“EVERYTHING WAS POSSIBLE”: EMOTIONS AND PERCEPTIONS OF THE PAST AMONG FORMER PORTUGUESE ANTIFASCIST ACTIVISTS

Guya Accornero

doi:10.17813/1086-671x-24-4-439

Abstract

In this article, I analyze how former activists opposed to Estado Novo, Portugal's fascist regime, see their past, as well as the emotions and perceptions associated with it. I argue that what Antonio Costa Pinto called a “double legacy” shapes these activists' process of remembering. This means that the legacies of dictatorship in Portugal's consolidated democracy are strongly shaped by how it ended and by how democracy was implemented in the country—that is, through a revolution and a radical “cut with the past.” I use semistructured interviews and open questionnaires to study how former activists are affected by and contribute to building this double legacy. By adopting an interactionist perspective and by bridging the scholarship on transition and oral history, this research aims to strengthen the dialogue between social movement and memory studies, and also stresses the relevance of the co-construction of individual and collective memory.

Highlights

The Estado Novo was institutionalized in 1933 by António de Oliveira Salazar, along the lines of European fascism
In 1968, António Salazar was succeeded by Marcelo Caetano, who embarked on a period of opening known as the ‘Marcelist spring’
On 25th April 1974, the Estado Novo was overthrown in a peaceful military coup led by the Armed Forces Movements (Movimento das Forças Armadas, MFA)

Summary

When we emerge from night and silence

The Estado Novo was institutionalized in 1933 by António de Oliveira Salazar, along the lines of European fascism. The strength of this debate and of the questions it poses for research motivated scholars such as Gary Alan Fine and Aaron Beim to ask: “Can the creation of collective memory be separated from the actions of social actors in their negotiations of meaning?” (Fine 2007: 1) This is similar to what happens in many other social science fields in respect to the classical distinction between agency and structure, as is, for instance, the case of the debate between political process model and interactionist approaches in social movement studies (see Goodwin and Jasper 2004). The recognition that history results from agency, even while it is based on an obdurate reality, demonstrates that the field of social memory studies is ripe for rigorous symbolic interactionist analysis” (Fein and Beim 2007: 1)

Oral history bridging memory and social movement studies

The experience of prison

The experience of the revolution

Findings

Memory and legacies of a successful fight