- 1 Diário de Lisboa, 15/07/1936.
- 2 These bulletins, issued daily by the censorship services, documented the cuts implemented and the r (...)
1On 15 August 1936, the day after Badajoz fell to Franco’s forces, the Diário de Lisboa, contrary to standard practice, published two editions. Page four of the first edition featured a report titled “Tragic visions wrenched from a Goya painting”, with the subheading “A Sunday in Somosierra — The requetés’ outdoor mass”.1 The report was authored by Artur Portela, one of the paper’s special correspondents in Spain, and related his experiences in Somosierra, in Segovia, just north of Madrid, in the aftermath of a battle between a combined force of Falangists and Carlists and the Spanish Republican Army. Portela’s report was partially censored, and the “Register and Justification of Cuts Bulletin”2 for 17 August 1935 stipulated that a passage describing the execution of a young communist — who had just been confessed by a Catholic priest — was cut from the article before publication. This article seeks to answer the following question: why did the censor deem this section inadmissible?
2Answering this question requires a critical and contextualised interpretation of the article and how its meanings interacted with Salazarist readings of the Spanish Civil War. Working from the premise that censorship functioned as a discursive mechanism to disseminate Salazarism, this article argues that this cut is evidence of censorship’s ideological function to contribute to the “sacralisation of politics” — a concept coined by historian of Italian Fascism Emilio Gentile (1990) — in Salazarist Portugal. After applying a qualitative critical discourse analysis (CDA) methodology to discourses in the Diário da Manhã, which reveal an intent to sacralise Salazarism, this paper then heuristically interprets the meanings encoded into this passage and the logic informing the censor’s decision to remove it, locating its analysis in the context of an era of sacralisation of Salazarism. It concludes that the passage was deemed inadmissible as it subverted the Estado Novo’s attempt to sacralise politics.
3This paper engages with the broader theoretical debate around the sacralisation of politics, demonstrating this framework’s suitability for examining Salazarism. The notion of sacralised politics continues to provoke robust debate and thus warrants further critical attention to ascertain more fully its usefulness for making sense of the dynamics of political ideologies and their relationships to religious modes of thought. One crucial example is Roger Griffin (1991, 21-32) — one of the foremost theorists of fascism —, who was initially sceptical towards the attempts to posit analogous relationships between ideologies and religions and saw any resemblances between the two as superficial, essentially instrumental attempts to mobilise political support for ideology by appealing to popular religious sentiment. However, his more recent work demonstrates a markedly more favourable stance towards the idea of “political religion” and the existence of a degree of functional equivalence between politics and religion, thus demonstrating the vital necessity of maintaining ongoing and critical engagement with this debate (Griffin 2015).
4Gentile’s sacralisation of politics framework has been applied only sparingly to Salazarism, an ideology that designated Catholicism as Portugal’s official religion and nominally posited separation between church and state, despite the close connections between the Catholic Church and the Estado Novo and the undeniable abundance of Catholic symbolism and imagery in official political discourse. These ambiguities, coupled with the robustness of the theoretical research on the structural and functional similarities between religions and ideologies, point to a need for further research which examines Salazarism through the sacralisation of politics framework, and also explores the relationship between ideology and religion in Salazarist Portugal more generally. The article is structured as follows: section one provides some necessary context; section two describes the theoretical framework; the third section analyses discourses in the Diário da Manhã; section four then discusses Portela’s report and the censor’s motivation for cutting a passage from it, with the final section offering some conclusions.
5Salazarism was a syncretic configuration of traditionalist, authoritarian and antiliberal nationalism (Leal 2015), which weaved together various strands of nationalism to form an innovative and durable nationalist programme which responded to the specific political, cultural and social contingencies of 1930s Portugal (Trindade 2017). One crucial way Salazarism repurposed existing themes and tropes to elaborate its discourses was by echoing 19th-century antiliberal discourses, which associated liberalism with masonry and Jacobinism and posited inseparable connections between Catholicism and Portuguese national identity (Lousada 1992; Torgal 2010). Salazarism framed both liberalism and communism as perfidious political maladies entirely incompatible with the “natural order of things” and sought to construct the Estado Novo political programme as equidistant between the two. Salazarist discourses consequently synthesised across a range of traditionalist nationalist projects to create its ideological and political programme, perhaps the most influential of these being Lusitanian Integralism and its doctrine of “renovation of tradition” (Cruz 1982; Carvalho 2012).
6According to the Salazarist reading, Portugal was in desperate need of wholesale societal regeneration to rescue the nation from the corrupting effects of failed experiments with liberalism. Salazarism constructed the Estado Novo as the organic political expression of Portugal’s putative innate spiritual essence. A crucial tenant of this programme was a fervent opposition to the secularisation and anti-clericalism that had characterised the first Portuguese Republic (1910-1926) and a reassertion of the Catholic Church as a vital source of institutional, cultural, symbolic and discursive power in Portuguese politics, embedded in a broader pan-European process to “rechristianise” society following the secularising tendencies of the 19th and early 20th centuries (Melo and Barros 2023). As we shall see, Portuguese nationalism had long appropriated images, symbols and tropes from Catholic discourses to posit inseparable connections between Portuguese national identity and Catholicism.
- 3 See also Fernando Pessoa’s poetry collection Message, awarded the Antero de Quental prize by the SP (...)
