira. Considerações Sobre o Presente e o Futuro de Portugal. Lisboa: Typographia Universal, 1883. Sobral, José Manuel. “Banditismo e Política – João Brandão no Seu Contexto Político e Social”, in Apontamentos da Vida de João Brandão, por ele Escritos nas Prisões do Limoeiro Envolvendo a História da Beira desde 1834. Lisboa: Vega, 1990. Sousa, Paulo Silveira e. “A Construção do Aparelho Periférico do Ministério da Fazenda em Portugal (1832-1878)”, in Burocracia, Estado e Território (ed. Pedro Tavares de Almeida and Rui Branco). Lisboa: Horizonte, 2007. Tengarrinha, José (ed.). História do Governo Civil de Lisboa. 2 vols. Lisboa: Governo Civil de Lisboa, 2002. Um Liberal. Coisas que Fazem Rir, e Golpe de Vista sobre as Questões Lazzarista e Charles et George. Porto: I. A. d'Almeida Junior & Irmão, 1858. Vaz, Maria João. Crime e Sociedade: Portugal na Segunda Metade do Sec. XIX. Oeiras: Celta, 1998. Weber, Eugen. Peasants into Frenchmen. The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976. Wheeler, Douglas L. Republican Portugal. A Political History, 19101926. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.

CHAPTER THREE THE STATES OF EMPIRE MIGUEL BANDEIRA JERÓNIMO

Introduction On 19 February 1836, almost two years after the end of the Civil War that led to the re-establishment of a liberal regime, the Minister of the Navy and Overseas (hereafter MNO), Sá da Bandeira, submitted a report about the general conditions of the overseas African provinces to the Portuguese Cortes. In his view, the African provinces were mere ‘decadent fragments’ of a non-existent, ruined empire. The ‘Empire’ was ‘invaded and conquered by African Negroes’, characterized by a prevailing absence of Portuguese forces and by internal dissent (Sá da Bandeira 1836, 13-14). In 1872, José Francisco da Silva wrote that only ‘an act of audacity or rewarding ententes with the natives’ could be the cornerstone of a project of territorial expansionism outside Luanda. The socio-political, demographic and ecological realities of the empire left no other choice (Coronel João de Almeida 1930, 4). Later on, in 1877, in a context of increasing internationalization of African affairs, the Governor-general of Angola Caetano Almeida e Albuquerque described the few colonial outposts in the interior, either officially sponsored or privately driven, as ‘lost isles’ in a ‘boundless indigenous ocean’.1 In January 1899, Mouzinho de Albuquerque, cavalry officer and governor-general of Mozambique until 1898, wrote that the ‘administrative processes’ through which the colonies had been governed until then ‘were con-substantiated in conventions and fictions’. According to him, the empire was formed by ‘extremely vast territories’, ‘formally ours’, in which ‘no influence was exerted’. The imperial and colonial authority was

 1

Report from Almeida e Albuquerque, 19 October 1877, in Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Secretaria de Estado da Marinha e Ultramar, Direcção-Geral do Ultramar, Correspondência dos Governadores, Angola, 1877.

66

Chapter Three

based on ‘powerful chiefs connected to the Portuguese crown by fictitious vassalages’. The ‘system of govern’ was ‘formally liberal’: ‘improvised citizens elected, in a simulacrum of voting, a fictitious deputy, previously designated by the ministry and therefore unknown to his circle and ignorant of the land he represented’. The administrative landscape was made up of ‘municipalities created by decree’ only, ‘with no deputies electable with any decency, no electors knowing that they were such, not even a municipal budget to administer’. The history of the colonial empire was made by ‘glorious victories in which no single Portuguese soldier took part’. The conquest was based on ‘auxiliaries of resolute dedication that turned into declared rebels the following day’. The portrait of the imperial and colonial worlds could not be clearer: ‘many majors and colonels, several commanders, numerous dispatches, voluminous reports, abundant legislation, plentiful decrees, copious ordinances, a lot of inapplicable regulation’. It was an empire made of ‘words, words, words!’ Mouzinho de Albuquerque was the Prince of Denmark (Albuquerque 1934, 17-18). In a report dated 23 February 1915, Governor-general of Angola Norton de Matos wrote: we have been unable to occupy and control Angola: our campaigns have been limited to the organization of military columns that inflict more or less severe punishments to the revolted gentile, whose territory we want to occupy; once their military mission has reached its end, once they have won a few battles, made some prisoners, killed or shot a few natives, they retire and dismantle, leaving just a small fort here and there, poorly armed and even more scarcely garnished, which will soon be considered harmless by the local populations. (Matos 1945, 253)

In 1952, in their analysis of the political and administrative organization and the economic coordination of economic issues of Angola, Henrique Galvão and Carlos Selvagem denounced the existence of a ‘plethora of bureaucracy’, viewed as an outcome of a ‘traditional tendency of corporative systems’. Despite its magnitude and theoretical advantages, this superfluity of bureaucratic agencies was seen to result in no effective informational control over the territory, its resources and populations. They were no instruments of rule and administration. The list of reasons supporting Galvão and Selvagem’s indictment included the diversity and variety of agencies; their dispersion, autonomous functioning (‘compartimentos estanques’) and the juxtaposition of responsibilities with previous or coeval, co-existing agencies; the lack of trained personnel and the ‘moral corruption’. All ‘subverted the intentions of the legislators’ and caused ‘disturbances and difficulties’. The existing plethora of agencies constituted more a ‘bureaucratic order’ than a ‘functional order of coordinated

The States of Empire

67

elements’. Galvão’s previous critical remarks regarding the lack of administrative coordination continued to resound. It was an ‘old machine of a bureaucratic type, outdated and naturally unstable’, ‘full of improvisations, more or less adventurous’. The same appraisals were made regarding Mozambique. Despite the blatant criticism, the need for a new order of colonial information and for new modalities of imperial and colonial management were emphasized. A new colonial State, indeed a new form of colonialism, was in need (Galvão and Selvagem 1952, 236237, 350-351, 298; idem 1953, 177; Galvão 1949, 152-172 and 213-326). This collection of examples illustrates and illuminates some of the main characteristics of the Portuguese imperial trajectory since the disintegration of the Luso-Brazilian imperial configuration in 1822, from the traditional shortage of military, economic, ecclesiastical, bureaucratic human and material resources to colonize, administer and control – which entailed the rule of the feeble – to the predominance of de jure over de facto realities (an empire of conventions and fictions, an empire in a map, an empire by decree) and the recurrence of episodes of pacification. These illustrations also reveal some of the facets of the historical process of the politico-administrative takeover of colonial territories, the process of the colonial State-formation, from the relatively low degree of autonomy from local powers (for instance due to the persistence of the Ancien Régime or due to local resistance) to the scarce social penetration and limited institutional territorialization of State-functions. Given these premises, the historical debate over the importance of the strengths and weaknesses of political authority within the colonial empire, already promoted regarding previous imperial configurations, is imperative, especially if it is able to clarify the complex political system of power in which the colonial State was articulated with other institutions (for instance the Church) and was based on modalities of negotiation and collaboration with local powers (via the distribution of prestige, labour and tax-returns).2 The Portuguese Empire-State devised a colonial State in order to attain two major, and to a certain extent interrelated, desiderata. First, the colonial State was fundamental to ensure the continuous recruitment, use and distribution (to public works and to private interests) of native manpower.

 2

In the “third” Portuguese empire, as in previous imperial configurations, the advocacy of its political feebleness entails dangers of exceptionalism and the potential glorification of the empire (see the appropriation of Gilberto Freyre’s luso-tropicalism). A feeble political organization does not necessarily entail a weak political authority. See Bethencourt and Ramada Curto (2007, 1-18) and Bethencourt (2007, 197-254).

68

Chapter Three

As was prevalent in other imperial and colonial polities, the management and provision of African labour and its transformation into a ‘State revenue flow’ (Young 1998, 105) was a central process in empire-building and colonial-formation. Labour (i.e., forced labour) was the pivotal mechanism of colonial extraction, the legalization of forced labour one of the backbones of the imperial undertaking. The ‘difficulties to make the natives work’ were the difficulties to make the colonial State work (Jerónimo and Monteiro 2012, 159-196). Second, the establishment of a colonial State apparatus was central to the institution of a modicum of taxation, from capitation taxes to a gradual emergence of a system of taxation.3 The imperative budgetary and fiscal self-sufficiency imposed to the colonies, that is the fiscal pact that was at the core of the transference of the costs of imperial expansion and colonial consolidation to the periphery – conquest on the cheap –, required an administrative structure capable of establishing, deploying and negotiating the execution of tax-exaction mechanisms. Although designed to meet other purposes (for instance, to reduce the costs of empire), the administrative reform devised by Rebelo da Silva in 1869 entailed the elevation of tax-exaction to a primordial repertoire of administration (Carta Orgânica das Instituições Administrativas nas Províncias Ultramarinas, 1894). The expansion of, and the balanced articulation between, imperial sovereignty (actual hegemony over colonial territories, population and resources) and revenue (the production of forms of State revenues) were at the forefront of empire-building. They were also the fundamental causes for the spread of conflicts within the colonial empire, which promoted the material and organizational institution of security mechanisms (for instance, the pacification campaigns that we will address below), and also fostered the local organization of resistance and protest (Young 1994, 124-133; Herbst 2000, 64-66; Newitt 1999, 110-122; Gardner 2012). Recognising but not exploring the different nature, dynamics and characteristics of the historical constitution of colonial administration within the constituent parts of the “third” Portuguese empire, this chapter traces the evolution of the colonial State, trying to identify some its fundamental aspects. Acknowledging the shortage of studies on fundamental aspects related to political, economic and socio-cultural dimensions of the history of the Portuguese colonial empire, namely with regard to crucial functions of the imperial and colonial administrations (from policing to education, from juridical to welfare responsibilities), this chapter aims to address some of the existent information and to signal some of the

 3

On the implementation of taxation in the metropole, see Chapter 2 in this book.

The States of Empire

69

problems that need further and deeper enquiry.4 Among many other decisive issues that require a finer empirical and analytical understanding – such as the role of State tradition and of the raison d’état (their ideological foundations, institutional modalities and repertoires of power) –, much is unknown about historical processes that were central to the construction, consolidation and eventual demise (or transformation and appropriation) of the colonial State and its institutional apparatus. The historical nature and the dynamics of the imperatives of statecraft (hegemony, autonomy, security, legitimacy, revenue and accumulation) within the “new Brazils in Africa” are still to be accurately considered, colony-by-colony, through time (Young 1994, 35-40 and 95-140). For instance, there is no proper history of the multifaceted forms of articulation between formal hierarchies of imperial and colonial authority and local patrimonial networks (and related processes of accommodation of existing political structures and mechanisms of rule), of the particular and contingent interaction between colonial statecraft and colonial societies (e.g. the political, socioeconomic or religious characteristics of African societies) or of the organization and institutionalization of colonial taxation (its multiple causes, mechanisms and consequences).5 The same is certainly true about the legacies of colonial State in each post-colonial formation.6 On a different level, the understanding of imperial and colonial bureaucracies (their major and minor players, and their multiple institutional levels of action) needs to go beyond organizational descriptions, prosopographic analyses or biographical portraits (Sousa and Almeida 2006, 109-126; Silva 2008). The study of the Leviathan qualities of the bulamatari (“the crusher of rocks”), their actual manifestations and limitations (Young 1994, 1-2), requires finer enquiries to articulate these important organizational

 4

For a selection of new researches that address central subjects of the Portuguese imperial and colonial history, the majority of them still clearly understudied, see Jerónimo (2012c). 5 The work of Catherine Boone demonstrates the extent to which diverse patterns of rural political economy in Senegal, Ghana and Ivory Coast entailed different colonial states’ modus operandi: Boone (2003). For a comparative analysis of state traditions and trajectories see, among others, Badie and Birnbaum (1979, 171-217). For a masterful and thoughtful survey of the problem in Africa see Lonsdale (1981, 139-225). 6 For an important contribution see Chabal et al. (2002). For a recent comparative tour-de-force see Young (2012).

70

Chapter Three

and institutional aspects with other political, social and economic problems.7

The pacification and privatization of colonial sovereignty Despite their clear minimalism in regard to actual obligations, the formulation of the doctrine of effective occupation, and the associated stipulations of articles n. 34 and n. 35 of the General Act of the Berlin conference, a decisive moment in the diplomacy of imperialism, entailed consequences for the overall strategy in the establishment of a formal sovereignty in the Portuguese colonial empire. The doctrine of effective occupation, alongside the overall languages and methods of international colonial law, was fundamental to those who wanted to attain a double goal. On one hand, it was a guarantee of international legitimacy, a sine qua non for the recognition of a wanted imperial stand. On the other, it offered a sound legal basis that enabled the confirmation of proprietary claims to African territories (seen as terra nullius), which could no longer rest on claims of spheres of influence (Fisch 1988, 347-375; Young 1994, 96). A common good and a common interest were identified and regulated in a political and juridical manner. Inter-imperial competition faced new guidelines. More than the guidelines with a view to promote territorial occupation, and the development of an administrative apparatus, Berlin provided the legitimate and the legitimizing mechanism for the ‘acquisition of sovereignty’ (Herbst 2000, 72). The international downplaying of the rights of discovery and the necessary replacement of the traditional rhetoric of historical rights led the Portuguese elites to enhance their imperial expansionist manoeuvres, which included political, economic but also religious and ecclesiastical drives and strategies. The missions of empire were manifold (Jerónimo 2012; Jerónimo and Dores 2012, 119-156).8 As Paiva Couceiro, a major colonial expert, summed up, ‘no allegations of property’ could ‘be set forth when not based on positive facts of administration and of policing’ (1948, 10). The international provisions that regulated the acquisition of sovereignty did not necessarily require a formal, developed, and expensive system of colonial administration. The territorialization of authority and hegemony could be attained in multiple ways, from the privatization or delegation of

 7

For a set of examples of the work still to be done regarding the Portuguese case see Gann and Duignan (1977; 1978a; 1978b; 1979) and Kirk-Greene (1999; 2000; 2006). More recently see Méchat (2009). 8 For the Berlin conference see Förster, Mommsen and Robinson (1988)

The States of Empire

71

sovereignty to chartered companies to the treaty-making with local chiefs, preserving or destabilizing local balances of power. But those international provisions certainly provided a stimulus to colonial ambitions within imperial societies. The same happened in the colonies. For instance, in 1880, in Luanda, Henrique de Carvalho and others created the Sociedade Propagadora dos Conhecimentos Geográficos Africanos [Society for the Promotion of African Geographical Knowledge]. Pressure for expansion, economically and politically driven, was also a local reality, in a context of widespread European inter-imperial competition, in the north and east of Angola (in the Congo and in the Lunda), but also in the south, where German imperial ambitions emerged (Freudenthal 2001, 135-169; Wheeler and Pelissier 1971, 71-76). To the Portuguese, the internationalization of African issues that led to the Berlin conference reinforced the momentum for the nationalization of the empire (the creation of efficient conditions for the effective, even if restricted, occupation) and for the imperialization of the nation (the promotion of the imperial and the colonial causes as a national imperative). From an economic point of view, the nationalization of the colonial economy was mandatory. Given the loss of the Luso-Brazilian empire and the progressive decline in slave trade, the plans to devise a new colonial economy, essentially aimed at the development of a plantation economy in São Tomé, Angola and Mozambique, also intended to enhance colonial sovereignty through a new geography of taxation in each colony, associated to the persistence of a traditional protectionist imperial policy (later epitomized by the tariffs of 1892), backed by specific metropolitan economic interests (for example, wine and textile industries) and always justified by grandiloquent declarations made by imperial nationalists. The political and economic processes of imperial nationalization were inseparable. The efforts to promote a new geography of taxation, based on a more stable and pacified commercial exchange and trade (via legal, technological, communicational and military procedures), were undoubtedly associated with a drive for territorial expansion. The motivations of the triangular strategy of territorial occupation of Ambriz, Bembe and São Salvador in Angola since 1855 are clear examples of this. The deployment of the State apparatus accompanied this rationale, of which the program of civilising stations is a telling illustration (ClarenceSmith 1985, 82, 85-86; Jerónimo 2012, 23-55). The international idea of civilising stations, a term coined by Émile Banning, Leopold II’s main counsellor on African affairs, resonated in Lisbon. The Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa [Lisbon Geographical Society, 1875], one of the most important institutional springboards of

72

Chapter Three

imperial expansionism from the 1870s onwards, appropriated the expansionist idiom and repertoires set forth at the Conférence Géographique de Bruxelles, held in 1876, and the Portuguese civilising stations were created in 1881. Their existence was seen as the ‘most practical and humanitarian way that experience and science suggest’ of controlling the ‘component and adjacent territories’ of Portuguese overseas territories. They were also, perhaps above everything else, the fundamental political and ideological resource used to sustain Portuguese claims in the highly competitive imperial and colonial environment of the scramble for, and partition of, Africa. Portugal looked for territorial expansion in order to civilise trade (that is, to turn commerce into a legitimate taxable enterprise) and to create the institutional conditions that could, at least in theory, civilise African populations, a major claim in the overall international competition for the legitimation of imperial expansionism. The expansion and the effectiveness of colonial sovereignty were justified as being the actual expansion of the conditions of and for civilization. The rationalization of economic circuits (which included the suppression of the slave trade and the reduction of contraband), the control of the political and economic agents (especially, but not only, of the native brokers), and the establishment of a modicum of infra-structural power of the colonial State (essentially materialized in fiscal and military structures) were claimed to be the fundamental institutional conditions to civilise trade and civilise the African populations. This was the fundamental context of the early imagination of the colonial State – a self-proclaimed civilising State – which was associated with political and economic maps that did not represent, or understand, local contexts and realities (Jerónimo 2012a, 179-181). The turbulent frontiers (Galbraith 1959/1960) of empire, where international, inter-imperial, transnational and cosmopolitan forces (such as missionaries and businessmen, so fundamental in the articulation of international, metropolitan and colonial or imperial processes) abounded in interaction with native societies, were crucial in defining the rhythm and success of political and economic nationalization of imperial territories. Similarly to what was argued regarding the series of crises of adaptation (Hopkins 1973, 125-126, 135-164; Law 1995) brought about by the socioeconomic phenomena associated with the aftermath of abolitionism, these frontiers were surely agitated by the impact of late nineteenth-century imperial expansionism, being related to several important processes. The loci of resistance normally occurred at the nuclear nodes of the projects of commercial and administrative expansion and rule. One exemplary consequence was social banditry, one of the fundamental forms of peasant

The States of Empire

73

response to, and retribution against, the processes of white settlement and land expropriation and economic reorganization and exploitation associated with colonial expansion (Clarence-Smith 1979, 82-88; Isaacman 1977, 130). Among others, the famous cases of Mapondera and Dambukashamba, whose field of operation included the Mozambican-Zimbabwean frontier, illustrate how the history of the establishment of the colonial State is profoundly marked by local modalities of political, social, cultural and economic protest against the advent of colonial rule, its violent and exploitative modus operandi. Partially a response to these protest and resistance movements, the gradual consolidation of a routinized administration in the 1900s diminished the occurrence of social banditry (Isaacman 1976, 107-115). Another example was the voluntary migratory movements of protest, associated with turbulent and porous frontiers and also with the organization of a colonial polity based on active political repression and subjugation, economic exploitation (through taxation, land expropriation and forced labour exaction) and socio-cultural transformation (for instance of socio-religious nature, as Terence Ranger emphasized (Ranger 1985, 51-56; Rodney 1971, 509-536)). As elsewhere, the pax colonica faced constant and variegated resistance, from open protest (for instance through pamphleteering, the protest writing (Wheeler 1972, 6787)), revolts and insurrections to sabotages (of labour and productivity cycles or equipment), robbery and pillages, among others.9 With geographical variations within the empire and within each formal colony, the role of previous cultural ties and landscapes, the connections and dependencies of existing trade networks and the authority of former political allegiances continued to persevere despite the gradual emergence and consolidation of the colonial State’s apparatus. The diverse and widespread modalities of protest and resistance are certainly connected to this fact. Many of them, such as the hidden transcripts of resistance (Scott 1990) or the politics of survival (indirect forms of non-compliance) in colonial contexts (Ajayi 1968, 179–80, 189) are still understudied and require a collective effort for their proper socio-historical contextualization, if possible with a view to promoting an inter-imperial comparative assessment (Derrick 2008). As José Francisco da Silva and many others acknowledged, as a project the empire required the establishment of mutual rewarding ententes between the Portuguese authorities and local powers. The frailties of the actual imperial sovereignty, the limits of colonial rule and the episodic nature of the demonstration of effective authority entailed a politics of

 9

See also the classics by Hobsbawn (1959, maxime 13-30; 1969).

74

Chapter Three

cooperation with local native structures. Much remains to be done in order to understand the dynamic role of patterns of cooperation and conflict between the establishment of colonial administrative, military and fiscal structures and the development of local, native political communities.10 The 1880s and the 1890s were surely characterized by the establishment of rewarding ententes with African chiefs, first as a way to increase the evidence of presence, next to assert a logic of fait accompli (a set of anticipatory measures that aimed to prove precedence in occupation) and then to demonstrate compliance with the international agreements devised in Berlin. In the first two phases, the role of missionaries was crucial (their role was frequently more politico-diplomatic than religious), especially in the Congo, where the political, scientific, ecclesiastical and economic competition was vibrant and combined in many different and dynamic ways. The logic of occupation was essentially one of dispersion of postos militares (military posts), aiming at a modicum of influence, barely of administration, and based on local negotiation and cooperation. A path of indirect administration, which obviously had different natures and manifestations – from the mere presence of a military post to the negotiation and delegation of authority with a compliant local authority – was for instance visible since the 1850s in the Congo (Jerónimo 2012) and since 1890 in Bihe Plateau, Central Angola (Pelissier 1986, 69-74). The evident advantages brought about by the use of modern warfare equipment, capable of counter-balancing the equally evident scarcity of logistical instruments and resources for a stable, institutionalized and territorialized administration, enabled the continuation of a modicum of colonial authority, despite the recurrent protest and resistance. The military incursions that formed the occupation movements of the so-called pacification campaigns between c.1890 and c.1926 were as much a sign of the fragility of the political, economic and social backbones of the empire as they were a demonstration of power. They were based on local human resources, on the local and sporadic recruitment of African auxiliary soldiers, mostly supplied by local clients, as a result of the traditional politics of cooperation and alliance with local potentados, sometimes associated with strategies of divide-and-rule, of instigation and instrumental use of local divisions. For instance, in the major revolt of 1917 in Amboim, certainly related to the Portuguese administrative and economic advances (related to coffee production), the Portuguese troops had the help of 3 000 African auxiliaries (Pelissier 1986, 52-56). The

 10

For an excellent and useful example of what is still to be done regarding the Portuguese colonial empire see Newbury (2003).

The States of Empire

75

Ngonior and the Achikunda played an important role in the pacifying efforts in Mozambique (in the Makuta rising in 1878 or in the Barue rebellion of 1917), as cipaios (native police) or as mercenaries. The case of the Fula (the fulas-pretos, not the fula-forros) or the case of the Senegalese Abdul Injaiin Guinea are other examples of circumstantial cooperation, surely motivated by different motivations and intents (for instance, Injai promoted his own rebellion in 1919) (Newitt 1981, 49-71; Vail and White 1980, 73-76; Isaacman 1976, 82, 169-171; Bowman 1986, 463-479; Pélissier 1989, 256, 258, 273-274, 342-351; Mendy 1994, 158-160, 221253; Forrest 2003, 105-126). The debilities of military, economic, ecclesiastical, bureaucratic, human and material resources to colonize, administer and control vast territories entailed more than the establishment of rewarding ententes with local powers and the exercise of violent forms of coercion. They required the delegation and the privatization of hegemony. In Mozambique, chartered companies – Mozambique Company (1891), Zambezia Company (1892) and Nyassa Company (1893) – were devised to enhance the imperative of colonial effective occupation and reduce its costs. Chartered companies were successful as instruments of territorialization of the country’s colonial sovereignty, of ‘outsourcing colonial rule’ (Gardner 2012, 19) and privatizing colonial hegemony (Young 1994, 103-105), as occurred in other imperial projects, from the AEF to the Congo Free State, the German colonial territories and the Rhodesias (Pedler 1975, 95-126). Their impact on colonial development (on production, investment, infrastructure expansion), on pacification and on the modernization of administration was less visible. These companies hardly saw the formation of a proper administrative apparatus as an end in itself. They were forms of ‘corporate feudalism’ that were considered an obvious solution to solve the territorial problem in a context of imperative effective occupation (Newitt 1981, 7679). In the beginning these were ‘largely paper structures’, as Malyn Newitt argued (1995, 367). The privatization and the delegation of the pacification, of the administration and taxation, and of the economic development of Mozambique nonetheless became a policy (with an important role being played by cipaios, the African guards or police). Following a transformation of the prazos system (related to a major administrative assessment made by António Enes in 1891-1892), their creation was intended to open the conditions for an effective pacification, an actual administration and a minimum economic exploitation, and simultaneously decrease the resilient power of Afro-Portuguese warlords and other local forces (like the Afro-Indian communities in Mozambique).

76

Chapter Three

In 1894 a similar move was made in Angola, where the Mossamedes Company was created (with German capital). Here, however, the delegation of the administration of justice, of the control of customs and of policing was not granted by the Portuguese government, contrary to what happened to the companies in Mozambique (Hammond 1975, 261; Clarence-Smith 1975, 192; idem 1979, 17-18; Wheeler and Pelissier 1971, 74). The political and economic scope of the functions and powers that these companies possessed in Mozambique was vast, clearly contributing to the general process of emergency, consolidation and spread of repertoires of direct and growingly unified colonial administration and rule. The pacification via military actions in Gaza (1895-1897) and in Barué (1902), the parallel establishment of the ‘imposto da palhota’ (hut-tax), the 1901 policy of land ownership (in which all unoccupied land became property of the State), the 1904 creation of a Secretaria dos Negócios Indígenas ([Department for Native Affairs] exclusively focused on the administration of the colonized in a much more organized and specialized manner) and the 1907 administrative reforms designed by Aires de Ornelas added to the reasons that marked an increase of political integration, even if not centralization, of the colony (Araújo 1900, 221-265; Vail 1976, 389416; Neil-Tomlinson 1987, 17-28; idem 1999, 109-128; Newitt 1995, 324334, 345-346; Isaacman 1972; Papagno 1980; Enes 1893; Capela 1977). Although different in historical nature and in terms of their action, the cases of the oligopoly of Companhia União Fabril (CUF) in Guinea and the roças in São Tomé add to the examples of quasi-States within quasi-States (Clarence-Smith 1985, 88, 167-168; Nascimento 2002; Jackson1990).

For a mobile interventionism: pacify, tax, subdue, pacify again (c.1900) Noticeable efforts towards intensification of colonial sovereignty emerged at the beginning of the twentieth-century. In Angola, Governorgenerals Eduardo da Costa and Paiva Couceiro faced the intense limitation of effective territorial occupation and control, exemplified by the still resonant rebellion of 1872 in the Dembos region, near Luanda, or by the undeniable autonomy possessed by local powers in the Congo, in the Lunda district or in the Libolo or South of the Cunene regions (Costa 1903; Couceiro 1948). The widespread uprisings in these two regions in the beginning of the twentieth century, exemplified by the Vau de Pembe massacre on 25 September 1904 (a consequence of the clash between the Cuamatos and the Portuguese), were simultaneously a cause and a result of the nature of Portuguese colonial rule (Felgas 1958, 101; Duarte 1999;

The States of Empire

77

Pélissier 1986, 249-255). They were a cause in the sense that they demonstrated the shortcomings of effective occupation and rule. The recognition of this fact promoted efforts to create the conditions for an effective colonial expansionism and the actual territorialization of colonial sovereignty. They were a result because the revolts and uprisings were also an outcome of the multiple violent movements of territorial expansionism (and economic disruption), albeit not colonization, that marked the imperial venture in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the abovementioned pacification campaigns. Not surprisingly, since the 1890s, the Portuguese colonial empire was characterized by an ‘endemic unrest’, essentially in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea. The Ovimbundu, the Bakongo, the Papel, the old prazo chiefs, the Muslim communities and the Makua, among others, were the main protagonists of a widespread turmoil, ignited by diverse motivations but also fuelled by common grievances regarding taxation and forced labour conscription.11 In the beginning of the century, the old coastal, mercantile model of occupation (with some outposts, especially in the Angolan plateau areas), merely based on the taxation of goods leaving the colonies and on circumstantial ‘rewarding agreements’, still prevailed. The new formula of occupation was to be based on a more systematic territorialization of sovereignty, which should entail a form of military government, especially in Mozambique (in Zambezia, Mozambique and Nyassa districts) and in Angola (in the Lunda and Huíla districts). Rebellion left no other solution (Costa 1903, 37-39). Interventionism, as Paiva Couceiro termed the policy that could change the state of affairs, was indeed scarce and limited. In Angola, it only gained momentum as a stable colonial policy under his administration (1907-1909). He devised a general system of occupation, whose leitmotiv was ‘peace and civilization via labour’, articulated around six penetration axes. These assumed a close relationship between communication and occupation. The existing communication routes and outposts should determine, at the time, the spatial distribution of the colonial administrative apparatus, which should be a mobile one, given the inadequate resources and the enormous scope of the responsibility. Both of these reasons, reinforced by ideological and celebrated military legacies of the 1890s pacification campaigns, led Paiva Couceiro to support a particular type of interventionism, based on the ‘use of armed police with the occasional use of force’. ‘Occupation’ and ‘administration’ were mobile, based on police operations and on military campaigns. As he summed up, with no ‘positive facts of administration and of police’ there

 11

For a summary see Newitt (1981 57-68).

78

Chapter Three

were no justifiable ‘allegations of property’. Predictably, this strategy provoked sequences of quarrels, which were followed by the creation of more or less temporary military-administrative outposts. This was the nature of the much-needed colonial sovereignty: pacify, tax (the hut-tax) and subdue (avassalar) the ‘insurgents’, pacify again. Political and economic strategies were indissoluble. The control of the territory and the appeasement and occupation of the turbulent frontiers, the pacification of the colonial polity and its signs of insurgency, the security of the existing markets, and the enhancement of colonial taxation only meant something together (Couceiro 1948, 9-10, 13-20, 22, 26).12 The establishment of a form of direct rule became more than a project in the early twentieth century. The widespread conflicts enticed occupation, occupation ignited resistance. Alongside the examples already mentioned above, some additional ones, namely Angola and Mozambique, can be mobilized. In Angola, since 1902, following the evolution of the Bailundo War, the Central Highlands region was progressively occupied. The dynamics of occupation-resistance-pacification-occupation was obvious. In 1902-1903, Mutu-ya-Kevela was able to form a coalition of local powers against the Portuguese, given the nefarious impact of the actions of the Boers and the Portuguese settlers and of the declining economic conditions (with regard to the rubber trade, for instance). In the north of Angola, in the Congo district, after the expansionist moves of the last decades of the nineteenth century, a series of mobile attempts to control the region took place in the 1910s. The ‘endless revolt of the Congo’, as Pelissier stressed (2004, 251), involved a widespread civil war related to political (royal succession) and economic (evolution of rubber trade) causes, which were eagerly used by the Portuguese to tentatively redefine the local balance of power. The Lunda district saw many similar examples. In 1907, the Dembos region, autonomous since 1872, was subject to military occupation, which nonetheless did not end the local expressions of revolt. In Seles (1902) and Amboim (1917-1918) the increase of colonists, gradually supported by a civil administration, and the related political and economic impact led to violent outcomes (Wheeler and Christense 1973, 53-92; Vos 2005; Felgas 1958, 157-159; Teixeira 1948; Machado 1913; Magno 1937; Pelissier 1986, 44-45 and 52-56.). At precisely the same time as the Amboim revolt, a rebellion erupted in the Barue Kingdom in Mozambique. This revolt soon acquired a pan-ethnic nature. It was a pan-Zambezian demonstration of protest and resistance to

 12

The model to be used was the set of instructions given to the administrative installation in Cuito.

The States of Empire

79

the intensification of politic-administrative (tax-exaction and forced labour recruitment, namely to build a road system in the area) and economic (land expropriation and general commercial burdens) dimensions (Isaacman 1976, 156-185). An increasing colonial interventionism in the 1900s onwards was also visible in two other interrelated aspects: the tentative reorganization of the political and administrative frameworks that could enhance colonial rule and the introduction of legislation focused on colonial taxation. As we have noted in the beginning, the detailed history of this interrelated political and economic interventionism on colonial fiscal sovereignty (and on its political, social and economic causes and consequences) is yet to be done. We use the Angolan case as a mere illustration. In 1906, two important political interventions occurred. There was a new administrative framework, organizing the colony into provinces, circunscrições and concelhos and new legislation was approved to regulate colonial taxation, starting effectively in the economic year of 1907-1908 (Decree of 13 September 1906). As José Ferreira Diniz (provincial-secretary of Angola) stated in his historical appraisal of the meaning and function in Angola, the ‘native tax’, or imposto de cubatas, was ‘one of the most valuable analytical element to assess the intensity and the efficiency of administrative occupation’ (Diniz 1929, 136, 147). It was surely a crucial aspect of the colonial economies, given the nature of the fiscal pact. It was also seen as a proof of an effective administrative occupation.13 In 1913, another piece of legislation was crucial to the consolidation of colonial sovereignty in Angola: the legal definition of the circunscrições administrativas reinforced the role, and importance, of the native taxes. As Norton de Matos, the governor-general of Angola that promulgated the legislation, clearly emphasized, tax-exaction was a powerful way to demonstrate the utility of colonial administration. Its payment should be promoted and enforced as ‘an act of gratitude given the advantages and the protection’ that the native population supposedly received from the colonial State. Moreover, its payment was ‘the recognition and acceptance of Portuguese sovereignty’, and its intent was ‘more political than financial’. It was ‘the final act of occupation, pacification and administration’, a ‘guarantee of pacification, of complete and loyal submission of the sobado, and its full integration in our administrative existence’. This would ultimately bring about the ‘end of expensive military operations, of severe repressions, of an anarchical state of affairs, unproductive and

 13

For a contemporary overview see Gonçalves (1908). For Mozambique see Capela (1977) and, for a later period, Santos (2007).

80

Chapter Three

inconvenient’. The decree also entailed a significant change related to the establishment of the colonial State. Only the colonial bureaucracy (e.g. the administrator or capitão-mor, or the chefes de posto) could collect taxes, directly or indirectly, via the appointed and recognized soba, the African chief. This not only reinforced the formal and institutional projection of the colonial State apparatus but also curtailed, or aimed to curtail, the intermediary, non-routinized role of local powers (e.g. local traders or cipaios), native or not. The (non-executed) Provincial-decree of 1919 essentially replicated the aims of the 1913’s doctrine, although introducing a per capita tax and stressing an important point: colonial native taxation was also an important mechanism to ‘lead the native to the good habits of labour’ (Diniz 1929, 148-150, 154).14 It was a powerful auxiliary in the promotion of labour, forced if necessary, as the foremost instrument of ‘civilization’ (Jerónimo, 2010). This civilising justification was reinforced by the promulgation of Regulamento do recenseamento e cobrança do imposto indígena [Regulation for indigenous tax registration and collection] in 1920, which defined the native tax as the ‘driving force of civilization’ (Regulamento do recenseamento e cobrança do imposto indígena, 1920, 8, 18).15 In 1948, the taxes paid by African peasants amounted to around 68% of the colony’s revenue (Heywood 2000, 73). This official document was also important for another reason: it articulated taxation with the production of censuses. The statistical objectivation of the imperial world aimed to create an imperial informational order that could sustain a more rational and effective administration of the colonial realm (Jerónimo 2006, 29-32). Again, the constitution and deployment of investigative modalities – in this case the survey and enumerative research – is still to be studied in the Portuguese case. Like in other imperial formations, the survey and the census investigative modalities were technologies of rule that rendered the natives legible and manageable. They were crucial tools of imperialism (Cohn 1987, 224-254; idem 1996, esp. 3-15; Appadurai 1993, 314-339; Ittmann, Cordell and Maddox 2010, 1-21). As the Regulamento stated, the ‘organization of a survey of the workers and of the military service, as well as of the production of statistics about livestock, crops, agricultural produce and industrial production of the natives, and about the areas of production’, was another ‘indispensable’ activity ‘to a good and progressive administration’ (Regulamento do recenseamento e cobrança do

 14

See Regulamento das circunscrições administrativas da Província de Angola (1913). 15 The provincial-decree was from January 14, not January 22 as the title indicates.

The States of Empire

81

imposto indígena, 1920, 7). However, as a later assessment by the director of the Statistical Department of Angola stated, the ‘lack of interest’ that the colonial bureaucracy showed concerning ‘statistical record and data’, the obstacles posed by communications and by the organization and publishing of the Yearbooks, and the ‘decentralization’ of information-production (each department of colonial bureaucracy had its own mechanism and classifications schemes) contributed to a problematic state of affairs regarding the production and potential instrumental use of imperial and colonial statistics in the colonial State’s administration (Lemos 1936, 4, 911, 13-14). When Armindo Monteiro visited Angola in 1930 (as undersecretary of State of the Ministry of Finance) and in 1932 (as Ministry of the Colonies and also as Director-general of Statistical Services in Portugal), he was able to notice the ‘overwhelming shortage of elements available to public services in order to provide information about the country, and even about their own activity, in a cognizant manner’. The appalling state of the information, statistical and otherwise, on the workings of the colonial State, on the colonial population and society, on ‘its physiological movements’, and on colonial resources and economies was undeniable. The existing numbers did not result from ‘uncontroversial and methodical record’, they were ‘pure estimates’. In 1932, Monteiro ordered the constitution of a Department of General Statistics. In 1933, he decreed the Carta Orgânica do Império [Organic Charter of the Empire] and the Reforma Administrativa do Ultramar [Overseas Administrative Reform]. All this legislation aimed to transform the imperial informational landscape, multiplying the loci of imperial and colonial information-gathering, organization and dissemination, diversifying its modalities and widening their core subjects and their practical aims, while centralizing these processes. The production of statistics related to the indigenous populations was to be a special concern, and the enlargement of the colonial State apparatus considered fundamental, in order to enhance knowledge on them. In 1935, the creation of the Instituto Nacional de Estatística [National Institute of Statistics] included a department of colonial statistics. In the same year, the introductory note to the Statistical Yearbook elaborated and published in Angola by the understaffed Statistical Services (created in September of 1932) declared that the main problem for the constitution of a viable instrument to the understanding of, and therefore to the intervention on, the activities of the colony was the ‘flaws of its informants’, that is, the fragilities of the State apparatus, not the quality of information provided by native intermediaries (Anuário Estatístico, 1935). Only in 1940 did Angola have its first general census. This certainly contributed to the informational

82

Chapter Three

and practical debilities of the fiscal devices and the related phenomena of tax-evasion, despite the growing rates and the gradual widening of the taxexaction. It also impacted on the historical process of consolidation of State power (Heywood 2000, 38). As briefly noted above, the tentative reorganization of the political and administrative frameworks that could enhance the consolidation of State power was a major concern since the 1900s. The institutional territorialization of the colonial State’s apparatus required new political and legal terminologies and guidelines, as it required renewed repertoires of rule. The languages of scientific colonialism consolidated internationally and started to gain some currency in Portugal, addressing issues such as the proper, modern models of colonial administration or its relation to local polities (for instance, direct versus indirect rule or centralized versus acephalous systems of power in African communities) (Dimier 2004; Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1964). Side by side with the colonial administrative frameworks, one of the main questions was related to the degree of autonomy of the colonial State and respective administration, which was traditionally rather limited. Until the decentralising measures promulgated by the new republican regime in the 1910s and the overall political and constitutional revision of the relationship between the empireState and the colonies (namely article 67 of the 1911 Constitution), following some of the ideas and precepts formulated by António Enes or Eduardo da Costa, the central government in Lisbon controlled the elaboration of colonial budgets (for instance for public works or for the pacification campaigns), the design of land and fiscal policies, the development of programs for colonial development and, always crucial aspects, the production of labour legislation and the management of the ‘system’ of native labour. The administrative dynamics of the colonial State was determined by the Ministry of the Navy and Overseas (from 1911 onwards Ministry of the Colonies). This strict centralization of the empire-State did not prevent, however, the continuity of a longstanding reality in each colonial domain: the considerable degree of autonomy of local powers and the prevalence of mechanisms of cooperation or of episodic coercion. The latter were the sine qua non of a modicum of colonial administration. Despite the power of the Governor-general, who possessed a considerable degree of autonomy in the decision-making process (on political, economic and military affairs), and despite the formal regime of centralization, local realities prevailed. The legislation approved in 1914 aimed to transform the situation. The principles of administrative and financial autonomy of each province were laid down by the Organic Laws of 15 August 1914. The

The States of Empire

83

structure of the colonial administration, which comprised conselhos do governo [government councils] composed by local representatives (including the filhos do país, sons of the country), aimed to promote a decentralized form of government, able to adapt to new circumstances and to sustain a new and much-needed imperial and colonial dynamics, one with a view to effective administration. The enhancement of local participation and the normalization of the participation of traditional authorities were some of the declared concerns and purposes. Their role in the establishment of a territorialized colonial State, on the founding of a new geography of taxation and on the organization of a system of native labour recruitment (based on compulsory mechanisms) was clearly recognized. As usual, these reformist projects failed to secure the necessary conditions to facilitate an effective materialization of the proclaimed objectives and the established legal norms. The multiplication of administrative instances was not accompanied by the multiplication of prepared colonial bureaucrats (Jerónimo, forthcoming; Newitt 1981, 175). Moreover, the traditional ‘superfluity of politics’ and ‘insufficiency of government’ (Smith 1970, 23) in the metropolis (thirty-three governments between 1890 and 1926) and in the colonies (for instance, in Mozambique, between 1890 and 1921 there were twenty-six governor-generals; from 1921 to 1926, four were the High-Commissioners) also contributed to the rather limited impact of these policies. Nonetheless, the previous centralising tendencies, and their negative consequences, were confronted with the promulgation of a series of colonial organic charters (only properly executed after World War I). One of the novelties was the creation of the High-Commissioners’ regime. The 1920s legislation – namely the Bases Orgânicas de Administração Civil e Financeira das Colónias [Guidelines for the Civil and Financial Administration of the Colonies] of October 9, 1920 – conferred new and extended responsibilities to the colonial political authorities and enabled local budgetary control, including the raising of loans, which supported the period’s economic modernization, for instance in the promotion of infrastructures. This led to considerable debt and spiralling inflation. Decentralization and autonomy were the fundamental drives. A certain degree of legal autonomy regarding issues such as labour, land or native policies in general was also obtained in these new imperial political arrangements. The period of Norton de Matos, undeniably associated with the expansion of civil administration, was marked by efforts to increase the

84

Chapter Three

colonial State’s autonomy regarding Lisbon.16 One of the milestones of his administration was the concession of a monopoly to Diamang, a company with French, South African and Belgian capital, in 1921. Apart from the exclusive rights to diamond prospecting and extraction, Diamang was granted the administration, policing and other social responsibilities in the Lunda, in Eastern Angola. Again, and despite the tentative erosion of native authorities (and their replacement by Portuguese administrators), the delegation of sovereign functions continued to be an option in an administration that had modernising and developmental tendencies (especially focused on communication infrastructures). Diamang should provide the ‘necessary amounts to subsidize the first stage of the efforts of development, of occupation, of administration and civilization’ that was under way, at least as a declared intent. The tentative replacement of the predominance of mobile, military rationales in the political organization of the colonial polities by a civil model, based on the territorialized administration, included the continuity of such solutions, even though Norton de Matos aimed to restrict their potential of denationalization. For instance, the terms of the concession to the Cabinda Company (created in 1903) were redefined and those of the Mossamedes Company were tentatively altered, aiming to correct a ‘serious error of colonial administration’ that enabled ‘organizations and pretensions’ that could ‘damage our sovereignty’. Again, the actual realizations did not match the grandiose plans and the modernising precepts of the colonial policies of the time. Scarce capital (private or public) to invest, almost inexistent colonization (irrelevant emigration, despite a minor increase in the number of colonists), incomplete political authority and fragile economic and financial intervention are some of the reasons that, as always, explain the outcome (Matos 1926, 146-162, 211226, 262-268 and 279-327, quotations at 307, 288; Cleveland 2008; Clarence-Smith 1985, 129-130). More or less the same happened in Mozambique. The post of HighCommissioner, first attributed to Manuel Brito Camacho (between 1921 and 1923), again afforded a certain degree of politico-administrative and economic autonomy to the colony. A significant divergence was nonetheless visible regarding Angola: the role and power of the chartered companies was immense. The feudality of the colony was hard to overcome, and a new administrative order hard to establish. The formation

 16

Norton de Matos was governor-general (1912-1915) and High-Commissioner of Angola (1921-1924). For his first incumbency in Angola see Dáskalos (2008, especially 55-58 and 169-189).

The States of Empire

85

of a modern colonial State was dictated by the nature, the characteristics and the duration of the sovereign and monopolistic States (the concessions), as it was by the action of the Banco Nacional Ultramarino [National Overseas Bank], created in 1864. The territories of Manica and Sofala, controlled by the Mozambique Company, were only under the direct administration of the colonial State since 18 July 1942. Like his Angolan counterpart, Brito Camacho also aimed to transform the economic landscape in Mozambique, facing constant obstacles, not only from within but also from British and South-African interests, focused on controlling the main loci of maritime and land transportation (namely the control of the Lourenço Marques port facilities and railway) and also, obviously, in benefiting directly from the colony’s administration eagerness for capital (Newitt 1995, 374-377). The famous ‘Hornung contract’ with the Sena Sugar Estates Ltd. (which involved the recurrent issue of state provision of African labour to private companies, up to 3 000 men per year, during 20 years) is a good example of the local (African and Portuguese), regional, inter-imperial and international political and economic dynamics that conditioned the establishment of a de facto authority of the colonial State and some of its plans to redefine its policies (Camacho 1926, 73-116; Head 1980, esp. 34-35, 50-51; Vail and White 1980, 215-216). As in Angola, the serious economic problems brought about by international and colonial processes in early 1920s created the conditions for a policy reversal that would take place over the next years.

The development of late colonialism The Military Dictatorship of 1926 immediately brought about the reinstatement of centralizing doctrines and policies. The major objective of the Minister of the Colonies João Belo (1926-1928), military and former colonial administrator in Mozambique (where he spent almost three decades), was to organize a response to the troubled state of affairs. Side by side with other important measures that aimed to nationalize the colonial domains, increase the colonial State’s intervention and authority – namely the definition of new organic laws regarding civil and financial colonial administration, the Estatuto Político, Social e Criminal dos Indígenas de Angola e Moçambique [Political, Criminal, and Civil Statute of the Natives of Angola and Mozambique], 1926 and 1929, or the Estatuto Orgânico das Missões Católicas Portuguesas de África e Timor [Organic Statute of Portuguese Catholic Missions in Africa and Timor], 1926 –, Belo clearly saw the economic and financial relative autonomy of the regime of the High-Commissioners as the primordial error of previous imperial and

86

Chapter Three

colonial policies. Centralization was the way out, the only one available to a new Imperial order, which would be given a legal substance with the Colonial Act of 1930 – the document that turned the historical mission to colonize into a constitutional precept and obligation – and with the legislation that followed, namely the above mentioned Organic Charter of the Portuguese Colonial Empire and the Overseas Administrative Reform, both of 1933 (Smith 1974, 653-667; Silva 1989, 101-152; Alexandre 1993, 1117-1136). The 1930s Colonial Act envisioned the establishment of a unified empire-State, the greater Portugal, in a period of growing internationalization of imperial affairs. To the Portuguese authorities, the labours of the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization bred new problems that needed to be addressed and understood (Jerónimo and Monteiro 2012, 159-196). The regime of High-Commissioners was abandoned, the relative autonomy of the colonies suppressed, a measure that was also intended to limit the power of the white settler community. The conciliation between decentralizing and autonomist programs of colonial administration, the politico-economic realities of the empire-State and the nature and characteristics of the colonial situation proved impossible to achieve. Centralization became the rule, nationalization the grand motto. The political and economic administration of the colonial empire returned to Lisbon. The predominance of metropolitan interests became a central principle, guided by a muscular economic nationalism (Jerónimo, forthcoming; Alexandre 1993, 209, 212). The premises of the corporative regime were extended to the colonial empire (Decree n. 27552 of March 1937) and reinforced the process. Fixed prices and quotas were defined to promote the coordinated production and commercialization of raw materials (the regime of culturas obrigatórias, since 1937) – cotton, sugar, coffee, maize, palm oil – which in some cases entailed the creation of monopolistic companies such as the Cotonang in Malange, Angola (Pitcher 1993; idem, 1995, 119-143; Isaacman 1996; Fortuna 1993). Following the Belgian model, certain ‘cotton areas’ with single concession-holders with exclusive rights of purchase from native producers, at fixed prices determined by the colonial State, were also created in Mozambique. In the 1940s, twelve cotton concession-holders existed in the colony (Vail and White 1980, esp. 273-275). Besides the establishment of a ‘colonial pact’ and the establishment of imperial autarky (by the Organic Charter), the Colonial Act and the following legal and political measures entailed a clear effort to end the delegation of sovereignty that was a traditional mechanism of expanding political and fiscal authority over the colonies. In this process, among many

The States of Empire

87

other important policy transformations, one is particularly noteworthy: the tentative creation of a professional colonial civil service that could improve a centralized colonial bureaucracy and assure a considerable degree of autonomy of the colonial State from local powers and interests, and their respective initiatives. This bureaucratic reformulation also aimed at a redefinition of the network of interlocutors and cooperative bodies in African communities. This process nonetheless entailed the political and economic incorporation and use of tradition titleholders and traditional authorities (under the supervision of the colonial bureaucracy), which continued to function as brokers, as tax-collectors, as labour recruiters and other crucial roles. In some areas, this form of indirect rule was still predominant in the 1950s (Heywood 2000, 85-86).17 The post-World War II period was marked by renewed institutional, legal and administrative frameworks, in the metropolis and in the colonies. Following similar historical patterns in other imperial formations, the Portuguese colonial empire also revealed a ‘second colonial occupation’ (perhaps, a first), which entailed a significant expansion in the ‘scope of activity and scale of operation’ of the colonial State (Low and Lonsdale 1976, 12; Young 1998, 105). A committed transformation in the nature and modus operandi of the administrative, technical and specialized instances that governed the colonial empire and the promotion of new modalities of imperial legitimization were mandatory, given the rising pressures of anticolonial nationalist movements and of international criticism over the resilience of imperial polities, among other important factors. The growth of revenues of the colonial State (due to the expansion of its geographies of taxation in the preceding decades and also to the colonial economic boom in the war period) allowed some room for manoeuvre regarding the expansion of the State’s orbit. The gradual redefinition of the fiscal pact towards an increasing metropolitan investment reinforced this tendency. Government planning and economic intervention by the colonial State was the rule, development the motto. But despite evidences of accommodation of imperial and international languages and methods of good government – a welfare colonialism based on models of State-directed economic development, political incorporation and social and cultural modernization –, the Portuguese case continued to reveal some of its longstanding attributes (Jerónimo and Pinto, forthcoming). Portuguese late colonialism was organized around a ‘repressive version of the developmentalist colonial State’, as Frederick Cooper aptly described it (Cooper 2002, 62). Despite the celebration of doctrines of historical imperial exceptionality –

 17

For the general economic policy see Clarence-Smith (1985, 146-190).

88

Chapter Three

from the civilizing mission (Jerónimo 2010) to the 1950s appropriation of Gilberto Freyre’s Luso-tropicalism (Castelo 1999) –, the colonial empire continued to be characterized by exclusionary native policies (on land, economic production, labour, education and citizenship) that engineered and administrated social, cultural, economic and political difference in its interior. The legal persistence of the indigenato until 1961 (Cruz 2005) and of forced labour for public purposes until 1962, year of the Rural Labour Code that suppressed de jure all forms of compulsory labour, and of the abolition of compulsory crop growing among other important measures, are sufficient evidence of this (Jerónimo and Monteiro 2013). Contrary to what happened in other imperial formations, in which a decrease in ‘coercion in labour mobilization’, and the opening up of some ‘opportunities for political participation’ and for ‘social ascension’ were noticeable, the Portuguese case failed to replicate other reformist paths (Young, 1998, 106). In this respect, the formal re-creation of regedorias (according to local customs) was a telling demonstration (Portugal, Ministério do Ultramar, 1961). Contrary to what happened in other imperial formations, the Portuguese colonial State was never capable of ‘indigenizing itself’ (Darwin 1999, 74), not even to win hearts and minds in increasingly difficult circumstances regarding its own legitimate existence. But it was certainly effective in promoting forms of decentralized despotism (Mamdani 1996). No equal citizens, many different subjects.18 The 1950s saw important changes that aimed to modernize the empireState and the colonial State, both at the metropolitan and colonial levels. In the metropolis, on the one hand, the legal end of the colonial empire was determined by the constitutional revision of 1951, whereby the Colonial Act of 1930, following two early reforms – Revision of 1945 and the Carta Orgânica do Império Colonial [Organic Charter of the Colonial Empire] in 1949 –, was incorporated in the constitution, therefore unifying the two existing legal frameworks (imperial and metropolitan) in a single document in order to sustain the claim of national unity. Colonies were now ‘overseas provinces’ and principles of political assimilation and economic integration were reinforced. A new ‘juridical construction of the empire’, as the former minister of Colonies José Ferreira Bossa foresaw in 1944, was a crucial move given the new international historical circumstances. The greater Portugal, a single political and economic polity, was a legal reality, even if

 18

For an excellent comparative analysis of the dynamics of political and administrative incorporation in the Portuguese and French empires, see Keese (2007).

The States of Empire

89

one where the dual citizenship regime prevailed. The ‘necessities of the development and welfare’ of the overseas provinces were consecrated as priorities, as the article 159 of the Constitutional Revision declared and the 1953 Overseas Organic Law reinforced (Wilensky 1968; Silva 1989). On the other hand, the constitution of the Gabinete dos Negócios Políticos [Cabinet for Political Affairs] (1959) marked the reorganization, and enhancement, of an institutional network of information and intelligence gathering, which comprised the Foreign Affairs Ministry, the Political Police (PIDE) and other agencies that operated at the colonial world (Silva 2008). This novel empire of information was to be the backbone of repressive developmentalism, and should prepare the empireState and the colonial State to deal with the changing historical contexts, marked by the rise of emigration to the overseas provinces (Castelo 2007), by the related novel political and economic role played by the white communities (Pimenta 2008), and by the intensification of anti-colonial manifestations (raising questions of internal and external security). Another example of the ‘imperialism of knowledge’ (Cooper 1997, 64) that characterized other imperial formations, the new empire of information included the creation of ‘study’ sections to focus on the production of specialized knowledge about several imperial subject-matters, and therefore to enhance the decision-making process regarding imperial and colonial policies (Jerónimo and Pinto, forthcoming).19 The ‘imperialism of knowledge’, and its association with a repressive and developmentalist colonial State, was also a local phenomenon from the 1940s onwards, as the initial statement of Henrique Galvão and Carlos Selvagem demonstrated. The territorialization of the colonial State’s bureaucratic apparatus was supported by the creation of administrative instances dedicated to the mobilization of investigative modalities of knowledge production about colonial realities that could be given instrumental use by programs of economic development and projects of political control (e.g., counter-insurgency ones). For instance, in Angola, as Galvão and Selvagem duly noted, ten departments addressed financial and economic issues (from public works to scientific domains such as geology and forestry), several juntas dealt exclusively with the management of the coffee, cereal and cotton production and trade. The bureaucratization of the overseas world also included political goals. The forced incorporation of mestiços organizations into para-governmental agencies, designed to control, and curtail, the process of constitution of political parties was an

 19

For the formation of scientific knowledge in Portugal related to imperial affairs see Ágoas (2012) and Castelo (2012).

90

Chapter Three

example. Similar operations were tentatively applied to the catholic ecclesiastical instances, with a view to turn them into civilizing agents of the colonial State. The ‘plethora of bureaucracy’, as technical and specialized services multiplied, was formed, resulting from multiple motivations (scientific, military, economic and financial, political), and being associated with numerous groups and institutions possessing diverse interests and intents, from the promotion of a scientific takeover of the empire to the strategic creation of solid foundations to resist decolonizing pressures (Galvão and Selvagem 1953, 350). The 1950s also saw the beginning of several developmental plans that were devised to modernize the imperial and the colonial worlds (Pereira 2012). The expansion, rationalization and professionalization of colonial governance and respective bureaucracy, the appropriation of international languages of welfare colonialism and the promotion of State-planned and State-directed economic development were parallel, frequently combined processes. Despite its characteristics and shortcomings, the 1953 six-year Plano do Fomento [Improvement Plan] combined State-coordinated and State-managed social, political and economic rationales, in which issues such as community development, rural welfare and development, (re)settlement projects and ethnic colonization, the moral and spiritual advancement of native communities, transfer of technology and techniques, political and economic integration and exploration were addressed. Subsequent plans would emphasize this feature. Colonial interventionism was now a multifaceted program. A good example of this combination of political, socio-cultural and economic intents that characterized the social engineering imagination of the late colonial State were the colonatos (native and European Statedirected and managed, rural settlement schemes), the exemplary model of the core premises of late colonial development. Another example of this integrated conception of developmentalism were the aldeamentos (native colonatos). Beside purposes such as the control of migration and labour mobility, the coordination of agricultural produce or the promotion of western forms of family, the aldeamentos were also governed by a clear military-strategic reasoning, that is, the establishment of safe areas where nationalist, insurgent influence could be contained and counteracted. They were part of a larger anti-insurgency package (Bender 1973, 235-279; idem 1978, 104-107; Jerónimo and Pinto 2012c). The ‘plethora of bureaucracy’ of the late colonial State was created to meet these multifaceted programs. The formation of intervention teams of Serviço Psico-Social [PsychoSocial Services] or the creation of Juntas Provinciais de Povoamento [Settlement Provincial Departments, 1961] – both focused on the

The States of Empire

91

propagation of modern techniques of agricultural production but also of codes of hygiene, for instance – are two outcomes of the developmental drive that aimed to induce rapid but strictly controlled social transformation within the empire that since 1951 was one no more, after the Constitutional Revision (Soares 1961; Junta de Investigações do Ultramar 1964; Bender 1978, 159-160, 165-196). They are also an illustration of the scope of activity and the scale of operation of the late colonial State, in a context in which the war (1961 onwards in Angola, 1963 in Guinea, 1964 in Mozambique) also added to the provinces’ economic dynamism, given the enlargement of colonial markets (to meet the rising European demand, also a result of metropolitan emigration) and the increase in public expenditure (on public works, sanitary facilities, communications, etc.). The formation of a colonial ‘security State’ was one of the fundamental elements, simultaneously a cause and a consequence, of the particular type of repressive developmentalism that characterized Portuguese late colonialism. Alongside many other consequences, the spread of the military conflict in Portuguese Africa reinforced the informational and institutional operations of the late colonial State, enhancing its repressive and its developmental combined nature, which would constitute one of the legacies to independent States and postcolonial societies (Mahoney 2003, 165-198; Young 1988, 25-66).

Conclusion The historical trajectory of the colonial State since the emergence of new imperialism – oversimplifying, from a ruthless extractive action and arbitrary deployment of authority, essentially based on tax-exaction and forced labour recruitment, to a developmental, welfare colonialism – was obviously a multifaceted and dynamic, often contradictory and ambiguous, process. The move from a ‘night-watchman State’, focused on maintaining an orderly status quo, towards a ‘proactive’, ‘dense’ and ‘big State’ – driven by a modernizing impetus that could enhance its legitimate existence and could meet the political, moral and economic challenges of the post-World War II world, and marked by the multiplication of “parapolitical institutions” and by a drive to promote administrative and culture uniformities in the colonies – was dissimilar in each imperial formation and in each colony (Darwin, 1999, 76-78). This comparative, inter-imperial and inter-colonial history is yet to be made. The comparative history of this process in the “third” Portuguese empire also remains to be done. The historical analysis of aspects such as State autonomy (vis-à-vis

92

Chapter Three

international, metropolitan and colonial interests and organizations), bureaucratic rationality (the development of the proactive, planning and coordinating, interventionist State, from political to economic and sociocultural aspects), social penetration (the territorialization of State authority and its institutional framework, from military to judicial and educational presence) and governmental legitimacy (internal, regarding African but also European settlers, and external, regarding international organizations, transnational movements and other States, including post-colonial ones) in each colony is still missing.20 Notwithstanding regional variations, local specificities and historical particularities (that need to be detailed and explored), the history of the colonial State in the Portuguese colonial empire is the history of the constitution – with uneven manifestations, evolution and impact (namely the obvious rural versus urban divide) – of a repressive developmentalism (Jerónimo and Pinto 2012c). Perhaps the depiction of the African colonial State as ‘the purest modern form of autonomous bureaucratic autocracy’ (Young 1994, 160) derives from an overemphasis on some of its characteristics. Based upon a ‘modus vivendi accommodation’ with local societies, the rewarding ententes that impacted negatively on its autonomy, the colonial State had, for the most part of its existence, a patent restricted authority. Given the recurrent shortage of human and material resources to effectively administer the colonial realms and given the active resistance to its authority by multiple constituencies (internationally, at home and abroad), the colonial State possessed a moderate and incomplete influence, producing a manifest uneven (under)development. Considering the bureaucratic heterogeneity of institutions and actors (with different motivations and contexts of action), even in an authoritarian regime, the empire-State and the colonial State did not constitute a monolith, a uniform corpus of doctrines, policies and actual decisions, without contradictions and internal conflicts. Nor were they examples of bureaucratic rationality or efficiency. However, the history of the “third” Portuguese colonial empire would be manifestly incomplete without a proper study of the colonial State as a pivotal actor in its historical formation.21



 20 21

See Newitt (1999, 110-122), who uses Lodge’s categories (1998, 20-47). For a critical assessment of Young (1994) see Berman (1997, 556-570, at 564).

The States of Empire

93

Bibliography AAVV. Salazar e o Salazarismo. Lisboa: Dom Quixote, 1989 Ágoas, Frederico. “Estado, Universidade e Ciências Sociais: a introdução da sociologia na Escola Superior Colonial (1952-1972)”, in O Império Colonial em questão (ed. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo). Lisboa: Edições 70, 2012. Ajayi, A. “The continuity of African Institutions under Colonialism”, in Emerging Themes on African History (ed. Terence O. Ranger). London: Heinemann, 1968. Albuquerque, Joaquim Mouzinho de. Moçambique 1896-1898, vol. II. Lisboa: Agência-Geral das Colónias, 1934. Alexandre, Valentim. “Ideologia, economia e política: a questão colonial na implantação do Estado Novo”, in Análise Social 28, 123/124, 1993. Anuário Estatístico de Angola. Anno de 1933. Luanda: Repartição Central de Estatística Geral/Imprensa Nacional, 1935. Appadurai, Arjun. “Number in the Colonial Imagination”, in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (ed. C. Breckenridge and P. van der Veer). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Araújo, António José de. Les Colonies Portugaises d’Afrique: colonisation, émigration, déportation. Paris: Imprenteur Lahure, 1900. Badie, Bertrand and Pierre Birnbaum. Sociologie de l’État. Paris: Grasset, 1979. Bender, Gerald. Angola under the Portuguese. The Myth and the Reality. London: Heinemann, 1978. Berman, Bruce J. “Review: The Perils of BulaMatari: Constraint and Power in the Colonial State”, in Canadian Journal of African Studies 31, 3, 1997. Bethencourt, Francisco and Diogo Ramada Curto (eds.). Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Boone, Catherine. Political Topographies of the African State: Rural Authority and Institutional Choice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Bowman, Joye L. “Abdul Njai: Ally and Enemy of the Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau, 1895-1919”, in Journal of African History 27, 3, 1986. Breckenridge, C. and P. van der Veer (eds.). Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Camacho, Brito. Moçambique. Problemas Coloniais. Lisboa: Livraria Editora Guimarães e C.ª, 1926.

