José Barreto

António Ferro:
Modernism and Politics

Revised version of the chapter published in Steffen Dix and Jerónimo Pizarro (eds.), Portuguese
Modernisms: Multiple Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts, London: Legenda, 2011, pp.
135-154.

Journalist, writer and man of culture, António Ferro (1895-1956) is referred to as

a figure of modernism in twentieth-century Portuguese literary history, but he is
better known and more studied for his political activities in the second half of his
life: the famous interviews with Salazar, which promoted the image of the dictator
in 1932-33, and most of all his work regarding the New State’s propaganda and
cultural policy from 1933 to 1950 when he headed the Secretariat for National
Propaganda (SPN – Secretariado da Propaganda Nacional). Ferro’s literary output
includes poetry, commentary, short stories, novels and plays and was relatively
short-lived: it started at the end of the First World War and came to an end around
1925. His 1917-1925 literary work has not particularly drawn the attention of
researchers either when compared with works of contemporary modernists.
Portugal’s leading literary review, Colóquio/Letras, has never published a single
essay or article about him since it was launched in 1971 apart from a short book
review. Books about Ferro published in the last thirty years basically focus on his
work for the SPN, and his political background.1 There has been a
photobiography published by his family, but only the first volume of the planned
complete works by Ferro ever came out.

It has been repeatedly suggested that this lack of interest, which some people
consider unfair, could result from a dislike for the writer in view of the position he
held in the dictator’s government in the 1930s and 40s.2 In fact, to consider Ferro
a major literary figure in the Portuguese modernist movement (and even futurist)
is a controversial matter and has never been convincingly established — and the
terms in which some of Ferro’s contemporaries, himself included, upheld the
view now sound absurdly exaggerated. 3 The ambiguity was certainly increased
by the vague, equivocal notion of what was meant by Portuguese ‘modernism’, a
term used in the 1910s and 20s in a very broad sense and which remains
imprecise to this day. José-Augusto França, though he was talking mainly about
1
J. Ramos do Ó, Os Anos de Ferro (Lisboa: Estampa, 1999) and Ernesto Castro Leal, António Ferro: Espaço
Político e Imaginário Social (Lisboa: Cosmos, 1994).
2
See the preface by António Rodrigues in António Ferro, Obras I - Intervenção Modernista (Lisboa: Verbo,
1987), pp. ix-xxvi, and the chapter about Ferro in António Quadros, O Primeiro Modernismo Português:
Vanguarda e Tradição (Lisboa: Europa-América, 1989), pp. 317-34.
3
The French writer Valéry Larbaud, who visited Portugal in 1926, called Ferro ‘the leader of the Portuguese
modernist movement’, according to António Quadros’s preface in António Ferro’s Saudades de Mim (Lisboa:
Betrand, 1957), p. 34. The Brazilian poet Ronald de Carvalho made a similar comment about Ferro in a
preface to António Ferro, A Idade do Jazz-Band (Lisboa: Portugalia, 1924), p. 34: ‘I know no other in his
country’s modernist literature who is more current, more perturbing, more artistically agile than the writer of
Teoria da Indiferença’.
the plastic arts, summed up problems with the concept of ‘modernism’ in the
following way:

[...] conceito polémico em 1915, integrado em 1930, ultrapassado dez anos

depois, e jamais claramente definido. Para uns teve sabor mundano e
elitista, para outros animava-o o fogo da criação, para outros, finalmente,
tinha indesejável sabor revolucionário. Necessariamente oposto ao gosto
oficial da 1ª República, naturalista quanto positivista, sofre recuperação no
regime seguinte por via ilusória e precária, por ele sendo abandonado em
nome dum nacionalismo cujos princípios ideológicos deviam estar para
além de posições estéticas subordináveis [...]

[…] a polemical concept in 1915, politically integrated in 1930, outdated

ten years later and never clearly defined. For some people it had a worldly
and elitist flavour, for others it was blessed by the fire of creativity, for
others, finally, it had an unwanted revolutionary flavour. Necessarily
opposed to the official taste of the First Republic, which was naturalist as
much as positivist, the concept underwent an illusory and precarious
appropriation by the following regime, which eventually abandoned it for
the sake of a nationalism whose ideological principles should supplant any
aesthetical position [...]4

In the case of young Ferro’s modernism, a predominant ‘worldly and elitist

flavour’ seems more applicable, together with what França calls, after Almada
Negreiros, Portuguese modernism’s trait of hesitating between a ‘way of being’
and a ‘way of dressing’, or better still, between a ‘modo’ [way] and a ‘moda’
[fashion].5 In a review of Ferro’s modernist writings reprinted in 1987, França
argues that Ferro’s work gave Portuguese modernism ‘uma dimensão em certa
medida mundana, algo superficial e banalizadora’ [a facet that is to a certain
extent worldly, somewhat superficial and trivializing], a quality that, in his
opinion, was also necessary to consider in modern literature.6 Acknowledging
Ferro’s gift as a phraseur, cultivator of paradoxes and portrayer of Lisbon’s petty
bourgeois society, França thinks that Ferro identified, to a certain extent, with the
Orpheu friends in their common aim ‘to reform urban mentality’. In another of his
works, França mentions the 1926 ‘Inquérito aos escritores portugueses’ [Survey
of Portuguese writers] that was organized by the Catholic nationalist writer, João
Ameal, in the Diário de Notícias columns. Giving voice, almost exclusively, to a
gallery of acclaimed writers who were representatives of literary traditions and
political conservatism, Ameal chose António Ferro as the only ‘authorised and
legitimate representative of the new generation’ — thus excluding Fernando
Pessoa and José Régio as presumably ‘illegitimate’ modernists. The ‘legitimate
modernism’ that Ferro thus personified was fashioned by the aesthetic and
political criteria of a traditionalist, João Ameal. 7

