António de Oliveira Salazar

Dictator of Portugal (1932-1968)

• Born: April 28, 1889
• Birthplace: Vimieiro, Beira Alta province, Portugal
• Died: July 27, 1970
• Place of death: Lisbon, Portugal

Prime minister and virtual dictator of Portugal during the calamitous middle decades of the twentieth century, Salazar was the most important leader of Portugal since the Marquis de Pombal. He restored economic order in the 1930’s and kept the country out of World War II, but he was severely criticized for his authoritarian and repressive regime and for brutally clinging to Portugal’s overseas colonies.

Early Life

António de Oliveira Salazar (ahn-TOH-nee-oh day oh-lee-VAYR-ah SAL-ah-zahr) was born in the hamlet of Vimieiro in Portugal’s wine country. His father, António de Oliveira, and his mother, Maria do Resgate Salazar, were middle-aged, had four daughters, and were of moderate means. They were a pious family and sent young Salazar to Roman Catholic schools, where he considered a priestly vocation. He was an outstanding student and in 1910 went to Coimbra University to study law and economics. In 1914 he obtained a licentiate of law with an outstanding 19 marks out of 20. In 1917 he became a lecturer in Coimbra’s Department of Economics, soon publishing three major studies on the gold standard, wheat production, and the commodity crisis. He was awarded a doctorate in May, 1918.

By dint of his academic excellence and the speeches he gave on Portugal’s tumultuous political situation, Salazar was recognized, in the words of one newspaper as “one of the most powerful minds of the new generation.” Salazar’s abstemious, reclusive bachelor existence, which he would maintain his entire life, enhanced his prestige in academic and political circles.

Life’s Work

In 1926, a triumvirate of military officers overthrew Portugal’s chaotic First Republic and appointed Salazar as minister of finance. With the military junta unable to restore stability to Portugal, Salazar soon quit the government. A new president reappointed Salazar in 1928, granting him complete powers to reorganize the economy. Salazar exercised a veto on government spending and within a couple of years had reduced the national debt, achieved a budget surplus, and returned Portugal to the gold standard. Espousing the principles of corporatism as the remedy for Portugal’s ills, he was hailed as “the saviour of the nation.”

The unprecedented nature of Salazar’s successes led to the establishment in 1930 of the União Nacional (National Union), a grouping of ministers and intellectuals, to support his efforts. Soon thereafter, Salazar enacted the Colonial Act of 1930 to integrate Portugal’s overseas provinces with Portugal itself. On July 5, 1932, he was appointed prime minister, the office he would hold until 1968. On March 19, 1933, his corporatist constitution was passed by a national plebiscite, giving him dictatorial powers and launching the Estado Novo (New State).

Although sometimes linked to Mussolini’s fascism, Salazar claimed to base the corporatist principles of his Estado Novo on Catholic social teaching and, in particular, on Pope Pius XI’s major social encyclical of 1931, Quadragesimo Anno. Pius had proposed the doctrine of subsidiarity which emphasizes organic, smaller groupings as a solution to labor and social strife. The most important of the subsidiary social units, as Salazar derived from Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, was the family. The unity of Salazar’s Estado Novo therefore was not to be based on discordant classes, parties, or legislative assemblies, but on cooperative institutes of employers and laborers and on the family.

Advocating an authoritarian state, Salazar abolished all other political parties, which he accused of endless wrangling. Likewise, most of the powers of Portugal’s national assembly were vested in the executive branch and concentrated in the prime minister, who would head a ten-member council of state. Salazar’s constitution allowed for freedom of speech, but speech that did not “pervert” public opinion. He established Portugal’s secret police force, PIDE (Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado), and enacted the Code of National Labor, which prohibited trade unions. Finally, Salazar repealed the anti-Catholic legislation that marked Portugal’s ill-fated First Republic, although he refused to reestablish Catholicism as a state religion.

Salazar’s new state had hardly begun to take shape, however, when he was confronted with the great calamities overtaking Europe. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Salazar supported Francisco Franco’s nationalist forces. At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Salazar attempted both to maintain neutrality and honor Portugal’s historic alliance with the United Kingdom. Perhaps Salazar’s major contribution to the Allied cause was to bolster Franco in resisting Adolf Hitler’s pressure for Spain to join the Axis powers, an effort marked by signing the Friendship Treaty with Spain in 1939 and 1940. In 1943, after much negotiation, Portugal granted England but not the United States military use of the strategic islands of the Azores. Nevertheless Portugal emerged from World War II under suspicion because of its fascist associations. Although Portugal was a charter member of the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, it was not permitted to join the United Nations until 1955.