94

Chapter Three

Capela, José. O Imposto da Palhota e a Introdução do Modo de Produção Capitalista nas Colónias. Porto: Afrontamento, 1977. Carta Orgânica das Instituições Administrativas nas Províncias Ultramarinas. Annotada por J. A. Ismael Gracias. Nova Goa: Imprensa Nacional, 1894. Castelo, Cláudia. Passagens para África: o povoamento de Angola e Moçambique com naturais da metrópole (1920-1974). Porto: Afrontamento, 2007. —. “O Modo Português de estar no Mundo”. O luso-tropicalismo e a ideologia colonial portuguesa (1933–1961). Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 1999. —. “Ciência, Estado e desenvolvimento no colonialismo português tardio”, in O Império Colonial em questão (ed. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo). Lisboa: Edições 70, 2012. Chabal, Patrick et al. A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002. Chilcote, Ronald H. (ed.). Protest and Resistance in Angola and Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Clarence-Smith, William. Mossamedes and its Hinterland. London: unpublished PhD Thesis, University of London, 1975. —. Slaves, Peasants and Capitalists in Southern Angola, 1840-1926. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. —. The Third Portuguese Empire: a study in economic imperialism, 18251975. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985. Cleveland, Todd. Rock solid: African laborers on the diamond mines of the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola (Diamang), 1917-1975. Minneapolis: unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Minnesota, 2008. Cohn, Bernard. An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987. —. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Cooper, Frederick and Randall Packard (eds.). International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays in the History and Politics of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Cooper, Frederick. Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present. New York: Cambridge, 2002. Coronel João de Almeida. Sessão de Homenagem realizada na Sociedade de Geografia em Fevereiro de 1930. Lisboa: [s.n.], 1930. Costa, Eduardo da. Estudo sobre a Administração Civil das nossas Possessões Africanas. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1903.

The States of Empire

95

Couceiro, Henrique de Paiva. Angola: dois anos de Governo, Junho de 1907 a Junho de 1909. História e Comentários. Lisboa: Tipografia Portuguesa, 1948. Cruz, Elizabeth Vera. O Estatuto do Indigenato – Angola – e a Legalização da Descriminação na Colonização Portuguesa. Coimbra: Novo Imbondeiro, 2005. Darwin, John. “What was the Late Colonial State?”, in Itinerario 23, 3-4, 1999. Dáskalos, Maria Alexandre. A Política de Norton de Matos para Angola 1912-1915. Coimbra: Minerva, 2008. Derrick, Jonathan. Africa’s “Agitators”: Militant Anti-Colonialism in Africa and the West, 1918-1939. London: Hurst, 2008. Dimier, Véronique. Le gouvernement des Colonies. Regards croisés franco-britanniques. Bruxelles: Edition de l'université de Bruxelles, 2004. Diniz, José Ferreira. “Da política indígena em Angola: os impostos indígenas”, in Boletim da Agência-Geral das Colónias 47, 1929. Duarte, José Bento. Senhores do Sol e do Vento. Histórias verídicas de Portugueses, Angolanos e outros Africanos. Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 1999. Enes, António. Moçambique. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1893. Engerman, David C., Nils Gilman, Mark H. Haefele, and Michael E. Latham. Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. Felgas, Hélio Esteves. História do Congo Português. Carmona: Ed. de Autor, 1958. Forrest, Joshua B. Lineages of State Fragility: Rural Civil Society in Guinea Bissau. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003. Förster, Stig, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Ronald Robinson. Bismarck, Europe, and Africa: The Berlin Africa Conference 1884-1885 and the Onset of Partition. London: Oxford University Press, 1988. Fortes, Meyer and Edward E. Evans-Pritchard (eds.). African Political Systems. London: Oxford University Press, 1964. Fortuna, Carlos. O Fio da Meada: o Algodão de Moçambique, Portugal e a Economia-Mundo (1860-1960). Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 1993. Freudenthal, Aida. “Voz de Angola em Tempo de Ultimato”, in Estudos Afro-Asiáticos 23, 1, 2001. Galbraith, J. S. “The "Turbulent Frontier" as a Factor in British Expansion”, in Comparative Studies in Society and History II, 1959/60.

96

Chapter Three

Galvão, Henrique. Por Angola (Quatro anos de actividade parlamentar). Lisboa: Edições de autor, 1949. Galvão, Henrique and Carlos Selvagem. Império Ultramarino Português, vol. III. Lisboa: Empresa Nacional de Publicidade, 1952. Galvão, Henrique and Carlos Selvagem. Império Ultramarino Português, vol. IV. Lisboa: Empresa Nacional de Publicidade, 1953. Gann, L.H., and Peter Duignan (eds.). Colonialism in Africa, 1870-1960: The Economics of Colonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Gann, L. H. and Peter Duignan (eds.). The Rulers of German Africa, 18841914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977. Gann, L. H. and Peter Duignan (eds.). African Proconsuls. European Governors in Africa. New York: The Free Press, 1978a. Gann, L. H. and Peter Duignan (eds.). The Rulers of British Africa, 18701914. London: Croom Helm-Hoover Institution Publications, 1978b. Gann, L. H. and Peter Duignan (eds.). The Rulers of Belgian Africa, 18841914. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Gardner, Leigh A. Taxing Colonial Africa: The Political Economy of British Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Gonçalves, Luiz da Cunha. O Imposto Colonial: teoria e legislação. Lisboa: Livraria Ferin, 1908.  Head, Judith F. State. Capital and Migrant Labour in Zambezia, Mozambique: a study of the labour force of the Sena Sugar Estates Limited. Durham: unpublished PhD thesis, Durham University, 1980. Heimer, Franz-Wilhelm (ed.). Social change in Angola. Munich: Arnold Bergstralsser-Institute, 1973. Herbst, Jeffrey. States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Heywood, Linda. Contested Power in Angola, 1840s to the Present. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2000. Hobsbawn, Eric. Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Century. New York: Norton, 1959. —. Bandits. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969. Hopkins, A. G. An Economic History of West Africa. New York: Columbia University Press, 1973. Isaacman, Allen. “Social Banditry in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) and Mozambique, 1894-1907: An Expression of Early Peasant Protest”, in Journal of Southern African Studies 4, 1, 1977. Isaacman, Allen (with collaboration of Barbara Isaacman). The Tradition of Resistance in Mozambique: The Zambezi Valley, 1850-1921. London: Heinemann, 1976.

The States of Empire

97

Isaacman, Allen F. Mozambique. The Africanization of a European institution: the Zambezi prazos, 1750-1902. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972. Isaacman, Allen F., and R. Roberts (eds.). Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1995. Isaacman, Allen F. Cotton is the Mother of Poverty: peasants, work, and rural struggle in colonial Mozambique, 1938-1961. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1996. Ittmann, Karl, Dennis D. Cordell, and Gregory H. Maddox (eds.). The Demographics of Empire: The Colonial State and the Creation of Knowledge. Athens: University of Ohio, 2010. Jackson, Robert H. Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira. “Os Missionários do Alfabeto nas Colónias Portuguesas (1880-1930)”, in Estudos de Sociologia da Leitura em Portugal no Século XX (ed. Diogo Ramada Curto). Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2006. —. Livros Brancos, Almas Negras. A “Missão Civilizadora” do Colonialismo Português (c.1870-1930). Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2010. —. A Diplomacia do Império. Política e Religião na Partilha de África (1820-1890). Lisboa: Edições 70, 2012. —. “The ‘Civilisation Guild’: race and labour in the third Portuguese empire, c. 1870-1930”, in Racism and ethnic relations in the Portuguese-speaking world (eds. F. Betthencourt and A. J. Pearce). New York: Oxford University Press, 2012a. Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira and António Costa Pinto. “A Repressive Developmentalism? An Anatomy of the Late Colonial State in the Portuguese Colonial Empire”, in The late colonial State in European colonial empires (Symposium). Providence: Brown University, April 2012b. Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira (ed.). O Império Colonial em Questão. Lisboa: Edições 70, 2012c. Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira and José Pedro Monteiro, “Internationalism and the labours of the Portuguese colonial empire (1945-1974)”, in Portuguese Studies 29, 2, Fall, 2013. Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira and António Costa Pinto. The Ends of European Colonial Empires: Cases and comparisons (forthcoming, 2014).

98

Chapter Three

Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira, “Administração Colonial”, in Dicionário de História da I República e republicanismo (coord. Fernanda Rollo) (forthcoming). Junta de Investigações do Ultramar. Promoção social em Moçambique. Grupo de Trabalho de Promoção Social de Moçambique. Lisboa: Centro de Estudos de Serviço Social e de Desenvolvimento Comunitário, 1964. Keese, Alexander. Living with Ambiguity. Portuguese and French colonial administrators, mutual influences, and the question of integrating an African elite, 1930-1963. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2007. Kirk-Greene, Anthony. On Crown Service: A History of HM Colonial and Overseas Civil Services, 1837-1997. London: IB Tauris & Co Ltd, 1999. —. Britain's imperial administrators, 1858-1966. London: St. Martin's Press, 2000. —. Symbol of Authority: The British District Officer in Africa. Vol. I. London: IB Tauris, 2006. Law, Robin (ed.). From Slave Trade to ‘Legitimate’ Commerce. The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Lemos, Alberto de. Contribuição para o estudo da organização dos serviços estatísticos das colónias e suas relações com o Instituto Nacional de Estatística. Lisboa: Tipografia Cristovão Augusto Rodrigues, 1936. Lodge, Tom. “The Southern African post-colonial State”, in Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 36, 1, 1998. Lonsdale, John. “States and Social Processes in Africa: A Historiographical Survey”, in African Studies Review 24, 2/3, 1981. Low, D. A. and Alison Smith (eds.). History of East Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Machado, Fernando de Utra. No distrito da Lunda: a ocupação de Cassanje. Relatório do comandante da coluna de operações ao Bondo e Bângala. Luanda: Imprensa Nacional, 1913. Magno, David. Guerras Angolanas. A nossa acção nos Dembos. Porto: Companhia Portuguesa Editora, 1937. Mahoney, Michael. “Estado Novo, Homem Novo (New State, New Man): Colonial and Anticolonial Development Ideologies in Mozambique, 1930-1977”, in Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (eds. David C. Engerman, Nils Gilman, Mark H. Haefele, and Michael E. Latham). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.

The States of Empire

99

Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Matos, Norton de. A Província de Angola. Porto: Edições de Maranus, 1926. Matos, Norton de. Memórias e Trabalhos da Minha Vida. Vol. IV. Lisboa: Editora Marítimo-Colonial, 1945. Méchat, Samya El. Les administrations Coloniales XIXe-XXe Siècles: Esquisse d'une histoire comparée. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009. Mendy, Peter Karibe. Colonialismo Português em África: a tradição de resistência na Guiné-Bissau (1879-1959). Bissau: Republica da GuinéBissau, Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisa, 1994. Nascimento, Augusto. Poderes e Quotidiano nas Roças de S. Tomé e Príncipe de Finais de Oitocentos a meados de Novecentos. Lousã: Tipografia Lousanense, 2002. Neil-Tomlinson, Barry. The Mozambique Chartered Company 1892 to 1910. London: unpublished PhD thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies/University of London, 1987. —. “The Nyassa Chartered Company: 1891-1929”, in The Journal of African History 18, 1, 1999. Newbury, Colin. Patrons, Clients, and Empire Chieftaincy and Over-rule in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Newitt, Malyn. Portugal in Africa: The Last Hundred Years. London: Longman, 1981. —. História de Moçambique. Mem Martins: Publicações Europa-América, 1995. —. History of Mozambique. London: Hurst, 1995. —. “The Late colonial State in Portuguese Africa”, in Itinerario 23, 3-4, 1999. Papagno, Giuseppe. Colonialismo e Feudalismo: a questão dos prazos da coroa em Moçambique nos finais do século XIX. Lisboa: A Regra do Jogo, 1980. Pedler, F. “British planning and private enterprise in colonial Africa”, in Colonialism in Africa, (eds. P. Duignan and L.H. Gann ) vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Pélissier, René. Naissance de la Guiné: Portugais et Africains en Sénégambie (1841-1936). Orgeval: Éditions Pélissier, 1989. —. História das Campanhas de Angola. Resistência e Revoltas, 18451941. Vol II. Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 1986.

100

Chapter Three

—. Les Campagnes Coloniales du Portugal, 1844-1941. Paris: Pygmalion, 2004. Pimenta, Fernando. Angola. Os Brancos e a Independência. Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 2008. Pitcher, Mary Anne. Politics in the Portuguese Empire: The State, Industry, and Cotton, 1926-1974. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. —. “From Coercion to Incentives: The Portuguese Colonial Cotton Regime in Angola and Mozambique, 1946-1974”, in Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa (eds. A. Isaacman and R. Roberts). Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1995. Portugal Ministério do Ultramar. Organização das regedorias nas províncias ultramarinas: Decreto no. 43896, de 6 de setembro de 1961. Lisboa: Agência-Geral do Ultramar, 1961. Ranger, Terence O. (ed.). Emerging Themes on African History. London: Heinemann, 1968. Ranger, Terence O. “African initiatives and resistance in the face of partition and conquest”, in General History of Africa – Africa under colonial domination 1880-1935 (ed. Adu A. Boahen). California: Heinemann/UNESCO, 1985. Regulamento das circunscrições administrativas da Província de Angola: decreto de 2 de Novembro de 1912, portarias provinciais e circular de 17 de Abril de 1913. Luanda: Imprensa Nacional de Angola, 1913. Regulamento do recenseamento e cobrança do imposto indígena: aprovado por portaria provincial n.º 30-A de 22 de Janeiro de 1920. Luanda: Imprensa Nacional de Angola, 1920. Rodney, Walter. “The Year 1895 in Southern Mozambique: African Resistance to the Imposition of European Colonial Rule”, in Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 5, 4, 1971. Rothchild, Donald and Naomi Chazan (eds.). The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1988. Sá da Bandeira. “Relatório”, in Memorial Ultramarino e Marítimo 1, March, 1836. Santos, Maciel. “An ‘obsessive idea’ – Native Taxation in Northern Mozambique (1926-1945)”. Working-papers - CEAUP , 2007. Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Silva, Carlos Baptista da. Administrando o Império: o Ministério das Colónias – Ultramar (1930-1974). Lisboa: unpublished PhD thesis, FCSH-UNL, 2008. Smith, Alan K. “António Salazar and the reversal of Portuguese colonial policy”, in Journal of African History 15, 4, 1974.

The States of Empire

101

Smith, W. H. C. Anglo-Portuguese Relations, 1851-1861. Lisboa: Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1970. Soares, Amadeu Castilho. Política de Bem-Estar Rural em Angola. Lisboa: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1961. Sousa, Paulo Silveira and Pedro Tavares de Almeida. “Ruling the Portuguese Empire (1820-1926): The Colonial Office and Its Leadership”, in Jahrbuch für Europäische Verwaltungsgeschichte 18, 2006. Teixeira, Alberto de Almeida. Lunda: sua organização e ocupação. Lisboa: Agência Geral das Colónias, 1948. Vail, Leroy. “Mozambique's Chartered Companies: The Rule of the Feeble”, in Journal of African History 3, 1976. Vail, Leroy and Landeg White. Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique: A Study of Quelimane District. London: Heinemann, 1980. Vos, Jelmer. The Kingdom of Congo and its Borderland, 1880-1915. London: unpublished PhD thesis, 2005. Young, Crawford. “The African Colonial State and its Political Legacy”, in The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa (eds. Donald Rothchild and Naomi Chazan). Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1988. —. “The African Colonial State Revisited”, in Governance 11, 1, 1998. —. African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. —. The Postcolonial State in Africa: Fifty Years of Independence, 1960– 2010. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. Wheeler, Douglas and René Pelissier. Angola. New York, London: Praeger, 1971. Wheeler, Douglas, “Origins of African Nationalism in Angola: Assimilado protest writings, 1859-1929”, in Protest and Resistance in Angola and Brazil (ed. Ronald H. Chilcote). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Wilensky, Alfredo Hector. Tendencias de la Legislación Ultramarina Portuguesa en África. Braga: Editora PAX, 1968.

CHAPTER FOUR TECHNOLOGICAL MODERNIZATION AND DISUSE IN THE MAKING OF CONTEMPORARY PORTUGAL’S CAPITAL: STREET LIGHTING FROM THE 1840S TO THE 1960S BRUNO CORDEIRO

Introduction Writing in the late 1950s, Joel Serrão, in an almost single-handed attempt, within Portuguese historiography, at a cultural history which takes material culture seriously gave us an account of one of the multiple instances of modernization processes in contemporary urban Portugal: how the ‘technical night’ overtook the seemingly inevitable rhythms of the ‘natural night’ in the nineteenth century. Power over nature through the discovery of the ‘secret of dawn’ is how he phrased it, after a line from a late nineteenth century poem (Serrão 1978 [1957]). For Serrão, the whole process culminated in the arrival of cheap electric lighting, starting in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The present text aims to contribute to a less linear narrative of modernization, and to cease positing the diffusion of electric lighting as the only and central path to “modernity”. Schivelbusch’s (1988) landmark study proposed an account of the disenchantment of the night in some cities of Northwestern Europe and the U.S.A., focusing mostly, though not exclusively, on the industrialization of lighting in the nineteenth century. The idea of industrialization as a dimension of modernization will certainly play a part in the argument developed below, but not so much in the sense given to it by Schivelbusch, as an unfolding process of growth of centralized production systems. Instead, modernization and industrialization are seen as a process of combined and uneven development, a framework applied by Raphael

Technological Modernization in the Making of Portugal’s Capital

103

Samuel (1977) to think about mid-Victorian Britain’s manufacturing, here applied to the history of street lighting in Portugal. Elsewhere (Cordeiro 2008), I have analyzed the histories of street lighting not only in the capital city, but in several other spatial and political units of Portugal, all the way from provincial capitals to villages. Here I will focus on Lisbon, which experienced not only the speediest adoption of novelties, but also the wider array of different techniques in use, as well as the longest time-span in the use and frequency of reuse for each of those. Partly but not only because of its size, Lisbon holds both much more of the old and of the new than any other place in contemporary Portugal. Public street lighting, in its regular everyday mode, provided by public authorities, was (and is) a technique of government of public space1, under the administration of the central State, the local or municipal powers, and others such as private companies (larger or smaller according to their different modes of participation in the industries of lighting). It had its origins as a regular practice in the early modern absolutist States of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, mostly as a form of police lighting, which went along with a general increase in State control over uses of the street in the nighttime. Those and other older origins of public lighting will not be dealt with here, as we will start our analysis at the point where the equation between urbanity and public street lighting at night is taken as a given, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. A micro-scale analysis of the material aspects and territorial distribution of public street lighting in the capital city of Portugal, from about 1848 (which marks the start of gas-piped street lamps) to 1965 (the beginning of the all-electric era, in Lisbon), will hopefully bring some light into how Portugal, and the government of its territory and population, figures into the grand narrative of modernization (or merely its brief sections dedicated to artificial lighting techniques), but it will also help to

 1

Regardless of other uses it has had, I am using the expression in the sense given to it by Otter (2008). His introduction (partic. pp. 12-19) is the background for the use of the term ‘technologies of government’ and ‘technological state’ in the present essay. His study, though rich and complex, is hardly transferable from Britain’s ‘liberalism’ to continental Europe or other places, and what he focuses on, in terms of the concrete material detail of lighting technologies are gas and electricity networks – which are precisely what I intend to overcome in the text. Nevertheless, his critique of a paradigm of ‘spectacle, panopticism and flanêrie’, through which illumination, colonization and disenchantment of the night has been analysed historiographically in the last decades, plus the alternative trilogy of categories he proposes ‘liberalism, technology and perception’, are quite stimulating.

104

Chapter Four

challenge an established, indeed worn-out, narrative concerning this issue, and issue a call for its revision. One proposal is to look beyond the stories of large-scale infrastructural projects of the so-called Technological State and focus on what was actually in use in specific moments and places, beyond the bounds of both a priori plans and a posteriori successes. Hence, off-grid types of lighting will take centre stage and our narrative will be articulated by focusing on a largely overlooked dimension of the history of technology: disuse. When one looks at the crossroads of the historiographies of the history of technology and urban history2, one finds that the dominant theme has been (and continues to be) the rise of the ‘networked city’3, with the preferred period of study, especially with regard to energy, being the 1870s to the 1930s. Two main biases have operated. A first one has been the focus on networks and large systems.4 Most studies have followed the setting of pipes and mains and very rarely have they accounted for those that lived in unplugged homes and streets (but also shops and workshops). It is not a history of how and what energy was used (not to mention disused) in the city in a given period, but rather the history of how networked energies were introduced and have grown, how they caused or followed the growth of cities. The storyline is that of how small systems got bigger and interconnected or were absorbed into even larger systems. The non-network technologies and things not thought of as systems have drawn scant notice and, if they are mentioned at all, deserve only a side comment on its mere persistence or, indeed, obsolescence. That is why our ignorance, in the specific case of street lighting, on the use of natural oils or kerosene lighting (or others still, such as acetylene gas) is vast and glaring. The second bias at work in this narrative is the innovationcenteredness of most accounts (and this is not just a problem within the historiography of technology, but in many others as well). This has led to the studying of each lighting technology within a very limited time window, between its first adoption and the first adoption of another, eventually more widely diffused, technology. This has also meant that, in terms of places, there has been an almost exclusive focus on inauguration

 2

Two examples are, for the USA, Tarr (2005), and, for Europe, Schott (2008). The more influential work on the ‘networked city’ is Dupuy and Tarr (1988). The networked city includes not only energy, but transports, sanitary systems (waste disposal), water distribution and communications. 4 Hughes (1983) is taken as a founding work for this and many studies followed, not confined to electric or energy systems. The most recent synthesis of these and an attempt at surpassing the national dimension of most of those studies is to be found in Van der Vleuten (2006). 3

Technological Modernization in the Making of Portugal’s Capital

105

spots. Hence, oils have been studied for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, gas lighting for the period from the early nineteenth century to the 1870s and electric lighting from the 1870s until the early twentieth century. Even within studies specifically addressing the history of gas, this bias has resulted, as a rule, in an omission of its uses for lighting in the twentieth century (particularly after 1914).5 As for the use or disuse of oils (natural or mineral) in street lighting, this has also been mostly left out for the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century.6 But even in the case of electric street lighting the late nineteenth century has commanded disproportionate attention. Finally, a specificity of the historiographies of lighting could be added as a third bias: the claim of the radical nature of electric lighting, which has led to non-electrics being addressed as no more than antecedents to electricity.7 As for the main perspective adopted here, to narrate developments in the modernization process by looking at a sequence of disuse instances, it is offered as an alternative to the chain of innovations tale, mainly with instrumental purposes, but also with some substantial ones. The study of disuse, sudden or gradual, temporary or definitive, is missing in many fields of historiography that have dealt with modernization processes, and most conspicuously in the field of the historiography of technology, which, perhaps not exclusively but more acutely than other historiographical fields, has an overwhelming bias towards “firsts” and early phases and an indifference to, when not plain ignorance of, what comes after peak moments in the use stories of technologies. I am interested in disuse, beyond whatever significance it may have in and of itself because I think it is one of the ways for us to arrive at another issue that holds an even greater interest, the history of whole time spans of use. By noting “lasts” as well as “firsts”, we get an indication of the depth of

 5

The most comprehensive publication due to its coverage of several countries and to its partial attempt at a synthesis is now Paquier and Williot (dirs.) (2005). 6 No degree of sophistication comparable to histories of gas or electricity use has yet emerged in the case of oils. Domestic lighting is addressed for the late nineteenth century and lubricant and power uses are the focus for the twentieth century – see e.g. Williamson and Daum (1959). Here, one notable exception is a Portuguese study (Moreira, 2001), in the field of industrial archaeology, and dedicated exclusively to street lighting by kerosene lamps of the town of Machico in the Atlantic islands of Madeira, which does deal with the whole life-cycle of use, including the final disuse of the kerosene lamps in the 1950s. 7 For a discussion of this see the Introduction and chapter 1 of Cordeiro (2007). Even Garnert (1998), who presents a summary of an extensive study on lighting and daily life in Sweden from the late nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century, suffers from this.

106

Chapter Four

our ignorance on the use of technologies. Such an approach has proven most fruitful in the study of the process of modernization in contemporary Portugal, and of the particular technology of government here at stake. One of the places from which I drew this latter interest was Svante Lindqvist’s (2011 [1994]) representations of technological volumes8 through time. Lindqvist made the crucial assertion that ‘The history of technology that has been written so far represents only a distorted fraction of the total technological development. We have not described the whole technological life cycle’. He went even further, arguing that due to the obsession with early moments and rapid growth phases ‘later – and historically often more significant – stages in the life-cycle of a technology’ were left out. By so doing, he suggests, ‘historians of technology have so far only written half or even less of the history of technology’.9 In the wake of David Edgerton’s (2007) Shock of the Old10, one would have to add that it is not just the periods under study, but the very choice of things studied that has left much more than half of that history out of view11, beyond the overlooked moments and places and the erroneous historical geographies of modernity that keep being replicated.12 His forceful demonstration13 of the benefits of doing away with the conflation

 8

Lindqvist (1994) powerfully attacks the pervasive imagery of the S-curve (and the conflation of the real world of technical performance with the frontier of performance characteristics) which he points to as one of the most unproductive transfers of ideas from a field to another (biology and economics into history of technology in his specific case). He proposed an alternative imagery, little tried or discussed so far, the study of technological volumes (i.e. ‘the sheer amount of technologies in use at a specific time’ (p. 271)). This imagery was very useful in finding metrics of use for the history of street lighting technologies (see GRAPH 1 below, my take on drawing technological volumes). 9 Lindqvist (idem, p. 271). 10 But also in the article that preceded it by about a decade (Edgerton, 1998). 11 Edgerton (2007) and see also the updated, revised and enlarged restatement of it later in Edgerton (2010). This omission in the historiography equally applies to inventions (e.g. idem, idem, p. xiv), not just to the technologies that become in-use. Though we need a real empirical test, my impression is that the absent chunk on the things in-use side (which is also different from what users do) is bigger than the chunk on the invention side. 12 In accounts found all the way from the older encyclopaedic types of histories of technology to the most recent textbooks, from the popular culture media to the supposedly more self-reflexive and less amnesiac academic world. 13 Edgerton (2007), p. xi-xv for the assertion (and several examples developed throughout the book for the demonstration).

Technological Modernization in the Making of Portugal’s Capital

107

of innovation and technology (for the sake of properly addressing both use and invention and innovation), is also important for my argument here. The next section will focus on the case of the street lighting of Lisbon, which, despite having its specificities14, can be taken as representative of a more general case in the histories of technology in Portugal. In the conclusion, I will make some considerations on the method of analyzing the historical process of modernization by focusing on the disuse of technologies.

Disuse in the street lighting of the Portuguese capital Focusing on the city of Lisbon will allow us to go into the geography of disuse down to the scale of neighborhoods, even streets (from lanes to boulevards). I will describe a series of disuses from the mid-nineteenth century (when the first natural oil lamps were replaced by gas) to 1965 (when the last non-electric lamp is extinguished). Along the way, I will look at the long and failed substitutions of gas by electric lamps between 1878 and 1916; the disuses caused during a coal energy crisis in the decade spanning from 1914 to 1923; and finally the ‘late-age’ of nonelectric lights, from the 1920s to 1965. A first and rather rough way of looking at the historical process of street lighting is to have a glimpse at the whole span of use life cycles of the different technologies involved, by merely plotting the decades in which they were used in a chronogram (Figure 1). From there, wanting a measure of the extent of use of each different type, one possible metric is to count the lamps, a measure that is connected to a territorial expression of each specific use (Graph 1).15 With these two background imageries for the whole length of this extended period, and beyond, we can start looking at different sub-periods, or at some temporary and critical moments of disuse for different types of technologies, in greater detail. We can also use this metric to track the geography of disappearance, by looking at its differentiation across the city16, as will be done below.

 14

A lengthier account of the history of Lisbon’s street lighting was done in Cordeiro (2007, chap. 3); for an account of the history of Portuguese street lighting not confined to Lisbon see Idem (idem, chap. 2) and in English Cordeiro (2008). 15 This metric is of course blind to differences in the intensity of the lights, and to costs, among other dimensions. For an argument on why counting the lamps is better fitted to the purpose of measuring use, than these other two methods, see Cordeiro (2007, subsection “Em busca duma métrica dos usos”, pp. 22-27). 16 And not just in the city as an aggregate, as in Graph 1.

108

Chapter Four

Figure 1: Chronogram of use life spans. Fuel-types in the street lighting of Lisbon 1780-

Sources: a wide array exhaustively referenced in detail in the set of tables of Appendix 1 of Cordeiro (2007) Graph 1: Technological Volumes (or weighing use) in Lisbon’s public street lamps. From the first lamp to the all electric, 1780-1965

Sources: a wide array of sources was used. Cruz (1851) is a crucial source for the period before 1834, but the bulk of the data collecting process was spent on harvesting several administrative records and some publications of Lisbon’s City Hall (Mostly the Minutes of the Meetings of the City Hall; Anais do Munícipio de Lisboa; Anuário da CML). For a detailed referencing of sources and a year-by-year list of the number of lamps in use see Appendix 3 of Cordeiro (2007).

Technological Modernization in the Making of Portugal’s Capital

109

Displacement: substitution, complementarity and ‘migration’, 1848-1870s The first disused type to be addressed here is the natural oil lamp. Its disappearance from the streets of Lisbon begins in July 1848 when the first of these lamps are removed from the streets, to be replaced by the newly arriving piped-gas lamps. This great demise did not happen overnight, though. It dragged on for about a decade: in December 1847, before gas entered the scene, there were 2 378 natural oil lamps; in 1855 only two were left under the supervision of Lisbon’s municipality and the last lampião (as they were called) which stood in one of the new barriers at the northern edge of the city (barreira do Arco do Carvalhão), was removed in the second half of 1869 after the arrival of the gas mains to that frontier.17 After 1856 and up to 1867 only two oil lamps will be kept and in August 1868 the Administrator of the Lighting of the City, Francisco Ferreira Borges, in his correspondence with the alderman heading his Pelouro (the term given to each of the municipal administration’s branches or portfolios), mentions that the only natural oil lamp that still subsists in the barrier of the Arco do Carvalhão ‘could be substituted by a gas one once the mains have reached the [former] Doors of the Arch.’ So, where did the oil lamps go? Firstly, they were not (fully) extinguished; secondly, their replacement by gas is only part of the story, and one in need of revision. While many of the displaced oil lamps were stowed in the municipality’s storage warehouse, waiting to be scrapped or sold, some were also being newly installed in different spots until 1852, with a handful of cases registered until 1855. There was an administrative reform in 1852, and the municipality of Lisbon had a 12% decrease in population and lost the freguesias18 of Ajuda, Belém and Beato, as well as parts of other four freguesias. New administrative limits were defined in July 1886, when the two municipalities created in 1852 were dismantled and, by (re)absorbing almost all of their territory, Lisbon municipality saw its population rise by 20%.19 The oil lamps migrated to the peripheral areas of the city and the only reason why after 1869 there were none left in Lisbon is because these

 17

Ofício n.º 33, of Francisco Ferreira Borges to Dr. Francisco Manoel de Mendonça dated 1868-08-03, in AML-AC, Copiador de Ofícios da Iluminação 1865-1870. 18 ‘Freguesia’ is a subdivision of the municipal administrative unit in Portugal, similar to the English ‘parish’. 19 See Silva. A.F. (1997, vol. I, 28-9), the source for the population data and where a wider study of Lisbon’s historical demography is to be found.

110

Chapter Four

outer areas are administratively removed from the municipality in 1852. They would only be reintegrated in Lisbon in 1886, and by then we can indeed say that the natural oil lamps had dropped out of sight. For a notion of the location of these outer areas see Map 1. Map 120: Where did the old lamps go? Disappearance, substitution and migration 1848-1852

Sources:21 For the oil lamps newly placed: Synopse dos Principais Actos da CML, 1848-1852 (no page number) – a street-by-street list of all the streets and number of lamps is given in Cordeiro (2007, chap. 3, Table 5). For gas lamps positioning in 1848: Appendix to the contract of 1847 with the CLIG (in Colecção de Documentos da Illuminação a Gaz (1800-1882), 3 vols., Lisbon, Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, vol. 1)

In inner Lisbon, as mentioned above, the last natural oil lamp was substituted by a gas lamp in 1869, but in the adjacent Belém and Olivais I could not find any records dating the last natural oil lamps in use. The circulation was from Lisbon to Belém and Olivais at first, still with natural

 20

Map 1 and Map 2 were only possible to draw with the help of Alexandra Peça Gomes. 21 The framed rectangular area roughly delineates the new and reduced administrative limits of Lisbon’s municipality from 1852 until 1885. To the left and slightly to the north of the squared area lay the new municipality of Belém and to the right and slightly to the north the new municipality of Olivais. The places where gas lamps were placed in 1848 and where new installations of oil lamps took place in 1848-1849 and in 1850-1852 are indicated over a twenty-first century Lisbon map. I could not find any detailed street-by-street listing of the position of gas lamps after 1848.

Technological Modernization in the Making of Portugal’s Capital

111

oil lamps, and then from Lisbon and Belém to Olivais (with natural but also mineral oils). In the first year for which I was able to get reliable numbers, 1887, there are no longer any natural oil street lamps in use.22 In the end, what sealed the disuse of natural oils in Lisbon’s street lamps was their replacement not by gas lamps but by another type of oil lamps, which used kerosene. The latter arrived in the 1860s and by the 1880s, if not before, had fully replaced their counterparts in Lisbon. In the rest of Portugal, the latest use I have found of natural oils in public street lighting was in 1900, but in most places with public street lighting at the time (which was not the majority of municipalities, at least until the 1850s), they were effectively replaced by kerosene lamps during the 1860s and 1870s.23 But there is even more to add on the circulation of the displaced lamps. Once we start tracing them, many more destinations show up. It was not just a question of administrative division and core-periphery issues within the capital and its outer areas. It went much further than that. Their useful life might have come to an end for Lisbon’s municipality, but right after 1848 they started being demanded by several towns throughout the country. Even before the arrival of gas lighting, requests for lamps from towns adjacent to Lisbon were already common. For instance, in 1840 the Municipality of Almada (on the south bank of the Tagus River, opposite Lisbon), asked Lisbon’s City Hall (henceforth CML) to send them two street lamps to be placed on the dock of Cacilhas.24 After the installation of gas lamps in the central streets and squares of the capital, a huge wave swept across the country. There was a widespread circulation of second-hand lamps. Requests arrived from practically every corner: North to South, East to West, from cities to secondary towns (though most of the smaller agglomerates were places closer to Lisbon, centre and south). Not even the more distant islands stayed out, with requests being filed from Funchal (in Madeira) and Ponta Delgada (in Azores). In the first years of gas in Lisbon and in those which the number of old oil lamps in the capital was still higher than the new gas ones, between 1848 and 1851, at least nine different municipalities made similar requests. But the greater bulk would come later with at least another twenty-one between 1852 and 1869. Some requests were answered, while

 22

The records which would allow a better knowledge of the 1869-1887 period were, until very recently inaccessible, in a ‘bubble’ at the municipality’s Historical Archive. 23 See Cordeiro, 2007, Appendix 1, for details. 24 Letter addressed to the CML dated 1840-05-29 - AML-AH, CMLSB/ADMGE/03/1446.

112

Chapter Four

others not (there was a bit of everything, from free offers to loans or sales). At the start the lamps were hard to obtain from the storage department. It seems that CML was not completely convinced of their uselessness, or ready to consider them worthless property. In total, 540 lamps were requested between 1848 and 1869 (but many requests did not specify the number of lamps they were demanding, so the actual total is presumably higher).25 Finally, the dating of the disappearance of natural oils and the rise of the gas piped lamps of the networked city have to be qualified by still another overlooked and hidden dimension of the process. The piped fuel brought a new feature to this service. Oils would serve as backup for the new phenomenon of blackouts, a less than bright feature of centralized production and distribution networks. The first blackout occurred in the winter of 1848, a few months after the gas inauguration. Later on, when a new company took over the concession and the new contract failed to provide for this backup function, a gas factory workers’ strike in 1896 and its success in interrupting the gas supply for some days led to the rushed addenda to the contract, which now included a clause obligating the company to keep in store the amount of oil lamps necessary for future blackouts (more on this below).26

Failed substitutions, 1878-1916 In the second period dealt with here, there are many instances of disuse, some of them in the newly arrived types of electric lamp, others in another gas lamp type that did not last long (the intensive gas burner). But if we consider the aggregate of the city, we realize that there is an expansion of street lighting (as indeed of the built-up area and of the population) throughout the period, with an increase in the number of lamps of all fuel-types of lighting (that is, gas, kerosene and electricity) at least from 1889 onwards (as can be seen in Graph 1 above). Otherwise, what we witness in those years is the extension of all fuel types of lighting,

 25

Two sources were used to obtain a preliminary notion of this circulation: the catalogue of records of the AML-AH available at the AML-AC (AML-AH, CMLSB/ADMG-E/03) and for the last years from AML-AC (“Oficios da Iluminação, 1865-1870”); the records of correspondence of Ministério do Reino, with the Municipalities and peripheral administration (Governo Civil) requesting Lisbon’s lamps (AHMOP, Iluminação Pública em Diversos Pontos do Reino e Ilhas, MR: 2D-2R 11). 26 For a study of gas blackouts in some USA cities in the nineteenth century see Baldwin (2004).

Technological Modernization in the Making of Portugal’s Capital

113

Map 2: Location of kerosene and electric lamps in Lisbon ca. 1909

Source: for the kerosene lamps, "Locais e quantidades de candieiros a petroleo existentes em 1 de Novembro de 1909", appendix to “Programa de arrematação da iluminação a petróleo para o ano de 1910” in AML-AC, SGO, Cx 110, 12-11-1909. For the electric arc lamps: AML-AC, SGO, Cx 110, list referring to 28-05-1909. The placement of both types of lamps is drawn from a twenty-first century map superimposed on a Map of 1909 (Carta Fiscal 1909 in Cartoteca - Biblioteca Digital of the Biblioteca Nacional Portuguesa).

either because new parts of the city are being developed or built-up or because the density of lamps increases in the already existing areas. The dominant thread in the historiography mentioned above, that this was an age of decline or disuse for gas lamps, or an ‘age of electricity’, is flawed. By most measures this could never be deemed anything but the age of gas. And, if it had to be something else, we would have to look in the direction of the kerosene lamp, the second widest presence in terms of number of streets and lamps up to 1917, rather than electric street lamps. Changes of old and new types were occurring at quite variable speeds and in various forms in different zones of the city, but also in different types of places (boulevards and squares, streets and lanes). Map 2,

114

Chapter Four

showing the positions of the electric and kerosene lamps gives us an idea of the situation towards the end of this sub-period (1909).27 Gas lamps would cover every built-up area in the inner city that was not covered by any of the other types (and they coexisted with electric lamps in the boulevards and squares).28 The pattern of use is roughly the following: electricity (complemented by gas) in boulevards and main squares; kerosene in every peripheral neighbourhood (and in some back and side streets of inner neighbourhoods as well); gaslights in most of the city. As for their totals, circa 1909, there were 692 fuelled by kerosene, 293 by electricity, and around 10 000 by manufactured gas.

A sudden but ‘temporary’ disuse: war and backups, 1914-1923 The third period to be addressed here is the one characterized by a major energy crisis, caused by World War I and its effects on the international coal trade during and after the war years. The first victims of the war in the field of public lamps will be the electric arc lamps (which used carbon electrodes), not gas. Incandescent metal filament electric bulbs, of the Nitra type of 750 Watts, were presented as a temporary substitution at first, and put on trial in April 1914 in just one side of one of the new boulevards in the upper part of the city, the Avenida da República.29 By November of that year, because of the war and with a view to ‘consuming less energy’ than the voltaic arcs, the substitution became definitive and the project to extend the substitution to other streets was put forward.30 But the major change came with the gas lamp. Things got increasingly worse in terms of the provision of coal, and imported coal was the main input in the production of gas. During 1916 the quality of the lighting deteriorated and there were many complaints. In the press, the blame was placed on the Gas Company (CRGE), which was accused of ‘cutting’ the light almost every night or of reducing it to ‘the

 27

As a comparison one might want to check the map drawn in Lousada (1995), pp. 90-91, for natural oils lamps circa a hundred years earlier, “Figura 2: Ruas e Praças onde existem Postes de Iluminação em 1811”. 28 Gas lamps are not drawn because I could never find a list of their placement, covering the whole city, for these years. 29 Minutes of the Meetings (Actas da CML, Comissão executiva), 1914-04-09, p. 223. 30 Minutes of the Meetings (Actas das sessões da CML), 1914-11-09, pp. 431-2.

Technological Modernization in the Making of Portugal’s Capital

115

brightness of glow-worms’.31 Complaints were made that from certain hours of the night onwards, and in certain areas, particularly downtown and in the new boulevards and squares, streets would slip into darkness. On the first day of 1917, the Government placed severe restrictions on the consumption of gas and electric lighting. Decree 2 92232 imposed a 50% reduction in street lighting and 30% in private lighting (using consumption levels of the previous year as a reference), besides placing the city under a sort of curfew. Furthermore, they rolled back closing hours for every grocery, shop, theatre, cinema, and prohibited the circulation of public transports from early on in the night. On 18 May 1917, though, the gas factories ceased production, and a long gas blackout began.33 The production of electricity was not affected in the same way: it continued to be produced, albeit with restrictions to its consumption and a complete blackout for a short period in 1918.

A long lasting blackout: kerosene as backup for gaslight A few weeks later, on 12 June 1917, when a workers’ strike at the electric power station caused electric lighting to go out too, the city went into full non-network mode. The major difference was felt mostly in the central parts of the city and more acutely in its main thoroughfares, particularly the big and new boulevards where ‘there was not a single lighted lamp, only the skylight was of any use for pedestrians.’34 On that night, beyond the rediscovery of ‘skylight’, a newspaper reporter noticed the revenge of well-lit streets, where kerosene was used: ‘The streets of other districts, the ones which do not have electricity, were lighted with kerosene and it was a luxury that contrasted with the darkness of all the others, now envious of the brass lamp that mocked the incandescent bulb’.35 A further reverse technology was used36, together with kerosene, in the main train station in Rossio. There, ‘the lighting was done by kerosene and as trains arrived, the station chief, a Mr. Carlos Pedroso, ordered that

 31

O Século, 1916-10-28, p. 1. DL nº 2922 of 30-12-1916. 33 As mentioned in the introductory note (Preâmbulo) to the Agreement of 1919 between the CRGE and the CML. 34 O Século, 12-06-1917, p. 1. 35 Idem. 36 See Edgerton (2007, pp. 10-11) for the reserve technology concept and many examples. 32

116

Chapter Four

carriers of [flame] torches be placed around [the platform] to help with the unloading.’37 The electric lighting of Squares and Boulevards returned in that same month of June 1917, after a few days off, unlike what had happened with gas-lights. The gas blackout, which meant a blackout of the majority of lamps across the city, forced an alternative lighting to be quickly put in place. This was no more than the enforcement of the clause in the gas company’s contract, which obligated the company to provide street lighting with kerosene lamps in case it was not able to supply gas for reasons ‘beyond its control’. The oil lamps, after an absence of almost 50 years, returned to the central parts of the city as a reserve for the failing networks. Some 4 000 kerosene lamps, in addition to the ones that already existed in the peripheral areas of the city, were installed. Yet, in June 1918 even kerosene was at risk of falling into disuse. Due to scarcity of supply, the Government threatened to take over the Company’s stock of that fuel. On June 27, at a meeting of the City Hall committee, those present agreed that the government should obtain its supply of oil by other means, through imports, but the government’s suggestion of not lighting the streets on moonlit nights was followed instead, though only for limited hour intervals and not every full moon, ‘as the constancy of moonlight is uncertain.’ At that same meeting one alderman even proposed, against the judgement of other aldermen, who felt that it could prove too dangerous for ‘public safety’, that until the end of October of that year the Company be dispensed of kerosene lighting. Even though he pointed out that ‘in other countries, due to war, cities were often left unlit for nights on end and no one was afraid’, the proposal ended up being rejected by a large majority.38 Though electricity production was not interrupted in such an extreme way as gas production, it did come to a near-halt at least once more. In November 1918 another electric blackout occurs, this time due to a malfunctioning machine at the factory and to the difficulty in repairing it, prompting the Administrative commission of CML to propose the municipalization of gas and electricity distribution and to allow the Tramway Company (Companhia Carris de Ferro de Lisboa) the right to supply electricity to private consumers, for one year. It further forced the CRGE to add some extra kerosene lamps, now as backup to the electric lamps. On 5 December 1918 the event was described as something of a

 37 38

O Século, idem. Minutes of the Meetings of the CML, 1918-06-27, pp. 456-461.

Technological Modernization in the Making of Portugal’s Capital

117

common occurrence. The newspaper headline read “Old theme: the lack of light. Yesterday Lisbon transformed itself into a true medieval borough.”39 Finally, yet another fuel-type of lamp was also put forward, if only for the years 1917-1918, a non-networked gas type, the acetylene lamp. This had a much brighter light than the kerosene lamps.40 In those years, acetylene street lamps were used in other parts of the country whenever gas production collapsed, most notably in Aveiro.41 Nevertheless, throughout all this, gas disuse was never seen by CML as more than temporary. With the end of the war, and the expectation of a return to “normality” of the coal imports trade, an agreement for the reestablishment of the gas supply was signed with the CRGE, and gas distribution effectively restarted in 1920, but the crisis in coal supply (now with a persisting rise in coal prices) endured and was aggravated by the difficult situation of the gas distribution network, which was much deteriorated due to it having remained unused (and without maintenance) for more than two years. By the end of 1920 gas production ceased again. In May 1920 new restrictions were legislated for lighting42 and this time, beyond the restriction of 50% in lighting by gas or electricity, the government went one step further and ordered public street lighting to ‘be suppressed in nights of full moon and on the three nights that precede and follow it’. Here, it was not only kerosene lighting following the moon calendar, but the whole lighting of Lisbon’s streets: a complete return to moonlight lighting for every Lisboner. For those in the boulevards this would be a novelty, but not so for those who lived in the lanes.43 The post-war problems were stalling the issue, but the intention of the City Hall was for gas to be put back into distribution.

The silent exit of Kerosene The end of kerosene lighting in Lisbon street lamps (contrary to what happened in the case of piped gas for street lighting) was actually not its end of ends in Portugal, as in other places it would only come to a close

 39

O Século 05-12-1918, p. 1. It was mentioned on the ‘Orçamento da CML’ (budget) for that fiscal year, though I never found (the streets) where it was actually used. 41 See Cerqueira (1956). Aveiro is a city in northern Portugal. 42 Dec. 6624 of 19-05-1920, by the Secretaria Geral do Ministério do Comércio e Comunicações, in D.G, 1st sem., p. 520. 43 In 1922 in a meeting at the CML, it was referred that the decree 6624 was still in force but that a request for the Government to revoke it urged (Minutes of the Meeting of the Administrative Commission of CML, 1922-08-25, p. 316). 40

118

Chapter Four

much later.44 In the capital city, kerosene lamps disappeared as silently as they entered the scene. The price of kerosene was on the way up in 1921, and the contract for keeping CML’s share of the lamps had barely been extended in 1922, terminating in 1923.45 The hiring of an engineer with the specific purpose of heading a street lighting division in May of that year coincides with the disappearance of the kerosene lamps from the streets. It seems that in their eagerness for modernity (or perhaps due to budgetary problems) the kerosene lighting service was terminated without it having been replaced with something else.46 Some parts of the city were thus left unlit. In 1926, for instance, inhabitants of the district of Palma de Baixo (which had been lighted by kerosene at least in 1909, according to the list used as a source for Map 2) complained that there was no street lighting there.47 A few years later, in January 1928, a request resembling the ones filed for oil lamps about a century before was now made by the City Hall of Alcobaça (a municipality in the centre of Portugal). This time, CML saw no problem in selling off what was left: some thirty new lanterns it had bought in 1921 and which had been laying in the General Warehouse of the Lighting Department since 1923. As for the brackets to hold the lanterns, there were some scattered through the lanes, but they saw no benefit in selling them ‘not only because their little value would not make up for the work involved in removing them, but also because they could be used as holders for electric bulbs that might be installed in place of kerosene lanterns.’ In any case, they added, those brackets could be ordered by the City Hall of Alcobaça from any local blacksmith, since they were ‘simple brackets made of curse iron’.48



44 The latest one I was able to register, which is most probably not the last one, occurred for Machico, in Madeira, in 1955 (Moreira, op. cit.). 45 Minutes of the Meetings of the CML 1921, p. 523; and idem, 1922-10-27, p. 616. 46 I never found in the records of the municipality, any explicit mentioning to it, but in the most meticulous report ever to be transcribed into the pages of the books of minutes of the meetings of the CML on these issues, in this whole period, written by that same engineer, it was mentioned that the ‘exocentric areas’ of the capital, were in need of 2 000 new lamps (Excerpt of Tito de Sousa Lopes’s report on the Minutes of the Meetings of the Administrative Commission of CML, 192408-08, pp. 316-9). 47 AML – AC Processo /1926, 28-04-1926. 48 Letter dated from 28-01-1928 signed by the President of the City Hall of Alcobaca and internal Ofício of street lighting division of the CML dated from 0602-1928 (both included in AML-AC – Processos de Secretaria – 1928 – Processo n.º 1292 - Cx 2/28).

Technological Modernization in the Making of Portugal’s Capital

119

Finally, a few months later, in May of that same year, we see that the apparently gone-for-good oil lamps would still have a final safe haven. In the new concession contract of May 1928 there is a clause forcing the concessionary to keep in store (as ‘Emergency Illumination’) 4 000 olive oil or kerosene or any other non-networked lamp type to be swiftly put to work in case the gas or electric networks failed.49 This contract was still in force in 1975, when the company was nationalized, but there is no way to be sure whether this entailed, in the case of a longer blackout, the return of oil lamps to the streets. In other localities, kerosene lamps circulated in much the same way as natural oil ones, as described above.50 Furthermore, they were effectively used as backup for the seasonal blackouts in places where the supply of electricity was dependent on weak and irregular river flows – along with the dry season, came a kerosene season.51

The last gas lights: slow death (or enduring third-age), 1923-1965 The last period to be addressed here will take us to the end of the nonelectrics. Contrary to the silent exit of kerosene lamps, the extinction of the last gas lamp deserved a special mention by the Mayor in December 1965. The last ones were removed from the Bairro de Santa Catarina between December 9 and 15. Between the reestablishment of the regular gas service in 1923 and the end of 1929 the gas lamps were still seen as occupying a pivotal position in the city. In April 1924, Tito de Sousa Lopes, the engineer newly contracted to head the street lighting division describes the stock of lamps in crude terms: 2 827 lamps unnumbered, 2 636 lamps unlit (of which 2 619 were ‘mutilated’, i.e. they had no lantern); with broken glasses, of all those who had a lantern, 5 419 were found; there were 8 500 which needed to be painted; and 2 800, approximately, needing their glasses cleaned.52 The agreement reached in 1923, and ultimately observed by the company, that of temporarily replacing gas burners and mantles by electric bulbs (keeping the lanterns and the rest of the structure of the lamps as intact as possible) was welcomed. In July 1923, the first 396 gas lamps that went into temporary disuse were replaced by electric filament bulbs (of 50-

 49

Article 63 of the May 1928 contract. It happened in the case of Funchal and Machico, in the nineteenth century, and later on in other locations. 51 See Cordeiro (2008, p. 73) for several examples. 52 Actas da Comissão Administrativa da CML, 1924-08-08, pp. 323-4. 50

120

Chapter Four

candle power, a much lower intensity than those which had replaced the arc lamps in 1914). The streets chosen were a few boulevards and wide streets. A lamp of great symbolic value also figured at the bottom of the list, lamp number 1, which had been installed at the entrance of the gas factory built near the river in Rua de Pedrouços, in 1887.53 Between August 1923 and February 1924 a further total of 6 050 mantles were replaced by bulbs.54 In parallel, improvements and not just replacement were going on in other parts of the gas network. The CML was also promoting experiments with a new type of high-pressure gas lamp to replace the old ones in the new boulevards.55 Meanwhile, negotiations were under way for the signing of a new contract that would cover electricity and gas distribution, which would replace the 1891 contract and its addenda and alterations throughout the years. Despite an acute crisis in institutional relations in 1925-1926, after the political change in the aftermath of the putsch of 28 May 1926, a new contract was eventually signed in May 1928, which favored a definitive disuse of most (though not all) gas lamps.56 Between May 1928 and the Summer of 1929 the wider and quicker substitution of lamps that has ever occurred in the history of the city took place: by the end of this process, gas-lit lamps were cut down to 467 and electric ones had risen to 10 840 (around 5% and 95% of the total, respectively). By the end of 1929, the city’s public street lighting would be radically different, but the gas lamps would still survive a few more decades. They would even reverse the disuse trend at one point, rising to 494 in the early 1930s, but from 1935 onwards they were more and more confined to the areas known as the “old neighborhoods” of the city, Bairro Alto, Alfama, Mouraria and Bica/Santa Catarina. Until 1956, their number would still be higher than the number of electric lamps that were used from 1878 to 1922.57 They survived several announcements of imminent extinction (in 1949 and in 1956 at least). At the end of 1956, though, the first major replacement occurred in Bairro Alto. The last gas lamps were removed only nine years later, in 1965, from the neighbourhood of Santa Catarina.

 53

Actas da CML, 1922, pp. 320-321 and Actas da comissão executiva da CML, 1923-07-03, p. 176-184. 54 Idem. Actas da Comissão Administrativa da CML, 1924-08-08, pp. 316-9. 55 Actas das sessões da Comissão Executiva da CML, 1925-03-25, pp. 202-3. 56 The contract of 5 May 1928 replaces and reformulates the one still in force from 1891 (and the bundle of additions and corrections accumulated in the several agreements added to it throughout the years). 57 Anais CML, 1949, p.169 ; Idem, 1950, p. 215 .

Technological Modernization in the Making of Portugal’s Capital

121

Conclusion If we want to grasp the history of the material world, we should shift our views away from the obsession with innovation. That is to say, we should cease to think that everything is a system (and is growing) and stop assuming that networks are omnipresent (and expanding all the time and everywhere). If we do so, chances are we will find historical trajectories beyond the main thoroughfares, travel not merely on the main street or high street but on every side street and lane and alley and move on through the world’s country roads; to gaze across wider timeframes, to see the large trees and not just the small figures in the landscape58; to understand and describe more of the things societies in general, and the State in particular, have used and disused. What I have tried to show in this text is that by focusing on what was in use, and on the extent of that use as well as its differentiation across several spatial scales (disuse here is but a decrease in the extent of use in time, or in a spatial unit), we can arrive at better accounts than the ones offered by innovation and network-centric narratives which are prevalent in the study of many technologies, perhaps especially in the case this text brought into view: lighting.59 I also sought to highlight the value of systematic measures of technologies-in-use over long periods, and specific spatial frames. Such measures are a vital component of an attempt to produce a richer account of the making of State power and of the history of technology in the processes of modernization of contemporary Portugal. Studying disuse forces us, indirectly, to study late but also whole ‘time-spans’, covering what was in use, for how long, to what extent, where exactly, and by whom, and to study it in out-of-the-way places and periods. The interest of this, particularly in the case of technologies of government or technological dimensions of State power in Portugal, does not lie in their exoticism or their uncommonness in historical accounts but rather in their uncommonness as framed by the narrow set of places and periods that are indeed common in the available historiography. If we take the issue further, and try to assess the significance of disuse, it will also lead us to the study of more things than the canon contains, and to the study of why so much is missing, and what the consequences of such an absence may be.

 58

For the landscape painting analogy and his notion of “technological landscape”, see Lindqvist (op. cit.), pp. 272-3, and 274. 59 Innovation centeredness has many problems; here explored mostly spatial and chronological ones. See for the source for the term as used here Edgerton (1998) and for a wider treatment (Edgerton, 2007, esp. introduction and chapter 1).

122

Chapter Four

Bibliography Baldwin, P. C. “In the heart of darkness: Blackouts and the social geography of lighting in the gaslight era”, in Journal of Urban History 30 (5), 2004. Baldwin, Peter C. “Street Lighting”, in Encyclopedia of American Urban History. Vol. 2. Sage Reference, 2007. Cerqueira, Eduardo. “A propósito da iluminação pública da cidade”, in Separata da Revista do Arquivo do distrito de Aveiro, vol. XII. Aveiro: Coimbra Editora, 1946. Cordeiro, Bruno Cordovil. A Iluminação Pública de Lisboa e a Problemática da História das Técnicas. Lisboa: unpublished MSc diss., ICS, Universidade de Lisboa, 2007. —. “De-electrifying the History of Street Lighting. Energies in use in Town and Country (Portugal, 1780s - 1930s)”, in The Culture of Energy (ed. Mogens Rüdiger). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. Costa, José Alves da. Gás de Lisboa. Da iluminação pública a gás na Lisboa Romântica ao gás natural. Porto: Lello Editores, 1996. Cruz, Francisco Ignácio dos Santos. “Notícia histórica acerca da iluminação da cidade de Lisboa”, in Trabalhos academicos litterarios e scientificos: apresentados á Academia Real das Sciencias, e que o seu conselho julgou não dever mandar imprimir. Lisboa: officina de Manoel de J. Coelho, 1851. Duarte, António Soares. Indústrias de iluminação. Lisboa: Biblioteca de Instrução Profissional, s.d. [ca1900]. Dupuy, G. and Tarr, J. (eds). Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. Edgerton, David. “De l’innovation aux usages. Dix thèses éclectiques sur l’histoire des techniques”, in Annales HSS 4-5, 1998. —. Shock of the Old. Technology and Global History since 1900. London: Profile Books, 2007 —. “Innovation, Technology or History: What is The History of Technology About?”, in Technology and Culture 51, 3, 2010. Garnert, Jan. “Seize the Day. Ethnological Perspectives on Light and Darkness”, in Ethnologia Scandinavica 24, 1994. Hughes, T. P. Networks of Power. The Electrification of Western Societies, 1880-1930. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Lindqvist, Svante. “Changes in the Technological Landscape: The Temporal Dimension of the Growth and Decline of Large Technological Systems”,

Technological Modernization in the Making of Portugal’s Capital

123

in Changes in the Technological Landscape. Essays in the History of Science and Technology. Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2011. Originally published in O. Grandstand (ed.). Economics of Technology. Amsterdam: North Holland, 1994. Lousada, Maria Alexandre. Espaços de sociabilidade em Lisboa: finais do século XVIII a 1834. Lisboa: PhD Dissertation, Universidade de Lisboa, 1995 Moreira, João Lino Pereira. Iluminação pública a petróleo na vila de Machico. Machico: Câmara Municpal de Machico e ARCHAI, 2001. Otter, Chris. The Victorian Eye. A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008. Paquier, Serge and Williot, Jean-Pierre (dirs). L’industrie du gaz en Europe aux XIXeme et XXeme siècles. L’innovation entre marchés privés et collectivités publiques. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2005. Samuel, Raphael. “The Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in Mid-Victorian Britain”, in History Workshop Journal 3, 1977. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Disenchanted Night. The industrialization of lighting in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: California University Press, 1988. Schott, D. “Empowering the Cities. Gas and Electricity Networks in the Urban Environment”, in Urban Machinery. Inside Modern European Cities (ed. M. Härdand T. Misa). Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press, 2008. Serrão, Joel. “Noite natural e noite técnica”, in Temas Oitocentistas II. Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 1978 [1957]. Silva, Álvaro Ferreira da. Crescimento Urbano, Regulação e Oportunidades Empresariais: A Construção Residencial em Lisboa, 1860-1930. Florence: PhD dissertation, European University Institute, 1997. Tarr, Joel. “The City and Technology”, in A Companion to American Technology (ed. Carroll Pursell). Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 2005. Van der Vleuten, Erik. “Understanding Network Societies. Two Decades of Large Technical Systems Studies”, in Networking Europe. Transnational Infrastructures and the Shaping of Europe, 1850-2000 (ed. Arne Kaijser and Erik van der Vleuten). Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications, 2006. Williamson, H. and Daum, A. The American Petroleum Industry. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1959.

124

Chapter Four

Archival Records referred Arquivo Histórico da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa (AML-AH); Arquivo Municipal do Arco do Cego, da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa (AML-AC); Centro de Documentação do Museu da Electricidade - Fundação EDP (CD-ME); Arquivo Histórico do Ministério das Obras Públicas (AHMOP).

Serials (State publications) DG: Diário do Governo, later Diário da República

Publications of the Câmara Municipal de Lisboa (CML) [Minutes of the meetings] Actas das sessões da CML several years (18781929) [includes Actas das sessões da comissão executiva and Actas das sessões da comissão administrativa] (or the various designations which it had before: Annaes; Synopses; Archivo Municipal). Anuário Cultural e Estatístico da CML (1935-1937). Anais da CML (1938-1965).

CHAPTER FIVE LIBERAL STATE AND IMAGES OF CIVIL SERVANTS JOANA ESTORNINHO DE ALMEIDA

Introduction – The Portuguese Civil Servants in Images In the present chapter, I will explore the relation between the formation of Portuguese State power and the images of civil servants and statesmen in circulation – first through the trivialization of illustrated periodicals and lithography, later through photography – from the definitive establishment of the liberal regime, in 1834, until it collapsed and gave way to Salazar’s dictatorship, in the early 1930s. The invention of the press and, in its wake, the rapid circulation of texts and images was decisive in the political and social configuration of the early modern State. In the eighteenth century, the development of political and satirical drawing had a significant impact on the political culture of the transition to the contemporary era. In the nineteenth century, the introduction of coal and later electricity into printing machines (and the invention of new printing technologies such as the rotary offset printing press) ushered in a period of exponential growth in newspaper circulation. In parallel, those techniques – which later come to include photography – allowed periodicals to have ever more illustrations. Also, when the photographic technique emerged in the 1830s, the State was quick to adopt it as an observational and filing tool within the frame of the then-emerging disciplinary institutions (Tagg 1988, 60-65). In Portugal, from the 1860s onwards, the liberal State fostered the use of photography for criminal and civil identification, determined that it was to be part of the curriculum of military academy graduates, employed it in geodesic and engineering works and saw it being embraced in Medicine and other disciplines (Sena 1998). In all such cases, photography was employed as a technique, that is to say, it was deemed neutral and reliable,

126

Chapter Five

with all the problems such a conception entails. In this sense, its use was subject to needs and purposes pre-established by its users. On the contrary, the images of civil servants and statesmen that are the material basis of our analysis were not originally produced with the aim of being or becoming representations of the State. These images came to be conflated with the idea of the State through the mutual interaction of a wide range of factors: the dissemination of image reproduction techniques; new uses for such techniques in newspapers; what was deemed an object of interest by draftsmen or photo-reporters and their specific goals; the public’s expectations towards the configuration and action of the State or State services; as well as the way in which public power wished to portray itself. This process was only possible through a continuous and evolving negotiation between the press and the State. To understand this process, one needs to retrace how the system of government and the architecture of the Portuguese public administration were established, over time, especially throughout the period in question, in parallel with the circulation of social representations of State bureaucracy. The first section of this chapter is devoted to the analysis of this process. In the following sections, my focus will shift towards concrete images of functionaries and statesmen, so as to draw out the way in which they reflected the system of government in place, all the while giving rise to a new way of perceiving the State. The aim of this chapter, then, is to analyze the processes of configuration of the Portuguese contemporary civil servant during the period that extends from the Constitutional Monarchy, encompassing the whole of the first Portuguese Republic, to the establishment of the New State.