4
José-Augusto França, O Modernismo na Arte Portuguesa (Lisboa: ICALP, 1991), p. 99. All translations
were made from the first time from the original language.
5
Idem, p. 101.
6
José-Augusto França, ‘António Ferro: Obras I - Intervenção Modernista. Teoria do Gosto’, Colóquio/Letras
100 (1987) 163-64.
7
José-Augusto França, Os Anos Vinte em Portugal (Lisboa: Presença, 1992), pp. 127-28.
Ferro and the Orpheu group

It is not the purpose of this work to make a profound assessment of the place of
Ferro’s literary work in the movement known as ‘Portuguese modernism’. The
key figures of the movement were Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Fernando Pessoa, Santa-
Rita and Almada Negreiros, who were all connected to the beginnings of the
Orpheu magazine, together with Sousa Cardoso, Eduardo Viana, António Soares
and others, and continued throughout the 1920s and 30s by the presencista group,
the nucleus of the so-called ‘second modernism’. However, that Ferro has
persistently been associated, and rather hastily, with the Orpheu ‘group’ and
‘movement’ deserves a few remarks, especially since the emergence of a theory
that describes Ferro’s work in the New State’s cultural policies as meaning
‘Orpheu in power’.8

Ferro being described as a ‘modernist’ invariably relies on the allegation that,

aside his friendship with Mário de Sá-Carneiro, six years his elder and the pioneer
of literary modernism in Portugal, Ferro was the ‘editor’ [publisher] of the
Orpheu magazine in 1915 when he was only nineteen. This is literally true
though misleading. In any case, it is not enough to prove that Ferro was part of
the ‘Orpheu’ group and much less that he identified with the magazine’s
hypothetical ‘ideas’, ‘aesthetic ideals’ and even ‘cultural policy’ proposals – of
which Ferro was allegedly the faithful depositary and in time the great practical
architect, according to his eulogist, António Quadros.9 This view is endorsed by
another writer, who accepted that the ‘Política do Espírito’ [‘Politics of the
Spirit’] of Salazar’s government, described as the personal work of Ferro, could
really have had Orpheu ‘at its origin’. 10 The most clamorous denial of such a
theory, if there were none other, was the vehement and indignant reaction,
although silenced by the censors, of Orpheu’s leading figure, Fernando Pessoa, to
Ferro’s and Salazar’s public disclosure on 21 February 1935 of the principles and
directives of the ‘Politics of the Spirit’.11 But let’s examine the facts regarding
the times of Orpheu.

It has long been known through testimonies left by Alfredo Guisado and Fernando
Pessoa that as a young man Ferro had been chosen by the organisers of Orpheu to
fill the position of the magazine’s mandatory ‘publisher’ — the person who was
legally responsible for the publication — on the grounds that as a minor, he would
be ‘irresponsible’ in the eyes of the law. Pessoa thought that Ferro was then still
‘muito criança, social e paulicamente’ [very much a child, both socially and
stylistically]. 12 Sá-Carneiro didn’t even ask Ferro beforehand if he would accept
to be its publisher and simply added his name at the head of the magazine. 13

8
António Quadros, ‘Anos 40 – Política do espírito é cultura portuguesa’, Tempo, 17 June 1982, reproduced
in Quadros, O Primeiro Modernismo Português, pp. 330-332.
9
Quadros, preface to António Ferro, Saudades de Mim, pp. 16, 17, 20 and 28. In O Primeiro Modernismo
Português, p. 331, Quadros maintains his previous position and considers Ferro the person who materialized
‘Orpheu’s profound thinking’.
10
Artur Portela Filho, Salazarismo e Artes Plásticas (Lisboa: ICALP, 1982), p. 58.
11
José Barreto, ‘Salazar and the New State in the Writings of Fernando Pessoa’, Portuguese Studies 24
(2008) pp. 188-20.
12
Letter dated 4 October 1914 to A. Côrtes-Rodrigues, in Fernando Pessoa, Correspondência 1905-1922
(Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 1999), p. 127.
13
François Castex, ‘Um inédito de Pessoa’, Colóquio, 48 (1968) 59-69. See also ‘A história do Orpheu –
Confidências de Alfredo Guisado’, Autores, 10 (1961) 10-11.
Ferro didn’t contribute any work of his to the magazine as a writer or as anything
else. There is just a handwritten note of Pessoa’s saying that Ferro had found
some subscribers. 14 Quadros, who claimed without any evidence that Ferro was
‘one of the most active and talented members’ of the Orpheu group or
movement15, tried to solve the problem of his not having collaborated with the
magazine by saying that ‘it would have come out in the following issues’.16
However, there is no evidence of this at all. On the contrary, the third issue of the
magazine, which was actually composed but never went into print, failed to
include any work of Ferro’s.

It should also be said that Orpheu, as a group of artists, had no ‘ideals’ of its own,
failed to display them in any collective document or manifesto, followed no
specific aesthetic line, much less a philosophical or political one — which must
be taken into account when people talk, as did Quadros, of the alleged ‘cultural
policy that the Orpheu movement recommended’, and which Ferro, when he was
older, was to have carried out.17 Pessoa described Orpheu’s literary trend as an
endeavour to combine different Portuguese ‘modern tendencies’, ranging from
saudosismo and post-symbolism to futurism, interseccionismo and
sensacionismo.18 A declaration dated 1915 that Pessoa had written and which
remained unpublished although it was meant to be signed publicly by Orpheu’s
two directors (the ultra-individualistic Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro), rejected the idea
that the artists of the group had some collective school, identity or ideology:

Os artistas do Orpheu pertencem cada um à escola da sua individualidade

própria, não lhes cabendo portanto [...] designação alguma colectiva. As
designações colectivas só pertencem aos sindicatos, aos agrupamentos com
uma ideia só (que é sempre nenhuma).

