The Estado Novo, explained

António de Oliveira Salazar, a professor of Economics and Finance at Coimbra, was called in by the military to put the public accounts in order: he took office as Minister of Finance on 27 April 1928, with a reputation as a “financial wizard”, and in his inaugural speech he said that he knew very well what he wanted and where he was going.⁴⁵ On 5 July 1932 he became President of the Council, the head of government, and so he remained for 36 years.⁵⁶ With a small group of collaborators he devised the 1933 Constitution, which gave him power: ministers answered to the President of the Council, and he answered only to the President of the Republic; the Assembly had no power at all over the Government.³

In 1937, the year in which Salazar escaped a bomb on Avenida Barbosa du Bocage, the State expropriated this mansion, behind Parliament, as the official residence of the President of the Council.⁷⁸ Salazar moved in in May 1938. During the works, the architect Cristino da Silva designed a monumental staircase linking the residence’s grounds to Parliament, to make communication between the two buildings easier.⁸

In 1968, a fall from a chair left him unable to govern, and Marcelo Caetano replaced him. Salazar went on living here until July 1970, the month in which he died — “without ever suspecting that he was no longer President of the Council”, wrote the Diário de Notícias.⁶⁸⁹ After 25 April, the mansion remained the official residence of heads of government — in 1979–1980, that of the first woman to head one, Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo, who did not, however, live here.⁸¹⁰

Right after the coup of 28 May 1926, a military force commanded by Lieutenant Vilhena closed this Parliament.⁵ It did not meet again until January 1935, as the National Assembly of the Estado Novo. The 1933 Constitution was put to a plebiscite on 19 March: abstentions and blank votes counted as “yes”, and a “no” had to be written on the ballot paper.³ It incorporated the Colonial Act of 1930, for which it was “of the organic essence of the Portuguese Nation to fulfil the historic function of possessing and colonising overseas domains”.¹¹ The empire has its own route, From the Padrão to the quay.

The National Assembly had a single chamber and little power. All its deputies came from the list of the National Union, the single party, and in practice the laws were made by the Government, by decree-law: in 1945, an opinion of the Corporative Chamber — the consultative body in which economic and local interests carried weight — acknowledged that “the Government is the normal legislative body and the Assembly the exceptional legislative body”.³ The National Assembly met for the last time on the morning of 25 April 1974, without a quorum. A year later, the Constituent Assembly, elected in freedom, was sitting here — it is the end of the route The days of freedom.³

It was this façade of a parliament that took in the first women. In the 1934 election, according to the Assembly of the Republic, the only women who could vote were those with a special, secondary or higher education; for men it was enough, as a rule, to be able to read and write.³¹² In January 1935 the first three women deputies took their seats here — Domitila de Carvalho, Maria Cândida Parreira and Maria Guardiola, all of them university graduates; the regime’s women deputies sat mainly on the committees for labour, welfare and education, matters thought to be “more closely linked to women’s interests”.¹³ In 1946, the deputy Maria Luísa van Zeller supported the vote for married women, but without “absolute equality” with men, which would run counter to “the spirit of the policy of women’s return to the home”.¹⁴

For the regime, a woman’s place was the home. In 1936 it gave statutes to the Mothers’ Work for National Education, to “guide Portuguese mothers” in bringing up their children and to “defend good morals, namely as regards dress, reading and entertainment”.¹⁵ It spread the role the Estado Novo assigned to women: mothers devoted to the family and to housework, wives obedient to their husbands, the “head” of the family.¹⁶

Maria Lamas, who edited Modas e Bordados (Fashions and Embroidery), the supplement of O Século (The Century), had another idea of womanhood. In 1947, as president of the National Council of Portuguese Women, she organised an exhibition of books written by women from thirty countries; the regime did not like it, and she was forced to choose between the magazine and the Council. She chose the Council, which the police closed down in June.¹⁷¹⁸ In 1952 the Portuguese Women’s Association for Peace, which Lamas had also chaired, was dissolved.¹⁹²⁰

After the Council was closed, Maria Lamas travelled the country for two years and published, in instalments, to get round the censors, As Mulheres do Meu País (The Women of My Country, 1948–1950): a great work of reportage on the life and work of peasant women, women of the sea, factory workers, domésticas and employees.²¹