The Portuguese civil service The most widely accepted date for the beginning of the institutionalization of a modern State bureaucracy in Portugal is the definitive implementation of the Constitutional Monarchy in 1834. Before that, the first reformist push came about in the second half of the eighteenth century, as a jurisdictional conception of public office gave way to a statist conception of power, according to which offices should not have a patrimonial or hereditary nature but rather be temporary, waged and hierarchically structured, with an established centre of power. It was in this context that Secretariats of State were created, new councils and tribunals formed, existing ones reformed, and new types of administrative posts, such as inspectors and intendants, created (Subtil 2006 and Almeida JE 2007, 182-192).

Liberal State and Images of Civil Servants

127

The Liberal Revolution arrived in Portugal in the wake of the French Invasions. The first Portuguese constitution grounded on the sovereignty of the nation was promulgated in Portugal in 1822. It aimed to implement a public administration that was homogeneous and meritocratic, thus formalizing the spirit of previous reforms, as well as neutral and autonomous from the legislative and judicial branches of power. In the following year, the Absolutists returned to power and crushed the constitutional ideals of the first Portuguese liberalism. Between 1826 and 1828, a brief constitutional period was again in place, when D. Pedro IV, the heir to the Portuguese crown and Emperor of Brazil, granted a Constitutional Charter to the Kingdom. Through a compromise between national sovereignty and monarchic sovereignty, the Constitutional Charter aimed at easing the political tensions afflicting the country. However, that only proved viable after Liberals and Absolutists, following a civil war that lasted between 1828 and 1834, had signed an armistice. With the definitive victory of the Liberals in 1834, the Constitutional Charter was reinstated and reforms geared towards the establishment of a liberal-type State were pushed forward. This constitutional document was in force, but for a brief interruption, until the establishment of the Republic in 1910. Despite the apparent constitutional stability, the political history of this period is best described as tumultuous. From 1834 to 1851, one constitutional government after another failed to push through their reforms, given the unflagging conflict between those that saw themselves as moderate liberals and, on the other side of the trenches, those proclaiming to follow in the footsteps of 1820s Liberalism, now perceived as radical. In 1851, a military coup – the so-called Regeneration – ushered in a stable period where the government was able to effectively put in place a series of public reforms geared towards the establishment of a Constitutional State and the fostering of economic liberalism. As far as the public administration goes, as early as 1834 the jurisdictional-type administration of the Old Regime, based on jurisdictional offices, great councils and tribunals, was dismantled. Formally, executive power was transferred to the King who, in turn, was expected to exercise it through his Secretaries of State. The latter were to oversee the administration of the country with the help of a host of civil servants distributed throughout the different Secretariats of State, each responsible for its own area of governance. While the king symbolically presided over the executive power, the Secretariats of State, later named Ministries, effectively coordinated the new pyramidal model of administration adopted by the majority of nineteenth-century constitutional monarchies across Europe. Their organization was to abide by the value of State uniformity,

128

Chapter Five

guaranteed in theory by the hierarchy and rationalization of services and their respective employees, as well as of the various public institutions now under their oversight (Hespanha 2004, 269-343). This was far from a linear process. Indeed, the subjection of many of these institutions to ministerial authority often went hand in hand with the preservation of acquired rights and relations of tutelage inherited from the Old Regime, just as many administrative procedures and established appointing practices were safeguarded (Almeida JE 2009, 113-130). With a view to effectively enforce the law across the national territory, the new liberal State sought to lay out a new territorial division, with new administrative authorities under the wing of their respective ministries. This territorial network was the base of the pyramid and, to repeat the point, it should be homogeneous and rational, thus putting an end to the particularisms and overlapping competencies that characterized the Old Regime. This goal was to prove elusive throughout the whole of the nineteenth century, both in terms of its social acceptance and in terms of the material capacity of the State to effectively implement it (Silveira 1998). The difficulty in assuring the territorial administration of the country also meant that attempts to establish a regular State tax collection and public security and public education networks fell short.1 Given the State’s weak capacity to embed itself in the territory, the Portuguese liberal Civil Service was by and large confined to the capital city (Silveira 1998). In short, the reformism of the nineteenth-century Portuguese State was unable to bridge the gap between Portugal and the developed European countries. Be that as it may, as recent studies have shown, its efforts must be gauged against the backdrop of a complete lack of local infrastructures, such as roads, transportation, monetary system, schools, to name but a few (Cardoso and Lains 2010, 262). There was, nonetheless, a statification of public life, inasmuch as the State was able to define and secure its role as a legitimate source of power. Which explains why, in spite of the State’s inability to sediment its administrative basis, for the majority of the published opinion in the nineteenth century, there was in fact an excess of State, an excess of appointments for public office, an excess of bureaucracy. By the end of the nineteenth century, public deficit, the development of the workers’ movement, Portugal’s dependence on England and its loss of influence in Africa, among other factors, made republican ideals gain ground, culminating in the 1908 regicide and the victorious proclamation

 1

Thus, the Portuguese liberal State was unable to implement its infra-structural power (Mann 1991). For the Portuguese case, see Chapter 2 in the present book.

Liberal State and Images of Civil Servants

129

of the Republic in 1910. The First Republic, as it was later called, brought about the implementation of new ideals of governance, in keeping with the liberal tradition. The 1911 Constitution did not guarantee popular sovereignty, but rather national sovereignty, such as it had been conceived by the 1820s liberals, preserving its bicameral structure and the separation of independent and equal powers. Still, it laid out a greater commitment to democratic principles, inasmuch as it guaranteed equality before the law, extinguished nobility titles and recognized equality among religious denominations, protecting freedom of religion while explicitly advocating a secular State (Catroga 2010). The executive power was held by the President of the Republic – indirectly elected by the two legislative chambers – who exercised it through ministers appointed freely and independently by himself. In fact, ministers were appointed in consonance with the majorities represented in the chambers and their status facilitated the formation of alliances to overthrow governments or otherwise made it easy for them to hand in their resignation at the least sign of opposition. This, as one would expect, was a source of great governmental instability throughout the First Portuguese Republic (Canotilho 2002, 175-177). Among the ministers, one was appointed President of the Ministry and was responsible for general policy affairs. According to the 1911 Constitution, territorial administrative bodies were autonomous from the central executive power.2 Civil service, whose organization kept clear of any major reform or change in personnel, was to embody the new values of the Republic’s secular civility.3 It was against the backdrop of this secular mission of the State that republican governments tried to establish universal education, which in turn inflated the list of State employees. Furthermore, it was under the Republican regime that women entered public service for the first time. The governmental instability of the Republic, the social opposition to its reforms and the desire for authoritarianism as a political solution all go some way towards explaining the success of the 1926 military coup, which established a dictatorial regime. It was in the frame of this military dictatorship that António de Oliveira Salazar was appointed minister for the first time, later becoming President of the Ministry Council, in which



2 For bibliographical guides to the political and state history of modern Portugal, see Hespanha, ‘An Introduction to nineteenth Century Portuguese Constitutional and State History’, n.d., http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Portuguese_Brazilian_Studies/ejph/html/issue 4/html/hespanha_main.html. 3 On the continuity of Public Administration cadres from the Monarchic to the Republican regime, see Ramos (1993, 457, 477).

Chapter Five

130

capacity he lay the ground for what was later to become known as the Portuguese New State, a non-liberal, authoritarian and corporative State. Throughout the whole of this period of constitution of the liberal State, the Portuguese civil service expanded along similar lines to that of other Western countries. However, it is difficult to estimate the number of personnel in the Portuguese contemporary State. In his groundbreaking study on the bureaucracy of the second half of nineteenth century, Pedro Tavares de Almeida showed how the Portuguese civil service did not increase inordinately between 1854 e 1897, either in absolute terms or relative to the rest of Europe (Almeida PT 1995, 269). The same exercise can be extended to the whole of the period under study, using the data available to us. Such a calculus is only possible using State budget data that include all the State employees – and these, given the variable clustering criteria used in each period, are not entirely reliable. Thus, the values included in the next table are approximate rather than exact calculi. 1838

1854

1890

1911

1930

1940

c. 51 000 c. 47 000 c. 53 000 c. 54 000 c. 88 000 c. 100 500 Sources: 1838 - Orçamento apresentado às Cortes por Manoel da Silva Passos. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1838. 1854, 1890 – L. N. Espinha da Silveira. “A Administração do Estado em Portugal”. Madrid: Los Ibericos y El Mar, 1998. 1911, 1930, 1940 – Anabela Ferreira Macias Nunes, População Activa e Actividade Económica em Portugal. Lisboa: ISEG, 1990.

This data seems to confirm that, despite complaints about the excess of State employees, the nineteenth century did not witness an abnormal growth in State personnel. On the contrary: in the twentieth century the public service apparatus grew much more than in the previous one, undoubtedly as a consequence of the new set of social functions that the State took on under the new political regimes. Firstly in the Republic and under the banner of its civilizing mission – which determined, for instance, the establishment of education and public assistance networks. And also in the New State, as an instrument for the construction of a modern corporative nation, which meant the State extended its reach into all spheres of public life, as it paradigmatically embraced its role as the only rationalizing pole of society (Hespanha 2004, 525s).

Liberal State and Images of Civil Servants

131

The configuration of the liberal civil servant: the “mangas de alpaca” With the establishment of the liberal State a new class of political leaders and statesmen came onto the scene. They not only started out as complete unknowns to most of the population but also, given the quick succession of different governments and their varied political leanings, their ranks were renewed at a much faster pace than in the Old Regime. Throughout the nineteenth century, these great statesmen – ministers, members of parliament or directors of great public institutions – became the privileged objects of representation for draftsmen, and later photographers. The latter’s work was an important means for the public to become acquainted with the new governing elites. For the period preceding the invention and dissemination of photography, there is a great number of paintings and illustrations of these high-ranking public figures. The large-scale portrait paintings were generally personal orders. As a rule, lithographically printed representations were simplified versions of a well-known painting, or original drawings from a simpler portrait. In this same period, small-scale drawn portraits were highly sought-after by various strata of the population, a consequence of the success of the miniature portrait tradition and of the easy access to portraiture in the wake of the development of drawing and reproduction techniques. In the first years of Portuguese Liberalism, in the 1820s, the subject was usually portrayed either in a standing position, alongside a desk, or sitting behind it. The desk was habitually cluttered with writing-related material, such as quills, inkwells, paper and books. The motif of writing paraphernalia was symbolic of literacy, on the one hand, and of diligence, responsibility and duty, on the other. These objects lend the public figure an aura of earnestness and respectability. They are equally pervasive in simpler portraits that often served as calling cards or illustrations in books, almanacs and magazines. Many portraits of this type, representing key figures in the Portuguese liberal revolution, were made during the period. It was customary for high-ranking State officials to appear in their official attire, with their honorific insignia in plain view. From the 1830s onwards, these drawings became increasingly simple, less detailed and without as many identification symbols and objects. Portraits would usually represent only the head and shoulders, and the person’s key physiognomic traits. The posture became slightly more studied, the pose more artificial, in three-quarter view. This stance became a rule partly due to the limitations of the technique that was disseminated,

132

Chapter Five

from the late eighteenth century onwards, for use in such portraits, the “Physionotrace”. Through the contrast of light and shade, this instrument enabled the capture of the main physiognomic traces of the portrait’s subject. Once it became widespread, the frontal position came to be associated with a lack of sophistication and with the offhanded manner proper to the lower classes (Tagg 1988, 35). The image banks of Portuguese archives have many examples of such portraits, namely of the key political figures of the first half of the nineteenth century. These drawings could be used by the subjects themselves, as calling cards, as engravings to be sold individually, or as illustrations of texts, representing either the author or the subject of the article.4 Almanacs, in particular, frequently included sections of brief laudatory biographies of relevant public figures, more often than not civil servants, whom the new liberal regime wanted to make known and legitimize before the general public. One of the most widely represented figures was Rodrigo da Fonseca Magalhães, a civil servant, later a minister, and the subject of one of the first daguerreotypes to be made in Portugal.5 From halfway through the nineteenth century, the daguerreotype and photographic technique became widespread in Portugal, at the same time as the circulation of newspapers increases and the last decades of the century witness the emergence and success of the illustrated press. In the 1870s and 1880s general-interest newspapers with a wide circulation, such as Diário de Notícias (1864 to this day) and O Século (1880-1977), gain ground and progressively begin to include images. In 1878 we see the first issue of O Occidente, a newspaper that was to include more and more photographs in its pages. In 1881, Ilustração Universal, considered the first image-based Portuguese newspaper, sees the light of day (Sousa 1998, 215-218). Once again, high-ranking State officials were among their preferred subjects. In O Occidente, for instance, we find several drawings from photographs,

 4

The Iconography section of the Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa (Lisbon National Library), for example, has made many of those drawings available online, in digital format. Cf. http://purl.pt/index/ic/PT/index.html. 5 Made by William Barclay, during a trip to Portugal, and gifted to Rodrigo da Fonseca Magalhães himself on 2 October 1841. Like many others, this author used the technique invented by Daguerre as a basis for his illustrations (Sena 1998). Rodrigo da Fonseca Magalhães was an official of the Secretaria de Estado da Justiça (Secretariat of State for Justice) in the 1820s and, later, one of the key figures in the reestablishment of the liberal regime from 1834 and during the Regeneration period. In the 1830s he returned to the Ministry of Justice as a High official and would subsequently become minister of Realm and Foreign Affairs in different periods.

Liberal State and Images of Civil Servants

133

portraying ministers and other statesmen. The composition of these illustrations usually followed the tradition of the three-quarter-view portrait that photography will preserve.6 Drawing from photographs was thought of as a cheap way to reproduce a lifelike image of the portrait subject.7 Portraits of mid-level civil servants, the bureaucratic personnel, created with the establishment of the liberal State, were, nonetheless, virtually absent from nineteenth century publications. As we have shown, draftsmen and photographers preferred to portray key statesmen and, to a lesser extent, as part of the trend to represent popular types, minor employees and auxiliary personnel. The public servant was, however, a key component of the new liberal State. The establishment of the new liberal regime in Portugal from 1834 onwards had institutionalized a type of State employee that did not fit into the regime of public offices of the Old Regime. Civil servants were the pillars of the pyramidal architecture of State administration, which was now the sole bearer of legitimate power under the Constitution. A State that was supposed to be unified, homogeneous and neutral. For the State apparatus to function properly, it should be composed of hierarchically organized services with neutral employees, chosen according to their capacity to adequately execute the tasks assigned to them, with welldefined incomes and career paths. In the process of achieving these goals, the creation of public posts was limited and regulated, the theoretical possibility of access to them was extended to all citizens, the composition of the secretariats staff, their appointment, career and remuneration regulated. Acceptance of the new employee status and their inclusion in the State apparatus culminated, after their appointment to a post, in the compulsory oath of allegiance to the constitutional text, an act which thus represented the rite of institution of the civil servant.8 These aims traversed the legislation and regulations of the various nineteenth century governments and will have been achieved in most public institutions, especially in the capital. Despite the formal intentions, however, the recruitment of functionaries through a process of public examination did not become a rule in all services, as personal sponsorship in the assessment of candidates to public administration posts persisted and was still very much socially valued. Furthermore, given the lack of liquidity on the part

 6

See, for example, the portrait of José Joaquim de Castro, announced as the new minister of Defense in issue 72, of the 1880 edition of O Occidente. 7 The first photograph published in a Portuguese newspaper is dated 2 February 1907, in the newspaper O Comércio do Porto (Sousa 1998, 219). 8 I am using here the classical notion of rite de institution as a moment of change in social nature, as described by Pierre Bourdieu (1982, 58-63).

134

Chapter Five

of the State, the payment of civil servants’ wages, the guarantee of their independence, was highly irregular (Almeida JE 2009, 318-341). The new constitutional frame for civil servants, its official implementation and their day-to-day reality led them to gain an identity of their own in the context of the liberal regime. Furthermore, on the whole, civil servants shared a common cultural background and life experience. On the one hand, a large portion of the employees had been exiled and had taken part in the civil war that preceded the reestablishment of the liberal regime in Portugal, which would cement their allegiance to the constitutional system as well as forging interpersonal bonds. On the other hand, many possessed the same type of knowledge, mostly acquired in specialized classes, namely languages and commerce. Their knowledge of the same type of subject matter and, which more often than not was surely the case, the simultaneous attendance of the same courses contributed to their homogenization and identity as a corps. Thirdly, the actual performance of their functions introduced employees into the systems of practices and beliefs of public offices. The rhythms and bearings of work organization, the handling of the various utensils, and the deployment of the necessary techniques for the fulfilment of the range of tasks associated with the service became part of the very constitution of employees and of their distinction from other professional and social categories. The internalization, indeed embodiment of the rules of routine, paired with the values of efficiency and neutrality, would lead to the championing of a distinguishing work ethics and a sense of pride over their field of action. Despite the lack of visual portraits of the mid-level State employee for public consumption, one comes across a number of literary descriptions of this nineteenth century figure. Alberto Pimentel offers an ironic description of the process of constitution of the new liberal civil servant in a work where he sought to register the multiple facets of life in the capital, tellingly titled Photographias de Lisboa: Civil Service was a popular chap, wearing a long coat, green glasses, and a bone knob walking stick. He was stern and softly spoken. His biography was entwined with the country’s. He took part in the struggles that preceded the establishment of the constitutional government on these shores. He carried out the 1820 revolution, figured in the 1823 restoration, celebrated the publication of the charter in 1826, emigrated in 1828, when Sir D. Miguel returned, made his way back in 1832, was in the siege in Porto and, once the liberal party had triumphed, hanged his rifle and begged for bread from those who had handed him gunpowder. Fair is fair, and so they took him in and made a civil servant out of him. He led a fastidious, earnest and transparent life. His private life shone through in all his actions.

Liberal State and Images of Civil Servants

135

Once he was employed, the first figurines arrived in Portugal. Figurines for this, that and the other: for what to wear, what to write, how to govern. It was at this point that the administrative figurine called Bureaucracy made its appearance. The latter being female, memories were stirred. He set his eyes on the madam, recalled his youthful years and they got married. (Pimentel 1874, 98-99)

Outside the walls of public office, the liberal civil servants’ esprit de corps came up against their public image and their social status. On the one hand, the social identity of the civil servants would be reinforced by the elevation of their official character, by the power of belonging to the State personnel and by the security which that theoretically implied. It was the strength of this image that led many men to want to become civil servants. Such is the case of one particular character, Pedro, a barber that wished to join the ranks of the Civil Service, in a naturalist novel by Júlio Lourenço Pinto, written in the style of Balzac: That very day the barber dashed out of Gustavo’s house, tingling with a rush of exquisite and intoxicating emotions. Gustavo had touched some secluded fiber in him and, triggered by this tremor, a surge of latent ideas erupted, in which life revealed itself from new angles, and which transfigured him, as if from the chrysalis of his humility a new and more luminous individual emerged. Elated, he saw himself in his new civil servant skin and, with a delightful vanity, foretasted the bliss of being at one with the convoluted machinery of the State, striking his note among the vertiginous roar of the wheels of that colossal factory, as he turned into one more cog of the mechanism which propelled lofty national interests. (Pinto 1888, 71-72)

The esprit de corps of civil servants was also cemented beyond the sphere of their public offices through the development of certain sociability practices, namely leisure time activities, as well as by pursuing forms of social distinction, such as official honours. On the other hand, the pride of being a civil servant came up against economic adversity and widespread public criticism. Throughout the nineteenth century, civil servants’ income was cut by one reform after another, their wages were paid extremely late and heavily taxed, which meant that many mid-level employees experienced severe economic difficulties. Their situation was denounced by many authors, former statesmen and current functionaries in particular, in books or newspaper

136

Chapter Five

articles.9 The few existing visual representations of the nineteenth-century State employee are illustrations denouncing this very reality. In the midnineteenth century, the Suplemento Burlesco do Patriota, one of the first Portuguese illustrated periodicals, published several anonymous satirical drawings of employees waiting for their monthly pay, taking their possessions to the pawnbrokers, or quite simply looking starved. In the last decades of the century, much in the same satirical vein, Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro, a prolific Portuguese artist, especially renowned for his caricatures, signed a series of drawings in which State employees, clerks in particular, are portrayed as skeletons.10 Figure 1 is one of the trademark drawings that Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro, published in his own weekly magazine, O António Maria, aimed at exposing the exploitation of the lower strata of the Civil Service in the push to cut down on the State deficit. In this small cartoon, the caricaturist shows the Finance Minister helping himself to slice after slice of the clerk’s income, to the point where the latter is unable to make ends meet, and finally tears off his skin, leaving behind only a skeleton and his mangas de alpaca (alpaca half-sleeves). As is well known, fabric half sleeves were widely used by clerks and writers to protect their clothes from ink stains. In Portugal, in the second half of the nineteenth century, these were made from alpaca – hence the name. Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro often used this bureaucratic accessory in his illustrations, as a shorthand to identify civil servants, and the fact that in Portugal, to this day, the bureaucratic employee is known as a “mangas de alpaca”, almost always pejoratively, can probably be credited to him. Besides the fact that their social expectations clashed against the reality of being poorly paid and indeed barely making ends meet, functionaries had to face repeated accusations as to their excess, inefficiency, corruption, or to the pointlessness and dullness of their work. Eça de Queirós, one of the major Portuguese writers of the nineteenth century, described this aspect of State bureaucracy in many of his works. A posthumous novel about a small businessman opens with the main character’s visit to the Ministry of the Navy and a virulent reflection on the service provided by the respective secretariat:

 9

One of the most eloquent descriptions of the difficulties endured by civil servants is to be found in José Joaquim Ferreira Lobo’s work (1871). 10 For examples of illustrations published in Suplemento Burlesco do Patriota and O António Maria by Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro, see the website Memory Bank for the Portuguese Bureaucracy https://sites.google.com/site/memorybankbureaucracy/home/images.

Liberal State and Images of Civil Servants

137

Figure 1 – The Finance Minister experiments on a State Clerk, In O António Maria, N. 62, 1880.

138

Chapter Five And so it went every time his Overseas commissions affairs took him there. Although he was in fact the cousin of a general-director, slipped a coin every now and then into the hands of the clerks, and had discounted accommodation bills for two second-rank secretariat officers, he was faced again and again with the same numbing waits for the minister, an eternal turning of paperwork, hesitations, delays, the irregular, creaky and rickety workings of an old disjointed machine. - The same faffing about, every time – he exclaimed, putting his hat down over the bookkeeper’s desk. – It makes one want to prod you, as you do to cattle: Hi ya! Ginger! Hi ya! Spots! Huphup! (Queirós 1925, 23-24)

Contrary to what one would perhaps expect, the material hardship they endured, namely as a result of delays in the payment of their wages, as well as the criticisms they were subjected to, may have strengthened their selfdefence mechanisms and, as a result, cemented the homogeneity of their self-image as a collective. Despite their status as impoverished citizens, victims of the State deficit and, all the while being put under the harsh light of ruthless scrutiny by their fellow citizens as to their usefulness and work ethic, through the images in circulation, both visual and literary, the nineteenth-century Portuguese State employee gains a cohesive identity which is the result of both their function – against the backdrop of the liberal State’s ideal of a unified and neutral public service – and from that very social status.11 A status which, on the other hand, progressively dissolves into the growing ranks of the nondescript urban middle class, particularly in Lisbon, in a process not dissimilar to developments in other countries across Europe (Varni and Melis 2002). The homogenization of their image as a specific type of urban service provider, encapsulated externally by their attire, by symbols such as the alpaca half-sleeves as well as their general demeanour, was socially very efficient, inasmuch as it is recognizable and recognized throughout the whole of Portuguese contemporary history.

Photographs of statesmen as the State By the end of the nineteenth century, with the massification of the press and the development of photoengraving, photography becomes increasingly common in newspapers, which allows for the diversification of photographic subjects and compositions. Alongside the traditional portraits published, as

 11

On the question of the homogenization of the civil service, see Hespanha (2004, 330s).

Liberal State and Images of Civil Servants

139

mentioned above, in the pages of O Occidente and similar publications, we now start to find photographic representations of individuals freed from the previously codified poses, as well as more and more collective portraits.12 A significant contribution to this diversification was the development of the illustrated news report and the appearance of photo-reporters. At the turn to the twentieth century, illustrations accompanying current news (drawings from photographs, at first) become commonplace in the main Portuguese newspapers such as Diário de Notícias and O Século. To take an instructive example, in the first years of the century, Joshua Benoliel (1873-1932) goes from amateur photographer to professional ‘graphic reporter’, as photo-reporters become known in Portugal, collaborating in several publications and becoming an example to many. Following a similar path to North American and German photo-reporters, Benoliel – in more ways than one a precursor to his foreign counterparts – covered all kinds of events and social realities, speaking several languages and dressing for each occasion. His work appeared mainly on the pages of Ilustração Portuguesa, a magazine owned by the newspaper O Século and inspired by The Illustrated London News and L’Illustration Française, which was to have a major impact on Portuguese society while it remained in print, from 1903 to 1924, both for its graphic innovation and for the way in which it told its stories using virtually only photographs, accompanied by very brief texts (Sousa 1998, 219-221). This new representational context had a significant impact on the disseminated images of statesmen, but did not spark an interest in representing the common civil servant. At the turn of the century, increasingly more images of the new governments and heads of public institutions find their way into print and among those we find, for instance, collective photographs of the executive.13 On the other hand, as was already the case with drawings, there are virtually no photographs of midlevel State employees as such. They would have their portraits taken

 12

Such is the case with the flagrantes [impromptu] portraits that Paulo Plantier divulges in Lisbon around 1887 (Sousa 1998, 217-218). 13 Cf. The photograph of the first government of João Franco towards the end of the Constitutional Monarchy, taken by José Bárcia, one of the Portuguese photoreporters that follows in the trail of Joshua Benoliel, Arquivo Fotográfico da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, PT/AMLSB/BAR/000457. This photograph has an interesting composition, insofar as the group of ministers clearly pose for the photograph, some of them standing behind a first row of three, which sit in front, with the head of the executive in the centre, arms crossed, but none of them look straight at the photographer, as dictated by the low status attributed to the frontal stance.

140

Chapter Five

privately in any of the studios that had opened across Lisbon, and which allowed an easy access to self-representation, all the while continuing to be the target of unflattering caricatures. This figure, to be found in urban centre public services, journeying across town in public transportation and scattered across its cafés, was not deemed newsworthy by photo-reporters, nor was it a source of particular interest for photographers seeking to assemble, through the medium of photography, their own collection of popular types.14 On the contrary, ministers and other statesmen were a privileged subject for the new photo-reporters, since newspapers soon realized the appeal of political news photographs. The political crisis that assailed the final stages of the monarchy and the transition to the new Republican regime was thus photographically documented by the various ‘graphic reporters’ that collaborated with newspapers. Right from the start of the establishment of the Republic in 1910, new Republican leaders found themselves being chased around by reporters. At the same time, they seize it as an opportunity to spread the new governance values they aimed to embody. Only a few days after the proclamation, the president of the provisional Republican government, Teófilo Braga, was the subject of a photographic report, published in Ilustração Portuguesa, which sought to document a day in his life, zooming in on the intimacy of his official routines as well as depicting his more high-profile public functions (Sousa 1998, 221). The new government officials were acutely aware of the power of images, especially in the context of a struggle for the social acceptance of a new ideology, a new configuration of the State, and as part of a process of instilling a new sense of “national patriotism” that was to supersede former political and social relations (Catroga 2011, 30-35). With that in mind, Republican statesmen placed tremendous weight on State rituals and symbols and adopted a new posture, in an effort to present themselves as models of civility. The report on Teófilo Braga in Ilustração Portuguesa shows him indefatigably busy with affairs of the State in the privacy of his domestic study as much as in the offices of executive power, at the same time as it captures him using public transportation like any other citizen. Throughout this period, newspapers and illustrated magazines report on numerous State ceremonies where its key representatives are present: from

 14

The tradition and paradigm of political caricature of Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro would be carried on during the Republic by Stuart Carvalhais, in his magazine A Sátira and, later, in O Século Ilustrado, a satellite publication of the newspaper O Século.

Liberal State and Images of Civil Servants

141

the celebration of commemorative days to the inauguration of monuments, from official visits to public institutions to displays of loyalty to their subordinates. In Figure 2 we find a commonplace example of the photographs published during the first Republic that represent a cabinet member or any other administrative head: in this case Afonso Costa, the Prime Minister and one of the key figures of the regime, signing a minute book on a table expressly taken to the location. This is a demonstration of the official nature of the act, carried out by a legitimate representative of public power, for the benefit of both the audience present for the occasion and readers of subsequent news reports. Other examples of photographs also frequently published in the Portuguese media at the time are those of commemorations and official visits, where ministers or other statesmen and high-ranking civil servants are generally depicted in motion, at the centre of the image, and surrounded by a crowd. On the one hand, they come across as dynamic and purposeful statesmen. On the other, they present themselves as common men chosen to lead the common man. In the early 1920s, photographers gained access to administrative buildings to register high-ranking civil servants taking office and, later, other ceremonies, such as the awarding of prizes. Previously, new statesmen had been presented in newspapers or illustrated magazines through traditional individual portraits. Now, as compositions and photographic subjects became more diversified, that no longer seemed sufficient. The professional photographer now enters public institutions to register acts of appointment and oath, recording the moment in his plates, and, at one and the same time, standing as a witness, as if his presence made the ceremony all the more official for the administrative head, the institution he serves and the public who will have access to those photographs. It is difficult to gauge to what extent photography influenced the transformation of such acts into quasi-public ceremonies. We know that since the establishment of the liberal regime new government officials and functionaries were sworn into their new administrative posts through an official letter of appointment, following an oath of fidelity to the constitution, but whether or not such an act implied a collective ritual is unclear. On the other hand, we cannot be certain whether photographers solicited access to public offices or were asked by public entities to record such moments. One way or the other, photographs of such acts attest to the fact that throughout the twentieth century these ceremonies became increasingly ritualized and participated, gathering more and more co-

142

Chapter Five

workers and subordinates and, given the ever-increasing endeavour to register them, becoming more visible to a general audience.15

Figure 2 – Afonso Costa signing the construction of the monument in honour of António José da Silva, a Portuguese Jewish writer, in 1913. Arquivo Fotográfico da CML, “Col. Joshua Benoliel”, PT/AMLSB/JBN/000500

With the downfall of the liberal and republican regime, the photographic representation of statesmen will somewhat change. In 1926, a group of military officers imposes a dictatorship that will lead to the institutionalization of António de Oliveira Salazar’s New State in 1933. The representatives of the dictatorship present themselves in their military uniforms, as more natural bodily postures and facial expressions progressively disappear. With the rise of Salazar and the establishment of his regime, photographs of new government officials tend to diminish, as governments



15 Compare, for example, these two images from the Arquivo Fotográfico da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa: Inauguration ceremony of the Director of Cultural Services for the Lisbon Council, 1938, (PT/AMLSB/PEL/005/S000639) and Inauguration ceremony of the Head of the 1st Finance Office, 1963 (PT/AMLSB /SER/S01572).

Liberal State and Images of Civil Servants

143

do not rotate as often, while also becoming more formal, as their subjects usually appear posing for the photograph, even in public ceremonies. State employees, in turn, were by and large kept out of the way of photographic lenses. The order advocated by Salazar, and idealized in his project for a New State, needed a competent and obedient body of civil servants devoid of any autonomous identity, thus pushing liberal constitutionalism’s ideal of a unified, homogeneous and neutral State to its highest expression. In the context of the New State corporatism, idealized as a triangle formed by the State, Employees and Workers, the civil servant should act and be perceived as the State itself. If, during the Republic, civil servants had transformed their mutual associations into trade unions, within the frame of the workers’ movement, now both in the new 1933 Constitution and in the various pieces of legislation surrounding it, State employees, by representing or indeed being a part of the State itself, fell outside of the world of labour and were no longer allowed to belong to unions.16 On the other hand, given the role they were given in the regime and the sheer increase in personnel, largely as a result of the non-liberal interventionist policy of Salazar, the Civil Service will become one of the social bases of the New State, a source of security and order (Rosas 1994, 107-109). The civil servant of the Portuguese New State never cut the same figure as Mussolini’s black shirts employee, at odds with the liberal State model of the civil servant. On the contrary, the image of the State employee of the Portuguese dictatorship carries forward the key traits it had acquired during the liberal regime, stressing the self-sacrifice and dedication to work and public service that Salazar, the highest-ranking State functionary, liked to tout about himself. This representation was one of the most effective tools to push through the idea of the need and inevitability of constructing a single, subordinate and diligent order encapsulated in the idea of the New State corporative nation. The civil servants of the Portuguese dictatorship, as a result of their social dissolution into the middle class and their submissive role within the new State configuration, were still seldom photographed by the media. Exceptions occurred in those moments where the State deemed it useful for publicizing their policies, in which case they almost always appeared as extras or a backdrop to the main subject of the photograph. Such was the case, for example, in the photographic register of public ceremonies, such as inaugurations of new State buildings, or oath taking ceremonies, or

 16

Constitution of 1933, Art. 24, Estatuto do Trabalho Nacional, 23/09/1933, and Decree no. 23050. Cf. Patriarca 1995, Vol. I, 285.

144

Chapter Five

medals or prizes awarding ceremonies to exemplary civil servants, which the New State saw fit to retain and develop as a way of bolstering the values of honour and merit in public service.

Figure 3 - Hanging of the portrait of Salazar in the General Directorate of Public Security, 1934, Arquivo Fotográfico d’O Século, ANTT, PT/TT/EPJS/SF/001001/0029/0962I

Figure 3 represents one of these exceptional moments where mid-level civil servants are photographed inside their public offices. It is a particularly eloquent photograph with regards to the role the dictatorship assigned to both images and civil servants. It records the hanging of the portrait of Salazar, which was given pride of place in a government office, probably taking the place of the symbol of the Republic (which had previously replaced the King’s portrait or the monarchic flag), a year after the establishment of the New State, captured by one of the photo-reporters of the newspaper O Século. Thus Salazar presents himself, in the way in which he had his portrait taken and placed in all public institutions (such as public offices, schools or tribunals), as the highest symbol of the New State. Salazar was the founder and ideologue of the New State. Not only did he oversee the whole of the construction of the institutional apparatus of the State but he was the architect of its authoritarian, corporative and

Liberal State and Images of Civil Servants

145

catholic ideology, and presented himself personally as the peacemaker that put an end to the political instability inherited from the Republic.17 Placing Salazar’s portrait thus served the purpose of embedding the key symbol of the new regime, as well as that of reinforcing, both by personal example and as an epitome of the legitimate centre of power, a sense of devotion, hierarchy and duty in public service. *** In the last figure, photography, both in the fixed portrait on the wall and in the news report that captures the moment, holds a pivotal role in disseminating the official image of the New State. The new regime is fully aware of its power, which Susan Sontag described as ‘the power of photographs to alter our notions of what is worth looking and what we have a right to observe’ (2002, 3). The technical character of photographs, that is to say, its apparent capacity to represent reality through the chemical process fixed on its durable material, made it a privileged vehicle for what was acceptable as truth. Photographs of statesmen and the civil servants that usually cluster around them tend to represent the way in which the State wishes to be perceived and remembered through a dynamic process of negotiation between the non-systematic selection of objects and subjects of interest by photo-reporters and what government officials and public administrators wish to be documented. Despite the diversification of photographed subjects and the increase in the production of images during the Republic, the range of what is deemed worthy of register and of being granted public access under the subject heading “State” is effectively limited to public events, or ceremonies where the protagonists are leading government and public administration figures. It is virtually impossible to find a hint of political discord or an alternative viewpoint onto these particular political events being depicted. Conflict and criticism was confined to the field of literary representation or illustrated caricature, a non-realistic form of representation. These are the media that offer a counterpoint to the State’s official image, allowing us a glimpse into the social resistance to its efficacy and effective dissemination.

 17

There is an ongoing debate on the nature of Salazar’s dictatorship, given its unique traits, such as the fact that it did not resort to a Fascist choreography of power or to the mobilization of the masses, but rather to Catholic corporatism, drawing its legitimacy from a written Constitution, a semblance of electoral process, and focused on the figure of Salazar (Pinto and Lucena 1994 and Bonifácio 2007, 104-105).

146

Chapter Five

The main subjects of photographic reports tell us very little about the routines, functions, beliefs or behaviour of the mid-level civil servant. The resulting photographs only give us clues through nonessential elements that find their way into the composition and that we have to follow beyond the frame that is imposed on us.18 Despite their peripheral position as an object of representation, the civil servant of Portuguese liberalism did indeed come to have a recognizable identity, fixed in homogenized images disseminated firstly through caricatures and literary characters, and later through photographs. Siegfried Kracauer called this recognizable image a ‘photographic face’, in relation to the process of communication of an image of the salaried masses of the first decades of the twentieth century in Germany (1998). There was a patent homogenization of the physiognomy of the Portuguese State employee, as far as their representation is concerned, as the sober, somewhat humble and sad, service man. Their profile ultimately faded into the background of bureaucracy in general, regardless of the diversity of public institutions they served or the concrete tasks they were assigned to. This face, unlike the one that crystallized in Weimar Germany, was not one of prosperity and economic independence, as this text has shown, but was nonetheless a rather socially distinctive one, not only in terms of attire and behaviour but also in the way it became recognizable, and it endured throughout the Constitutional Monarchy and the First Portuguese Republic. With the arrival of the authoritarian regime and the establishment of the New State, it became lodged in a paradigmatic anonymity, through a twin process of social dilution and circumscription of its function to an official role in the new corporative State.

Bibliography Almeida, Joana Estorninho. A Cultura Burocrática Ministerial. Repartições, Empregados e Quotidiano das Secretarias de Estado na primeira metade do século XIX. Lisboa: unpusblished PhD dissertation, ICS, 2009. —. “Between Officeholders and Employees of the State: Administrative Designations at the end of Old Regime Portugal”, in JEV - Jahrbuch fur Europaische Verwaltungsgeschichte 19. Baden-Baden: 2007.



18 Elizabeth Edwards and Christopher Morton’s recent research has focused precisely on the importance and meaning of those incidental elements in photography (2009, 3-6).

Liberal State and Images of Civil Servants

147

Almeida, Pedro Tavares de. A Construção do Estado Liberal. Elite Política e Burocracia na “Regeneração” (1851-1890). Lisboa: FCSH, UNL, 1995. Bonifácio, Fátima. Estudos de História Contemporânea de Portugal. Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2007. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Les Rites d’Instituition”, in ARSS 43, June 1982. Cardoso, José Luís and Pedro Lains (eds.). Paying for the Liberal Stateࣟ: the Rise of Public Finance in Nineteenth-century Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Canotilho, J. J. Gomes. Direito Constitucional e Teoria da Constituição. Coimbra: Almedina, 2002. Catroga, Fernando. “Em nome da Nação”, in Res Publica, 1820-1926ࣟ: Citizenship and Political Representationin Portugal (eds. Fernando Catroga and Pedro Tavares de Almeida). Lisboa: Biblioteca NacionalௗAssembleia da República, 2011. —. O Republicanismo em Portugal. Da formação ao 5 de Outubro de 1910. Lisboa: Casa das Letras, 2010. Edwards, Elizabeth and Christopher Morton. Photography, Anthropology and History. Expanding the Frame. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2009. Hespanha, António Manuel. Guiando a Mão Invisível. Direitos, Estado e Lei no Liberalismo Monárquico Português. Coimbra: Almedina, 2004. Kracauer, Siegfried. The Salaried Massesࣟ: duty and distraction in Weimar Germany. London: Verso, 1998. Lobo, Joaquim Ferreira. As Confissões dos Ministros de Portugal (1832 a 1871). Lisboa: Typographia Lisbonense, 1871. Mann, Michael. The Sources of Social Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Nunes, Anabela Ferreira Macias. População Activa e Actividade Económica em Portugal. Lisboa: ISEG, 1990. Orçamento apresentado às Cortes por Manuel da Silva Passos. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1838. Patriarca, Fátima. A Questão Social no Salazarismo 1930-1947. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional/Casa da Moeda, 1995. Pimentel, Alberto. Photografias de Lisboa. Porto: Livraria Universal, 1874. Pinto, António Costa Pinto e Manuel Lucena. “Notas para uma teoria dos regimes fascistas”, in Análise Social 125-126, 1994. Pinto, Júlio Lourenço. O Homem Indispensável, in “Scenas da Vida Contemporanea” series. Porto: Ernesto Chardron, 1888. Queirós, Eça de. Alves e Companhia. Lisboa: "Livros do Brasil”, 1925.

148

Chapter Five

Ramos, Rui. A Segunda Fundação (1890-1926). Lisboa: Círculo de Leitores, 1993. Rosas, Fernando. O Estado Novo 1926-1974. Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 1994. Sena, António. História da Imagem Fotográfica em Portugal. 1839-1997. Porto: Porto Editora, 1998. Silveira, Luís Nuno Espinha. "A Administração Do Estado Em Portugal No Século XIX", in Los 98 Ibéricos y El Mar, vol. III. Madrid: Sociedad Estatal Lisboa ’98, 1998. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Penguin, 2002. Sousa, Jorge Pedro. História Crítica do Fotojornalismo Ocidental. Porto: Universidade Fernando Pessoa, 1998. Subtil, José. O Terramoto Político (1755-1759). Memória e Poder. Lisboa: Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa, 2006. Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation. Essays on Photographies and Histories. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1988. Varni, Angelo and Guido Melis. Impiegati. Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 2002.

CHAPTER SIX SCIENCE, STATE AND SOCIETY: THE EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL RESEARCH IN PORTUGAL FREDERICO ÁGOAS

Introduction The empirically informed, scientifically minded study of society or of the population, depending on the formulation, is nowadays taken for granted. Indeed, and regardless of the standing we may wish to grant it (pre-paradigmatic, on the threshold of epistemologization, or properly scientific), we do not contest the fact that social sciences do exist as an epistemic field and structured social activity. To draw on the phrase that British chorographer William Camden (1984, 333) coined or at least fixated in the early sixteenth century, particularly apposite to a form of knowledge of which he himself was a precursor, ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’. As we very well know, that was not always the case. Without prejudice to other forms of knowledge on both topics, and momentarily putting to one side the historical and regional variations of the term science, a long time elapsed before modern science (such as we understand it today) took as its object the phenomena which these two terms – population and society – name. The latter, society, not only as a scientific object but even as a concept (within the semantic field outlined by the present chapter’s title) is indeed fairly recent. Conceptual history has brought that out in strong relief, tracing its fixation, as such, back to the century spanning from 1750 to 1850 (Baker 1994); and, as paradoxical as it may seem, other studies have shown the extent to which science itself (namely statistics) has contributed to its own emergence as a concept, and, more importantly, has helped crystallize the assumption of objective properties that its referent holds for us today – filling with ontic density what at first had been, in

150

Chapter Six

essence, an abstraction (Hacking 1990, chap. 20; Sætnan et al. 2011). In its turn, the emergence and dissemination of each one of those two concepts will also have been a precondition for the scientization of so-called social thought (which until then was of a speculative nature and had focused largely on the State), inasmuch as they alluded, respectively, to an aggregate of individuals defined by their respective territory (and nothing beyond that) and to a domain of civil life autonomous from the sovereign and not immediately reducible to the market or the family – in short, to a reality susceptible of being characterized according to its natural regularities, on the one hand, and amenable to being apprehended via its objective properties, on the other (Desrosières 1991; Donnelly 1996). In both cases – in the contemporary definition of those two concepts and in the scientization of social thought – State bureaucracy played a pivotal role: notions such as population and society stand out among the lexicon that will condense emerging governmental rationalities, not without precedents, to be sure, but only generalized from the eighteenth century onwards; and empirical knowledge of administered reality (and of human collectives in particular) will precisely be one of the technologies of government that came to define the modern State (Foucault 2001). This is not to say, of course, that one can reduce those two processes to the sway the State and its agents may have had over them. The semantic variation of population and society will also have stemmed, for instance, from their respective unfolding in erudite universes such as the natural sciences, in the case of the first, and the moral sciences, of the latter (Heilbron 1995). And at least as much than as the scientization of government, if not more, the scientization of social thought will have resulted from equally striking developments in the theory of probabilities and, later on, from mathematical statistics, which in turn were instrumental in the development of scientific government (and specifically statistics as, literally, ‘the science of the State’) (Porter 1988). A fortiori, nor can we deduce the history of social sciences from the deployment of new governmental rationalities centred on the population or from its corresponding technologies of government. In effect, alongside the circulation of ideas and research methods (within the frame of different disciplines) and scientific and political exchanges among bureaucrats and scholars, such an historical account also needs to factor in a host of other institutional universes, namely associations, as well as the social dynamics of each of the various institutions in play – government offices, universities and scientific and philanthropic societies. Last but not least, its narrative lens needs to be calibrated to national specificities, all the more relevant inasmuch as they propagate across all of these factors.

Science, State and Society

151

The above sketch maps an ambitious research program, one that has been conducted gradually and which indirectly but inescapably spills over into the history of the State (see, e.g., Wagner et al. 1991). In fact, this has been one of the corollaries – or so I hope – of the work I have been developing on the history of social sciences in Portugal, where I seek to gauge the relevance of social research for the development of those sciences (Ágoas 2010; 2012). It seems to me, though, that this venture has its very own pertinence in a book on the State, such as this one. And that pertinence lies in the fact that State social research is precisely the most striking precipitate of the dialectics between the scientization of government and the governing of society, foundational to the modern State, as I have argued, or, to use Michel Foucault’s terms (which provide the guiding thread of my argument), to the process of governmentalization of the power of the State. It is not my intention, nor could it be, to recover the history of those two terms in all its length and breadth. More modestly, I merely aim to pinpoint the circumstances in which, in Portugal, science and society intersect at the level of the State and track the initial development of that precipitate, itself a condition, as well as in some measure a product, of new governmental ambitions aimed at the social body. As we shall see, however, the emergence of (empirical) social research cannot be understood without bearing into account dynamics that I will designate as properly epistemic. In fact, its original (or at least main) field of study, centred on the living conditions of the population, more than a matter of government in itself, will initially result, even before it has been established as such, from the autonomization of vectors of investigation pervasive in State surveys on economic activity, conducted from the 1880s onwards; and their specific object – the working classes – would in itself, for an extended period of time, bear witness to that same genealogy. Indeed, in Portugal and well into the twentieth century, the target-group of social research will remain almost exclusively circumscribed to individuals directly involved in productive activity, in the industrial arena, to begin with, and later in the agricultural one. In turn, its research program, whether explicit or not, will continue to be aimed not quite at the welfare of the population, as one might deduce from a quick glance at the topics actually addressed (housing, food, etc.) or from the discourses that sustain it, but rather, precisely, at the conditions for the reproduction of the labour force. As a matter of fact, it is mostly in view of that goal that the method employed at the time for that purpose – the household budget survey – measures and develops itself on an international scale, even though we should not disregard other parallel

152

Chapter Six

aims for that very same method (to understand society, to gain access to the social representations of the working class), which help us to put that kind of use into perspective. In what follows, then, I will begin with an excursus through the chief international uses of this method, resorting mainly to secondary sources, so as to later bear witness to its occurrence in Portugal, firstly at the hands of the State, within the frame of economic and political concerns with the urban working class, and later in an academic milieu, at the Instituto Superior de Agronomia [Lisbon Agronomical Institute], within the frame of similar concerns (in this particular case, with the rural working class) albeit as part of more sweeping reformist policies. Indeed, as we shall briefly see, these policies (and the reasons that supported them) will be crucial not only to the development of social research in Portugal (resorting to that same method) but also, following this, to the emergence of the first manifestations of empirical sociology in the country.

Household budget surveys At the time of its first application in Portugal, in the early twentieth century, the household budget survey – the systematic record of incomes and expenses of family households, habitually broken down into food, housing, clothing, fuel (heating) and lighting, and other expenses – already enjoyed a solid reputation in many other parts of the world, particularly among an entire generation of nineteenth-century social reformers (Savoye, 1994).1 In this genealogy, the name Frédéric Le Play looms large. He began to employ and popularize the household budget method in family monographs, in the 1840s, and would later systematize the procedure in his 1855 seminal work, Les Ouvriers Européens. Among the other renowned proponents of this method are several of his more immediate followers, such as Henri de Tourville or Édmond Demolins. Alongside others, they developed his legacy and institutionalized his Science Sociale outside university (namely in the École des Voyages), before sociology as such had established itself within academia (see Kalaora and Savoye 1989). Actually, the Leplaysian lineage would flourish well beyond its circumstantial roots, giving rise to this and other methods of social research, through dense institutional networks, both national and international, which, as said above, would eventually reach Portugal. Indeed, and from the start, its objectives would stretch far beyond any

 1

This and the next section are largely indebted to Savoye (1994).

Science, State and Society

153

pure class altruism or desire for social reform, setting out to achieve important ‘knowledge effects’ concerning families’ social activities and integration in their own physical and social milieus, as a means to reach a diagnosis of the general state of society (Savoye 1994, 55). In turn, the household survey itself reached far beyond its Leplaysian uses – in philanthropy as well as in other fields of application. Let us dwell upon these. Within the scope of similar initiatives, this same instrument was widely used in a number of countries, namely Germany, to study the rural population, as part of the extensive and diversified activity of the Verein für Socialpolitik. Created in 1873, this association for social policy – as its name translates into English – also proclaimed unequivocal philanthropic goals, in stark opposition to the period's hegemonic liberalism and emergent labour radicalism. Among its members we find the likes of Max Weber or Ferdinand Tönnies and, in 1909, it would give rise to the German Sociological Association (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie) (Therborn 1980, 131). In the United States, in the first decades of the twentieth century, the so-called survey movement, which also boasted a predominantly philanthropic orientation, would accommodate a wide spectre of reformist tendencies. Within it, it is worth singling out Paul Kellog and the comprehensive social survey he conducted in Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh Survey 1909), financed by the then newly-created Russell Sage Foundation and employing that same procedure, among others, to assess the living conditions of workers in that city (Savoye 1994, chap. 3). In this particular case, the closest methodological reference points were, on the one hand, Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), the Scottish naturalist and precursor of urban planning, himself knowledgeable of Le Play’s work, a member of the Society For Social Economy (created by Le Play in 1856) and frequent contributor to the Leplaysian journal La Science Sociale; and, on the other hand, Charles Booth, the famous English philanthropist, author of the monumental Life and Labour of the People in London (1892-1897), whose complex methodology also included similar instruments (Savoye 1994, 96100). In fact, in Great Britain, within the frame of a humanist agenda, this practice had been in place since the late eighteenth century, originally by David Davies, a Scottish clergyman who studied in Oxford, and subsequently by Frederick Morton Eden, a renowned pioneer of political economy, who used similar methods (in The Case of Labourers in Husbandry Stated and Considered 1795, and The State of the Poor 1797), in the wake of a rise in the price of cereals and other essential goods, to

154

Chapter Six

appraise the level of subsistence of the poorest strata of the population (Stigler 1954; see also Monroe, 1974). In the meantime, such instruments, developed and used outside university, were embraced by academia, especially in the United States, where philanthropic empirical social research (in many cases, of religious inspiration) would prove crucial for the academic institutionalization of sociology itself, namely in the case of the Chicago School (see Oberschall 1972); or in France, even earlier, albeit more narrow in scope, where the influence of the Le Play school, which gained some academic acceptance in the final decade of the nineteenth century, would in the end give way to the emerging Durkheimianism, in the midst of a bitter struggle between this and other intellectual factions, where each sought to impose its own socio-scientific paradigm and to gain institutional control over the field of sociology (Savoye 1994, chap. 5; see also Mucchielli 1998). Still, the sociologist Paul de Rousiers, who meanwhile had taken the post of president of the very Leplaysian International Society for Social Science, would lecture a course on the major modern industries at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques until 1932 (Savoye 1994, 226). In turn, and more significantly, the eminent sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, under direct influence of Émile Durkheim himself, would employ the analysis of household budgets in his PhD thesis in 1912 (Halbwachs 1913), at a time when the use of this method within French social science was waning, to support his sociological theory of a hierarchy of needs in the working class – which established the topic of social classes within Durkheim’s group at the same as it turned him into the most prominent advocate of this method.2 Halbwachs first dealt with this issue in purely theoretical terms, in a 1905 essay (Halbwachs 1905). Later, he would use household budgets in La Classe Ouvrière et les niveaux de vie. Recherches sur la hiérarchie des besoins dans les societies industrielles contemporaines (the title of his aforementioned thesis), to objectively assess how workers established their hierarchies of needs and fulfilled them to achieve a standard of living they themselves deemed acceptable. In his view, and within the terms of that text, the actual family consumption reflected not only economic values, but also the relative valuation of a given good within the society under study, as well as the degree to which, for a given social class, it satisfied the corresponding need. In Halbwachs’ hands, family budgets were a means to bringing to light not only the material difficulties the workers were faced

 2

As pointed out by Mucchielli (1998, 512) and despite a few references to the reality of social classes, Durkheim would not go as far as raising the subject to the status of a foremost sociological problem.

Science, State and Society

155

with (in terms of food, housing, clothing, lighting, heating and other expenses), but also the economic representations of the working class as such. Although he initially had some reservations about this instrument, namely with regard to the way Le Play had employed it, Halbwachs insisted in its properly sociological potential – as opposed to its applied uses – namely in a 1908 programmatic article titled “Budgets de Familles”, to which he would remain faithful until the end of his career. On that very subject, and underlining the ‘science issues’ that stemmed from it, Halbwachs wrote: It is the study of the social classes, of their reactions, their limits, which thus becomes possible, and it is the sociologist who steps onto the scene, not only to draw from the budgets and to use that which held no interest to the hygienist and the philanthropist, but also to show to the interviewers how they are to choose the cases to observe, and what information, precisely, they are expected to gather (Halbwachs 1908, 561).

His own PhD thesis, aside its empirical component, was a veritable critical textbook on the method. Soon, however, Halbwachs would find himself in relative isolation within French social science, which, as the Le Play School lost its influence, gradually eschewed this methodological tool. Paradoxically, the household survey would survive essentially in its applied form, more specifically as part of the State apparatus, and would be instrumental to the shaping of then-embryonic social policies. And not just in France: as we reach the turn of the century, the same was true, to some degree, of every industrialized or developing nation (but also of Portugal, as we shall see). The State began to resolutely use this kind of procedure (somewhat less resolutely, in the case of Portugal) in the wider context of other survey practices, which it had gradually began to adopt since the early eighteenth century.

State and social research The importance of the State’s administrative action towards the development of social research in several countries is now duly acknowledged.3 The national specificities of this process fall outside the



3 For the French case, see Savoye (1998 chap. 1); for the German case, see Lindenfeld (1997); for the British case, see, among others, Kent (1981), Abrams, (1967) and Bulmer (1985); for the British and North-American cases, see Lacey and Furner (1993); for the Portuguese case, see Madureira (2006, chap. 4).

156

Chapter Six

scope of the present text, but it is worth mentioning its extraordinary international reach (on both a thematic and a methodological level); a process that is enmeshed in another one that precedes it and has a wider range, not exclusively centred on Man, but rather aimed at the official development and establishment of the State’s general accounting (see Stone, 1986). In fact, it can be legitimately claimed that, in its conception, alongside important conceptual and methodological findings, and a gradual rationalization of deep-seated administrative procedures (such as tax collecting, for instance), there are new economic and political determinations and governmental practices in which Man, gathered in the collective figure of the population (but also nature or territory), will emerge – in the mercantilist thought, for instance – precisely as one among a host of factors that determine the State’s wealth, or, in that first case in particular, as an index of the nation's geopolitical might (Foucault, 2001). It is certainly not fortuitous that among the authors of the first population estimates are precisely people such as Vauban (1633-1707), a prominent French military engineer, or the Englishman William Petty (1632-1687), commonly credited (among other achievements) as the pioneer of both political economy and demography. Perhaps all too briefly, one could say that population inventories and the first modern censuses of the eighteenth century are later followed by other more specific survey practices, where topics such as crime, prostitution, hygiene or health become privileged subjects of social observation. Among the universes it focuses on, the city is the first to come to prominence, followed by the working class (their living conditions, in particular), as well as other subaltern strata of the population (Yeo, 2003). Regardless of this process’s local specificities, it can also be considered as part of the extension of forms of exercising power directly pointed at the biological life of the nation (Foucault, 2001a). Conversely, one could also argue that the more or less generalized waves of social protest contributed towards the development of social research; in many cases, it tends to be the reverse side of the social measures from which the State will draw some of its political legitimacy. At the end of the nineteenth century, a period of fierce inter-State competition and intense social and political instability, these concerns with the population's vitality are converted into indexes that account for the physical condition of soldiers and workers and give rise to new sciences such as anthropometry and others linked with food and nutrition. As far as the household budget survey is concerned, as already suggested, the State now becomes one of the main promoters of the method systematized by Le Play, as a means to assess general subsistence levels.

Science, State and Society

157

In Germany, the great 1909 household survey conducted by the central bureau of statistic warrants particular emphasis. As a result of its superior quality, the latter will become, alongside another survey conducted by the Metallurgical Workers Union, the empirical basis for Halbwachs’ theoretical conclusions on the working class’s hierarchy of needs.4 In France, despite the methodological development of this procedure and notwithstanding an already long tradition of social research, we have to wait until 1913 until the first household survey is conducted, on the initiative of the Ministry of Labour. Halbwachs himself was part of the committee overseeing this survey, which covered fifteen hundred industrial working class families and other workers (Savoye 1994, 63).5 Around this same time, and with a similar purpose, the North American Department of Labour starts a regular survey of 25 000 families, as part of general procedures for statistical collection (Mucchielli 1998, 517). In fact, in the United States, in the same institutional domain, there were already similar practices in place at least since 1875, used by the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labour, whose director (Caroll Wright, 1849-1909) was a keen follower of the works of the Leplaysian Society for Social Economy (which he would eventually join). Subsequently appointed director of the then recently created federal Bureau of Labour Statistics, he began, in that capacity, to undertake extensive household surveys focusing on the income and expenditure of American workers, but also of workers from the main industrialized countries. In his 1890 report on workers of a series of heavy industries, the said department published the findings of a survey on 3 260 budgets, by questionnaire, 770 of which are carried out in Europe (Savoye 1994, 61). Here, in turn, at the outset of the twentieth century and in the same institutional domain, the household survey also had important precedents. It is indeed the State’s viewpoint that prevails in the first known procedure of this kind in England. In 1696, in the wake of the works of William Petty, Gregory King, an eminent English genealogist and a renowned precursor of political economy, presented tables reporting the income and expenditure of twenty six socio-economic categories (from dukes to vagrants) and national expenditure, exhaustively broken down into several food and

 4

In the bibliographic addendum to La Classe ouvrière et les niveaux de vie, Halbwachs (1913) reviews the budget surveys conducted by German official statistics from 1879 to 1909. 5 In fact, this survey had been preceded by another one, of lesser reach, in 1905, conducted by the Labor Office (Office du travail), on home-based work within the underwear industry, also resorting to one hundred or so household budgets, which Savoye deemed of uneven value.

158

Chapter Six

clothing items. Apparently done with no immediate or practical purpose in view, this work nonetheless set itself a very clear goal, which was to assess the contribution of the various social groups towards the nation's wealth – tellingly, the author used the data he himself had compiled so as to compare England to its two strongest political and commercial rivals, France and Germany (Stone 1997). Within the context of its modern application and as a direct extension of the State’s apparatus, one should single out the Belgian Édouard Ducpétiaux (1804-1868), who in 1855, the same year Le Play was to put Les Ouvriers Européens to print, publishes Budgets économiques des classes ouvrières en Belgique: subsistances, salaires, population, which contained the results of approximately a hundred and fifty family budgets. The same author had also previously published, among many works with a similar reformist bent, De la condition physique et morale des jeunes ouvriers et des moyens de l'améliorer (1843), where he argues in favour of the State taking responsibilities in this matter. A prolific columnist and Law graduate, he also distinguished himself for his criticism of the death sentence and for his important works on the penal system; as a matter of fact, he began working for the State as government inspector of prisons, a post he would later (from 1841) combine with that of member of Belgium's central bureau of statistics, a division that was created by the government at this time and within which Ducpétiaux gathered the budget data used in the aforementioned work (the data was compiled in 1853) (Juste 1871). The significance of this study lies not only in the fact that it was one of the first applications of the household survey, but also because, along with other budgets collected by Le Play, it provided the groundwork for the German economist Ernst Engel, when he undertook what turned out to be the first statistical analysis of data about domestic consumption, which would in turn lead to the famous Engel's law (Stigler, 1954). The closest methodological precedent of this work was the probabilistic treatment of several different human phenomena undertaken by the Belgian mathematician Quetelet, as part of his “social physics” (initially named “moral statistics”). It also came in the trail of important developments in the field of probability theory, up until then almost exclusively dedicated to the study of natural phenomena. Based on the socio-economical division of families and the percentage breakdown of these families' consumptions into different kinds of expenditure, Engel concluded, in an 1857 work, that the smaller the income of a certain household, the greater the proportion spent by such a family on food (Engel 1857, apud. Stigler 1954, 98). This same law eventually became a postulate of economic science, after being the subject of important discussions and amendments (namely by the

Science, State and Society

159

aforementioned Caroll Wright, among others) (Stigler, 1954, 98); and was later decisively expanded, as we have seen, by the sociological perspective of Maurice Halbwachs, according to whom the importance of food in the workers’ global consumption was partly accounted for by the fact that meals were said to be the most intense moments of their social life, which was over-determined by the anomic effects of factory discipline and deprived of other leisure activities. An essential component of economic studies on consumption and of early empirically-grounded sociology of the social classes, the statistical analysis of household surveys was actually originally employed by Engel as part of a circumstantial strategy to compare Saxony's aggregate consumption (extrapolated from the average percentages of the individual expenses of the Belgium families studied by Ducpétiaux) with its matching production estimates, in order to determine the subsistence threshold of this German State's population – where he oversaw the statistics bureau (Stigler 1954, 98, n. 8). After becoming director of Prussian central statistics, in 1860 (an office he held until 1882, after the German unification), Engel would also employ the same methodological procedure to study German families (the German 1879 budgetary survey is of particular importance here). Likewise, in Italy, the first household surveys, sampled from a rural environment, dated back to the 1870s, and were geared towards addressing widespread concerns about the peasant condition. After an 1877 survey, ordered by the parliament and conducing to the collection of household budgets throughout the country, another similar survey would follow in 1885, using similar methodologies to address the hygienic and health conditions of the Kingdom's communes; the practice was later repeated in another survey commissioned by the parliament in 1907, to deal specifically with the living conditions of peasants in Southern Italy and Sicily (the so-called mezzogiorno region) (Savoye 1994, 64). The same procedure was later expanded and extensively used throughout the country, during the Fascist regime, in a massive survey in eleven volumes that the Instituto Nazionale di Economia Agraria began to publish in 1931 and which would be particularly influential in Portugal (INEA, 1931). However, regardless of the national specificities of this process and its international interchanges, what is of particular interest here is to highlight the relative importance of the administrative and political action undertaken by central authorities towards the institutionalization and actual development of the household survey, against the backdrop of, on the one hand, its philanthropic affiliation – with which it is often virtually indistinguishable – and, on the other hand, its academic use – which quite

160

Chapter Six

often followed in its wake. Effectively, in global terms, the State will figure not only as a prominent practitioner of this kind of research, but also as its precursor and decisive instigator. In Portugal, where philanthropic tradition was absent from this field, and in the context of an overall rejection of inductive methodologies in academic circles, it is precisely the State that promotes such a procedure, once more as part of a wider set of prior and similar initiatives focused on, or directly aimed at, the working class – and this in spite of the fact that at the time (in the first decade of the twentieth century) the teachings of Frédéric Le Play were already present within the university.