7According to Joel Serrão (1969, 9-10), Sebastianism, or the trope of a political leader as messianic saviour, “has remained constantly on the horizon of our culture, as a preoccupation, sometimes almost an obsession”. In the context of the antiliberal counterrevolutions of the 1820s, traditionalist ideologues such as José Agostinho de Macedo (1823) framed their caustic invectives against liberalism in terms overflowing with religious allusion, thus conferring politics with sacred functions. Oliveira Martins (2010, 236-239), one of the leading conservative intellectuals of the “Generation of 70”, argued that Sebastianism was a fundamental characteristic of Portuguese political culture and a recurrent archetype in its mythologies. According to Oliveira Martins (2010, 237), the messianic phenomenon would emerge most powerfully during moments of crisis, rescuing the nation from decadence by restoring organically Portuguese models of social organisation and civic life: “For us, Sebastianism is a posthumous proof of nationality. At the hour of their final agonies, the violent sobs of the people brought the inner voice to their lips and uttered the natural organic thinking, eloquently and loudly”. Sampaio Bruno’s (1904) The Hidden One, meanwhile, maintains a critical dialogue with 19th-century Sebastianist anti-decadence discourses, citing individualism and materialism as the primary causes of Portugal’s state of decline in the early 20th century and arguing for a reappraisal of the value of esoteric, metaphysical and spiritual values in Portuguese public life. Later, literary modernists made recourse to epic poetic forms to revitalise the Sebastianist myth for the 1920s (Cabral 2014).3
8Rosas (2001) argues that Salazarist mythology was articulated along a synchronous temporal axis and abounding with Catholic motifs to posit the Estado Novo as a “transtemporal” or “atemporal” expression of divine providence. For Simpson (2014, 71-77), the Estado Novo appropriated elements of Catholic discourse to legitimise its authority. He cites how Salazarism made recourse to religious imagery and symbolism to frame Portuguese colonialism as a form of missionary outreach; a process he terms the “sacralisation of empire” (Simpson 2014, 97-98). Sousa (2011), meanwhile, introduces the concept of “professorial fascism” to frame Salazarism as a technocratic mode of governance, posited as a sacred mission and framed in explicitly religious terms. Sousa (2011, 354-359) identifies a process of sacralisation of politics following the 1933 constitution, operationalised via “Salazar’s rhetoric of invisibility”. He illustrates how Salazarist rhetoric sought to deify Salazar’s public image by narrating his political trajectory in terms which mirrored the three stages of Christ’s spiritual “becoming” in the Bible (Sousa 2011, 257). Thus, existing research has demonstrated the suitability of the sacralisation of politics framework to the case of Salazarism, while also evidencing a need for more focused studies.
- 4 Ethno-symbolists contend modernists’ understanding of national identity as innately constructed, re (...)
9Salazarism — a syncretic political-ideological programme — repurposed well-established themes and tropes and adapted them to the contingencies of 1930s Portugal (Smith 2009).4 Within this political conjuncture, in which popular culture was undergoing a burgeoning massification and where such attempts to democratise political and cultural participation were cause for concern for Portugal’s conservative elites and ideologues, the authoritarian regime came to attribute great importance to aspects of language and culture as means of reproducing and naturalising its ideology and as instruments of social control (Trindade 2008, 2020). Accordingly, the Estado Novo elaborated official propaganda mechanisms and inaugurated the official “Censorship Service”, embedded within the institutional framework of the National Secretariat of Propaganda (SPN) and wielded in service of António Ferro’s “politics of the spirit”, a cultural and aesthetic counterpart to Estado Novo economic and social policy (Ó 1999).
10In the context of Ferro’s “politics of the Spirit” programme, the Diário da Manhã — established in 1931 as the official organ of the National Union, the only legal party under the Estado Novo — was instrumental in constituting mentalities and forging public opinion conducive to the Estado Novo’s political and ideological objectives. The Diário de Manhã articulated a discourse that decried liberal individualism and parliamentary democracy, while promoting a corporatist and nationalist worldview aligned with Salazar’s vision of political unity, moral order and national regeneration (Neto 2019). As such, the Diário da Manhã, beyond functioning merely as a propagandistic mouthpiece, constituted a key site in the construction and dissemination of Salazarism, offering critical insight into how the regime framed its legitimacy and elaborated its public image. The Diário de Manhã thus makes an excellent case study for examining the crystallisation of Salazarism.
11Censorship in 1930s Portugal also functioned as a discursive mechanism to reproduce Salazarism. César (2018, 2) views censorship as one of the “three pillars” on which the Salazarist “ecosystem of coercion” was founded, in tandem with the police and propaganda, to “construct a reality adapted to the reality of the dictatorship's political propaganda” (César 2018, 7). For Azevedo (1999, 23-33), meanwhile, censorship functioned to establish a “virtual country” aligned with the “Portuguese variant of Italian fascism”. Barros (2022, 109) approaches censorship as “a discursive weapon”, which enabled a political elite to elaborate a perception of reality conducive to the “authoritarian, nationalist and Catholic current”. She highlights the existence of a “early connection between censorship and the Catholic Church”, arguing that the censorship services’ Register and Justification of Cuts Bulletins reveal a “process of affirming authoritarian nationalism combined with a project to Catholicise Portuguese society” and that “the Catholic Church constitutes a fundamental pole in the diffuse, ‘sociological’ propaganda of Portuguese nationalist authoritarianism” (Barros 2022, 113-115). A recent article by Barros and Melo (2023) builds on Martins’ (2016) notion that a central tenant of Salazarist discourse was the omnipresence of the “eye of god,” conferring every citizen with a responsibility to save the nation from the Anti-Christ, to examine the influence of the international Catholic Church on censorship in Portugal during the Estado Novo. In short, censorship functioned to impose a reading of reality conducive to the ideological programme of Salazarism, within which Catholicism was a crucial nexus of discursive, symbolic and institutional power.
12The Spanish Civil War catalysed an era of intensified censorship in Portugal (Pena Rodríguez 2012a, 2012b, 2015). The Estado Novo saw the Spanish Civil War as an existential threat and accordingly sought to manage stringently public opinion around it (Pena Rodríguez 2019). Despite the complicated historical relationship between Portugal and Spain, Salazarist Portugal professed a deep ideological and cultural affinity with Franco’s nationalists and was also intensely alarmed about the implications of a Republican victory in Spain for Portugal’s political sovereignty. The Spanish Civil War thus provoked fluctuations in the Estado Novo’s ideology and public image as the regime instrumentalised the conflict to crystallise its ideology, centred around its vision of Portuguese national identity as intrinsically Catholic (Pena Rodríguez 1999, 2019; Simpson 2014). One crucial characteristic of this fluctuation was a blurring of the distinction between the religious and the political in Salazarist discourses, which increasingly framed political events in apocalyptical and civilizational terms (Azevedo 1999; Pena Rodríguez 2019).
