The Rest Is History - 230. Portugal: Football, Fado, and Fascism?

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

In the final chapter of this series on the history of Portugal, Tom and Dominic explore Portugal in the 20th century, the two World Wars, the Miracle of Fatima and dictator Antonio Salazar. Join��The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. Or, if you're listening on the Apple Podcasts app, you can subscribe within the app in just a few clicks. hello welcome to the rest is history as in the background we hear the beautiful voice from malia rodriguez dominic a wonderful fardo singer and i know that you are a huge huge fan of fardo aren't you it is the voice of portugal's

regret for what had once been and um we uh we left portugal not in a good state uh lost brazil um very impoverished um and where are we in the 19th century what is it that gives rise to fardo um is there anything to hope for there's loads to hope for tom this is going to be an absolutely thrilling i mean you don't want to start on a downer do you this is going to be a thrilling podcast uh it's got music it's got football it's got fascism or or is it fascism well we will discuss that um it's got portuguese empire in the 20th century it's got world war ii so it's the podcast with everything. But as you say, we start in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. So our third podcast, we were talking about early modern Portugal, about the earthquake and about the Enlightenment

and so on. Portugal has, as you say, lost Brazil in the 1820s. It does still have an empire. 19th century Portugal has Angola, Mozambambique east timor and goa for example so it has how and macau so it has a few sort of enclaves interestingly the portuguese don't really claim that that is an empire they come to describe themselves as a pluricontinental nation that's an excellent way to disguise an empire isn't it yes it is yes so these places are not colonies they're actually parts of they're indivisible parts of Portugal. It's about 19th century Portugal. I mean, it's basically a complete backwater.

So rather like Spain, its history, its political history is to an outsider utterly bewildering and consists of endless coups and civil wars and arguments about constitutions and sort of feuding between liberals and conservatives. But that, in a way, is just the sort of surface stuff. And actually, beneath that, the picture is one of a very, very agricultural country that has not really embraced industrial modernity at all.

It still has these two cities, Lisbon and Oporto, with very little industry, very little manufacturing. A great fact that I read in 1910, only about a fifth of workplaces that the Portuguese themselves describe as manufacturers, as Belgium, in the Netherlands, of big factories employing thousands upon thousands of people. That gives you a sense of how far behind, as it were, Portugal is. And rather like with Spain, that sort of sense of stagnation is accompanied by an enormous political turbulence. So administrations coming and going, people, kings and queens being deposed. And it's in this period, I think, that you get the Portuguese, you really get this sort of sense that the Portuguese have been ill-served by history, the golden age is behind them, and that their defining characteristic to outsiders comes to be this kind of melancholy and

nostalgia. So that's saudade is that right that's saudade yes so for those people who i mean there's a great description by a british travel writer called aubrey bell um well he was a great hispanophile he wrote a book called in portugal in 1912 and he says the famous saudade of the portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future, not an active discontent or poignant sadness, but an indolent, dreaming wistfulness. And there's this sort of sense that the defining characteristic of the Portuguese comes to be a kind of melancholy and a nostalgia

and a kind of mourning for what had been what had been for husbands lost at sea for ancestors who vanished into the mists of time um it's this sort of yeah it's it's it's actually extremely enjoyable as an outsider you know it's romantic well it's it's Tolkien-esque isn't it it's actually extremely enjoyable as an outsider. You know, it's romantic. Well, it's Tolkien-esque, isn't it? It's very Tolkien-esque. It's the long defeat, all that kind of stuff that we were talking about last week. It's weird to be going back to Tolkien, but yeah, Tolkien, that thing about the elves mourning the passing of Middle-earth and all that. So that's all Sardar Day.

That's all Sardar Day. Yeah, the greatest Portuguese modern writer is the poet Fernando Pessoa. His poems are shot through with Saudade, with nostalgia and melancholy. And there's actually a statue of him in Lisbon, which sits outside a cafe in the Chiado district, so a very upmarket district.

There's the statue and he's sitting at a table. And the cafe is called A Brasileira, the Brazilian lady. And I always think that's very telling because, of course, Brazil is what has been lost. And Brazil is expanding and going from strength to strength. And the Portuguese are just sort of left to contemplate. So it's like us looking at America. A little bit, but we never have that with America, do we? I mean, Britain just simply doesn't have a sense of melancholy and nostalgia and mourning for America. I mean, most British people never think about the American War of Independence at all.

Yes, that's very true. Yes. So the Saudade, you played the Fado at the beginning, and I guess the Fado is the defining cultural expression of that melancholy. Yes, very famous for that, isn't it? So you're not really a fadoophile, are you, Tom? I have a terrible sense that you played it ironically at the beginning of this podcast.

No, not at all. Since we started doing this, I thought this is the way to get into a Portuguese frame of mind. So I've been doing nothing but play it. So I got very into it. So I've learned something that's good so you've you've you've enriched me culturally oh Tom that's a nice thing to hear that's I've educated you something you've educated me yes well yeah I haven't educated myself I've been educated by you that makes me feel great but that's what this podcast is all about isn't it it's it's a self me educating you yeah this is my revenge for um i was only listening today it sounds it's a

terrible thing to say that you've listened to your own podcast but i had to go to the dentist and i had to drag my son with me to the to when i went to the dentist and i left him in the car and i left him listening to to you talking about.R.R. Tolkien. And what he found particularly amusing was that you compared me to Sam Gamgee. And when I next spoke, I said Tom and you corrected me and said Mr. Tom to you. So the Fardo discussion. Much hilarity. Much hilarity. Much.