In the wake of the international movement Indeed, in Portugal, and without prejudice to other non-academic approaches to the same body of knowledge (to be addressed below), the first university course specifically devoted to the doctrine and methods of that French sociologist dates back to 1907-1908. It was a lecture series for students of the School of Law of the University of Coimbra – the only one in the country at the time – by the Professor of Economics (“Ciência Económica e Direito Económico”, literally Economic Science and Economic Law), Marnoco e Sousa (1908). At a more immediate level, the initiative may be understood within the framework of the inflection this professor gave to that course, whereby it will gradually jettison the classical schema – essentially confined to the study of production, circulation and consumption – in favour of an inclusion in the curriculum, among other changes, of course units devoted to the State and to population, as condition and basis of economic life, respectively. In parallel, and indeed at the intersection of these two topics, the historiographical and juridical study of the so-called social question (of the workers’ movement and labour laws, to be more precise) also establishes itself, at first in a Social Economy lecture series taught at the turn of the century by the Professors of Economic Science themselves (Marnoco e Sousa and his predecessor, Abel de Andrade) and, from 1910 and 1912, in courses under the same name created in the Schools of Law of Coimbra and Lisbon, in turn – the latter having been formed in the meantime, within the new University of Lisbon. On a wider scale, in Coimbra, the introduction of Leplaysian subject matter and the emerging concern with the social question (or the scientific reorientation of the discipline of Economic Science which these changes are part of) should be understood within the context of a new grasp of the conceptual triangle individual/State/society and, in its wake, of the science of Law itself, which

Science, State and Society

161

would become critical of the profligacy of the political and economic liberalism of the time and will advocate a greater degree of State intervention. At a theoretical level, such shifts are then associated with the new positivist paradigm (so-called ‘juridical sociologism’), introduced in the curricular reform of 1901 and reverberating into other disciplinary domains, such as penal law or philosophy of law (Ágoas 2011, chap 2). It is nonetheless a fact that this tentative academic penetration of Le Play’s social science in Law would, in time, gain further momentum, driven by initiatives taking place outside of the university (see Kalaora 1989). Succinctly, one might say that, in the wake of the conferences of the General Secretary of the International Society of Social Science, Joseph Durieu, at the Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa [Lisbon Geographical Society], in 1908; of the invitation by the Liga de Educação Nacional [League for National Education] to another prominent “sociologist” of the same school, Léon Poinsard, to come to work in Portugal, in 1909; or of the foundation of a Sociedade Portuguesa de Ciência Social [Portuguese Society of Social Science], in 1918, we finally have, in 1930-1931, the opening of a “Social Science” course at the Faculdade de Direito de Coimbra [Coimbra School of Law], convened by Paul Descamps (then the key figure of that school of thought). This, it should be added, followed his publication of a number of essays in the School’s Bulletin. That same course, created at the suggestion of the future dictator Oliveira Salazar (then the Finance Minister and a long-term admirer of the corporatist and social catholic principles underpinning the works of Le Play), would be repeated the following year at the Faculdade de Direito de Lisboa [Lisbon School of Law]. From both these initiatives would spring the manual La Sociologie Experimentale, in 1933, and family monographs by the students of both Schools, in a total of 90 collaborators. His stay in Portugal further produced the article “As repercussões sociais do clima em Portugal” [“The social repercussion of the climate in Portugal”] (1934) and the book Le Portugal. La vie sociale actuelle (1935), to some extent the successor of Portugal Ignorado [Overlooked Portugal] (1912), fruit of the research conducted in the country a quarter of a century earlier by the above mentioned Léon Poinsard. The real epicentre of empirical social research of the 1930s and 1940s, however, was located elsewhere; and, even though it was largely indebted to Leplaysian methods, it stemmed from other initiatives – whose genealogy itself could be traced to different sources. In point of fact, it was in the Instituto Superior de Agronomia [Lisbon Agronomical Institute] that the methods systematized by Frédéric Le Play would come to be used more extensively, in research works such as the

162

Chapter Six

Inquérito Económico-Agrícola [Agricultural Economics Survey] (1934; 1936) and the Inquérito à Habitação Rural [Rural Housing Survey] (1943; 1947); and, more than to the work of direct disciples of the French sociologist or to the academic penetration of his Social Science, such surveys would be scientifically indebted to the recommendations emanating from international forums on economic and social policy and, above all, to the actions of State bodies and working class surveys under his supervision. One should nonetheless frame its occurrence in predominantly epistemic terms. In truth, its conception and application may be perceived against the backdrop of a process of gradual scientization of the government which would at the time be substantially intensified but which can be traced back to the previous century. The development of official statistics is perhaps the most relevant notorious manifestation of this process, of which the survey will in the meantime become a key instrument. We are well aware of how the production of information on the administered realities is intrinsic to the exercise of political power. One might go as far as saying that, alongside other processes, it is one of the ways in which the modern State constitutes itself, both in terms of the scope of its action and in its composition, as a vast body of civil servants. Be that as it may, for a long period of time, in Portugal and elsewhere, tasks of such a nature, which now go by the name of statistics, were conducted in a merely incidental manner (see Sousa, 1995). Originally, in fact, and despite the deliberate compilation of data on military personnel and property, by the crown, the State does not hold the prerogative of this type of procedures (in this matter, and until the end of the Middle Ages, ecclesiastical authorities play the central role). Notwithstanding the gradual organization of public finances or the sporadic population counts (Numeramentos, as they were called) from the sixteenth century onwards, the fact remains that until the end of the eighteenth century the State’s knowledge of the Realm was cursory at best. At that time, more than anything, what we have are (regional) chorographies undertaken on the initiative of private individuals. Alongside the international generalization of the so-called estadística, there was a succession of plans for the registry (cadastro) of the Realm, as the first statistical series on foreign trade (1776-1831) and the first systematic population census (the first one under that name dates from 1801) are established. As a whole, however, the data collected are scattered and gathered from second-hand sources. For demographic purposes, for example, data are solicited from parish priests who in turn compile them from parish records. Also, for a large part of the

Science, State and Society

163

nineteenth century, production estimates (when they do exist) are produced by the hierarchical chain of the executive power itself (Sousa 1995, 19-21). In 1822, the most comprehensive description of the Realm is still that of an Italian geographer, Adriano Balbi (Essai Statistique sur le Royaume de Portugal et d’Algarve). And despite the gradual establishment of (not always continuous) statistical series for foreign trade (1842) or for municipal taxes (1845), among other areas, alongside the creation, still in the first half of the nineteenth century, of a coordinating commission and an inspection service in this field, it is only in the second half of the nineteenth century that statistics are firmly established in Portugal.6 Throughout the 1850s some decisive steps are taken in that direction, with the creation of statistics divisions in each of the offices (repartições) of Agriculture, Commerce and Manufactures of the newly created Ministry for Public Works Commerce and Industry (1852); with the creation of district offices and a Comissão Central de Estatística [Central Statistics Committee], with coordinating functions, located in that ministry (1857); and, finally, with the establishment of the first regular public service in this field – the Repartição de Estatística da Direcção de Comércio e Indústria [Statistics Public Office of the Directorate for Commerce and Industry], also in the same ministry (1859) (Sousa 1995, 149). Alongside the institutional development outlined here, however, one should highlight the emergence of two closely interconnected epistemic movements. On the one hand, to the State’s routine accounting, generally associated with the acts of public administration themselves but also encompassing, for example, the population (presumed to be an integral part of the State itself), (new) domains of civil life, namely economic ones, are gradually added. On the other hand, alongside the sheer compilation of data, mostly of administrative but also ecclesiastical provenance, as we have seen, we now have procedures for active gathering of information. These are parallel processes, as said before, but not immediately reducible to each other. In fact, it was to the study of a long-established field – population – that the new methods will first be applied in a more consequent manner. This will be the main innovation in the General Census of 1864, deemed the first census in Portugal and (in line with the recommendations of the International Statistical Congress) conducted through nominative and simultaneous collection, based on family bulletins that account for gender,

 6

Comissão Permanente de Estatística e Cadastro do Reino, in 1815, and Secção de Estatística e Topográfica na Inspecção Geral de Obras Públicas do Ministério do Reino, in 1842.

164

Chapter Six

marital status and age of each one of the respondents.7 The reform of the Statistics Public Office of the General Directorate of Commerce and Industry [Direcção Geral de Comércio e Indústria], in 1886, gives institutional expression to this double movement, dividing its services into three sections, each responsible, respectively, for the statistics of the Ministry of Public Works, Commerce and Industry itself, the statistics of other ministries and public services and, finally, for the general population census and for surveys conducted by any other ministry. It is within this double movement, in particular, and within the process of scientization of the government outlined above, more generally, that the emergence of the State’s social research – of which workers’ budget surveys of 1909 and 1916 are the main manifestation – is more immediately embedded. However, contrary to what could be expected, or surmised, from what was presented above, the conception and application of those two surveys does not follow directly from the gradual standardization or scientization of the study of the population, as such, but rather from economic surveys, industrial ones in particular, launched from 1880 onwards – themselves an expression of that double movement, although with more or less remote and occasional precedents. Indeed, the first of those social surveys, in particular, may be understood as an extension of economic concerns on the part of the General Directorate of Commerce and Industry (the State body responsible for its application) about the working conditions (workplace safety and wages, primarily) of the urban proletariat, originally addressed in the first major Industrial Survey, in 1881, then given an autonomous status in surveys focusing specifically on those matters and in the meantime included in periodical statistical data (from 1906 onwards) in the Boletim do Trabalho Industrial [Industrial Work Bulletin]. This is all the more true since the said social survey will be carried out only after the censuses and the statistical services themselves had been moved from that service to the Finance Ministry, as a result of the legislation changes brought about in 1898, which also created in the Industrial Labour Office [Repartição do Trabalho Industrial] of the said General Directorate an annual publication aimed at publicizing data on national labour (the above mentioned Bulletin). More to the point, the inquiry into the ‘average cost of living of a working class family’ and their ‘main items of expense’ are but a component of a questionnaire sent to employers’ and workers’ associations

 7

From the III Census (1890), the procedure will become standard and will come to include a household (and vessel) bulletin as well as an entry for the professional class of the respondents, sectioned into large fields of activity (the second census, of 1878, already contemplated their educational attainment).

Science, State and Society

165

which addressed, first and foremost, the general situation of that particular industry and the generic labour regime, while the living conditions of workers came second, in a section that focused mainly on the reproduction unit of the labour force (their housing, that is) and which comprised the aforementioned items (DGCI, 1910). The same general argument holds true for the very autonomization of the study of ‘food supply of the working class’ (DGCI 1911) and ‘proletarian housing’ (DGCI 1912) instigated by the said general directorate – more or less episodic research initiatives that would be added to other pre-existing ones on the two topics, which were more hygienist in nature and regarded general population as such. Towards the end of the monarchic regime and after a period marked by fierce protests on the part of workers, the parliament eventually turns towards the direct consultation of trade associations which are forced by law to keep the government informed on the designated topics: the questionnaire itself, which was over a hundred questions long, alongside items concerning living conditions, also included several questions about strike movements and workers’ organizations (number of members, income and expenditure). In the course of these initiatives, the working class becomes a specific object of inquiry, as State surveillance gradually extends from the conditions of production in factories to the conditions of reproduction of the labour force and from there to the institutional foundations of workers’ identity itself (Madureira 2006, 67-70). In turn, the labour movement is gradually brought into the fold of the liberal State's sphere of action, progressively becoming its subject, through the direct consultation of its interests and the implementation of measures that regulate the relation between capital and labour. The establishment of the Republic in 1910 confirmed this double shift, making this social problem a key concern within the State's competences. The most conspicuous signs of this transformation is the ministerial status granted to the issue, with the creation of the Ministry of Labour in 1916, as well as the legal implementation of the first welfare measures in 1919 (Pereira 2005). However, the process will also have an effect on actual survey practices. After the first survey initiatives, still relatively circumstantial and limited in scope, nation-wide systematic information gathering procedures will follow; concurrently, the Ministry of Labour’s reformist orientation, supported by the most recent international developments in mathematical statistics but, above all, on similar practices abroad, equips itself with a methodological apparatus that is able to process the information gathered with a greater degree of abstraction, and then translate it into so-called single numbers. It is worth underlining how this new economy of statistical

166

Chapter Six

procedures is guided by immediate political objectives or how, all the while, it licenses an instrumental approach to the very objects it fabricates (Madureira 2006, 71-73).8 Among its chosen topics we find precisely the generalized problem of subsistence caused by a steep rise in prices over the first half of the 1910s – a time of growing protests against the carestia (price hike), bureaucratically glossed as ‘cost of life’. After an initial attempt, in 1913, to create an aggregate price index by resorting to constant Trade Balance data, the Ministry of Labour's Office for Economic Defence would launch a new survey focusing on the country's trade associations, in 1916, aimed at elaborating the first weighted indicator of the cost of living in Portugal – an initiative to which the supply problems brought about by World War I, the ensuing exacerbation of the social question as well as the anachronistic nature of the existing instruments surely contributed (Madureira 2006, 74). Influenced by the English statistics made public by the Board of Trade, Aquino da Costa Júnior, head of the above mentioned public office, will then utilize this survey to determine, with regard to a series of products, the quantities that were effectively consumed by a domestic unit of 4 persons and, on that basis, to estimate the impact of the evolution of prices on the lives of families (Júnior 1917).9 In a strict sense, then, this will be the first Portuguese State led budget survey (Mendonça 1917) – and it was to remain the only one of its kind for a long time to come.10 A constellation of factors, such as political instability, to begin with, and later the establishment of the New State, the abolition of the Ministry of Labour and the political foreclosure of the social question itself, would conspire to put an end to urban social research.

To raise the standard of living! In the end, and somewhat paradoxically, these same scientific practices would subsist by virtue of the ruralist orientation of the economic and social policy of the early years of the New State, originally through the actions of Eduardo Lima Basto, Professor at the Instituto Superior de Agronomia (ISA) and former Minister of Labour during the I Republic, in works already mentioned, such as the Inquérito Económico-Agrícola

 8

The phrase ‘economy of statistical procedures’ derives from a nearly identical one employed by Madureira (2006, 72), on which this section draws extensively. 9 For methodological details and scientific significance of the survey within the field of mathematical statistics see Madureira (2006, 76-79). 10 The same procedure, however, would still be repeated twice within the Ministry of Labor, in 1918 (ISSOPG 1920) and in 1920 (ISSOPG 1921, 1923).

Science, State and Society

167

[Agricultural Economics Survey] (Basto 1934; 1936) and the Inquérito à Habitação Rural (Basto and Barros 1943; Barros 1947), which did not spring directly from that developmentist ruralism but for which the latter would initially offer political cover and practical usage. Both works, in fact, would align themselves with the abstract reasons of State, offering to contribute to the economic and social reforms to be put in place via grandiose projects of (rural) internal settlement and hydraulic engineering.11 Such an orientation would then benefit from the creation of the Technical University of Lisbon, where ISA would be integrated, and which would lead to a new and closer connection between the State and University. The same orientation can be aptly gauged in the first thorough Portuguese academic work on the living conditions of the working population of the country, the conference “Níveis de vida e custo de vida. O caso do operário agrícola português” [“Standard of living and cost of living. The case of the Portuguese agricultural worker”], by Lima Basto, published in 1935. It was in this lecture, in fact, that its author would begin by invoking the methodological and conceptual instruments rehearsed in the Inquérito Económico-Agrícola and fully implemented in the subsequent Inquérito à Habitação Rural: the family household budget and the notion of ‘standard of living’. And it was in this lecture, indeed, that its author would first appeal to the sociological reach of those instruments, in terms which reminded Halbwachs’s, thereby calling upon them to answer the statist and reformist vocation that inspired the conference. With regard to that notion, ‘standard of living’, Lima Basto foregrounded precisely its sociological aspect, absent from the concept of ‘cost of living’, which he had been assigned to examine by the Senate of the Technical University. The latter notion, in his view, failed to adequately grasp the total satisfaction an individual or family gained from the goods they effectively consumed – inasmuch as, unlike the first (and at odds with the recommendations on the part of international authorities on the matter as well as the more recent North American economy and sociology), it did not bear into account factors such as the social development or the country, differences in age and educational levels, the dimension of the family unit and, first and foremost, their social class. In short, because the notion of ‘cost of living’ did not take into consideration the actual consumption of concrete families, as opposed to a mere abstract consumer basket (Basto 1935, 7-8).

 11

The first would in the end not have any much to show for in the way of actual implementation: cf. Chapter 7 in this book.

168

Chapter Six

With regard to the household budget survey, Lima Basto criticized the procedures adopted by the central State at the time in gauging the living conditions of the population, anchored on the “consumer basket”, positioning himself before the 1916 Republican survey, but also in line with more recent guidelines issued by the Bureau International du Travail as well as the long lineage of practitioners of that method, about whom he displayed flawless erudition. In addressing the subject, he would invoke names such as Gregory King, Quetelet, Le Play and Engel, and would highlight the more advanced and indeed superior stage of development of the method in the United States of America; he would further cite a host of analogous initiatives abroad, information which he probably gleaned from Halbwachs’s Doctoral dissertation, of which he was most certainly aware. He would nonetheless underline the pivotal importance of the actions of the Bureau International du Travail and in particular the II and III International Conferences on Labour Statistics, in 1925 and 1926, responsible for the dissemination of the method as a means of weighting the cost of living. These meetings would also give rise to common international foundations for its application and to a recommendation for the regular and universal undertaking of surveys covering family incomes and expenses (Basto 1935, 16-17). In Portugal, however, this recommendation would have no effect. Lima Basto singled out this deficiency, reasserting the superior usefulness of these surveys for the study of the standards of living of the different classes – at a time when the data from the 1916 survey were still the source. In line with this methodological program and apropos the latter, besides deeming it outdated, Lima Basto pointed out a number of specific limitations: to begin with, the socio-professional indistinction of the respondents, ‘with highly variable wages and quite diverse standards of living’; secondly, the geographical distribution of families, from ‘regions with contrasting habits and customs’, not duly taken into account in the data analysis; finally, the fact that the conditions of the various social groups were not laid out separately, as only the type of family (defined by the number of elements of the family unit) and the dimension of the municipality of residence was contemplated (Basto 1935, 26-27). All these reservations notwithstanding, he would still draw attention to the high percentage of income spent on produce and the insufficient caloric intake reported by the survey. The question, however, called for an up-to-date examination. That was one of the stated purposes of the Lima Basto’s conference I have been drawing attention to. Essentially grounded on family monographs (and their respective household budget surveys) conducted within the scope of the (then ongoing) Inquérito Económico-

Science, State and Society

169

Agrícola, the author painted a rather striking portrait of the social situation in the fields, which, as previously said, was unprecedented at the time. The situation was dire. The account, however, would chiefly be a means to appeal for specialized research studies, geared towards the resolution of the problem – another of the conference’s purposes. To raise the standard of living! That much was demanded, according to Lima Basto, by the most elementary principles of justice, to begin with, but also by the survival of industry, whose development was curtailed by the ‘insignificant proportions’ of the market, and by the work capacity and the vigour of the race itself. At stake was no less than the future of the country as a whole – its economic, social and moral future. Such was, in fact, the wide held opinion of the major classic economists he cited, Adam Smith in particular: ‘A plentiful subsistence increases the bodily strength of the labourer, and the comfortable hope of bettering his condition, and of ending his days, perhaps, in ease and plenty, animates him to exert that strength to the utmost’; but also David Ricardo: ‘In those countries, where the labouring classes have the fewest wants, and are contented with the cheapest food, the people are exposed to the greatest vicissitudes and miseries’ (Basto 1935, 46). Finally, such was also the position of Alfred Marshall, with whose words the lecture comes to a close: for as soon as the improved standard of life had had time to exert its full effect on the efficiency of the workers, their increased energy, intelligence and force of character would enable them to do as much as before in less time; (…) A rise in the standard of life for the whole population will much increase the national dividend, and the share of it which accrues to each grade and to each trade (Basto, 1935, 49).12

It was imperative, then, the author went on, to measure the exact scale of the problem, widening the scope of inquiry and assessing the hindrances he had pointed out so comprehensively. This goal, as said above, would translate itself thoroughly into the Inquérito à Habitação Rural of the Lisbon Agronomical Institute, undertaken from 1938 onwards, the results of which would appear in print in 1943 and 1947. Within the two volumes published, dealing with the North and Centre of the country (the publication of the third, on the South, would be thwarted by the political authorities), one finds over eighty family monographs with their respective household budgets, inventories, floor plans and photographs of their homes. At the time, it was the most

 12

In his Portuguese translation, Lima Basto omitted the references to efficiency and productivity (‘to do as much as before in less time’).

170

Chapter Six

important work of social research ever conducted in Portugal. Indeed, while centred on the issue of housing, its reach would prove much wider, in line with the sociological breadth of the methodologies involved, as seen above, though mostly with the objective in view. Lima Basto himself would say as much in the study that preceded the first volume, where he enunciated his far-reaching goals. To study the conditions under which the population of a given country lives and develops is the most elementary of duties for anyone invested in that country’s progress. On the robustness of a population, their wellbeing, depend, to a large extent, their productive capacity, and on the latter the nation’s wealth rests.

All the more so, he clarifies, given the importance that particular sector of activity assumed in Portugal: Portugal is a predominantly agricultural country. Most of its population lives in the fields and off the fields; this population is the great seedbed of the race we all wish will be strong, robust, productive and wholesome; we need to keep our ears to the ground to listen for its afflictions so as to seek an effective cure (Basto 1943, 22-23).

These formulations, beyond the explicit delimitation of the issue, also help us understand the fact that this work focused exclusively on the lower strata of rural society while covering the length and width of the country. Unlike the Inquérito Económico-Agrícola, it was no longer a case of diagnosing the economic and social diversity of each of the regions effectively under study within the frame of the comprehensive description of large economic and agricultural areas of the country – as stated in its goals, with a view to a sweeping agricultural reform. What was at stake, first and foremost, was the laying bare of the general and effective conditions under which the working population of the rural country lived – so as to ensure minimum subsistence levels but, mostly, to guarantee work’s productivity and economic development. Such rationales would later be translated into a wide spectre of regional research studies conducted around the same period, either with the same or with other institutional origins directly related to ISA and involved in the extensive internal settlement or hydraulic engineering projects mentioned above. Indeed, and leaving aside its concrete results (which were virtually non-existent, as far as their social goals are concerned), State initiative would prove decisive in the emergence and consolidation of agrarian social research and even in the partial institutionalization of an early (rural) sociology in that institute. This fact did not prevent the New State from

Science, State and Society

171

attempting to quash it: the authorities would interrupt the publication of the said survey, as we have said, due to the seriousness of its findings13; and they would seek to excise the sociological subject matters that had meanwhile been incorporated into the academic curriculum of the Lisbon Agronomical Institute by the lecturers, before they were forced, in 1955, to legally establish a scientific domain that the State itself had inadvertently fostered. By then, however, other key figures in social research had started to come onto the scene. These were also originally linked to State bodies but would later emerge as the real instigators of the definitive institutionalization of sociology within the University, following the establishment of a democratic regime in 1974. In fact, from the 1950s onwards, a new surge of social research would emerge around two academic poles with ties to colonial bureaucracy (Ágoas 2012), on the one hand, and corporative and industrial bureaucracy, on the other (Ferreira 2006). Their strategies for scientific and academic affirmation would also involve underplaying the origins and sources I have outlined here. The foundational narratives that accompanied the establishment of both, duly expunged of possible antecedents and their respective bureaucratic geneses, alongside the political anathema that would fall on the rural sociology of ISA would in the end consign it to oblivion and bring about, by omission, a historiographical chasm between administrative practices of scientific research and the academic institutionalization of sociology (Ágoas 2013). This fact does not preclude, of course, the substantial relevance of the agrarian social research of the Lisbon Agronomical Institute, nor the objective ties (which are yet to be the subject of an in-depth investigation) between that rural sociology, in particular, and the sociology of development and labour that in the meantime had emerged on the back of prior social research in the industrial and urban domain.

Conclusion At any rate, the narrative we have followed here should allow a glimpse into a science of the social gradually assembling itself hand in hand with its object as part of a wider dynamics bound to the development (and

 13

Part of the data pertaining to the third volume of the Inquérito à Habitação Rural, addressing the Southern provinces, would be made public in two studies by one of its collaborators in the form of his internship report (conducted within the Junta de Colonização Interna) and University Degree report. Both of them, however, would circulate only within their respective institutional bureaucratic and academic milieus. With regard to these data, see Silva (1947).

172

Chapter Six

international circulation) of certain governmental technologies (such as statistics and the survey) and renewed ‘reasons of State’, namely the wealth of the nation and its own affirmation qua State. In the case in hand, as we have seen, this fact manifests itself not only in the ruralist turn to which the pair science/society was subjected to but also in the very imposition of the social as an epistemic domain: originally subsidiary to extrinsic logics (namely economic), it would eventually gain its own footing and status, to a great extent as a result of the natural development of the scientific practices that began to bring it into focus. In turn, the brief history of the introduction and application in Portugal of a simple scientific method – the household budget survey – that I have sketched here, albeit within a specific temporal frame (c. 1900-1950), will hopefully help us to understand how violent political breaks such as the transition from the monarchy to the Republic (1910) and later from the republic to the dictatorship (1926) are not incompatible with remarkable continuities at the level of the governmental rationalities and instruments, which at arm’s length from the political regimes (but not disregarding their differences) enable us to address the State and its gradual institution and development. Few examples are arguably as paradigmatic of this ambivalence as the formal place urban wage-labourers and field workers were given in Portugal, each in their turn, as the ground of truth in the economy and society (industrial and urban, first; agricultural and rural, after) and for whose affirmation (as such) social research contributed in a way that one could, to a certain extent, classify as equivalent. Indeed, it is worth underlining that the forceful imposition of a rustic and backward social imaginary by the dictatorship did not at first stand in the way of the more or less sustained development of the survey practices addressed in the present text (originally emerging from within an industrial domain) or of the developmentist discourses associated with it. The fact that Salazar’s New State did indeed limit the publication of works of this nature, and that it did try to prevent unwanted consequences that might have followed from the dissemination of those studies, such as the academic institutionalization of social sciences, and sociology in particular, simultaneously brings to light how far this domain had reached under its rule, all the while revealing the deeply authoritarian and repressive nature of the regime. A contradiction in its own terms, to be sure, but not a paradox, if one bears into account the relative autonomy of the State.

Science, State and Society

173

Bibliography Abrams, Philip. The Origins of British Sociology: 1834-1914. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Ágoas, Frederico. “Economia rural e investigação social agrária nos primórdios da sociologia em Portugal”, in O Estado Novo em Questão (eds. Nuno Domingos and Victor Pereira). Lisboa: Edições 70, 2010. —. “Estado, Universidade e Ciências Sociais: a introdução da sociologia na Escola Superior Colonial”, in O Império Colonial em Questão (séculos. XIX-XX). Poderes, saberes e instituições (ed. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo). Lisboa: Edições 70, 2012. —. “Narrativas em perspectiva sobre a história da sociologia em Portugal”, in Análise Social 206, 2013. —. Saber e Poder. Estado e investigação social agrária nos primórdios da sociologia em Portugal. Lisboa: unpublished PhD dissertation in Sociology, FCSH/UNL, 2011. Baker, Keith Michael. “Enlightenment and the Institution of Society: Notes for a Conceptual History”, in Main Trends in Cultural History: Ten Essays (eds. Willem Melching and Wyger Velema). Amstedam: Rodopi, 1994. Balbi, Adrien. Essai Statistique sur le Royaume de Portugal et d’Algarve. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, Faculdade de Economia da Universidade de Coimbra, 2004 [1822]. Barros, Henrique de (ed.). Inquérito à Habitação Rural, vol. II, A Habitação Rural nas Províncias da Beira (Beira Litoral, Beira Alta e Baixa). Lisboa: Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, 1947. Basto, E. A. Lima (ed.). Inquérito Económico-Agrícola. Lisboa: Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, 1934 (vols. 1-3), 1936 (vol. 4). Basto, E. A. Lima and Henrique de Barros (eds.). Inquérito à Habitação Rural, vol. I, A habitação rural nas províncias do Norte de Portugal (Minho, Douro Litoral, Trás-os-Montes e Alto-Douro). Lisboa: Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, 1943. —. Níveis de vida e custo de vida. O caso do operário agrícola português. Lisboa: Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, 1935. Booth, Charles. Life and Labour of the People in London, 10 vols. London: Macmillan and Co., 1892-1897. Bulmer, Martin. Essays on the History of British Sociological Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Camden, William. Remains Concerning Britain. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984 [1605].

174

Chapter Six

Davies, David. The Case of Labourers in Husbandry Stated and Considered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1795]. Descamps, Paul. La Sociologie Expérimentale. Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1933. —. Le Portugal. La vie sociale actuelle. Paris: Firmin-Didot et Cie., 1935. —. Les Répercussions Sociales du Climat du Portugal. Lisboa: Oficinas Fernandes, 1934 [1933]. Desrosières, Alain. “How to make things which hold together: social science, statistics and the State”, in Discourses on Society. The Shaping of the Social Science Disciplines, Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook (eds. Peter Wagner, Björn Wittrock and Richard Whitley). Dordrech: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. DGCI (Direcção Geral do Comércio e Indústria), “Inquirição pelas associações de classe sobre a situação do operariado”, in Boletim do Trabalho Industrial 49. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1910. —. “A alimentação das classes pobres e a sua relação com o trabalho”, in Boletim do Trabalho Industrial 44. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1911. —. “Casas operárias – Contribuição para estudo das casas para operários”, in Boletim do Trabalho Industrial 66. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1912. Donnelly, Michael. “From Political Arithmetic to Social Statistics: How Some Nineteenth-Century Roots of the Social Sciences Were Implemented”, in The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity. Conceptual Change in Context 1750-1850, Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook (eds. Björn Wittrock, Johan Heilbron and Lars Magnusson). Dordrech, Boston and London: Kluwer, 1996. Ducpétieux, Édouard. Budgets Économiques des Classes Ouvrières en Belgique: subsistances, salaires, population. Bruxelles: M. Hayez, 1855. —. De la Condition Physique et Morale des Jeunes Ouvriers et des Moyens de l'Améliorer. Bruxelles: Meline, Cans et Compagnie, 1843. Eden, Frederick Morton. The State of the Poor, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 [1797]. Engel, Ernst. “Die Productions- und Consumptionsverhältnisse des Königreichs Sachsen”, in Zeitschrift des Statistischen Bureaus des Königlich Sächsischen Ministeriums des Innern 8, 9, 1857. Ferreira, Nuno Estêvão. A Sociologia em Portugal: da Igreja à Universidade. Lisboa: ICS, 2006. Foucault, Michel, “La ‘gouvernamentalité’”, in Dits et Écrits II, 19751988. Paris: Gallimard, 2001 [1978].

Science, State and Society

175

—. “Les mailles du pouvoir”, in Dits et Écrits II, 1975-1988. Paris: Gallimard, 2001a [1976]. Hacking, Ian. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Halbwachs, Maurice. “Budgets de familles”, in Revue de Paris XV, 1, 1908. —. “Remarques sur la Position du Problème Sociologique des Classes”, in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 13, 6, 1905. —. La Classe Ouvrière et les Niveaux de Vie. Recherches sur la hiérarchie des besoins dans les sociétés industrielles contemporaines. Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1913. Heilbron, Johan. The Rise of Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. INEA (Istituto Nazionale di Economia Agraria). Monografie di Famiglie Agricole, vol. I. Mezaddri di Val di Pesa e del Chianti (Toscana). Roma: Libreria Internazionale, 1931. ISSOPG (Instituto de Seguros Sociais Obrigatórios e de Previdência Geral). “Inquérito às condições de vida económica do operariado português”, in Boletim de Previdência Social 9-10, 1920. —. “Inquérito às condições de vida económica do operariado português”, in Boletim de Previdência Social 11, 1921; 14, 1923. Júnior, J. Aquino Costa. “O Custo de Vida em Portugal”, in Boletim da Previdência Social 3, 1917. Juste, Théodore. Notice sur Édouard Ducpetiaux. Bruxelles: Comptoir Universel d’Imprimerie et de Librairie, Victor Devaux et Cie., 1871. Kalaora, Bernard. “Paul Descamps ou la Sociologie Leplaysienne à l’Épreuve du Portugal de Salazar”, in Gradhiva 6, 1989. Kalaora, Bernard and Antoine Savoye. Les Inventeurs oubliés. Frédéric Le Play et ses continuateurs aux origines des sciences sociales. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1989. Kent, Raymond A. A History of British Empirical Sociology. Aldershot: Gower Publishing Company, 1981. Lacey, Michael J. and Mary O. Furner (eds.). The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Le Play, Frédéric. Les Ouvriers Européens. Tours: Alfred Mame et fils, 1879. Lindenfeld, David F. The Practical Imagination: The German Sciences of State in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Chapter Six

176

Madureira, Nuno Luís. As Ideias e os Números. Ciência, Administração e Estatística em Portugal. Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 2006. Mendonça, Custódio. “Inquérito às condições da vida económica do operariado português”, in Boletim de Previdência Social 2-4, 1917. Monroe, Day. “Pre-Engel Studies and the Work of Engel: The Origins of Consumption Research”, in Family and Consumer Sciences Research Journal 3, 1, 1974. Mucchielli, Laurent. La Découverte du Social: naissance de la sociologie en France. Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1998. Oberschall, Anthony. “The institutionalization of American sociology”, in The Establishment of Empirical Sociology: Studies in Continuity, Discontinuity and Institutionalization (ed. Anthony Oberschall). New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Pereira, Miriam Halpern. “The origins of the welfare State in Portugal: the new frontiers between public and private”, in Portuguese Journal of Social Science 4 (1), 2005. Poinsard, Léon. Portugal Ignorado. Porto: Magalhães & Moniz Lda., 1912. Porter, Theodore M. The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Sætnan, Ann Rudinow, Heidi Mork Lomell and Svein Hammer. The Mutual Construction of Statistics and Society. London: Routledge, 2011. Savoye, Antoine. Les Débuts de la Sociologie Empirique, Études sociohistoriques. Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1994. Silva, Carlos. Habitação Rural. Províncias do Alto Alentejo e Baixo Alentejo (Ensaio). Lisboa: Bachelor thesis, Instituto Superior de Agronomia, 1947. Sousa, Fernando de. História da Estatística em Portugal. Lisboa: Instituto Nacional de Estatística, 1995. Sousa, José Ferreira Marnoco e. Sciência Social. Lições sobre o Methodo e Doutrinas desta Escola feitas na Universidade de Coimbra ao Curso de Sciencia Económica e Direito Económico de 1907-1908. Coimbra: França Amado, 1908. Stigler, George J. “The Early History of Empirical Studies of Consumer Behavior”, in The Journal of Political Economy 62 (2), 1954. Stone, Richard. “Nobel memorial lecture 1984: the accounts of society”, in Journal of Applied Econometrics 1, 1, 1986. —. Some British Empiricists in the Social Sciences, 1650-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. .

Science, State and Society

177

Therborn, Göran. Science, Class and Society. On the Formation of Sociology and Historical Materialism. London: Verso, 1980 [1976]. Wagner, Peter, Carol Hirschon Weiss, Björn Wittrock and Hellmut Wollmann (eds.). Social Sciences and Modern States: National Experiences and Theoretical Crossroads. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Yeo, Eileen Janes. “Social surveys in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries”, in The Modern Social Sciences (eds. Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross), vol. 7 of The Cambridge History of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

CHAPTER SEVEN TIME TO SETTLE DOWN: PROPERTY, STATE AND ITS SUBJECT ELISA LOPES DA SILVA

The history of the Portuguese rural space in the twentieth century, and particularly that of the Alentejo region, is a history of social tensions and conflicts, one that clashes with the image of peacefulness and immobility painted by the rural conservatism of Salazar’s regime, which lingered in the collective imagination well beyond the fall of the New State. The convoluted history of land occupations and land reform of the revolutionary period following the 25 April 1974 is perhaps not so much a moment of exception, a historical anomaly of contemporary Portugal – to be read against the backdrop of the pervasive social stillness of the Portuguese countryside, before and after the revolutionary period –, but rather an integral part of a wider history of rural resistance, in line with a series of episodes of open social conflict which erupted intermittently, but time and again, throughout the whole of the Portuguese twentieth century. The primary goal of this chapter is to offer an understanding of the ideas of ‘internal colonization’1 as a State-led and agriculture-centred project for the reformation of Portugal’s rural territory in its articulation with this set of social, economic and political dynamics, which marked Portuguese modernity, and through this approach to contribute towards understanding how rural society and the State shaped each other in the

 1

The term internal colonization is the literal translation of the Portuguese ‘colonização interna’. There are other possible translations – for example, ‘internal settlement’ or ‘internal colonialism’ – as there is no established expression in the English-language bibliography to refer to this process or to analogous historical processes in Italy and Spain. See, for example, the most widely quoted study in English on the land reclamation and rural colonization carried out by the Fascist regime in Italy, Mussolini's Cities: internal colonialism in Italy, 1930-1939, Caprotti (2007).

Time to Settle Down

179

period under study. Besides being a privileged analytical observatory on the relations between State and society, the study of agrarian colonizing reformism in Portugal, which aimed at displacing populations so as to promote settlement and agricultural practice in scarcely populated and scarcely cultivated parts of the metropolitan territory, gains an added pertinence from the key role played by rurality in contemporary Portuguese history, not only as a pivotal topos within nationalist ideology2 for the larger part of the twentieth century, but also as a defining condition of a society where half of the active population worked in the fields until around 1950. Before coming to the gist of the argument, it is perhaps useful to bring to the fore some of the historiographical premises on which my interpretation of the subject is anchored. In Portugal, in line with an international historiographical trend, attempts at land reform during the New State have been predominantly addressed within an economic and political frame. Briefly put, this viewpoint has sought, on the one hand, to assess the role played by landholding structures in the national economic development (or “backwardness”) and, on the other, to expose the tensions and contradictions between development and conservation policies within Salazar’s regime.3 Historiographical debates on the agrarian restructuration have mostly focused, then, on its functional relation with the agricultural modernization efforts carried out (or not) by the New State’s economic policy. By displacing its object away from the field of economic history and towards the history of the powers of the State, the present chapter aims to sketch a history of the ideas of internal colonization within the State apparatus which goes beyond the bounds of a history of the regime (the New State) centred on the decision-making power of its governing elites or on the clarification of the doctrines which underpinned their actions. Hence, by attempting to write a history of this reformist policy from the viewpoint of the bureaucratic apparatus in which it was embodied – the Junta de Colonização Interna [Internal Colonization Board, henceforth JCI] –, and by framing it in its relation with the rural social dynamics with which it is intertwined (and which it also partly generates as a political problem as such), I will seek to distance myself, at one and the same time, from a history of ideas solely concerned with the typologies of political regimes and from a conception of, and research on, the actions of political

 2

See Chapter 10 in the present book. On this historiographical debate, mostly held in the 1990s, see Rosas (2000). On the policy of internal colonization, see also Baptista (1993). 3

180

Chapter Seven

power that gravitates, analytically, on the voluntarist (in this case, reformist) individualism of the governing elites. This twofold distance from historiographical idealism and analytical individualism is to be gained through a (tactical and therefore circumstantial) disavowal of the notion of ideology (of the State, of the government or of the rulers) and its (provisional and tentative) replacement by the notion of technology, following Michel Foucault’s theoretical cue, taken up most significantly by governmentality studies4, which have enjoyed some fortune in the historiographical field over the past few years. The use of the term ‘techniques of power’5 is aimed at overcoming the (misleading) dichotomy between ideologies (both in the sense of coherent discursive configurations, and of “mystifications” of the truth) of the New State and, on the opposite pole, the bureaucratic practices of the institutions in charge of public policies – a dichotomy which holds great sway in historical approaches to the State. In other words, the key is to study the New State without framing the State as a unified, mechanical and fully efficient entity whereby it becomes, to a large extent, coterminous with the political regime. The present study, then, seeks to offer a focus on the (New) State that veers towards a material approach to the State’s power techniques, that is to say, the mechanisms through which the government of subjects and of populations was made operative. This rotation of our analytical angle is not so much the result of a definitive subalternization of the study of ideas or ideologies, but is, rather, a necessary means of drawing closer to the non-discursive mechanisms and rationalities of power which underpin it in the study of State power. Or, put another way: it is no longer a question of studying the State apparatus (institutions, personnel) as a producer of ideology (Salazarist, fascist), but rather an attempt to understand how the bureaucratic practices of the State apparatus (and its colonizing techniques, in particular) are, in and of themselves, already ideological (as producers of subjectivities).



4 Governmentality was a term first introduced by Michel Foucault in his 19771978 course in the Collége de France. In its wake, particularly from the 1990s onwards, an area of study was formed that gravitated around this concept, focused on the ‘governance of conduct in all its forms, especially but not exclusively those of politics and the state’. Cf. Joyce (2010, 229). See also Foucault (2004). 5 Michel de Certeau was one of the first to underline Michel Foucault’s attempt to circumvent the dichotomy between the analysis of ideology (Enlightenment humanitarians and reformists) and technical procedures in the analytics of power he rehearsed in Discipline and Punish. Cf. Certeau (1987)

Time to Settle Down

181

It would perhaps be misguided to address the power of State during the Salazarist regime from a strict Foucauldian interpretative framework, which downplays the exercise of the State’s (repressive) sovereign power in favour of a focus on biopolitical forms of power, concerned with the management of the population’s well-being. Nonetheless, the process of institutionalization, within the State’s apparatus, of the ideas of internal colonization needs to be grasped as part of a wider project of rationalizing the territory in relation to its population. In its most basic elements, the rationale of the proposals for the colonization of the metropolitan territory – formulated, as we shall see, from within a productivist and populationist discourse – is that of objectifying and harmonizing these two realities, population and territory. It should therefore be understood within the frame of the process of construction and consolidation of the techniques and rationalities of the powers of the modern State. Indeed, it is the State’s rationale of optimizing the productive forces that seems to account for the way in which internal colonization projects were seemingly embraced across the political spectrum (by conservatives, such as Lino Neto, by the reformist Ezequiel de Campos, and even, later on, by the agrarian agenda of the Portuguese Communist Party). However, although colonizing ideas can be seen in themselves as a manifestation of the biopolitical power mechanisms of modernity, it is equally true that they were only institutionalized and rendered operational with the authoritarian regime of the New State. Hence, although not reducible to an authoritarian rationality of State political power, it is beyond doubt that ideas of internal colonization, and in particular its social engineering projects, must be perceived in the context of a “strong” State, one that assumes the role of privileged, and even single, conductor of the political, social and economic organization – in a word, of the life – of the country. And thus it is only with the State institutionalization of colonizing ideas, through the creation of the Junta de Colonização Interna in 1936, by the New State, that a bureaucratic framework emerged which enabled, in close collaboration with academia (the Instituto Superior de Agronomia), the development of an agronomical science with a growing penchant for social intervention (Ágoas 2010, 216220), and the correlative operationalization of colonizing ideas. A body of knowledge and an assembly of specialists (agronomists, but also architects, landscape architects, social workers) now has the necessary institutional conditions to develop, within the State apparatus, a series of techniques of colonizing power. Paradoxically, while the new regime entrusted the State with new functions which allowed it to foster the colonizing project, its own conservative traits, geared towards maintaining

182

Chapter Seven

the economic and social status quo, were the cause for the elimination of the more ambitious plans for agrarian and social restructuration of a significant portion of the South of the country.

From the population problem... Let us now track back to a previous moment, at the close of the nineteenth century, when internal colonization ideas consisted of a series of notions spread by influential intellectuals that gravitated around the State, calling on it to engage in a new type of political intervention on the populational and territorial disposition of the country. Very briefly put, internal settlement ideas took shape from within a project of agrarian reform, itself part of a broader impulse for the agrarian modernization of Portugal. This meant a reconfiguration of the country’s agrarian structures which entailed assembling the agricultural plots in the North of Portugal, where small landholdings were prevalent, parcelling out those of the South, the majority of which were large estates, and relocating the excess population in the North to new family farms, or homesteads, and thus populating (or colonizing) the lowlands of Alentejo. The colonizing solutions for the South of the country are formulated on the basis of a twofold diagnosis of the country: one based on new forms of cognitive representation of the population and territorial realities (from population censuses to agricultural statistics) (Madureira 2006), which developed, in particular, during the second half of the nineteenth century; and one based on an interpretation of Portuguese history grounded on a stark dualism6 between the population of the North, portrayed as combative, industrious and Christian, and the population of the South, moulded by the Mozarabic trading tradition. It is precisely against this background of a stark demographic and agrarian duality, between the populous and productive North, where small peasant landholdings were prevalent, and the South, deserted, dominated by large estates and poorly cultivated by rural wagelabourers, that the colonizing ideas for the South crystallize towards the end of the nineteenth century. What is worth underlining at this point is the formulation of the metropolitan colonization of the country as a mechanism for the administration of populations, abstractly objectified and historically conceived, according to a productivist logic of rationalization of the territory.

 6

José Manuel Sobral has studied historiographical representations of the country that split the latter into North and South, particularly in Basílio Teles. Cf. Sobral (2004).

Time to Settle Down

183

‘At present, we need to plant men and to plant trees: to give the earth over to them who can make it fruitful. It is necessary to bleed it in certain areas, and to ligate in others’ (Martins 1994, 22), in the vitalist rhetoric of Oliveira Martins, in a speech where he presented his Projecto de Lei de Fomento Rural [draft Law on Rural Improvement], at the Chamber of Deputies, in 1887, a seminal document for generations of intellectuals to come but which never came to be debated on the floor. From the population and agricultural imbalance between the North and the South of the country, a recurrent theme since at least the end of the eighteenth century, Oliveira Martins extracts the whole of his improvement project, a key programmatic reference for the colonizing plans for the South and, more widely, for a ‘developmentalist’ project (Rosas 2000, 156-157) for the country until the 1960s. The economic – and indeed political – crisis of the end of the 1880s set the stage for the emergence of a discourse on the restructuration of the Portuguese economy which, taking a protectionist turn, aimed to exert reformist pressure upon the agricultural sphere, pushing it in the direction of food self-sufficiency. It seemed imperative, then, to clear and cultivate unfarmed plots, to transform the fallows, corkoak forests or pastures of the large estates in Alentejo into cereal lands. The oblique valley of the Tagus, one might say, divides the populated Portugal and the deserted Portugal, the cultivated Portugal and the uncultivated Portugal; and the primary need of our internal economy is to counterbalance these two halves, to unify these two parts, to transplant into the deficient regions that which exists in the bountiful ones: man, capital. It is to carry out within the borders of the Kingdom a movement of displacement, which is indeed taking place these days, but only to the outside of the country (Martins 1994,22).

Hence, the population imbalance of the territory is seen as the key (national) productive problem to be solved, the solution to which would lie in a more effective, productive, management of the demographic flows, one that would allow emigration to Brazil from the Northeast of the country to be channelled towards the deserted South. Population is depicted as a dysfunctional machine – because unequally distributed across the territory – in the production of national wealth, the movements and features of which are in urgent need of repair. It is in this sense that the regulation of the population, an expression of a biopolitical power, becomes the main and defining feature of the metropolitan colonizing rationality, which aims to optimize the national productive forces through the most efficient administration of the population flows (external and internal migrations).

184

Chapter Seven

The potentiation of the productive forces of the national population through a better territorial distribution is a logic that presides over the various ideas for the agricultural colonization of South, which, despite the differences between its more conservative champions, such as Basílio Teles, and the more modernizing ones, such as Ezequiel de Campos (Saraiva 2009), take on the character of an almost political truism in the early twentieth century. In the New State, the demographic duality between the North and South of the country remains the basis for the rhetorical deduction of the need for a colonizing policy of the South, institutionalized within the regime with the creation of the JCI, in 1936. Now polished and coherent, this rhetoric that correlates agrarian structures and population density shapes and even legitimates the New State metropolitan colonizing policy until it comes to a close in the 1960s. It is during this period that the productivist arguments of the colonizing solution gain momentum, through the voice of the Minister of Agriculture (1934-1940) and later of the Economy (1940-44), Rafael Duque (Rosas 1991), in the face of new realities, which moulded the population problem, namely the “subsistence question”. Since at least the period of World War I, the food supply of the growing population had become a recurrent and pressing topic in matters of public policy. It was against the backdrop of a strong economic nationalism, in the wake of the 1929 crisis, that the colonizing project of the New State developed and gained in complexity: within the economic policy of the 1930s, the internal colonization project was part of a wider plan for the economic modernization of the country which, alongside forestation, was grounded on an agrarian restructuration and a cultural intensification rendered technologically viable through an ambitious program of agricultural hydrological works, to be carried out by the Junta Autónoma das Obras de Hidráulica Agrícola [Autonomous Board on Agricultural Hydrological Works], which was to precede it. Internal colonization would now be able to materialize a project of cultural intensification and reconversion, by means of the irrigation of large estates and their parcelling into small family landholdings. However, the administration of population flows within the national territory, while present in the official rhetoric that justified internal colonization policy during the New State, was effectively pushed to one side in favour of a newer mechanism and rationale in matters of population intervention. Despite making an appearance at the top of legislation preambles, figuring in public discourses and scientific reports, the population mechanism at work in the internal colonization policy of the New State was centred less

Time to Settle Down

185

on management of population flows within the territory, and more on the transformation of the social conditions of that very population.

... to the social problem Since the end of the nineteenth century, a mass of temporary agricultural wage-labourers was growing in the southern fields, prompted by cereal protectionism. It was a true rural proletariat (both in terms of social standing and political behaviour) (Cabral 1983, 39-40), socially dominant in the large estate region of Alentejo until the rural exodus to the industrial belts of Lisbon from the early 1960s onwards. The Wheat Campaign (1929-1933)7, inspired by the Bataglia del Grano of fascist Italy, had placed particular emphasis on the clearing and cultivation of many wild or underexplored fields, a process which was mainly carried out by seareiros (sharecroppers) who rented small second-rate plots of land in the outskirts of large estates, to complement their income. The employment of labourers in agricultural work, prompted by the Campaign, to clear or cultivate the last and few available tracts of land, according to some authors, would have contributed decisively to ‘a near disappearance of social conflict’ (Pereira 1983, 119) in the fields of Alentejo, after a period of intense social turmoil during the First Republic. While a euphemistic “social peace” reigned in the southern fields throughout the 1930s, brought about by the brutal and efficient presence of the New State’s repressive apparatus – which, by dismantling the rural union organizations, toned down organized workers’ rights movements – social tensions in fact mounted, triggered by a phenomenon that, while not in itself new, had reached an unprecedented and disquieting scale: rural unemployment.8 The ‘unemployment among the rural class’, while portrayed as an ‘old affliction’ and ‘an ever present threat’, had been escalating over the past few years, as alerted by the agronomist Henrique de Barros in the Inquérito Económico-Agrícola [Economical-Agricultural Survey] (Barros 1934, 115). Rural unemployment was mainly agricultural and seasonal in nature, fluctuating along with the harvesting cycles, reaping, weeding, threshing and olive picking, and was thus particularly

 7

Cf. Pais (1976 and 1978). On the launch of the Wheat Campaign as a way of fighting rural unemployment, see also Baptista (1993, 172-173). 8 There are no reliable quantitative data on the phenomenon of rural unemployment in the 1930s. Still, as a sample, it is worth quoting the data presented by Henrique de Barros, based on data supplied by the City Hall of Cuba, Alentejo, for January 1932: out of 1300 unemployed, 1200 were agricultural workers, figures which come close to the total of day workers in the municipality. Cf. Barros (1934, 115).

186

Chapter Seven

prevalent among the day labourers of Alentejo and Ribatejo, who, in the words of Henrique de Barros a propos the temporary wage-labourers in Cuba (Alentejo), ‘could not count on more than six months work’ per year’ (Barros 1934, 115). Given the predominance of wheat among the cultures in the Alentejo region, its production cycle matched, to a large extent, the cycle of agricultural employment (and unemployment). Hence, with the extension of cereal culture in the early 1930s, rural unemployment seems to have reached unprecedented levels, extending to a large portion of the year. As emigration had been blocked in that same period9, rural unemployment rose, particularly during World War II, a time when rural strikes10 that spread across the large estate areas of Alentejo and Ribatejo came to the fore. It is precisely with this cycle of rural struggles in the 1940s that the so-called “social question” closely intertwined with the rural world comes to the surface and is framed by the regime as a matter of public order. Later, in 1945, the “rural overpopulation” in the most important survey on agriculture in the first half of the twentieth century, written by agronomists Mário de Azevedo Gomes, Henrique de Barros and Eugénio Castro Caldas, is formulated on the basis of a description of the problem of unemployment: ‘agriculture, which previously called for arms to plough the land, now hears the desperate cry of those who need the land so that their arms can be made fruitful’ (Gomes 1945, 31). The causal chain these authors draw between the demographic pressure in the fields (given the conditions of cultural exploration in the large estates, it should be stressed) and the rural social tensions and conflicts is clear-cut. Indeed, from the 1930s onwards, but especially throughout the 1940s, “rural unemployment” becomes a recurrent topic not only among agronomists but also in political discourse on the rural world, a topic which, as we reach the mid-century, is increasingly framed and discussed under the designation “population surplus". Rural unemployment was endemic to the large estate and extensive culture regions of Alentejo and Ribatejo, where temporary rural wagelabourers amounted to nearly 90% of the active agricultural population (only around 10% were permanent workers) (Caldas 2000, 509 and 609). In fact, between 1940 and 1950 the agricultural population grows by 26% in Alentejo, which, in the context of the mode of cereal production, resulted in

 9

Chapter 1 in this book addresses the question of emigration during the New State. On social conflicts from 1943 to 1945 in the large estate regions of the South see Rosas (1990, 400-406) and Pereira (1983, 125-129). 10

Time to Settle Down

187

an accentuation of the process of agricultural proletarianization11, leading to the more acute social polarization12 that characterized the rural social order of the Southern fields. Despite the increase in the quantity of seareiros, and concomitant reinforcement of subsistence farming, giving an added complexity to the social composition in the large estate region, the interdependence between the expansion of wheat culture and the levels of agricultural proletarianization is unmistakable. To deal with the problem of rural unemployment, and as a way to mitigate the social and political effects which stemmed from it, the New State regime had initiated a public works policy during the 1930s – through the creation of the Comissariado do Desemprego [Commissariat on Unemployment], in 193213 –, although from the start that had been considered an isolated emergency response, and a heavy burden on public finances. On the other hand, the corporative organization of the New State, as a regulatory structure on work relations, also did not seem too offer a structural solution to the problem of rural unemployment; the Casas do Povo [Houses of the People] (Freire 2012), the corporativist organization ideally uniting rural workers and landowners through an “interclassist” mechanism, were clearly inoperative in this respect. It is against this backdrop of the 1930s, but even more during the 1940s, that internal colonization policies gain an unprecedented weight within the authoritarian State’s apparatus, both through the executive influence of Minister Rafael Duque, the chief advocate of the colonizing ideas within the regime’s governmental structure, and through the bureaucratic apparatus of the JCI. Colonizing ideas now emerge as a real political alternative, one that was thought to be structurally adequate to the fight against the rural “work crises” and its social fallout – deterioration of

 11

Renato do Carmo has pointed out that interpretations on the social stratification in Alentejo that focus on social polarization should be qualified in the face of the continuity, and even increase, in sharecroppers throughout the 1940s. Still, for this author, social proletarianization in the Alentejo is incontrovertible, even if the process is less accentuated and less linear than other accounts may lead us to believe. Cf. Carmo (2007, 823-824). Fernando Rosas also offers an interpretation of the Portuguese social structure in the 1930s rural world which signals the variety and complexity of the various social groups, namely within the rural proletariat of the South. Cf. Rosas (1994, 48-53). 12 The classic study on social polarization in the Southern fields, from 1973 and later discussed by the above-mentioned authors, is Freitas (1973). 13 The policies on public works carried out by the New State since the 1930s was to a great extent based on the unemployed workforce, who received meager benefits from the newly created Comissariado do Desemprego (Decree n. 21 699, of 19 September 1932). See Alho (2008, 191).

188

Chapter Seven

living conditions of salaried workers –, as well as its more eminently political repercussions – such as disturbance of public order – in contrast with the more circumstantial character of the public works policy and the ineffectiveness of the corporatist regulatory mechanisms on rural work. The colonizing project of the New State presented itself, then, with a social rationale of its own, one that was made politically viable through an already existent and coherent economic-productivist project geared towards the maximization of the productive forces of the national population. Once the legislated policy on internal colonization had floundered, the repressive apparatus, and, in particular, the systematic use of the Guarda Nacional Republicana [Republican National Guard], was perhaps the key instrument used by the New State to address the “social question” in the Portuguese southern fields.

Deproletarianize and repeasantize The New State’s internal colonizing policy in the 1930s should be structurally understood as an attempt to reorganize and optimize, through the State’s action, the productive forces of the growing population, which not only had to be fed but whose living conditions also, and urgently, had to be improved, under a regime which thus aimed to pre-emptively defuse social tensions in the southern fields. In the absence of social protection mechanisms in the rural world – given that the structure of the Portuguese Welfare State would only be sketched a few decades later – that could alleviate the gradual material (and “moral”) impoverishment of the working class, internal colonization should be perceived as a conservative social mechanism operating through access to property, at a time when the rural social order is essentially structured on the basis of land ownership, considered the ultimate condition of security (both of the workers’ themselves, and of the political order).14 The internal colonization policy aimed at a profound intervention in the mode of cereal production, which was thought to be the cause of

 14

This argument is drawn from Robert Castel, who reads the policy of access to property as a form of security in Bonapartist France, in line with the aspirations of a ‘return to the land’ of Le Play and others social reformers of the French Third Republic, in his long narrative on the formation of the salariat. Cf. Castel (1995, 488 ff.) The author sees the proposals for access to property as going against the grain of the emergence of the Welfare State as a safeguard of the security of the “disaffiliated” salariat – i.e. without property – within capitalism. Tellingly, the author designates as ‘social property’ the host of social protections created in the context of the Welfare State (in French, ‘État Social’).

Time to Settle Down

189

seasonal agricultural unemployment. All legislative discourses on internal colonization, as well as the wide debate it generated in the National Assembly when the Law on Agricultural Hydraulics was promulgated (1937) and, even more explicitly, the technical-scientific discourse which justified the colonizing programme in the 1940s, elaborated by the agronomists of the JCI, seem to have been particularly prescient in diagnosing this problem: systematizing its logic, one could say that the system of extensive cereal production of the large estates implied the use of a labour force that was irregularly distributed throughout the year, generating large waves of seasonal unemployment, and only cultural intensification in the new small landholdings, necessarily explored by family members in a poly-cultural system, would be able to absorb the available labour force in a stable and regular way. The desired cultural intensification, which would solve both the productive and social problems of a growing population, would thus entail a reform of agrarian structures that would multiply the small and mediumsize plots and break up the large estate landscape of the South. The passage of some rural wage-labourers to small landholders (deproletarianization), was seen as a process of social and economic elevation – or, to use the scientific term employed by the agronomists themselves, but also widely repeated in political debates, of ‘elevation of standards of living’ – and the fostering of a lasting peace in the fields which, while economically justified, was socially and politically imperious. The counter-revolutionary aim of internal colonization, as part of a land reform, is explicitly stated by one of the most important agronomists to take part in the materialization of the colonizing policy, Henrique de Barros, in a book entitled precisely Sobre o conceito de Reforma Agrária [On the concept of land reform] (1949): rather more efficient than discretionary police measures are land reforms of an individualizing nature, aimed at the creation of a high number of small private properties and the establishment of numerous independent companies, whose stated purpose is that of building a dam, thought to be insurmountable, against the penetration of the ideas of land collectivization, and, in a wider terms, against the advancement of forms of social revolution (Barros, 1949, 16).

In short, and in a different language, it was necessary to change the social relations of production in areas where agricultural wage-labourers were prevalent. Socially, politically, it was necessary to deproletarianize the southern fields.

190

Chapter Seven

Internal colonization projects in the meshes of the State The policies of internal colonization in the Portuguese metropolitan territory during the New State, which entailed a social project of transforming the large wheat plains of Alentejo into family homesteads explored in a poly-culture system, presupposed a cultural diversification and intensification which needed to be, first and foremost, made technically viable through an ambitious irrigation program, carried out by the Junta Autónoma das Obras de Hidráulica Agrícola. The agricultural modernization desired by agrarian reformists who had a voice within the new executive was thus anchored, in parallel with forestation, on this technical association between the colonizing program and the hydraulic plan that would green the dry lands of Alentejo, but was also politically conditioned by the need to expropriate of those irrigated (privately owned) lands, which proved an insurmountable obstacle for the conservative political regime. Governmental plans for intervening in property relations emerged at two historical moments: in 1937, at the time of the promulgation and discussion of the Law on Agricultural Hydraulics which, although it was never regulated or enforced, granted the State ‘discretionary powers of land expropriation (…) as long as higher motives of an economic and social nature’15 dictated the need to change the exploration regime (Rosas 1991, 782); and two decades later, in the 1950s, during a heated debate in the National Assembly, where the possibility of expropriation was removed from the legislation, and it fell on land owners to manage the colonizing process of their accord and in their own pace.16 One could thus say that it was a case of replacing the ‘social function of property’ evoked in the law of 1937 by the social function of the proprietor, the foundation not only of the rural social order but also of the very social and political equilibriums on which the regime was built. This vast plan of radical transformation of the agrarian and human landscape of Alentejo, although doctrinally important to understand the radical/revolutionary leanings of the New State, which draw it quite close to Italian fascism, were thus systematically contested, indeed annulled, by the strength of the rural conservative block – comprised mostly by the large estate owners of Alentejo and Ribatejo, a key political support for the regime – both at the end of the 1930s and, definitively, at the close of the 1950s. And thus, in an evaluative rhetoric, it is as a political failure that the existing

 15 16

Law 1949, of 15 February 1937. Cf. Law 2072, of 18 June 1954.

Time to Settle Down

191

bibliography (Rosas 2000; Baptista 1993) has qualified the New State’s policy of internal colonization. Be that as it may, the state apparatus organization responsible for carrying out the colonizing policy of the New State, the JCI, continued to operate bureaucratically from 1937 until the end of the regime. The more revolutionary goals of the colonizing policy were gradually emptied out, to be sure, but this historical thread in itself becomes less linear once we realize that during the 1940s, within the State apparatus, the JCI devises another colonizing project for the South of the country. To understand the State institutionalization of colonizing ideas, therefore, one should not only look at the executive policy for the colonization of irrigated lands, but also grasp the rationalities of the colonizing project developed by the technicians of the Junta de Colonização Interna, and through it understand the complexities of the colonizing action of the State, beyond the executive sphere. When all is said and done, the project of colonization of irrigated lands in Portugal came to nothing: none of the lands irrigated by the State was in fact colonized (Baptista 1993). The opposition of the large landowners of the South precluded the agricultural reform based on the ambitious 1938 Plan for Hydraulic Works, which projected the irrigation of over 100 thousand hectares (Baptista 1993, 72), in the long run, which would be the foundation for a wider social and political reform. However, outside the scope of the governmental plan, during the 1940s, the agronomical engineers of the JCI undertook the studies necessary for the elaboration of an even more ambitious plan: in the estimated 800 thousand hectares of land that could be ‘fruitfully colonized’, of the 3 million hectares or so between the Tagus river and the Algarve, they aimed to install, in each of the ten previously delimited perimeters of colonization, ten agricultural colonies that would fixate ‘40 thousand colonist families, approximately, in as many autonomous smallholdings’17, with an average of 20 hectares each. In fact, and once again, the legal mechanisms for expropriation, laid out in the 1937 law, were never employed, and the plan never came to be presented, much less discussed, in the public sphere. Outside of the boldest plans for an agrarian reform legislated at end of the 1930s, and of the administrative alternatives laid out by the agronomists of the JCI, which were politically pushed to the background, in 1946 a plan for a five-year colonization was legislated and would, in fact, serve as the basis for the installation of the few agricultural colonies

 17

Cf. Ministério da Economia. Junta de Colonização Interna, Notas sobre a crise de desemprego rural e as possibilidades de colonização do Sul (1948) 30 and 41.