13Increasingly, Salazarist narratives began to attribute to the state functions traditionally reserved for religion, while simultaneously presenting Salazar himself in deified, messianic terms, especially in relation to the events in Spain (Pena Rodríguez 2015, 2020). The official censorship and propaganda apparatus were the primary instruments for crystallising Salazar’s ideology and public image in response to the Spanish Civil War (Pena Rodríguez 2019, 2020). The battle between the Republicans and the Nationalists in Spain transcended the merely political and was constructed in biblical terms, as a confrontation between the forces of good and evil. Via these ideologically charged representations of the conflict, the Estado Novo instrumentalised the war to construct narratives which conferred the regime’s politics with divine purpose. Thus, the Spanish Civil War is a highly suitable chronology to examine the ideological functioning of censorship in Salazarist Portugal and explore the evolution of Salazarism, especially in its religious, sacralising dimensions.
14The empirical analysis locates Portela’s report within the discursive context of the sacralization of Salazarism and relates textual elements within the article to this broader systemic process. To this end, it will employ Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), a linguistic approach derived from conventional discourse analysis. CDA departs from conventional linguistic discourse analysis by reorienting the object of inquiry from the purely linguistic, as a self-contained system, towards the relations between power structures and discourse, to reveal how language functions to produce, reproduce and resist political power and ideology (Van Dijk 1993; Fairclough 1996). In short, CDA is an integrative approach which understands texts as necessarily embedded in a specific socio-political context and seeks to shed light on the mutually constitutive relationships between language and power by causally relating specific textual features, such as certain grammatical structures, rhetorical devices and lexical items, to the broader ideological and political structures governing the context of their production.
15Wodak et al. (2009) employed CDA to explore how Austrian national identity is discursively constructed. The authors contend that national identities are often constructed in reference to an “other”, a negative reference point in opposition to which the nation can more clearly define its self-concept (Wodak et al. 2009, 4, 15). Triandafyllidou (1998, 595-596) also cites “othering” as a discursive strategy intrinsic to nationalism, arguing that, as nationalism proceeds from the premise that the world is divided into nations, the existence of a specific nation, by definition, presupposes the existence of other nations too. Thus, national identities are inevitably constituted relationally, through the systematic “othering” of groups defined as external to the national community, thereby crystallising the nation’s sense-of-self by defining “Us” in opposition to “Them”. Van Dijk (2012) conceptualises the “Us” and “Them” categories as the “ingroup” and “outgroup”, respectively, to illustrate how ideological discourse seeks to foster social cohesion and mobilise support for a political-ideological project around a common antagonist, thus consolidating the dominant group’s position of power and legitimising its dominant status.
16Regarding the sacralisation of politics, Anderson (2016, 23) insists that nations must be understood in light of the “larger cultural systems” which preceded them, namely, the religious community and the dynastic realm. He argues that “imagined” national communities share an affinity with religious communities: nationalism — unlike liberalism or Marxism — is concerned with death, immortality and regeneration. Nationalism, like religion, gives meaning to death by promising eternal salvation to those who participate in its community and follow its moral and ethical codes. Nationalism thus alleviates anxieties about mortality by linking the dead with the yet unborn through a process of regeneration. By conceiving the nation as eternal, nationalism provides members with a sense of spiritual purpose, imbuing daily existence with meaning by framing national membership as participation in community that stretches back to a primordial past and extends beyond the death of the individual.
17Gentile (1990) coined the notion of the “sacralisation of politics” to describe the process by which the fascist state assumed functions which were traditionally the reserve of religion in 1920s Italy. Gentile’s theory builds on Durkheim’s notion that politics acquired a degree of functional equivalence between religion and politics in the context of societal secularisation. According to this functionalist understanding, as societies became increasingly secular, new civil religions would arise to play the social function previously played by traditional religions. In the context of 19th-century Europe, romantic nationalism was a highly suitable surrogate for religion and satisfied populations’ needs to engage in religious modes of thought and acts of devotion (Gentile 1990). However, Gentile (2004) makes a crucial distinction regarding the origin of the content from which these myths are composed — fascism was unconcerned with the originality of materials from which it fashioned its mythologies, but only their effectiveness in conferring the state with sacred properties. Fascism, therefore, gladly borrowed and adopted symbols and imagery both from Christianity and other political movements to construct the myths which sacralised the state. Thus, a regime aligned with a traditional religion can be considered an example of sacralised politics if the state syncretises itself with the traditional religion to achieve the status of sacred.
18Discourses in the Diário da Manhã demonstrate that the regime sought to naturalise its ideology and thus legitimise its power by aligning its politics with Catholic morality and spirituality, thereby presenting itself as a providential project concerned with ensuring Portugal’s spiritual salvation. The Estado Novo was the political-administrative expression of a putative spiritual essence and, under the stewardship of its messianic leader, Salazar, the only mode of political organisation capable of ensuring that Portugal fulfilled its spiritual destiny. Thus, Salazarist discourses sought to equate political loyalty to the Estado Novo with devotion to God; to oppose the Estado Novo’s political power was akin to religious heresy. Salazarism discursively constructed a Portuguese national identity in which political identity could not be separated from religious identity and where politics exhibited a high degree of functional equivalence with religion. In contrast to Italian Fascism or German Nazism, this was not achieved by replacing traditional forms of religion but rather by aligning with them, specifically a highly politicised version of Catholicism.