Great banter. Right. So Fardo music, it originates in Lisbon, in the port areas, people think. And it's all these ballads that are full of sort of nostalgia and stuff. The most famous fado singer of the 19th century was called Maria Severa. And she was the daughter of a prostitute and was a sort of prostitute herself. So you get this sort of sense of it being the music of the of the streets and the queen of fardo is amalia rodriguez and she is um the best-selling ever portuguese musical artist and she again comes from poverty

she supposedly sold fruit on the keys of lisbon and she always performs wrapped in this kind of black shawl so she looks old-fashioned you know she looks kind of nostalgic rocking that retro look rocking that retro look exactly so she is one of the faces of 20th century portugal um so people outside portugal if you who you would recognize i would say ultimately there are three people so there there is amalia amalia rodriguez if you're interested in music if you're interested in sport probably the figure eusebio the pearl, and we'll come back to him. But the biggest figure by far, and the person with whom actually Amalia Rodriguez's musical career comes to be entwined, is the man who decides that he is going to put an end to the sort of the bickering and the turbulence and the inconsequentiality of Portuguese politics.

And that is Antonio Salazar. So he's a pretty strange figure, Tom, isn't he? Well, you've described him to me as the Tolkien of Portugal, which considering that he's a highly reactionary dictator, isn't perhaps the most flattering reference to Tolkien. considering that he's a highly reactionary dictator. Isn't perhaps the most flattering reference to Tolkien. No, it's not. But, well, so we obviously recorded about,

we did our podcast about Tolkien last week, so Tolkien was much in my mind when I was reading about Salazar. They're born only a few years apart. Salazar was born in 1889. When was Tolkien born again? Mid-1890s wasn't it um uh salazar he comes from a sort of you know it's not a particularly rich family his father is the manager sort of agricultural manager for some rich landowners in the center of portugal in the viseo district um young antonio is very very clever so he studies at a seminary and he trains to become a priest,

but he doesn't go through with it. Like Tony Abbott. Tony Abbott. Yeah. So in fact, he's the Tony Abbott of Portugal. He's the Tony Abbott of Portugal. Those are three men who nobody, no other history podcast has ever put together.

Tolkien, Salazar, Tony Abbott. Tony Abbott, the prime minister of australia of course who featured in our yes prime ministers who ate an onion on the campaign trail didn't he that's right by he thought it was an apple and then just had to follow through with it pretend he liked it um but i'll tell you someone else who a friend of the show who he resembles is anastasius the um emperor who stabilizes the currency though he's not as bald as no he's not no salazar isn't bald but he is an accountant so i was thinking kind of yes famous accountants in history so he doesn't become a priest salazar he becomes an accountant that that rest is history

episode on the top 10 accountants we We're a fifth of the way. We've got two of them. So, yes, he goes to Coimbra, the university that has played a part throughout this whole series because it's the great university of Portugal. And he studies law and finance there. And he becomes an economics professor at Coimbra in his mid-20s. Now, this is at a time, Tom, the Portuguese, it sounds harsh to call, I mean, I don't know whether it's cancelable now to call a country backward, even if it's a country in the past, but Portugal

has been left behind by industrial modernity. Most Portuguese are still illiterate. And they're short, aren't they? Yeah, I mean, because of poverty. So they are ill-fed, they're ill-housed. So the Dutch are all huge and the Portuguese aren't. Well, exactly. So if they'd re'd refought those Dutch-Portuguese wars

that we're talking about, Portuguese would have been in very poor shape to take them on. Exactly. And Salazar in his youth, I mean, he is intensely conservative and he watches as Portugal goes through these sort of almost comical kind of ructions. So 1910, after all these decades of instability, there's a revolution that overthrows the monarchy.

You have the first Portuguese Republic. So it's happening in kind of parallel, I suppose, with what's happening in Spain, which is better known. And the first Portuguese Republic, I think I'm not being too harsh when I say it's an absolute and utter shambles. So in 16 years, they have eight presidents, they have 44 different cabinets,

they have 21 further coups or uprisings or revolutions of various kinds. So it's not, you know, it's basically, it makes Theresa May's Britain look like a... Yes, look like a model of stability. Paragon of stability. Massive inflation at the end of the First World War. The Portuguese had joined in the First World War

sort of halfway through on the Allied side. For the same reason it enters the Napoleonic Wars, that basically it's attached by commercial and sentimental ties to Britain. And so it kind of joins in. It absolutely makes sense for it to be supporting Britain and France because, I mean, obviously Britain and France are neighbours.

They're closer than Germany. But as you say, for commercial reasons, and because the Portuguese Empire basically depends on the goodwill of the British. Well, I'm ashamed to say I didn't even realise Portugal had entered the First World War. And I did not know, I'm reading that 8,000 competence, Portuguese competence die on the Western Front, which may not sound much. But to put that in context, if that was mapped onto the United States as it is now, that would be equivalent to 400,000 Americans dying. So quite brutal. So you've got that going on and you've got this kind of tension, presumably as in Spain, between liberals and devout Catholics.

