Priscila Lena Farias / Anna Calvera Marcos da Costa ... - Blucher

The doctrines of Good Taste
BÁRTOLO, Carlos / MA / IHA/FCSH Universidade Nova de Lisboa + Universidade Lusíada de Lisboa / Portugal
Portugal / Propaganda / Nationalism / Education / Identity
This paper try to analyse the Good Taste Campaign (Portugal,
1940’s) and understand how it was generated and produced: the
intentions, sources and influences supporting it; how it derived
from these usually irreconcilable concepts (modern and tradition);
and, despite the authoritarian background, its decisive consequences
on the present Portuguese identity and in the formation
of the discipline, as probably the most successfully implemented
Portuguese national Design policy.
1. An original regime
It’s expected of an authoritarian regime, as Portugal was after May
28th 1926, the formulation of a set of values that should rule the
country and maintain its strength and perpetuity.
This essay, part of my PhD research on the dictatorship idealization
of a Portuguese Home concept, try to survey how the formulation
and promotion of these political, moral and social values interconnected
with the Design emergence in 1930’s and 1940’s Portugal.
The military coup d’état of 1926 was the outcome of an extended
political crisis led by the failure on the implementation and stabilization
of a liberal and democratic system experienced since the
monarchy exactly one hundred years before. This coup was part
of a European predisposition, between the wars, for political extremism
from which derived the birth of authoritarian regimes all
throughout the continent.
In Portugal, after a brief and equally unstable beginning, the regime
found its pace under the authority of António Salazar (1889-1970),
a conservative catholic economy professor, invited in 1928 to
straighten out the acute national debt as an all-powerful Finance
Minister; he gradually secured a more prominent role in the government
until he arose to the position of Prime Minister in 1932.
With the ratification of the 1933 Constitution (establishing the
power on a corporative regime entitled Estado Novo [New State]),
Salazar held his position as a de facto dictator, balancing out the
different factions of the Portuguese far right. For the equilibrium of
these forces (from the poles of the ancien régime Monarchists to
the pro-fascists National-Syndicalists) Salazar, himself a Conservative
Catholic close to the Integralist-Lusitan movement, created a
single-party regime. He brought together the reactionaries with
the authoritarian moderns while also answering to the yearnings
of different society sectors (the high-rank military, the old rural
landowners, the arising industry monopolists and the crescent
administrative middle-class) against a unique enemy: the socialliberal-democratic
system (Rosas, 1989).
Regarded in the broadest sense as fascist, Estado Novo differentiated
itself from other contemporary systems as an original hybrid
regime that, trying to modernize a still underdeveloped country,
simultaneously kept it lost in a glorified, bucolic and pious past.
Salazar, a somewhat non-charismatic and reluctant crowd pleaser,
sought to incarnate a stoic persona that carried out the divine duty
of fathering the country, giving up his personal freedom and happiness
in the name of the Nation (Rivero, 2010).
To maintain this unquestionable power Estado Novo promoted nationalistic
ideals based on the celebration of its history, ethnical
uniqueness and global mission as standard in authoritarian regimes
regardless of their politic faction. This example of a dynamic
revolution tried to recreate a modern national identity moulded on
the traditional world of the bonhomous peasant, allegory of sanctioned
values, and on the culmination of decades of nationalistic
exaltation and of an artistic and ethnographic identity quest (in
everything similar to other European movements developed since
the end of 19th century). The most effective method for this identity
implementation was the previous indoctrination of established
truths that should irrefutably prevail and suppress opposing truths.
2. A cultural policy
The SPN/SNI 1 creation in 1933 filled this need of indoctrination; a
propaganda service had become an important tool for governments
and a crucial one at an authoritarian regime. While refusing
the idea of modernity, ironically it would be through these
modern instruments that the regime would publicize its ideology.
‘Propaganda emerged as a fundamental strategy of the society acceptance
of itself, and presented as revelation of its own «core»’ 2
(Melo, 2001: 54).
Until 1949 SPN/SNI was run by António Ferro (1895-1956), a cosmopolitan
writer associated with the Portuguese and European
modernist and futurist milieu since his youth 3 .
1 SPN-Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional [National Propaganda Bureau]. In
1945, on the aftermath of World War II, and probably due to the negative connotation
of the term propaganda, it would be renamed SNI-Secretariado Nacional de
Informação, Cultura Popular e Turismo [National Bureau of Information, Popular
Culture and Tourism].
2 This quotation, as the others, is a free translation by the author.
3 In 1915, with just 19 years old he was editor of Orpheu, the avant-garde
magazine that laid the foundations of the Portuguese modernist movement with
Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro and Almada Negreiros, among others.
António Ferro wrote novels, poems and plays (some of which created some public
outrage) while working as journalists for various newspapers and magazines. As
an international reporter he interviewed personalities like d’Annunzio, Maurras,
Pétain, Rivera, Mussolini and even Hitler but also Cocteau, Mistinguett or Poiret.
Politically he began as a Republican Party sympathizer, evolving to the Sidonists
(authoritarian modern) and the Conservative Republicans, while gradually admiring
the contemporary authoritarian regimes, especially Mussolini’s. In 1932 when
interviewing Salazar they discussed the political role of the culture; months later
his political career began when invited to SPN.
Design Frontiers: Territiories, Concepts, Technologies / Proceedings of the 8th Conference of the International Committee for
Design History & Design Studies - ICDHS 2012 / São Paulo, Brazil / © 2012 Blucher / ISBN 978-85-212-0692-7