Salazar, Antonio de Oliveira

(b. Beira, 28 Apr. 1889, d. 29 July 1970) Portuguese; Finance Minister 1928 – 32, Prime Minister 1932 – 68 Salazar was born in the village of Santa Comba Dao, in the northern interior province of Beira. His parents were small farmers. In 1900 he joined the Catholic seminary of Viseu for his education. He remained there eight years and was deeply marked by this experience. Nevertheless, he did not decide to pursue an ecclesiastical career but went to the University of Coimbra where he became a professor.

In 1919 he was falsely accused by the Republic of conspiring against the state with three other colleagues. This led him to enter politics and become part of the Catholic opposition against the anticlerical Republican parties. In 1921, he was briefly a Member of Parliament. Disappointed with the politics in the First Republic, Salazar became co-founder of the extra-parliamentary Academic Centre for Christian Democracy (Centro Academico para a Democracia Crista — CADC) and a leading Catholic opponent of the Republican regime in the 1920s. He came to the forefront of Portuguese politics after the collapse of the First Republic in a military coup d'état on 28 May 1926. He refused a request from that military dictatorship to become Finance Minister, because he was not granted full control over the spending of all ministries. The economic pressures increased and he accepted a renewed invitation in April 1928. He imposed a very restrictive budget which stabilized the economy within two years, and was regarded as the saviour of the country.

After several political crises within the government, Salazar became Prime Minister in 1932. In 1933 and the following year his constitution created the Estado Novo, the New State, along corporatist lines. This concentrated power in the hands of the Prime Minister and the only legal political organization, the União Nacional. His authoritarian dictatorship formally lasted until 25 April 1974, but he was removed from office earlier in September 1968, after suffering a stroke. In his forty years at the helm, he attempted to preserve the way of life of a largely agrarian population and persecuted the opposition with his political police (PVDE and later PIDE). During the 1940s his dictatorship was sympathetic to Fascism, and his policies changed only slightly in the 1950s and 1960s. Portugal was neutral during the Second World War and was integrated into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 and into the United Nations Organization (UNO) in 1955. The invasion of the Portuguese enclaves in Goa and Damao Diu in December 1961, and the subsequent annexation by Indian troops, had a spillover effect in Portugal. The colonial wars in the Portuguese African empire, Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, imposed a considerable strain upon the budget. The international pressure coming from the democracies in Western Europe, the decolonization process, and the façade organic elections in the 1950s and 1960s forced Portugal to change both domestically and overseas. Salazar left this legacy to his successor Marcello Caetano.

(b c 1650; d Mexico City, 27 May 1715). Mexican composer of Spanish birth. Originally a prebendary in Seville, he went to Mexico and became cathedral maestro de capilla in Puebla (1679) and then in Mexico City (1688); a skilled organizer and teacher, he supervised the installation of a new organ there in 1695. His music, all sacred, is conservative in style, with little chromaticism; some works (e.g. Salve regina) are for double choir. He had a reputation for writing extended villancicos for feast days and composed 20 such pieces, 1680-1704.

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The government of the Portuguese statesman António de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970) once was considered to be the very model of a modern authoritarian political system.

António de Oliveira Salazar was born on April 28, 1889, in Vimieiro near Santa Comba Dão in the province of Beira Alta. His parents, owners of several small estates, as well as innkeepers, were António de Oliveira and María de Resgate Salazar, who, despite financial problems, saw to it that Salazar was well educated. He entered the seminary of Viseu in 1900, but after 8 years of religious training he decided to teach. In 1910 he began to study economics at the University of Coimbra, spending 4 years there as a student and another 7 as an economics professor. He obtained a chair of political economy in 1918. A knowledge of economics was valuable in underdeveloped Portugal, and soon Salazar was well known by the government for his monetary skills.

The emergence of Salazar as a national figure came at a difficult moment in Portuguese history. After more than a century of economic difficulties tied to imperial decline, political life had degenerated badly. The double assassination of Carlos I and the crown prince in February 1908 and the overthrow of Manuel II in October 1910 had led to creation of a republic which in the 16 years of its existence went from crisis to crisis. The University of Coimbra furnished many republican leaders in the first phase of the period, but spread of a deeper radicalism engendered a conservative reaction led by António Sardinha. He sought an "organic monarchy" that would be traditionalist and antiparliamentary, but chaos prevented any success.

Economic Policies

In the stalemate after 1918 Salazar's star rose. His economic thought was strongly influenced by Catholic corporatism and Leo XIII's Rerum novarum. He favored joint labor-management industrial commissions, compulsory arbitration, and Catholic trade unions. In January 1921 Salazar was one of three Catholic deputies elected to the Parliament, but turmoil was still so great that he attended only a few sessions before returning to the university. However, in May 1926, when a military dictatorship overthrew the republic, Salazar was offered the Ministry of Economic Affairs. He refused the position until 1928, when he received great powers which made him the most important figure in the government.