Oh, absolutely. Huge tension between the Catholic Church. It's that classic pattern that you see in Spain and you see in Latin America, anti-clericals versus kind of clerical conservatives. And that presumably then is the backdrop for the most internationally famous thing that happens in Portugal during the First World War, which is the visions of Fatima, which is a village where a group of children who are working as shepherds, the Virgin appears to them. So first of all, it's announced by the Archangel Michael, and then the Virgin appears, and there are kind of increasing numbers of visitations. And then the Virgin announces that she's going to appear on the 13th of october so and did she 1917 so this is the backdrop you know the russian revolution is

the sense that great events are happening in the world well i so i'll read you an account that was written by a portuguese writer in 1952 that what happens so this huge crowd that they've been the virgin has told these children that she's going to appear on the 13th of october um huge crowds turn up it's not just devout catholics it's also lots of of anti-clerical kind of liberals who've come to have to have a sneer and supposedly what happens is that the clouds clear and the sun appears and it's kind of displaying this strange color and then the sun starts to behave very very oddly it began to revolve vertiginously on its axis like the most magnificent fire wheel that could be imagined taking on all the colors of the rainbow and sending forth multi-colored flashes of light producing the most astounding

effect this sublime and incomparable spectacle, which was repeated three distinct times, lasted for about 10 minutes. The immense multitude, overcome by the evidence of such a tremendous prodigy, threw themselves on their knees. And so there's a huge debate about what was going on. Is it a mass hallucination? And this definitely happened, Tom. Huge numbers in the crowds claim to have seen this right so and crowds are never wrong as we know yeah so it's of huge interest to psychologists and you know yeah mass delusions whatever or maybe it was because it's it's that phenomenon that makes the vision of the virgin at fatima so influential throughout the 20th century and there's this idea that you

know that there are three secrets and that John Paul II is supposed to have had one. You know, he was obsessed by Our Lady of Fatima. And this idea that- Who's got the others? Well, the Pope, the papacy has them, supposedly. Really? She revealed these three things were going to happen,

one of which was the Russian Revolution. And then the two other great events that were going to happen so lots of people also thought that that when the um in in the shadow of nuclear war that perhaps the third vision was of the third world war but i don't know i i'm slightly slightly winging it here crikey what are the other what are the i want to know what the other secrets are of course you do of course you do. Of course you do. James Callaghan's victory in the 1976 Labour election. It was foretold. It was foretold. Yeah.

And, oh, who knows? What were the other? The Pierce Brosnan's casting as James Bond in the early 1990s. But Dominic, calm down, calm down. I'm guessing that against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution, the war, the convulsions that are happening within Portugal, that this seeming vision of the Virgin must be quite influential on the willingness of people to give an ear to Salazar. Well, I think you're absolutely right that the visions of Fatima must reflect an immensely turbulent political and economic landscape

in which people are looking for solace and looking for escapism. And the 1920s are a grim decade for Portugal. The late 1910s and early 1920s are a grim time. Lots of bombings, lots of assassination attempts. It really feels like Spain before the Spanish Civil War. So summon an accountant. Well, so they have a coup in 1926, an army coup. The army come in to try and run Portugal's affairs.

Portugal is crippled by massive, massive public debt as well as the inflation and all these other things. And the army say, well, let's get this bloke who's the professor of economics at Coimbra to come in and sort out the economy. A top boffin. A top boffin. Now Salazar has been, he was in parliament.

He'd been briefly elected to parliament in 1921. He'd only gone once and he'd left because he said he was so disgusted. He's very anti-parliamentary. Like General Gordon going to see a ballet. Yes, I suppose so. So the comparison with, I mean, Tolkien, the comparison is only sort of partly tongue-in-cheek.

Tolkien in Britain, to give a British comparison, he's somebody who is, as we said before, very reactionary, very ultra-Catholic, very anti-modern. You know, you said his model of politics was a kind of sacral kingship. He sees himself as a conservative anarchist and all this sort of thing. Salazar, too, dislikes parliamentary democracy, dislikes modernity. But he's not in any way an anarchist, is he?

No, he's not in any way an anarchist. I mean, that is one of many differences. And he doesn't write about hobbits. No, he doesn't. Okay, there are lots of differences. He's not from Birmingham. He's got no interest in ancient finnish so never read bear wolf dominic i'm afraid the differences are actually amounting up but let's park that comparison i had thought tom they were identical people but now you've proved me wrong so i taught

you about fardo you've taught me that there were two different people we've educated each other we have we both learned something. Live on a podcast. They called in Salazar in 1926, and they say, will you be the finance minister? And basically he does it for five days. He does it for five days, and then he gets on the train and goes back to Coimbra, and he says, you won't let me do what I want, which is to cut spending and to do all these reforms.

So I'm not going to do it and actually this becomes his his modus operandi for the rest of the 1920s they keep dragging him back and saying be the finance minister and sort out the accounts and he keeps threatening to resign and every time he threatens to resign they just give him more power basically so that by 1928 he becomes finance minister sort of permanently as it were and he gets from the president who's a guy called carmona who's a sort of he's a republican and he's another freemason actually um carmona basically says okay fine you have complete right of veto on all the other departments so you can basically be running the government from the finance ministry and then by 1932 he becomes prime minister and really when i say prime minister i mean he basically is the government so everybody else does what he tells he has almost quasi dictatorial power even though he's only prime minister not president and he's only

prime minister for the whole all the decades that he's in control in Portugal. Yeah, he's never president. He's always prime minister serving at the discretion of the president. So how is he maintaining power? I mean, what are the underpinnings, the kind of the practical underpinnings? The practical underpinnings are he does sort out the economy. So he does sort out Portugal's debt and he starts running balanced budgets um they've had incredible turbulence yeah and they recognize that he is an incredibly clever and hard-working man of this kind of flinty slightly terrifying integrity uh he also has an enormous appeal to catholic conservative middle-class conservatives and of course he's a very useful

