Ralph Fox and Portugal Now (1936): a Communist militant’s odyssey in search of Salazar’s country
Ralph Fox and Portugal Now (1936): a Communist militant’s odyssey in search of Salazar’s country
College of Arts School of Modern Languages and Cultures
Date: Friday 06 October 2023
Time: 13:00 - 14:30
Venue: Hetherington Building, room 317.
Category: Public lectures
Speaker: João Paulo Ascenso Silva (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
Website: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYkcOGrqD8sHdBpzS2HqlbJtphaqIqwyR8Y
Ralph Fox and Portugal Now (1936): a Communist Militant’s Odyssey in search of Salazar’s Country.
João Paulo Ascenso Silva, New University of Lisbon
Friday, 6th October 2023, 1 p.m., Hetherington 317 and online
Abstract
Although numerous, the travel narratives of English authors who visited Portugal during the 20th century have been unjustly forgotten, despite the fact that they contain an important body of information about the periods of the First Republic (1910-1922), the Estado Novo (1936-1974) and the Carnation Revolution (25 April 1974). Perhaps because of their relative historical and temporal proximity, they have been overlooked by the same scholars who have exhaustively studied similar texts from preceding centuries.
In 2006, contrary to this trend, the Portuguese translation of the account of the trip to Portugal by British writer and communist activist Ralph Winston Fox, whose work Portugal Now was published for the first time in 1937. Written in 1936, during the period in which, in the service of the Spanish Republic and after having enlisted in the International Brigades, Fox travelled to the Portugal of Salazar and the Estado Novo, on a risky espionage mission, in order to investigate and assess the extent of the logistical, diplomatic, material, military and human support granted by the Portuguese fascist regime to the Junta de Burgos and the Nationalist forces.
The date chosen for the release of the Portuguese translation of Fox's account was certainly not an accident. In fact, 2006 was the 70th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War and also of the Ralph Fox’s account. On the other hand, it is well known that the participation of the Oliveira Salazar regime in the Spanish Civil War, alongside Generalissimo Franco, has been the subject of growing interest among our historians, intellectuals and literati since the Carnation Revolution, as attested by the significant number of monographs and dissertations that have been written on this subject since then.
It is also important to note that the very slow and gradual opening of the archives of institutions directly associated with the Estado Novo, such as the PIDE-DGS (the Estado Novo Secret Service), the Portuguese Legion, the Censorship Commission, the National Propaganda Secretariat, and the Salazar Archive itself, has been making it possible for our historians to consult a vast collection of documents, which were not only unprocessed, but whose access was equally difficult for academics and scholars of contemporary Portuguese history. In this talk, João Paulo will be discussing lesser-known aspects and details of one of the darkest and most dramatic pages in the history of the Estado Novo have been recently brought to light and made public.