"Foreign" Context

{Portugal's Perspective}

In terms of gender rights, there were great inequalities between men and women at the time. The regime disfavoured women, whose role was passive and whose most promoted function was that of dedication to the family as well as an obligation to be submissive to her husband and father.

Considering it was an oppressive and repressive regime, controlling tools were part of it. These were supervised and coordinated by Salazar himself, whose goal was to try to stop any moves that would be opposed in any way or shape to the imposed rules.

A law from 14th May 1936 establishes a total control over newspapers; it forbids official advertising in some so that the “enemies of Society and the State” would not be financially supported, regulates the number of pages and forbids the entrance, distribution and selling of newspapers, magazines and any other foreign publication with material that wouldn’t be permitted in Portuguese publications. In 1944, censorship became legally a tool of political formation and propaganda. As Salazar mentions in one of his public announcements: “Politically, there is only what the public knows there is”.

After 10 years of the regime, censorship was institutionalized and oppression and repression were a reality that came to be known and lived with certain normality. The role of the Serviços de Censura(Censorship Services) in the education of the Portuguese population was also very important. The books that were meant to be used for family, moral and civic education were dependent on their choices. Aside from the Censorship Services, the Secretariado Nacional de Informação(National Office of Information)  - the SNI - had power over the publishing scene. SNI approved the activities of Portuguese and foreign news agencies. It was mandatory for print houses to send a copy of each book before publishing it to the SNI. Also, public safety authorities had the power to close down any print store that printed material that was thought to disturb public welfare.  

The Direcção-Geral de Segurança (Safety General Office) could order a search to any bookstore, and Post Offices controlled the distribution of books. Since some books were not censored previously (because they were printed before the regime or because they escaped the SNI in an initial stage), any edition could be prohibited after publishing.

In 1968, Oliveira Salazar was substituted by Marcelo Caetano, the last prime minister of the New State. Printing and publishing freedom was given to Portugal with the Revolution of 1974.

As expected, the previous censorship had harsh consequences on the literary production of Portuguese writers. At the time, official censorship created permanent self-censorship within the writer, which was only overcome by writing between the lines or using well-crafted metaphors. So words like “aurora” or “rising” started to symbolize socialism, “spring” as Revolution and so on. These metaphors added a poetic side to the Portuguese writing of the ’40s. Nonetheless, these were still at risk of being captured and forbidden.

Around 900 books were forbidden from 1933 to 1974 and the majority was related to philosophical and political matters. Censorship looked for books that touched upon topics like revolution, syndicalism, freedom, feminism, political prisoners, external conflicts, poverty, inequality, sexuality and colonialism. These included authors like Mario Soares, Egas Moniz, Fidel Castro, Karl Marx, Lenine and Charles Darwin.

These authors published books that, willingly or not, were against New State ideologies. The regime of Salazar and Caetano was known as “Lapis Azul” (Blue Pencil) and its censoring processes would be extended to what was published in newspapers, magazines, books and even movies, music or radio programming.  Censorship would approve or not its content, and if approved it could still be corrected in parts that were deemed inappropriate (done by scratching off that part with a blue pencil). In worst cases, authors would have their works rejected, or even forbidden, often with consequences like imprisonment or exile. Some authors would even try to publish by using pseudonyms. Besides capturing and forbidding books, censorship also forbade media from mentioning the censured titles and respective authors, and thus many writer’s works and existence would go unnoticed until the end of the regime.