tool for the big landowners, for the army, for the Catholic Church, because they have found somebody who is exceedingly competent, who will protect their interests from socialism, Bolshevism, anarchism. And his thing is, he freezes in place the status quo. But what I'm trying to understand is the degree to which he is a dictator, or whether his position in power depends on him having the backing of powerful blocks within the state. Well, I think that's probably true of all dictators, isn't it, Tom? That they actually, the fantasy that we have, which is that they're Bond villains. Well, no, becauseler is a fuhrer

mussolini is a duche i mean they indisputably stand at the head of the state and they have a kind of they they claim a heroic status by virtue of that i mean if if salazar is is just the prime minister yeah you know he's not even the president then that is that is quite a difference isn't it this is what makes him tom and, such a richly fascinating study. Because, as you say, he appears to be in many ways, I mean, you make the comparisons with Hitler and Mussolini. Or indeed Franco would be the... Oh, Franco.

So there'll be lots of people who've listened to this and have heard us jokingly make the Tolkien comparison and will bridle because they will think Salazar is a fascist and J.R.R. Tolkien wasn't a fascist. But Salazar, in some ways, he wears a business suit. He's very frugal. He's just the prime minister. He doesn't have rallies.

He has no rallies. He has no personality cult. He doesn't really have a political party. So they have a new constitution, a corporatist constitution. He has a single party, the National Union, which he basically sells as a non-party. He has no interest in mobilizing the masses. He doesn't really sell himself as anything other than a technocrat, so the public, sort of Catholic technocrat. There's no sense of energizing young people. There's no sense of embracing modernity,

of military expansion, of all these other aspects of the hyperactive, the hysterical side of 1920s fascism. He has none of that. So on his propaganda posters, he portrays himself as figures from Portugal's heroic past. So he compares himself to John of Braganza, Jau of Braganza. He does indeed. And actually, so the great historian of fascism, Robert Paxton, says that one of the confusing things about Salazar is that Salazar, he copies often the language and the iconography, which is so common in the 1920s and 30s, of fascism.

So you see a Salazarist monument or you see a Salazarist poster, and they do look very fascistic. But the difference is that it has none of the dynamism or the excitement or the radicalism that fascism holds out, which is so intoxicating to younger voters often in the 20s, so Mussolini's Italy, let's say. Everything that Salazar is trying to do, it's quite a depersonalized regime.

So the image of him that's presented to the public is this sort of mr he's very frugal um he's unmarried he doesn't like the trappings of power he's kind of monkish monkish exactly monkey an academic an academic actually and people often say you know he's he governs like a professor he works all the time in his office he doesn't he doesn't believe in the heating because he thinks it's wasteful so he's or like a professor. He works all the time in his office. He doesn't believe in the heating because he thinks it's wasteful. Or like a schoolteacher, a teacher treating the Portuguese. Portuguese as children. So, Tom, I was just going to say, you'll enjoy this.

You know, we talked in the last podcast about that bloke who wouldn't take his coat off. Yeah. Dom João. Salazar won't take his coat off in the winter because he doesn't believe in heating. So he works in his overcoat. Well, a model there for everyone in europe this witness do as salazar did that's that's a slogan um um but but so if he's a school teacher school teachers have the right to punish their pupils their students yes so what is the apparatus of control that Salazar is exercising? There's a secret police that goes through various incarnations.

It's best known as the PIDE. And they have prisons. Do they have concentration camps? They have political prisons, I think it's fairer to say, rather than concentration camps per se, for dissidents. I mean, we'll come after the break to some of the suppression of dissidents in the post world war ii era but they do people do die and people do disappear and and one of the reasons that salazar is so much debated and that in a way he seems such

an ambiguous figure is that on the one hand people disappear and die on the other hand the numbers by comparison with other 20th century societies are not very great so i i found it i was researching this podcast i found it very hard to find a definitive figure which probably tells you its own story so it's maybe between 50 and 100 people in portugal and how many how many decades is the impact over so what we're talking from the mid 1920s to 1968 1970 so that's quite a long time i mean you could say one or two people a year are tortured to death in prison beaten up by the secret police um are disappeared right by his secret police but portugal doesn't have the death penalty so the death penalty had been abolished in the late 19th century he doesn't he doesn't reintroduce it no he does not reintroduce it so he has what's

called his estado novo his new state again you know that's very very 20s 30s kind of dictatorship isn't it to talk of a new state but the difference between his new state and mussolini or hitler is he doesn't want to lead Portugal into a new age. He wants to lead it back, doesn't he? He wants to stop the clock. So this is your Tolkien comparison. He wants to go back to a Catholic medieval. Catholic feudal society, virtually.

I mean, just, you know, he doesn't. There are changes. So people become more literate. There are new schools. There are all these kinds of things. And the economy is run more competently than it had been in previous decades but really he doesn't want anything to change i mean it's a wonderful story that um when someone told him much later in the 60s i think the oil had been discovered in angola which you would think he would be delighted by he said yes oh what a pity yes well that that's also very tolkien well i

think listen let's let's take a break now and then when we come back um as it were dig a little deeper uh and describe his relation with with hitler with franco with mussolini and what happened second world war and then the aftermath of that so we'll see you back in a few minutes i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment in a few minutes. episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hola y bienvindo a Oresto e Historia. Tom, we are nearing the end of our great Portuguese odyssey. We are. And you have introduced this extraordinary figure, Antonio Salazar, dictator or is he dictator of Portugal, this kind of monkish figure. And before the break, you were talking about him in relation to the fascist leaders. If Salazar is a devout Catholic,

