The author, a political scientist at Brazil’s Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, offers the most detailed analysis to date of Integralist membership and ideology. The monograph, a translation of Trindade’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Paris in 1971, does not provide a history of Plínio Salgado’s Integralist movement; rather, it focuses on the attitudes and values that produced the movement, leaving to the reader the task of fitting Integralism into the fabric of Brazilian events. Fortunately, Trindade does not limit his treatment to the upper echelons of the Integralist hierarchy. This is the most useful aspect of his contribution, and it overshadows whatever inconvenience the lack of historical context may create.
Integralist national and regional leaders were businessmen, landowners, and industrialists, as well as members of what Trindade calls the intellectual bourgeoisie—lawyers, physicians, professors, and senior bureaucrats. Local officials for the most part came from the petty bourgeoisie, as did the rank and file, although somewhat less than one-fourth of local cell members were recruited from the working class, thereby making Ação Integralista Brasileira the first truly national political party in Brazilian history.
Working from an elaborate and well-constructed set of interview questionnaires administered in the 1960s to former Integralist activists, Trindade reveals, predictably, that ex-Green Shirts scored highest on religious/moral values and were anti-liberal, antisocial, traditional, and authoritarian. In spite of its pathetic efforts to imitate European fascist ritual, the A.I.B., the author holds, was a deeply Brazilian phenomenon, rooted in the sociopolitical vacuum of the period between 1922 and 1937. The Integralists came to center stage when conservative Brazilians saw that neither Republican constitutionalism nor the ideologically vacant Liberal Alliance offered protection against the threat of disorder from the dormant masses below. Integralist adepts admitted publicly what many others held privately: that they preferred order and discipline to liberal progress.
Trindade’s methodology raises some questions about the applicability of his conclusions about Integralist membership. He offers few clues about the geographic distribution of his sample; presumably, much of his local data came from Rio Grande do Sul, a state whose participation in the movement was atypical. It might have been interesting to test, for comparison, a control group of Brazilians of similar ages who had not joined the A.I.B. in the 1930s. In any event, his overall analysis is sound and extensive and should lead to further understanding of Integralism. The book contains an excellent bibliography.