192

Chapter Seven

that were actually built during the New State. The 40 thousand families of colonists to be settled in the 800 thousand hectares of the semiarid Alentejo, in the JCI project, were a far cry from the modest official plan of establishing 1 532 casais agrícolas [homesteads] in 21 293 hectares18, whereby little more than a third (592) were to be settled into common lands, all of them situated far away from the large estate region, in the North of the river Tagus. In the end, the colonizing work of the State, through agricultural colonies, came down to the construction of seven settlements, five of which would be located in common lands North of the Tagus (Milagres, Martim Rei, Montalegre, Alvão and Boalhosa), and two in State-owned properties (Gafanha and Pegões). The only one located to the South of the Tagus was Pegões, also the only settlement to come out of the above mentioned ambitious plan for the colonization of the South, which, developed during the 1940s within the JCI, was never approved by the government. In 1960, in a last-ditch effort to push forward a policy on internal colonization, the colonist families settled into homesteads amounted to a mere 543, and it is worth stressing that none of these was located in land irrigated by the State in the South of the country.

Producing producers: the subjects of property The large project of internal colonization had nearly no impact on the landscapes of the South, and only one agricultural colony, Pegões, with around 215 homesteads, was settled in the large estate area, in the early 1950s. However, one can get a clearer understanding of the rationalities of internal colonization, especially of the project of demobilization of the agricultural wage-labourers of the South, by taking into account the amount of attention devoted, from the 1930s onwards, to the agricultural colonies that has been built in the meantime on the common lands scattered across the Northern region, above the Tagus river. These colonies were perceived as models for the colonizing policy to come. If it was deemed imperative to change the social relations of production in the South of Portugal so as to change the subjectivity of the rural wage-labourers, thought to be too unruly, the project of turning them into “subjects of property” went beyond the concession of farming land. The members of both parliamentary houses, and, above all, the agronomists of the JCI put the figure of the colonist or settler at the centre

 18

All figures concerning the area to be colonized and the projected casais agrícolas referred throughout this paragraph were gathered from Mapa I, Anexo do decreto-lei no 36054, 30 December 1946.

Time to Settle Down

193

of any success the colonizing project might have. The criteria for the recruitment of settlers – their geographical origin, their psychological traits, their agricultural habits, their age – are from very early on a subject of debate among the JCI technical cadres. But it is only with the conception and establishment of agricultural colonies that we can examine the implementation of strategies of administrative surveillance which would then have a bureaucratic expression in the various annual19, monthly20 and, for a brief period, fortnightly reports, personally scrutinized by the Presidents of JCI. These reports contained fixed headings that described and assessed the settlers in great detail, as they steered them into a new life. Among these headings we find: the ‘demographic movements’ (records of births and deaths, as well as of the people who arrived or left the colony), ‘agricultural and economic activity’, ‘medical assistance’ (which detailed any administered treatments, vaccines, house visits and their prophylactic hygienist measures), ‘educational movement’ (which detailed the number of students enrolled in each school year and their progress reports), and ‘social centres’ (which included, for example, home economic courses).21 To generate a new subjectivity, that is, to turn them into peasants, it was not enough to deproletarianize the agricultural wage-labourer (or to give land to shepherds from the highlands of Barroso or to smugglers from Sabugal). The individuals that would cultivate their own plot of land (and would thus be safe from the uncertainty of seasonal work and free from the wage relation) would be the “subjects of property” idealized by the State, not only by virtue of their renewed ties to the land but also through behaviourist techniques carried out under the term “assistance” by JCI agricultural scientists and other experts of the social. The aim was to create peaceful communities, close-knit families and conscientious individuals that would steer away from their bad habits and any form of immoral behaviour and that would fulfil their duties to both their family and their country. From the point of view of the agronomical engineers, who had already devised colonizing guidelines that included a detailed economic plan for the future settlers, it was not enough to oversee the seeding and the harvesting, to monitor the well-being of the cattle, the state of the

 19

For example, Ministério da Economia. Junta de Colonização Interna. Relatório dos trabalhos executados nas Colónias Agrícolas, 2ª repartição, 1941. 20 For example, Ministério da Economia. Junta de Colonização Interna. Relatório Mensal da 2ª Repartição. October 1959. 21 A similar use of Reports in the constitution of subjectivities can be seen in chapter 8 in this book, in relation to secondary students.

194

Chapter Seven

agricultural utensils, the clearing of the pinewood areas, as well as their financial lives, paying close attention to the repayment of loans.22 ‘The transformation from careless negligent worker to thoughtful, farsighted and entrepreneurial landowner, the head of a family that could climb the social ladder to a higher economic position and social standing’23, in the words of the officials, was also, perhaps even mainly, engendered through the so-called social, medical and moral assistance ministered by doctors, teachers, vicars and female rural educators in the colony. The making of subjects of property would involve surveillance and control over economic and leisure activities, bodies, acquired skills, social habits. These techniques of surveillance and control did not have as their primary purpose the exclusion of individuals but rather, slowly but surely, the creation of new habits and desires in the subjects of property at hand. The productivism of the internal colonization policy of the New State, which has been interpreted in the existing literature as part of a project of economic modernization of the country, does not manifest itself merely in the initiatives for the transformation of agriculture (cultural intensification and reconversion) that aimed at an increase in the country’s food production. The internal colonization policy also follows a productivist logic in its attempt to produce producers, to ‘(…) turn inactive or insufficiently productive elements into creators of a socially unique wealth (…)’, in the telling words of the Minister Rafael Duque (Duque 1940, 28). Let us take a closer look, among the array of colonizing techniques, at the technical assistance provided by agronomists and other agricultural technicians of the JCI, whose mechanisms for everyday surveillance of the conduction of the homesteads’ economic life would, so it was hoped, lead to an ‘alchemy’24 of personality. The JCI technicians sought to increase

 22

The exemplary value of the agricultural colonies and its occupants for the region in which they were located is a recurrent topos in the colonizing discourse, and especially important for the political project of colonizing the South. Since the colonization of the South aimed to articulate the various types of agricultural farm – family-run homesteads but also large estates –, which means it would not eliminate the rural proletariat, it would be through the example set by colonists to the surrounding communities and rural wage-labourers that a transformation of the political landscape of the region was to take place. Cf. Ministério da Economia. Junta de Colonização Interna, Notas sobre a crise de desemprego rural e as possibilidades de colonização do Sul (1948) 29-30. 23 Cf. Ministério da Economia. Junta de Colonização Interna. Relatório de Trabalhos e Contas de Gerência. Ano de 1942. Lisboa: 1943, 20. 24 According to the most important JCI report on the assistance provided in the agricultural colonies, the ‘agricultural and administrative aspects’ of the technical and economic education are entwined with ‘the social and religious aspects’ of the

Time to Settle Down

195

production through scientific means, and, through no less scientific means, to produce producers. This was carried out through the elaboration of thorough plans for exploration, tailored to each homestead, and through the proper transmission of the agronomical knowledge that underpinned such projects to the colonists. With that in view, agricultural scientists, whose intervention mechanisms emanated from an agronomical knowledge of social intervention that provided the scientific legitimation of their social action, offered guidance to colonists on their day by day agricultural work, seeking to train them in economically effective forms of work. In the agricultural settlement of Milagres, under the close supervision of the “assistance” personnel, colonists, as they tended to their crops, would separate the produce they needed for their own consumption and for future sowing, setting aside the remainder, to be sold; once these had been sold, they would deposit the funds that were not be spent at once.25

Assistance operates, then, by breaking down the process of production (and commercialization) of agricultural produce into precise and limited tasks, by means of an everyday surveillance of the colonists’ working time units so that they would fit into a pre-established agricultural productive cycle. Thus, the very process of learning the scientific techniques for agricultural production, by means of a variety of surveillance mechanisms, incorporated the instruments for working on the colonist’s “personality”. A close watch was kept on a variety of aspects, moments and processes: the Fall and Spring sowings, the buying and selling of live-stock, the state of repair of agricultural implements and occasional use of machinery, land

 ‘education of personality.’ Furthermore, given that ‘technical values are easily acquired’, it was on ‘human value, which is in fact divine value, albeit to be perfected by man’ that technicians should focus on. The author does not hesitate to characterize the relation between the assistant and the colonist as a ‘new alchemy, in which personalities are the reagents, while assistants can be regarded as their true catalyst, or the minimal element required for the whole process to work through and through.’ The metaphors employed by the author are either religious or scientific, but it is the vocabulary he chooses to invoke – ‘personality’, ‘improvement’, ‘attitude’ – that signals the extent to which agronomical science was permeable to psychological concepts in designing this process of subjectivation of the colonists. The ‘process of modifying the structure of moral personality’ in the hands of ‘assistance’ thus seemed essential to the production of the proprietor-individuals which the agricultural colony wished to house. See Pinto (1956, 8-10). 25 Cf. Ministério da Economia. Junta de Colonização Interna. Relatório de Trabalhos e Contas de Gerência. Ano de 1942. Lisboa: JCI, 1943, 75-76.

196

Chapter Seven

improvements such as the digging of wells or the draining of swamps, and loan repayments. Besides the management of the times of work in the fields, “assistance” sought from the start to introduce a set of principles for the financial administration of the smallholdings, for the increase in work productivity entailed training colonists in the most modern techniques of financial management, made possible through access to banking accounts. The seven agricultural settlements projected by the New State should thus be understood as fields of social and personal experimentation, or ‘agrarian social laboratories’26, aimed at the social formation of subjects, subjects to be equipped with a set of work skills and social and personal behaviours that were moulded by the JCI through technologies provided by agronomical knowledge and by specialists of the social, at one with the ruralizing and orderly ideology delineated by the regime. From the zealous and obedient peasant of the 1930s to the progressive and conscientious entrepreneur of the 1950s, colonizing techniques of the New State, where “assistance” takes centre stage, focus primarily on the social production of the family smallholder, simultaneously an economic figure of the ideal agricultural worker and a political figure of the peaceful and law-abiding citizen. The proprietor was, then, the key element in a new rural social order designed by the internal settlement policy during the New State.

Conclusion The desire to harness the mythical productive potentialities of Alentejo, which ran through economic thought since at least the close of the eighteenth century was finally legislated – although politically nullified – during the New State regime. In the process of State institutionalization, with the creation of the Junta de Colonização Interna, ideas of colonization of the metropolitan territory are made operative through the construction of a technical-scientific agronomical knowledge with a socially interventionist penchant, which legitimated the program of social engineering underlying the colonizing project. Although the desired changes in the rural landscape of the South did not come to fruition, this was the moment of technologization of the colonizing ideology: the introduction of a coherent set of ideas into the State apparatus entailing the translocation of people from the populous North to the deserted large estates of the South of the country, now divided and repopulated, allowed,

 26

Cf. Caldas, João Lemos de Castro. Política de Colonização Interna. A implantação das colónias agrícolas da Junta de Colonização Interna, [policopied document] (Lisboa: 1988).

Time to Settle Down

197

simultaneously, for the construction of a knowledge which objectified rural society (and turned temporary rural unemployment and the worsening of living conditions into a public and political issue) and for the development of a host of colonizing (hydrological, agronomical and social) techniques. In the face of the emergence of the “social problem”, the solution of translocating excess labour force from the North to the South was sidelined in favour of the political urgency of measures of deproletarianization/repeasantification defined by colonizing techniques. By bolstering the optimization of the productive forces and capacities of the populations and territories which underpin the formation of colonizing ideas, the projects of internal colonization advocated within the New State apparatus obeyed a productivist rationality germane to a nationalist economic policy concerned with forging a food autarky in the 1930s, or, in the post-war period, with the industrialization of agriculture. It is in this light that we can best grasp the programmatic shift in the colonizing economic proposal, which ceases to be in the service of ensuring the viability of a cereal economy and comes to be rooted in a cultural intensification and diversification. The creation of the Junta Autónoma das Obras de Hidráulica Agrícola and the Junta de Colonização Interna towards the end of the 1930s, and the articulation of their respective administrative competences – the first would irrigate the lands which, having been divided and expropriated, would be colonized by the latter – corresponded, historically, to the political consecration of an alliance between a techno-productivist colonization, geared towards a macro-economic policy, and a social-reformist colonization, aimed at raising the standards of living and pacifying the population. The political intervention in the property relations underpinning the whole project, by triggering an active resistance on the part of large estate landowners, the regime’s core support base, dictated the unfeasibility and ultimate failure of this large-scale project. Although in a slightly different sense, this productivist rationality was still the driving force behind the agricultural colonies established in the common lands situated to the north of the Tagus, inasmuch as the agricultural use (as opposed to grazing) and private property of the land (as opposed to its communal use) were considered essential for the boosting of productivity. However, one needs to understand internal colonization as a productivist policy that seeks to produce not only food for a fast-growing population but also the producers themselves, the settlers. The transformation of rural wage-labourers into subjects of property, devoted to their trade, conscious of their duties and bound to their obligations implied, then, the use of a set of techniques for the productive organization

198

Chapter Seven

of bodies, as important as the hydrological and agronomic techniques aimed at increasing the land’s productivity. The political desire for the formation of a proprietor class which would socially complement the salaried class of the Alentejo region in the social composition of the rural space of the South led to a specific kind of State intervention on the social, here taken simultaneously as the economic foundation of production and the political terrain of neutralization. The colonizing proposal for the change in relations of production in the large estate regions of the South, achieved through the promotion of access to land ownership for wage-labourers that would then ascend to the condition of proprietors, would at one and the same time enable a rise in standards of living and a drop in social tensions. At a time when the income resulting from the wage-relation was uncertain and social protection policies that might mitigate this uncertainty were absent, some sectors within the regime’s State apparatus delineated a policy for rural society, now scientifically elaborated, for the promotion of private property, ideologically rooted in the (social) security role of the landownership. The phrase apego à terra [attachment to the land] seems to encapsulate the rationality of the New State’s colonizing policy. While the land might produce the agricultural goods necessary to feed a fast-growing population, it was from the dimension of attachment, that is to say, from the emotional investment in one’s relation with the land, from the production of distinct forms of social solidarities and a communal lifeworld, that a specific subjectivity would spring and shape a new social reality for the South of Portugal.

Bibliography Ágoas, Frederico. “Economia rural e investigação social agrária nos primórdios da sociologia em Portugal”, in O Estado Novo em Questão (eds. Nuno Domingos e Victor Pereira). Lisboa: Edições 70, 2010. —. Saber e Poder. Estado e Investigação Social Agrária nos Primórdios da Sociologia em Portugal. Lisboa: unpublished PhD dissertation, FCSH/UNL, 2011. Alho, Albérico Afonso Costa. F.P.A. A Fábrica Leccionada. Aventuras dos Tecnocatólicos no Ministério das Corporações. Porto: Profedições, 2008. Baptista, Fernando Oliveira. A Política Agrária do Estado Novo. Afrontamento: Porto, 1993. Barros, Henrique de. “Inquérito à Freguesia de Cuba”, vol. 1, in Inquérito Económico-Agrícola. Lisboa, 1934.

Time to Settle Down

199

—. Sobre o Conceito de Reforma Agrária. Porto: Biblioteca Fenianos, 1949. Cabral, Manuel Villaverde. O Proletariado – O Nome e a Coisa. Lisboa: A Regra do Jogo, 1983. Caldas, João Castro. “Emprego Rural”, in Dicionário da História de Portugal, Suplemento VII (eds. António Barreto e Maria Filomena Mónica). Porto: Livraria Figueirinhas, 2000. —. “Desemprego Rural”, in Dicionário da História de Portugal, Suplemento VII, (eds. António Barreto e Maria Filomena Mónica). Livraria Figueirinhas: Porto, 2000. Caprotti, Federico. Mussolini's Cities: Internal Colonialism in Italy, 19301939. Youngstown, N.Y: Cambria Press, 2007. Carmo, Renato Miguel do. “As Desigualdades Sociais nos Campos: o Alentejo entre as décadas de 1930 e 1960”, in Análise Social XLII, 184, 2007. Castel, Robert. Les Metamorphoses de la Question Sociale. Une chronique du salariat. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. Certeau, Michel de. “Microtechniques et Discours Panoptique: un quidproquo”, in Histoire et Psychanalyse entre Science et Fiction. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Duque, Rafael. As Subsistências e a População. Lisboa: Editorial Império, 1940. Foucault, Michel. Sécurité, Territoire, Population. Cours au Collége de France 1977-1978. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2004. Freitas, Eduardo de. “Sobre a polarização das relações sociais em Portugal. 1930-1970”, in Análise Social 39, 1973. Freire, Dulce. “Estado Corporativo em Acção: sociedade rural e construção na rede de Casas do Povo”, in Corporativismo, Fascismos, Estado Novo (eds. Fernando Rosas and Álvaro Garrido). Lisboa: Almedina, 2012. Gomes, Mário de Azevedo et al. “Traços Principais da Evolução da Agricultura Portuguesa entre as Duas Guerras Mundiais”, in Revista do Centro de Estudos Económicos 1, Instituto Nacional de Estatística, 1945. Lains, Pedro and Sousa, Paulo Silveira e. “Estatística e produção agrícola em Portugal, 1848-1914”, in Análise Social XXXIII, 149, 1998. Madureira, Nuno Luís. As Ideias e os Números. Ciência, Administração e Estatística em Portugal. Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 2006. Martins, J. P. Oliveira. “Projecto de Lei de Fomento Rural”, in Fomento Rural e Emigração. Lisboa: Guimarães Editores, 1994. Pais, José Machado et al. “O Fascismo nos Campos em Portugal: a

200

Chapter Seven

campanha do trigo I”, in Análise Social XII, 46, 1976. Pais, José Machado et al. “O Fascismo nos Campos em Portugal: a campanha do trigo II”, in Análise Social XIV, 54, 1978. Pereira, José Pacheco. Conflitos Sociais nos Campos do Sul de Portugal. Mem-Martins: Europa-América, 1983. Pinto, José Rebelo Vaz. As Colónias Agrícolas e a sua Assistência. Lisboa: Junta de Colonização Interna, 1956. Relatório de Trabalhos e Contas de Gerência. Ano de 1942. Lisboa: Ministério da Economia. Junta de Colonização Interna, 1943. Rosas, Fernando. Portugal entre a Paz e a Guerra. 1939-1945. Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 1990. —. “O Pensamento Reformista Agrário no século XX em Portugal: elementos para o seu estudo”, in Salazarismo e Fomento Económico. O primado do Político na História Económica do State Novo. Lisboa: Notícias Editorial, 2000. —. “Rafael Duque e a política agrária do Estado Novo (1934-44)”, in Análise Social 26, 112/113, 1991. —. O Estado Novo. Lisboa: Círculo de Leitores, 1994. —. Salazarismo e Fomento Económico. O primado do político na história económica do Estado Novo. Lisboa: Editorial Notícias, 2000. Saraiva, Tiago. “Laboratories and landscapes: the Colonization of Portugal and Mozambique and the Building of the New State”, in HoST, Journal of History of Science and Technology 3, 2009. Sobral, José Manuel. “O Norte, o Sul, a Raça, a Nação – representações da identidade nacional portuguesa (séculos XIX-XX)”, in Análise Social XXXIX, 171, 2004.

CHAPTER EIGHT THE PORTUGUESE STATE AND MODERN EDUCATION: HIGH SCHOOL MANAGEMENT AND STUDENT SUBJECTIFICATION IN THE 1930S AND 1940S JORGE RAMOS DO Ó

Introduction This chapter focuses on high schools and the Portuguese State's role in their modernization. My central goal is to show how a new regime of enunciation developed powers, vectors and interconnections that transformed the scenario of secondary education and its players, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. The State appears in my narrative as an instance in which government problems gradually arose as verbal and linguistic complexes. Language will therefore not appear as an ideological or justificatory instrument. When I speak of it and of its status in this chapter I will endeavour to show its performative force and ascertain how a field of discursive enunciation aimed at the subjectivity of high-school students slowly formed around the State. I think this should be regarded as a process. I prefer the word subjectification, which was coined by Michel Foucault, who points to the effects of composition and re-composition of forces, practices and relations designed to implement and transform the historical subject in the name of its interiority and even idiosyncrasy. The question of chronology and historical time must also be clarified. Based on an incursion into the archives of the Ministry of Education and several Portuguese high schools, I will posit that it was the governments of the Military Dictatorship and the Estado Novo, headed by Oliveira Salazar as of 1932, that managed to create the proper institutional and material conditions for disciplinary ideas and solutions related to the socialization of students to emerge. These ideas, insistently put forward from the last

202

Chapter Eight

quarter of the nineteenth century, almost always by democratic educators, were finally extended to the entire high school network. In fact, the pedagogic model focusing on student autonomy was embraced one by one by all education agents – deans, teachers and school physicians and nurses – and obliged them all to work in a network and produce the same kind of education discourse on students’ aptitudes, attitudes, dispositions and behaviours.

Modern education and its history I believe that the choice of a history of secondary education aimed at establishing the complex relations that marked the future exercise of power and organization of knowledge, looking at specific forms of subjectification, will place the emergence and consolidation of mass schooling in at least two main historical frames: the fight for secularization of the government of the soul and the need to deal with populations at risk or in moral danger. All school socialization work can therefore be described as disciplinary and disciplining. Indeed, it was by adapting the practices of a pastoral-type of religious supervision and direction, i.e. an attempt at self-identification with a higher being, a transfer of spiritual discipline to everyday routines, that State schools managed to establish the principle of personal fulfilment in the very heart of the disciplinary goal of liberal States. The constitution of the national school system was not, therefore, the expression of purely educational principles. It emerged from demands placed on State administrations and was based on pre-existing Christian technologies for the governance of souls. Along the same train of thought, we will also recognize that popular education reflected a general purpose, which was based to a large extent on the pedagogic interface, of keeping the population so as to create masses whose conduct was highly marked by self-inspection. To talk about modern schools, regardless of the source or origin, is to talk about policy of conscience and the invention ‘of secular forms of pastoral control that merge individualization and totalization’ (Gordon 1991, 9). This very remote matrix had little to do with the cultivation of repressive practices, fear or passive obedience. Many identity games pointed to positive forms of identification and internal moral work. Another historical aspect is the emergence of mass schools in the expansion of moral topographies designed to accommodate dangerous or high-risk populations. Back in the nineteenth century, writes António Nóvoa, (1986, 9), the ‘institution of intentional education processes’ seemed closely linked to a feeling that we know was arising at the dawn of

The Portuguese State and Modern Education

203

the Ancien Régime, the idea that a child was a ‘vicious, immoral’ being that needed to be ‘domesticated’. The essential mission of the school model spread to the four corners of the earth from the late nineteenth century onwards was soon found to be not so much to transmit knowledge, but rather, essentially, to mould the students’ conduct, supervising, assessing and correcting any possible children’s pathologies (Rose 1990, 122). It was the continuation of the nineteenth century attitude towards criminals, the insane and the poor. The central mission of State schools was to develop an observation apparatus to objectively document these individuals’ unique character and make innovative suggestions on the domestication of children at risk. I believe that the (albeit brief) identification of these two lines is sufficient to show that it was from this old disciplinary and standardization logic that today’s illuminist belief sprang, according to which it is the school’s job to find and exploit potential intellectual, physical and moral capacities in all students, capacities that will make them creative, satisfied, fulfilled players from an emotional, professional and affective point of view. In fact, any pedagogic discourse that in the past may have taken a critical position on the state of schools and insisted on an urgent need for modern reforms made it very clear that students could no longer be treated as subjects whose education was based solely on the benches and compendia used in the classroom, where year after year they assimilated school subjects until they received a diploma that only certified and quantified intellectual knowledge. What the critics of traditional schooling defended was the production of a certain type of being. All reformative ideas were based on the subordination of instruction to the principle of complete education of the student. It is clear that my perspective is not focused on political chronology, which education historians often use to organize their analyses. I believe that my choice of the long term, the historical narrative I have just described, has an operative strength that pervades all modernity and goes right to the heart of our beliefs. Telling the story of the modern high school, an institution created in Portugal after the reform by Jaime Moniz (Ó 2003, 224-305), which began in 1894, obviously involves recognizing political dynamics and inventorying sporadic measures, some of them deriving from the solutions of the regime at the time. But that is very different from imagining that there may have been a type of education and especially a different kind of student depending on whether the country was governed by a monarchic, republican or authoritarian regime. What we can talk about here is new programs, adjustments or even accelerations of a model of complete education and governance of students, which fully

204

Chapter Eight

governed the field of education after the translation presented in Portugal by upholders of New Education in the 1920s. Not once was their socializing efficacy called into question in the twentieth century and they met with the possibility of stabilization and coherent codification in the 1930s and 1940s.

Intertextuality at Portuguese high schools: technologies and players I will now endeavour to identify the general system for preparing and teaching textbooks at high schools and indicate their origin and strategic purpose. The forms of representation of these teaching documents were clearly closely linked to writing situations that it is important to discover and interpret. Each historical document is clearly intertextual. The discursive artifacts available to historians in high school and Ministry of Education archives were produced, circulated and deposited with very similar rules and goals. It was not only the inevitable directors and teachers who opined on secondary school students and their education but also physicians, school nurses and psychologists, for one thing because they were obliged to do so by the central authorities. One way of encouraging a functionary to voice an opinion was to compel them to draft a report on their work. That was the case with the director of studies in 1759, under the orders of the Marquis of Pombal, and would continue to be so over the decades. Nonetheless, with the administrative sophistication and growth in high school teaching immediately after Jaime Moniz’s reform, there was a veritable explosion in enquiries and requests for information from local education agents about the resources and situation of education and the idiosyncratic characteristics of each student. My intention here is to show that these texts are not so much products of authors but rather of a certain writing unit. It was this unit that made it possible to overcome contradictions and connect the texts in series. These player-authors were in a trans-discursive position associated with certain forms of expression. Their accounts should not therefore be taken literally, as if the sum of the many descriptors used to describe high schools and their students was a faithful portrait. These texts are actually something else: a product of education policies and an exercise in building ties between programs nationwide. These discursive units should not, however, be regarded as the result only of a central stance that defined, commanded and subordinated all parties coherently and relentlessly at the time. There is also the fact that official education policies were indebted to the language and analytical

The Portuguese State and Modern Education

205

instruments that experts in pedagogy and especially psycho-pedagogy designed for their scientific field of origin. The introduction of this discourse was also different from later changes and updates. Power came as a composition and its effects corresponded to efforts at constant, endless adjustment. I will endeavour to show here that the network formed by this new set of players corresponded to the establishment of forms of representation of students and education that were closely interconnected in their way of producing diagnoses and presenting solutions. The pertinence of the school and its purposes was always related to a routine of annotation and accumulation of information on a large number of students that focused more and more on personal situations, private dossiers. A science of individualization that was bureaucratic and documental, modern pedagogy mobilized different specialists and services at high schools. Their work routines were connected to identity inscription devices. These techniques could translate the student’s properties, abilities and energies into documental artifacts: tables, letters, diagrams, and measurements… The twentieth-century high school was more like a stage, in that subjectivity was regarded as a calculable force and was visible in a writing network that involved not only traditional education administrators but also scholars of the body and soul available at the time. When it came to highschool education, the Portuguese State spoke through directors, teachers, physicians and school visitors. Let us see exactly how this enunciation system worked.

A map of the modern high school: the director The directors were extremely important in the construction of the foundations of modern secondary education. The mere list of competences assigned to them and the types of reports that they were obliged to write about the students would be enough for any observer to conclude that a policy aimed explicitly at increasing concrete forms of control over the high-school population was accompanied by an extraordinary increase in discourse on education practices that just kept growing. The head of the institution seemed gradually to lead to a huge textual apparatus that would also be binding on all other functionaries. Indeed, it was this possibility of being able to produce, trigger and centralize myriad reports and records on the students from all the players in education that I believe best personified his status as leader. The prerogatives and forms of expression to which the director was bound in the first half of the twentieth century clearly showed the strategic intentions that resulted in multiple innovations in education

206

Chapter Eight

and created the right circumstances for them to flourish. The map of complete modern education would gradually be established. Historian João Barroso (1995, I, 552) regarded the obligation to draft an annual report on the situation of education and teaching activities as a way of ‘showing the integration of high school into current rules and guidelines’. This resulted from the fact that the document had to be drafted in accordance with increasingly detailed, comprehensive parameters. This meant that the high school director was also subject to a type of power that obliged ordinary players to discourse accurately and truthfully on realities that their superiors hoped had actually happened. In fact, the director was actually creative in describing the ways in which his institution had managed to fulfil programs and goals set by the central administration every school year. After he had established this scenario of compliance, he could then set out his own ideas, proposals, criticisms and even complaints. The very important fact that this report had no named recipient, as it was addressed to a central department of the Ministry of Education, but could also have been printed and circulated as an ordinary periodical, placed the director in an ambivalent position. His report would be viewed internally and externally and he had to decide where he should press further or otherwise show restraint in his descriptions, opinions and objections. But the annual report was not limited to his writing obligations. As time went by, certainly from the 1920s onwards, a growing number of circular letters ordered directors to collect and systematize sundry information on education and its output. Between January 19, 1935 and September 22, 1955, the Direcção-Geral do Ensino Liceal [Directorate-General of High School Education] sent out no less than 2 000 circulars to directors, most of them requesting clarifications and information. The job of narrator and the role of director blend together. The decree that founded Portuguese high schools in 1836, set out that, at the end of the school year, the High School Board headed by the director, at that time the dean of teachers, had to send the Directorate-General of Studies ‘a status report on studies at the high school, containing the causes of progress or decline and the establishment’s statistics’ (Decree of 17/11/1836). In the 1860s, all legislation maintained the rule that the director would correspond with the Director-General of Public Instruction and that he would write an annual report on the high school’s economic and academic status. The Regulation of September 9, 1863 said that this obligation should be accompanied by ‘all the necessary documents and a synopsis of resolutions’ made by the High School Board. Ten years later, it was decreed that directors’ reports should be ‘accompanied by teachers' annual reports, tables of statistics and other appropriate documents’ (Decree of

The Portuguese State and Modern Education

207

31/3/1873). Jaime Moniz’s reform went further. It spoke of the need to ‘organize’ a report and also ‘publish’ it as a yearbook. In 1906, the Director-General of Public Instruction, Agostinho de Campos, required the management of each high school to submit ‘a special report on school excursions taking place at the end of each academic year, stating ‘clearly how the teachers understood and performed such an important part of their exalted mission’ (Circular, 25/10/1906). A new circular on November 1, 1913, printed on official government notepaper ordered directors to provide annual information about another innovation introduced in the meantime, ‘the utility of the teaching of gymnastics and the zeal and competence of those administering it’ or wishing to do so. It also required satisfying the ‘pedagogical purpose of these publications’ by including in the yearbooks ‘any works of a pedagogical nature and students’ exercises’ considered ‘worthy’. The circular reminded them that the minister of the Realm expected ‘zeal and dedication’ from directors. The 1918 reform sought to systematize the type of information that the report-yearbook should contain while also ordering that it be produced by everyone working at the institution, not only teachers. The document had to be extremely detailed. The report was an instrument of both description and construction of reality. Right from the start, its structure is associated with statistics, thereby contributing to the overall vision of man and things that the modern State wished to obtain from this science. There was even a desire to develop new tables and parameters capable of providing increasingly detailed information on the students’ performance, such as their progress. But innovative measures, such as time management, experimental education and even emerging curricular areas like gymnastics, affected the forms of the director’s writings. In a circular in 1935 and a note in 1938, the Director-General of High School Education, António Augusto Pires de Lima, issued two rules worded not very differently to the directors’ reports. A simple listing of the fields that the directors' discourse should cover (Tables I and II) showed that nothing was to be left out. The vision set out there is of a table with fields giving a complete overview of the status of high schools and their population. It is necessary to discuss the intentions behind a veritable discursive explosion that was now subject to a standardized process. It was first a question of furthering the 1918 intention of involving other high school staff in the drafting of the report. In the 1930s, the idea was that the director's annual account should be based not only on his ‘own observation and study’ but also on other reports from grade directors, buildings directors, school physicians and chairmen of oral exam committees. In

208

Chapter Eight

addition, there would be ‘services’ (‘school associations, cinema, canteens, assistance, etc.’) that would produce their ‘special reports’. The director’s job was ‘a comparison and synthesis’ and he had to attach all the documents that the institution had produced. The political effect of all this discursive production was clear, i.e. the obligation to record a wide range of practices via all those involved meant that they existed to be recorded. It was as if the reality of each high school found its own skeleton in the criteria defined from above. Secondly, the descriptive part of the report (on allocation of classes, timetables or test and exam statistics, for example) had to be accompanied by tables and charts that had to be numbered and quoted in the report. All the information was set out a second time in graphic, immediately understandable language. Finally, there was standardization. This huge documental production had to be organized and presented so that its contents could be ‘compared and studied by the director’. The collection of data and the contents and order of the report plan had to ‘abide strictly’ by the ministry’s standards. The justification at the time was that, if the information was standardized, the central services could make the ‘necessary comparison’ between establishments and draft the ‘general high school report’. Of course it was never actually written. In the 1930s, written reports were mainly a local political tool. The central State power took the form of a taxonomy that each player had to address, and in which they had to show their creative ability and further what they believed to be their mission. At each high school, domination of people and things depended on the ability of the director, teacher, doctor, and secretary to discover, combine, calculate, mobilize and compose new realities based on the fields provided. In short, the power of the State was wielded remotely, but gave each player the opportunity to become a new centre that could act at several other points in the chain (Circular, 17/8/1935 and Note, 30/6/1938). The instructions on how to fill in the items in the report show that the director was often left in the difficult position of showing how education policies had been implemented and explaining in detail every noncompliance and deficiency. It was in this situation that the integrative function was most evident. When writing his report, the director was responsible for implementing the government’s main education options. There was the grade system, for example. He had to fully explain how it was put into operation. He first indicated the ‘criterion’ used to allocate students to classes and how the teachers had met ‘all the provisions of the teaching sequence, the concentration of the smallest number of teachers in each class, the homogeneity of teaching groups in each grade’, while also giving a satisfactory ‘justification’ for ‘any deviations from regulatory

The Portuguese State and Modern Education

Table I- Director’s General Report 1935 A. General Services: I – The building and its annexes II – High School Personnel III – Student enrolment IV - Composition grade and class teacher groups V – Timetables VI – School board meetings VII – Grade directors’ meetings VIII – Coordination of teaching in all grades IX – Education performance B. Grades: I – Classrooms II – Grade personnel III – Distribution of students per class IV – Functioning of classes V – Discipline in class VI – Class meetings VII – Fulfilment programs VIII – Coordination of teaching in each grade IX – Class performance X – School associations XI – Study visits and school excursions XII – School exhibitions XIII – School parties XIV – Other educational work C. The premises D. Exams E. General extracurricular activity: I – School Associations II – School excursions involving students from more than one grade III – School cinema IV – Optional objects V – School assistance VI – School canteens VII – School exhibitions VIII – School parties IX – Local or national commemorations X – Any other educational activities F. Day students G. School health and Hygiene H. School administration I. Final part J. Tables (Circular of 17/8/1935)



209

210

Chapter Eight

Table II – Director’s General Report 1938 A. Building and its annexes B. High School Personnel C. Cycles 1. Installation of each cycle 2. Students 3. Personnel of each cycle 4. Timetables 5. Functioning of classes and sessions 6. Discipline 7. Board meetings 8. Fulfilment of programs 9. Coordination of teaching 10. Exams (boards) 11. Performance (eliminatory subjects) 12. Performance (non-eliminatory subjects) D. Premises 1. Premises with their own private director 2. Library 3. Other premises E. Extra-curricular activities 1. School associations 2. School assistance 3. School prizes 4. Study rooms 5. Useful learning outside syllabus 6. School canteens 7. Cultural sessions 8. School cinema 9. Study visits and school excursions 10. School exhibitions 11. School parties and commemorations 12. Participation in educational parties and commemorations 13. School games 14. Other extracurricular activities at the high school or with its participation 15. Mocidade Portuguesa 16. High school cooperation associations F. School health and hygiene G. School administration H. Final part (Note from 30/6/1938)



The Portuguese State and Modern Education

211

standards’. Regarding class timetables, he had to provide information on the ‘placement of subjects in the different teaching hours’, where he once again had to offer reasons for any deviation from ‘regulatory and pedagogical standards’. He had to give details on the number of class meetings and meetings of the class director board and summarize the matters discussed at them. On the subject of teaching coordination, he had to recount the actions of responsible teachers and report ‘special cases’ in which their work had been adversely affected. He had to write general considerations on the programs and also report ‘special cases’. He obviously had to inform the central authorities of ‘untaught subject matter’ by ‘subject and class’ and of the ‘reasons for any non-compliance’ (Circular, 17/8/1935). Another important area that both documents sent to directors was the so-called extra-curricular activities. The list of fields shows the long road already travelled since the beginning of the twentieth century to assert the modern idea of complete education. There were even substantial differences between the two in this regard. The 1938 Note covered the initiatives in Carneiro Pacheco’s reform in 1936, essentially resulting from the appearance of Mocidade Portuguesa.1 The concern with keeping an exhaustive record of these activities was, in itself, a sign of its importance and we might easily conclude that there were two parallel high schools, such was the number of non-teaching activities. The new pedagogical principle of permanent occupation of students with recreational, cultural and study activities, or even the high disciplinary value of rewards for the best grades, was being introduced all over the country in the 1930s after being tested mainly at Liceu Pedro Nunes in Lisbon, run by the same director since 1906, António Sá Oliveira. But the rules show that the overriding concern of the Ministry of National Education was assessing the success achieved by students and teachers. More than in any chapter of his report, the director had to provide information on the interest and results of non-teaching activities. The form obliged him to collect information on this too. In these new areas of socialization of students, it was necessary to identify and promote the motivation of a large number of teachers in tasks that were not normally theirs and represented an added workload that was rarely paid. The director had to indentify everyone who contributed to the construction of an active secondary school. Albeit symbolic, the inclusion of a teacher's name in the report sent to the Director-General would mean recognition and was itself an important reward for them. It was a matter of involving

 1



New State’s youth organization.

212

Chapter Eight

teachers in a new territory defined by modern education, one that was aimed at developing institutional structures governed by the students. Extracurricular activities were regarded as promoting initiative and demonstrating a capacity for achievement. The collection in the Ministry of Education Historical Archives between the 1935-36 and 1954-1955 school years, i.e. when the 1938 circular and the 1938 Note were in force, shows a number of very different attitudes among the various schools. Out of 760 possible reports, 409 reports were found, which represented significant progress in relation to previous years. The 1947 reform set up the High School Inspectorate and obliged directors to send a copy of their report. Supervision and control mechanisms were even tougher with the closer presence of the inspector, who had to analyze not only ‘organization processes’ and ‘results achieved’ but also ‘the way in which the reports were written’. In fact, practically half of the reports found (203) are on the eight years prior to the formation of the inspectorate. In conclusion, there was a connection, as a greater degree of control also meant a greater amount of discourse.

Pedagogical ties to the class system: the teachers The same kind of principle underlies my characterization of the teachers' situation. The oldest demand made on them was set out in the Regulations for National High Schools in 1873, signed by Rodrigues Sampaio. Their duties included drafting ‘a report each year’ on the teaching method that they used and their compliance with the program, any difficulties they may have experienced in doing so, progress of the studies entrusted to them and other information about ‘students’ progress and instruction’ (Decree of 31/3/1873). That same year, Counselor Jaime Moniz, who was Director-General of Public Instruction, issued a circular to high schools pointing to the failure of many teachers in fulfilling this obligation. He found that the methods and results reported by those who showed ‘intelligence in giving lessons [and] were used to coping with students’ diverse aptitudes’, were ‘precious and always indispensable data’ to higher functionaries who made decisions on public education. The government ‘demanded the information requested’ from the teachers, awaited it with natural ‘solicitude’ and would not tolerate any failure to comply. The Director-General would then analyze the small collection that he had managed to amass. His analyses already suggested that this report could be a tool for measuring and standardizing teaching practices. Teachers could only mention ‘the subject matters set out in the



The Portuguese State and Modern Education

213

regulations’. That was the right road. Jaime Moniz championed a modern nuance in the unification of discourse: It was to wish everyone to limit themselves and adhere to the same rules and be governed by them, without prejudice to the fair breadth of thought and demonstration, which the government certainly does not want to foreclose and is actually pleased to see.

The Director-General used the rest of the Circular, in fact its largest part, to address the essentials of the teacher's work. In governance of the subjects, it was important for the programs to be ‘followed to the letter’, unless there was an ‘exception justified and authorized by the Government’. But this was not a blind, unthinking, obedience identical in all circumstances. As mentioned above, respect for rules and personal initiative should govern teachers’ actions. It was really a question of interpreting or performing an adapted execution regarding the students and the ‘duration of the lesson’. Jaime Moniz required intelligence in the dosage and mixture of the different components, a balance between ‘science’, ‘legal provisions’ and ‘teachers’ practice’, so as to ‘set the maximum and minimum for the teaching of each subject’. Along with an economy of subject matters, there was management of classroom activities. Half of each lesson should be used to ‘give the necessary explanations for an understanding of the next lesson’. Here, the DirectorGeneral reminded them that he could not ‘allow each one’s free will to change practice’, as the legal provision rightly said. A third type of recommendation had to do with exercises or ‘practical methods’, as Moniz called them. He reminded teachers that exercises were the most powerful and effective teaching tools and explained: a proposition which can only be grasped by the highest intelligence when explained in words becomes obvious to all, more lasting in the memory, more engraved in the understanding if developed or clarified by practical exercises. It is not enough then to just know the rule; it is necessary to implement it, become accustomed to using it, and that is only achieved with practical exercises.

The same principles applied to the teaching of modern languages, which should be done ‘using the spoken word’. Finally there was the issue of student discipline. Teachers would have to strictly maintain ‘good order’ and ‘obedience to school laws and regulations’. Moniz knew that it was impossible to build a network of agents interconnected to the same pedagogical program without the circulation of documents. The teachers’ obligation to write reports was also a way for the school authorities to



214

Chapter Eight

identify new problems, which would result in new documents giving a clearer explanation of policies by return of post. If we wish to continue to examine the ways of controlling teachers in documents, we have to jump far forward. Up to 1935, the issue of teacher selection, ‘one of the most serious problems in secondary education’, brought back mandatory reports. The justification was that it was necessary to find objective ways of assessing their professional competence. A classification of teachers based only on their academic and professional diplomas seemed insufficient to the authorities at the time. Theoretical knowledge should not be enough for career progression and it was necessary to find a way of enshrining and valuing ‘years of good, effective service’. Once again, in this delicate matter, the government only came to a decision after consulting with high school teachers. The entire analysis of practice was based on a detailed report. The external visibility of the teachers’ work with their students tended to increase. It was a question of directly associating discourse and the promotion of the profession. The struggle for a permanent position as a teacher entailed submitting a description demonstrating one’s adaptation to the high school’s main principles and targets. Each teacher described his class planning and teaching methods, performance and showed a voluntary, committed participation in extracurricular activities (Decree 25078 of 26/2/1935). The Ministry of Education Historical Archive contains some of these reports, though without the accompanying opinions. The collection contains only 145 documents for the period from the 1934-35 to 1938-39 academic years. It is not very representative of the teaching population of the time. The situation only changed again after 1947, after the formation of the High School Inspectorate. In its broad appreciation of compliance with legal requirements, this new central department of the Ministry of National Education was directly involved in the classification of teachers, with reference to their ‘professional competence and action’. The process was once again a report. Except that this time, the entire teaching population was obliged, though as a ‘right’ and no longer a duty, to write a detailed report on their activity during the school year. Everything else remained the same. The report had to be sent to the inspectorate via the directors, who attached ‘information’ (Decree 36508 of 17/9/1947). For the measure’s first school year, 1948-49, there are 117 reports, i.e. almost as many as in the previous four years. All the documents have been stamped by the inspectorate and some also include the director’s opinion. The most important aspect, however, is to directly relate this increase in the number of documents with a much stricter control over teachers’ work. The inspectorate laid down that teachers should be classified on a number



The Portuguese State and Modern Education

215

of items so that no area was left out. It covered ‘teaching results’, ‘accuracy and spirit of fairness when judging the students’, ‘attendance and punctuality’, ‘sense of discipline especially in setting an example and using persuasion’, ‘a caring attitude to students’, ‘involvement in extracurricular work’ and ‘capacity for acquiring new knowledge and use of the most effective pedagogical methods’ (Decree 36508 of 17/9/1947). I have just transcribed another declaration of intent typical of modernity, directly connected to the optimization of a disciplinary device that forced educators into free initiative, personal responsibility, self-restraint and the use of essentially persuasive authority over their charges. This brief overview shows that the type of power that they had over their students was the same as others had over them. The teachers were thus also subject to the governance rule that I have been highlighting: there is no distinction between the subject and object of power.

The expansion of soul governance technologies: physicians and school visitors The rightful and de facto arrival of another set of trained, qualified players, i.e. physicians and school nurses, is for me the most perfect illustration that the horizons of our educational experience, as established in different documental processes to classify and distinguish students, show that a multiplicity of forms of subjectification is not a modern-day characteristic. For practically the whole first half of the twentieth century, things happened as if it was still absolutely necessary to determine the properties, capacities and energy of the soul of the entire population in view of the socializing goals that secondary school had been pursuing since the end of the previous century. The hygiene program would lead to the development of new languages and new discursive practices. Grids and tables, vocabulary, rules and assessment systems began to circulate to include and literally enlarge the same type of experience for which the school authorities strove. The arrival of the psy sciences in high school meant that subjectivity and inter-subjectivity could effectively be converted into rational student management objects and become driving forces for their inclusion in school life. In the twentieth-century high school, there was always room for the appearance of new parameters for recording differences. Individual traits were produced not only from observation and examination, but also from vigilance and standardizing judgments of the student's body and mind, always paving the way for different data recording techniques. The student archives grew exponentially with contributions from medical, psycho-pedagogical centres determined



216

Chapter Eight

to record and encode all the particular variations. Personal identity and subjectivity began to lead to specific theoretic categories, a specific language. The specialists from these scientific fields referred to the paths of good not directly in the name of a political or religious interest, but in light of a scientific truth. This truth was not designed to imprison the students but rather to guarantee them autonomy, freedom and personal satisfaction at the end of the schooling process. There was no doubt a great, pressing ambition here fusing the technologies of the self with the techniques of the self. It was a question of making the language and criteria provided act on the student’s body, thoughts and conduct so that they could perceive their own faults, deviations or vices or project their ideas of fulfilment and personal happiness. The success of this mechanical adaptation of language would depend on the students’ capacity to recognize themselves, for better or worse, as a certain type of person emanating from the normative judgments provided by the new educators on what he was and could and should be. In order to establish the symbiosis, young students were encouraged to perform self-inspection and self-problematization while entering into a relation of therapeutic exchange by confessing their most intimate secrets to the physician, that new expert on the soul. They also took part in those games through which human beings regulate each other and themselves in light of certain games of identity truth. There was nothing ontological about their relationship with themselves or their peers; it was all historical, social. The success of this operation would depend on the students’ ability to regard morality as their own voice as speakers of a common language. Personal identity would become a reflexive project, personal self-construction, as sociologist Giddens so often insists when talking about a politics of personal life. The education authorities regarded school hygiene as a problem warranting special attention in late 1901, when the School Health Inspectorate was set up (ISE), along with the Technical Directorate of School Constructions (Decree 8, December 24). The high school reform of 1905 (Decree of August 19), extended health inspection along the same lines to secondary schools and actually added nine more. High school students would have to undergo a special exam ‘to determine the Swedish gymnastics exercises’ that each one would have to do. The government also decided that each high school in Lisbon, Coimbra and Porto would have a health inspector, while those in the rest of the country would have a ‘local health delegate or sub-delegate’. But little was done. In the 1920s, the Boletim da Inspecção Geral de Sanidade Escolar [Bulletin of the Inspectorate General of School Health] – the institution’s name had



The Portuguese State and Modern Education

217

changed slightly – recognized that the seven high school health inspectors ‘were unable to make their action bear fruit due to their low numbers and exaggerated size of the areas under their supervision’ (S. A. 1923, 1). In any case, even though it never went beyond the legislative level, the doctors’ competences were clarified further in 1911. Their first task was inspection and supervision of high school buildings ‘from a health point of view’ (Decree 2 of 5/26/1911, Decree of 8/2/1911). Another immediate task of school physicians, to which they ‘had to devote great efforts’, was the observation of each individual student. For the first time, the means and processes for standardized registration of each student's physical characteristics were tailored for gathering real knowledge about the entire high school population. It was the controversial ‘medical anthropometric exam’ that was in question, particularly in 1911. School medical services were restructured again in 1918 and 1919. Physicians gained greater freedom of movement and were not confined to the school health office. The law set out that they could ‘sit in on school work and visit all the rooms in the building’ especially those ‘assigned to teaching and take part in board meetings and meetings of teachers and students to learn about school life from a medical point of view and offer an opinion or advice’ on matters that had to do with ‘students' physical or mental health’ (Decree 4695, of 23/7/1918). This organization continued until the second half of the 1920s, when – so we learn – the interest in hygiene reasons had dwindled significantly. A few months after the formal creation of the Estado Novo, in 1933, the Salazar government set up the Directorate-General of School Health (DGSE), which was to oversee all matters pertaining to ‘the health, medico-pedagogical and hygiene conditions of students in State and private schools and of their teaching resources and buildings’. The school physician was the ‘executor of school health laws and regulations’, working with a view to ‘not only the protection of the students’ physical health but also and mainly to the necessary conditions for the formation and development of their character’. In addition to the competences set out in 1918, he was authorized to ‘provide any individual assistance’ that he saw fit (Decree 22751, of 28/6/1933). Another new measure was the introduction of the job of school visitor at the directorate-general. The will to institutionalize these nurses, which had been expressed since the 1920s, was finally fulfilled by decrees 25 676 of June 25, 1936 and 27 442 of December 31, 1936. They placed 28 nurses at different high schools in mainland Portugal. Working as physicians' assistants, these visitors initially seemed mainly devoted to



218

Chapter Eight

policing family life, thereby finally answering decades of doubt on the part of parents about the health care and upbringing being provided to students. School doctors and visitors were also involved in the production of detailed reports on their work at high schools. The difference from the other public servants that I mentioned above was that the DGSE required more frequent reports. From 1935 for the physicians and 1937 for the visitors, they had to write monthly, quarterly, six-monthly and annual reports. But the most regular practice was the production of one annual report. The collection that I managed to gather, which had already been established by Carlos Abreu (1999), is relatively small. It consists of 169 physicians’ reports and 77 reports by school visitors. There were three types of physicians’ reports, all of them typed and around 40 pages long. The variations in format had to do with a variable accommodation between quantitative and qualitative information. The writers make an effort to systematize and correlate the information on the students’ physical condition, though there are references to their discipline and vigilance in certain cases. Yet, this possibility of changing from the whole to a part was perfectly feasible due to the tables that always accompanied the medical reports. They are the high point of the observation, inspection and diagnosis of each student. The many fields filled in by the doctor might show a student number and student case. These forms allowed all their statistics to be cross-referenced. While the largest field referred to physical disorders, they also clearly attested to systematic observation of the mind, following up on the central goal of fostering student’s moral health. We find expressions such as ‘individual action’ and ‘results of therapeutic and psychological action’. The doctor’s job was not only to ‘direct’ the student, like any other educator, but also to ‘correct’, ‘combat’ and ‘discipline’ whenever he came across ‘deficient formation of their mind’. The school health authorities agreed that the real value of the work done by their representatives at high schools was their ability to produce a most detailed casuistic report. This was why blank spaces were being left for considerations on results of psychological observations. Around 25 years after the start of debates on school health, the Directorate-General of School Health was able to record relatively regular information on the school population for at least two decades running. Their inspectorate areas were the calculation centres that would promote standardization of collection processes and the aggregation and even publication of the results of observations, expressed for example in the tables that I included above. The inspectors’ intervention was highly decisive here, as was publication of the medical and pedagogical journal A



The Portuguese State and Modern Education

219

Saúde Escolar (School Health), with regular issues between 1936 and 1942, and which became a platform for discussing methods and also evidently published total results. This journal, which was provided for in the decree that regulated the DGSE, was a decisive step towards the mapping of the psychological and physical characteristics of the high school population. It even became a rare, if not unique tool in which a central administration body discussed and tried to fine tune criteria for structuring statistical science by accumulating and tabulating facts about the population that it governed. The institutionalization of medical pedagogy very clearly illustrates how high schools saw the reinforcement of this goal, which we know was increasingly consensual, of also becoming a machine for constant examination of the student. What I will endeavour to demonstrate now is how this calculation technology was aimed first and foremost at the student's mind and resulted in an extraordinary increase in situations of surveillance. So-called ‘psychological action’ was commonly regarded at the time as the high point of the school physician's intervention, for which ‘all the activity aimed at the sum’ was nothing more than a ‘preparatory study’ (Pinto, 1936, 135). Inspector Fernando Correia insisted that physicians working under his command at high schools get used to collecting elements from everywhere ‘for psychological classification and mental and moral orientation of the students’, and conducted ‘as many psychological exams as possible in order to avoid hasty conclusions’. The work of school health in the field of education had to be based on ‘the best possible knowledge of the student’. The school physician, who was a ‘mere psychology apprentice’ at the time, was obliged to avoid empiricism and follow ‘the rules of scientific observation used routinely in clinical practice’, placing them at ‘the service of psychotherapy of both the sane and the psychopath’ (Correia 1936a, 81; 1936b, 268; 1937, 75). Students were subject to the principle of mandatory visibility. The need to ascertain their psychological status meant that school physicians sought ‘the most favourable opportunities and conditions’. They would first begin an informal conversation with the student in the corridor, street or café, watch him during recess and at play, in canteens, school associations and the boy scouts and on excursions. The school health representative also had to collect information from family members, ‘teachers, roommates, classmates and friends’ and interview the students themselves, Fernando Correia noted (1936a, 81; 1936b, 268). Inspector Cortez Pinto (1936, 151) stressed the importance of studying the adolescents, ‘more often, in theory classes and written exercise classes’.



220

Chapter Eight

He felt that ‘observation of students' attitudes’ in the latter type of class was ‘particularly interesting’, as they were all ‘forced to pay attention to their school work’. It was an excellent opportunity to check on the student's ‘calm or agitation’. An analysis of daily exercise books also provided ‘crucial elements to psychological observation, such as method, cleanliness, clarity of exposition, orderliness, language, spelling, etc.’ No plan or perspective was out of reach to the school physician. He was, in essence, a panoptic supplement. However, the medical and disciplinary apparatus did not manifest itself only in these visual operations. Psychological diagnosis also usually involved a consultation, though not an ordinary one. Direct psychological observation in the consulting room entailed a very well staged and thought-out ceremony. In his introductory article on the school medical services for the 1935-36 school year (“Dos serviços médico-escolares da 1ª Área durante o ano de 1935-36”), Inspector Daniel Monteiro noted a report by one of his physicians, Assunção Teixeira, working at Liceu Passos Manuel in Lisbon, and the way he filled in the individual forms in consultations. As information on the ritual of assertion of the doctor's power is rare, the document requires careful analysis. In his consultations during psychological exams, Assunção Teixeira said that he worked ‘in a way that was the most prudent and most economical and least uncomfortable for the student’, in order to avoid displeasure, particularly ‘on the part of parents whose unfounded misgivings about their children’s medical inspections’ was ‘well-known and highly prejudicial in interviews by predecessors’. As a rule he gathered three or four students in his office and began to interview them jointly, asking (i) ‘about their school results: favourite subject, number of absences, main reason, etc.’; (ii) about their ‘favourite games and pastimes’, (iii) ‘what they want to do when they leave school’, (iv) their ‘greatest wish’ and ‘greatest fear’. But the purpose of these questions was not, as it would seem at first sight, to get ‘direct answers’, although they were often ‘very interesting and elucidative’. These and other questions taken from questionnaires such as those of Decroly, Rossolimo or Adler, were simply ‘to get the boys talking’, as the resulting conversation almost always showed the doctor a series of ‘qualities, faults or tendencies’ which he could record directly on the form, immediately after the ‘impressions gathered by other means’, i.e. ‘information from parents and teachers, spontaneous statements from friends and employees and direct observation of conduct inside and outside the high school’ (Assunção Teixeira quoted by Monteiro, 1936, 391).



The Portuguese State and Modern Education

221

After this initial phase of the interview, the students were then separated. The physician kept one with him and ‘sent the others to sit on the other side of the office’, though where he could continue to watch them. The questioning that followed was also not of interest in itself. A Liceu Passos Manuel physician explained that the ‘questions about previous diseases’ and the ‘general somatic exam’ conducted ‘separately and with the proper discretion’ were to pave the way for ‘immediate or future confession of intimate matters’ that the doctor was interested in hearing about. To keep the student talking, he would ask him half a dozen questions such as ‘his parent or guardian's occupation, number and age of siblings, number of rooms, windows and people’ at home. The aim of all this dynamic revolving around their life stories was to bring the students out of their shells and get them to reveal themselves even if they did not even suspect they were able to. The doctor needed to establish a climate of trust required for the confession, the key moment of the whole ritual. Assunção Teixeira gave numerous explanations on how to get students to want to disclose their secrets and how he gave them different treatments. Persuasion, suggestion and individual interests were the conceptual levers of medical power. And there was more. The exam principle surrounded the high school student with documenting techniques with which they would be described, measured and compared with others as individuals. I am referring here to the intelligence tests and collective surveys or questionnaires designed to assess affective disposition that had been spreading widely from the mid1930s onwards. It is in this relational dimension that it makes sense to talk about permanent comparison and of the student's inclusion in an endless network of annotations, the permanent power of the written word. The criteria describing high school students' physical and psychological characteristics configured not only the space but also the limits of each one's truth. The structuring of the reality expressed two principles that we can call grammatocentrism and calculability. The former represents the way in which power knowledge was wielded in writing and the latter allocates a quantifiable value to each student, thereby also making him or her a calculable person. In this type of artifact, we can clearly see how a scientific discourse can be linked to a disciplinary practice. The idiosyncratic contents, associated here with disorders of the body and mind, were definitively conditioned by the words that these psy specialists coined to describe them. Diseases and deviations could be ordered and systematically classified to make them intelligible, analyzable and therefore controllable.



222

Chapter Eight

Although medical pedagogy in the 1930s and 1940s was very far from asserting that religious spiritualism was a myth, it was in a position to prove that it had a scientific taxonomy capable of drawing out the student's inner reality. Where before the Catholic Church saw substances and essences, secular positivism introduced rules and disorders.

Conclusion It seems legitimate to conclude that no social practice exists outside the words used in each era to describe it. It is as if there were no distinction between reality and representation and the destiny of individuals and populations were played out in the circulation, appropriation and manipulation of ordinary vocabularies. Determining the discursive artifacts that the State and psycho-pedagogical science produced in order to transform the student into a social artifact and establish the processes of creation and circulation of texts is, quite literally, making history. I believe that the truth of a documental source lies in the purposes for which it was written and the way it was transacted. Subjectivity was thought of as a calculable force and became visible through a network of writing that involved not only traditional administrators of education but also scholars of the body and soul available at the time. In their comprehensive and microphysical contemplation, the discursive practices produced by directors and teachers, physicians and nurses from the 1930s onwards materialize and offer us a reflection of the landscape of the modern school in its entirety. It is a landscape in which the transmission of knowledge was to be done actively and adapt to each student’s personal characteristics. It is one in which education goals should take the form of an incessant churning out of activities and occupations not included in the syllabus and in which the standardization of the student should assume the existence of a device for constructing a dossier for each student and surprising all those who are about to cross or have already crossed the boundary of deviation. There can be no doubt that the network constituted by this new set of players corresponded to the fixation of forms of representation of the student and education, which are very closely linked in their way of conceiving educative diagnoses and presenting their solutions. In this period there was constant growth in records, in which attention to the student entailed not only measuring and analyzing intellectual, creative and physical capacities, but also inventorying and describing forms of conduct. Endeavouring to talk about all of them within the frame of their pedagogical, psychological, medical language enables us to start building



The Portuguese State and Modern Education

223

a historical narrative that will be far from a merely epistemological project.

Bibliography Abreu, Carlos. Limpos, Sadios e Dóceis: História da Saúde Escolar em Potugal no Estado Novo (1930 a 1960). II Vols. Lisboa: Masters Dissertation, Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciências da Educação, 1999. Barroso, João. Os Liceus: Organização pedagógica e administração (1836-1960). II Vols. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian/Junta Nacional de Investigação Científica e Tecnológica, 1999. Correia, Fernando. “Os Serviços Médico-Escolares nos Liceus da 3ª Área no Primeiro Período de 1935-1936”, in Saúde Escolar 2 (1), 1936a. —. “Um Ano de Medicina Escolar nos Liceus Portugueses”, in Saúde Escolar 4 (1), 1936b. —. “O Serviço de Inspecção Médico-Escolar na 3ª Área em 1935-1936 II”, in Saúde Escolar 10 (2), 1937. Direcção Geral da Saúde Escolar. Saúde Escolar: Directrizes e organização duma iniciativa do Estado Novo. Lisboa: Editorial Império, 1936. Foucault, Michel. Vigiar e Punir. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1999 [1977]. Gordon, Colin. “Governmental rationality: An introduction”, in The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality (eds. G. Burchell, C. Gordon & P. Miller). London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. Monteiro, Daniel. “Dos Serviços Médico-Escolares da 1ª Área da Saúde Escolar durante o ano lectivo de 1935-1936”, in Saúde Escolar 7 (1), 1936. Nóvoa, António. Do Mestre-Escola ao Professor do Ensino Primário: Subsídios para a história da profissão docente em Portugal (séculos XVI-XX). Lisboa: Universidade Técnica de Lisboa/Instituto Superior de Educação Física, 1986. Ó, Jorge Ramos do. O Governo de Si Mesmo: Modernidade pedagógica e encenações disciplinares do aluno liceal (último quartel do século XIX – meados do século XX). Lisboa: Educa, 2003. —. “Pedagogia Moderna em Tempos de Conservadorismo PolíticoSocial”, in V Encontro Ibérico de História da Educação: Renovação Pedagógica (coord. Ernesto Candeias Martins). Coimbra: Alma Azul, 2005. Pinto, Américo Cortez. “Notas e considerações sobre os serviços da medicina escolar”, in Saúde Escolar 3 (1), 1936.



224

Chapter Eight

Rose, Nikolas. Governing the Soul: The shaping of private self. London: Routledge, 1990. S. A. Serviços de sanidade escolar. Boletim da Inspecção Geral de Sanidade Escolar, 1 (I), 1923.



CHAPTER NINE STATE, CHURCH AND SOCIETY: THE 1911 LAW OF SEPARATION AND THE STRUGGLE FOR HEGEMONY OVER A COMMON SUBJECT DIOGO DUARTE

The establishment of the Republic in Portugal, on 5 October 1910, brought about a transformation in the relations between State and Church on an unprecedented scale in the country’s history. On 20 April 1911, following a series of laws aimed at the laicization of the State, its institutions and society, the Law of Separation of State and Churches is published and, for the first time, the State relinquishes religious confessionalism. The laicization of the State and society was not only an old republican aspiration and a pivotal piece in its ideology but also proved, in that revolutionary conjuncture, indispensable to the new regime’s consolidation, especially given the weakness of republicanism outside of the major cities, on the one hand, and the strong social embeddedness of the Catholic Church, on the other.1 Hence, with regards to religion, unlike what occurred in other spheres, the Provisional Government and subsequent republican governments were steadfast in their principles and made it clear, almost from day one, that laicization would rank high in the priorities of the new regime. The present chapter aims to approach the relations between Church and State in contemporary history, taking as its primary focus the early years of the First Republic. Given the attention this topic has drawn, as my argument unfolds I will engage in close and continual dialogue with the

 1

In Portugal, Catholicism was overwhelmingly predominant. According to the 1900 Census, 99,8% of the population declared itself Catholic. Cf. Neto (2009, 130).