Each of the Orpheu artists belongs to the school of his own individuality,
they don’t therefore fall […] under any collective designation. Collective
designations are only for trade unions, groups with one sole idea (which
always means none).19

If there were common characteristics that Pessoa claimed for the Orpheu group
but which the magazine collaborators only partially reflected, they were only
‘absolute originality’ and ‘cosmopolitism’ or ‘internationalism’. 20 Besides this,
the clearest evidence that there was no aesthetic, philosophical or political unity in
Orpheu is their divergences and disagreements, which resulted in a change of
directors between the first and second issue and contributed, along with financial
difficulties, to the sudden end of the project.21

14
Fernando Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, ed. by Jerónimo Pizarro (Lisboa: INCM, 2009), p. 38.
15
Quadros, preface to António Ferro, Saudades de Mim, p. 15.
16
Idem, p. 14.
17
Idem, p. 28.
18
Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, pp. 37-95, specially p. 49.
19
Idem, p. 69.
20
Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, p. 49.
21
João Gaspar Simões, Vida e Obra de Fernando Pessoa, 4.ª edição (Lisboa: Bertrand, 1981), pp. 233-55 e
611-16.
Finally, we should remember a key episode that was the satirical letter that
Fernando Pessoa/Álvaro de Campo sent to the Lisbon daily newspaper, A Capital,
on 6 July 1915, in which he objected to the newspaper’s repeated attacks on
Orpheu’s ‘madhouse literature’. In this letter, the poet also rejoiced in a serious
incident suffered a few days before by the Republican leader Afonso Costa.22 The
scandal caused by that blague among the Republicans had repercussions on
Orpheu and led to several of its collaborators ostensibly drawing their support
away from Pessoa/Campos and even keeping their distance from the magazine
itself. Antonio Ferro’s own position, which he revealed in a letter to O Mundo,
deserves a mention here. In his capacity as ‘publisher’, although merely
perfunctory, he not only distanced himself from ‘those gentlemen’ at Orpheu
while expressing the ‘greatest of admirations’ for Afonso Costa, but he also
announced he was going to relinquish his position as publisher immediately. 23 In
short, the only definite and documented thing that Ferro did with regard to
Orpheu, besides allowing his name to be used as the publisher of the first two
issues was to contribute towards its end by distancing himself publicly from
Pessoa, from the magazine and from the group. In comparison, Sá-Carneiro and
Almada Negreiros also disassociated themselves publicly from Pessoa’s letter but
not from him or the Orpheu project.

Subsequent to this affair, the modernist group around Pessoa and Almada no
longer kept close to Ferro. The poetry that the young Ferro published between
1913 and 1916 clearly mirrors the gulf that separates him in terms of aesthetics,
‘originality’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ from the Orpheu poets.24 Besides, Ferro had
nothing to do with the publications that followed in the wake of Orpheu and
which, to a certain degree, carried on its innovative style, such as Centauro (1916)
and Portugal Futurista (1917), which Pessoa and Almada were connected to,
though he did contribute to Exílio (1916). Much to the contrary, when he began as
a journalist with O Século in 1918, Ferro made fun of the poets who frequented
Café Martinho, the modernists’ usual haunt, and made allusions that were
seemingly aimed at the poet of the heteronyms and Ode Triunfal as well as the
Portugal Futurista magazine, which had come out some months before:

Os poetas do Martinho! A sua Arte é um constante Carnaval... Andam todos

mascarados, com receio que não lhes dêem pela falta de talento... [...] E os
que posam de futuristas, que cantam a força, as máquinas, o Progresso, e
andam para aí a apodrecer pelas esquinas?!...

Martinho Poets! Their Art is one constant Carnival…They all go about in

masks in fear that their lack of talent will be noticed… […] And those who
pose as futurists, that sing in praise of strength, machinery, Progress, and
are rotting away at street corners?!...25

22
Idem, pp. 611-616. Pessoa’s letter was transcribed, along with similar documents, by Jerónimo Pizarro in
Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, pp. 379-81.
23
The letter dated 7 July 1915, signed by Alfredo Guisado and António Ferro was reproduced in J. G.
Simões, Vida e Obra..., pp. 614-615, note 2.
24
Ernesto Castro Leal, António Ferro: Imaginário Político e Imaginário Social (Lisboa: Cosmos, 1994), pp.
189-96.
25
‘Carta do Martinho’ (O Século, 3 March 1918) reproduced in Ferro, Obras I - Intervenção Modernista, pp.
10-11.
In the 1920s, Pessoa and Almada Negreiros occasionally collaborated with Ferro,
who had, in the meantime, abandoned his republican sympathies and flung
himself successfully into political and cultural journalism. He wrote regularly for
O Século (1918-20), O Jornal (1919), A Situação and O Imparcial (1920), Diário
de Lisboa (1921) and, most of all, for the Ilustração Portuguesa magazine, which
he ran for a semester in 1921-22. He modernised its graphics and greatly
improved its literary and artistic contents, which included collaborations with
Pessoa and Almada.

In 1929, in an article called ‘Alguns precursores’, Ferro made an appraisal of the

history of ‘modernism’ in Portugal, which was by then being renewed by the
Presença group (1927-1940). He examined and reviewed the group of
‘precursors’, including himself among them, and started off by quoting Sá-
Carneiro (‘our Appolinaire’), Pessoa (‘the great philosopher of the new spirit in
Portugal’), Santa-Rita, Sousa Cardoso and Almada Negreiros. 26 Dividing the 15-
year history of the ‘modern movement’ in three parts, he considered an initial
period, which revolved around Orpheu, Sá-Carneiro and Pessoa, without
forgetting to mention the ‘irresponsible publisher’, that is to say, himself. The
second period, was marked by the Contemporânea magazine (1922-26), founded
and run by José Pacheko. The third and last period Ferro kept for himself and his
‘Teatro Novo’, a supposedly ‘art theatre’ or ‘vanguard theatre’ that he tried to
launch in 1925 but failed apart from a play by Jules Romains and another by
Pirandello. The very ambitious and much publicized project ended up acquiring
the characteristics of a worldly event, an elitist attempt to import the ‘good taste’
of Parisian boulevards, the very opposite of a vanguard theatre experience. 27
Ferro finished his pretentious appraisal in the 1929 article with his belief that the
‘modern movement’ had triumphed in Portugal, suggesting again his personal
merit in the achievement, side by side with Sá-Carneiro, as if they were both
founding fathers of the modernist movement:

Triunfou o modernismo em Portugal? Suponho que sim, porque o sinto,

cada vez mais, na própria alma de quem o combate. Toda essa mocidade
que anda aí pelos jornais, pelas capas de livros, pela fisionomia gráfica das
revistas, pela pintura, pelos cartazes, pelas montagens de certas peças
ligeiras — é obra nossa, é o nosso influxo, a nossa respiração, é o braço de
Sá-Carneiro “a dançar nos salões do vice-rei...”