what is his attitude to the kind of the pagan strain, say, within Nazism? Well, that's exactly what he would call it. Do you know, he would love your book Dominion. You would have had great chats with Salazar about Dominion, Tom. Okay, I don't quite know how to feel about that. So Salazar does think that Nazis are pagan. So he's a very, very reactionary Catholic, and he hates Bolshevism socialism all of this stuff which he

sees as godless and evil so from that point of view he sees the fascists as a i suppose a useful bulwark against it but on the other hand he he goes he says he describes hitler and the nazis as he says they are pagan they're incompatible with the character of our Christian civilization. There are attempts to have kind of overtly fascist movements in Portugal, as there are in every other European country. In Portugal, it's a group called the Blue Shirts. Salazar basically purges them, denounces them. He condemns, and it's interesting, he condemns what he calls the exaltation of youth, the cult of force through direct action, the principle of the superiority of state political power and social life, and the propensity for organizing masses behind a single leader. And that's actually a pretty good academic definition of fascism.

And he basically says all of that is bad. He very much sounds like the kind of chap who would not be in favor of the exaltation of youth definitely not a man for the exaltation of youth no is is there something jacob reese moggish about him no i don't well maybe i'm revealing too much about my opinion of jacob reese mogg but i don't think there's anything at all contrived about so jacob reese mogg loves the media and he loves to appear on the media and the the persona is very carefully calibrated you know to get publicity salazar hates publicity he he's genuinely monkish he's very austere um he's not going to be giving quotes to channel 4 news right he's not rich no he's not well he's i mean he's not badly off i mean he has a summer house and he has

his residence and stuff but is he corrupt he's not corrupt he's not no i don't think he's especially corrupt actually i mean he's definitely he works with people who are corrupt and you could like all dictatorships his regime has plenty of corruption but personally personally, he lives with this extraordinary personal life. So he works all the time. Life magazine said, very insulting to the Portuguese actually, the American magazine Life said of him, he is everything that most Portuguese are not, calm, silent, ascetic, puritanical, a glutton for work, cool to women.

But he lives with this housekeeper called donna maria um so she's she's a sort of peasant she was initially a sort of illiterate sort of servant woman who basically stays with him as his housekeeper is that in inverted commas housekeeper well people have said isn't it mysterious that he has this sort of live-in companion and um she had two nieces that he was very kind to so some of his portuguese opponents said oh these are obviously his children i don't think that's true i don't think they were an extraordinary thing that when she died in 1981 so 11 years after salazar the director of the care home where she had been living decided

that for the sake of her reputation, she must be basically exhumed. And he would have her examined to see if she was still a virgin. And was she? Apparently she was. So yeah, I mean, that is very bizarre. So properly monkish, yeah. But the other comparison is, I mean, let's state the comparison, not just with Hitler, but with Mussolini and Franco. Mussolini is all about strutting.

It's about pomposity. It's about display and swagger and this sort of almost comical kind of virility. Salazar, it's inconceivable. You cannot picture him on the balcony addressing great crowds. Franco is incredibly corrupt. I mean, Franco is a very unlikable man. Salazar can't really stand Franco. Franco is a great show-off.

He's all about, you know, lots of medals, lots of pomp, lots of display. His family become incredibly rich. Again, Salazar has none of this. So one of the things that I suppose makes him almost uncomfortable to study is that in some ways, he's the kind of person that when we're writing about political leaders, we're often tempted to find quite admirable in quite a chilly way, because he does have this kind of seriousness and integrity. But of course, he is running a very repressive

incredibly reactionary regime in which you you know the free speech is limited um the newspapers there's huge censorship um and political dissidents are jailed if not tortured i mean i suppose you could put it this way if you were given the choice to lead your life through the 30s and 40s in Italy, Spain, Germany, or the USSR, or Portugal, you'd probably go for Portugal. Yeah, you would. I'm sure you would. I'm sure you would. And in fact, that's the interesting question, isn't it? So given where Portugal is, it's on the European peripheryy given its economic and political condition um so which is analogous to spain maybe italy or greece i suppose or indeed countries of latin america i mean portugal is sleep is terribly sleepy and stagnant in the middle of the 20th century but at the same time you know it

doesn't have coups it doesn't have a civil war right it doesn't have mass repression mass terror all of these kinds of things so you know best of a bad lot maybe the best of a bad job or i mean who knows the alternative to salazar probably wasn't was a civil war a happy successful democracy it might well have been yeah more bombings more terrorism more and he keeps portugal out of the Second World War? Well, yes and no, actually, interestingly. So it's basically the Peninsular War all over again. So Salazar is sort of relatively benevolently disposed towards the Nazis.

He's not, you know, by the standards of people's attitudes to the Nazis. You know, he's so anti-communist that in some ways they could be natural allies. But on the other hand, of course, Britain is all important. So Britain, even in the 19th and early 20th century, still accounts for a huge proportion, something like a quarter, I think, of Portuguese imports. And, you know, it's a dominating kind of economic factor. So he can't alienate the British, but also he's terrified of alienating the Germans. He doesn't want to jump into bed with the British because he thinks Lisbon will be bombed

and Portuguese bases will be bombed and so on. So basically, right at the beginning, he squares it with the British. He says, we're still your allies, but we're going to remain neutral in this war. And the British are completely fine with that. They understand that and they actually confirm that. They send him a kind of diplomatic note saying that's completely fine. And in fact, when Churchill comes in, I mean, the British go out of their way to say to Salazar, it's fine that you're neutral. Thank you for being neutral. So Churchill sends Salazar a personal letter in the autumn of 1940. I commend you for all you're doing. Look after your country and all this.