19Discursively constructing this national identity required constructing an “other” in opposition to which Portuguese spiritual and moral values could be defined. Since the 18th century, Portuguese antiliberal discourses had constructed liberalism as an alien and morally bankrupt ideology, incompatible with Portuguese cultural and ethical values. Discourses irrevocably linked liberalism to masonry and French Jacobinism to frame it as an attempt by foreign forces to undermine and corrupt “organic” Portuguese social structures and modes of life. This trope of liberalism as an agent of moral and social decay, fabricated and propagated by Portugal’s foreign enemies and irreconcilable with the Portuguese people’s innate spiritual essence, became one of the foundational tenets of Salazarism. In response to the socio-historic contingencies of 1930s Europe, however, in particular the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and the looming prospect of Marxist social revolution reaching Portugal, Salazarism reconfigured this invective against liberalism as a perfidious and heretical doctrine and applied it to communism, which became the principal “other” against which sacralised Portuguese national identity was constructed during the 1930s.
- 5 Diário da Manhã, 15/05/1936.
20On 15 May 1936, the Diário da Manhã published a transcript of a speech given by António da Fonseca on the Emissora Nacional, under the title “Communism is Against Religion”.5 Fonseca’s argument proceeds from the premise that if communism is, as stated by Lenin, an intrinsically materialist doctrine, then communism is by definition incompatible with a belief in any higher spiritual truth or authority, and the destruction of religion is one of its inherent objectives. Despite parting from this decidedly philosophical hypothesis, Fonseca immediately abandons intellectual abstractions and grounds his analysis in empirical data, providing statistics on the number of priests assassinated in or exiled from the USSR and citing Marx and Lenin directly to support his claim that the annihilation of religion is not merely an incidental aspect of communism but one of its essential ideological components and core objectives. This abandonment of sweeping rhetoric in favour of concrete evidence suggests that Fonseca was seeking to frame the conflict between religion and communism not merely as purely abstract or intellectual, but as one with urgent practical implications.
- 6 Diário da Manhã, 15/05/1936.
21Nevertheless, the author ends with a “rhetorical” flourish by quoting the “Militant Godless’” promise to “set fire to all the churches in the world” immediately followed by the statement “There is a church in every Portuguese village…”.6 By juxtaposing atheist communists’ stated intent to destroy religious institutions and infrastructure, Fonseca invites the reader to infer that the anti-religious violence ravaging the USSR could very well take root in Portugal. For Fonseca, communism is not some distant threat but an imminent and tangible menace. The struggle against it is thus not merely a battle for abstract ideals, but rather for the physical preservation of Portugal itself — Portugal’s duty to defend Christian civilisation from communism is not purely a symbolic or metaphorical crusade, but a fight for its very survival against an existential threat. Working from the premise that communism is an inherently materialist doctrine unconcerned with any transcendental purpose, Fonseca frames it as fundamentally incompatible with the pursuit of higher spiritual ideals which constitutes a fundamental axis around which defined Portuguese national identity. In this reading, the destruction of religion and the rejection of any form of spirituality are intrinsic to communism.
- 7 Diário da Manhã, 13/06/1936.
22On 13 June 1936, a speech given by Dr Manuel Ferreira de Rosa was transcribed under the title “Communism and Our Destiny”, in which the author expounded his ideas on the relationship between the “lies of communism” and “Portugal’s historic and human destiny”.7 Even his evocation of the concept of destiny, both in the body of the text as well as in the title itself, is loaded with subtext. In the context of nationalist discourse, the concept of destiny is charged with far greater emotive and metaphysical significance than that of future; as Anderson (2016, 22) asserts “It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny”. Destiny connotes transcendence and immortality via the regeneration of something vital and intrinsic, connecting the living and dead and ensuring a place in posterity for departed members of the national community. In nationalist discourses, the nation represents historical continuity and is a manifestation of realised destiny. Destiny, as opposed to merely “future”, is divinely ordained, immutable, existing outside of linear time and causality. Human beings can merely achieve or fail to achieve their destiny depending on their capacity to align with a path set out for them by some supernatural or divine mechanism. Here, beyond a mere political and ideological antagonist, communism is framed as an explicit threat to the realisation of Portugal’s national destiny.
- 8 Diário da Manhã, 13/06/1936.
23On 19 July 1936, two days after the Spanish Civil War broke out, the front page of the Diário da Manhã featured a report on the year’s commemoration of the Battle of Aljubarrota under the title “Pilgrimage to Aljubarrota” — a title dense in religious allusion that explicitly conflates the religious with the political.8 The report lionises the Portuguese combatants, especially the Mestre de Avis and Nuno Álvares, as heroes who “sealed with their generous and ardent blood the historic record of the Portuguese nation's independence from Spain and the world”. The Salazarist reading of the Battle of Aljubarrota is of a glorious victory in which a heroic minority of Portuguese national heroes freed Portugal from the yoke of illegitimate foreign rule from Spain to ensure Portugal’s sovereignty. Such a reading becomes charged with additional layers of meaning in the context of the outbreak of civil war in Spain and the possibility of a Spanish republic dominated by an internationalist ideology bent on mobilising transnational class solidarity to export a Marxist social revolution abroad. Evoking the history of Castilian dominance over the Portuguese monarchy and describing victory over it in such exalted and providential terms is an attempt to draw clear parallels between the struggle against the Crown of Castille and Spanish communism, as battles for the preservation of Portugal’s national soul against an alien invader intent on corrupting the nation’s moral and spiritual fabric.
