Forbidden and Censored Books during the Portuguese Estado Novo

This talk presents my ongoing research on literary censorship in the context of the Portuguese New State dictatorship, Salazar’s “Estado Novo,” which ran from 1933 to 1974. During the dictatorship, besides political persecution, imprisonment, and torture, generalized censorship targeted all areas of knowledge and cultural production. The Directorate of Censorship Services reviewed books as an ideological intervention in favour of the regime’s doctrine, and against the freedom of writers and the independence of the literary milieu. In terms of the censorial processes applied to books, this intervention was mainly done after books were already printed. The outcome could mean authorization of circulation, authorization with cuts, ambiguous decisions such as “seen” and “dismissed,” or a strict “forbidden” stamp, that is, a ban of circulation and reprint. These procedures, together with the seizure and destruction of books from libraries, bookstores, publishing houses, printers, and even peoples’ homes, led to severe consequences in the production and reception of literature. The censors wrote more than 10,000 “reading reviews” on books by Portuguese and foreign authors. The censored titles were often accused of being “immoral, pornographic, communist, irreligious, subversive, antisocial, anarchist or revolutionary.”

This cultural kidnapping resulted, among other things, in the retention of an examined copy in the Library-Archive of the Censorship Services, which gathered a reference library of thousands of books. These unique copies preserve the materiality of the censorial reading marks and cuts. They can now, for the first time, be compared with the “reading reviews” written by the censors themselves. That said, it is important to mention that a substantial part of these copies was rescued from the Censorship Services headquarters during the first hours of the 1974 Carnation Revolution, yet it remained uncatalogued at the National Library of Portugal (BNP) until 2009, and unknown to the general public until 2022.

Therefore, beyond the political processes of the dictatorship, there are institutional, memory, and preservation issues that come into play during the democratic period. How to approach the reconstitution and representation of the archive? How to approach its study, dissemination, and restitution? Two of the answers given in this context were the exhibition and book catalogue “Obras Proibidas e Censuradas no Estado Novo” [Forbidden and Censored Books during the Estado Novo], curated by Álvaro Seiça, Luís Sá, and Manuela Rêgo at the BNP (2022), and the collection “Biblioteca da Censura” [The Censorship Library] – 25 facsimiled volumes that came out with the Público newspaper between 2022 and 2024. The aim of these initiatives was to study the dictatorship's legacy and to reactivate its historical memory.

During the talk, I highlight a couple of literary works that are paradigmatic in relation to the censorial impact. I conclude by pointing out some of the consequences of censorship and political surveillance, at the level of the instrumentalization of power, and the repression of writers and their works. Censorship had a tremendous impact not only on authors' lives, but also on literary reception. However, its legacy is still alive. Finally, I address possible ways to tackle this legacy today.

A brief introduction to the topic and the exhibition can be read in the following English leaflet: https://zenodo.org/records/6566960 

Main reference

Obras Proibidas e Censuradas no Estado Novo: Biblioteca dos Serviços de Censura e «Obras Proibidas» na Biblioteca Nacional, ed. Álvaro Seiça, Luís Sá, and Manuela Rêgo. Lisbon: National Library of Portugal, 2022. https://livrariaonline.bnportugal.gov.pt/Issue.aspx?i=322255