Under the Salazar regime, many Portuguese citizens spontaneously interacted with the secret police (PIDE), sending it letters of denunciation, prospective applications and petitions. The historians of the Estado Novo, by reducing the nature of the relations between the PIDE and society to its mechanisms of top-down repression, have overlooked the significance of the phenomenon. Drawing on the inputs of the international bibliography on accusatory practices and ‘everyday life’ under dictatorship, this article looks at the PIDE through the subjective perspectives of the individual citizens who approached it ‘from below’, thereby nuancing and complementing the established narrative of violence and repression. It focuses on the instrumentalisation of the PIDE by ordinary citizens as: an influential sponsor; an appropriable device of coercion; an instrument of private conflict resolution; a platform for collaborative interaction with the regime; an economic opportunity. The article also puts forward an interpretation of these ‘everyday’ interactions as part of a broader system of governance used by the authorities of the New State.
This article examines the relations between Portuguese society and Salazar’s political police (PIDE) from the perspective of the everyday lives of ordinary citizens – in contrast to the small minority of oppositionists that has so far monopolized the attention of historians. It is based on a quantitative survey of 400 respondents in four separate locations across Portugal and addresses two main research questions: To what extent did the sample of ordinary citizens experience the PIDE as a disruptive influence on their daily lives? Was the PIDE ‘normalized’ by them as part of the framework of everyday life? The data analysis calls upon the inputs of the international bibliography of everyday life under dictatorship and critically engages with the existing historiography of the PIDE.
This article examines how the interaction between El Camino de Santiago and a late medieval re-enactment in the Castilian village of Hospital del Órbigo motivates a new and promising touristic panorama in current and future Spain. While massive tourism to the Mediterranean coast was a productive tool for the regeneration of the country during Francoism, El Camino de Santiago and its discursive power resulted in the proliferation of lesser-known cultural practices that simultaneously enabled a space to refashion autonomic-local identities. The annual celebration of the legacy of the medieval knight Suero de Quiñones nurtures a neomedieval spectacle in this Leonese region: a look at historical memory and a congregation of multiple postmodern medieval remediations. Ultimately, these neomedieval spectacles in Spain are a valuable instrument to recuperate regional-territorial sentiments within national borders that have been historically neglected, particularly during the Francoist era, yet in present times embodied in the incidence of political conservatism and the emergence of ultra-authoritarian legislators.
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