History in Times of Fascism
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History in Times of Fascism Discipline and Practices of History during the Beginning of the Portuguese New State. Masters Thesis Research Masters in History: Political Culture and National Identities Supervised by: Prof. dr. H.J. Paul António Renato Castelo Branco da Silva Rêgo – s1102990 [email protected] Leiden, July the 12 th , 2015 1 Table of Contents Introduction 3 Conceptual Framework 6 Literature Review 11 Source Material 17 An Overview 19 Chapter I: Performance and the ideal of the Historian 23 A Commitment to Knowledge 25 Science 25 Documents and Documentalism 30 Objectivity 39 A Commitment to the Nation 45 A Commitment to Unity 55 Chapter II: the Final Product 68 Realism 71 Metonymy and Synecdoche 83 Irony 96 A conservative realism 105 Anti-Realism 113 Metaphor 116 Romance 121 Conclusion 133 Annexes 140 List of Images 146 Bibliography 150 2 Introduction "In the pages that follow shall be written the history of a great People, of a great Nation: candidly — the History of Portugal!" 1 So ends the preface of the History of Portugal, Monumental Edition, commemorative of the 8th centennial of the foundation of the nationality , commonly called the Portuguese History of Barcelos. This was, perhaps, the most emblematic work of historical scholarship of the early New State. Without a shadow of a doubt, if ever there was a piece of writing that represents historical scholarship at the highest level produced in the context of a fascist dictatorship, this was it. And that is precisely what this thesis will focus on: how scholars conducted their academic activities and production within and throughout fascism. The history presented in this thesis takes place during the beginning of the New State in Portugal. This was the Regime that crystallised out of the military dictatorship of 1926, which in turn was an answer to the collapse of the First Republic (1910-1926). As Alfredo Pimenta, one of the historians we will be looking into, wrote in 1925, "the Republic is dead. There is a need to remove it, without delay. Without men and without parties, she cannot even play the poor role it has played." 2 One year later, the so called National Revolution of May 28th would do just that. It would be in the following seven years that the Regime would shift from a military dictatorship into a proper authoritarian State. Rising to prominence from the ranks of the University of Coimbra, António de Oliveira Salazar became the military dictatorship's Minister of Finances in 1928. Previously, he taught Political Economy and Finances in Coimbra, where he became a doctor in law in the year of 1918. A staunch catholic and sober to the point of almost becoming a caricature for asceticism, he would eventually become the president of the council of ministers in the new conjuncture of the constitution of 1933, after which he would rule in what was characterized as the professorial stance of "cathedratic fascism" by Miguel 1 All the passages in Portuguese in the main body of text are translated to English by the author of this thesis; Damião Peres (ed.), Eleutério Cerdeira (art ed.), História de Portugal, Edição Monumental Comemorativa do 8º Centenário da Fundação da Nacionalidade , Vol.1 (Barcelos: Portucalense Editora, 1928), 12. 2 Alfredo Pimenta, Nas Vésperas do Estado Novo (Lisboa: Nova Arrancada, 1998), 11. 3 de Unamuno 3. It is the constitution of 1933 that marks the end of the military dictatorship and the beginning of Salazar's New State, a nationalist, corporatist, authoritarian, anti-parliamentarian and anti-partisan Regime 4. Yet, the title of this thesis refers specifically to fascism, a label not used in the previous description. The question of whether or not the Regime was fascist has elicited a number of debates in Portugal, in the recent decades. It could be argued that the Regime was corporatist-conservative, a category which, historically, has been used precisely to describe those authoritarian governments which, being on good terms with fascist nations, suppressed fascism at home 5. On the one hand, the national-syndicalists, a group which could be associated more closely with fascist groups in their earlier stages (using Robert Paxton's terminology 6) were indeed dissociated from the New State 7. On top of that, the Regime claimed to aim to rein in precisely that totalitarianism which is often associated with fascism. There is even a sense in which the discourse of the New State was anti-totalitarian 8. On the other hand, the institutions created for the Regime to function, such as the National Union (1930) — the only legal party —, the National Secretariat of Propaganda (SPN — 1934), the Portuguese Legion (1936) or the Portuguese Youth (1936), organizations aimed at the defence and moral formation of the Nation, exude precisely the kind of fascist