Churchill gets Oxford University to give Salazar an honorary degree. He must have liked that, I guess. I bet he loved that. Yeah, of course. They upgrade the embassy and they send a very distinguished diplomat, Sir Ronald Campbell, to be the British ambassador to Portugal to say, look how seriously we take you. The Portuguese have a big exhibition in 1940 to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of Portugal as a kingdom in 1140 and its independence from Spain in 1640 and the British go out of their way to send the Duke of Kent so a senior member of the royal family to represent them even in wartime at this exhibition in Portugal to show Salazar how much they think of him and what what the British get

out of that well they get two things so one they're very keen to keep getting tungsten Portugal is a is a supplier of tungsten wolfram, as it's sometimes called. And they're supplying it to both Britain and Germany. And actually, there's incredible scenes at the beginning of the war where British and German agents are sort of rushing to villages to get their supply, competing to get their hands on these. It's a very good setting for spy thrillers, isn't it? It is.

There's loads of spy thrillers set in Portugal, in lisbon in the 1940s so they get that but the thing that they want above all is the azores so the azores as an atlantic base and they are quite sort of they they they take their time before asking for it so really they only get the azores they only ask for the azores once it's kind of obvious that they're going to win salazar had a plan that if the germans attacked portugal he would evacuate to the azores with brit he'd do a peninsular war style the british would evacuate him the british would evacuate him but in 1943 the british under because the americans keep saying why don't we ask get the azores from portugal the british ask um salazar for the azores to if they can use these bases they actually have a plan that if he says no it's

called operation brisk your brother would enjoy this tom they would have all these landing craft and they would seize the azores themselves a bit like we did it with iceland but they don't need to do it because actually salazar says yes and so the british are able to he says as long as you know you don't use any sort of portuguese planes or you don't implicate us you can use these bases which we do so the british use the azores so we're very grateful to salazar for that so that's why he stands so high in western esteem and sort of anglo-american esteem anyway at the end of world war ii when hitler dies doesn't he fly the flags at half mast does he I think he does right so Eamon de Valera

Eamon de Valera yes and uh actually he's probably got on well with Eamon de Valera I don't know they seem quite similar types yes yeah yeah so there we've got so now it's the quartet Tolkien Eamon de Valera Salazar and Tony Abbott the bad monks um but but the other thing is uh is refugees which is really interesting so the portuguese save thousands of people from hitler and the interesting question is whether this is because of salazar or despite salazar so definitely he says to the portuguese consuls there are some people you should let in so So, for example, the last Habsburg empress, Zita, and her son, Otto, they are rescued through the help of the Portuguese. Because Otto von Habsburg had actually been sentenced to death by the Nazis.

He goes on to become an MEP into the 1990s and beyond. So they are rescued by the Portuguese. But there are also these amazing stories about Portuguese diplomats who basically give out thousands and thousands of visas to Jews in France. The most famous one is a guy called Aristides de Souza Mendes, and he's the consul in Bordeaux. And he was declared, was it, righteous among the nations? Yeah, in Israel.

In Israel, because he, I mean, people argue about how many he gave out. He may well have given out tens of thousands. Some people say that's exaggerated, but I think it's plausible. Tens of, I mean, literally sort of like confetti to people to try and get them out, give them Portuguese visas so that they can escape before the Nazis catch up with them. And actually, that guy, Sousa Mendes, when the Portuguese had this big vote to decide who was the greatest Portuguese in history, he came third.

So who came first? Salazar. Salazar won 41% of the vote. Now, this is in 2007. Wow. Fascinating. That is fascinating. I think one of the biggest margins, because there are lots of it.

This TV show, for those people who don't know, was modeled on the BBC series Great Britain. So there are lots of imitators all over the world. And Salazar, I think, won with one of the biggest pluralities of anybody who did win. How fascinating. Fascinating. Okay. Yeah. And that's presumably because, well, as we were saying before the break, he holds Portugal together.

There's no civil war. There's a measure of stability. He keeps Portugal out of the Second World War. But then going into the 50s and 60s, so into the Cold War, the Americans and NATO quite keen to have a staunch anti-communist on their side. Absolutely. He's a founder member of NATO. And so what's the apparatus of repression is it does it become worse after the war or much of a muchness uh does it become worse it's certainly maybe more overt and maybe more glaring so the most famous

example of this is 1958 now as we said before the before the break salazar was never president he was always prime minister so actually he served at the discretion of successive presidents. Even though he runs the government, he is the big man. They defer to him. He has lots of rich and influential friends. But in 1958, an Air Force general called Humberto Delgado, who was actually the founder of TAP, the Portuguese airline, still the Portuguese national flag carrier. He says, I'm going to run in this presidential election as an independent as an independent candidate and during the campaign

somebody says uh will you what would you do when you're elected he says well the first thing i do would be to sack salazar as prime minister and from that point on was people call him general sem middle the general without fear because this is a thing that you just don't say yeah it's like saying as a senator saying i'm going to take down augustus similar kind of yeah precisely and actually to do what tom i thought about augustus when i was reading up on salazar there's a the best book in english by the way is by a guy called tom gallagher who is a professor at the university of bradford because Augustus, not altogether dissimilar, made a big public show of his frugality and his kind of, I'm an ordinary Roman,

