Cultural Organizations, Networks and Mediators

12 The International Dimension of the Portuguese “Politics of the Spirit” Antnio Ferro, Jlio Dantas, Fidelino de Figueiredo Ângela Fernandes When considering the Portuguese public panorama in the first half of the twentieth century, we should note the close connection between political evolution towards dictatorship and the growing process of institutionalization of cultural and artistic phenomena. In this process, the presence of Antnio Ferro (Lisbon 1895–1956) is absolutely prominent. As a literary author and a public intellectual, Ferro was a leading figure, and his writings help us understand both the international connections and the national focus of the Portuguese state policy concerning the promotion of the arts, namely in the 1930s. 1 In the newspaper article “Política do espírito” [“Politics of the spirit”], published on November 21st, 1932, Antnio Ferro borrowed Paul Valéry’s title and coined the expression and the key concept underlying what he considered the necessary future political and cultural intervention in Portugal, and soon the motto “politics of the spirit” became the heading of the state program to promote the arts. Indeed, a few months later, Ferro was invited to be the director of the SPN—Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional (the Office for National Propaganda), officially inaugurated in October 1933, and all initiatives promoted during the 30s and the 40s under his leadership were meant to be part of a comprehensive “politics of the spirit” aimed at the support and the enhancement of Portuguese culture. In order to map the international dimension of the Portuguese “politics of the spirit” and also the international (namely European) connections of the Portuguese intellectuals of the time, we shall analyze not only Antonio Ferro’s most relevant writings on this topic but also the testimo- nies of other protagonists of the Portuguese intellectual scenario. Among others, we should mention Jlio Dantas (1876–1962), who was the Por- tuguese representative in the League of Nation’s International Committee on Intellectual Co-operation between 1933 and 1943 and delivered a speech on the “Política Internacional do Espírito” [“International Politics of the Spirit”] at the meeting in Paris, on October 16th–18th, 1933, and also Fidelino de Figueiredo (1888–1967), who participated in the 14th International PEN Conference in Buenos Aires, on September 5th–15th, Portuguese “Politics of the Spirit” 233 1936, as the official Portuguese delegate, as well as in the seventh meeting of the League of Nation’s International Committee on Intellectual Co-operation, also in Buenos Aires on September 11–16th, 1936. In a general sense, in all their writings, we may grasp the tensions between the Portuguese nationally focused politics of the regime and the international background where the avant-garde intellectual and conceptual frame had emerged. We shall analyze the way international references and examples are incorporated in these texts and how the ideas of international culture and relationships function in the arguments developed by these authors. Antnio Ferro’s 1935 statements concerning his own literary life may be read as a key to understanding the changes undergone in the Portu- guese public atmosphere in the 1920s and 1930s. In the speech delivered on February 21st, 1935, in Lisbon, during the award-giving ceremony of the first literary prizes of the SPN, in the presence of the head of govern- ment, Antnio de Oliveira Salazar, Ferro explains in detail his concept of “politics of the spirit”, stressing what it is and what it is not, and eventually recalls his own personal experience. In an explicit answer to those who may reproach some incoherence in his intellectual trajectory, Ferro alludes to his literary avant-garde experiments in the early 1920s. We may easily understand that, since some of those avant-garde works were then found shocking and even outrageous,2 they might now be associ- ated with the artworks that, according to Ferro, “blemish” the spirit and must thus be repudiated by the “politics of the spirit”. The image of the “combat”, which had already appeared in the speech Ferro delivered at the inauguration of the SPN,3 is extremely vivid in this 1935 address, the target of this “war” being artistic “evil” ( Ferro 1935 : 11). But the point is that Ferro’s former literary works might be included in this “evil”; there- fore, he considers those old experiments as “dead stones from former times” and makes a plea for the artist’s “right to evolve”. He claims: “that was me, but it is no longer me!” (idem , 17) and adds that nonetheless he still feels himself in the avant-garde, but in a new sense; following Jacques Maritain, Ferro asserts that he is now following an “anti-modern avant- garde, against the mistakes of present time, and ultra-modern avant-garde heading to all the truths of the future” (idem : 17–18).4 Antnio Ferro’s words are very relevant as our starting point