characteristics which can be found in later stage fascist States. Indeed, Luis Reis Torgal characterizes it as "Portuguese style fascism" 9. Without wanting to take a rigid position on this debate, what can be argued for the purpose of this thesis is that, referring to how the new Regime was seen by the scholars being studied, it was associated with virtues, habits and language which can also be seen in other (less disputably) fascist States. In fact, João Ameal, an organic intellectual of the Regime who also wrote several historiographic works (though this is usually 3 Jorge Pais de Sousa, "O Estado Novo de Salazar como um Fascismo de Cátedra: Fundamentação histórica de uma categoria política," Storicamente 5 (2009). http://www.storicamente.org/05_studi_ricerche/estado-novo-como-fascismo-de-catedra.htm. 4 Fernando Rosas (ed.), O Estado Novo (Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 1998), 179-183. 5 Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 43-47. 6 Robert Paxton, "The Five Stages of Fascism," The Journal of Modern History , Vol. 70, No. 1. (1998), 1- 23. 7 Luis Reis Torgal, Estados Novos, Estado Novo: Ensaios de História Política e Cultural , Vol. 1 (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2009), 313-329. 8 Torgal, Estados Novos , Vol. 1, 254-264. 9 Torgal, Estados Novos , Vol. 1, 364-367. 4 characterized as poor history, or not history at all, in the sense that it is severely ideologically compromised), wrote profusely about the Portuguese "New Generation", the Portuguese New State and also Italian fascism, translating the Fascist Decalogue, the Decalogue of the fascist militia-man and also authoring the Decalogue of the New State (1934), strongly inspired by Italian doctrine10 . But João Ameal, whose historical work we will look into later on, was not a University-bound historian. Though he wrote history, and belonged to the Portuguese Academy of History, he was not, stricto sensu , an academic. The same cannot be said, for example, about Eusébio Tamagnini, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Coimbra and notorious for quoting Hitler in the inaugural lesson of 1934-1935 11 . Indeed, there is a remarkable lack of resistance in the University facing the New State, and we could say that State and University will coincide in thought and action, generally speaking, for the duration of the period here analysed 12 . Thus, it makes sense to claim that the historiography under study in this thesis, while not necessarily written under a fascist Regime, depending on one's position on this debate, is undeniably History written in the context of fascism — in times of fascism. In addition, this loose definition of fascism that we are using, playing on comparison against liberalism, rather than being based on a positive definition (as can be seen in the works of Stanley Payne or Michael Mann, for example13 ) also goes hand in hand with loose temporal boundaries. While this history can be said to be set between 1926 and 1945, we will mostly be focusing on particular tokens of production, on the one hand, and on one particular organization (the Portuguese Academy of History, APH), on the other. The dates of publication of the tokens of production range from 1927 to 1943, while the temporal scope of the documents pertaining to the organization spans from 1936 to 1948. Thus we will be illustrating practices of research and explanation within this temporal scope, but never exhausting it, not even pretending to aim at such an enterprise. In the current state of research, that would be impossible in a small work like a Master's Thesis. 10 Torgal, Estados Novos , Vol. 1, 112. 11 Luis Reis Torgal, "A Universidade entre a Tradição e a Modernidade," Revista Intellectus , ano 07, Vol. I (2008), 9. 12 Luís Reis Torgal, A Universidade e o Estado Novo: O caso de Coimbra , 1926-1961 (Coimbra: Minerva, 1999), 88-95. 13 Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, (1914-1945) (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Mann, Fascists . 5 Conceptual Framework One of the most prominent aspects of this thesis is that it is strongly methodologically oriented. There is a clear aim to apply and intertwine a concept and a set of heuristic tools: personae and tropology, respectively. Personae or, as we will be using them, in the fashion of Herman Paul, scholarly personae , are fairly recent as an analytical tool. They roughly date back to 2003, when Otto Sibum and Lorraine Daston wrote the text "Introduction: Scientific Personae and their Histories" 14 , but perhaps the most important application of this notion so far has been in Lorraine Daston's and Peter Galison's Objectivity , a book that associated particular virtuous forms of sight — how to look well at a scientific object — with ways of being scholarly, that is, role identities such as the sage, the worker or the expert — personae 15 .