‘I wanted to carry out the revolution’: activists’ trajectories in Portugal from dictatorship to democracy

ABSTRACT

This article reconstructs the life trajectories of Portuguese radical left activists who mobilized against the Estado Novo authoritarian regime between the mid 1960s and the mid 1970s. It analyses the consequences of political engagement on the political and life trajectories of the activists across three different institutional settings: an authoritarian regime (until 1974), a revolutionary process (1974–1975) and a democracy (from 1976 onwards). The aim is to understand how the engagement and its consequences changed according to the changes at a political level. The underlying question is ‘what became of the radical activists who mobilized against the Portuguese dictatorship in the late 1960s’? To address this question, I adopt a longitudinal perspective, which contextualizes the present life of the former activists in a longer process, composed of different phases of engagement, activism, prison, disengagement, reconversion and life as former activists. I understand these phases as strictly interconnected to the organizational dynamics (groups and networks) and the political processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Activism
• authoritarianism
• regime-change
• revolution
• political disengagement
• social movements’ consequences

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the external reviewers and to the editor of Social Movement Studies for their helpful suggestions. I would also like to thank James Jasper for hosting me as a visiting scholar at the CUNY-Graduate Center, as well all the participants at the Politics and Protest Workshop for their invaluable comments, and particularly the discussants of my paper, John Krinsky and Elke Zuern. Finally, my special thanks to all the former activists against the Estado Novo who accepted to participate in this research.

Author Links

Social Media Profiles: https://twitter.com/guyaaccornero

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Even though it was part of the research, I decided to not include information on the background of these activists and to focus more on the specific dynamics that started at the moment of their engagement. I consider that primary socialization is relevant in shaping this interaction and the activists’ trajectories, but also that many mechanisms I detected appeared to be more related to the interactions and processes triggered by the engagement in itself and its development in those specific conditions than to the preliminary background. This is also consistent with Corrigal-Brown’s findings that ‘Income is not a significant predictor of engagement over time’ (2012, p. 54) and neither are ideological factors. On the other hand, the author considers cultural resources, education and political knowledge as determinant factors in participatory trajectories, and these are very similar among the activists I interviewed and mostly depended on their secondary socialization starting at secondary school or university.

2. As stressed by Bosi and Reiter, ‘interactive interviews with open questionnaires can produce excellent material on both the history of social movements and on their memory’ (Bosi & Della Porta, 2015, p. 130).

3. Erik Neveu’s pioneering study on the trajectories of ‘ordinary “68 activists” (2008) opened the way to the understanding of the ’68 beyond the ‘big narratives’ which sedimented around it and as a much more complex event which involved different classes – not just the students – and different areas of the country – not just Paris.

4. On the eve of the revolution students were the social group most affected by repression, accounting for almost half of all political prisoners in 1973 and in the first four months of 1974. In 1973, the year with the highest number of student political arrests, they represented 43.5% of all political prisoners (Data collected by the author from the Instituto dos Arquivos Nacionais, Torre do Tombo de Lisboa-IAN/TT, archives of the PIDE/DGS-IAN/TT – PIDE/DGS, records on political prisoners. The PIDE/DGS archive was declassified in 1995. More information here https://digitarq.arquivos.pt/details?id=4280051).

5. See note 2.

6. See on this also Accornero and Villaverde Cabral 2011.

7. It is important to stress that, if some feminist issues were present before, feminism and feminists really appeared in Portugal only after the revolution (Barbosa, 2008, Cardina, 2009). It has been noted above that in countries where political demands represented an urgent priority, as was the case of the dictatorships of southern Europe, less energy was found for aspects of social and cultural change.

8. The people who were interviewed are Maria (5 June 2015), Rui (11 June 2015), Bernardo (12 June 2015) and Glória (17 June 2015). Their given names are real, and they all consent to their use. Interviews’ excerpts translated by the author.

9. This expression is used by Kostis Kornetis (2013).

10. On this date there was an attempted right-wing coup led by General António Spínola.

11. The working class city on the southern bank of the River Tejo, facing Lisbon, always a stronghold of the PCP.

12. At the end of the ’60, the more radical students abandoned any hope of using the legitimate channels of participation, a strategy that only continued to be defended by the PCP, which, as in the early 1960s, held strong to its belief in the need for double action, legal and illegal, without interference between the two and with the illegal sphere being as dissimulated as possible (Accornero, 2016).

13. The Left Block (Bloco de Esquerda) is a radical left-wing party created in 1999 meshing together the different ‘souls’ of the Portuguese new-left – especially Maoist, Trotskyist and revolutionary socialist – most of which emerged towards the end of the regime.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia IF/00223/2012/CP0194/CT0001.

Notes on contributors

Guya Accornero

Guya Accornero is a senior researcher at the Centro de Investigação e Estudos de Sociologia-Lisbon University Institute (CIES-IUL). She has published articles in the journals Journal of Contemporary Religion, West European Politics, Estudos Ibero-Americanos, Democratization, Cultures & Conflicts, Análise Social, Storia e Problemi Contemporanei, Historein; the monograph The Revolution before the Revolution. Student Protest and Political Process at the End of the Portuguese Dictatorship and the edited book (with Olivier Fillieule) Social Movements Studies in Europe: The State of the Art.