and just holding an office by the will of the Senate, all that sort of stuff. But going back to Humberto Delgado, Tom, Humberto Delgado runs and he gets actually 25% in the presidential election. But most people think if it had been a real free election, he could have won. He might well have got more than 50%. After the election, for his temerity, he is expelled from the army and eventually exiled. But in 1965, Humberto Delgado is lured into what seems like an ambush on the Spanish border. He's lured back over the border and murdered by the secret police. Probably they were hoping to kidnap him and bring him to Portugal for trial. And his death, the death of somebody so high profile,

a guy who'd been a presidential candidate seven years earlier, that is, I think, the moment where it becomes obvious to the world who had sort of not really been looking at Portugal. Peopleugal people say you know what this regime is actually pretty unpleasant so it's in 1965 i mean it's it's a year of help swinging 60s i mean it's all kicking in and there's a funny tom gallagher says in his book you know 1966 um was it the year of the beatles revolver salazar is sitting around at the table with his sort of aides complaining about the Reformation, the French Revolution. Wow, that's very Tolkien behaviour.

Yeah, it is very Tolkien behaviour. So to go back to the comparison with Augustus' Bread and Circuses, the circuses, Salazar is, as you said, a very austere figure, not a guy who you'd associate with fun. He's not Captain Fun. But he does start to so there's this phrase fatima for religion we've talked about fatima fardo for nostalgia he doesn't really approve of fardo but he comes to accept that he you know it's it's quite useful to him yes and

football for the glory of portugal yeah so those three things fatima is bringing in tourists and pilgrims um so that's all good the fado as you absolutely say fado was the music of the streets it had a kind of radicalism to it but what happens after the war is fado becomes kind of slightly tamed and the nostalgia the nostalgia is kind of turned up to 11

and that figure who brought us into the show Amalia Rodriguez kind of in her black shawl singing these laments. The Salazar, she's not a Salazarist, but the regime, and in fact,

Salazar despises her, but the regime use her, you know, to, to, to sell abroad this image of Portugal as an unchanging, you know, old fashioned country of,

of true Catholics and, and stuff. So there's that. And then there's football and football in both Spain and Portugal in the 1950s and 1960s becomes an enormous asset to those regimes. I was reading that the journalists reporting on the Portuguese national team or Portuguese clubs playing other clubs from other countries that um they the journalists would get in trouble if for any lack of patriotic hyperbole which I think is something

that we could profitably introduce here we could absolutely do with that Tom British sports writers yeah take note all they do is moan isn't it well this podcast Tom um is produced by Gary Lineker's company and maybe you should you've educated me in this podcast. Maybe you should have a word with Gary and say – Yeah. You know, take a more Salazarist approach to Match of the Day and the World Cup. To reporting on England at the World Cup. Yeah.

Halfways with Jonathan Wilson as well. Sort him out. Exactly. But, no, these are glory days for Portuguese football. Because Benfica, the big Lisbon team, they win the European Cup, the ancestor of the Champions League in 1961 and 62. They're finalists three times.

After that in 63, 65, 68, Portugal gets the semifinals in England in 1966. And this is, of course, the heyday of Eusebio. And Eusebio, and Eusebio is a he is probably the single most internationally famous Portuguese person before Cristiano Ronaldo famous for his history of the church and his biography of Constantine right well well Eusebio is interesting because of course he's he's black so he's born in Mozambique from a very poor family. And what I think is fascinating about Eusebio is Eusebio becomes this international avatar of Portugal at a point at which Portugal's relationship with those colonies, with Mozambique, with Angola, is increasingly strained. So as we said, they'd always said, they're not an empire, we're a pluricontinental nation. But obviously, by the mid 1960s, you know...

Well, they lose Goa, don't they? Yes, they've lost Goa in the 60s. So there's a brilliant story about that, that the Indian army was kind of, you know, moving in on Goa, Nehru sends the tanks in, and the military authorities in Goa send a telegram to the general staff in Lisbon requesting sausages. And sausages is code for cannon shells. And the general staff sent a whole batch of pork sausages. To actually send them sausages.

They literally sent them sausages because they'd forgotten that this was the code. Oh, brilliant. So Goa Falls becomes part of India again. Yeah. And by the late 1960s, there have been uprisings in Angola and Mozambique in what becomes Guinea-Bissau. And, you know, the Portuguese are very dependent on – they're still dependent, actually, on Britain and on the United States.

Salazar is becoming boxed in. He's becoming increasingly, you know, his friends are South Africa and Rhodesia. So the breakaway regime in Rhodesia. And he's sort of supporting the Ian Smith regime in Rhodesia. So actually Mozambique becomes one of the world's most important kind of trading centers because all Rhodesian trade has to be funneled through Mozambique to break the boycott. But the spending on the army to try and fight off the sort of nationalist uprisings in Africa is absorbing more and more of the Portuguese budget. So in total, 8,000. So the same is similar to the First World War, actually, Tom. About 8,000 Portuguese are killed fighting in Angola and Mozambique in the late 60s.

