The Clerico-Corporative Estado Novo

Abstract

Portugal was the first state in the Iberian peninsula to come under a semifascistic regime. Unlike Mussolini’s Italy, however, the dictatorship did not come about through the triumph of a pre-existent fascist party. In the case of Portugal both the fascistic party and the Party-State came into being after the advent of the dictatorship. Although the Portuguese Party-State expressed respect and admiration for Mussolini’s Italian dictatorship, it found most of its inspiration in the type of integral nationalism espoused by Charles Maurras’s Action Française and in the clerico-corporativist philosophy set forth in the papal encyclicals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Portuguese authoritarian system was to serve as a model for at least some aspects of Franco’s regime in Spain, Pétain’s Vichy France, and Getulio Vargas’s dictatorship in Brazil.