226

Chapter Nine

historiography on the period in question. My starting point is an understanding of the Law of Separation not as a historical watershed in these relations, both as the acme of a lengthy process, that is to say, the offshoot of deep social, cultural and political transformations that can be traced back many years, and as its most momentous and striking episode, resonating throughout the decades that followed. Hence, the present text will briefly focus on laic institutional manifestations from prior to the establishment of the Republic, which the republican regime carries forward. It will seek to grasp this process as a shift in social and State structures in Portugal, rather than as a sign of the ideological radicalism of a minority that comes to power at a precise historical moment. Furthermore, it rests on the assumption that one cannot fully grasp this process if one stays within the bounds of the terms set by the two institutions that define it, the State and the Church, as this would mean binding other groups and agents they interact with, and the control of which they dispute, to conceptual parameters and rationales that are to a large extent foreign to them. Republican rhetoric and ideology are often described as aspiring to the revival of the nation; a goal that would imply a transformation of mentalities clouded, from the Republican point of view, by religion and superstition, as a result of the historical presence and weight of the Catholic Church in the country’s history. The Separation of Churches and State was, to the eyes of many, the most decisive step to be taken in that direction, eliminating once and for all the direct influence the Church wielded on the country’s political institutions, thus clearing the path for new State institutions, closer to the Republican ideal and capable of steering the population towards a rational and laic civic conscience. However, to reduce the course of the laicization process to an ideological question, grounded on a positivist notion of history and confined to a group of intellectuals and politicians invested in its advancement and with no other end in sight but the materialization of their ideal is to paint a truncated, incomplete picture. Not only was laicization not an aberrant phenomenon at the time, but it came as part of a wider set of transformations taking place in countries all over the world, transformations that were triggered, to a large extent, by industrialization and historical events such as the French Revolution. Furthermore, the project of laicization was not exclusive to the Republican ideology, nor should we attribute or circumscribe its onset to the Republican regime. Laicization of society is part and parcel of a wider process of dismantling the social and State organization of the Old Regime that had been gaining considerable momentum in Portugal from the early



State, Church and Society

227

nineteenth century. What the establishment of the Republic brought about was a radicalization of this process in terms of the relations between the State and the Catholic Church, with a dramatic reversal of the terms in which this relation was framed, as the supremacy of the power of the State was unequivocally asserted and consolidated. In Portugal, from arguably as early as the mid-eighteenth century, one can pinpoint the implementation of a host of measures geared towards the reduction or alteration of the role of the Church within the civil sphere and within the State’s political institutions. From then onwards, and especially during the period of Constitutional Monarchy, this process became all the more intense. In fact, part of the laic laws passed by Republicans, from virtually as soon as the regime was established, and many of the articles in the Law of Separation presented in 1911, can be traced back to measures introduced during previous decades. Indeed, in many instances they were a re-enactment of measures that had been revoked in the meantime, or a revision of their terms and scope. At first glance, the most striking and original aspect of this law, at least on a symbolic level, is the cessation of the official religion, which the Portuguese State had embraced over the course of its history. Hence, the Law of Separation should be seen as the pinnacle of a process unfolding across the previous century, rather than a radical manifestation of anticlericalism reducible to a specific political conjuncture or to the idiosyncratic interests of a small clique of politicians.

Historiography and the “religious question” Despite what has been said above, the Law of Separation and the Republican laicizing action have commonly been interpreted as a radical manifestation of the regime’s social untimeliness, which in some historiography is given an instrumental role in framing their account. In the introduction to a recent work addressing that political period, the editors, Fernando Rosas and Maria Fernanda Rollo, identify the persistence of an interpretation of the period in question anchored on an a-historical reading which considers it incomprehensible in light of the social and political realities of the country, ‘since it did not have roots in them, much less reflect them’ (Rosas and Rollo 2009, 9). The relations between State and Church that defined this historical period are generally singled out as the more clear-cut example of this dissonance between the regime and the social reality in which it established itself. Within this framework, the structural aspect of the wider transformation we have alluded to becomes indistinguishable from its contextual aspect or, at best, is pushed into the background.



228

Chapter Nine

It is within a conservative line of interpretation of the First Republic that the “religious question” comes closer to such an understanding. In fact, it is no longer perceived merely as a religious question but rather a “religious war”.2 Pulido Valente argues that Afonso Costa3 found in the “religious question” ‘a way to bring about a permanent state of war between the conservative forces and the regime’ (Valente 1999, 171). For that same reason, this conflict becomes the pivotal element in a thesis that encapsulates the early years of the Republic as “terror” or as a period of “permanent war”. In this view, the Law of Separation was nothing but ‘a declaration of war, pure and simple’ and a ‘not very subtle exercise in sectarianism and brutality’ (Idem, 183). For Rui Ramos, who subscribes to the same thesis, pushing the argument even further, “religious war” had become the ‘regime’s raison d’être’ (Ramos 2009, 587), even if he also underlines the fact that the Law of Separation could to some extent be explained as an ‘effect of fashion’, triggered by a similar law passed only five years earlier in France (Ramos 2001, 355). The historian Maria Lúcia de Brito Moura, in turn, supports the “religious war” thesis by way of an account of a violent persecution of the Church, the clergy and Catholics, all of whom, having held ‘benevolent expectations’ towards the revolution (Moura 2004, 46), end up being dragged onto ‘the battlefield’ by ‘anticlerical radicalism’ (Idem, 50).

 2

It bears noting that the term “religious war” expanded, in the meantime, well beyond the scope of the political historiography addressed here, although its use, in those works, generally takes on a different meaning and does not imply the subscription to the theses I will be highlighting in the course of my argument: e.g. Catroga (1991, 351); Ferreira (1993); Neto (2009); Salgado de Matos (2010). On the other hand, Luciano Amaral also resorts to the expression “religious war” to characterize the situation in which the country found itself, in a thesis quite close, if not similar, to that of the authors addressed in this paragraph (Ramos and Pulido Valente), to the point of stating that violence was the essence of republicanism, ‘its very nature, rather than an attempt to theorize and put in practice a liberal and democratic program typical of the revolutions that, in the nineteenth century, reproduced the French example of 1789-92, or social-democrat or socialist, as was the case in most revolutions that wanted to follow in the footsteps of, or pull against, the example of the Russian revolution of 1917’. Cf. Amaral (2011, 96). Going against the grain, Reis and Pinto challenge the pertinence of the term “religious war”, as it was used. Cf. Reis and Pinto (2011, 157-9). 3 Afonso Costa was one of the most influential figures of the First Portuguese Republic, particularly in the course of its first few years. In the Provisional Government, announced immediately after the revolution, he was given the Justice and Cults cabinet post. He was the author of the Law of Separation of State and Churches, promulgated on 20 April 1911.



State, Church and Society

229

Although she does not consider “religious war” to be a new historical phenomenon, tracing its origins back to the period under the Marquis of Pombal in the eighteenth century, she argues that in the First Republic it becomes ‘a new reality’, characterized ‘by clashes with an unprecedented degree of violence’ (Idem, 32). In line with many research studies addressing anticlericalism, in Moura’s work the latter is framed as, first and foremost, an ideological and vanguard phenomenon, thus sidelining its various structural aspects and even its presence among the people (where its expression was often autonomous from the so-called “political anticlericalism”, the latter being more closely tied to the political elites and which, generally speaking, was of an anti-religious nature4). It is this assumption that supports a portrait of a religious, indeed messianic, Republicanism, eager to bring into being, forcefully and without delay, a “perfect world”, a stance which would account for and justify its use of violence as a legitimate instrument (Moura 2004, 29-30, 239 and 242). Furthermore, this millenarist fanaticism, devoid of any material grounding, would be the basis for the inevitable collapse of the Republic and its inability to overcome the problems that crossed its path. It should be highlighted, though, that the “religious question” also plays a pivotal role in the work of authors that follow distinct lines of interpretation. Fernando Rosas, for instance, who puts forwards a reading of the First Republic framed within the context of a crisis of the liberal system which had been gaining momentum since the last decade of the nineteenth century and which, therefore, had its roots in the Monarchy, sees in the “religious question” one of the primary causes for the collapse of the regime. Rosas goes as far as pointing to the “religious question” as one of the ‘five fatal errors of the First republic’, given the recklessness of Republican Jacobinism in ‘allowing a political question concerning the relations of the State with a religious institution to be framed as a religious question’ (Rosas 2010, 88-89). Although this thesis is equally debatable – both in terms of the consequences assigned to the process (as it is put on the same scale as, for example, World War I or the worsening of the social

 4

In a classical ethnographic study, focusing on a freguesia (local administrative unit, bearing some resemblance to the English “parish”) in the centre of Portugal, Joyce Riegelhaupt underlines that, ‘from an analytical point of view, one must recognize the difference between an anticlericalism that is fundamentally “antichurch”, on the basis of the institutional position it occupies within a certain State, and a wider form of anti-clericalism, which is tantamount to “anti-religion”’, Riegelhaupt (1982, 1216). In that same essay, the author further distinguishes between an anticlericalism which targets the priest, and not necessarily the Church as an institution or religion, which is the focus of her analysis.



230

Chapter Nine

conditions of the population and the conflicts arising from it), and for the decontextualization of the “religious question” towards which it tends to slide, in suggesting that the core elements of Republican laicization could be achieved without ever being framed as a religious question by the Church –, it has the advantage of inscribing it within the political and social landscape of the time. That is to say, it does not overlook the Church’s attitude and the latter’s political interests and leanings nor its centrality to the Republican worldview and hence does not reduce it to a tactical manoeuvre or to a radical and persecutory political supplement, as it is portrayed within approaches that follow the line of political history we have evoked above. In works where the “religious question” is given a key role, it naturally acquires more complex contours, even when only a few of its traits are brought into relief. Be that as it may, and just as in the previously cited works, they generally narrow their focus on the conflict between the Church and the State.5 Even in some studies where the social dimension of the question is placed nearer to the focal point, it tends to be treated as a backdrop to the Republican political initiatives6, on the assumption that it was their direct correlate, and to be conflated with the Church and its positions. The present chapter aims, however, to step beyond the acknowledgement of the place the conflict at hand occupies in the various

 5

E.g. Neto (1998); Seabra (2009); Salgado de Matos (2010). Neto, although he focuses mainly on the period of the Constitutional Monarchy, addresses the first year and a half of the Republican government. Hence, his work is to be distinguished from the remaining research covered here, given its admirable contribution to an understanding of the antecedents to the so-called “religious question” of the First Republic, not overlooking its economic, social and political significance (which renders problematic the inclusion of his work within this cluster of references). Seabra is chiefly concerned with attesting the theses which serve as his starting point – that there was “religious persecution”, of which the Church was a victim –, which overshadows the insight that could have sprung from his exhaustive analysis of the Law of Separation. Salgado de Matos, whose work is the most recent of all these, offers undoubtedly the most thorough and in-depth analysis of this conflicting relation that marked the period of the First Republic, bringing to the fore aspects that had been occluded until then and approaching the issue in all its enormous complexity. 6 As the most clear-cut example of this, there is the abovementioned work by Maria Lúcia de Brito Moura. Luna de Carvalho’s work, on the other hand, can be offered as a counterpoint, inasmuch as it does not limit the uprisings that erupted in the context of laicization to mere religious expressions or to a side-effect of the measures and attitudes of republicans or the Church. Cf. Luna de Carvalho (2011)



State, Church and Society

231

historiographic theses. The pertinence of a proto-conceptual notion such as the “religious question”, which has a far-reaching – one could go as far as saying, an hegemonic – historiographic role in the analyses on this historical period, should also be challenged, inasmuch as the interpretation and understanding of some of the events it generally invokes are compromised or limited, namely the wide range of popular acts of resistance to, and support for, laicization that took place throughout this period. Such an effect occurs because, as a macro-scale abstract category, “religious question” subsumes the interests or specificities we encounter at a local or community level, for instance, under the terms of the State and the Church. As we will seek to make clear, a popular conflict triggered by the law on civil registry or by the Law of Separation is not, given its “origin”, reducible to its religious dimension, much less bound to an institutional or elitist source. Scholars generally marginalize the social manifestation of this transformation process; or, rather, it is extrapolated from the terms of the two most conspicuous protagonists: the State and the Church. The various social groups, more than acting in tune with their own material conditions and beliefs, would seem to have reacted mechanically to the terms of those which, acting above them, settled the conflict through decrees and laws, and to have acted in line with interests that pertained, there and then, more to the “top-level” political structure than to the social conditions and everyday life of those “below”. This does not mean, of course, that no consequences ensued from the political-legislative transformation under way, or that the latter did not impact on others beside those that were directly engaged in the conflict, but rather that this transformation and its repercussions cut across different levels which cannot be linearly conflated. As underlined by Grendi, the acknowledgement of the effective role of macro-historical categories (as are the Church and the State, in the case at hand) does not justify a deterministic framework, ‘given that social action, much like individual action, implies a choice within a field of limited alternatives that constitute “the factory of the social and psychological reality of man”’, and any one of these categories is but one of its components (Grendi 2009, 48). In other words, the historiography of the First Republic is characterized by the use of outworn concepts (State, Church, “religious question”) and by the reproduction of discourses produced by the agents in conflict on the national stage – republicans, clergy and monarchists. The lack of contextualization, which stems from the choice of a so-called political history, can easily lead to anachronism. The chief consequence of this framework is the dissolution of the episodic, the local or the individual



232

Chapter Nine

within these categories and its distortion through the excision of their particular structural contexts, deterministically subordinated to extrinsic macro-historical processes. This undermines the ‘awareness of sociocultural dimensions at odds with the social culture in which we live’ (Idem, 49). Accordingly, it seems fitting to analyze the "religious question" without resorting to "strong" and sweeping concepts such as the ones we have mentioned above. Besides the lack of problematization of these concepts, the available historiography also falls short of an analysis that starts from a micro viewpoint, which would allow events generally subsumed under the said question to be framed in their own terms, unweaving their contextual socio-cultural significance. However, before we seek to summarily illustrate the importance of paying more attention to the social as a means of understanding the conflict and the relations in which State and Church are embedded, let us address the historical antecedents of laicization, with a particular focus on the institutional plane.

The “roots” of the laicization process Even prior to the implementation of the Republican regime, one can distinguish, broadly speaking, at least three stages of this process, with repercussions both at a social level and at the level of political institutions. Firstly, there is the intensification of an anti-Jesuitical discourse and subsequent expulsion of the Jesuits, in 1759, by the Marquis of Pombal. In the first decades of the nineteenth century and in the wake of the liberal revolution, this discourse gains further momentum and evolves into a more generalized anti-congregationalism, and begins to be linked more frequently to expressions of anticlericalism.7 Still at this stage, despite not having abandoned an official State religion, the State takes measures geared towards the progressive secularization of its institutions and society. Finally, at a later stage, which materializes more emphatically around the 1870s, anticlericalism and anti-congregationalism, in the eyes of some political tendencies (especially socialist, anarchist and republican), become cognate, nearly interchangeable terms, designating a space in which antireligious or atheist stances often take centre stage.



7 An anticlericalism that often emerged among the clergy itself, thus embodying a rejection of Ultramontanism, or was expressed by avowedly religious persons, as was the case with liberal historian Alexandre Herculano. At this stage, then, anticlericalism seldom takes on an anti-religious nature.



State, Church and Society

233

Although the genesis of anti-Jesuitism, and of the process of mythologization that underlies its propaganda, is as old as the Jesuits’ presence, and can be found within the sphere of Church itself (Franco 2002, 73), in Portugal it is with the Marquis of Pombal that there emerges and is fostered an ‘ancillary ideological-political vector of the myth [of the Jesuits], emanating from regalist misgivings (…) towards the presence of an institution of ultramontanist obedience, with an enormous power within the State’ and thus deemed a threat to the progress of the Realm (Idem, 74). It is worth underlining once again that, at this stage, anti-Jesuitism exists independently from an anticlerical mentality, although we can already find some manifestations of anticlericalism (which neither means that the first is to be conflated with the latter, nor that the first excludes the latter). The persecution of Jesuits is to be explained, then, more on account of its ultramontanist character and as a consequence of the accusation of an absence of “national sentiment” (in this case, to be clear, this meant a hostility to royal power and an opposition to the Constitutional State), the Jesuits being accused of manipulation by obscure interests and of aiming at taking power. Still, it is also to be accounted for by economic reasons, for it was thought that they undermined the commercial interests of the crown and of private agents, especially in Brazil (Idem, 82). All of the above are factors that help explain how the nineteenth century came to be pervaded by a growing anti-Jesuitism, its expression inherited and refashioned by cultural elites of secular and anticlerical affiliation. This distinction would, in fact, assume a juridical expression, both during liberalism and within the Republican regime. Even before the extinction of all convents, monasteries, schools, hospices and other masculine religious institutions was announced (and their assets nationalized (Neto 1998, 50; Seabra 2009, 35-8)) by the Minister of Justice Joaquim António de Aguiar, D. Pedro, in response to the edict of D. Miguel8 that aimed at the restoration of the Society of Jesus, not only reiterated the annulment of his sibling’s brief, but also asserted that the extinction of the Jesuits was autonomous from the decree, with the above mentioned consequences, to be approved in a matter of days. As to the Republic, only three days after its establishment, on 8 October 1910, Afonso Costa repeals the 1901 decree by Hintze Ribeiro, which readmitted congregations, and reinstates the law of the Marquis of Pombal which ordered the expulsion of the Jesuits, as well as that of

 8

D. Pedro and his brother D. Miguel would lead the liberal and absolutist sides, respectively, of the 1828-1834 civil war.



234

Chapter Nine

Joaquim António de Aguiar, which extinguished religious orders, further decreeing that the assets of clergymen were to be listed and appraised, and that those belonging to the Jesuits would be immediately declared the property of the State (Seabra 2009, 75). In the words of António Araújo, ‘there was, in the minds of the republican leaders and legislators, a clearcut distinction between three elements: a) the Company of Jesus and its members; b) religious orders and congregations; c) the Catholic Church as a whole’ (Araújo 2010, 85). With the 1820 Revolution, and particularly after the definitive break with Absolutism, in 1834, the liberal State breathes new life into the process of its own secularization as well as that of society as a whole, aiming to cement its sovereignty and reduce the Church’s influence. Among the various measures put in place, one should highlight the extinction of the tithes and the establishment of church rates, as early as July 1832, and the abovementioned extinction of the religious orders, in May 1834. Such measures not only affected the social and political power of the Church but also severely dented its economic strength, increasing its dependence on the State. These initiatives had a political and cultural purpose, but also an economic one, fostering the consolidation of an agrarian capitalism by clearing space for the private ownership of a large amount of goods and estates that until then had stood on the sidelines of the emergent capitalist dynamic. One of the consequences of this cluster of initiatives was the functionarization of the clergy, henceforth treated as local agents at the service of the State. In the words of Vitor Neto, ‘liberalism “nationalized” the Church and attempted to place it at its service’ (Neto 1998, 46), which triggered a struggle that lasted virtually throughout the whole of the liberal era and which not only pitted the constitutional regime against the ecclesiastical sphere, but further split the latter, opposing the ultramontanist clergy, faithful to the Holy See, and the liberal clergy, who sided with the regime. In this environment, and throughout the 1830s and 1840s, numerous conflicts, conspiracies and anti-liberal popular insurrections erupt, often instigated by parish priest devoted to D Miguel, the deposed absolute King. Furthermore, we must not underestimate the importance the liberal State placed on schooling, establishing its compulsory nature (at the hands of Passos Manuel, in 1836, and Costa Cabral, in 1844). Although the teaching contents were not fully secularized, as elements of the Christian doctrine were still included in the school curriculum, it meant that another sphere under the Church’s power was affected, making the teacher an



State, Church and Society

235

adversary of the clergyman, in a battle that ‘emanated, in almost every case, from issues of local prestige and which was the reflection of a struggle over social powers’ (Idem, 222). To add to the weakening of the political and social power of the Church, the religious institution’s hostility towards modern ideas as well as its anti-liberalism, patent in Syllabus Errorum (1864) and in the First Vatican Council (1869-70), contributed to the growth of anticlericalism throughout the liberal era (Idem 24 and 106-7; Catroga 1991, 323-4), both in intellectual and political spheres, and at a grassroots level, particularly in Lisbon and Porto. Thus, according to Neto, ‘from 1865, secularization was pushed further forward and the laic agenda began to be outlined. With the impact of Positivism and Scientism, a comprehensive laic worldview on nature and society emerged’ and anticlericalism began to be associated, from then onwards, with a critique of religion itself (Neto 1998, 263; also Catroga 1991, 87-9). In the 1890s there is a radicalization of anticlericalism and the ‘religious issue is increasingly articulated with the political issue and with social and economic oppression’ (Catroga 1991, 88). But it is also in the last three decades of the Concordat regime that we see the prelates regain ‘influence over political power and, at times, challenge the legal order’, thus aiming to free themselves from Regalism (Neto 1998, 108). One should note that, although the abovementioned laws had remained in force, religious orders, and the Jesuits among them, had (while the regime turned a blind eye) settled once more within national territory, and had grown significantly, especially in the final decades of liberalism. Some achieved it by opening private schools and others in the sphere of social assistance, thus taking advantage of the State’s shortcomings in those areas. Besides, the regular clergy had a strong presence in the colonies, where they carried out missionary work and, in certain territories, were the only effective colonial presence. The decree by Hintze Ribeiro, dated 18 April 1901, cleared the way for religious orders to consolidate and grow with greater stability, allowing for the legalization of their existence within the national territory. If the growing openness and complacency of the liberal regime can be accounted for by its weaknesses and, subsequently, by the crisis into which it plunged, leading to a gradual questioning, on the part of the then emerging antagonistic political forces, of its legitimacy in government, it is equally true that the Church’s approach represented ‘the episcopacy’s response to the expansion of republican and socialist laicism’ (Idem, 1101). Against this background, both forces felt that in shifting their position advantages would outweigh disadvantages.



236

Chapter Nine

We thus come to understand that the so-called “religious question”, viewed as a conflict between Church and State, did not begin with the First Republic and, as such, cannot be addressed autonomously or be given an isolated significance, as is the case with many of the available approaches to the subject. To grasp it within a frame of continuity with the monarchicconstitutional period helps us to see the “religious” conflicts that traversed the Republic with fresh eyes, and to underline the political and social dimension they contained, not only because the “religious question” gained a different political meaning to the Church with the establishment of the new regime, leading to a change in attitude and precipitating the intensification of the conflict, but also because such conflict was closely linked with the profound social and economic transformations that had been reshaping the whole country for decades.

Laicization in the First Republic and the Law of Separation The situation faced by the Church during the liberal regime forced it to rethink its presence in society and the form of its political intervention. The compliance with the secularizing measures of the Constitutional Monarchy, received with little organized resistance by the Church, was also a demonstration of its inability to mount a coordinated political reaction in the face of a new scenario, unmoved in its firm stand against liberalism. However, faced with a State and society in the midst of a crisis and a political system almost fully discredited – factors that would lead to the fall of the Monarchy, with little or no resistance –, the Church began to show signs of grasping its new standing in Portuguese society, and not only did it take the opportunity, as we have seen, to draw close to the government and to the space which the Decree by Hintze Ribeiro (1901) opened for its reorganization, but it also adopted a new political attitude, taking the sting out of the more hostile anti-liberalism within its ranks and laying the foundations for a Catholic social movement, with the creation, for instance, of the Centro Nacional [National Centre] (1901) and the Partido Nacionalista [Nationalist Party] (1903) – which ‘did not entail any adhesion to liberal principles, which continued to be criticized by the Church’s official doctrine’ (Neto 1998, 581). From almost as soon as Republicans emerged as a relevant political force, laicism was adopted as one of its chief banners, which did not leave the Catholic hierarchy any room for doubt in terms of what it could expect from the new regime. Still, some sectors clung to the hope that the Separation of State and Churches, a goal of both Republicans and



State, Church and Society

237

Socialists from as early as the 1870s, would mean the Church would enjoy a greater degree of autonomy, now free from the constraints of the monarchic regalism that had significantly subjugated and weakened it. Given that secularization and laicization were at the centre of a large portion of government initiatives in the first few months of the Republic, or at least taking centre stage as far as media and political attention was concerned, it seems inevitable that it would become a privileged arena for open conflicts and resistances to the new regime, often manipulated by monarchists. First and foremost, the “religious question” contributed to a split in the Republican forces themselves, opposing those that stood for moderate action to those that subscribed to the radicalism that many read into the Law of Separation. On the other hand, for the Church, the “religious question” acquired a new significance with the Republic, as it became inextricably linked with political issues, against the background of the fall of the Monarchy – rather closer to the heart of the clergy’s political leanings, all the more so given the approximation that had taken place over the decades previous to the Republic. Besides, the laicizing measures of the Provisional Government allowed monarchists to capitalize on the predicament of the Church and take on the “religious question” as their own cause. Religion thus proved the ideal battlefield for the opposition to spur political conflict, both because within its frame some of the key differences between the camps were brought to the surface, but also because it was an issue that had a greater potential for social and cultural repercussion that any other pressing matter. Be that as it may, while the Church as well as the monarchists saw the religious question as the ideal catalyst for conflict, the Provisional Government thought it could find a way to use it as a means of controlling the opposition, severely weakening the power and reach of the religious institution and repressing many of its actions. For Republicanism, the relationship with the Church also had a primary political significance, as testified by the urgency it attributed to laicizing measures. Furthermore, repression and censorship applied by the State left little room for doubt on this matter. However, the large majority of the legislation was aimed at putting in place a cultural reform, rather than at institutionalizing or fuelling political conflict, and we cannot understand these legislative initiatives apart from the worldview that undergirded this project. The laicizing laws were a focus of attention from the very first days of the Provisional Government, and nearly all of them were published over



238

Chapter Nine

the first six-month period.9 The polemical Law of Separation of State and Churches sees the light of day on 20 April 1911, and is approved by all members of the provisional Government. Its extensive text, comprised of 196 articles and seven sub-sections, proclaimed, in the first few articles, the State’s neutrality in matters of religion, thus abandoning State religion for the very first time, and recognizing freedom of conscience to all Portuguese citizens as well as foreign citizens residing in Portugal. The Church’s possessions were expropriated (the possessions of Orders and Congregations having already been expropriated in the liberal regime and with the establishment of the Republic), but they were allocated for worship, and thus given over, free of charge, to the associations that were to be responsible for them, as well as for the residence of bishops and parish priests. Worship was now provided by ‘worship associations’, whose organization was placed in the hands of citizens, hence reducing the clergy’s authority by making them dependent on decisions by external structures.10 Although church rates were abrogated, the State now granted a lifelong pension to any priest that would apply for it, and in the text of the law, the paragraph in question included a polemical specification, seen as sheer provocation, whereby these pensions, in case of the recipient’s death, were extensible to his parents as well as any widows or offspring. A host of measures were aimed at confining worship to the private sphere: it was free, as long as it was conducted in buildings designated for that express purpose, from sun up to sun down, but any act of worship outside of those buildings, such as processions and even funerals was subject to permission, so as to guarantee public order; religious symbols were prohibited in the façades of private buildings, in public monuments or in any other public place, except for churches and cemeteries; use of habit or

 9

The promulgation of the majority of these laws, decrees and diplomas takes place in 1910. The exception, which is worth underlining given its importance, was the promulgation of the Código do Registo Civil (Civil registration Code), on 18 February 1911, which established compulsory civil registration, thus contributing to the laicization of three acts that had a momentous symbolic importance in the life of the population – birth, marriage and death – removing from the clergy’s hands one of the key functions it fulfilled up to that point – and which, in fact, also had economic consequences. 10 In some cases, this measure led to the cult being transferred into the hands of anticlerical or atheist groups. For an interpretation of the persistence of such cases, which were, in fact, unlawful, see Salgado de Matos (2010, 159-160). On the originality of the items concerning worship associations in Portuguese law, particularly in contrast with the French law, see the same work, pp. 154ff.



State, Church and Society

239

liturgical vestments outside the temple and of cult ceremonies was forbidden. In sum, while the law fulfilled its purpose of laicizing the State, it also took the functionarization of the clergy – initiated during the liberal Monarchy – a step further, and upheld the need for government approval of any royal edicts concerning the clergy or the Catholic faithful, despite ceasing to interfere in the appointment of bishops. It was, in sum, a law that not only did not increase the Church’s autonomy from the State, in comparison with the monarchic period, but also, in some of its aspects, interfered in matters previously left untouched, and indeed, one could argue, aimed to cause direct harm to the religious institution. Still, the factors that contributed the most to hostile responses to the Law of Separation had nothing to do with its supposed ‘substantial futility’, in the face of what had already taken place in the course of liberalism (Amaral 2011, 54), or with a supposed ‘gratuitous exhibitionism, low-level politics, or Masonic partiality’ (Ramos 2001, 355). It was not a mere whim, as these formulations seem to imply. A proper understanding of the conflict opposing Church and State cannot be reduced to a Manichaean logic, split between two poles which see the Law of Separation as “persecution”, on the one hand, or as “enlightenment”, on the other (Salgado Matos 2010, 31). Even if it was not breaking new ground, its weight and importance was partly due to the way in which it accentuated measures already in place from the time of the Constitutional Monarchy, namely by eliminating a set of privileges enjoyed by the Catholic Church without, however, affecting regalist measures. This means that all provisions that sustained State control over the institution were left untouched. Through the Law of Separation, the State pushed the Catholic Church even further away from the struggle over sovereignty, establishing for the first time in Portuguese history ‘a form of political power that dispensed with any legitimacy of a religious nature’ (Catroga 1991, 361). However, as Salgado de Matos argues, the separation was not effectively sought by either the Church or the State (Salgado de Matos 2010, 33): the first wanted to preserve some of its privileges, whereas the second feared the first’s power and mistrusted its intentions11, either because of the hypothetical monarchic links or because of the pressures exerted by the Vatican over the Portuguese episcopacy. It is important to underline that for a large portion of Republicans, not only was there no clear-cut distinction between regalism and separation

 11

As the words of Eurico de Seabra make clear, when he states that ‘the Republic was forced to act (…) as an “armed” and “vigilant” State, the only way to prevail over a Church that was also “armed” and “malicious”’, in Catroga (1991, 351).



240

Chapter Nine

(Idem 40), but there was no other option available than for political power to engage in ‘an offensive and vanguard action’ (Catroga 1991, 371), for without such intervention the desired laicization of consciences and of the social field would be compromised. To understand this need, one must recall that the Church at the time cannot be equated with the post-Vatican II Church, as it so often is, for there are key differences, to a large extent resulting from the social role it still played. In the years prior to the establishment of the Republic, the Church was indeed adamant in its condemnation of modernism, in its many guises, and championed a reinforced centralization of papal power.12 Yet, it was believed that this dispute did not necessarily imply a desire for mutual hostility and, accordingly, negotiations between the Portuguese State and the episcopacy continued for a few months after the establishment of the Republic, with a view towards a compromise solution.13 More than an institutional conflict, what was at stake was a clash between two antagonistic bodies with similar purposes, embedded within totalizing worldviews, in a dispute for hegemony over the same subject (Pinto 2011, 26-30 and 57).14 It is within this clash of cultures, much wider than a circumscribed political context, that this conflict is to be inscribed. Progress, reason and science were to take the place of religion and the sacral viewpoint as foundations of social life, of order and morality, for only the laic man would be capable of reaching a true and definitive emancipation (Catroga 1991, 361). As such, for the consolidation of this new model of sovereignty, it was crucial to push the Church away from certain areas where it had maintained its hold, areas which would now come to be under the exclusive jurisdiction of the State, especially education, henceforth anchored solely on science and social morality (Idem, 326) and, as in other fields, guided by the aim to subtract the

 12

See, for example, the papal encyclical Pascendi, published in 1907 and followed in 1910 by the Oath Against Modernism (Sacrorum Antistitum). 13 According to Salgado de Matos, ‘until halfway into December 1910, it was legitimate to suppose that republicans and Catholics would come to an understanding’, and negotiations between the Portuguese episcopacy and Afonso Costa carried on until mid-February (cf. 2010, 75-6). The breaking-point in those negotiations, according to the author, comes in the wake of the Pastoral Colectiva do Episcopado Português ao Clero e Fiéis de Portugal (Collective Pastoral of the Portuguese Episcopacy to the Portuguese clergy and faithful), in February 1911 (written from December 1910), most likely the result of pressures from the Holy See. This document signaled a change of attitude on the part of the episcopacy and we can thus hold the Church partially responsible for the shift in Afonso Costa’s stance (Cf. 2010, 145). 14 For a wider historical perspective, see Bax (1991).



State, Church and Society

241

individual’s relation with the State from any form of socialization or mediation on the basis of religious values. The Civil Registration Code, promulgated on February 1911, besides taking on a central role in the project of hegemonizing the Republican worldview was also closely bound to the affirmation of State sovereignty, laying out the individual’s exclusive ties to the State. As highlighted by the Republican Fernão BottoMachado, in 1908, ‘it is imperative for the State to have its own record of the names and civilian status of all its citizens. Only thus can it assume its patronage and carry out its tutelary or coercive actions’ – its sovereignty would be undermined if it continued to hand out this tasks to an external entity, such as the clergy (in Catroga 1991, 336-7). The new man was now, first and foremost, a subject belonging to a political community. In short, State intervention, more than the result of a strictly political purpose, was grounded in a project of cultural transformation that aimed to counterbalance the weight that the Church still carried in the workings of Portuguese society, viewed as the chief cause of the backwardness of consciences and, as such, responsible for blocking the emergence of the ideal agent in the frame of the political conception of the Nation-State, that is, the rational autonomous citizen, the laic man – as opposed to the religious man, ‘narrow-minded and easily manipulated by the priest’ (Idem 326).

Some examples of protest and popular action concerning the “religious question” The conflict between Church and State should not obfuscate the society whose control was indeed in dispute, nor should the latter be invoked as if it was nothing but a space limited and determined by the interests and actions of those two agents – in other words, a space devoid of autonomy. Paradoxically, given the centrality afforded to the “religious question” in the course of the First Republic, and its crucial role in the latter’s outcome, according to many accounts, studies with an in-depth focus on its social and popular expressions have been few and far between. This becomes all the more surprising when we consider that the radicalism of republican initiatives is generally emphasized through a contrast with the strong and pervasive presence of Catholicism among the Portuguese population, to the point where, as we have seen, terms such as “religious war” have been used to characterize the social impact of those initiatives. Furthermore, there is a conspicuous lack of problematization of the term “religious question” itself. The latter generally refers to the relations between State and Church and stays close to the parameters offered by



242

Chapter Nine

both these institutions. Even when it encompasses other analytical aspects within that chain of relations, these tend to be perceived along a vertical and unidirectional axis, that is to say, from top to bottom. Such an interpretation denies autonomy to these popular actions and exempts itself from explaining and understanding these phenomena by way of terms that are proper to their sphere, failing to recognize that the actions of those “from below” are not reducible to the terms of each of those antagonistic institutions. To grasp these actions, one must gauge the weight of distinct moral and even material factors, as well as structural constraints that may be in play at a merely local level, mediated by a wide range of interpersonal relations. But there are other consequences that we may associate with the use of the “religious questions” category, and which it is important to bring into relief. By speaking of the “religious question” (in the singular), confining it to an ideological dispute between republicanism and the Church, one implicitly legitimates the interest of the Church in consolidating its hegemony over the religious domain, obfuscating the decisive differences between what it meant to be a catholic from a popular viewpoint and what it meant to be a catholic according to the Church’s official doctrine, differences that were in fact the source of a number of conflicts between these two poles, of which the well-known popular anticlericalism, present even among profoundly religious segments of the population is a clear sign. Furthermore, we should not forget that to reduce the conflict between State and Church to a “religious question” was instrumental in the latter’s argument that politics or power were far from their concerns, which meant that they could present themselves as victims of the process.15 Hence, “religious question” as a category seems to contribute very little to our understanding of the phenomena it seems to address, obscuring rather more than it elucidates. Closely tied to the popular actions at stake here, we find a number of factors that allow us to frame them as a simultaneously social, political and economic question. They are indeed



15 The actions and interests of Catholics and, in particular, of the Church itself, are tendentially framed as belonging almost exclusively to a sphere that we could define as that of ‘meaning’ (see Bax, 1991), grounded above all on symbolic issues associated with religious beliefs and practices, autonomous and indifferent to mundane and secular practices. Within this frame, the Church is commonly cast in the role of the victim of an intrusive meddling on the part of political powers in a field that was foreign to them, that is to say, that of religion and belief, thus removing it from the political chessboard and from any power struggle or, rather, presenting the Church’s political involvement as an inevitability, in the face of externally-imposed contextual conditions.



State, Church and Society

243

inextricable from all of these issues that traversed and defined the First Republic. To note the deep interrelation of the sacred and the profane among popular classes, especially in rural milieus, allows us to bring this aspect into greater focus. Just as the Church itself was an institution of power, with strong political ties and intervention, as well as with an enormous economic weight, for Catholics in general there was also, and perhaps even to a greater degree, a dense mesh between the sacred and the profane, albeit one that was expressed in rather different terms. The two worlds were far from apart, especially in their everyday aspects. For that reason, actions of resistance were not only taken as a form of defence of their religious practices – which should not be linearly conflated with a defence of the Church as an institution, or of its official religious practices –, but were also intertwined with a range of other elements, within a wider frame, and with the defence of a more inclusive way of life, tied to forms of sociability we may characterize as communitarian. It is from this angle that one should understand the participation of the population in the resistance against the listing of the Church’s goods, restrictions to the chiming of bells or the latter’s removal, the closing down of churches or constraints on certain acts of public worship, such as processions, often taking action against Republican and religious authorities (in some cases, carrying out a procession even in the absence of the priest or in the face of the latter’s express opposition). Drawing from the previously mentioned, and exceptionally thorough, study by Luna de Carvalho, let us look at a few examples of acts of popular resistance in the context of the application of laicizing measures.16 Firstly, consider resistances to restrictions on the chiming of bells or their removal, imposed by the Law of Separation. To account for these actions

 16

A similar exercise could be performed in an analysis of actions with opposite purposes, in other words, of anticlerical violence, such as the premeditated destruction or damaging of religious objects, images and buildings, generally invoked to illustrate the ferocity and ruthlessness of revolutionaries and to reinforce the climate or “persecution” and “terror”, as part of the ongoing “religious war”. In another work, and through a systematic study of this type of actions, I attempted to demonstrate how they could not be easily subsumed under “religious persecution” and how, despite their manipulation for political goals, they certainly could not be perceived as episodes in a “religious war”, as attested by their sporadic and aleatory character. Above all, the origins of a large part of such actions, perhaps even most of them, is indissociable from local conflicts, personal vendettas or, quite simply, from less than consensual pranks, even if all of the above were reinforced or legitimated by the weakening of the social and institutional weight of religion. Cf. Duarte (2011).



244

Chapter Nine

solely within the frame of the “religious question” – as certain sectors of the bourgeoisie and of the intellectual or urban elite did, even at the time – overlooks the crucial role bells played in local life. Bells’ acoustic presence was virtually inescapable in the everyday life of villages and towns, and their function was far from being strictly religious in nature. Their sound was ‘so embedded in the communities’ culture that it formed the acoustic landscape of their sensible landscape’ (Luna de Carvalho 2011, 81-2): bells chimed to announce a birth, a christening, a wedding or a death, but also to sound the alarm in the case of fires or accidents; they marked the time of work (its beginning and its end); they rang out both to summon the population in distressing situations (“uprisings” were nearly always triggered in this fashion) or to mobilize them during the period of the “food riots”, and even strikes were often initiated through the ringing of bells. Another sign that bell chiming extended far beyond all of these functions and their religious context is to be found in the fact that they were used in civilian funerals, at odds with the will of the parish as well as of republican administrative authorities (Idem 82-4). Thus, some of the upheavals related to restrictions imposed on bell chiming enable us to illustrate the moral autonomy of the populations in relation to the official precepts of both Republican and Catholic hierarchies. As for resistances prompted by other restrictions to public worship, and which according to Luna de Carvalho amounted to 40% of the total of actions with politico-religious pretexts that occurred in the first seven years of the Republican regime, these, once again, cannot be understood properly without bringing into the equation a series of factors beyond the realms of religion and which were often invoked by the populations themselves: by which I mean, more specifically, factors of an economic nature17 and factors of a cultural and social nature, explained by the great significance these festivities had for the local life of the community.18

 17

The economic importance of local popular religious festivities serves as an example because they attracted large number of people from nearby villages, providing a boost to the local commercial activity; see Marques (2005, 307). This factor also weighted heavily in the decisions by local authorities, and was used as an argument against the prohibition of those events, e.g. Luna de Carvalho (2011, 116). 18 As a sign that what was at stake was not simply a defense of religion or, more precisely, of the Church as an institution, many acts of public worship, even though they were forbidden by the authorities, did indeed take place by way of the populations’ disobedience, they took place, then, not only against the will of local authorities but often that of the local clergy itself – in some cases, funerals or processions took place even in the absence of a priest, as the population invaded



State, Church and Society

245

With regard to this last factor, one should underline, beyond its communitarian importance, that some of the upheavals sprung from the aleatory application of the restrictive measures, that is, from the fact that a given form of worship was allowed in one locality while forbidden in adjacent ones. Consider one final type of such cases: those prompted by the closing down of churches and the listing of their goods. While inventories were seen by the Church as a form of spoliation of their goods by the State, for the population, as far as we can ascertain in virtually every case analyzed, they were seen as theft, pure and simple, inasmuch as it was claimed that the church belonged to the people, who had indeed built it, and that they would never allow “their church” to be plundered, these objects being viewed as their own belongings, donated by the faithful themselves. One may argue, then, that the sense of local belonging loomed larger than the sense of being part of an institution such as the Church. On the other hand, and now drawing to a close, consider also how the forms of resistance to which Luna de Carvalho attributes primarily economic and social pretexts cannot be dissociated from religious factors, as attested by many of the descriptions of those events, which serves to underline the problem of privileging one factor over another. In anti-fiscal riots, as well as in other acts of resistance with medico-sanitary pretexts, or even in reactions against the appropriation of communitarian goods (such as the commons), one discerns moral factors that come close to religious values and rhetoric. What is at stake here is not the religious aspect of these and other events or even the belief of those involved, but rather the pertinence of classifying under the term “religious question” a wide spectrum of situations that imply a series of moral dispositions and local cultural values and which, for that very reason, owe as much to religious factors as they do to social, political or economic ones. Indeed, in virtually every case addressed here, one could invoke a ‘moral economy’, such as it was developed in the well-known essay by E. P. Thompson (Thompson 2008),

 the church, took hold of the artifacts needed for the ritual and performed the ceremonies themselves (in a clear “profanation” of those objects, in the eyes of the Church, especially as those ceremonies were almost always led by women). The inclusion of restriction to events such as processions and pilgrimages within the “religious question” opposing the State and the Church becomes all the more problematic if we recall that the Church was always critical of those ceremonies, a stance that continued to come to the surface, if only occasionally, during the First Republic. For further examples, see Duarte (2011, 21) and Luna de Carvalho (2011, 201); on popular processions, see Marques (2005, 306-7).



246

Chapter Nine

all the more so since it manifests itself, as rule, at a local level. Even when it is justified to speak of a religious question, one needs to distinguish between a popular “religious question” and the Church’s “religious question” for, as we have seen, it was not so much the defence of a specific institution that was at stake in the majority of these actions but rather, first and foremost, the defence of a particular ethics of sociability, if you will, and of particular forms of conviviality as well as particular worldviews. *** Drawing on what was briefly presented above, one could argue that the process of laicization during republicanism should be understood as a manifestation of a program for a cultural and worldview transformation that went against the grain of that espoused by the Old Regime and the Catholic Church. However, one cannot hope to understand this manifestation outside of a longer historical period that preceded the Republican regime and, especially, without bearing in mind the deep transformations that had been underway for more than a century across the whole of the Portuguese social, economic and political structures – or, within an even wider frame, in a European context. These transformations were not confined, then, to the uppermost levels of society and its institutions – in this particular case, the State and the Church – but rather extended, and had an autonomous expression, within the various sectors of society, namely popular ones. Hence, only a comprehensive diachronic and synchronic perspective will allow us to discern all the complexities and nuances of the notorious “religious question” as one of the defining elements of the First Portuguese Republic.

Bibliography Abreu, Luís Machado de, António José Ribeiro Miranda (eds.). Anticlericalismo Português: História e Discurso. Aveiro: Universidade de Aveiro, 2002. Amaral, Luciano (ed.). Outubro - A Revolução Republicana em Portugal (1910-1926). Lisboa: Edições 70, 2011. Araújo, António. “As Ordens e Congregações Religiosas e o Direito Republicano”, in Ordens e Congregações Religiosas no contexto da I República (eds. José Eduardo Franco, Luís Machado de Abreu). Lisboa: Gradiva, 2010.



State, Church and Society

247

Bax, Mart. “Religious Regimes and State-Formation: toward a research perspective”, in Religious Regimes and State-Formation: Perspectives from European ethnology (ed. Eric Wolf). Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. Catroga, Fernando. O Republicanismo em Portugal: Da formação ao 5 de Outubro de 1910, 2 vols. Coimbra: Faculdade de Letras, 1991. —. Entre Deuses e Césares: secularização, laicidade e religião civil, uma perspectiva histórica. Coimbra: Almedina, 2006. Desan, Suzanne. Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Duarte, Ricardo Diogo Mainsel. Violência Anticlerical na I República (1910-1917): Perspectivas Antropológicas e Historiográficas. Lisboa: Masters Dissertation, FCSH/UNL, 2011. Ferreira, António Matos. “A Igreja e a República”, in História de Portugal (vol. 10): A República (org. João Medina). Lisboa: Ediclube, 1993. Franco, José Eduardo. “Génese, Evolução e Carácter do Antijesuitísmo em Portugal: Uma Perspectiva Evolutiva”, in Anticlericalismo Português: História e Discurso (coord. Luís Machado de Abreu and António José Ribeiro Miranda). Aveiro: Universidade de Aveiro, 2002. Franco, José Eduardo and Luís Machado Abreu. Ordens e Congregações Religiosas no Contexto da I República. Lisboa: Gradiva, 2010. Grendi, Edoardo. “Paradoxos da História Contemporânea”, in Exercícios de Micro-História (org. Mónica Ribeiro de Oliveira e Clara Maria Carvalho de Almeida). Rio de Janeiro: FGV Editora, 2009 [1981]. Luna de Carvalho, David. Os Levantes da República (1910-1917): Resistências à Laicização e Movimentos Populares de Repertório Tradicional na 1.ª República Portuguesa. Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 2011. Madureira, Arnaldo. A Questão Religiosa na I República: Contribuições para uma autópsia. Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 2003. Marques, Luís. Tradições Religiosas entre o Tejo e o Sado: Os Círios do Santuário da Atalaia. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 2005. Moura, Maria Lúcia de Brito. A Guerra Religiosa na Primeira República: Crenças e Mitos num tempo de Utopias. Cruz Quebrada: Editorial Notícias, 2004. Neto, Vitor. O Estado, a Igreja e a Sociedade em Portugal, 1832-1911. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1998. —. “A questão religiosa: Estado, Igreja e conflituosidade sócio-religiosa”, in História da Primeira República Portuguesa (eds. Fernando Rosas and Maria Fernanda Rollo). Lisboa: Tinta-da-China, 2009.



248

Chapter Nine

Pinto, Sérgio Ribeiro. Separação Religiosa como Modernidade: Decretolei de 20 de Abril de 1911 e modelos alternativos. Lisboa: CEHR, 2011. Ramos, Rui. A Segunda Fundação (1890-1926). Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 2001. Ramos, Rui, Bernardo Vasconcelos e Sousa e Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro (coords.). História de Portugal. Lisboa: A Esfera dos Livros, 2009. Reis, Bruno Cardoso and Sérgio Ribeiro Pinto. “República e Religião, ou a procura de uma Separação” in Outubro - A Revolução Republicana em Portugal (1910-1926) (ed. Luciano Amaral). Lisboa: Edições 70, 2011. Riegelhaupt, Joyce Firstenberg. “O Significado Religioso do Anticlericalismo Popular”, in Análise Social XVIII, 72-73-74, 1982. Rosas, Fernando. Portugal siglo XX (1890-1976): Pensamiento y Acción Política. Mérida: Junta de Extremadura, 2004. Rosas, Fernando & Maria Fernanda Rollo (eds.). História da Primeira República Portuguesa. Lisboa: Tinta-da-China, 2009. Rosas, Fernando. 1910 a Duas Vozes: Porque Venceu e Porque se Perdeu a I República? Lisboa: Bertrand, 2010. Salgado de Matos, Luís. A Separação do Estado e da Igreja: Concórdia e Conflito entre a Primeira República e o Catolicismo. Lisboa: Dom Quixote, 2010. Seabra, João. O Estado e a Igreja em Portugal no Início do Século XX: A Lei da Separação de 1911. Cascais: Princípia, 2009. Thompson, E. P. A Economia Moral da Multidão na Inglaterra do Século XVIII. Lisboa: Antígona, 2008 [1971]. Valente, Vasco Pulido. O Poder e o Povo. Lisboa: Gradiva, 1999 [1976]. Wolf, Eric. Religious Regimes and State-Formation: Perspectives from European ethnology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.



CHAPTER TEN THE SYSTEM OF NATIONALISM: SALAZARISM AS POLITICAL CULTURE LUÍS TRINDADE

The making of national identity The common thread in most stereotypes about the Portuguese is, one could say, epistemological: more than by a distinguishing quality, the Portuguese are supposed to be characterized by the idealistic image they have of themselves and thus of Portugal as a country. Such stereotype is deployed, as is usually the case with national identities, in the everyday, and is especially visible in the discourses of mass media and mass culture. This intense circulation of images and discourses proved particularly contagious among all kinds of intellectual analysis. In fact, the insistence on the inclination of the Portuguese towards idealism, and all the tropes associated with it – a proneness to unrealism, fantasy, sorrow and nostalgia –, seems to have acquired the status of theory, if not indeed ontology, in Portuguese national identity. A wide range of historians, social scientists, philosophers and literary critics have thus contributed to a systematization of this general theory and its particular tropes, which, in turn, led to a reverse movement, whereby the theoretical apparatus of Portuguese idealism permeated the everyday use of stereotypes. The process is obviously circular. What seems particularly problematic is the coincidence between the intellectual and discursive nature of both its object and its subject. In fact, it is virtually impossible to distinguish the supposed idealism of the Portuguese from the array of discourses defining the Portuguese as idealist. On the other hand, given the epistemological nature of the problem, it is also impossible to determine whether the fantasies produced by unrealism – the major “consequence” of idealism as

250

Chapter Ten

such to both social processes and national identity1 – are to be found in society or rather in social knowledge itself. In any case, this seems to suggest that any reflection on national identity needs to start with an analysis of these theories, which themselves already deal primarily with other theories, or at least participate in a general circulation of discourses (academic, literary, journalistic, etc.). In other words, national identity seems less a question of primordial roots and essence, that is to say, of a genealogy to be traced back through popular culture, than a negotiation being held at the crossroads of academia, the public sphere and, of course, the State as the site of mediation of all different parts involved. This negotiation needs to be historicized in order to resist the spell of idealism and the tropes of national identity it carried and sustained. To situate what seems unreal, immaterial or absent in its historical context will enable us to identify how these discourses on national identity managed to invent traditions (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983) and thus worked in and through the material world, which phenomena they were a symptom of and which social groups and political interests they served. In fact, the conceptual pairs of fantasy/unrealism and sorrow/nostalgia match perfectly, even if by contrast, with some of the key elements of what is usually known as modernization – particularly if framed as the development of capitalism – and the making of the modern State. It is probably enough to evoke the imaginary of Weberian disenchantment of modern life or the way positivism and its concomitant ideology of progress shaped societies, to read a real trauma with modernization into these images apparently removed from the material world. From a historical point of view, the British Ultimatum of 1890 is usually seen as the ultimate traumatic event in Portuguese modern history. This may therefore be an appropriate place to start this chapter’s narrative and to pose our initial problem in all its different aspects. The Ultimatum was a moment of generalized crisis in Portugal. The brief memorandum sent by the British Prime Minister urging the Portuguese government to withdraw its troops from the territories in the African hinterland under dispute by both countries may seem a minor diplomatic incident. However, the sheer impossibility of any kind of resistance to the British created an acute awareness of the country’s vulnerability as an historic Empire and of its subordinate role in late nineteenth-century Europe. From a diplomatic crisis, then, the situation evolved into a set of political,

 1

Eduardo Lourenço produced the classical theory of “Portuguese unrealism” in his O Labirinto da Saudade. Psicanálise mítica do destino Português. Cf. Lourenço (1978)



The System of Nationalism

251

economic, and later cultural and intellectual crises.2 The ultimatum may also be seen as a key moment for understanding the role of the State in Portuguese modern politics, having had a direct impact in the sequence of regimes: many historians seem to agree, for example, on the ultimatum’s decisive role in the terminal crisis of the constitutional monarchy and the eventual rise of the Republic in 1910. The crisis’ impact was particularly dramatic in the intellectual and literary fields. On the one hand, one could argue it marked a critical shift in the country’s perception of its People, particularly in Portuguese anthropology and the studies of popular culture. According to João Leal, the 1890s will witness both the ‘weakening of the romantic background’ (Leal 2006, 102) that had until then underpinned the discipline’s methodology, and its replacement with new research practices based on a direct contact with popular sources. What looked like a simple methodological change in fact reinforced the general feeling of postultimatum national pessimism. The idealized people of romantic anthropology gave way to a negative image of the Portuguese where the reasons for the country’s decadence, made all too apparent by the ultimatum, were to be found. It would not be difficult to see in contemporary realism a literary counterpart to this post-romantic, late nineteenth-century anthropology. And yet, the emergence of a counter-image to the country’s decadence – operating as a form of compensation for the crisis – would overcome realism as the public image of the country’s self-consciousness at the break of the new century. With its origins in literature, rather than in the social and historical sciences, this other image kept the idealized people of romanticism intact. Accordingly, instead of the decadent Portuguese unable to cope with modernization, the figure that emerges from early twentieth-century literature is that of a people still uncontaminated but already threatened by the pressures of urbanization and industrialization. From this moment on, national identity will play itself out between these two poles: the Portuguese as decadent and in need of a regeneration that would equip them for the challenges of modernization; or, the Portuguese as still able to hold on to their authenticity and in need of protection from the corruptive power of industrialization and urbanization. Idealism, that is, the resistance to instrumental reason behind the processes of modernization, could thus be seen either as “backwardness” or defiance. In this chapter, I will argue that idealism – which will assume different forms, to be later analyzed in detail – became hegemonic through a

 2



For a brief introduction to the episode, see Coelho (1990).

252

Chapter Ten

cultural and political process starting in the 1890s – in the aftermath of the British Ultimatum – and then unfolding through the cultural and political histories of Portuguese twentieth-century. This process is, I would also like to suggest, the history of Portuguese nationalism. Nationalism, in this sense, becomes both a field of politics – as a zone of contention between different theories of national identity – and an active agent in the making of the modern State.3 As such, it may manifest itself as a cultural phenomenon – or appear through cultural phenomena – but is political through and through. The specific politics of this form of nationalism should thus be looked for in the mechanisms through which the different theories of national identity struggled with each other for dominance. More concretely, the hegemony of an idealist, conservative and ruralist version of the Portuguese national identity should be drawn out of the structure of the country’s public sphere. This perspective combines all the agents negotiating the image of national identity and thus participating in the processes through which nationalism becomes a central element in political struggle.4 For instance, the ascendancy of a neo-romantic idealized image of the people over the negative representation emerging from anthropology – the process I just described as the birth of modern nationalism in Portugal – can only be grasped by looking at the boundaries between academia and the literary field in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact, the difference between the images produced by anthropology and literature entails more than merely theoretical and discursive options. Firstly, one should note that the lack of academic professionalization and the inexistence of a strong scientific research culture in the country was what paved the way for the hegemony of literary forms (Santos, 1994). In itself, this hegemony constitutes a key element for understanding the mode of

 3

The relation between nationalism, national identity and feelings of national cohesion, on the one hand, and the growth of the modern State, on the other, is aptly described by Michael Mann: ‘Quite unconsciously, most State activities furthered the nation as an experienced community, linking the intensive and emotional organizations of family and neighbourhood with more extensive and instrumental power organizations.’ Mann (1993, 730). 4 One of the few approaches in English to Portuguese nationalism that focuses on political processes (rather than in the timeless permanencies of identity) is AbdoolKarim Vakil’s. This frame, he argues, enable ‘us to displace the rather simplistic concern with concrete territorial state borders, in favour of a more complex analysis of the production and articulation of other incongruous and shifting administrative, secular and ecclesiastical, cultural and economic referents, and the processes by which they emerge, are experienced, imagined and represented.’ In Vakil (1993, 33).



The System of Nationalism

253

production of national identity and the processes of nationalism. For the literary field and the forms it produced went far beyond the domain of fiction. In fact, only a wide notion of literary form (one which includes journalism and all its genres: news, feuilletons, chronicles, literary critique, historical essay, etc.) can account for the strength and persistence of Portuguese romanticism as a literary culture whose role in mediating between the tropes of national identity, modernization and the making of the liberal State was so imposing that it managed to conceal, and to a large extent erase, the discourses of post-romantic social sciences from the public sphere. Moreover, the public sphere reconstitutes the country’s geographical structure of power, which will prove decisive in determining both the dominant images of national identity and the winners in the struggles of nationalism. In this sense, Lisbon’s supremacy over the rest of the country over-determined not only the relation between the State and the nation, but also, and fundamentally, the relation between the subject and the object of representation in Portuguese national identity. Briefly stated, the capital’s literary institutions shaped the public image of the whole country. This could not have happened before the modern mechanisms of mass culture and mass media – the press and mass literature in the context of a slow but constant literacy growth – were set in place. In the case of Portugal, the distance – political, but also economical, social, cultural and symbolical – between city and country, further dramatized this supremacy. This leads us to paradoxical consequences: whereas almost all of the mechanisms for the reproduction of the images of Portugal and its national identity are based in Lisbon, the particular image that becomes hegemonic is, as we have underlined from the beginning, a negation of modern civilization and its material life-world – of which the city was the ultimate symbol. In other words, what somehow crystallized as Portugal was a negation of Lisbon and the affirmation of all that was external to it – the whole constituted by the countryside and rural life – as the supposed source of what was most authentic in the People’s identity.5 The reasons

 5

In one of the most challenging discussions about the origins of Portugal, historian José Mattoso suggests that the State was, from the beginning, the major factor in the creation of the country’s national identity. Any intent to search for the nation before the State (in a common ethnic ground, for instance) would have to leave Lisbon and its inhabitants outside the nation. Cf. Mattoso (1998). Mattoso’s text is discussed within a more updated theoretical frame for the studies of nationalism and national identity by Manuel Villaverde Cabral, who argues for a compromise between an instrumentalist – the state as the creator of national identity – and an essentialist – the nation precedes state formation – approach to the issue. As an



254

Chapter Ten

for this paradox must then be looked for within the cultural mechanisms of the Portuguese capital. This has such far-reaching consequences for my analysis that one could go as far as saying that, rather than nationalism, it is the structure of the cultural sphere that is truly at stake here. In other words, this is an approach to nationalism through cultural history, whereby the former merely functions as the ideological referent to the cultural system of power.

The City and the Mountains It may seem odd to go search for the rural images of a country’s national identity in its capital city. And yet, if we start our narrative with some post-ultimatum literary works that would later prove influential in twentieth-century nationalism, Lisbon – or even, more abstractly, urban and literary life as such – will clearly emerge as the absent cause of that same uneasiness with modern life that blazed a path for idealism. The 1890s saw the emergence of a new literary generation reacting against modernity and searching for inspiration in the countryside and its people, where, they professed, the roots of national authenticity were still intact. They called themselves neo-garrettists, after the name of a founding father of Portuguese romanticism, Almeida Garrett, who, according to his late nineteenth-century followers, ‘had copied Portugal onto his books’ (Oliveira 1894, 37). The group’s literary curtain-raiser took place in 1892, with the publication of António Nobre’s Só – ‘Portugal’s saddest book’ –, a lament for a country at a loss, besieged by modernization.6 Two years later, another young poet and Nobre’s close friend, Alberto de Oliveira, would establish the group’s doctrine with Palavras Loucas.

 approach to the question in the context of the formation of the State, this chapter will stress the making of modern nationalism rather than analyze any pre-existing forms of national identity. Cf. Cabral (2003, 513-33). 6 The past and geographical distance mark that loss, as in a poem significantly called Viagens na Minha Terra (the title of a classic novel by Almeida Garret): ‘Oh, Portugal of my childhood/ I don’t know why I love you from a distance / I love you more when I’m alone…’ (Nobre 1959, 79). Interestingly, the poem was written in Paris, not in Lisbon. This geographical discrepancy would later organize the structure of Eça de Queirós’s The City and the Mountains, posthumously published in 1901. The City and the Mountains would become paradigmatic of this nationalist narrative: after a lavish, but ultimately empty, experience with technology and cosmopolitanism while living in Paris, the novel’s protagonist would find the true meaning of life in the remote mountains of northern Portugal. Lisbon is not even taken into account in this particular city versus mountains contrast.



The System of Nationalism

255

As the manifesto of neo-garrettism, Palavras Loucas represents a key work within Portuguese nationalism. Its importance stems from the narrative of decadence that makes it such a good example of the period’s pessimism about the nation. In short, the picture drawn by Oliveira is remarkably close to the critique of reason and of social and technological progress familiar to so many European conservative intellectuals of his time. Yet, what is most interesting about it is the way in which he equates decadence with the city and, more to the point, how he contrasts that same decadence with the rural haven where the true Portugal was still to be discovered: ‘poets in Portugal should emigrate to the villages. This way, we could perhaps understand our country’s character and see a wider path to follow (…) amidst this exhausted literature.’ (Oliveira 1894, 32) Behind the anti-modern conservatism of this critique, the call to leave the city in search of the lost world of pre-modernity is, in itself, profoundly modern: because it assumes that all that is visible, and thus real, is what is produced by the public sphere. In themselves, Portugal’s villages were worth nothing. In order for them to attain any kind of existence, let alone the status of the true essence of Portugal, city poets had to retrieve them. The key paradox of this nationalism lies here. Alberto de Oliveira’s own inquiry into the life of the people shows him something decisive: people in the countryside, despite their low levels of literacy, made a much better use of language than urban intellectuals. After watching some women testifying in court – presumably one of the few situations where illiterate women had the opportunity to be heard by State institutions – he realized that to say exactly the same thing ‘any intellectual would take twice as much time, and wouldn’t be as picturesque, or as lively’ (Oliveira 1894, 192).7 This is the literary specificity of Oliveira’s wider critique of modernity: the written word is the common tool to all institutions organizing urban life, from State bureaucracy to mass media. As such, to praise the oral skills of the people could be seen as both a celebration of their authentic way of life and a critique of modern life as an emanation of bureaucracy, a civilization founded on the circulation of written ideas and the production of written laws.8 Neither neo-garrettism nor Alberto de Oliveira play a very important role in the histories of Portuguese literature and ideas. The central role

 7

The word used for intellectual in the original text, literato, can have a number of meanings, all related to an educated person with a good command of the written word. 8 On the formation of a bureaucratic culture in modern Portugal, see chapter 5 in this book.