From 1931 to 1971, the Diário da Manhã (Morning Daily) was produced here. Its first editorial called it a “republican newspaper”, but it was the semi-official organ and indoctrination vehicle of the National Union, the single party, and it gradually became a newspaper devoted to the cult of Salazar.²² The regime was “anti-party, anti-liberal and anti-parliamentary”: opposition parties were outlawed, and only the National Union put up candidates.³

Until 1945 there was never another list. In the 1942 elections, for example, ballot papers reached people’s homes by post or were delivered by the police and by the National Union itself, polling stations were open from 09:00 to 14:00, and voters could only cross names out, without replacing them; fraud served above all to inflate the number of voters.²³ Opposite stood República, the opposition newspaper; and, from 1969, further up the same street, at no. 125, the censorship office, which cut with its “blue pencil” what the newspapers could say — the story is told in the route The machinery of repression.²⁴²⁵

Under Marcelo Caetano, the National Union was renamed National Popular Action, and in 1971 the Diário da Manhã gave way to Época (Epoch).³²² On 26 April 1974, the people wrecked the headquarters of Época, of National Popular Action and of the censorship office.²⁶ Since 2001 this building has been the headquarters of the 25 April Association, which brings together the great majority of the military who made the revolution.²⁷

When he replaced Salazar, in September 1968, Marcelo Caetano — who in the 1940s had been national commissioner of the Portuguese Youth (Mocidade Portuguesa) — brought a “timid opening”.²⁸²⁹ Some changes touched women’s lives: in 1968, the law began to require the same of men and women in order to vote — being able to read and write, at a time when, in the early 1970s, one woman in three could not; in 1969, married women no longer needed their husband’s authorisation to have a passport, and women primary teachers no longer needed the minister’s permission to marry; in 1970, Maria Teresa Cárcomo Lobo became the first woman in a government.^3031323334

Other things only changed their name: the PIDE became the DGS, the National Union became National Popular Action, and censorship became “Prior Examination” — Caetano kept it, citing the colonial war.³⁵³³⁶ For the Assembly of the Republic, the attempts at change in the 1969 elections “exposed the rigidity of the regime and its inability to open up and renew itself”.³

It was here, in the GNR barracks, that Caetano took refuge in the early hours of 25 April 1974. Late in the afternoon, surrounded by Salgueiro Maia’s column and by thousands of people, he handed power to General Spínola — “so that power does not fall into the street” (assim o poder não cai na rua).³⁷³⁸ The regime ended in the same barracks where, in June 1926, censorship had been set up.²⁵ The whole day is told in the route The first day.

From 1936, boys and girls were regimented by the Portuguese Youth (Mocidade Portuguesa), which had its headquarters in this palace until 1974.³⁹⁴⁰ In primary school, enrolment was compulsory and was entered in the pupil’s school record book.⁴¹ There was physical exercise in a militaristic spirit, and discipline and respect for hierarchy were learned.¹⁶ In 1938, for the tenth anniversary of Salazar’s arrival at the Ministry of Finance, seven panels were made that served as propaganda in schools. A poster from that year, “A lição de Salazar” (Salazar’s Lesson), designed by Martins Barata, summed up the programme: “God, Fatherland, Family — the trilogy of national education” (Deus, Pátria, Família — a trilogia da educação nacional).⁴⁴²

Girls had their own organisation, the Women’s Portuguese Youth (Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina), which came under the Mothers’ Work and sought to form a “new woman” through “moral, civic, physical and social education”; its members gave the Roman salute. In 1940 it covered 93% of the girls in secondary schools (liceus) and technical schools, but only 5.2% of those in primary school. From 1938 to 1968 its national commissioner was Maria Guardiola, headmistress of the Liceu Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho and a deputy; Maria Luísa van Zeller was assistant commissioner. The commissariat was on Praça Marquês de Pombal.²⁸

The Church gave its blessing: on 13 May 1939, at Fátima, the Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon, Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira — a former professor at Coimbra, like Salazar — blessed the flags of the Women’s Portuguese Youth.²⁸⁴³⁵ The following year, the Concordat with the Holy See took away the right to divorce from those who married in church.⁴⁴ On 25 April 1974 itself, Decree-Law No. 171/74 abolished both youth organisations, and the palace was occupied, at the insistence of the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), by the Association of the Disabled of the Armed Forces.³⁹⁴⁰