Did modernism triumph in Portugal? I believe so, because I feel it more and
more in the very soul of those who fight it. All those young people out there
in newspapers, doing book covers, graphics for magazines, painting,
posters, staging certain light plays – that’s our work, it’s our influx, our
breathe, it’s the arm of Sá-Carneiro “dancing in the salons of the
viceroy…”28

26
António Ferro, ‘Alguns precursores’, in Ferro, Obras I - Intervenção Modernista, 368-72.
27
Graça dos Santos, Le spectacle dénaturé. Le théâtre portugais sous le règne de Salazar 1933-1968 (Paris:
CNRS Éditions, 2002), pp. 107-09.
28
Ferro, Obras I - Intervenção Modernista, 371-372. The final quote refers to a poem by Sá-Carneiro
appeared in Orpheu.
In the years between Orpheu and this self-praising assessment of modernism in
1929, Ferro began and virtually concluded his literary career. After publishing in
the first half of the 1920s some books, conferences and a play, which he tried to
make as much ado as possible, he interrupted his writing career in order to
concentrate on journalism and much later on politics.

The seduction of charismatic leaders and authoritarian rule

During the Sidónio dictatorship, Ferro’s political position suffered a sudden

downturn and he forever abandoned his sympathies for historical republican
leaders, defeated in December 1917 by the military coup led by Sidónio Pais. In
April 1918, this artillery officer and former Portuguese ambassador in Berlin was
enthroned as President of the Republic by popular vote and without a challenger.
Historians agree that he was a precursor of the authoritarian ideas and regime in
Portugal if not of European fascism itself. The charismatic Sidónio was to
fascinate young Ferro in 1918 at a meeting Ferro much later described as a sort of
epiphany. In fact, similarly to what happened with Fernando Pessoa, it was only
after Sidónio Pais’ assassination (December 1918) and when the Messianic and
Sebastianista myth growing about him as a martyr and saviour had grown into an
ideological weapon against the República Nova that Ferro came forward with his
inflammatory writings in praise of the Sidónio dictatorship and accused the
republican government again in power of his death. In 1918 Ferro was called up
to do his military service, another experience he described as being decisive in his
education. Naval Commander Filomeno da Câmara, whom Sidónio appointed
governor of Angola, took Ferro with him to Africa and a few months later made
him general-secretary of the colony’s government. Câmara, a future admirer of
Mussolini and tireless plotter of military coups in 1925, 1926 and 1927, greatly
influenced Ferro in Angola in 1918 and in Lisbon after the Sidónio dictatorship.
According to what Ferro was to say later, he had been, until they met, nothing but
a bohemian poet, an idle frequenter of cafés, a cultivator of paradoxes and what
he called ‘hollow Baudelairianisms’ and ‘disdainful Wildisms’.29 The energetic
and restless naval commander offered Ferro ‘contact with life’ and ‘the edifying
spectacle of a great leader in action’. He was his ‘great teacher of practical
nationalism’, instilling in him ideas about authority, a willingness to serve the
motherland and a hatred of ‘professional politics […], the so-called liberals’. 30 In
the memoirs he wrote in 1954, Ferro added this observation which sheds light on
the image he then had of his former fellow modernists:

Foi ele quem me sacudiu, me rasgou os olhos, me arrancou a mim próprio.

Se o não tivesse conhecido, eu continuaria, talvez — ai de mim! — sem
encontrar saída no labirinto das mesas do Café Martinho, “a beber, com um
café detestável, uma inspiração ainda mais detestável”. E quantos, quantos
não se perdem, quantos não ficaram lá, por não terem encontrado o seu
Filomeno da Câmara, o seu comandante…

He was the one who shook me, ripped my eyes open and tore me away from
myself. If I hadn’t met him, I would have perhaps continued – alas! – not to
29
Ferro, prefácio a D. Manuel II, o Desventurado, pp. 23-24.
30
Idem, pp. 28-33.
 find a way out of the labyrinth of tables at Café Martinho, “drinking in,
along with an abominable coffee, some even more abominable inspiration”.
And how many, how many were lost, stayed there because they didn’t find
their Filomeno da Câmara, their commander…

Ferro really had found ‘his commander’, his master of authoritarian nationalism in
1918, but the era’s cosmopolitan culture, bohemian lifestyles, disdainful poses
and hollow frivolity were to hold a strong attraction for him on him for years to
come.

António Ferro, A Idade doJazz-Band,

front cover by Bernardo Marques (Lisbon: Portugália, 2nd ed., 1924). 17 cm. Conference
delivered at Teatro Lírico do Rio de Janeiro,30 July 1922.

Ferro and his modernist period

Starting in 1919, when he joined the political circle in Lisbon of the man he
always called ‘my commander’ and as he began his career in political journalism
in newspapers linked with conservative and nationalist republicanism (O Jornal,
A Situação, O Imparcial), Ferro also began to write social columns, theatre
criticism, literary collaborations for magazines, interviews and journalistic
reports. Ferro was a nationalist, a lover of cultural traditions and folklore – while
still a teenager he had published a book of quatrains in Portuguese folk verse 31

31
Augusto Cunha and António Ferro, Missal de Trovas [Missal of Ballads] (Lisboa: Livraria Ferreira, 1912).
and was interested in folk dances, which he was keen to renovate and promote. He
was at the same time an enthusiastic admirer of grand European illustrated
magazines, cinema (in 1917 he gave a conference about cinema 32), Diaghilev’s
Ballets Russes (that came to Lisbon in 1917-1918), modern music (in 1922 he
gave an innovative conference in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, interspersed with
band music, A Idade de Jazz-Band, which he later published 33) and modern
theatre that he got to know during his visits to Paris.