256

Chapter Ten

they have in this chapter’s narrative is thus strictly political. In other words, we will not be looking for the literary specificities of their fiction and poetry, or for the particularities of their system of thought, but to the process through which their critique of the city and their project to recover the lost world of Portuguese rurality became so influential in the course of twentieth-century politics. In fact, what is most meaningful in the whole process is precisely the fact that nationalism did not become hegemonic through forceful doctrines or epic narratives but rather through a set of ideas and literary practices that did not cease to undermine everything that defined writers, intellectuals, and intellectual life in general. It should be said that Portuguese nationalism had its ideologues – suffice it to think of Portuguese Integralismo, a local version of antimodern and reactionary doctrines inspired by the work of Charles Maurras and the Action Française. It also had its modern epics – of which Fernando Pessoa’s Message is probably the most significant. More than a doctrine or an aesthetic, however, nationalism’s ability to impact on Portuguese modern politics was a direct consequence of the very structure that framed the country’s public sphere and which determined that all images and narratives defining national identity were produced in the only place – the city – presumably outside of the nation as such. What makes this structure so important is the fact that, in its unevenness between the city as the subject of power and the rest of the country as its political object, the public sphere rigorously reproduced the power relations between the State and the territory under its rule. This insistence on Lisbon’s supremacy in the making of the country’s representations is critical because what I initially called idealism depends directly on it. In other words, as in the relation between the State and its citizens, intellectuals too (writers, journalists, artists, and politicians engaged in literary activities) made their decisions about the country from a distance. A joke about the Republican regime, according to which the latter was established in Lisbon through a revolution on 5 October 1910 and then announced to the rest of the country by telegraph, eloquently encapsulates the structure of this political culture. This is why Republican nationalism, despite all its patriotism and engagement in the creation of national symbols (flag, anthem, civic values and calendar, etc), was never truly hegemonic: its aim, to be achieved through massive schooling, was to fill the gap between the people and the State by creating citizens (Catroga 2000). As such, the system of nationalism based on that same gap never ceased to undermine the regime’s efforts to put an end to the idealized world of the Portuguese countryside in both social relations and representations. In other words,



The System of Nationalism

257

this brand of nationalism, which hinged on the assumption that the country was essentially a passive, unchanging entity waiting for others to determine what it should look like and how much modernization it should be the recipient of, could never be based on the deployment of modern forms of political mobilization. On the contrary, its politics was always one of depoliticization.

The system of nationalism The history of literary nationalism is thus a history of depoliticization, i.e., a process through which the material features of politics as such (doctrines, debates, programs, parties, and political struggle in general) are undermined by a system subsuming social and political reality to the metaphysical dimension I started referring to under the loose term Idealism. It was, in this sense, a negative process, based on the production of silences and invisibilities, and as such particularly difficult to translate into narrative form. An editorial in the influential Diário de Notícias, written by its director, Augusto de Castro, on 2 February 1922, may help us with this difficulty, by situating depoliticization historically as well as bringing into relief the decisive role of the nationalist generation within it. Between 1890 and 1922 the country’s politics had been very unstable, with the crisis of constitutional Monarchy – including the regicide of Carlos I in 1908 – and the emergence of the Republican regime in 1910. The Republic never managed to stabilize the country’s political life and by the time Castro wrote this text – in a historical context marked by postWorld War I political turmoil – it was entering its last period of endemic crises before falling at the hands of the army in 1926. Meanwhile, Alberto de Oliveira and his generation – to which Augusto de Castro was a latecomer – had both avoided any strong compromise with politics and its disputes and assumed a central role in Portuguese cultural life and its institutions. This may begin to explain the editorial’s importance, for it carries an extra-political legitimacy – that of the intellectual, or journalist – to attack politics from the outside. The text’s explicit subject is another political crisis against which the title reacted with a resounding negative interjection: “No!”: ‘No’ to more rebellions, uses of force and violence! This ‘no’ is in every heart and every mouth; this ‘no’ expresses the supreme will of the nation in its condemnation of anarchy. No opposing voice in the press; no organized political force dares to raise even the slightest dissidence or discord against this strong statement of our collective consciousness. No!



258

Chapter Ten (…) This ‘no’ means the exhaustion of hatred in Portuguese society, fatigue with resentment, the fear of crime, the terror of the past, the alarming uncertainty about the future.9

The dramatic tone of the protest can be easily framed within – or used in favour of – the generalized assault on liberal political institutions that gave rise to the different forms of Fascist authoritarianism in Europe. In part, that is exactly what the editorial does. And yet, two other things, both concerning the relation the newspaper establishes with the nation in general and its readers in particular, need to be highlighted: first and foremost, the no itself, a critique of political instability which offers no political solutions, thus refusing to participate in the political debate as such. This way, Castro insulates himself from controversy, and his text can be violent and yet beyond dispute, as it is merely common sense and, as such, can be equated with the feelings of the nation. In other words, the newspaper – and its director – is able to keep politics at arm’s length by projecting the impact of his text beyond the struggles of political life. The second thing was the demonstration of the text’s impact in the following days, when the references made to “No!” in other newspapers and the letters of support received by Diário de Notícias, especially from the provinces (where, as it was also noticed, the editorial was printed in numerous local papers) were published. A few days later, Augusto de Castro would express his gratitude to everyone on behalf of public opinion itself. The director of one of Portugal’s leading newspapers was then able to personify that same public opinion and become the representative of a narrow, but politically decisive minority of 30% of Portuguese who could read and had easy access to newspapers (and political life). But also, given the ability of this restricted public sphere to speak for the rest of the nation, to automatically assume that his common sense was also the nation’s. More than content, then, nationalism worked as a form. The nation could of course be imagined10 with many different contents. But before becoming a specific ethnic identity or historical heritage – the two main threads of nationalist narratives – this nation was an entity organized

 9

Augusto de Castro, “Não!”, Diário de Notícias, 22-2-1922, 1. The expression is, of course, Benedict Anderson’s, to whom the modern press was instrumental in nations’ ability to become imagined communities in two different ways: first, through the newspaper’s fictiveness, i.e., ‘the essential literary convention of the newspaper’, and secondly, through the ‘relationship between the newspaper, as a form of book, and the market’ (whose primary form is national). Cf. Anderson (1983, 33).

10



The System of Nationalism

259

around a consensus, a true pact of silence outside which only politics – and the city, its space par excellence – remained. The political form of this nationalism, in the context of its anti-liberal critique – a more concrete version, in the 1920s, of the still too abstract anti-modern discourse of Palavras Loucas – comes forth as the combination of two complementary moves: while the concrete speeches of politics are silenced, the authentic voice of the nation can be made to resound. In this sense, the discourses of nationalism must be read in context. To argue that nationalism is a form, rather than content (or a doctrine), means that its impact depends on the sites of its utterance (e.g., the editorial of a prestigious newspaper) and the combination between what it says and what it silences, or what it prefers to leave unsaid. In other words, to relate the (institutional, geographical and symbolical) discourses of different nationalist intellectuals and writers both among each other and with the different sets of speeches they produce may allow us to reconstitute nationalism’s political performance. For example, when Germany declared war on Portugal in 1916, Augusto de Castro asked ‘is this time to think? Is this time to discuss?’ (Castro 1917, 120) only to give exactly the same answer as the one given in the 1922 editorial: ‘No’. The repetition suggests a pattern: the negation, even more obviously in 1916 than in 1922, refuses politics qua conflict and negotiation between different positions, in the name of nationalist consensus: ‘In times like this, patriotism is an exclusive feeling, an infinite belief, an absolute faith. It is because it is’ (idem). More or less at the same time, Castro wrote an article with no apparent relation with politics, let alone the war. A female friend had asked for his advice on what to read during a sojourn in the countryside. Castro replied that she did not have to take any books with her, because ‘poetry will be in the remarkable harmony surrounding you – and it will be in yourself, as long as your heart has eyes and ears for it.’ (idem, 52). The urban traveller should not need literature, as nature itself – and the proximity of those same rural Portuguese still uncorrupted by modernization – would provide for any spiritual needs. The relation between the former nationalist call for consensus during wartime and the latter literary eulogy of bucolic landscapes is not obvious. And yet, a common critique is identifiable in both. To declare the indisputable status of the fatherland and to situate poetry in nature – i.e., the non-urban countryside – both amounted to a dismissal of human (written, political) discourse. This dialectic between the poetry of pristine nature and the corruption of political and literary discourses was at the basis of the narrative of nationalism. The fact that another nationalist writer, Afonso Lopes Vieira – probably the generation’s most active



260

Chapter Ten

element in the making of a Portuguese nationalist culture –, insisted on precisely the same dialectical tropes shows how nationalism was becoming pervasive by circulating between journalism and literature and infusing the public sphere. Vieira argued that language (the same oral language Alberto de Oliveira identified with the people and Augusto de Castro saw as nature’s poetry) was the strongest element of cohesion in Portuguese society, especially in moments of political turmoil like the Republic. The two things were again combined. On the one hand, Portugal only existed ‘thanks to language’, while on the other, given the way Portuguese society was being corrupted by political debate, the solution had again to come in some form of silencing: In Portugal, after listening to this annoying racket of voices chattering and conspiring, fussing and quarrelling, one assumes that what the country needs is a mystical elixir: a cure of silence. By tacit agreement, we would all remain silent for a while. After which maybe souls and language could become purer. (Vieira 1922, 357)

A consensus was gradually being established by the insistence and combination of these discourses. On the one hand, writers like Augusto de Castro and Afonso Lopes Vieira occupied positions of heightened visibility within the public sphere. On the other, their concrete critique of politics was both a form of censorship and a wider negation of urban life and modernization in the name of that invisible countryside silenced by the clatter of Lisbon’s political life. But in order for this politics of nationalism to fully come forth – as the silencing of urban politics and the emergence of the authentic voice of the nation –, a further combination was required. This provides us with an opportunity to know the generation of Castro, Lopes Vieira and some other nationalist writers in greater detail, and to map out their geographic distribution. This will allow us to draw a more faithful portrait of the system of nationalism against the background of the relations between Lisbon and the rest of the country. For if the form of Portuguese nationalism as a conflict between the city and the country (with everything these two spaces symbolize) has been made clear, we are yet to understand why its narrative was so appealing and effective. In other words, we are yet to give an account of its performance.

The display of invisibility We can take the cases of Augusto de Castro and Afonso Lopes Vieira to draw a first distinction between two different positions within the same generation. For whereas Augusto de Castro became a renowned journalist



The System of Nationalism

261

as the director of Diário de Notícias and the author of best-selling books where he collected his articles and feuilletons, Vieira built a literary persona based on its refusal of urban life and political institutions: in 1916, he quit his job in the Republican parliament and launched, from a distance, a nationalist campaign to retrieve and systematize the artistic heritage of the country. He was in this sense closer to other nationalist writers with whom he shared a set of cultural affinities, such as António Corrêa de Oliveira and Antero de Figueiredo, whose popularity grew steadily throughout the first decades of the century. Two things united the literary biographies of these three men: they all had enough financial resources to live without a salary and for that reason they all abandoned their professional careers in the public sector and in politics on behalf of a more “authentic” form of existence in some haven in the Portuguese countryside. But isolation was not only, maybe not even fundamentally, a celebration of rural life. For the rural farms and sea cottages where these men lived were, in all three cases, a refuge from previous urban experiences. In other words, refusal was the decisive element – a biographical version of Augusto de Castro’s ‘no’. This refusal could express itself vaguely as a disappointment with the inhumanity of crowds and the impersonality of city life, as in Antero de Figueiredo’s travelling memoirs. But it could also be visible in more concrete episodes, such as the traumatic revolution (during the republican regime) when Corrêa de Oliveira saw ‘a poor woman, starving and in rags’ being killed at his doorstep in Lisbon with a baby in her arms.11 Or it could go as far as an open campaign against the republican regime, and its mechanisms of literary legitimacy, as in the nationalist militancy of Lopes Vieira. Whichever the case, the move away from the city and the isolation in the countryside was more than a political stance or a biographical episode. The geographical move had concrete literary consequences, for leaving the city allowed these writers to distance themselves from the rhetoric of politics and get closer to preserved forms of rural life. Accordingly, what they wrote was in an ideal position to express, and thus preserve, the spiritual truths beyond material progress and the ancient wisdom of uncorrupted oral communication of (illiterate) peasants threatened by modernization. Religiosity became a central feature in this literature, not only because God and faith were the cement of traditional

 11

The episode was recorded in an interview published in the popular magazine ABC. Gomes Monteiro, “Como Trabalha o Poeta Correia de Oliveira”, ABC, February 23, 1922, 2.



262

Chapter Ten

society and the guiding thread of the country’s historical narrative, but also because it moved their writings away from the secular and mundane concerns of opinion and realism. When Antero de Figueiredo decided to write about the 1917 apparitions at Fátima – his impeccable Catholic credentials granted him exclusive access to Lúcia, the only surviving visionary of the apparitions – he explicitly called on divine inspiration: ‘if intelligence fails, emotion can’t fail; (…) if reason can’t reach the climax, let them be achieved by love.’(Figueiredo 1941, 59) Emotions, sentiments, as opposed to reason, or the intellect, were what lent this literature an ambition that went well beyond a mimetic relation with a referent and a direct communication with the reader. For, more than a theme, the spiritual frame of what they wrote was an inspiration, if not indeed a blessing. This gave Antero de Figueiredo a sharp sense of self-righteousness. And the same proximity to the spiritual sources of life allowed Corrêa de Oliveira and Lopes Vieira to go even further and pretend that more than writing for the people or about the people, their verses were actually an expression of the people itself – ‘a poet is the voice through which a People speaks’ (Vieira 1922a, 11) – and, as such, the voice of the nation: ‘Portugal is speaking to you, and thus spoke Portugal:/ (…) “my palace was history;/ my neighbour is God.”’ (Oliveira 1948, 23) Of course, to refuse any direct interaction with the urban mechanisms of the literary field and the public sphere, or pretending to embody the utterance of abstract entities such as the divine or the people, does not in itself give any guarantee of public visibility (arguably, quite the opposite). What then, one could ask, made their literary careers so successful? Here is where Lisbon re-enters the picture and the system of nationalism reaches its full circle. The distinction already drawn between Afonso Lopes Vieira – in his self-exile in the ideal Portugal of religion and rural life –, on the one hand, and Augusto de Castro, the visible and influential director of Diário de Notícias, on the other, was above all geographic. The decisive role played by geography this chapter is trying to convey, however, worked both at the level of form and of content. In other words, the city was not only the nemesis against which the ideal world of the countryside could be defined. It was also where the main institutions of the country’s public sphere – newspapers, publishers, theatres and the other cultural industries, academies, etc. – were located. As such, the visibility of the isolated, or better still, the transformation of their ideal imaginary into urban and public opinion, could only be achieved through the mediation of all these urban mechanisms. This is the ultimate form of our initial paradox and the matter in which the geographical distribution of the different members of the nationalist



The System of Nationalism

263

generation proved so effective. For while Afonso Lopes Vieira, António Corrêa de Oliveira and Antero de Figueiredo attributed their inspiration to a direct contact with the authentic sources of national identity, their urban fellow travellers occupied strategic posts in the cultural milieu which allowed them to manage the circulation of discourses. Institutionalized nationalism spread its influence in many different ways: through literary critique and political commentary in the press, the control of cultural institutions, political positions (especially in the fields of education and the arts), etc. This urban side of the generation was formed by men like Augusto de Castro who, as has been pointed out, was a newspaper director and best-selling author, but also a diplomat; Júlio Dantas, another bestselling author, director of the academy, minister, parliamentarian, cultural diplomat, etc.; or Agostinho de Campos, politician, literary historian, linguist, pedagogue, and opinion maker in newspapers and the radio. Together, and alongside a few others, they materialized the political culture of nationalism. By giving isolated nationalists an intense public visibility, urban nationalists bestowed the symbolic power of the literary system upon them while at the same time undermining the material institutions of city politics and culture (Trindade 2008). Through newspapers, urban readers were fed a constant diet of literary critiques, chronicles and reports about the works and lives of the isolated. The image thus created was in sharp contrast with the presumed lives of those same readers and the city they lived in. According to Júlio Dantas, António Corrêa de Oliveira was ‘the poet in whose golden voice the voice of silent things sung, the ecstasies of plentiful nature roared, the stones and the beasts, the trees and the sea spoke’ (Dantas 1915, 126). Similarly, in the journalistic portraits of Antero de Figueiredo depicted by Augusto de Castro, everything in this literature was spiritual and comforting, not only because he was close to the purest sources of inspiration, but also, and fundamentally, because he was far removed from the city and its material ambitions: ‘this is how, in a time of charlatans, he is able to be a silent and quiet creature that seeks and attains, with rare faith, a noble ideal.’ (Castro 1916, 207) Finally, this silent existence was what, beneath the clatter of politics and mass culture, would allow the expression of true Portugal to (re)emerge. In the early 1920s, Agostinho de Campos was given the opportunity to establish the nationalist canon by organizing a Portuguese Anthology in a series of volumes. The only two living authors included in the collection were Antero de Figueiredo and Afonso Lopes Vieira. In the introduction to the latter’s volume, Campos’s would assure his readers that those pages, ‘apart from the opportunity of aesthetic enjoyment, [also] constitute a precious instrument of pedagogy, culture and taste, a lesson in



264

Chapter Ten

appropriate language, (…) idealism and portuguesismo [Portugueseness].’ (Campos 1925, LXIII) Once again, it may have been difficult to see exactly what portuguesismo stood for, what true Portugal looked like – that was, after all, the role of silence and invisibility, the insistent tropes used to create the image of the isolated. It was, on the other hand, much easier to see what it refused. Easier, not only because the targets of such refusal – urban life, politics – had a more concrete existence, but mostly because those forms were closer to the everyday life of readers. Moreover, in the context of the 1910s and the 1920s, when this literary canon came into being, it became obvious to everyone that such idealism was being mobilized into very concrete political struggles. In a word, it was mobilized against the Republic. The republican regime encapsulated everything nationalism stood against. It was an urban phenomenon, its project was to modernize the nation, and it engaged in a permanent struggle between words, doctrines and discourses through newspapers, the parliament and party rallies. In a series of anti-republican pamphlets, Corrêa de Oliveira used the discursive form of the homily to complain against the way the words of republican politics were dividing the nation: ‘Oh! Lord! How can I/ How can we, from brother to brother/ Use the same words/ First, in the Lord’s Prayer/ Later, in curse and treason.’ (Oliveira 1921, 40) Afonso Lopes Vieira, as we have seen, was the most vigorous opponent of republicanism. His nationalist campaign was clearly designed as a project to purge Portugal and its culture from the external influences of positivism and democracy. After the war, he used the spectre of the Unknown Soldier – who would come ‘with no discourses, no sentences’ – to accuse the regime of sacrificing the country’s youth in World War I. When, in the 1920s, the political situation shifted towards the nationalist ideals all these writers had been fighting for, he could clearly see how the new political situation was a coming to terms with the ideal nation expressed by their literature: Portugal now exists in History, and in ourselves. It has a kind of metaphysical existence, while simultaneously being so tangible and powerful in the abstraction with which we keep it and preserve it, that day after day our faith swells and heroic Portugal grows in the minds and creations of its intellectuals and artists. (in Campos 1925, XVIII)



The System of Nationalism

265

Conclusion – Salazarism as political culture of Portuguese nationalism Nationalist literature may have played a meaningful part in the crisis of the Republican regime and the emergence of anti-liberal and antidemocratic political values. But that was not the only political impact it had. For this same ascendancy of literature over politics – or rather, of the literary dimension of politics – had a say in shaping the new authoritarian politics of the 1930s. In fact, one can say that Salazarism, the political habitus symbolized by Oliveira Salazar (Estado Novo’s de facto political leader), was to a large extent the political embodiment of the ideological performance of neo-garrettism. On the one hand, because the public image of the dictator rigorously reproduced the intense visibility of isolation we saw in writers like António Corrêa de Oliveira, Afonso Lopes Vieira or Antero de Figueiredo: in his case, the rhetoric of work and modesty, used to explain Salazar’s supposed resistance to public appearances, circulated widely and repeatedly through newspapers and the regime’s propaganda (Ramos do Ó 1999). But also, and on the other hand, because everything in Salazar – from his ideology to his political practice – reproduced the discursive ethics proclaimed by nationalist literature. The first aspect is more difficult to narrate, precisely because it corresponds to the negative process producing silences and invisibilities this chapter is trying to come to terms with. In other words, Salazarism was a product of mass media and mass culture based on a negation of the public sphere organized by those same mass media and mass culture.12 More concretely, it mass-produced the absence of the dictator, Oliveira Salazar, as someone not really belonging to the mundane world of politics and opinion, yet another isolated figure, a rural spirit sacrificing his life for the country in the reclusion of his office.13



12 Even when faced with the need to organize its own propaganda, Salazar insisted – in a public interview – on his resistance to any public aspect of politics: ‘We have to follow that path, towards an intense and consciously organized propaganda, but it is a shame that so much noise is needed to impose truth, so many beats and drums, which is exactly the same process used to spread lies.’ In Ferro (2003, 123). 13 José Gil analyzed the public image of the dictator as a mass production of silence and invisibility: ‘The fact that Salazar subtracts the words of the Portuguese means that his own silence (the silence of what it excludes condensed in his personal example) takes the form of a violent negation of any other diverging or opposing discourse.’ cf. Gil (1995, 40).



266

Chapter Ten

As for the discursive ethics of Salazarism, Agostinho de Campos, who would become one of the most influential ideologues of the new regime in the 1930s, clearly equated the corruption of parliamentarian politics – ‘since its origins in 1820, political eloquence (…) developed its choice of tricks to paralyze the education of a retrograde audience’ (Campos 1924, 137) – with the excellence of Salazar’s language: ‘his speeches are not just political “eloquence”, but rather much more and much better than that – “political literature”.’ (Campos 1943, 25) The solitary mission of Salazar purified what he said or wrote and distinguished his sobriety from the noisy political debates of liberalism. Salazar himself showed how central silence was to the ideology of the dictatorship in one of his most important public speeches: We do not discuss God and virtue; we do not discuss the nation and its History; we do not discuss authority and its prestige; we do not discuss family and its morals; we do not discuss the glory of work and its duty... (in Nogueira 1977, 368)

As before, the contents of the discourse were all predictable enough: god, virtue, the nation, history, authority, family, work, etc, are what one would expect from the imaginary of an authoritarian conservative like Salazar. The negation, however, the refusal to discuss, is, like Augusto de Castro’s ‘No!’, what turns familiar tropes into self-evident political values. The ultimate paradox, then, lies in yet another formal detail: this call for silence was made in one of the first speeches in Portuguese politics to be radio broadcasted (and filmed). This was, I will argue in conclusion, the formal model of Portuguese nationalism in the twentieth century – its banal version.14 Its most important feature was not, it is worth repeating, a specific doctrine or narrative, although one should add that not all narratives fit the model. In fact, the standard history of early twentieth century Portuguese nationalism was suitably based on a negation – of modernity as capitalism, as we have shown from the start. According to it, Portugal, in its rural authenticity and incorruptibility, could emerge as the spiritual guide to a modern world heading for decadence and destruction in the 1930s and 1940s, on the one hand, while at the same time preserving, through the refusal of that particular form of modernization, its initial role in the history of modern civilization. The appeal of the narrative is obvious. The maritime expansion of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had been an evangelical adventure through which the Portuguese had spread European values, i.e.,

 14



I here draw from Michael Billig’s notion of banal nationalism (Billig, 1995).

The System of Nationalism

267

Catholicism, throughout the world. Later on, still following the same narrative, Spanish, English, French and Dutch capitalist expansions would corrupt Portugal’s initial mission with its materialist interests. Now, in the interwar period, when capitalism seemed bound for self-destruction, Portugal’s economic “backwardness” could be turned into a spiritual advantage. In fact, from the poems of Corrêa de Oliveira and Lopes Vieira to the discourses of Salazar, or from the newspaper articles of Augusto de Castro and Agostinho de Campos to the Estado Novo’s propaganda, the ecology of the Portuguese countryside, with its spiritual forms of human existence, insistently showed Portugal as a modern example to other nations that had lost their way. This narrative fits the nationalist model of silence and negation insofar as it spoke in the name of the silenced countryside – whose legitimacy depended, precisely, on its distance from the mechanisms producing public discourse – and refused everything that threatened its authenticity – all the while using those very mechanisms to impose its silencing power. To argue, as Portuguese nationalism so often did, that Portugal’s role in twentieth century history was to guide the world, or at least the West, towards salvation, may sound hyperbolic, if not indeed absurd. And yet, to criticize this narrative for its incoherence or unrealism would miss the point of its political efficiency, that is, the ways in which, despite its failure in taking the world back on the path of spiritual values, it had a long-lasting effect in Portuguese history and politics throughout the last century.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage, 1995. Cabral, Manuel Villaverde. “A Identidade Nacional Portuguesa: Conteúdo e Relevância”, in Dados – Revista de Ciências Sociais, 2003. Campos, Agostinho de. Ler e Tresler. Apontamentos de Linguagem e Literatura. Porto: Livrarias Aillaud e Bertrand, 1924. Campos, Agostinho (ed.). Antologia Portuguesa – Afonso Lopes Vieira (prosa e verso). Lisboa: Livrarias Aillaud & Bertrand, 1925. Campos, Agostinho de Campos. Falas sem Fio. Lisboa: Livraria Bertrand, 1943. Castro, Augusto de. Fumo do Meu Cigarro. Lisboa: Empresa Literária Fluminense, 1916. —. Fantoches e Manequins. Lisboa: Editora Literária Fluminense, 1917.



268

Chapter Ten

Catroga, Fernando. O Republicanismo em Portugal. Da formação ao 5 de Outubro de 1910. Lisboa: Editorial Notícias, 2000. Coelho, Teresa Pinto. ‘“Pérfida Albion” and “Little Portugal”: The Role of the Press in British and Portuguese National Perceptions of the 1890 Ultimatum’, in Portuguese Studies 6, 1990. Dantas, Júlio. Ao Ouvido de Madame X. Porto: Livraria Chardron, 1915. Ferro, António. Entrevistas de António Ferro a Salazar. Lisboa: Parceria A.M. Pereira, 2003. Figueiredo, Antero de. Fátima. Graças, segredos, mistérios. Lisboa: Livraria Bertrand, 1941. Gil, José. Salazar: a Retórica da Invisibilidade. Lisboa: Relógio d’Água, 1995. Hobsbawm, Eric, Terence Ranger. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Leal, João. Antropologia em Portugal. Mestres, Percursos, Tradições. Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 2006. Lourenço, Eduardo. O Labirinto da Saudade. Psicanálise mítica do destino Português. Lisboa: D. Quixote, 1978. Mann, Michael. The Sources of Social Power: Volume 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation States 1760-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Mattoso, José. A Identidade Nacional. Lisboa: Gradiva, 1998. Nobre, António. Só. Porto: Livraria Tavares Martins, 1959. Nogueira, Franco. Salazar: estudo biográfico. Lisboa: Atlântida Editora, 1977. Oliveira, Alberto de. Palavras Loucas. Coimbra: F. França Amado, 1894. Oliveira, António Corrêa de. Na Hora Incerta ou A Nossa Patria (redondilhas que para o povo escreveu), book 5th “A Fala que Deus nos Deu”. Porto: Companhia Portugueza Editora, 1921. —. Hora Incerta: Pátria Certa. Lisboa: SNI, 1948. Ramos do Ó, Jorge. Os Anos de Ferro. O dispositivo cultural durante a “Política do Espírito”. 1933-1948. Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 1999. Santos, Boaventura Sousa. “Onze teses por ocasião de mais uma descoberta de Portugal”, in Pela Mão de Alice. O Social e Político na Pós-Modernidade. Porto: Afrontamento, 1994. Trindade, Luís. O Estranho Caso do Nacionalismo Português. O Salazarismo entre a literatura e a política. Lisboa: Imprensa das Ciências Sociais, 2008. Vakil, AbdoolKarim A. “Nationalising Cultural Politics: Representations of the Portuguese ‘Discoveries’ and the Rhetoric of Identitarianism, 1880-1926”, in Nationalism and the Nation in the Iberian Peninsula:



The System of Nationalism

269

competing and conflicting identities (ed. Clare Mar-Molinero et al). Oxford: Berg, 1996. Vieira, Afonso Lopes. Em Demanda do Graal. Lisboa: Portugal Brasil, 1922. —. País Lilás, Desterro Azul. Lisboa: Portugal Brasil, 1922a.



CHAPTER ELEVEN ‘PORTUGAL IS NOT A POOR COUNTRY’: THE POWER OF COMMUNISM JOSÉ NEVES

At present we have not one but rather two histories of communism. On the one hand, whether within the frame of a general reflection on the emergence of the modern State (Skocpol 1979; Scott 1998) or as part of ongoing debates around the topic of totalitarianism (Furet 1995; Courtois 1998; Furet and Nolte 2001), we have a cluster of studies that have focused on communism essentially through the prism of the historical analysis of Socialist States. There is, on the other hand, a strand of studies which frames communism as an autonomous political culture or social movement (Kertzer 1980; Pudal 1989; Godinho 2001). This split does justice to the fact that the term communism, throughout the contemporary era, has been used to designate some of the most powerful States in the world as well as the various movements that have opposed, and struggled against, other no less powerful States. While it has stood as a banner for institutions such as the defunct Stasi (the political police of the German Democratic Republic), for dictatorial governments such as Joseph Stalin’s or even for a Chinese regime that has recently stepped into a key role in the world’s geopolitical arena, Communism was no less associated with events such as the Paris Commune and the Saint Petersburg Soviet, or the resistance to fascist dictatorships in Europe and anti-colonial movements that extended from India to the Caribbean. Let us begin, then, by acknowledging the pertinence of these two histories of communism: the history of communism as State rule and the history of communism as a movement counter to, or in the margins of, the State. This state of the art, nonetheless, leaves us to deal with important difficulties. While most of the research we know tends to consider communism either as State rule or as a movement counter or in the margins of the State, it seldom analyzes it as an historical element marked by both realities at one and the same time. Drawing on bibliography that

‘Portugal is Not a Poor Country’

271

has sought to intersect the history of communism with Nationalism Studies (Anderson 1991 [1983]; Hobsbawm 1990; Seth 1995), my research on communism in Portugal (Neves 2008) has sought to bring into focus the differences along with the continuities between both these standpoints. To put it another way: in light of the fact that the communist experience in the contemporary era has been primarily narrated as a history of a political paradox – communism would be, within this framework, a force of State oppression and a force of resistance to State oppression –, my aim, grounded on the presupposition of this dual historical condition of communism, has been to disentangle the implications of such a duality. In short, my goal has been to make headway towards a history of communist forms of power in which its oppressing and resisting facets are perceived not only in their contradiction but also in and through the effects of their concurrency. The line of investigation which emerges from this dual focus zooms in, then, on the very fact that communism has named divergent, even conflicting, processes and tracks the historical meanings of such a coincidence. The present chapter is divided into four parts. In the first, I offer a brief summary of the history of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), and discuss its place in the memory and historiography of the twentieth century, which will allow me to situate my own research. In the second and third parts, I set out to analyze the formation and transformations of the economic discourse of the PCP between 1940 and 1974, when both the dictatorship and the Portuguese Empire collapsed. Finally, in the fourth and last part, this analysis is projected onto a wider canvas, the history of the Portuguese twentieth century.

The History of the Portuguese Communist Party Founded in 1921, the PCP was but a minor force in 1920s Portugal. Throughout the First Republic, in the arena of institutional politics, its activity developed in the shadow of the so-called Republican left (Ramos 1994; Pinto 2009), while in the field of the worker’s movement and other social movements it played second string to the hegemonic anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist forces (Cabral 1977; Medeiros 1978; Freire 1992). When the military coup of 28 May 1926 took place, overthrowing the Republic and clearing the path for a dictatorship that would last until 25 April 1974, the communist party organization, already frail, was nearly wounded to death. Even if it is true that communist militants individually participated in some counter-coup attempts, as an organization the party was unable to marshal any effective response to the dictatorial forces. It



272

Chapter Eleven

was not until 1929, under the leadership of militants such as Bento Gonçalves, that a first effort to reanimate party activity was to materialize. This effort, which meant that throughout the 1930s the Party was to show initiative on the national political scene and seek to develop more regular contacts with the Communist International (Nunes 1996), would nonetheless prove precarious: when the time came to face the repressive siege, which drew ever closer as the New State became more radicalized (Rosas 1994), and against a political backdrop defined by the rise of Nazism and Fascism in Europe, as well as by the Spanish Civil War and its outcome, the PCP would be subjected to the State’s effective and efficient repressive action (Pereira 1999). It was only in the 1940s that the PCP gained a more solid footing as a relevant political organization on the Portuguese political scene. In the wake of a troubled leadership battle in 1940-41, starring some of the militants that survived from the 1930s, the stage was set for a process of reorganization (Pereira 1999) that would lead the PCP to re-emerge on the political arena with a fresh face. This was not only a pivotal moment in its history, but indeed a breaking point, which is tellingly signaled by the fact that the reorganizers designated the 1943 party congress as the first PCP congress, suppressing two congresses that had been held in the 1920s. Throughout the following decades, this reorganized PCP, as it adapted to repressive conditions under the dictatorship, would develop a reach and effectiveness unmatched by any other oppositional organization or movement. In spite of the failures, crises and internal transformations, evident both at the level of political strategy and of the Party’s organizational structure, one can see an organic continuity between the PCP that emerged from this reorganization and the PCP at the time of the April Revolution, in 1974 (and indeed, one could argue, at the end of the twentieth century), a continuity that can be gleaned from the extended leaderships of militants such as Álvaro Cunhal, Sérgio Vilarigues or Dias Lourenço. The longevity of the PCP’s resistance to the dictatorship gave it centre stage in antifascist-leaning memory and historiography. Although it began to take shape before the end of the dictatorial regime, this antifascist historical culture gained further momentum with the democratic revolution of the 25 of April 1974, a day that would henceforth be made a national holiday. Within this framework, either in individual and collective memories (Serra 1997; Vilaça 2003; AAVV 1975) or in historiographical works (Raby 1991), the term communism was often an epithet for the will to resist the repressive power of a State – in this case, the New State. Within antifascist historical culture, the emancipatory political vocation of



‘Portugal is Not a Poor Country’

273

Portuguese communism was celebrated, the history of its oppression cast it as a victim of the State, and the history of its resistance elevated it and its militants – those that were imprisoned and tortured in particular – to the status of antifascist heroes. The primacy of this antifascist historical culture, however, has come to an end, fiercely disputed by other approaches to the Portuguese communist past that have proliferated more recently. Over the last decades, drawing on different political and ideological currents, a representation of communism as a totalitarian phenomenon, in particular, has been steadily gaining ground. While such a representation was already palpable before the 25 April 1974 – within the anticommunist line of the New State and, to a lesser extent, within the ranks of the Republican and socialist oppositions (Farinha 1998), as well as part of leftist critiques of soviet communism – nowadays it is more pointedly articulated by what we could label as a liberal historical culture. For this historical culture, the Portuguese communist past is to a large extent the manifestation of a historical process defined by the expansion of State powers and its encroachment on the individual, civil society or the market, drawing on this culture’s own terminology. This liberal standpoint was first spurred by political sectors close to the Socialist Party, the parties to their right or the Catholic Church, in the context of the struggle for political domination over the State that defined the 1974-1975 period1, after the fall of the dictatorship and the end of the Portuguese Empire, but it gained further momentum from the early 1990s onwards, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR. This series of events, and all the transformations they triggered, seem to have served as a backdrop for both the essayistic efforts of intellectuals seeking to equate the personalities of the dictator Oliveira Salazar and the communist leader Álvaro Cunhal (Lourenço 1992; Barreto 1996) and analyses of a more properly historical nature (Ramos 2009) that have contributed to the denunciation of Portuguese communism as a national manifestation of a totalitarian vein that, on the left, found its epitome in the Eastern European socialist regimes. For the purposes of this essay – an analytics of communism simultaneously attuned to the statist and anti-statist echoes of its name –, antifascist and liberal historical cultures alike pose obstacles that need to be identified and circumvented. Antifascist historical culture draws a sharp image of a running antagonism that defines the contours of the Portuguese and European twentieth century – the opposition between Communism

 1



Chapter 12 in this book focus on the revolutionary process at length.

274

Chapter Eleven

and Fascism–, but does so by narrating communism’s trajectory across the century as a parade through Freedom’s Way of the Cross. In this account, communism comes across as a long-suffering yet redemptive political entity that, sure of itself, traversed the long span of the dictatorship without ever being tainted by the materiality of its path, its vicissitudes and accidents. More than the history of a struggle between fascists and antifascists, constitutive of both as well of the last century as a whole, it is as if the historical identity of ones and the others preceded the struggle in which they were engaged, indeed enmeshed. The result of such a narrative is that communism is often represented within the antifascist historical culture as a monumental antithesis of the New State. From this angle, there is a sheer incommensurability between the two opposing forces, whereby fascism designates the oppressive power of the State and communism the resistance to that power. Liberal historical culture, in turn, even if it seemingly pushes in the opposite direction, still treads along the same line. Concerned with challenging the validity of antifascist historical culture, and cutting empirical reality to fit the size of the topic of totalitarianism, the liberal viewpoint generates a narrative that undervalues the antagonism between communism and fascism, sidelining their differences. If antifascist historical culture, presupposing an absolute difference between communist forms of power and its fascist counterparts, is blind to the State-centred strain of communism, a large part of the historical revisionism targeting antifascist culture tends to reduce communism to that strain, suggesting an absolute identification between fascism and communism. To sum up, even if there are different lines of interpretation of the communist past – as a history of emancipation, from an antifascist perspective, or as a history of totalitarianism, from a liberal perspective –, one nonetheless finds that such analyses share a single analytics of power, one that privileges an approach to communism whereby the latter is either completely separate from, or at one with, other historical subjects. This overlooks the site of conflict where, as I see it, the singularity of the communist historical experience weaves itself, defined as much by an individualization and separation from other historical subjects as by its approximation to, and identification with, them. As will become clear in the following pages, it is the history of that site of conflict that I want to bring into focus. My aim is, then, to follow through an investigation into the history of Portuguese communism from the party reorganization of 1940-41 to the democratic revolution of 1974, a time span which draws its meaning first and foremost from the internal history of the PCP but in which is also projected a wider frame, intersecting our account both with



‘Portugal is Not a Poor Country’

275

the History of Contemporary Portugal and the General History of Communism.

From Protest to Production In this section, the key object of our analysis is, to put it bluntly, communist economic discourse. The double historical condition of communism also manifests itself at this level. Communism was not only a name for the struggle for political freedom and a banner for States defined by a denial of that very freedom but also a name which, on the one hand, pointed towards the end of wage exploitation and a horizon of “pleasant tasks” (to use Marx’s formula) and, on the other, to a present of forced labour. Attention to the economic sphere will, I hope, allow us to contribute to an historiographical perspective on communism that is at once political and economic, situating our analysis in a line of approaches to the economic that is at odds with those we generally find within economic history or even political economy; and in a line of approaches to the political that pull away from both the history of the State and political regimes and the history of social movements or so-called civil society. This gesture of pulling together the political and the economic will also allow us to go beyond the scope of liberal historical culture, which tends to describe the history of communism as an episode in the political domination over the economic, and of antifascist historical culture, which tends to ground the primordial effect of communist history on the achievement of political democracy. From the 1940-41 process of reorganization onward, as the new PCP’s organizational network both expanded and became more closely knit, its political discourse settled into a pattern. Abroad, these were the years of World War II and the heralding of a new international order in its wake. It was against this ostensibly troubled backdrop that the PCP crystallized some of the fundamental postulates for its understanding of global geopolitics (Neves 2009). Internally, although closely tied to the wider context of the World War, movements of popular protest against the scarcity of goods, alongside an emerging strike movement, in what amounted to one of the first key episodes of social opposition to New State policy and existing economic relations, were seen by Portuguese communists as signs of encouragement. From the end of 1941 onwards Portugal is struck by a series of strikes. Over the last months of 1942, strike movements take over the Lisbon region. The following year, another wave of strikes sweeps Lisbon and the South Bank of the Tagus. According to the PCP, around 50 000 workers were involved in strike



276

Chapter Eleven

actions in the Summer of 1943 (AAVV 1982, 64) and the following year another wave of strike movements spread from Lisbon to the Ribatejo region (Pereira 2001, 379; Rosas 1994, 353-356). Against this background, the core group of communist militants that had led the so-called “reorganization” will begin to shape a discourse to counter the regime’s propaganda. The regime pointed to the international situation and the national lack of economic resources as a justification for the restricted access to essential goods by the majority of the population at the time. In turn, PCP’s newspaper, Avante!, in September 1941, asked and answered: ‘Why is there a shortage of meat, olive oil, eggs, butter? BECAUSE THEY ARE SENT TO SPAIN ON COURSE TO GERMANY!’2 News along these lines will appear repeatedly over subsequent issues and throughout the following year. In October 1941 the newspaper denounced that ‘while they are more and more scarce in our markets, cattle exports to Spain continue shamelessly’.3 In July 1942 it listed what ‘is shipped and how it is shipped to the Axis’.4 In October it protested against ‘the multiplication of exports to Germany’.5 Well aware of the proliferation of popular revolts and riots, in July 1943 the PCP leadership would go as far as inciting robbery: ‘Wherever trains or trucks pass or come to rest on their way to the Axis, the people should rob them and distribute the produce among the people’.6 This type of denunciation and plea are the main thread of communist economic discourse in the first few years after the reorganization. Critically aimed at the New State, their international allies and what it perceived as the ruling economic interest, communist discourse over this period is powerfully determined by a notion of social equality – set against the idea that a part of the community could gain an advantage at the expense of another part of the community – and includes in its repertoire content actions that can be labelled radical, forged within the dynamics of the popular protests and social movements of the time. Indeed, throughout the following decades, both equality as an ultimate goal and the suspicion of radicalism will haunt the Portuguese communists like a spectre. This spectre was at times invoked by anticommunist propaganda – keen on portraying any gesture by the PCP as a sign of its subversive vocation, so as to block any approximation between the Party and more moderate political sectors or social groups – but also occasionally acclaimed by

 2

Avante!, September 1941, 2. Avante!, October 1941, 4. 4 Avante!, July 1942, 3. 5 Avante!, October 1942 2, 1. 6 Avante!, July 1943 1, 3. 3



‘Portugal is Not a Poor Country’

277

communist themselves, when trying to bring more radicalized political sectors and social groups into its fold. At the turn of the first half of the 1940s, however, we see some signs of change in communist economic discourse. Just as in the first half of the decade, from midway through the 1940s communist arguments are set against the reasons invoked by the regime’s propaganda to justify the poverty most of the population found themselves in. Except now the nature of the argument shifts. One early evidence of that shift can be found in the speech of communist leader Álvaro Cunhal in the 1946 Party congress, a meeting held in the context of a consolidation of the process of internal reorganization, in the wake of the above mentioned strikes and social conflicts and at a time when a new internal order was beginning to take shape. On that occasion, then, Cunhal, who was to be SecretaryGeneral of the PCP between 1961 and 1992, says ‘cereals thrive up and down the country’ and ‘the sea is plentiful and teeming with fish’, thus concluding that ‘it is not that Portugal is poor’ – on the contrary, ‘Portugal is a rich country’ – but it is rather ‘the fascist agenda of protecting monopolies that condemns Portugal to backwardness and destitution’ (Cunhal 1997 [1946], 92-93). Cunhal thus sought to establish a map of the territory’s natural resources as a ground for the argument that ‘Portugal is not a poor country’, a formula that in years to follow would become a leitmotiv in communist discourse, as attested by a document written by Cunhal himself in the 1950s, during the extended prison stays he endured in that decade. Entitled Contribuição para o estudo da questão agrária [Contribution to the study of the agrarian question], the document reiterates the need to refrain from ‘speaking of “natural poverty” when in fact the country is barely known’, suggesting that nowhere else does ‘the oak thrive more spontaneously’ or do we ‘find better wines than the Portuguese ones’. Further adding that ‘what we know is enough to assert that its potential riches are barely tapped’, Cunhal concludes that Portugal could ‘become one of the most wonderful orchards in the world’. This was a denunciation of the political and economic elite’s incapacity to foster development, appealing to the need to force ‘nature to yield what it will not of its own accord’, once again insisting that ‘Portugal is not a poor country’ (Cunhal 1976, 14-18).7

 7

Cunhal’s document on the agrarian question was written in prison throughout the 1950s. It was first published in Brazil (late 1960s, early 1970s) and finally published in Portugal in 1976. Along the same lines, see the article written by communist historian Flausino Torres in the late 150’s under the title “É Portugal um país pobre?”[Is Portugal a poor country?] (República, 28-10-1957, 12).



278

Chapter Eleven

At this point, I ask you to bear in mind this shift in the history of Portuguese communism: in the first half of the 1940s, the arguments used by the regime to justify Portuguese economic fragility were countered by the communists on the basis not so much of the potentialities of the country but rather of its possibilities, a notion bolstered by the recognition of, and incitement to, an antagonism between the haves and the have-nots; that is, in the post-war context the communist critique of the regime’s arguments is no longer grounded on reclaiming access to goods but rather on appealing to their production. The most urgent priority is now that of an increase in the national productive capacity, as the demand for a more even distribution of what has been produced is pushed to the background. While in the first half of the 1940s the communist line of argument was bound to the here and now, claiming that poverty was needless given the possibility of an immediate distribution of produce among the Portuguese population, from the mid-1940s onwards the point was rather to invest in the future. In the name of this future, the provision of consumption needs was simultaneously postponed and promised. This change within the communist argument can be understood in the light of transformations at both a national and international level. One such transformation revolves around the colonial issue. In the first half of the 1940s, the early years of the party’s reorganization, communist discourse showed signs of a geopolitical understanding of the Portuguese place in the world which, when set against communist movements in other countries, had the singular trait of being grounded in a standpoint which had not only an anti-imperial slant (perceiving the Portuguese people as exploited by a ruling elite at the service of the interests of Germany and the Axis), but also, at times, a colonialist slant. In February 1942, for example, one could read in Avante! ‘The produce in the country and that which is brought from the colonies by the merchant fleet would be more than enough for the regular supply of the nation but for the criminal policy of sending everything abroad, fomented by the fascist-traitor government of Salazar!’8; that is to say, the wealth provided by the imperial status of the country operated as a condition for reclaiming a fairer access to produce. Now, in the context of the post-war international order, dominated by the rise of anti-colonial nationalisms, PCP was pushed to a different stance on the colonial issue, more in accord with its internationalist agenda. This shift will, of course, have far-reaching consequences on its economic discourse.

 8



Avante!, February 1942, 4.

‘Portugal is Not a Poor Country’

279

In an attempt to expunge any signs of complicity with Portuguese colonialism from its arguments – which would culminate in the PCP’s declaration, in 1957, of unconditional support to the self-determination of the peoples colonized by Portugal –, the communists began to take on the challenge of projecting a post-colonial Portugal. This stance, it should be noted, was widely dismissed, both within the regime and in the opposition, on the grounds that the country would be unable to maintain its independence without its colonial riches. And it is in light of this postcolonial horizon that throughout the 1960s, in the context of the Colonial War, the developmentalist wager will take on a pivotal role in Portuguese communists’ arguments. While the regime began to advocate that “Portugal is not a Small Country” but rather a territory extending from the Minho region to Timor, the communist leadership insisted more and more forcefully on the idea that “Portugal is not a Poor Country”. Hence, they put forward an economic proposal that put its trust in the productive capacities of the Portuguese population and territory, which they thought had been insufficiently explored. The strengths of this proposal would indeed be forcefully expressed in Rumo à Vitória [Path to Victory] (Cunhal 1974 [1964]), a report by Álvaro Cunhal on the situation of the country and on the political strategy of the PCP which was to become a key programmatic text for Portuguese communists until 1974 and beyond, defining the party line during the revolutionary period of 1974-1975 and even in the decades that followed. To trace a genealogy of the Portuguese communist developmentism in these pages, it is still necessary to push our analysis in other directions beside the colonial question. First of all, let us not forget that, as others have already noted (Pereira 2001, 618), the developmentist thrust of the communists also runs along the wider and well-worn path of Portuguese economic reformism, which we can trace back to the nineteenth century. As an example, consider that in 1947 the communist intellectual Fernando Pinto Loureiro invokes the figure of the nineteenth-century well-known Portuguese intellectual Oliveira Martins portraying him as someone who ‘fought tirelessly for the development of national industry and agriculture, for the growth of the merchant navy and for the progress of the overseas territories’.9 Secondly, because the productivist enthusiasm of the Portuguese communists is far from exclusively tied to the Portuguese situation. It also springs from a world-wide dynamic that is bound, first and foremost, to the years of the 1929 crisis, the emergence of

 9

Quoted in A Invenção de Oliveira Martins – Política, Historiografia e Identidade Nacional no Portugal Contemporâneo (1867-1960) (Maurício 2005, p.195).



280

Chapter Eleven

Keynesianism and the Soviet five-year plans; furthermore, to the emergence of production as one of the key battlefields of World War II, triggering a colossal labour effort. In this context, national governments marshalled a barrage of planning instruments, which remained in place once peace was restored and proved adaptable to different political and ideological systems. As a scientist close to the Portuguese communists put it in 1947, ‘there is a new and colossal battle to be fought, only this time it is a peaceful, productive, humane one’, as tanks give way to tractors: ‘the whole world wants to increase and improve production’ and ‘Portugal should seek the same solution, since, if that is not the case, it will never be able to reach an equilibrium in its trade balance’ (Henriques 1949, 223). By the end of the 1940s, it should be added, a number of theses along these same lines already circulated widely within oppositional intellectual milieus. Indeed, their authors would later become key references in the field of economic planning. Among them was the Brazilian economist Celso Furtado, of whom the Revista de Economia, launched soon after World War II by the communist Bento de Jesus Caraça and a privileged vehicle for the dissemination of Keynesian ideas in Portugal, will publish a seminal article on “Economic planning technique” (Furtado, 1954). To sum up, in trying to understand the shift in PCP’s economic discourse in the mid-1940s, to the greater weight given to a critique of the Portuguese Empire among communists one must add the strength of the call to production – let us call it a productivist appeal –, whose roots can be found both in the history of Portuguese economic thought and the world context of the time. While in the first half of the twentieth century the economic discourse of Portuguese communism contributed to an identification of the figure of the worker as one who rebels, protests, strikes and seeks to consume, from the second half of the 1940s onwards it will veer towards a definition of the worker as one whose productive activities feed the economy and fuel national progress. Communist discourse would never cease to see the worker as an element of social protest, but it will begin to stress more and more vehemently that work was a pivotal element within the national economy, as attested by these words of the communist leader Jaime Serra in 1958: Who truly commits a crime against the national economy? Workers who, rightfully indignant, paralyze work for a few hours, or the government,



‘Portugal is Not a Poor Country’

281

shutting down factories for 30 days, arresting and firing workers en masse, workers who are thus, along with their families, pushed into hunger?10

The production of communism From an historical point of view, this growing concern with national economic production among communists has been deemed all the more relevant given that communist political culture includes and involves – either as a result of the lasting impact of the 1917 revolution or, in the Portuguese case, as a result of the PCP’s engagement in, and close ties to, the protest movements of the first half of 1940s – specific social groups such as industrial workers and rural wage-labourers, as well as political groups such as the African anti-colonial militants. As a rule, these groups were more willing to adhere to communist discourse than to the discourses coming from the State or capitalist and pro-capitalist agents. This circumstance is often highlighted in critiques aimed at communist parties from within the political and theoretical field of Marxism, critiques according to which communist parties turned out to be one of the key factors in the accommodation of social unrest within the dominant order. According to this view, communist parties, in a process of political and ideological degradation, had gone from being opposed to the ruling order to being instrumental in the functioning of that same order.11 Communist discourse itself, although obviously in different terms, sometimes did claim some merit for that accommodating function. A 1946 statement by Álvaro Cunhal is telling in this regard: ‘by leading workers into the struggle, and by nurturing national unity, we reconciled workers with the nation’ (Cunhal 1997 [1946], 121). These words by Cunhal fit nicely into analyses from within the history of nationalisms, such as Eric Hobsbawm’s – in which he mentions ‘socialist parties that were or became the key vehicles for the dissemination of the national movement of its peoples’ (Hobsbawm 1993, 117). And Cunhal’s words also fit into analyses focusing on the question of the State, such as that of Pierre Clastres’s – who argued that ‘society, as it is shaped today, would find it extremely difficult to function but for this extraordinary mediating apparatus of power and padding, capable of reaching the point of abuse of power, that is the structure of the PC and the CGT’ (Clastres 2003 [1974], 271).

 10

Cf. Freitas [Jaime Serra], Informe da Comissão Política ao Comité Central do PCP: Sobre as Greves Políticas, August 1958, 6. (Fundação Mário Soares Archive, Dossier PCP). 11 See the study of Marcel Van der Linden on the western marxist critiques of the USSR (Linden 1997).



282

Chapter Eleven

There are, however, good grounds for us to distance ourselves from this at times rather simplistic understanding of the growing productivist vocation embraced by communist economic discourse. If the latter does indeed promote a postponement of the desire for social justice constitutive of a tradition of radical popular protest, it does not do so at the expense of any simple suppression of such a desire. Carved out of a tradition of struggle for social justice, communist discourse credits it on a promise, a promise that points towards a future equality for which the increase in production is a necessary stage. The formula “Portugal is not a poor country” can be read precisely as such a progressive promise, that of the possibility of the present production of goods to be distributed in the future. In other words, communist discourse contains a desire for social justice, in the double sense that it both affirms and curtails that desire, saying yes to equality and consumption but holding off on it, accepting a life committed to wage labour and production but rejecting its perpetuation. We should thus be wary of taking the promise of social justice as a simple demand for social justice, as communist discourse itself, prone to stress the affirmative rather than curtailing aspect of the promise, to some extent compels us to. Nor, for that matter, should we do the opposite, as critiques of communist discourse from within the theoretical-political field of Marxism or Leftism sometimes tend to do. The bridge that communist discourse builds between a tradition of radical social protest and the productive mobilization of the population is as effective as it is precarious. The risks we take in embracing a straightforward understanding of the productivist thrust of communism, however, go well beyond ignoring the ambivalences it registers. In this process of simplification, one also runs the risk of overlooking the changes that took place in economic activity itself at the time of the transformation of communism into a function of the economy. The terms of the relation between this transformation and the said changes are not, to be sure, easily discerned. For once resorting to a trading metaphor, we could begin by saying that it is not only communism that pays a price for its adherence to productivism, as productivism itself is touched and changed by the communist wager. We will not find any direct correlation between social protest, political discourse and the workings of the economy, but we can at least tease out some relations of affinity, if not determination, between the three levels (Negri 1994 [1968]). Communist political discourse brings to the general process of productive mobilization not only an accumulated symbolic capital, given its sociological ballast – the already mentioned proximity to specific social



‘Portugal is Not a Poor Country’

283

and political groups – but also elements that have participated in the qualitative definition and redefinition of the productive process itself. Communist discourse mobilizes producers, for instance, by starting to perceive emigration as a waste of national productive forces (and less as the population’s right to mobility12) and by pointing out the need to further explore natural resources, but also by appealing to a different form of exploration of the population and territory. Put another way: communist discourse appeals to an investment of a greater amount of energy in productive activity, but also pushes for a qualitative shift in production, making it expand not only extensively but intensively. A testimony to this is a late-1950s article by the communist intellectual António José Saraiva. Glossing the motto “Portugal is not a poor country”, Saraiva sought precisely to re-centre the issue of national economic development on what, hinting towards the concept of human capital, he designates as ‘general culture’ and ‘specialized culture’. The following excerpt is long but, I believe, instructive: It has too often been said that Portugal is a poor country, that is, a country with a meagre capital in natural resources. This thesis is highly questionable at a time when, at a breakneck speed, new techniques find new means of transforming Nature and invent, if we can put it thus, new natural resources. But it is, above all, an incomplete thesis, since it leaves to one side the most important capital, which is man. Portugal is perhaps at present (which does not mean that it is so potentially) poor in natural resources. But it is, more than anything, extremely poor, at present, in human resources: a country where so few study, and those few don’t study much; a country of large-scale emigration, that exports machines of manual labour at cut rates; a country with a more than feeble general culture and a less than feeble specialized culture; a country where the lack of culture makes men numb and passive in the face of Nature, to the point where they take poverty as a natural fate; a country where it is still possible to consider culture a luxury or a privilege of the elites, to be paid for exclusively by those who can afford it (Saraiva 1996 [1960], 155).

Hence, communist discourse will emphasize the importance and economic value of culture. In fact, it will champion its massification, demanding a greater investment in education, health and science, demands that became a trademark of the discursive arsenal of communist politics. In short, if the communist economic discourse, with its call to the mobilization of producers, makes of communism a function of economic

 12

The main trends in twentieth century Portuguese emigration are described in Chapter 1 in this book.



284

Chapter Eleven

production, it also triggers a shift in production, from a production essentially dependent on an unskilled labour force towards a production grounded on the growing intellectual qualification of labour. At this point, we can conclude that the history of communist economic discourse in Portugal partially overlaps with the History of Portugal and of the twentieth century. As it took on a productivist goal, communist discourse bore the marks of the post-colonial turn that changed twentiethcentury geopolitics, limiting the territorial space available for exploitation by the colonizing countries. Yet, in embracing this productivist goal, communist discourse also took part in its transformation, which implied changes at the level of the human qualities integrated into the economic process, changes we can qualify as biopolitical (Foucault 2004). They reflect the will of institutions within political and economic spheres of power but also the need for those institutions to adapt to new forms of resistance towards them. In fact, geopolitical changes associated with postcolonialism and biopolitical transformations can, as I see it, be read in correlation: the historical relevance of the end of the imperialist stage is ultimately all the more acute when articulated with the importance of workers’ resistance within the metropolitan territories and its effects on the dominant economic and political organization, which in turn are amplified when set within the frame of the emergence of a post-colonial situation (Hardt and Negri 2000). Both phenomena work as borders to the commodification of the labour force, emerging as obstacles to its expansion but also as its future horizon. The end of colonialism carves a path for anti-colonialism, on the one hand, and for neo-colonialism, on the other; and the shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist production model (Jessop 1995), in turn, leads both to a colonization of work time by life time and to its reverse (Virno 2004).

Communism in the Twentieth-Century Let us now move to some final comments. Communist discourse bridged the gap between political and economic power, on the one hand, and the critique directed at that very same power by the social groups in its margins, on the other. Communist discourse in the first half of the 1940s, in its critique of the economy of war, put forward an idea of community anchored in a here and now geared towards preventing one part of the community from reaping benefits at the expense of another part. This notion of community – which followed a tradition of popular politics that can be traced back for centuries, as studies of the Portuguese nineteenth century have shown (Sá 2002; Monteiro 2010) or, indeed, to the British



‘Portugal is Not a Poor Country’

285

eighteenth century (Thompson 1971) – stayed mostly within the bounds of egalitarian values, notions of justice and forms of direct action, and was thus seemingly resistant to both capitalist processes of commodification and State authority. This conception would to a large extent be superseded in communist discourse, as it shifted its focus onto a critical standpoint anchored on the denunciation of the productive inactivity of the population and territory, opening a path for a defence of communism as a better form of governing the nation. PCP’s economic discourse thus partook in a process of political institutionalization of popular protest and the PCP itself began to embody a specific political culture which, although it could not be conflated with a culture of power, neither could it be understood as grounded on a critique of power. We could say, rather, that it presents a specific art of governing. In the report that Álvaro Cunhal brought to the 1946 Party Congress, concerning the strike movements of the period leading up to it, we find a good example of this art of governing, which we, drawing on the already mentioned ambiguity of the concept, might also call a policy of containment. Cunhal stated: It is certain that the spontaneity of a movement reveals the extent to which the will to struggle is rooted in the masses, shows how strong and irrepressible is their desire to fight, how the movement is inevitable, and hence makes absolutely clear (since there was no organized groundwork for the October-November strike) that there were objective concrete conditions for the strike to take place. To draw such a conclusion one need only have the deductive abilities of a certain Mr. La Palice when he concluded that it had rained from the moistness of the atmosphere (Cunhal, 1997 [1946], 192).

The communist leader immediately added that it was necessary to go beyond the abilities of Mr. La Palice, namely through a political vanguard that would bear in mind ‘the Leninist conditions for an insurrection to arise’ (Idem, 200), a party leadership to whom fell the task of ‘realizing the ripening of objective conditions (and contributing to that ripening) and, once they are ripe, to boldly take the vanguard position, providing guidance and direction to the masses’ (Idem, 192). To sum up, communist discourse is here neither the word that gives voice to the critical voices of the present nor the word that seeks to erect a future country, but rather a “watchword” that both ignites the protest against the state of things and steers that protest towards the future. The identity of the party resides, then, in its mediation – in this case, textual mediation – between society, on the one hand, and the political and economical spheres, on the other.



286

Chapter Eleven

This intermediate position that comes to define the party’s identity makes of the history of the PCP an object that partakes of the history of social movements as well as of the history of the State, of the history of the worker’s movement as well as of the history of capitalism, thus establishing itself as a pivotal part of the history of the Portuguese twentieth century, just as the history of the international communist movement is part and parcel of the general history of the twentieth century. Diachronically, we can say that an integral part of the past of communism in Portugal is the elimination of many of the signs of an anarchist political culture which, in the first decades of the twentieth century, was deeply embedded in the social and workers’ movements, an autonomous culture which expected little or nothing from the State; and no less integral to its history is the consolidation, after the revolution of the 25 April 1974, of a parliamentary democratic regime that until very recently had combined both social democratic and liberal orientations. In this configuration of the regime, the State took on certain social functions that operated as barriers to the unbridled proliferation of commodification, all the while opening new paths for its possible expansion. It is yet unclear whether the current crisis of the Portuguese Welfare State and its equally intermediate function, halfway between social and workers’ movements, on the one hand, and State and employers, on the other, does not also amount to the turning of a new page in the history of Portuguese communism. In it, the autonomous dynamics of the social and workers’ movements and the disposition of militants and leaders of the party are likely to carry the same weight.

Bibliography AAVV. A Defesa Acusa – os comunistas portugueses perante a polícia e os tribunais fascistas. Lisboa: Edições Avante!, 1975. —. 60 Anos de Luta ao serviço do Povo e da Pátria. Lisboa: Edições Avante!, 1982. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities – reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso, 1991 [1983]. Barreto, António. Sem Emenda. Lisboa: Relógio d’Água, 1996. Cabral, Manuel Villaverde. O Operariado Português nas Vésperas da República 1909-1910. Lisboa: Presença, 1977. Clastres, Pierre. A Sociedade contra o Estado. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2003 [1974]. Courtois, Stéphane (ed.). Le Livre Noir du Communisme. Crimes, terreur, répression. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997.



‘Portugal is Not a Poor Country’

287

Cunhal, Álvaro [Duarte]. IV Congresso do PCP – O Caminho para o Derrubamento do Fascismo – Informe Político do Comité Central. Lisboa: Edições Avante!, 1997 [1946]. —. Contribuição para o Estudo da Questão Agrária. Lisboa: Edições Avante!, 1976. —. Rumo à Vitória – As tarefas do partido na revolução democrática e nacional. Porto: Opinião, 1974 [1964]. Farinha, Luís. O Reviralho. Revoltas Republicanas contra a Ditadura e o Estado Novo, 1926-1940. Lisboa: Estampa, 1998. Foucault, Michel. La Naissance de la Biopolitique. Paris: Gallimard-Seuil, 2004. Freire, João. Anarquistas e Operários. Ideologia, ofício e práticas sociais: o anarquismo e o operariado em Portugal, 1900-1940. Porto: Afrontamento, 1992. Furet, François and Ernst Nolte. Fascism and Communism. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Furet, François. Le Passé d'une Illusion, essai sur l'idée communiste au XXe siècle. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995. Furtado, Celso. “A Técnica do Planejamento Económico”, in Revista de Economia VII, I, 1954. Godinho, Paula. Memória da Resistência Rural no Sul – Couço 19581962. Oeiras: Celta, 2001. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000. Henriques, Renano. “A produção pecuária no quadro económico da nação”, in Vértice 74, 1949. Hobsbawm, Eric. Nações e Nacionalismos desde 1780. Lisboa: Gradiva, 1993. Jessop, Bob. The Regulation Approach, Governance and Post-fordism, Economy and Society. London: Blackwell Publishing, 1995. Kertzer, David. Comrades and Christians: Religion and Political Struggle in Communist Italy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Linden, Marcel Van der. Western Marxism and the Soviet Union. A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates since 1917. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Lourenço, Eduardo. “Do Comunismo (Português) como Cultura”, in Nova Renascença XII, 45-47, 1992. Maurício, Carlos. A Invenção de Oliveira Martins – Política, Historiografia e Identidade Nacional no Portugal Contemporâneo (1867-1960). Lisboa: INCM, 2005. Medeiros, Fernando. A Sociedade e a Economia Portuguesas nas Origens do Salazarismo. Lisboa: A Regra do Jogo, 1978.