24According to the author, the Portuguese forces at Aljubarrota “fought with faith and valour, for a well-defined and concrete ideal — the Freedom of the Fatherland”. This phrase reinforces the idea that Christian faith was a decisive factor in ensuring victory for the Portuguese forces and a foundational element of the putative cause of Portuguese nationalism, which supposedly triumphed at Aljubarrota. However, here the author goes further by also positing an ineluctable relationship between concrete political objectives and divine providence — faith guaranteed the “well-defined and concrete” ideal of “the Freedom of the Fatherland”, thereby implying that politics functions as a means of manifesting divine will on Earth and, by extension, that the project of Portuguese nationalism is imbued with spiritual purpose. Given the implicit parallels posited between the historic victory at Aljubarrota and the contemporary threat posed by Spanish communism, the sacred dimensions conferred on the Mestre de Avis and Nuno Álvares can be extended to Salazar and the Estado Novo in their opposition to the forces that threaten to destroy the value systems and socio-political structures that allowed Portugal to realise its spiritual destiny. Here, the Estado Novo is being retroactively projected into the deep past, with Salazarism representing the contemporary iteration of the centuries-old mission to vanquish ungodly and diabolic hordes seeking the destruction of Christian civilisation — the reconfiguration of a foundational trope in antiliberal Portuguese nationalisms since the 19th century.
25The article continues to depict the battle in mythic terms, consistent with Salazarist representations of the victory at Aljubarrota, claiming that the “exhilarating Portuguese case” is the “guiding thread of the history of nationality”. Most tellingly, the report asserts that “faith in God, love of the Fatherland and trust in our Leader worked the miracle of victory”, adding “Now, as then, we must have unwavering faith, patriotism and confidence so that we can triumph in this harsh battle for the restoration, defence and advancement of Portugal”. This is a further attempt at what Burger (apud Wodak et al. 2009, 1) termed the “national dilation of time” — the socio-historically specific nationalist sentiments of 1930s Portugal are being framed as timeless, eternal, and the Estado Novo as the culmination of a primordial ethnogenetic process, the organic political expression of a historically distinct people united around a shared innate set of character traits and values. The Portuguese nation has always existed, Salazar is merely its inheritor and custodian, and the Estado Novo is the only political model capable of articulating its intrinsic essence.
- 9 The Portuguese uses the word Chefe, which evokes the profoundly resonant notion of chefe de família(...)
26The trinity of “faith in God, love of the Fatherland and trust in our Leader”, framed as the causes of Portuguese victory at Aljubarrota, expresses a high degree of resemblance to “Salazar’s Trilogy”: “God, Fatherland and Family”. The intimate associations between “Leader”9 and “Family” render the two sets of values almost identical. This analogy between the principles upheld at Aljubarota and those championed by the Estado Novo further underlines Salazarist discourses’ desire to construct Portuguese national identity as rooted in an essential moral and ethical code and attribute deep historical continuity to the cause of Portuguese nationalism, of which Salazarism is the most recent incarnation. In this reading, Salazarism is a means to preserve and perpetuate an authentic and organic manifestation of Portuguese nationhood, one consonant with the country’s most deeply-held traditions and core values and which achieves continuity with its glorious and heroic past.
27In summary, the Diário da Manhã’s discourse exhibits two primary objectives: the sacralisation of Portugal’s national history and identity, and the framing of communism as the “other”. These constructions constitute the respective “ingroup” and “outgroup” categories along which Salazarism articulated its creation myths, positing the Portuguese nation as eternal and timeless, a manifestation of divine providence. The evocation of historical events establishes a narrative of continuity, where the nation’s historic victories in defending its faith and territory are framed as prefiguring the civilizational struggle against communism. The narrative extends beyond the past and present to encompass Portugal’s divinely ordained destiny. By aligning with its traditional values and defending them in the face of imminent threat, Portugal will preserve Christian civilisation against the debasing effect of crass materialism and divisive class politics, thereby realising its national destiny.
28Regarding the “outgroup” component of the discourse, meanwhile, by positing continuity between the Battle of Aljubarrota and the dynamics of political and military conflicts of 1930s Europe, the contemporary struggle against communism becomes the latest iteration of Portugal’s historic mission to defend Christian civilisation. This apocalyptic vision imbues the drive to uphold traditional values and morality with existential urgency, transforming the struggle against communism from a mere political confrontation to a battle for the spiritual redemption and salvation of humanity’s eternal soul, thus framing Salazarism as a providentialist project. It is in the context of the discursive construction of sacralised Portuguese “Ingroup” national identity, defined in opposition to an othered “Outgroup”, the demonised image of communism, that Portela’s article and the censor’s logic for removing a passage from it must be interpreted.
- 10 Diário de Lisboa, 23/07/1926.
29Since its inception, the Diário de Lisboa was a groundbreaking newspaper with a cutting-edge approach to journalism and dedication to high culture and art — even its logo was designed by the modernist painter António Soares. Its first edition featured an excerpt from a novel by the esteemed novelist Aquilino Ribeiro, as well as a text by the modernist poet and future director of the SPN, António Ferro, on page three, accompanied by illustrations by the multidisciplinary artist Almada Negreiros (Lobo 2022). When in June 1926, the Military Dictatorship inaugurated official prior censorship, the Diário’s front page of the 23 June edition, the final day before censorship came into effect, carried a caustic invective against censorship, lamenting the impoverishing effect the move would have on the quality of public debate and the intellectual autonomy of the individual.10 The Diário de Lisboa had always positioned itself as a bastion of free speech and independent thought, adopting an openly dissident and defiant stance to Portugal’s authoritarian politics (Cabrera 2022). Portela’s report appears on page four of the Diário de Lisboa’s first edition on 15 August 1936. It details the events of a skirmish between a combined force of Falangists and Carlists (requetés) and forces loyal to the Spanish Republic in Somossierra, just north of Madrid, on Sunday, 13 August. The Register and Justification of Cuts Bulletin for 17 August 1935 details that the censor stipulated that the following passage be cut from the article before publication:
- 11 Museu da Presidência da República, Boletim de registo e justificação de cortes, 17/08/1936, PT/MPR/ (...)
