On April 25, 1974, 50 years of dictatorship in Portugal would collapse in a few days, that by Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. Today, decryption with a historian of Portugal, Yves Léonard, who has just published on April 18 by Perrin, Salazar: the enigmatic dictator.
Came to power under the National Dictatorship (Ditadura Nacional), Salazar transformed it into Estado Novo (New State), a dictatorial and corporatist regime which ruled Portugal from 1933 to 1974.
franceinfo: Salazar, an enigmatic dictator who during the Second World War, did not act like Franco, did he stay on the sidelines?
Yves Leonard: He was a fairly prudent and clever man, who had the art, as they say, of not putting all his eggs in one basket. During the Second War, he still gave preference to the British Alliance, which was the traditional maritime alliance, with the tutelary power since the Middle Ages. But he still built a preferential relationship with the German ambassador in Lisbon.
Lisbon, nest of spies at the time?
Nor any spies in fact, with everyone competing, observing each other, spying. The reign of lies and “fake news” before its time, corresponds well, a little, to the sibylline, sinuous, ductile nature, as I say, of Salazar, who always takes care not to reveal himself too much, to preserve the strategic interests of your country, that is to say neutrality. He is a very skillful man, who almost knows how to navigate by sight, who negotiates the question of the Azores in a very sneaky manner with the English.
There are also Portuguese colonies in Africa?
This is the non-negotiable part. This is what we can’t touch. And therefore, the national narrative that he constructed cannot be understood without the contribution of the colonies. That is to say, Portugal is not a small country, says the propaganda, it is not a small country, why? Because there is Angola, Mozambique and everything else.
Salazar is also the dictator who wants an agrarian country, especially not an industrial country, because for him, who says industry, says proletariat, and who says proletariat says communism?
So. And what he dreams of is a rural Portugal, where the Portuguese would live “usually”, as he says, that is to say respecting the immutable order of things. Salazar will use this register a lot. First of all, he himself comes from an inland province, from a relatively modest background, and he is a man who deep down has “a nationalism of the earth and the dead”, as they said.
And then, there is the Catholic Church which is powerful, well established, there are local notables who are under its control, at its hands. And it creates a local ecosystem that allows it to reign supreme. And for all the recalcitrants – they exist – to identify them as communists.
No opposition, with the Pide political police…
The Pide is omnipresent, very well organized, it will be more and more so after the end of the Second World War and its resources will increase. It identifies those who conspire against the good of the nation, as they say. But at the end of the 1950s, there was a double phenomenon: Salazar wanted to promote what he called a sort of late colonialism, that is, telling the Portuguese from modest backgrounds, the little whites as they were called, that They come to settle in the colonies, in Angola and Mozambique, mainly.
And then a reality on the ground, poverty, but not only poverty, the colonial wars, which caused many young Portuguese, in order not to do military service, not to go overseas, to leave Portugal clandestinely.
Hundreds of thousands of Portuguese are literally fleeing the famous jump, the “salto”, to take refuge in France, in Federal Germany, in Switzerland, in Belgium, in short, where they can hope to find a better future. Often difficult at first, because they are the slums, but they are in contact with populations where they see that there is consumption, civil liberties, union protections and paid leave, all things which do not exist in Portugal. And they say to themselves, “but perhaps this is what should be imposed in our country, which is so behind.”
And then, is it a Portuguese dictatorship not too badly viewed by the West?
What partly saved the regime was first of all its ambiguous attitude during the Second World War, but above all it was its anti-communism and the Cold War. NATO, founding member of NATO, not like Spain. Salazar is immediately the privileged interlocutor, and in addition he has relations with Franco, which are complex: friendship and common interests and elective affinities also on some fundamentals. But at the same time, as they say, he is also a general for him, and a general for Salazar, he is someone who, on the intellectual level, is weakly structured.
Four years before the Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974, Salazar died on July 27, 1970. Your last chapter on the end of Salazar is called “Funeral Horizon” and not oration?
Funeral horizon, indeed, because the last few months correspond well to this image of both a declining personality and a regime that is no longer able to do so. And besides, what follows will show that Salazarism without Salazar doesn’t work.