Salazar's reforms brought some national stability by prohibiting the import of foreign goods, cutting the state budget, and developing a new tax system. Soon he turned to a revision of the structure of government itself. "In an administrative system in which lack of sincerity and clarity were evident," he said, "the first requirement is a policy of truth. In a social order in which rights were competitive and unaccompanied by equivalent duties, the crying need is for a policy of sacrifice. And in a nation divided against itself by groups and clashing interests which threatened its unity, the main need is a national policy."

Ruler of Portugal

The national policy emerged during 1929 in the wake of Portugal's newfound stability, when Salazar's reforms stood the test of the Depression. The military leaders of the dictatorship no longer had as much prestige or interest in ruling, and Salazar informally became the strongest man in the regime. He immediately began to write a new constitution which was approved by plebiscite on March 19, 1933. It created a corporative state divided by levels into sindicatos (government unions by industry), gremios (guilds of employers), and ordens (white-collar organizations). Each of these handled welfare arrangements, employment of their members, and vocational training and negotiated national wage agreements. Each was also guided by special government secretariats that dictated policy. A fourth level was made up by the armed forces, although here there was more autonomy in honor of the role played by the services in establishing the new regime. All four levels elected representatives who then chose deputies for the national Parliament, giving the franchise to the corporative institutions rather than to the national electorate - a variation of the indirect franchise. Salazar's motto was "control by stability," which was facilitated further by the provision that only his National Union party had official status. The president of the party became president of the republic with enormous executive powers, not the least being control of the newly established secret police, the PIDE.

Much of this structure had been modeled on Mussolini's Italy, and Salazar remained diplomatically close to Mussolini in the 1930s. He intrigued several times against the Spanish Republic, and when the Civil War broke out in Spain, he recognized Franco's Nationalists in December 1937. Portugal supplied funds and arms to the Burgos government until the end of the war, and on March 17, 1939, a pact of friendship and nonaggression was signed between the two countries which pledged eternal opposition to communism and created an "Iberian bloc" linking them together against outside attack. For Portugal it was the first time since 1640 that it had cooperated directly with Spain, but even so Salazar was restrained by long-standing treaties with Great Britain, which kept him from closer cooperation with either Franco or Mussolini. Portugal, as a result, remained correctly neutral during World War II until 1943, when Salazar granted the Allies bases in Portuguese territory. His anticommunism brought Portugal into NATO in 1949 and won him backing to join the United Nations at the same time.

Postwar Period

The postwar period, despite these successes, was troubled, first because of domestic economic difficulties and then because of colonial unrest in Angola and Mozambique. Government mismanagement of both problems led to renewal of opposition to Salazar's dictatorship in 1956. Two years later, an opposition candidate, Humberto Delgado, polled a quarter million votes for the presidency, which Salazar had occupied since 1951. The PIDE became more active, but the opposition continued to grow until 1965, when Delgado was assassinated in Spain. By that time Draconian measures in the colonies diminished the drive for independence to the point where there was less unrest in metropolitan Portugal, although vestiges of opposition continued to manifest themselves spasmodically until September 1968, when Salazar was incapacitated by a massive brain hemorrhage. His 36-year rule thus came to an end on September 27, when Marcelo Caetano of the National Union replaced him in the premiership. Salazar died on July 27, 1970, in Lisbon.

Further Reading

A biography of Salazar is Christine Garnier, Salazar: An Intimate Portrait (1952; trans. 1954). See also Gowan Pinheiro, Oldest Ally: A Portrait of Salazar's Portugal (1961).

For more information on António de Oliveira Salazar, visit Britannica.com.

Salazar, António de Oliveira (əntô'nyʊ thĭ ʊlēvā'rə sələzär') , 1889–1970, Portuguese statesman and dictator. After studying at the Univ. of Coimbra, he became professor of political economy there. Profoundly religious, Salazar was the leader of a political group committed to putting into action the social principles expressed in the encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII. He was elected a deputy in 1921 but withdrew from the chamber immediately, viewing its proceedings as futile. After the military coup of 1926 Salazar was briefly minister of finance, and in 1928 he was recalled to office by Gen. António de Fragoso Carmona. Given the full financial control that he demanded, he put Portuguese finances on a stable footing for the first time in the 20th cent. As premier after 1932, Salazar was generally considered a dictator. He introduced (1933) a new constitution that established a corporative and authoritarian state. Political opposition was effectively suppressed. Salazar supported the Nationalists during the Spanish civil war (1936–39), but he maintained relations with Portugal's traditional ally, Britain, and permitted the Allies to use the Azores as a base during World War II. After the war he set in motion several economic-development programs, but there were signs of increasing opposition to his regime. In his final years he devoted considerable resources to the attempt to suppress revolts in Portugal's African colonies. In 1968, Salazar suffered a severe stroke and was replaced as premier by Marcello Caetano.

Bibliography

See study by H. Kay (1970).