Without doubt, Volume II of Oliveira Marques’s History of Portugal is the best overall treatment of modern Portuguese history in the English language. Nonetheless, it falls short of the high standards set by the author in Volume I. The second volume is especially marred by its peculiar organization. More or less chronologically presented, the five chapters deal with the following topics: the constitutional monarchy, Africa, the First Republic, the New State, and the twentieth-century empire. The individual chapters are confusing. Demographic, social, ideological, and economic trends come first, followed by a narration of the actual sequence of events. This means that we learn the reasons for the Republic’s fall before we find out how it fell, or that before we learn who Salazar is, we are told about his ideology.
Marques did not arbitrarily choose 1815 as the beginning of his second volume. He views this date as a break in Portuguese history: a time when the country turned away from empire. The Salazar regime is viewed in the same manner: as a break with the past. The events themselves, however, contradict the author. Time after time, the themes of the first volume-the role of the colonies, the effects of emigration, the dependence on foreign imports, the domination of the economy by foreigners, and the importance of the Catholic Church-reappear in this account of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This masterful attempt at synthesis suffers from a difficulty indigenous to the study of modern Portuguese history: the lack of monographs on the period. Thus, the author often lacks the basic information to explain events. Too often he has to rely on an amorphous public opinion as a causal force. Some questions never get properly explained. For instance, is it true that Portugal’s nineteenth-century African empire building was not economically motivated? Why did the first Republic fail? How did corporativism work? Why is Portugal, the poorest country in western Europe, the last real colonial power? Through no fault of his own, the author can only hint at the answers to these and other questions until more detailed studies exist.
Writing modern Portuguese history presents other problems. The author did not participate in the events of Volume I of this work. He did in those of Volume II. How does one, without resorting to polemics, talk about a regime that has persistently persecuted liberal intellectuals and crushed civil liberties? Oliveira Marques, who has suffered from the Salazarist persecution of intellectuals, attempts to be fair. Ironically, sometimes that attempt backfires. In a very moving section, the author explains how censorship worked under Salazar. To avoid official censorship, authors wrote what they knew would pass: a pattern which led “to extremes of caution with little real justification” (p. 187). After perceptively analyzing this phenomenon, the author then appears to succumb to it.
Although the book as it now stands could not have been published in Portugal, such self-censorship explains the puzzling treatment of Salazar. Claiming that Salazar stood against both Italian Fascism and German Nazism, and praising him for having “clearly distinguished between authoritarianism and totalitarianism,” (p. 181) Oliveira Marques then lists the “totalitarian institutions of the New State” (p. 186), one of which was, of course, P.I.D.E., the political police. The same ambivalence crops up again in the discussion of Salazar’s economic policies. Marques denies that Salazar benefitted the country in any real economic sense. Yet, in writing about what he calls “the Portuguese equivalent of the famous Soviet Five-Year Plans,” the author hedges: “it seems beyond doubt that their contribution to the shaping of a developed country, halfway between capitalism and socialism was a major one” (p. 199).
Perhaps the author’s unconscious self-censorship does not explain his ambivalence toward Salazar. Perhaps it stems from a need to justify. To compensate for their shame over Portugal’s backwardness, some Portuguese insist on defending their country: a tendency shared by Oliveira Marques. An outspoken liberal, an anti-Salazarist, and without question an excellent historian, he confesses his avowedly nonpartisan views on the Portuguese political police: it does not “belong in a civilized world” (p. 188).
Yet, he justifies not only Salazar, but even Portuguese colonialism. While the facts are presented bluntly enough, the interpretation often tergiversates. When dealing with the Portuguese educational system in Africa, for instance, Oliveira Marques presents the illiteracy rates for 1950: almost 99 percent in Guinea, just under 98 percent in Mozambique, and about 96 percent in Angola. Even after the considerable push to establish schools in these areas in the 1960s, the illiteracy rate still remains over 90 percent. Yet, in assessing the results of these educational reforms, Oliveira Marques arrives at the conclusion that although the Portuguese system has grave faults, it, nonetheless “could compete favorably with many others on the Continent” (p. 256). One can only conclude that such limited competition provides meager fare for justification.
Aside from these flaws, the book contains many perceptive insights into Salazar’s regime. Particularly intriguing is the author’s explanation of how Salazar’s use of the Catholic Church differed from Franco’s. He also shows how Salazar made a “fetish” of balancing budgets; how he concentrated on road building and public works, and how he, above all, made his emphasis on the overseas territories into the cornerstone of his policies.
Oliveira Marques concludes on an optimistic note. Once again he sees change: this time beginning with Salazar’s death and Caetano’s accession to power. We can only hope that he is correct.