because, first, they show how the institutionalization of cultural policies in Portu- gal is linked to Modernism and to the avant-garde artistic dynamics and how, in an important way, it results from the international connections developed by many of its participants. On the other hand, these words also show the acknowledged change, in terms of art forms and contents or themes, undergone alongside the consolidation of the “Estado Novo” dictatorship: in the 1930s, artistic experiments and international connections are no longer guided by radical openness and freedom, but rather aim to be in line with the dominant nationalist political outlook, “fight- ing” against moral (and ideological) deviances. All those who did not 234 Ângela Fernandes understand this new political and artistic stance could not be part of the “ultra-modern avant-garde” promoted in the Portuguese “politics of the spirit”, in Ferro’s phrasing. These two main lines will organize this chapter. First, we will consider Antnio Ferro’s example in the panorama of the international connections of the Portuguese avant-garde and the international models of the “politics of the spirit”, along with the need to justify this path with foreign examples. Then, we will analyze how the official “politics of the spirit” built itself as a defense of “healthy” and ordered art ( Ferro 1935 : 10), stemming from and reinforcing an idea of “national” culture that repeatedly prevailed in both public and academic discourses and that we may also find in rather different authors, such as Jlio Dantas and Fidelino de Figueiredo. 1. Antnio Ferro, Avant-Garde and International Connections During the 1930s the Portuguese authoritarian regime consolidated its system of cultural and artistic guidance by means of the previously men- tioned SPN, a state organism created in September 1933.5 The date is very noteworthy in the history of Portugal since in this same year a new con- stitution granted the legal grounds to the “National Dictatorship” that had been established by the coup d’état of May 28th, 1926. Antnio de Oliveira Salazar had become the head of the Council of Ministers in July 1932, and in November he granted several interviews to Antnio Ferro, by then a well-known journalist and opinion-maker. These interviews, which were published as a book in 1933 under the title Salazar, o Homem e a Sua Obra [Salazar, the Man and His Work] and translated into several European languages in the subsequent years, constitute the clear- est element of Ferro’s direct contribution to consolidating the image of the Portuguese dictatorship on both internal and international grounds.6 Moreover, the interviews with Salazar in 1932 are Ferro’s definite turning point to plunge into national political affairs after several years dedicated to the international panorama. We may argue that Ferro’s willingness to intervene in national life in a “more rational way” ( Acciaiuoli 2013 : 78) grew precisely from his vivid international experiences and from all he thus learned concerning the new relationship, in the early 20th century, between art, rhetoric, public affairs and politics. We should recall Antnio Ferro had been close to the Portuguese artistic avant-garde movements since Orpheu (1915). He was the “editor” of this emblematic journal, which gathered remarkable collaborators, such as Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro and José de Almada Negreiros. However, it seems he was chosen as editor mostly because, as a minor, he would be “not answerable” by the law, if any problems might arrive due to the ground-breaking stance of the journal ( Barreto 2011 : 136); Ferro was close to the Orpheu group, but not exactly in the group. Portuguese “Politics of the Spirit” 235 Nevertheless, he represented the worldly taste of some Portuguese modernism, eager to get closer to contemporary international institutions and public personalities. Following this line, after 1919, Ferro became above all a journalist and, at Diário de Notícias, “he made a name for himself mainly as an international reporter, and only left to become Salazar’s head of propaganda in 1933” ( Barreto 2011 : 144). During his journeys in Europe and America during the 1920s, Ferro interviewed politicians, industrialists, artists and intellectuals such as D’Annunzio, Mussolini, Hitler, Pétain and Primo de Rivera, as well as André Citroën, Jean Cocteau, Douglas Fairbanks, José Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno, among many, many others. These international interviews and reportages were published in Portuguese newspapers and eventually collected in different volumes that came out between 1927 and 1933: Viagem à Volta das Ditaduras [Travel around the Dictator- ships], 1927 ; Praça da Concrdia [Concord Square], 1929 ; Novo Mundo, Mundo Novo [The New Word, A New World], 1930 ; Hollywood, Capi- tal das Imagens [Hollywood, Capital of Images], 1931 and Prefácio da Repblica Espanhola [Preface to the Spanish Republic], 1933 .

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