On the same day in September 1933, the Government published the National Labour Statute and the laws on the employers’ guilds (grémios), the national syndicates and the Casas do Povo (People’s Houses).⁴⁵ “The Portuguese State is a unitary and corporative republic”, said the Statute: property, capital and labour were to cooperate, and strikes and lockouts became punishable.⁴⁵ Trade unions became “national”: only one per profession, with statutes that repudiated “class struggle” and leaderships that the Government had to ratify.⁴⁶ The workers’ answer was the general strike of 18 January 1934.⁴⁷

For leisure time, the regime created in 1935 the National Foundation for Joy at Work (FNAT), which was to “strengthen, educate and entertain the body and spirit of those who work”; its beneficiaries had to be members of a national syndicate, a Casa do Povo or a Casa de Pescadores (Fishermen’s House).⁴⁸⁴⁹ In 1946 the FNAT set up its headquarters here, in the former Palácio Camarido; it organised excursions, holiday camps, sport and shows.⁵⁰⁴⁹ Another poster from “A lição de Salazar” (Salazar’s Lesson), also from 1938, promised: “with the Corporative Estado Novo begins an era of dignity for labour and of social justice” (com o Estado Novo Corporativo inicia-se uma era de dignificação de trabalho e de justiça social).⁵¹

The Statute also said where women belonged: their work outside the home, and that of minors, would be regulated “according to the demands of morality, physical protection, motherhood, domestic life, education and the social good”.⁴⁵ After 25 April, the FNAT stadium was renamed Estádio 1.º de Maio (May Day Stadium), strikes became a right once more and, in 1975, the FNAT gave way to INATEL, today the INATEL Foundation, which still has its headquarters in this palace.^38524950

In 1938, a decree that reorganised the Lisbon Civil Hospitals, to which this hospital belonged, ordered that nursing and domestic service posts held by women should be filled only by “single women and widows, without children, who shall be replaced as soon as these conditions cease to be met”: a nurse who married lost her post.⁵³ So began the nurses’ 25 years of struggle.⁵⁴ In the National Assembly, the deputy Maria Luísa van Zeller argued in 1947 that nursing should be entrusted to women — “No one knows as well as a woman how to bend delicately over pain” — and a deputy later recounted that some nurses married and, so as not to be dismissed, did not record their new status on their identity cards.⁵⁵

The ban only fell in March 1963, and even then the decree recalled that a married woman’s place was the home, “where the noblest mission is reserved for her”.⁵⁶ Women primary teachers went through something similar: from 1936, they could only marry with the authorisation of the Minister of National Education, granted if the bridegroom had “good moral and civil conduct” and an income “in keeping with the teacher’s salary”. The requirement only ended in December 1969, with a decree of Marcelo Caetano’s that called it a “bureaucratic formality”.⁴¹³³

And the 1966 Civil Code still said: “The husband is the head of the family, and it falls to him in that capacity to represent it and to decide on all acts of common married life.” Outside the liberal professions and the civil service, if he had not given his consent, a husband could end his wife’s employment contract at any time.⁵⁷¹² The “head of the family” only disappeared with the 1976 Constitution and the 1977 revision of the Civil Code.⁵⁸

In 1933 the regime created the National Propaganda Secretariat in order, among other things, “to combat by every means within its reach the penetration into our Country of any ideas that disturb and dissolve national unity and interest”.⁵⁹ It was headed by the journalist António Ferro, who remained in charge of propaganda until 1949 and called his programme the “Policy of the Spirit” (Política do Espírito): re-educating the Portuguese according to the official ideology, with posters, radio, cinema, exhibitions and prizes, combining a modern language with the regime’s conservatism and ruralism.⁶⁰ In 1940 the State bought this palace to house it;⁶¹ in 1944 the National Information Secretariat, which succeeded it, brought propaganda, tourism, the press and censorship together in the same hands.⁶²

Propaganda also spoke to women. A National Information Secretariat poster, from 1945 or 1946, said: “Portuguese woman, thanks to the Estado Novo you have the stability of the family, religious freedom…: you owe it to Salazar” (Mulher portuguesa, graças ao Estado Novo tens a estabilidade da família, a liberdade religiosa…: a Salazar o deves) — and urged: “mothers, wives, brides-to-be of Portugal, vote for Salazar” (mães, espôsas, noivas de Portugal votai por Salazar).⁶³

On 28 May 1974, the 48th anniversary of the 1926 coup, around a hundred artists entered the courtyard of this palace and covered the statue of Salazar that stood there with a black cloth and a green and red banner. They wanted it put away in a museum: “Fascist art is bad for the eyes” (A arte fascista faz mal à vista), said the painter Vespeira.⁶⁴