288

Chapter Eleven

Monteiro, António Cardoso. “«Autogoverno» e «moralismo igualitário». Política popular em Portugal no Século XIX”, in Como se Faz um Povo – Ensaios em História Contemporânea de Portugal (ed. José Neves). Lisboa: Tinta-da-China, 2010. Negri, Antonio. “Keynes and the capitalist theory of the State” (1967), in Labor of Dionysus (ed. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri). Minnesota/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Neves, José. Comunismo e Nacionalismo em Portugal – Política, cultura e história. Lisboa: Edições Tinta-da-China, 2008. —. “The Role of Portugal on the Stage of Imperialism: Communism, Nationalism and Colonialism (1930–1960)”, in Nationalities Papers 37 (4), 2009. Nunes, João Arsénio. “La Formation de la Stratégie Antifasciste du Parti Communiste Portugais”, in Centre and Periphery. The History of the Comitern in The Light of New Documents (eds. Mikhail Narinsky e Jürgen Rojahn). Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History, 1996. Pereira, José Pacheco. Álvaro Cunhal, Uma Biografia Politica. “Daniel” – O Jovem Revolucionário (1913-1941). Lisboa: Temas e Debates, 1999. —. Álvaro Cunhal, Uma Biografia Política. “Duarte” – O Dirigente Clandestino (1941-1949). Lisboa: Temas e Debates, 2001. Pinto, Ana Catarina. “A Transformação Política da República: o bloco radical”, in História da Primeira República (eds. Fernando Rosas and Maria Fernanda Rollo). Lisboa: Edições Tinta-da-China, 2009. Pudal, Bernard. Prendre Parti. Pour une sociologie historique du PCF. Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences, 1989. Raby, David L. Fascism and Resistance in Portugal: Communists, Liberals and Military Dissidents in the Opposition to Salazar 19411974. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991. Ramos, Rui. A Segunda Fundação (1890-1926). Lisboa: Círculo de Leitores, 1994. Ramos, Rui (ed.). História de Portugal. Lisboa: Esfera dos Livros, 2009. Rosas, Fernando. Estado Novo (1926-1974). Lisboa: Círculo de Leitores, 1994. Sá, Fátima. Rebeldes e Insubmissos: Resistências Populares ao Liberalismo. Porto: Afrontamento, 2002. Saraiva, António José. Dicionário Crítico. Lisboa: Gradiva, 1996 [1960]. Serra, Jaime. Eles Têm o Direito de Saber. Lisboa: Edições Avante!, 1997. Seth, Sanjay. Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics – the case of Colonial India. New Deli: Sage, 1995.



‘Portugal is Not a Poor Country’

289

Scott, James C. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Skocpol, Theda. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Thompson, E.P. “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth-century”, in Past and Present 50 (1), 1971. Vilaça, Alberto. Resistências Culturais e Políticas nos Primórdios do Salazarismo. Porto: Campo das Letras, 2003. Virno, Paolo. Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. New York: Semiotext[e], 2004.



CHAPTER TWELVE ‘THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY LAW EVER APPROVED’: SOCIAL CONFLICT AND STATE ECONOMIC INTERVENTION DURING THE PORTUGUESE REVOLUTION (1974-1975) RICARDO NORONHA

Introduction On the evening of the 14 March 1975, the banking system in Portugal, with the exception of foreign-owned banks and credit unions, was fully nationalized. The following day, the same happened to insurance companies, thus bringing most of the financial sector into State ownership. Only three days prior, far-right and conservative military forces led by General Spínola had launched an unsuccessful military coup against the Movimento das Forças Armadas [Armed Forces Movement, MFA], formed by middle-rank officers and responsible for bringing down the dictatorship less than a year before. Radicalized by recent events, the leftwing military officers, although already split into the main political fractions that divided the armed forces (that is, the socialists, the communists, and the broad spectre of the far-left), held an emergency general meeting in which they decided to take on major political and economic transformations. They appointed a Conselho da Revolução [Council of the Revolution] as the leading political institution in the country – formed by all military officers that held cabinet positions, as well as representatives of all branches of the Armed Forces – and pressed for bold measures against the capitalist elite that controlled the financial sector and the lion share of the Portuguese economy. Most bank facilities were occupied, since the morning of the 11 March, by the bank workers’ trade-union delegates,

‘The Most Revolutionary Law Ever Approved’

291

who called for the immediate nationalization of the sector. Faced with this fact the Council of the Revolution set out with a very clear sign of what would become the country’s immediate future, by issuing a Decree-law that met the union’s demands. General Costa Gomes, nominated President of the Republic by the MFA in early October 1974, described it as ‘the most revolutionary law ever approved’ in the country. (Cruzeiro 1998, 277) In the text of the Decree1, the Council of the Revolution stated that the banking system had hitherto been ‘an element at the service of the big monopolist groups’, thus disregarding the ‘needs of the national economy’, and it would now be converted into a ‘fundamental lever of command over the economy in order to create growth and employment’. Furthermore, it stressed the ‘capacity shown by bank workers in the surveillance of, and control over, their own sector of activity’, which was to take on a major role in the immediate future. In this decree, we find some of the pivotal elements for the interpretation both of the previous course of the Portuguese revolution and of the nature of the economic transformations that would take place over the following months. With the nationalization of the financial sector, a substantial and fundamental part of the economy would indirectly come under State property, due to the concentration of most stock exchange bonds in the hands of a very small number of individual entrepreneurs and/or firms, closely related to banks and insurance companies. Besides the firms that had already been intervened by State delegates or were under workers’ control (and many more would follow during the spring and the summer), due to mismanagement, or the imprisonment or exile of their owners, the majority of the largest and most important industrial sectors became public property, with companies later merging to form one single company in each sector. This was the case with cement, steel, electricity, communications, shipping companies, chemicals, petrol and public transportation. In the countryside, namely in the latifúndio (large estate regions of the south), wage labourers started occupying lands and forming Unidades Colectivas de Produção [Collective Farms] during the spring, sharing most of the strategies and guidelines followed by urban workers (Barreto, 1987; Piçarra, 2008). A “Portuguese path to socialism” became the centre of political debate (namely in the campaign for the election of the Constituent Assembly that would take place on 25 April 1975), with most parties (despite the obvious nuances from the most radical leftists to the most

 1



Decreto-Lei 132-A/75.

292

Chapter Twelve

moderate rightists) favouring a planned economy with workers’ democratic participation, in a country independent from both military blocks, committed to cooperation with the Third World and aimed at building a fully independent socialist plural democracy. The political and economic consequences of the March attempted coup were far-reaching. As if history had condensed into a very short period of time, the decisive events that took place in those few days bring to the fore three different sets of historical problems concerning modern Portugal: 1) the history of capitalist development since the late nineteenth century, with its distinctive features as far as the role of the economic elite in its relationship with State power is concerned (that is, the ongoing and problematic relationship between political and economic power), the process of capital concentration that resulted in the formation of monopoly groups (including both financial and industrial corporations), the elements of dependence that shaped the country’s integration into the world economy (enhanced by a structural and long-lasting commercial deficit) and the persistent low wages as the decisive competitive advantage of the Portuguese economy throughout the twentieth century; 2) the interpretation of the revolutionary process initiated on 25 April 1974, in the wake of the military coup staged by the MFA, precipitating a State crisis which, in the context of a world economic crisis, combined with growing social unrest and labour militancy, led to a radicalized social and political situation that would eventually bring about the March events ; 3) the analysis of the project for an alternative organization of both the economic system and social relations in a national context, referred to as the “Portuguese path towards socialism”, capable of addressing the problems afflicting the Portuguese economy through a combination of government planning and workers' control, in which the banking system was to assume a central and decisive role regarding both savings and credit. In the following pages, I will try to address these three sets of historical questions and put forward some ideas for their interpretation, while simultaneously highlighting the far-reaching impact of the events and decisions at the centre of this approach.

A particular form of fascism for a particular form of bourgeoisie To fully understand the political economy behind the making of the Portuguese ruling class, one needs to start from the fundamental fact that



‘The Most Revolutionary Law Ever Approved’

293

all the large fortunes made since the late nineteenth century up to the present benefited from close ties to State officials and from the ability to influence political decisions on their behalf. The fact that most of these fortunes took the form of family businesses, and the existence of numerous and intertwined ties between them, makes it easy to identify the long rule of what several observers of the country’s economic history have labelled the “economic oligarchy”, that is, a small number of families whose last names figure on most of the largest firms’ administration boards all throughout the twentieth century, with only a relatively brief interruption following the Portuguese revolutionary process (Costa et al., 2010). Enriched trough the monopoly of tobacco, along with the export of agricultural and raw goods from Portugal and its colonies, or the financing of the public debt (due to investment in railroads and other infrastructures), the traditional elite of the late nineteenth century (mainly focused on the financial sector), would soon be joined by a cluster of powerful industrialists, closely connected with agrarian interests from the large estates in the South, who benefited from State protection of nationally produced grain (wheat). Facing a general crisis since the end of World War I, this economical oligarchy supported the emergence of an authoritarian solution, which would materialize in the military coup of 28 May 1926, giving birth to Europe’s longest dictatorship, led by António Salazar after 1931.2 The industrial policy of the New State was precisely aimed at guaranteeing stable and steady margins of profit to all major agents already in control of the key sectors of the Portuguese economy. All throughout the 1930s, and lasting until 1971, the policy of condicionamento (the political imposition of prices and limitation of competition and investment within each industrial sector) managed to preserve a massive fragmentation of some sectors (like the textile, the shoe making and the canning industries), while promoting the concentration (granting monopolies or duopolies) of those where the highest investment was required, thus favouring the wealthiest sectors of the Portuguese bourgeoisie. Some of the ties between these families were stronger than others and although all of them



2 It is important to note, however, that as early as 1917, during the brief period of dictatorship led by Sidónio Pais, Alfredo da Silva, the country’s leading industrialist, was involved in promoting an authoritarian regime capable of repressing the worker’s movement and restoring order in the urban centres. For an interpretation of “sidonismo” that underlines the ‘old monopolistic trends of Portuguese largest capitalists’, see Cabral (1979, 373-392). For a study of social conflict and different class strategies adopted immediately before the formation of the Estado Novo, see Medeiros (1978).



294

Chapter Twelve

circulated in and around the regime’s highest spheres, it is important to note that the Espírito Santo family (which owned the Bank with the same name and had strong ties to international finance, having been linked with the purchase of gold from Nazi Germany during World War II) and the Mello family (which stemmed from the marriage between Alfredo da Silva’s daughter to the aristocrat D. Manuel de Mello) were particularly close to the regime’s top technocratic elite, including Salazar himself. The State was therefore invested with the function of serving as referee between the different competing economic interests, while at the same time guaranteeing sound and safe profits for all of them, by stabilizing prices and promoting an array of large-scale public investments that absorbed industrial production (such as the “wheat campaign”3 regarding fertilizers, or the several roads and bridges built under the oversight of the Minister of Public Works, Duarte Pacheco, that provided a steady demand for Henrique Sommer’s steel import and cement production companies). Generating and managing an uneven balance between all sectors of the oligarchy – here comprising the Catholic Church and the military as the two leading conservative forces of the country –, while limiting the modernization of the countryside and keeping the industrial areas under close watch by its repressive apparatus, was the historical task the Portuguese fascist regime took upon itself. Its aim was to provide a combination of different regimes of capital accumulation and the coexistence of pre-capitalist patterns of social life with fully developed capitalist relations of production, both in rural and urban areas (Rosas 1986; Bernardo 2003, 319-326). This state of affairs went through major adjustments in the wake of World War II, when a wave of industrial development arose under the Planos de Fomento [Improvement Plans], which, although initially aimed at substituting imports, would soon take on as a major goal the enhancement of industrial production for exportation to the European markets of EFTA and EEC. Public investment in the electrification of the country played a key role, by absorbing machinery and cement in hydro electrical production while simultaneously providing cheaper energy than that offered by imported coal. The Gross Domestic Product grew at a very fast pace (6,8% a year, on average, between 1958 and 1973), namely due to the dramatic industrial growth of the period (7,6% a year on average during the same period, against the 1,5% of agriculture and a stagnation in commerce and services). This industrialization process changed the face of urban areas, which also grew at a fast pace,

 3



The “wheat campaign” is discussed in chapter 7 in this book.

‘The Most Revolutionary Law Ever Approved’

295

particularly in the Lisbon/Setúbal area in the centre of the country and in the urban corridor that stretches from Aveiro to Braga, passing by Porto, in the north. The country’s “backward” rural interior lost a considerable portion of its inhabitants both to this internal population movement and to the growing emigration to France and northern Europe (estimated in over a million people, more than doubling the number of Portuguese who moved to the African colonies in the same period). During this period, the power of the economic oligarchy was greatly enhanced by the opportunities provided by the country’s rapid economic growth. In 1973, the key sectors of the Portuguese economy were in the hands of seven major groups, which resulted from the articulation between fourteen leading families and thirty other less powerful ones: Banco Nacional Ultramarino, Banco Fonsecas & Burnay, Champalimaud, Companhia União Fabril (owned by the Mello family), Banco Espírito Santo e Comercial de Lisboa, Banco Português do Atlântico and Banco Borges & Irmão (Martins, 1973; Santos, 1977; Ribeiro et al., 1987). Of the 411 companies with annual sales volumes above thirty million escudos, 400 belonged to what Américo Ramos dos Santos labelled as ‘the monopolist core’, which also held the main means of transportation (namely shipping and trucking) (Santos 1977). It possessed 8 of the 10 largest industrial firms, half of the companies with capital above five hundred million escudos and the five main exporting companies, besides controlling the four industrial sectors with the highest productivity, profit margins and technological capacity (beer, tobacco, paper and cement) and heavy industries (energy, chemistry, ship building and repair, steel and metal). It also detained 64% of the capital held by the banking system and granted 83% of the credit in the country. The most highly concentrated industrial sectors, where State regulation had favoured the emergence of dominant positions or had directly promoted monopolies/oligopolies, were precisely those with the highest profit rates, with heavy investments obtaining very high returns due to politically fixed prices and wages (Pereira 1977, 168-174). Simultaneously, the activity of the Lisbon stock exchange, which grew exponentially in the first years of the 1970s, also contributed to the profits of these groups, since many of the stock transactions were carried out by banks and holdings that belonged to them, with capital provided through credit. Most foreign investments during this period were strongly connected to these big groups, whether directly through joint investments or indirectly through credit. The Espírito Santo and the CUF/Mello groups had the closest ties to foreign capital, the first being associated with several U.S.



296

Chapter Twelve

financial institutions in business in Africa, and the latter with European firms in the shipyards of LISNAVE and SETENAVE. As a whole, the Portuguese economy was characterized by the combination of very high levels of concentration and very low levels of technical development. It maintained a structural deficit in the balance of trade, compensated by the influx of money from remittances from emigrant workers, in the form of deposits in foreign branches of Portuguese banks (which amounted to 11% of the country’s Gross National Product in 1973), along with some incoming revenues from the African colonies. This, together with the fact that the main Portuguese exports were concentrated on relatively few foreign markets (France, Federal Republic of Germany, United Kingdom, Benelux, United States of America and Canada), and that a vast amount of the raw materials needed for its industrial production were imported, meant that the fate of this economic structure was highly dependent on the evolution of Western economy and on the stability of prices in the world market. Its fast pace of growth during these twenty years had very feeble foundations and would prove extremely vulnerable when the world crisis erupted. Given that its main competitive advantage, and primary ‘natural resource’, lay in low wages, the fate of the ‘Portuguese model of underdevelopment’ was highly dependent on the repression of working class militancy and its organizations.4 The official trade unions were part of a corporative system subject to government control, which meant that strikes were forbidden and most major companies had informers from the political police (PIDE, later re-baptized DGS) paid in order to prevent underground labour organization inside both factories and banks (Pimentel 2007, 268-271). For all the abovementioned reasons, it was no surprise that the opposition to New State considered the ruling families of this economical oligarchy as the true owners of the country and the main source of social support to the regime. When, in the fall of 1968, Marcello Caetano succeeded to António Salazar in the leadership of the Portuguese government, the regime was facing the social and political consequences of a quick capitalist development based on a highly unbalanced division of income between labour and capital. Caetano had long been the informal leader of a faction within the regime’s elite, whose aim was to modernize the State in order to join the process of European integration. Among several measures taken in the early stages of his government – such as the liberation of some wellknown political prisoners and a brief containment of political repression –

 4



The expressions between comas were used in Murteira (1979, 139).

‘The Most Revolutionary Law Ever Approved’

297

this “reformist” turn included the democratization of the trade unions, allowing for open elections without government interference and making the negotiation of collective labour contracts mandatory between representatives of workers and entrepreneurs. The government – which included several “technocrats” from catholic youth organizations who worked in the major business conglomerates – set out to create a layer of modern labour activists, capable of serving as intermediaries between the working class and the regime without leaving that ground open to the Opposition (namely the Portuguese Communist Party), as it was facing a widespread explosion of wildcat strikes and labour conflicts since the beginning of the year. Allowing for trade union leaderships to be elected and recognized by the workers – instead of being imposed by the Ministério das Corporações (Ministry of Corporations) and mistrusted as police informers, as they had been until then – was therefore a key aspect of Caetano’s modernizing project (Patriarca 2004, 171-212; Noronha 2010, 233-264). Its outcome was, however, a far cry from what he had expected. In the following two years, the leaderships of key trade unions like metal and textile workers and insurance and commerce employees were taken over by members of the democratic opposition (communists, leftist Catholics and socialists), while labour agitation showed no signs of abating. Bank workers were at the forefront throughout the whole process, after the leaderships of Porto and Lisbon trade unions had been won by the opposition early in 1966 and 1968. Meanwhile, labour conflicts gained pace, against the backdrop of rising inflation and growing popular opposition to the colonial war which, combined with a remarkable lack of manpower due to emigration and military conscription, all of which led Portuguese society as a whole to a slow but steady turn to the left. The convergence of blue and white-collar workers inside the trade union movement – which would evolve into an informal Confederation in 1970, giving birth to the Intersindical –, along with the persistence of selforganization inside large factories in the Lisbon industrial belt, forced the government to alter its policy (Barreto, 1990). Be that as it may, the mobilization and radicalization of the workers, along with the rising militancy of labour activists, rendered the repressive option ineffective. Where the militant trade unionists had been strong enough to organize the workers, repression proved insufficient to break them. And where it had not – as in the newly created factories around Lisbon, which produced electronics, machinery and garments, with a very young and mostly feminine labour force –, it simply led to the creation of



298

Chapter Twelve

underground forms of coordination and organization, spreading and multiplying labour conflicts. In the process, bank workers’ and office clerks’ trade unions assumed a decisive role in producing studies and analyses of the Portuguese economy, elaborating a critique of government policy, pointing the finger at the business conglomerates that controlled the financial system and the main industries, alongside the powerful colonial interest groups, for the rising inflation. In 1973, the escudo was rapidly sinking (with an inflation rate that exceeded 20% a year) and the government’s response consisted solely in freezing salaries, in order to make wage-labourers pay for the impending crisis. This process proved decisive in the shaping of a widespread socialist and anti-monopolist perspective regarding the problems of the Portuguese economy. The political composition assumed by the working class during this period set the stage for a revolutionary process instead of a smooth transition to democracy, putting class struggle at the centre of all major historical events to follow. Portuguese capitalism was thrown into turmoil after the fall of the political regime that had been pivotal in its consolidation. A particular form of fascism for a particular form of bourgeoisie, Estado Novo was a pressure cooker waiting to explode at a social level.

Social conflict and political transformation in the Portuguese revolution As he faced the euphoric crowd from his balcony window, on the morning of the 25 April 1974, Caetano decided to surrender to the uprising military officers ‘to prevent power from falling into the streets’ (Cervelló 1993, 183). And yet it seems it was already too late. In the weeks that followed the military coup – while the young officers who filled the ranks of the Armed Forces Movement were settling into their new offices and a provisional government was being formed with representatives from the Socialist Party (PS), the PCP and the MDP-CDE (close to the PCP and consisting mainly of progressive Catholics), along with members of the former “liberal wing” of the National Assembly, who would later form the People’s Democratic Party (PPD) –, a wave of wildcat strikes and building occupations gathered pace, running counter to what the government deemed its most fundamental and urgent task, bringing stability to the country’s economy and political institutions. Entrepreneurs and managers were taken hostage by workers inside their own offices, as the latter demanded pay raises and other labour claims, while numerous poor families from Lisbon’s slums moved in to vacant palaces and spacious buildings. The Trade Unions, which had been urged to cooperate with the



‘The Most Revolutionary Law Ever Approved’

299

new authorities, lost track of the movement’s pace and ended up opposing the “irresponsible strikes” and denouncing far-left organizations as provocateurs. Workers’ and tenants’ commissions were formed in hundreds of factories, offices and neighbourhoods, in a sweeping movement of self-organization driven by the subaltern strata of the population (Pires 1975; Santos et al. 1977; Pérez 2009; Dows 1989). At the end of May, the Government was forced to set a minimum wage (which excluded domestic and rural workers) in order to prevent the escalation of the strike movement. Although it was much lower than what most radical strikes were demanding and, in some cases, achieving, it was still beyond the financial capacity of many industrial firms, whose main competitive advantage was precisely the low cost of labour. Forty-eight years of repression were suddenly vindicated in two months that decisively shifted the balance of power, turning a democratic orderly transition triggered by a bloodless military coup into a widespread State crisis that gradually assumed the form of a revolutionary process. In rough terms, it is possible to split the Portuguese revolution into two different periods prior to March 1975: • From April to September 1974, a liberal/conservative stand prevailed in the 1st and 2nd provisional governments, with General Spínola, the first President appointed by the MFA, trying to bolster his political and military influence against the Movement’s middle-rank officers, in order to re-establish State authority (which proved difficult, since both the political police and the anti-riot police had been dissolved immediately after the fall of the dictatorship) and assure the country’s main capitalists, as well as its foreign allies from the U.S. and Western Europe, that his main goal was to guarantee economic and political stability in Portugal and a negotiated decolonization in Africa; • From October 1974 until March 1975, the country veered to the left and State intervention in the economy seemed more and more urgent, in order to prevent a steep fall in production and consequent rise of unemployment, while the main political conflict opposed the moderates and the radicals inside the MFA, as well as the Communist Party and the Socialist Party inside the 3rd provisional government. The watershed between the two periods was a critical weekend in late September, when the far-right tried to stage a demonstration of “the silent majority of the Portuguese people” in support of Spínola, aimed at provoking street clashes with left militants in Lisbon and at clearing a path for a State of exception that would grant the General full and undisputed power. It was faced by massive opposition, in the form of road blockades organized by the PCP, the trade unions and the far-left, together with a



300

Chapter Twelve

firm and threatening stand from the MFA officers, which ultimately led to the General’s resignation on 30 September. Although it isn’t easy to summarize what divided Spínola and his political/military entourage (which included some of the main businessmen in the country) from the MFA officers and the political Parties on the left, during the spring and summer of 1974 – at least without going into a blow-by-blow account of the main events of the period – one could argue that the bones of contention were the continuation of the war effort in the colonies, with Spínola keen on a “white” decolonization in Angola, similar to the one that had occurred in Rhodesia, and his will to firmly suppress labour conflicts in Portugal, which, along with a policy aimed at favouring the country’s main business conglomerates, proved unacceptable to both of his opponents. With the MFA officers committed to bringing the colonial war to an end and the left parties fearing that repression of labour conflicts would spell their own marginalization (and, in the case of the PCP, full illegalization), Spínola’s antagonistic attitude and open ambition to concentrate power in his own hands could not but promote a belligerent relationship with his adversaries, reinforced by his clear underestimation of both at a military level. The defeat of his political project – a conservative democratic regime centred on his own personal presidential authority (openly inspired in De Gaulle and the French 5th Republic), with a gradual economic integration in the EEC compatible with a certain degree of influence in the former African colonies – opened the way to the growing radicalization of the MFA and to the influence of the PCP (as the most organized political party, with enormous influence in the trade unions) over the Provisional Government. The country seemed ripe for major social and economic transformations, with the public debate now revolving around the reach of State intervention and the changing shape of labour conflicts, while wage demands gave way to a struggle for power inside firms and workplaces. Although governing the economy seemed to be more and more at the centre of the political arena, it became increasingly clear that the divided government coalition did not run the show in that field. During the fall of 1974 and winter of 1975, the accusation of “economic sabotage” grew among the workers’ movement, as more and more businessmen dissolved their companies or reduced their staff, claiming economic and financial problems. The Comissões de Trabalhadores (Workers’ Committees) that had been formed and organized in several factories in the context of the May/June wave of strikes, and under the sway of the far-left began to face up to their administrations and fought to gain access to their companies’ documents and accounts, while forming



‘The Most Revolutionary Law Ever Approved’

301

their own federation (Interempresas), parallel to the Intersindical. The latter, however, which federated the traditional Trade-Unions, ran by PCP militants, was also involved in this new wave of labour struggles, geared towards seizing power inside companies and establishing workers’ control over production and management. Major factories came under permanent worker control, boards of directors blocked from entering their own offices, safes opened, files read, accounts examined. Following the thread of “economic sabotage”, both Workers’ Committees and Trade Union delegates (at times working side by side) took over their firms or forced State intervention, writing reports to the MFA and the government claiming that several businessmen were moving their money abroad through all kinds of illegal schemes and financial sleight of hand. The months between October 1974 and March 1975 witnessed a quick turn to the left on the Portuguese political scene, placing socialism on the table. In this process, the balance of power inside most major companies shifted dramatically away from the Portuguese economic oligarchy, which was by now clearly on the back foot, if not in a panic. During this period, bank workers’ surveillance over the financial sector and their accusations of “economic sabotage” by the bank owners proved decisive. While keeping at arm’s length from the turmoil of May and June 1974, the Lisbon Bank Workers’ Union was soon to play a pivotal role in the revolutionary process. Its direction board had cooperated with the military authorities and the provisional government from the beginning, after the union delegates had taken control over banks on 25 April, in order to prevent both massive withdrawals and looting. From the summer of 1974, most private banks, facing liquidity problems, had been supported by the central bank, in order to facilitate credit flow and allow for the financial support of companies affected by the world crisis and by the wage increases. The Union would soon turn against bankers and bank managers, accusing them of cutting off credit to small enterprises while privileging their own investments and companies instead. The tone of this accusation rose after September 28, in the wake of the discovery of documents proving the funding of far-right organizations by the Banco Espírito Santo e Comercial de Lisboa and by the Banco Totta & Açores (owned by the Mello family). Thus, the trade unionists’ argument was that public money was being used to fund counter-revolutionary activities rather than fulfilling its official purpose. Private ownership of the financial system was more and more considered part of the problems faced by the Portuguese economy. Amidst several conflicts with bankers, a motion by the Lisbon tradeunion, calling for the full nationalization of the financial sector (banks and



302

Chapter Twelve

insurance companies), was unanimously approved on the 3 January 1975, at a meeting attended by over 5 000 bank workers. Insurance workers would soon follow suit and, in time, so would the Intersindical and Interempresas. Control over that key sector of the economy was considered crucial by the whole of the workers’ movement. These developments proved critical on 11 March 1975, when bank workers’ unions took control of the entire sector and virtually imposed its nationalization upon an unresponsive 3rd Provisional Government and an increasingly radicalized MFA. Besides seizing some of the country’s main bankers and administrators (including several members of the Espírito Santo and Mello families) and delivering them to the leftist military officers, Bank Workers’ Trade Unions were able to dictate the nomination of managers and directors, were allowed to inspect a wide array of account movements and to remove anyone they suspected of politically supporting the deposed regime or right wing counter-revolutionary conspiracies, in a process designated as saneamento [cleansing, or purging]. They would also play a critical role in providing emergency credit to several companies under State intervention and/or workers’ control, to prevent them from going under for lack of funds, once their owners had fled the country or had been incarcerated. Even though banks were formally run by State-appointed directors, the Trade Union delegates threw their weight into the scale of every decision and served as a line of communication with Workers’ Committees and Trade Union delegates from small and medium-size factories. The question of who would have control over the economy was still in the balance, in a context of dual power.

Credit and planning: the short life of “the Portuguese path towards socialism” What briefly took form in Portugal during the spring and summer of 1975 escapes any given definition. A state of emergency was frequently invoked to justify the swiftness of state intervention in several sectors, since any lingering or hesitation regarding the country’s immediate future would only aggravate its economic difficulties. This provided a context in which the initiative within each workplace lay with the workers, who were now able to take over management or simply to remove and replace its board of administrators, in a rather unclear situation in most companies, whereby workers’ representatives – whether trade union delegates or Workers’ Committees – dealt with State–appointed technicians (namely clerks, lawyers and engineers) or directors on even terms. This situation



‘The Most Revolutionary Law Ever Approved’

303

varied from place to place and would also unfold apace with the transformations occurring on the broader political scene. Social struggles, combined with an economic crisis broadened and deepened by the combined effect of a crisis of the State and the exodus of a large portion of the country’s businessmen, conspired to produce a powerful public sector of the economy. Both the government’s economic staff and the MFA thought that this could now be consolidated and serve as a pillar for a socialist accumulation that would allow an alternative development strategy, making Portugal economically independent and stabilizing a domestic partition of income highly favourable to the urban working class and the agricultural wage-labourers of the southern collectivized estates. New forms of worker’s control inside the nationalized industrial sectors were widely debated and negotiated at length between government officials and workers’ representatives, with both sides agreeing on the substantial goal of ensuring the maximum efficiency inside companies while safeguarding newly-acquired labour rights.5 In the collectivized estates of the south, ran by wage-labourers’ representatives and benefiting from agricultural emergency credit provided by nationalized banks, the immediate goal was to improve land productivity and enhance food production, in order to simultaneously demonstrate worker’s ability to run the farms and to diminish the country’s import needs on that domain. At the same time, the new socialist regime would try to safeguard the property of small businessman and small landowners (especially in the north), and make sure they benefited from credit for the improvement of their production and a steady market for their products (thanks to the wage increases in the urban centres). Under pressure due to the quick degradation of the country’s economic situation, the coordination of the nationalized banking sector by the Banco de Portugal (Portugal’s central bank) became an improvised form of economic planning, a centre for the control and selection of investments, financial analysis and planning, as well as the standpoint from which global restructuring (both of nationalized banks and of the economy as whole) was debated. Among several efforts to coordinate the nationalized banking system, namely by creating unified structures for handling such problems as risk management and human resources, common criteria for credit concession were adopted (in which profit was to be downplayed in favour of the social utility of the investment and a committee for the study of bank restructuring started working in early

 5

For a collection of texts and positions within this debate, see AAVV (1975, 765816; 1976, 1049-1146).



304

Chapter Twelve

May). The envisaged restructuration included the creation of specialized banks to deal with agriculture, housing construction and foreign trade, leaving a small number of institutions (that would result from the merger of smaller banks with larger ones) to operate as commercial banks, with a reduced margin for competition over credit rates. One of the main goals was to insure full nationwide coverage by banking agencies, in order to absorb most of the savings of peasants and emigrants into the system and allow for central control over the country’s monetary mass. On the whole, the profit margins of the system were severely compromised by the interest rates fixed by the central bank, which favoured saving accounts (with higher interests paid by banks to depositors) rather than credit accounts, in order to attract private savings, while at the same time most of the companies and individual borrowers preferred short-term credit (thus paying smaller interests to the banks) to long-term loans. The nationalized banks were also affected by the increase of bad debts, namely those of former administrators, bank owners or businessmen with close ties to the large business conglomerates, but also from small and medium scale industrialists facing foreign market contractions and unable to deal with rising labour costs. Until the end of 1975 and into 1976, foreign currency reserves held by the Banco de Portugal were massively used to support these companies, according to restructuring plans approved by the government, who tried to create the conditions for the ‘State to digest all that it had swallowed during the previous months’.6 The project of creating a planned economy with some forms of workers’ control, combined with democratic pluralism and national independence had two main obstacles to face. The first one was of a directly financial nature. With a structural trade deficit (most imports being rather rigid, since they consisted in such vital goods as grain, meat and fuel) and an unfavourable balance of payments (partly due to the contraction of emigrant’s remittances since the revolution), the short-time funding needed to make these firms settle into a steady pace (allowing them to pay for salaries, raw goods and electricity), not to speak of the capital investment needed for technological upgrading and full restructuring of the productive cycle, could only come from the Banco de Portugal’s accumulated foreign currency reserves or, beyond a certain amount, from a major foreign loan guaranteed by the gold reserves held by the central bank. Negotiations for the loan, as well as for foreign

 6

The expression was used by the Economic Coordination Minister of the 4th Provisional Government, Mário Murteira, in an interview to a weekly newspaper: “Mário Murteira: desemprego é mais grave do que a inflação”, Expresso, 28.03.1975, 1.



‘The Most Revolutionary Law Ever Approved’

305

investments and business trade agreements, were conducted in several countries, involving a series of credit institutions (including Soviet ones), but all came to a stalemate due to the uncertainty surrounding the country’s political situation. This generated a deadlock in which it was possible to maintain several firms in business, but not to restructure them and adapt their production or activity with a view to reaching economic independence, by correcting the balance of trade deficit through socialist planning. Apart from the already mentioned company fusions promoted in key sectors, for the most part, the emergency credit support and the restructuring projects put forward by the nationalized banks and the new managements of nationalized companies was unable to bring about a structural transformation of the Portuguese economy. The second obstacle was of a broader political nature (and even a geopolitical one, within the frame of the Cold War appeasement of the mid 1970s). Even though the main political parties were involved in the 4th provisional government coalition and had struck a pact with the MFA, reaching a general agreement over a “Portuguese path towards socialism”, they became sharply divided after the elections for the Constituent Assembly (which the MFA had pledged would take place within a year from the fall of the dictatorship), carried out in April 1975, and decisively won by the moderate parties (PS and PPD). Even though both of these parties were in the government coalition and supported the nationalizations, they immediately started claiming that their results at the polls should be reflected in the composition of the cabinet, and thus demanded a greater share of cabinet positions, accusing the communists of manipulating both the military and the trade unions in order to compensate for the PCP’s weaker electoral results. A conflict would soon flare up between electoral legitimacy and street legitimacy, spreading from State institutions to army barracks, workplaces and trade unions, threatening the outbreak of a full-scale civil war, with the communists, the far-left organizations and the most radical wing of the MFA predominant in Lisbon and the South, while the moderates and conservatives prevailed in the centre and north of the country. The far-right (which had been twice defeated and ousted) also resumed its operations inside the country, with the support of foreign secret services and local Catholic Church officials, planting bombs and attacking headquarters of the PCP and the far-left in several cities in the North. The summer of 1975 was marked by an endless succession of massive street demonstrations, with both blocks trying to make a show of their strength. The victory of the moderate and conservative forces, which became evident in September, gave the process a new direction, with the cabinet



306

Chapter Twelve

for the 6th (and last) provisional government including a clear majority of moderate socialists and liberal conservatives, while the radical leftist and pro-communist wings of the MFA lost ground to moderate and conservative officers. Inside the trade unions, elections started leaning towards more moderate stands, as candidates from the Socialist Party (supported by the PPD) gained control over the Bank Workers’ (at Porto in February and at Lisbon in late August 1975), the Insurance Workers’ and the Office Clerks’ Trade Unions, whose members had played a decisive role in the management of several State-controlled companies, as well as firms under workers’ self-management. Even though the political platform of the new trade union leaders was favourable to socialist revolution and supported the nationalizations, they would soon prove willing to cooperate with most of the “normalization” strategy pursued by the 6th Provisional Government. The debate on the nature of the social formation that would emanate from the revolution was just about to begin when the situation came to a climax after an unfathomable and mysterious military coup mounted on 25 November 1975, whose outcome further bolstered the moderate and conservative positions. The impasse in the negotiations with several banks and international institutions on the matter of a foreign loan, which had been dragging on for some time, was eventually broken once the political situation was clarified and the EEC, the USA and the IMF offered a considerable credit line to the Portuguese government during 1976. Socialism was never left out of the official public speeches, as it was identified with the new public sector and the massive State intervention on the economy; but it gradually became clear that the processes of transformation would ground to a halt, national economic planning reconsidered, and the market left to function in the determination of both the production of commodities and the reproduction of the labour force. Most of all, the law of value should henceforth rule unchallenged, with the State competing with all other private agents on (theoretically) even terms, using mostly monetary and budget tools to influence the economy. When the new Constitution was approved, in April 1976, the numerous paragraphs it contained regarding socialism, workers’ self-management, economic planning or land reform had been transformed into nothing more than poetic license, void of any practical meaning. Time had gone back to its usual track.



‘The Most Revolutionary Law Ever Approved’

307

Conclusion What are we to make, then, of the Portuguese revolution and its impact on both the economy and society? Not much, at first glance. Since the process was brought to a standstill, in the context of fierce political rivalry between two social and political blocks, both of which claimed to be fully committed to the construction of a socialist society in Portugal, it is not easy to grasp the depth and reach of the transformations imagined and planed during the Spring and Summer of 1975. What would eventually take shape bore no resemblance to socialism, and can best be described as a market economy with a significant Stateowned or State-controlled sector of the economy (albeit quantitatively on average with most European countries at the time, regarding employment and percentage of the GDP) and politically fixed prices. No global planning was ever put in place, even though a three-year-plan was outlined (1977-1980) and some of the smaller banks were effectively merged into larger ones. European integration became a steady horizon for most of the political elite (PS and PPD alternated in power, circumstantially allied with the conservative Centro Democrático e Social [Social and Democratic Centre – CDS]) and two IMF adjustment interventions – imposed by the structural deficit in the balance of trade and by the country’s vulnerability to the evolution of the world economy – resulted in even more severe limitations to the government’s ability to pursue the economic goals set in the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic. State support to private businessmen came to be increasingly considered the country’s main recipe for economic success. However, looking at a report written by three MIT Professors who were in Portugal in December 1975, on an OECD technical mission requested by the Banco de Portugal, allows us to pause and consider the range of possibilities closed off as quickly as they arose and imagine alternative developments and scenarios. Since a narrative has gradually taken root, blaming the revolutionary process for the country’s financial problems during the following years, thus justifying austerity measures and the return of several companies into the hands of their former owners, in order to get things back on their “normal” course, it is interesting to note that the opening words of the report point in a rather different direction: There seems to be virtually unanimous opinion in Portugal that there was a catastrophic decline in economic activity in the last half of 1974 and during 1975. Appraisals include phrases like “verge of chaos”, and “brink of disaster”. In the face of such gloom, it may be regarded as unwarranted



308

Chapter Twelve optimism to maintain that, although the situation is quite tenuous, at the beginning of 1976 the Portuguese economy is surprisingly sound. [...] For a country recently experiencing thorough social reform, a sea change in its foreign trade position and six revolutionary governments in the past nineteen months, Portugal enjoys unexpectedly good economic health. While real output clearly dropped in 1975, the decline was not precipitous; the best estimate is a three percent decrease in gross domestic product (GDP) (Dorrnbusch et al. 1976, 1-3)

The report stressed the fact that most of the statistics regarding the Portuguese economy were similar to the ones of other western countries, all facing economic depression at the same time. While it highlighted the main specificities brought about by the revolution – namely what it considered to be the increase of both ‘participation of labour in decision making’ and of its share of the national product –, it also highlighted the impact of the decolonization process and of the severe reduction of immigrants’ remittances, along with the increases in oil and other commodity prices, that severely affected the country’s terms of trade. For the most part, these MIT economic experts considered that the country faced critical choices in 1976 in order to get its economy back into shape while it still had the resources to do so. But regarding 1975, Portugal’s year of living dangerously, they reserved special praise for the impact domestic demand, highly increased by the rise of industrial wages, had in maintaining overall levels of activity stable in spite of the sharp decline in investment. That was only made possible by the policy of monetary growth and other counter-cyclical measures carried out by the country’s monetary authorities: Had there not been a government deficit in 1975, the private sector would have had to adjust to the trade deficit by cutting investments and consumption with consequent reduction in imports. There were substantial, though undesired, reductions in investment. However, Portuguese authorities wisely supported personal consumption by not following “balanced budget” policies. [...] Putting the matter briefly, the source of domestic money creation is no longer a balance of payments surplus and has become credit creation instead. [...] The decline in the Bank of Portugal’s net foreign assets is the financial counterpart of the current account deficit, the real causes of which have already been discussed. (Dorrnbusch et al., 12-13)

The report did not specifically address the performance of the firms that had gone through State intervention or that were nationalized, nor did it try to evaluate the overall impact of the increase in the participation of labour in the decision-making process, but it considered that the growing



‘The Most Revolutionary Law Ever Approved’

309

labour militancy that shaped the revolution was not in fact any higher than that of most Western European countries, although its novelty had led to an inflated public perception and hyperbolic accounts of the disruptions in the productive process. In line with several other studies and texts, mostly produced on the losing side of this process (that is, by economists, politicians and labour militants that were closely associated to the project of economic transformation developed under the 4th and 5th provisional governments), this report leads us to conclude that, as a whole, the brief experiment of socialist transformation undertaken in Portugal in 1975 was far from having produced a chaotic economic situation, let alone being responsible for the country’s enduring structural crisis. Being as it was the sole moment in the twentieth century in which national income distribution was more favourable to wage-labourers than to capital owners, the revolutionary process occupies a position of its own in Portuguese modern history, as the most divisive and at the same time the most striking event in recent public memory, one that shaped the country’s political map and questioned a century-long pattern of capital accumulation. Members of the economic oligarchy who were forced to flee the country, only to return during the 1980s to buy their banks back with the money they received as compensation, still recall with trepidation those tumultuous days when they lost not only the traditional support from the State apparatus, but their property and privileged position altogether. Apart from the anger and resentment that emerge from their memories, little remains of ‘the most revolutionary law ever approved in Portugal’.

Bibliography AAVV. “Controlo Operário em Portugal (I)”, in Análise Social XI, 42-43, 1975. —. “Controlo operário em Portugal (II)”, in Análise Social XII, 48, 1976. Barreto, António. Anatomia de uma Revolução: a Reforma Agrária em Portugal 1974-76. Mem Martins: Europa-América, 1987. Barreto, José. “Os primórdios da Intersindical sob Marcello Caetano”, in Análise Social XXV, 105-106, 1990. Bernardo, João. Labirintos do Fascismo. Porto: Afrontamento, 2003. Cabral, Manuel Villaverde. “A grande Guerra e o Sidonismo (esboço interpretativo)”, in Análise Social XV, 58, 1979. Cervelló, Josep Sánchez. A Revolução Portuguesa e a sua Influência na Transição Espanhola (1961-1976). Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 1993. Costa, Jorge, et al. Os Donos de Portugal. Porto: Afrontamento, 2010.



310

Chapter Twelve

Cruzeiro, Maria Manuela. Costa Gomes – O último Marechal. Lisboa: Editorial Notícias, 1998. Dornbusch, Rudiger et al. Analysis and Projections of Macroeconomic Conditions in Portugal – Report from an OECD - sponsored mission to Portugal (December 15 to 20 -1975). Lisboa: 1976. Dows, Charles. Revolution at the Grassroots - Community Organizations in the Portuguese Revolution. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. Martins, Maria Belmira. Sociedades e Grupos em Portugal. Lisboa: Estampa, 1973. Medeiros, Fernando. A Sociedade e a Economia Portuguesas nas Origens do Salazarismo. Lisboa: A Regra do Jogo, 1978. Murteira, Mário. Desenvolvimento, Subdesenvolvimento e o Caso Português. Lisboa: Presença, 1979. Noronha, Ricardo. “Inflacção e contratação colectiva”, in O Estado Novo em Questão (eds. Nuno Domingos and Victor Pereira). Lisboa: Edições 70, 2010. Patriarca, Fátima. “Estado Social: a caixa de Pandora”, in A transição falhada (eds. Fernando Rosas e Pedro Aires Oliveira). Lisboa: Editorial Notícias, 2004. Pereira, João Martins. Indústria, Ideologia e Quotidiano: ensaio sobre o capitalismo em Portugal. Porto: Afrontamento, 1977. Pérez, Miguel. Abaixo a Exploração Capitalista – As Comissões de Trabalhadores durante o PREC (1974-75). Lisboa: Masters Dissertation, FCSH/UNL, 2009. Piçarra, Constantino. A Ocupação de Terras no Distrito de Beja 1974-75. Coimbra: Almedina, 2008. Pimentel, Irene. A História da PIDE. Lisboa: Círculo de Leitores, 2007. Pires, José. Greves e 25 de Abril. Lisboa: Edições Base, 1975. Ribeiro, José Félix et al. “Grande indústria, banca e grupos financeiros – 1958-73”, in Análise Social XXIII, 99, 1987. Rosas, Fernando. O Estado Novo nos anos 30 (1928-1938). Lisboa: Estampa, 1986. Santos, Américo Ramos dos. “Desenvolvimento monopolista em Portugal: 1968-73”, in Análise Social XIII, 49, 1977. Santos, Maria de Loudes Lima dos et al. As Lutas Sociais nas Empresas a Seguir ao 25 de Abril, 3 vols. Porto: Afrontamento, 1977.



CONTRIBUTORS

Frederico Ágoas is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at CesNova, New University of Lisbon, and Honorary Research Associate at the Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies, Birkbeck, University of London. He has worked and published on Historical Sociology and the History of Science, particularly on the relations between the emergence of social sciences and the development of the modern State. Research for Frederico Ágoas’s chapter in this book was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship from the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (SFRH/BPD/73985/2010). Joana Estorninho de Almeida works on the history of public administration in Portugal and Europe, particularly in the transition from the modern to the contemporary State. She is particularly interested in the cultural history of State-building from the daily practices of bureaucracy and iconography of public service. Currently, she is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Law and Society (CEDIS) in the New University of Lisbon. She published A “Forja dos Homens”. Estudos jurídicos e lugares de poder no século XVII. Research for Joana Estorninho de Almeida’s chapter in this book was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (SFRH/BPD/43916/2008). Bruno Cordeiro is currently a research assistant at ICS, University of Lisbon and a doctoral student in History at the New University of Lisbon. He has done research on the field of contemporary social and economic historiography and history of technology, in Portugal and the wider world. His current research projects include the history of archives and State power, and also the history of policing. Diogo Duarte is a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History, New University of Lisbon. Graduated in anthropology, he has worked on anticlerical violence during the Portuguese First Republic and his currently preparing a PhD on the history of Anarchism and the State in Portugal. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo (PhD History, King’s College London, 2008). Researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon and Visiting Scholar at King’s College London (2012-2013). He was a Visiting Professor at Brown University (USA) in 2011 and 2012. His

312

Contributors

research interests focus on the Global and Comparative Histories of Imperialism and Colonialism (XVIII-XX centuries). He published Livros Brancos, Almas Negras: A “Missão Civilizadora” do Colonialismo Português, c. 1870-1930 (2010) and A Diplomacia do Império. Política e Religião na Partilha de África (2012), and edited O Império Colonial em Questão (2012). He is co-editor of the book series História e Sociedade at Edições 70. Research for Miguel Jerónimo’s chapter in this book was supported by two research projects funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Portugal): “Portugal is not a small country”: The End of the Portuguese Colonial Empire in a Comparative Perspective (FCTPTDC/HIS-HIS/108998/2008) and Constructing an Empire-State: A Historical Sociology of Portuguese Colonialism (PTDC/CS-SOC/ 108650/2008). José Neves is Assistant Professor in History at Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He has worked on Portuguese communism, nationalism and other aspects of twentiethcentury political and cultural history. In 2008, he published Comunismo e Nacionalismo em Portugal – Política, Cultura e História no Século XX and in 2010 he edited Como se faz um povo – Ensaios em História de Portugal Contemporâneo. He also published on historiography and the history of Portuguese sports. He is the coordinator of The Making of State Power in Portugal: Institutionalization Processes from 1890 to 1986, research project funded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (PTDC/HIS-HIS/104166/2008). Ricardo Noronha is a historian based in Lisbon, interested in the subjects of social conflict and critique of political economy. His PhD dissertation concerns the process of Bank nationalization during the Portuguese revolution (1974-75). He is currently working on a postdoctoral research about economic transformations in Portugal in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Research for Ricardo Noronha’s chapter in this book was supported by a doctoral grant from the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (SFRH/BD/30830/2006). Jorge Ramos do Ó is Associated Professor at the Institute of Education of the University of Lisbon and Visiting Professor at the University of São Paulo (Brazil). He has published on discourse analysis, political and cultural history, history of the mentalities, in particular during the period of the Portuguese New State (1933-1974), and also on History of Education and Pedagogy in the longer period from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to mid twentieth century. He supervises a postgraduate research seminar on the articulation between reading and writing. He is also an editor of Sisyphus – Journal of Education.



The Making of Modern Portugal

313

Diego Palacios Cerezales is Lecturer in European History at Stirling University. His main research interests are popular politics, citizenship and State building in the Iberian Peninsula during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has published two books: O Poder Caiu na Rua (Lisbon, 2003), which dealt with popular movements in Portugal after the Carnation revolution and Portugal à Coronhada (Lisbon, 2011), a history of the interaction between State building, popular protest and policing in Portugal during the last two centuries. Victor Pereira holds a PhD in history from the Institute of Political Studies in Paris. He is professor at the University of Pau and Pays de l’Adour. He is currently working on Portuguese and French migrations and economic planning. He co-edited O Estado Novo em Questão (with Nuno Domingos) in 2010 and published La Dictature de Salazar Face à l’Émigration in 2012. Elisa Lopes da Silva is a PhD candidate in History at Instituto de Ciências Sociais, University of Lisbon. She received her undergraduate degree in History and her masters degree in Contemporary History from Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas (New University of Lisbon), the latter with a thesis entitled A Propriedade e os seus Sujeitos. Colonização interna e colónias agrícolas durante o Estado Novo (Property and its subjects. Internal colonization and agricultural colonies during the New State). Luís Trindade is Senior Lecturer in Portuguese Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He has worked on Portuguese nationalism and several other aspects of twentieth century cultural history. In 2008, he published O Estranho Caso do Nacionalismo Português, on the relations between Salazarism and literature. He has also published about the histories of Portuguese cinema, intellectuals, journalism and advertising. His current research focuses on Portuguese revolutionary and postrevolutionary culture.



INDEX

1911 Constitution, 32, 34, 82, 129 1933 Constitution, 34, 143 25 April 1974 (Carnation Revolution), 26, 30, 38, 178, 271, 273, 286, 291, 292, 298, 301 Abreu, Carlos, 218 Absolutism (Absolutists), 29, 234 Action Française, 256 Adler, Alfred, 220 Aguiar, Joaquim António de, 233 Albuquerque, Caetano Almeida e, 65 Albuquerque, Mouzinho de, 29, 65, 66 Almeida, Eugénio de, 54 Anderson, Benedict, 258 Andrade, Abel de, 160 Araújo, António, 234 Associação Comercial de Lojistas de Lisboa, 28 Authoritarianism, 10, 11, 12, 15, 129, 258 Balbi, Adriano, 163 Balzac, Honoré de, 135 Banco Borges & Irmão, 295 Banco de Portugal, 62, 303, 304, 307 Banco Espírito Santo e Comercial de Lisboa, 295, 301 Banco Fonsecas & Burnay, 295 Banco Nacional Ultramarino, 85, 295 Banco Português do Atlântico, 295 Banning, Émile, 71 Bárcia, José, 139 Barros, Henrique de, 173, 185, 186, 189 Barroso, João, 206

Belo, João, 85 Benoliel, Joshua, 139, 142 Booth, Charles, 153 Bossa, José Ferreira, 88 Botto-Machado, Fernão, 241 Braga, Teófilo, 140 British Ultimatum, 250, 252 Bureau International du Travail, 168 Cabinda Company, 84 Cabral, Costa, 234 Cabral, Manuel Villaverde, 40, 253 Caetano, Marcello, 38, 296, 309 Caldas, Eugénio Castro, 186 Camacho, Manuel Brito, 84 Camden, William, 149 Camões, Luiz Vaz de, 3 Campos, Agostinho de, 207, 263, 266, 267 Campos, Ezequiel de, 181, 184 Capitalism, 8, 188, 234, 250, 266, 286, 298 Caraça, Bento de Jesus, 280 Carvalhais, Stuart, 140 Carvalho, Henrique de, 71 Carvalho, Luna de, 230, 243, 244, 245, 247 Casas do Povo, 187, 199 Castel, Robert, 188 Castro, Augusto de, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 266, 267 Catholic Church, 14, 222, 225, 226, 227, 234, 239, 246, 273, 294, 305 Centro Democrático Social - CDS, 307 Certeau, Michel de, 180 Champalimaud, António, 295 Chicago School, 154 Clastres, Pierre, 281

The Making of Modern Portugal Cold War, 95, 99, 305 Colonial Act, 86, 88 Colonial wars, 2, 10 Comissões de Trabalhadores, 300, 310 Communism, 5, 9, 15, 16, 270, 272, 273, 274, 275, 278, 280, 281, 282, 283, 285, 286, 312 Communist International, 272 Companhia União Fabril - CUF, 76, 295 Conférence Géographique de Bruxelles, 72 Conselho da Revolução, 290 Constituent Assembly, 291, 305 Constitutional Charter, 24, 25, 127 Constitutional Monarchy, 46, 126, 139, 146, 227, 230, 236, 239 Cooper, Frederick, 87 Correia, Fernando, 219 Corporatism, 8, 143, 145 Costa Gomes, Francisco, 291, 310 Costa Júnior, Aquino da, 166 Costa, Afonso, 31, 32, 141, 142, 198, 228, 233, 240 Costa, Eduardo da, 76, 82 Couceiro, Paiva, 34, 70, 76, 77 Cunhal, Álvaro, 272, 273, 277, 279, 281, 285, 288 D. Carlos I, 257 D. João IV, 20 D. Miguel, 29, 134, 233 D. Pedro IV, 127, 233 Dantas, Júlio, 263 Davies, David, 153 De Gaulle, Charles, 300 Decolonization, 10, 16, 299, 300, 308 Decroly, Ovide, 220 Demolins, Édmond, 152 Descamps, Paul, 161, 175 Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, 153 Diniz, José Ferreira, 79



315

Disuse (technological), 11, 104, 105, 107, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121 Ducpétiaux, Édouard, 158 Duque, Rafael, 184, 187, 194, 200 Durieu, Joseph, 161 Durkheim, Émile, 154 Eden, Frederick Morton, 153 Edgerton, David, 106 Empire, 1, 2, 9, 10, 15, 44, 65, 67, 81, 86, 88, 94, 97, 99, 100, 101, 250, 271, 273, 280, 287, 312 Emsley, Clive, 45 Enes, António, 75, 82 Engel, Ernst, 158 Espírito Santo family, 294 European Economic Community EEC, 39 European Free Trade Association EFTA, 294 Faria, Severim de, 20 Fascism, 190, 274, 292, 298 Fátima (apparitions), 147, 262, 268, 288, 310 Ferrão, Martens, 46, 52, 53 Figueiredo, Antero de, 261, 262, 263, 265 First Vatican Council, 235 Foucault, Michel, 21, 151, 180, 201 Franco, João, 139 French Revolution, 226 Freyre, Gilberto, 2, 67, 88 Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, 3 Furtado, Celso, 280 Galvão, Henrique, 66, 89 Gama, Vasco da, 3 Garrett, Almeida, 254 Geddes, Patrick, 153 Giddens, Anthony, 216 Gomes, Mário de Azevedo, 186 Gonçalves, Bento, 272 Governmentality, 13, 21, 180, 223 Grendi, Edoardo, 231, 247 Guarda Civil, 53, 62

316 Guarda Nacional Republicana, 58, 188 Halbwachs, Maurice, 154, 159 Herculano, Alexandre, 232 Hirschman, Albert, 19 Hobsbawm, Eric, 281 Injaiin, Abdul, 75 Instituto Nacional de Estatística, 81, 98, 176, 199 Instituto Nazionale di Economia Agraria, 159 Instituto Superior de Agronomia, 152, 161, 166, 176, 181 Integralismo Lusitano, 256 Interempresas, 301, 302 International Labour Organization, 86 International Monetary Fund - IMF, 306, 307 International Society for Social Science, 154 Intersindical, 297 Jacobinism, 229 Janeirinha Revolution, 54 Jesuits (Company of Jesus), 232, 233, 234, 235 Jesus, Lúcia de, 262 Junta Autónoma das Obras de Hidráulica Agrícola, 184, 190, 197 Junta de Colonização Interna, 171, 179, 181, 191, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 200 Junta de Emigração, 35 Juntas Provinciais de Povoamento, 90 Kellog, Paul, 153 Keynesianism, 280 King, Gregory, 157, 168 Kracauer, Siegfried, 146 Laicization, 225, 226, 230, 231, 232, 237, 238, 240, 246 Latifúndio, 291 Le Play, Frédéric, 152, 160, 161, 175 League of Nations, 86



Index Leopold II, 71 Liberal Revolution, 127 Liberal State, 11, 27, 29, 125, 128, 130, 131, 133, 138, 143, 165, 234, 253 Liberalism, 127, 131 Liga de Educação Nacional, 161 Lima Basto, Eduardo, 166 Lima, António Augusto Pires de, 207 Lindqvist, Svante, 106 LISNAVE, 296 Lobo, José Joaquim Ferreira, 136 Loureiro, Fernando Pinto, 279 Lourenço, António Dias, 272 Luso-Tropicalism, 2 Magalhães, Rodrigo da Fonseca, 132 Mann, Michael, 21, 252 Manuel, Passos, 234 Marshall, Alfred, 169 Martins, Oliveira, 27, 31, 51, 58, 63, 183, 279, 287 Marxism, 281, 282, 287 Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labour, 157 Matos, Norton de, 66, 79, 83, 84, 95 Mattoso, José, 253 Maurras, Charles, 256 Mello, Manuel de, 294 Melo, Sebastião José de Carvalho e (Marquis of Pombal), 22, 204, 229, 232, 233 Metallurgical Workers Union, 157 Military Dictatorship, 85, 201 Mocidade Portuguesa, 210, 211 Moniz, Jaime, 203, 204, 207, 212, 213 Monteiro, Armindo, 81 Monteiro, Daniel, 220 Mossamedes Company, 76, 84 Moura, Maria Lúcia de Brito, 228, 230 Movimento das Forças Armadas, 290

The Making of Modern Portugal Movimento Democrático Português - Comissão Democrática Eleitoral - MDP-CDE, 298 Mozambique Company, 75, 85 Mutu-ya-Kevela, 78 Napoleonic Wars, 44 Nationalism, 5, 9, 14, 15, 86, 184, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 286, 312, 313 Nazism, 272 Neto, Lino, 181 Neto, Vitor, 234 New Education, 204 New State (Estado Novo), 8, 10, 12, 13, 33, 34, 35, 37, 98, 126, 130, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 166, 170, 172, 178, 179, 180, 181, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192, 194, 196, 197, 198, 200, 211, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 293, 296, 312, 313 Newitt, Malyn, 75 Nobre, António, 254 Nóvoa, António, 202 Nyassa Company, 75 Oliveira, Alberto de, 254, 255, 257, 260 Oliveira, António Corrêa de, 261, 263, 265 Oliveira, António Sá, 211 Ornelas, Aires de, 76 Pacheco, Carneiro, 211 Pacheco, Duarte, 294 Pais, Sidónio, 293 Paris Commune, 270 Partido Nacionalista, 236 People’s Democratic Party - PPD, 298 Pessoa, Fernando, 148, 256 Petty, William, 156, 157 PIDE, 89, 296, 310 Pimentel, Alberto, 134 Pinheiro, Rafael Bordalo, 136, 140 Pinto, Cortez, 219 Pinto, Júlio Lourenço, 135



317

Poinsard, Léon, 161 Portuguese Communist Party - PCP, 15, 181, 271, 297 Pulido Valente, Vasco, 228 Queirós, Eça de, 54, 136, 254 Quetelet, Adolphe, 158, 168 Ramos, Rui, 228 Ranger, Terence, 73, 268 Reis, Jaime, 55 Repressive Developmentalism, 89, 91, 92 Republican Revolution, 44 Ribeiro, Hintze, 233, 235, 236 Ribeiro, Maria da Conceição, 42 Rollo, Maria Fernanda, 227 Rosas, Fernando, 227, 229 Rossolimo, Grigory Ivanovich, 220 Rousiers, Paul de, 154 Russell Sage Foundation, 153 Sá da Bandeira, Marquis of, 65 Salazar, António de Oliveira, 3, 39, 42, 46, 59, 64, 93, 101, 125, 129, 142, 143, 144, 145, 161, 172, 175, 178, 179, 201, 217, 265, 266, 267, 268, 273, 278, 288, 293, 294, 296, 313 Salazarism, 59, 249, 265, 266, 313 Sampaio, Rodrigues, 212 Samuel, Raphael, 103 Saneamento, 302 Santos, Américo Ramos dos, 295 Santos, Boaventura Sousa, 2 Saramago, José, 3 Sassen, Saskia, 20 Schengen area, 39 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 102, 123 Scott, James, 17 Seabra, Eurico de, 239 Secretaria dos Negócios Indígenas, 76 Selvagem, Carlos, 66, 89, 96 Sena Sugar Estates Ltd, 85 Serrão, Joel, 102 Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras, 39 Serviço Psico-Social, 90

318 SETENAVE, 296 Silva, Alfredo da, 293, 294 Silva, António José da, 142 Silva, José Francisco da, 65, 73 Silva, Rebelo da, 68 Sobral, José Manuel, 182 Socialism, 8, 291, 292, 301, 302, 305, 306, 307 Socialist Party - PS, 273, 298, 299, 306 Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, 71, 161 Sociedade Portuguesa de Ciência Social, 161 Sociedade Propagadora dos Conhecimentos Geográficos Africanos, 71 Society For Social Economy, 153 Sommer, Henrique, 294 Sontag, Susan, 145 Sousa, Marnoco e, 160 Spanish Civil War, 272 Spínola, António de, 290, 299, 300 Stalin, Joseph, 270 Stasi, 270 Techniques of the self, 216 Technological State, 104 Technologies of the self, 216



Index Teixeira, Assunção, 220, 221 Teles, Basílio, 182, 184 Third World, 2, 10, 97, 292 Thompson, E.P., 245 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 153 Torpey, John, 17 Tourville, Henri de, 152 Trade Unions, 143, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 305, 306 União Nacional, 35 Unidades Colectivas de Produção, 291 Vatican, 235, 239, 240 Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre de, 156 Verein für Socialpolitik, 153 Vieira, Afonso Lopes, 259, 260, 262, 263, 264, 265, 267 Vilarigues, Sérgio, 272 Weber, Max, 17, 42, 153 Wheat Campaign, 185, 294 World War I, 83, 114, 166, 184, 229, 257, 264, 293 World War II, 10, 35, 87, 91, 186, 275, 280, 294 Wright, Caroll, 159 Zambezia Company, 75