And presumably the Portuguese economy is still very much flatlining at this point. Yeah. I mean, what has grown, so all Western European economies have grown after World War II. So Salazar's defenders will often say, look, look howugal portugal's economy grew in the you know 1940s 1950s 1960s i think the truth probably is that whoever you know mickey mouse could have been prime minister of portugal and it would have grown but you're right portugal's economy is still it is still the poorest country in western europe it can ill afford these african wars and there's a definite sense i think by the late 1960s,

that this guy who was reactionary even by the standards of the 1920s, who's still running the country. So he's still running the country in 1968. So there's Soissons-Wittard out on the streets, and the hair is long, and the joystick's are burning. And he's fulminating against Martin Luther. Yeah. So what happens to him? He's at his house,

his sort of summer residence. There are different accounts, but I think the most likely thing is he falls off his chair. Some people say it's in the bath, but I think it's his chair. On the 3rd of August 1968 and he suffers a brain hemorrhage. He appears to get better, but after two weeks

he goes into a massive decline. He goes into hospital. He goes into a coma. The president, who's sort of one of these identikit, slightly faceless kind of military conservative types, he thinks Salazar must be about to die. So he formally dismisses him as prime minister. And he gets another academic, actually, the former rector of Lisbon University, one of Salazar's old associates called Marcelo Caetano, a very distinguished constitutional lawyer. You know, it's weird that there's this dictatorship of academics,

of university professors. So Caetano becomes prime minister. But Salazar doesn't die. He lives for another 23 months. And nobody tells him is he conscious he's conscious he's lucid he's been in a coma for i think a month um but nobody says you're no longer prime minister i mean they basically say well he's kind of giving orders and people pretend to obey them i think he's he's in it i mean he's obviously not complete he's 80

he's he's obviously not you know functioning at the peak of dynamism. And people are saying to him... Like Joe Biden. Well, I think Joe Biden is still president, isn't he? I mean, unless things are happening behind the scenes that we don't know. Yeah, I mean, I've seen very exaggerated stories about this where people say,

oh, the Lisbon newspapers produced fake editions, which were shown to Salazar every day so that he would think he was still prime minister. I find that hard to believe that a newspaper would go to such ludicrous lengths for almost two years. But I think they didn't tell him he'd been sacked. And, you know, he just thinks that my deputies are doing the work and I'm sort of sitting here at home recuperating. And then eventually in 1970, he dies and the regime, well, we will come back to the fate of the regime and the last Western European revolution, which takes place in the 1970s. I think we should come back to that, shouldn't we, Dom? Yes, as part of this exciting package of projects that we have coming your way in November. So we won't say anything more. We'll just kind of tantalize you with that. So you're an outsider to this, as it were.

You've not written about Portuguese history, but you are obviously really interested in the Catholicism and the political Christianity, I suppose. So what's your take on him? I'm intrigued by the degree to which he clearly had, he must have had a measure of popular support. Because if he, I mean mean if his security apparatus i mean it sounds repressive but it's not the gestapo is it no it's grim and i don't want to downplay it

because there'll be some portuguese listeners to this by and large the traditional fascist states they make a virtue of being repressive they they rub people's noses in it um if he's not doing that then he must have a measure of support and i I guess the fact that 40% vote for him in this poll suggests that it's ongoing. That is, I guess, unsettling if you're for narratives of liberal, you know, the perspective of democracy and liberalism, to imagine that someone who is so reactionary and so clearly repressive could have maintained such popular support for so long. Well, what's interesting is he's become quite fashionable in some circles in recent years. So the magazine, the American Conservative, published a big essay a couple of years ago called Waiting for Salazar, basically saying, you know, he's the philosopher king, post-liberal age. But was he a philosopher king? Dean Acheson, who was the Truman Secretary of State, he described him as the closest thing the 20th century

had to a platonic philosopher king. I mean... But platonic philosopher kings are famously repressive. I mean, I think I agree. I think he is an unsettling... It's odd that he's an unsettling figure because he's so ambiguous. Because there are things about him, the work ethic, the seriousness that... The thing about fascism, you know

who the goodies and the baddies are. It's very very clear who the baddies are uh i i guess salazar is i mean he sounds as if it's slightly more complicated figure than that that you can't just yes 100 engage in the kind of goodies and baddies that's i think that's right that's what tom gallagher's biographer says is that he's much more ambiguous and actually it's very hard to kind of pin him down and with a moralistic kind of kind of label um anyway so he's not he's much more ambiguous. And actually, it's very hard to kind of pin him down with a moralistic kind of label. Anyway. So he's not racist. Is he racist?

Not racist. Not massively overtly racist, I wouldn't have said. But I mean, maybe some Portuguese listeners will know more about this than me. But I don't think the racism... I mean, he's not... So for example, he's not overtly anti-Semitic. And people often said in the 1930s and 1940s,

Portugal is unusual in being in having so little antisemitism now actually franco i would say was much more antisemitic than um than salazar was well i think that there was this tradition in portugal of regretting uh the fact that the jewish population had gone to amsterdam and feeling that they'd really right they'd been robbed yes you know that had been a terrible mistake uh kind of hankering i suppose for what might have been so perhaps that's something that feeds into it i don't know tom have you been converted to lucifilia yes i completely have i really want to go to lisbon now yeah oh lisbon's a fantastic city absolutely stunning city one of the top so there are four great cities as you know in europe there is lisbon as i told you the other day lisbon vienna

stockholm and wolverhampton yeah okay two of them effectively portuguese cities actually these days yes of course wolverhampton yeah absolutely um i will go uh because obviously you know as i said i i associate portugal with sunburn to my buttocks. Is that the image on which we're really going to end this podcast? I'm prepared to overlook that. I feel that you have educated me. And in fact, to a degree, I've educated myself because I've really enjoyed reading up on it.

I like to think we've all been educated, Tom. So on that bombshell, we will say adeus to all of you. You can go off and listen to your Fado music and help yourself to Pastéis de Nata. And we will return with, I can't even remember what we're doing next week, but it'll be absolutely riveting. It'll be great, won't it?

It'll be brilliant. It will indeed. So enjoy that, and we will see you then. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.

I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to the