Salazar was criticized both for his authoritarian, single-party government and for his insistence that Portugal’s long-held territories in Goa, Angola, and Mozambique were not colonies but provinces of Portugal, on the same political plane as the European mainland. This argument was rejected by the United Nations General Assembly, which supported decolonization, and seemingly by the territories themselves. In 1961, India invaded Goa, annexing it shortly thereafter. In the same year, violent rebellions erupted in Angola, soon spreading to Mozambique. Salazar responded by mobilizing troops to suppress the rebellions. After a decade and a half of violence, Angola and Mozambique achieved independence in the 1974 Carnation Revolution, which transformed Portugal first from a dictatorship to a communist state and then, two years later, to a democracy.

Portugal’s colonial wars increased opposition to Salazar’s regime at home, which Salazar met with greater repression. Portugal’s secret police brutalized opponents of the government, and thousands of dissidents were imprisoned. In 1965, General Humberto Delgado, the most persistent opponent of the regime, was found murdered under mysterious circumstances. The Catholic Church, emerging from the modernizing influences of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), became openly critical of the Portuguese dictatorship. Portugal’s early membership in the European Free Trade Association and rapid economic growth did not quiet critics of Salazar’s regime.

On September 6, 1968, Salazar became incapacitated after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. His position as prime minister was assumed by Marcello Caetano. Salazar died two years later, on July 27, 1970. His Estado Novo would be completely dismantled during Portugal’s Carnation Revolution in 1974.

Significance

Salazar was one of the most paradoxical dictators of the twentieth century. He rose to power not by force but by intellectual prowess, which military leaders correctly believed could be put to service to cure Portugal’s chaotic economy and society. Possessing near absolute power for almost forty years, Salazar refused public attention, leading an austere, reserved existence.

Salazar’s dictatorship had many benevolent aspects. He was more influenced by the political philosophy of corporatism, which he believed combined integralist and Catholic principles, than he was by fascism. Taming Portugal’s chronic debt in the 1930’s, he achieved a good measure of prosperity in the 1950’s and 1960’s largely from tourism and natural resources. His regime eschewed the death penalty and although the PIDE repressed dissent, Portugal was not a police state. Salazar kept Portugal neutral during World War II, which allowed it to serve as an asylum for thousands of war refugees.

However, Salazar would increasingly resemble a leader out-of-time. Clinging to a vain dream of Portugal as a multicontinental, multiracial, multiterritorial nation, Salazar resisted decolonization of Angola and Mozambique, which suffered decades of violence in the wake of his resistance. The international community, including Catholic leaders, became increasingly critical of Portugal’s disdain of democracy, and Salazar’s Estado Novo was rapidly repudiated following his death.

Bibliography

Birmingham, David. A Concise History of Portugal. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Summary of Portuguese history finds Salazar a mediocre leader, sustaining power by juggling the interests of Portugal’s elites.

Bruce, Neil. Portugal: The Last Empire. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975. Although dated, this work nonetheless provides a good assessment of Salazar’s foreign colonial policy and its bloody aftermath.

Kay, Hugh. Salazar and Modern Portugal. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1970. Situates Salazar in the larger context of twentieth century Portuguese history, suggesting his inability to adapt to modern circumstances. Includes detailed maps and a time line.

Lewis, Paul H. Latin Fascist Elites: The Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar Regimes. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002. A study of fascism and fascist states in southern Europe, particularly Portugal under Salazar, Spain under Francisco Franco, and Italy under Benito Mussolini.

Nogueira, Franco. The United Nations and Portugal: A Study of Anti-Colonialism. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1963. Written by Salazar’s long-time foreign minister. A defense of Portugal’s overseas territories, in response to the United Nations demand for their independence. Appendix includes important United Nations documents.

Pinto, António Costa. Salazar’s Dictatorship and European Fascism: Problems of Interpretation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Compares Salazar’s authoritarian and corporatist state with that of Austrian chancellor Englebert Dollfuss, both of whom were strongly influenced by Catholic revival.

Pitcher, Anne. Politics in the Portuguese Empire: The State, Industry, and Cotton, 1926-1974. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1993. A study of Portugal’s textile industry under Salazar (and Caetano) as a case study in economic relations between Portuguese manufacturers and colonial Africans supplying raw cotton.

Salazar, António. Doctrine and Action: Internal and Foreign Policy of the New Portugal, 1928-1939. Translated by Robert Edgar Broughton. London: Faber & Faber, 1940. Collection of Salazar’s speeches on major topics of domestic and colonial policy, manifesting his corporatist philosophy.

Wiarda, Howard. Corporatism and Development: The Portuguese Experience. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977. A sympathetic analysis of the principles of corporatism, which, Wiarda argues, Salazar betrayed to accumulate political power.