António Ferro, Leviana. Novela em

fragmentos, introd. by Ramón Gómez de la Serna; front cover by Antonio Soares (Lisbon:
Emprêsa Literária Fluminense, 1929). Edition: ‘Ed. definitiva’. 19 cm.

An old dream of Ferro’s was to play a role in bringing this new cosmopolitan
culture to Lisbon and thereby to contribute patriotically to making it a modish and
up-to-the-minute city. His personal strategy to this end consisted of making
himself cosmopolitan first of all. He set off on constant trips to and fro European
capitals, Brazil and the United States, with his job as an international reporter
acting as the ideal pretext. An extrovert, charmeur, bold and highly skilled in
making excellent contacts inside and outside Portugal, Ferro set up a network of
acquaintances in key cultural positions, as well as forming a group of young and
talented artistic and literary Portuguese and foreigners, who in their turn
influenced him. In 1920 Ferro launched in grand style his career as an
international journalist by writing a report for O Século: he travelled across
Europe to the Adriatic coast to meet and interview his beloved writer and hero,

32
António Ferro, As Grandes Trágicas do Silêncio (Lisboa: Monteiro & Companhia, 1917).
33
António Ferro, A Idade do Jazz-Band (Lisboa: Portugália, 1924).
Gabriele D’Annunzio, then the ‘Duce’ of Fiume, which he had occupied with his
nationalist troops. The meeting took place a few weeks before the end of
D’Annunzio’s military and political adventure, one that was to serve in several
respects as an inspiration to Mussolini. Ferro later published his report in a book
called Gabriele D’Annunzio and Me34, which is typical of his snobbery and self-
promotion. That same year, he visited Colette in Paris and then gave a conference
about her in Lisbon, followed by a book.35 In 1920 Ferro began by publishing a
work that launched him as a writer, Teoria da Indiferença,36 which was a
collection of short, paradoxical aphorisms and definitions, at times witty and at
other times just out to shock the bourgeois. It was clearly influenced by the
creator of this greguerías genre, a Spanish writer and his future friend, Ramón
Gómez de la Serna,37 who published the book Greguerías in 1917, followed by a
collection of erotic short stories, Senos. In 1921 Ferro published Leviana, a
‘novel in fragments’, which is a series of portraits, sentences and dialogues
depicting a futile, ridiculous and flighty [leviana] woman, which served as an
excuse for some daring erotic writing. It also owes a great deal to the style of
Gómez de la Serna, but perhaps written in a more blagueur, vain and misogynist
style, which makes it more difficult to decide who is more frivolous: the woman
whom he simply called ‘Leviana’, or the disdainful author. That same year Ferro
published a leaflet-manifesto called Nós [Us]. Despite its name, it was a personal
proclamation, Marinettian in style, but following in the footsteps of Almada’s and
Pessoa’s futurist manifestos and conferences of some years before (1916-17) by
partially imitating their bombastic style and phraseology. A cry of fierce elitism,
in the form of a conventional dialogue between an inflated and arrogant ‘Me’ and
an obtuse, deaf and hostile ‘Crowd’, Nós expresses the author’s obsession with
being modern, up-to-date, revolutionary, higher and faster, like a plane or a ‘Sud-
Express train to the future’. The author calls his passionate cult of the new ‘the
religion of the Hour’.38 The manifesto failed to find an echo in Portugal, but was
published in Brazil’s modernist Klaxon magazine in 1922.

Common to Ferro’s works in the first half of the 1920s is his elitist shunning of
the crowd, disdain for critics (whom he called ‘pygmies’ or ‘the etceteras of life’),
his narcissistic showing off, the cult of punning and paradox, provocation and
overriding superficiality; characteristics that are offset by his witty style and
positive aspects related to his struggle against artistic traditions and prejudice.39
Without ever neglecting the promotional aspects, his books were always
published in modernist wrappings, with cover designs by some of the most
talented illustrators of the time (António Soares, Jorge Barradas, Almada
Negreiros and Bernardo Marques) and frequently preceded by flattering prefaces.
His lightness of tone and the superficiality of his themes were only to disappear in
Ferro’s more controversial and scandalous work, a faintly Ibsenian play called
‘Mar Alto’, which was staged in São Paulo in 1922 with Ferro playing one of the
34
António Ferro, Gabriele D’Annunzio e Eu (Lisboa: Portugália, 1922).
35
António Ferro, Colette, Colette Willy, Colette (Lisboa: H. Antunes, 1921).
36
António Ferro, Teoria da Indiferença (Lisboa: Portugália, 1920).
37
His influence over Ferro has been studied by Antonio Sáez Delgado, ‘Ramón Gómez de La Serna, António
Ferro y la greguería’, Península - Revista de Estudos Ibéricos, 4 (2007), pp. 195-202.
38
António Ferro, ‘Nós’, in Fernando Pessoa et al., Nas Encruzilhadas do Mundo e do Tempo. Escritos
Públicos (Porto: CEP, s.d.), pp. 91-98.
39
For Ferro’s ‘five years of modernism’, see Nuno Rosmaninho, ‘António Ferro e a propaganda nacional
anti-moderna’, in L. Reis Torgal and Heloísa Paulo, Estados Autoritários e Totalitários e suas
Representações (Coimbra: IUC, 2008), pp. 290-292.
parts. The South American tour also gave Ferro the opportunity to give his self-
promoting conferences and appear as ‘the representative of Portuguese
modernism’.40 The play depicted scenes of amoral realism and some Brazilian
critics found it shocking. It was performed only once in Lisbon in July 1923 and
had to be stopped because an incensed audience booed and protested while
arguing with the actors. The storyline, a very outrageous one (for those times)
dealt with the husband-wife-lover triangle situation, a subject clearly chosen to
‘light a fire’, and was considered ‘immoral’, ‘repugnant’ and ‘pornographic’ by
most critics. 41 Given the threat of further disturbances, the police closed down the
play. These events, more than any merit the play might have had, made the front
page news and writers and intellectuals of all political inclinations signed a protest
against the prohibition. This helped to console Ferro for the fiasco and gave him
an opportunity to emerge in the role of victim of censorship. The ban was lifted a
few days later but the play was not performed again, much less under the 1926-
1933 military dictatorship and the New State, when the censorship would never
have allowed it. Ferro would later concur with the moralizing criticisms when his
political functions required him to project an image of moral respectability.