Diário de Lisboa, 15 August: Several cuts were made to the chronicles from its special correspondents in Spain, as they were deemed inconvenient. One example is an episode recounted by Artur Portela: ‘.... The other day, Father Redim had a difficult case. He was a sad young man who, unlike today's Spanish youth, was afraid to die, shivering. Filled with remorse, his victims rose up like spectres before his stunned steps, he wept; he renounced everything. The afternoon was beautiful, and the platoon was waiting. Then Father Redim, during a long walk through the countryside, gave him a lengthy confession, always followed by a soldier to ensure he could not escape. The boy accepted God and, with a serene soul, was already talking about other things, when the priest, realising that he had now prepared him sufficiently to appear before the Lord, signalled to the soldier. A bullet rang out from behind him, and the communist fell, exhilarated, in the middle of the golden wheat, with a happy smile on his lips, without ever having realised that death was coming. Shameful, don't you think?.11
30Portela’s report is written in an unmistakably literary style and offers a keenly subjective account of his personal experience of the events, rendered in evocatively descriptive and emotive language. Indeed, Portela opens his account with a decidedly impressionistic depiction of the requetés’ dawn mass that Sunday, emphasising the sensory aspects, such as the colour of the foliage and the warmth of the sun. The style is expressive over purely informative, and Portela is clearly intent on eliciting emotional responses in his reader via pathos and appeals to the senses. This approach adds a poetic layer to the narrative, blending aesthetic, spiritual and emotional reflections with factual content, suggesting that Portela’s report is not merely a documentary account of a battle, but a meditation on the spiritual and moral dimensions of the conflict. The second crucial characteristic of Portela’s report is its intent to narrate within a moral and spiritual frame of reference and place the action in a religious context — from the outset, the text is dense with religious allusions, from the subheading “The ‘requetés’ outdoor mass” to the description in the second paragraph of the silence as a “divine blessing”. There is a clear and consistent intent throughout to foreground the religious dimensions of the events and depict them in biblical terms. This biblical imagery connects the battle to a larger metaphysical war, a framing that aligns with the ideological views of the Estado Novo.
31Portela initially depicts the requetés favourably: “There were several squads of “requetés”, those who, under fire, obeyed neither their officers or prudence, bravely climbing the terrain and falling, rolling with their red berets”, and later refers to them as the “brave «requetés»” and “heroic Navarrese”. The report goes on to describe a mass conducted by the requetés on the morning of their assault on the village of Castilla la Vieja, which is interrupted by an aerial attack by the republican forces. Portela employs hyperbole in his rendering of this scene to reinforce the heroic image of the requetés and offer a vividly dramatic and subjective account of the scenes: “Kneeling on the ground, immovable bronze statues, the heroic Navarrese didn't even look to see where death was coming from”. The image of the Spanish Republicans bombing a mass can be read as a stark and damning indictment of the barbarism and ungodliness of the Republican cause. After the attack, the squadron leader, lieutenant-colonel Radau, seizes the flag, climbs the altar and defiantly waves it at the retreating aircraft so that, if it returns, “it would see the Sacred, passionate Heart of Jesus burning brightly in her, in a holocaust to God and the Fatherland”. The image being painted here is unequivocal — this is a religious war, in which political and religious allegiances cannot be separated. The nationalist cause represents nothing less than the defence of Christian morality against a sacrilegious ideology, the bastion of Christianity in Europe. However, despite initially seeming to reinforce aspects of the Estado Novo narrative around the Spanish Civil War by representing the nationalists in positive terms, Portela later on gradually opens up a more complex discussion on heroism and morality in the context of war.
32Let us return to the censor’s report and the passage it stipulated be cut. To understand better why the censor deemed this passage “inconvenient”, we must interpret this text in reference to the allusion to Goya in its title (“Tragic Visions Wrenched from a Goya Painting”). The painting being referenced is undoubtedly Goya’s The Third of May 1808, which depicts a French firing squad executing Spanish villagers who participated in the Second of May Uprising against Napoleon’s occupying army during the Peninsular War. The painting is widely considered to constitute a drastic rupture with the conventions of war paintings and subvert many of the principles which traditionally informed how war was represented in art (Hughes 2003; Capers 2021). The perspective is jarring, unrealistic and too flat, refusing to obey the conventional precepts of composition for this genre, which had classically sought to portray war in epic and grandiose terms. The painting has a disorientating centre of balance, with the firing squad far too close to the man they are about to execute, creating an unsettling, unproportioned composition. This deviation from classical principles of perspective and framing is almost certainly a motivated artistic decision to produce a less idealised and aesthetically pleasing depiction of war — Goya’s intent is to show war as ugly, brutal, grotesque and lacking in any redeeming virtue. There is nothing heroic or glorious taking place here, and by subverting the rules of art, Goya is forcing us to put aside any romantic notions we might have of war and confront a much bleaker and harsher reality.
Figure 1. Goya’s The Third of May 1808
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:El_tres_de_mayo_de_1808_en_Madrid_%282008%29.jpg
33The most forceful artistic statement Goya makes is placing the helpless victim as the piece’s central figure (Hughes 2003). Here, the individual victim is foregrounded, humanised and represented, perhaps, as a martyr, dressed in white in a scene dominated by sombre colours and opening his arms wide in a Christ-like pose. His martyrdom is reinforced by the light shining on him from the nearby lantern — light had long symbolised martyrdom in Christian art. Nevertheless, as we shall see, this man is not quite a martyr in the typical Christian sense, and his death is essentially futile. The crucifixion parallels are further strengthened by the presence of stigmata wounds on the man’s hands. There is, however, no Christ-like serenity or dignity on his face — this man is helpless and despondent, and his death has no redemptive quality. He is dying for nothing, the victim of senseless brutality. This is a painfully human Christ about to suffer a meaningless and inhumane death. There is a chilling pathos in Goya’s depiction of war as an irredeemable act of barbarity whose victim is a painfully relatable humanity. Such a representation stands in bleak contrast to the conventions of romantic and baroque art, which were chiefly concerned with conventionally stylised and idealised representations of heroism and valour (Bouvier 2011; Capers 2021).
