Salazar: A Political Biography is the definitive biography of the longstanding Portuguese dictator.
António de Oliveira Salazar entered the government of Portugal when Herbert Hoover was president and ended his political career at the end of the Johnson administration. He remained in power for forty years (1928–1968), one of the longest tenures in modern history. Unlike the other ‘great dictators’ of the twentieth century, Salazar, an academic, immersed himself in the minutiae of government and administration, maintaining a prodigious work rate until illness forced his retirement. He successfully managed his country’s finances despite the impact of the Great Depression, imposing a harsh policy of austerity. He then preserved Portugal’s neutrality during the Second World War, ultimately favouring Great Britain and the United States. But Salazar was at heart an extremely conservative, even reactionary statesman. He relied on secrecy and a police state to maintain the order which, he believed, was necessary to control progress. Rejecting the anti-colonialist movements in Asia and Africa, he plunged Portugal into a series of wars in Africa it could ill afford.
Fully revised and updated throughout, this remains the authoritative biography of a key Portuguese political leader who was a significant presence in twentieth-century politics. This book will be of interest to historians of the far right, international diplomacy and Portugal.
Prologue Introduction 1. From Santa Comba Dão to São Bento 2. The New State in the Age of Totalitarianism 3. The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 4. The Second World War: The Axis Threat, 1939–1942 5. The Second World War: The Allied Threat, 1943–1945 6. The Postwar World 7. Salazar and the Politics of the New State, 1945–1958 8. A New Opposition: Humberto Delgado and the Bishop of Oporto 9. The Colonial Reckoning I: Angola, 1961 10. The Colonial Reckoning II: Salazar’s Defiance 11. Portugal at War: The 1960s 12. Illness, Retirement and Death Conclusion Bibliography
Biography
Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses is a Professor of History at Maynooth University, Ireland. He is the author of numerous works on Portuguese history, including Portugal 1914–1926: From the First World War to Military Dictatorship (2004) and Afonso Costa – Portugal (2010). The first edition of his biography of Salazar was originally published in 2009 and was translated into Portuguese a year later. With co-author Robert McNamara, he wrote The White Redoubt, the Great Powers and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1960–1980 (2018). The following year he edited, with Catriona Pennell, A World at War, 1911–1949: Explorations in the Cultural History of War. He was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 2017.
Praise for the previous edition:
‘Meneses’ book is [...] a courageous effort and a successful one. The book, as the author acknowledges, reflects the remarkable development, since the 1990s, of the historiography on Salazar’s regime’.
Luís Nuno Rodrigues, Luso-Brazilian Review, June 2013
‘What distinguishes this academic biography from the other non-academic biographies of the dictator already in existence? Seriousness and rigour. The author carried out a deep dive in the archives, especially Salazar’s, and read and used a great many of the works already published on the New State’.
Victor Pereira, Público, 27 August 2010
‘Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses’ monumental biography of Salazar fills a vacuum [...] it is the first complete and dispassionate work on the man who governed Portugal for nearly forty years’.
António-Pedro Vasconcelos, Sol, 17 September 2010
‘This biography […] fills a gap in Portuguese historiography and becomes straight away a work of reference, as future years will inevitably confirm’.
Pedro Correia, Ler, 1 November 2010