In 1935, and recently arrived in a position of power, Ferro tried to label these too
novel and too awkward works as ‘dead weight from other eras’ and shadows in a
personal ‘development’ that had meanwhile made him another person. 42 Towards
the end of his life, now in possession of greater ‘Catholic sensitivity’ and critical
shrewdness, he would freely admit to the frivolous, decadent and brash traits of
the writings of his iconoclastic youth. 43 However, he never stopped believing that
they were avant-gardist in their own way, just as he never stopped thinking that
his political career afterwards was also imbued with ‘vanguardismo’, a concept
with elitist and anti-democratic echoes that made it much more attractive for the
conservative-authoritarian ideology of the New State than the ambiguous and
rebarbative ‘modernism’ that reeked of rebelliousness, cosmopolitanism,
liberalism and the First Republic.

In a famous speech that he gave in February 1935 in which he defined the

‘Politics of the Spirit’ in the presence of Salazar, Ferro brushed aside accusations
that he had betrayed his avant-gardism of the 1920s and asserted he felt he was ‘in
the vanguard as never before’, but a vanguard – quoting Jacques Maritain – that
was ‘antimodern against the errors of the present time and ultramodern in all the
truths yet wrapped in the future’.44 In a 1943 speech in which he looked back on
the ten years of cultural policy at the head of the Secretariat of National
Propaganda, Ferro definitively settled scores with the term ‘modernism’, which he
said he ‘loathed’, preferring the word ‘vanguardism’ to describe the orientation of
his politics.45 On one condition, however: vanguardism had to divorce itself from
internationalism, with which it was almost always linked, by means of
‘nationalisation work’. Ferro thus openly broke with his modernism, exchanging

40
Ferro, Obras I – Intervenção Modernista, p. 399.
41
An extensive dossier of reviews was published together with the play in António Ferro, Mar Alto (Lisboa:
Portugália, 1924), pp. 67-95, with a long preface by the author. The book includes ‘Protesto dos Intelectuais
Portugueses’, with fifty or so signatures, which was sent to the head of the government.
42
António Ferro, Prémios Literários (Lisboa: SNI, 1950), pp. 26-29.
43
Ferro, preface to D. Manuel II, o Desventurado, pp. 9-35.
44
Ferro, Prémios Literários, p. 29.
45
António Ferro, Dez Anos de Política do Espírito (Lisboa: SPN, 1943)., pp. 17-18.
it for a nationalist vanguardism that was committed to a return to tradition and a
‘renaissance of folk art’, though served by a generation of young values, ‘seeking
new skills and materials to construct new works.’46

Reporter of dictatorships and the propagandist of Mussolini

After starting a career in journalism on his return from Africa in 1919, Ferro
began work in 1923 with Diário de Notícias, where he made a name for himself
mainly as an international reporter, and only left to become Salazar’s head of
propaganda in 1933. His literary work in the form of A Amadora dos Fenómenos
(1925) stories came to an end on the eve of the 1926 military coup, and he would
only start to publish books again with selections of his reports and interviews with
foreign celebrities for that newspaper — Viagem à Volta das Ditaduras (1927),
Praça da Concórdia (1929), Novo Mundo, Mundo Novo (1930), Hollywood,
Capital das Imagens (1931) and Prefácio da República Espanhola (1933) —
during his travels throughout fascist Italy, Primo de Rivera’s Spain, Mustafa
Kemal’s Turkey, democratic France, the United States (where he was more
interested in Portuguese immigrants, Broadway and Hollywood than in politics)
and again Spain, this time no longer a dictatorship. Attracted to Italian fascism
very soon, he was to witness its theatrical prologue in Fiume with D’Annunzio. In
1923 Ferro interviewed Mussolini after having introduced himself as an ‘admirer
of fascism and its leader’. Ferro met Mussolini again in 1926 and 1934 (by then
he was already the head of Salazar’s propaganda machine) and transmitted to the
Portuguese an uncritical and peaceful image of the man who had ‘saved Italy’ and
‘turned Italy into an eternal Spring’. Ferro depicted Mussolini as a historical
figure transforming into a bronze one and as ‘the grand master of modern
politics’, the ‘astounding sculptor of modern Italy’, the author of a ‘miracle’ that
could not happen in Portugal ‘because everyone’s eyes were shut as everyone is
asleep’.47 In his constant search for notable people, ‘the majuscules’ as he called
them, he also interviewed Primo de Rivera (1924), Hitler (1930) and the leading
liberals in France and Spain, he spoke with Cardinal Gasparri, Marshals Pétain
and Foch (1930), writers and intellectuals (Cocteau, Valle-Inclán, Ortega y
Gasset, Unamuno), the industrialist Citroën, the director of Figaro, but also the
Parisian singer and actress, Mistinguett. Around 1930, Ferro was already
considered the ‘prince of the interview’ in Portugal.