34The poignant humanity of the individualised victim is starkly juxtaposed with the faceless anonymity of the firing squads — with their backs to us, dressed in identical uniforms and adopting identical postures, they constitute a depersonalised monolithic mass, unfeeling, undifferentiated and dehumanised. Yet despite foregrounding his protagonist’s individuality via composition and the use of light and colour, Goya simultaneously undermines his individuality by presenting him as a member of a mass of men to be executed in a mechanistic, almost industrialised fashion, surrounded by the corpses of those already executed. This suggests that, while Goya wishes us to identify with this man’s individual humanity, he is encouraging us to infer that his victim is being debased to an anonymous non-entity by an indifferent and uniform military machine, one entirely unmoved by the human suffering they are inflicting. Yes, this man is an individual, but he is being reduced to a faceless insignificance at the moment of his death, just another statistic of a slaughter en masse. Furthermore, this juxtaposition of the individual victim and the depersonalised mass raises grave implications about the scale of the tragedy unfolding — if this member of the depersonalised mass possesses an individual humanity, by extension, so does every other member, and each of the corpses is that of an equally human victim.
35Tension also exists between Goya’s martyrised protagonist and his representation of war as futile, brutal and lacking in any heroic or redemptive quality. The contrast between the biblical imagery and the radically unidealised depiction of war perhaps constitutes a direct attack on Christianity itself — by comparing the executed man, dying a pointless and unheroic death in a senseless and brutal war, with Christ, Goya could be attacking Christianity’s foundational myth. Perhaps Goya is implying that Christ died for nothing. This reading is reinforced by Goya’s pronounced anti-clericalism, as expressed constantly throughout his oeuvre — Goya is explicit in his attacks on the Catholic Church as a corrupt institution that functioned as an instrument of social control in the interest of entrenched socio-political power (Vega 1994). However, in The Third of May 1808 Goya arguably goes far beyond critiquing the practices of the church and priesthood and seems instead to be attacking the symbols and central tenets of Catholicism themselves. He appears to have transcended social and political commentary and launched an attack on Christianity as a belief system by questioning the redemptive effect of the crucifixion and thus, by extension, Christ’s divinity itself.
36Let us compare Goya’s nightmarish vision with Portela’s article and, crucially, the passage censored from it. As already established, Portela’s representation of the aerial attack on the requetés is dramatic, idealised and rendered in language reminiscent of epic poetry. The requetés are portrayed in heroic, mythic terms as fearless Christian warriors engaged in a righteous struggle against a mechanised and faceless enemy. Victims of the attack likewise remain anonymous, and there is no attempt to highlight their individuality via detailed descriptions of individual deaths — they remain archetypes, idealised abstractions, fallen heroes fighting bravely for a just cause. In this section of the article, then, there is little resemblance to Goya’s painting or anything that the censor would deem subversive, and Portela appears content to narrate the events within the parameters established by the official narrative around the Spanish Civil War. However, a drastic shift in tone occurs when Portela goes on to describe the aftermath of a skirmish to control Buitrago, a tactically important high point. Portela makes a clear separation between these two sections using a dinkus, and opens the second section as follows:
- 12 Diário de Lisboa, 15/08/1936.
The drama is different now. It's the contrast. A page from Goya is being painted. It's one of those sinister shootings of the French, in ‘Cuatro Caminos’, in the bloody light of the lanterns, with the death squad already lined up. In a blaze of fire, the head of the man to be executed stands out, splattered with anger and howling with contempt. It is a human blasphemy, made sacred by patriotism. The revolt is greater than the pain. Goya should have seen ‘this’.12
37In addition to the explicit reference to Goya, any reader familiar with The Third of May 1808 will infer associations between the scenes described here and Goya’s painting from the references to the “sinister shootings of the French... in the bloody light of the torches, the death squad already lined up”. While these images are unequivocal and chilling evocations of Goya’s painting, a more implicit parallel is Portela’s decision to afford a position of thematic centrality to the victim and his undeniable intent to humanise him by emphasising his individuality and foregrounding the suffering he experiences at the moment of his death. Portela appears to be attempting something decidedly subversive here — by humanising the executed man, a member of the Spanish Republican Army, Portela indirectly casts aspersions on the official narrative of the Spanish Civil War as a conflict between defenders of Christian morality and civilisation and an abstract mass of godless savages. Furthermore, by equating the requetés with the French firing squads and individualising the victim, Portela may even be inverting this narrative to some degree. What is also telling is Portela’s evocation of Christian morality to condemn the execution from a humanistic perspective (“a human blasphemy”), followed by a subversion of the sacralisation of the nationalist cause (“made sacred by patriotism”), where Portela seems to be mocking nationalists’ attempts to legitimise their violence by invoking a higher spiritual purpose. Nevertheless, here Portela demonstrates some restraint and does not dwell excessively on his individualised depiction of the victim nor the religious analogies, which likely accounts for this censor’s decision to allow this passage to appear in the article.
- 13 Diário de Lisboa, 15/08/1936.
38We cannot say for certain where exactly in the report the censored passage was intended to appear, but it seems safe to assume that it originally came somewhere after the third paragraph, which ends as follows: “The fat and affable Father Redim,… recounts several episodes…”.13 Understood in this way, the censored passage is one of Padre Redim’s anecdotes, which would account for its opening, “The other day, Father Redim had a difficult case”. The fourth, fifth and sixth paragraphs recount the details of Padre Remin’s experiences with executions, with the fifth and sixth stating that “Almost all the communists, despite being atheists” requested to see a priest before being executed. None of these cases is examined in detail, however, and the “communists” remain an abstract, depersonalised mass. The censored passage was likely intended to appear after the sixth paragraph. Understood in this way, the censor’s motives for removing the censored passage come into much clearer focus. The censored passage can be read as a reimagining of Goya’s The Third of May 1808, which uses the painting as a frame of reference to construct meanings antithetical to the official narrative around the Spanish Civil War. Portela riffs on the themes in Goya’s painting but reorganises them to compose messages which directly pertain to his contemporary moment and indirectly contend the Estado Novo’s reading of it. Specifically, Portela’s text subverts the black-and-white morality of Salazarist discourses and distorts the respective images of the “communists” and the nationalists elaborated in the official discourses.