In his interviews with politicians and intellectuals, Ferro would always ask them
for their opinion about dictatorships, a political solution he had defended for
Portugal before it became a fashionable idea in Europe and for which he had
plotted with his Commander Filomeno da Câmara in 1925. The journalist was a
militant of a political cause and this fact comes out in his asking Câmara in 1927
to write the preface to his Viagem à Volta das Ditaduras [A Voyage Around
Dictatorships]. The commander used the occasion to praise the ‘saviour’
Mussolini and call Ferro ‘one of the precursors in defence of the principle of

46
Idem, p. 18.
47
António Ferro, Viagem à Volta das Ditaduras (Lisboa: Empresa Diário de Notícias, 1927), pp. 74-75, 113,
121.
Authority’ in Portugal. 48 That same year, when Câmara led another coup to force
the military dictatorship to take a more fascist line, Ferro was his agent
connecting him with various military units. 49 The coup was a ridiculous failure;
Câmara went back to Africa, this time without Ferro, who found some years later
his new political leader in Salazar.

From 1926 onwards, Ferro’s foreign interviews were already the work of a
journalist coming from a dictatorship. Along with the 1926-1933 military
dictatorship came the censorship of press, books and performing arts. The effect
of this is noticeable in what Ferro was publishing even though, as a supporter of
the dictatorship, he obviously neglected to complain. In the early 1930s, when
Catholic vigilance over morality started to grow more powerful hand in hand with
state censorship, it was no longer possible to publish books such as Teoria da
Indiferença (where he had written that ‘to kneel down and kiss a woman’s body
was to be Christian’), his novel Leviana or, above all, his play Mar Alto. In view
of the new political situation, it is highly probably that Ferro no longer wanted to
do any more writing of this particular kind, but the alleged ‘personal
development’ that the ex-modernist writer Ferro said he had undergone must have
been in some way connected with the hold that censorship had over Portugal. The
effect is visible in the interviews after 1926 as they could not contain anything
that might prove politically inconvenient. Consequently, in interviews carried out
in 1930 in Spain with some leading politicians and intellectuals, 50 in which the
subject of dictatorship constantly crops up, there is not a word about the recently-
installed dictatorship in neighbouring Portugal. The interviewer could no longer
publish in his own country any free opinions about taboo matters.

Antonio Ferro grew up in an age in which freedom of expression, apart from a

few threats, remained a consensual matter, and he became a supporter of
dictatorships that destroyed this freedom. The impudent modernist writer who had
pushed back the frontiers of what was publishable, and who had been defended by
his peers as a victim of censorship, this journalist who fought hard against
republican governments and denounced the way freedoms were being trampled
on, was now in a paradoxical situation, as his opponents pointed out. Ferro didn’t
hesitate, however, when he had to choose between defending a liberty of
creativity that no longer interested him and adapting to the rules of a game in an
authoritarian regime whose ideology he basically identified with. The perspective
of a political career in the dictatorship, which he skilfully prepared, quelled any
hesitation he might have had.

The myth-creator and embellisher of the dictatorship

When Salazar was appointed minister of finances in 1928, very few people knew
of him in Portugal. The Catholic professor of Public Finance was a shy and
retiring politician who avoided journalists and crowds and was believed to be
ascetic. However, he soon revealed immense ambition and a talent in conducting
state affairs and, above all, in strengthening his own position within the military

48
Idem, p. 12.
49
Leal, António Ferro: Espaço Político e Imaginário Social, p. 43.
50
António Ferro, Prefácio da República Espanhola (Lisboa: ENP, 1933).
dictatorship. In 1930, he was already the key civilian in government and launched
his ‘National Revolution’ plan, a one-party system to bring liberalism and
democracy to a definitive end. In July 1932, he became head of government and
prepared the Constitution, which, the following year, established an authoritarian
and corporatist regime called ‘Estado Novo’ or New State, which was both
similar and dissimilar to Italian fascism.

In 1932, when Salazar became dictator, António Ferro tried to approach the
triumphant leader. As journalist and admirer of Mussolini, he had in the past
helped construct the Sidónio myth and he had supported Filomeno da Câmara in
his unsuccessful efforts to become dictator. Ferro now didn’t hide his ambition to
play a part in the propaganda, staging and promotion of the new dictator. In May
1932, he wrote two articles for the Diário de Notícias in which he pointed out
what he considered to be the lacunas in the dictatorship as far as propaganda and
cultural policy were concerned. He argued that it was urgent to find the right
man, a ‘director’ who would know how to tackle the missing sense of celebration
or ‘joy’ as well as the difficulty of not letting good initiative, wit and talent to
become dispersed.51 With Salazar now at the head of the government, Ferro
wrote two new editorials in which he insisted on the new regime’s crucial need
for a celebration of ‘the life of the spirit’52 and defended more active propaganda,
a festive ‘staging’ to link the dictator with the masses and he had Mussolini
clearly in mind as a model:

Que deve fazer o ditador para evitar a morte da sua obra e do seu nome, para
não ser esquecido, para não ser vítima da ingratidão daqueles que serviu,
daqueles que salvou? Apenas isto: martelar constantemente as suas ideias,
despi-las da sua rigidez, dar-lhes vida e calor, comunicá-las à multidão. Que
o ditador fale ao povo e que o povo lhe fale. Que ditador e povo se
confundam de tal forma, que o povo se sinta ditador e que o ditador se sinta
povo...