39In direct reference to Goya and echoing the execution he describes earlier in his article, Portela places the executed man in the foreground, at pains to highlight his individuality and humanity. Portela further strengthens the parallels with Goya by juxtaposing the individuality of his victim with his dehumanising condition as a member of a mass of men to be executed, inviting us to consider the other anonymised victims of the slaughter in the same terms — as in Goya’s painting, asserting the individual humanity of one victim of a mass execution humanises the mass as a whole and forces us to confront the scale of the tragedy. Portela is undermining the image of the “communists” as a faceless and indistinct horde. But where Portela is at his most subversive is in his description of the central figure’s apparent religious devoutness at the moment of his execution — not only is this man, a communist, presented as an individual, but a seemingly Godfearing one with a keen and fervent desire for absolution from a Catholic priest. This representation constitutes an attack on one of the foundational tropes of Salazarism, namely, that of nationalism as the defender of Christian values and morality against ungodly forces bent on the destruction of Western civilisation.
40The anonymity of the executioner, who is never even referenced explicitly — a shot simply rings out from behind, and the man falls — reinforces the associations between the Francoist forces and the faceless French firing squad in The Third of May 1808. Portela thus further reorganises the meanings in Goya’s painting to critique the narrative and symbolic dimensions of Salazarism and subvert the Estado Novo’s attempts to disseminate Salazarism via representations of the Spanish Civil War in print media. According to Portela’s testimony, the executed man, having received confession, was “sufficiently prepared” to die — essentially, a Christian who had been absolved by a Catholic priest. The pathos-leaden image of a Godfearing Catholic shot from behind at the orders of a priest appears to be an explicit attempt to elicit sympathy for the victim and a direct appeal to the reader to identify with him as a fellow Christian. Perhaps, even more subversively and echoing Goya’s anticlericalism, Portela is showing the priest as complicit in, if not directing, an act of cold-blooded murder against a repentant sinner, thereby inviting the inference that the Catholic Church often acts at odds with Christian morality. If we consider the anti-clerical, and perhaps even blasphemous meanings encoded into the painting to which Portela draws such unambiguous parallels in relation to the Estado Novo’s official narrative around the Spanish Civil War, the censor's aversion to this passage becomes painfully apparent.
41The passage censored from Portela’s article was likely cut because it attacked the foundational tenets of Salazar’s sacralised nationalism. Specifically, the image of an unarmed communist shot in the back while in a state of grace, with the complicity of a Catholic priest, disrupted the black-and-white moral dichotomy underpinning the Estado Novo’s attempts to instrumentalise the Spanish Civil War to naturalise an “Us vs. Them” nationalist discourse. This graphic depiction also destabilised the Salazarist framing of the nationalists as the “ingroup”, a kindred cause imbued with higher spiritual and moral purpose, in opposition to the othered communist “outgroup”. In light of the un-Christian brutality Portela recounts, alignment with Franco’s nationalists — framed by Estado Novo propaganda as defenders of Christian civilisation — would have exposed contradictions in the regime’s attempt to fashion a providentialist myth which posited an inseparable connection with nationalist political allegiance and Catholic religious devotion. Furthermore, given that a depersonalised mass of “godless communists” served as the other against which this sacralised configuration of Portuguese national identity was discursively constructed, by creating associations between the “communist” executed in Somosierra and the Spanish peasant from Goya’s painting, Portela humanises the figure of Salazarism’s principal ideological opponent, thereby undermining the foundations of Salazarist discourse around the Spanish Civil War.
42Portela’s article thus constitutes an instance of cultural resistance to the Estado Novo’s discursive power, a counter-discourse challenging the Estado Novo’s hegemonic narrative. Here, in direct opposition to the Salazarist “Us vs Them” mythology, the Francoist cause was not imbued with divine purpose, the struggle against the communist “outgroup” was not the battle to save humanity’s eternal soul and the nationalist “ingroup” was not the earthly expression of divine providence. By extension, the Estado Novo was not performing a divine mission, and its demonised enemies were, in fact, fellow mortal humans, helpless victims desperate for absolution before being butchered in cold blood by God’s soldiers. Contrary to Salazarist discourses around the Spanish Civil War, there was no higher spiritual value at stake in the conflict — this was, like all wars, a brutal, inhumane conflict devoid of any redemptive quality or transcendental purpose.
43This article has demonstrated how official discourse sought to sacralise Salazarism during the Spanish Civil War and argued that the censor cut a passage from Portela’s article as it subverted this ideological construction. It thereby addresses a gap in the literature regarding the sacralisation of politics as it relates to Salazarism and thus contributes to the debate concerning Salazarism’s ideological character, the role of censorship and propaganda in disseminating Salazarism and, crucially, makes an original contribution by examining a case of attempted discursive resistance. Furthermore, the article maintains critical dialogue with the broader discussion around the sacralisation of politics and the discursive construction of national identity more generally. One of the article’s central considerations has been the need to incorporate “bottom-up” perspectives into the study of censorship by examining how an agent of cultural production sought — and failed — to evade censorship and sneak a veiled criticism of Salazarism into a major newspaper at a crucial historical juncture. The empirical component of this paper should be read as a case study, and future studies should expand on this approach by seeking to reconstitute the dynamic between Salazarist and oppositionist discourses in print media using broader data sets, in tandem with the documentation in the censorship archives to shed light on censorship’s ideological function in this discursive confrontation.