What should the dictator do to prevent his work and his name from dying
and being forgotten, victim of the ingratitude of those he served, those he
saved? Just this: hammer in his ideas continuously, take away their stiffness,
give them life and warmth, transmit them to the people. Let the dictator
speak to the people and the people speak to him. Let the dictator and the
people become one so that the people feel they are the dictator and the
dictator feels he is the people… 53

These proposals for a cultural policy and a propaganda strategy failed to persuade
the dictator immediately as he didn’t see the need for the state to subsidize the arts
and culture or spend money with political marketing. In his contact with the
public, Salazar had acquired a kind of chilly charisma, professorial and
conservative, the very opposite to Mussolini. Ferro knew this and suggested that
in order to solve the ‘chilliness’ problem, Salazar should entrust ‘someone’,

51
‘Vida’ [Life], Diário de Notícias, 7 May 1932, p.1, and ‘Falta um realizador’ [A Director Is
Needed], Diário de Notícias, 14 May 1932, p.1.
52
‘Política do Espírito’ [Politics of the Spirit], Diário de Notícias, 21 November 1932, p.1.
53
‘O ditador e a multidão’ [The Dictator and the Crowd], Diário de Notícias, 31 October 1932,
p.1.
suitable and competent, to organise the ‘necessary staging of the festival of the
ideal, those indispensable interviews in dictatorships between the people and their
rulers’.54 Ferro, who was obviously proposing himself for this job, managed to
persuade Salazar in December 1932 to give him a series of interviews, which the
newspaper published on the front page and had enormous public impact. Brought
together in a book with a long preface by the dictator, the work came out in
several European countries too.55 The inspiration behind Ferro’s publicity stunt
was the interviews that the German writer and journalist, Emil Ludwig, had
conducted with Mussolini in April 1932 and were published in book form.56 But
the distance that separated the German writer (an avowed pacifist and
individualist) from Mussolini was in no way present in the conversations between
Ferro and Salazar, and by showing the journalist’s fascination and total adherence
with the dictator’s political ends, the interviews became a simple propaganda tool,
although reflecting the interviewer’s talent and ‘publicity skills’, as Fernando
Pessoa conceded in a letter thanking him for his book.57 The work was very
effective in dissipating the aura of remoteness in which the dictator had enclosed
himself, making him humane in the eyes of the public and also showing his
political ideas in an informal and more attractive manner. José Augusto França
describes Ferro’s work as ‘the first stone in the mythification’ process of Salazar,
and Ferro himself, within the Portuguese setting, as the ‘only intellectual (aside
from minor ones) who took the fascist attraction to its practical consequences’. 58

For Ferro, the success of this work meant that in October 1933 he was invited by
Salazar to run SPN, the new governmental department that was to handle
Portugal’s domestic and foreign propaganda along with its cultural policies. Six
months previously, Hitler’s Germany had set up a Ministry for People’s
Enlightenment and Propaganda, headed by Goebbels, and in Italy, culture and
propaganda were also to be brought together in a new department which in 1937
was called the Ministry of People’s Culture. The French journalist, Émile
Schreiber, on a visit to Portugal in 1938, saw a new Goebbels in Ferro: ‘The
Portuguese dictatorship also has its secretariat for propaganda. Its head, its Dr
Goebbels, as energetic but less aggressive, is Mr António Ferro.’59 The concern
that dictators took with propaganda, ‘the continuous hammering of ideas’ on the
people (as Ferro put it with no pejorative meaning intended) was then seen with a
great deal of scepticism by a few Europeans. Austen Chamberlain, a leading
British Conservative politician, had agreed to write the preface to the English
edition of Ferro’s book of interviews in 1935 and said in his mostly sympathetic
but incidentally critical words about the Portuguese dictatorship:

54
Idem.
55
António Ferro, Salazar: O Homem e a sua Obra (Lisboa: ENP, 1933), published in Great
Britain as Salazar: Portugal and Her Leader (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), prefaced by
Austen Chamberlain, and in France as Salazar. Le Portugal et son chef (Paris: Grasset, 1934),
prefaced by Paul Valéry. There were Italian (1934) and Spanish (1935) editions too.
56
Emil Ludwig, Talks with Mussolini (London: Allen & Unwin, 1932).
57
Letter from Pessoa to Ferro, dated 11 March 1933, in Fernando Pessoa, Correspondência 1923-
1935 (Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 1999), p. 289.
58
José Augusto França, ‘Sondagem nos anos 20: cultura, sociedade, cidade’, Análise Social 77-79
(1983), p. 838.
59
Émile Schreiber, Le Portugal de Salazar (Paris: Denoël, 1938), p. 136.
 The Fascist dictatorship in Italy, the Nazi dictatorship in Germany, and the
dictatorship of the Coimbra Professor of Finance in Portugal have one thing
in common. Signor Mussolini, Herr Hitler and Dr. Salazar have each set out
to remake the soul of a people. An Englishman may feel that the price paid
is too high. He may thank heaven that he is still free citizen of a free
country, and resolve that he will guard that freedom the more jealously
because of its destruction elsewhere. 60

António Ferro, Salazar: Portugal and her Leader,

prefaced by Austen Chamberlain; trans. by H. de Barros and John Gibbons. (London: Faber and
Faber, 1939).

As director of SPN, Ferro developed an energetic and efficient approach to

political propaganda inside and outside Portugal, a task that he summed up as the
need to construct ‘the great façade of the nation, what one can see from the
outside’.61 On the other hand, he created and developed, within the framework of
the officialised ‘Politics of the Spirit’, a pioneer system of stimulus for the arts
and literature that was firmly aimed at the political ends of the ‘National
Revolution’ and defined by the nationalist and traditionalist ideology (contrary to
fascism in this) of Salazar’s regime. ‘Politics of the Spirit’ in action served the
twofold aim of the ‘aesthetisation of politics’ and the politicisation of art, features
common to all totalitarian regimes between the two world wars. To this end and
with this innovative opening and concern, Ferro also looked to recruit artists of
the modernist generation with whom he had maintained a long relationship.
Several authors on a path paved by António Quadros have found in this blend of
traditionalist nationalism values with modern sensitivity, not always welcomed by
the regime, proof of the ‘synthesis’ of the traditional with the vanguard that would
characterise all his work. For his part, José Augusto França accepts that Ferro in
the 1930s and 40s at the head of the SPN struggled against ‘nineteenth-century

60
Austen Chamberlain, preface to Ferro, Salazar: Portugal and Her Leader, p.9.
61
Ferro, Salazar: O Homem e a sua Obra, p. 86.
provincialism’ that lingered in the aesthetic tastes of the New State government
members. 62

António Ferro, Intervenção Modernista, introd. by António Rodrigues; with a sanguine red chalk
drawing of the author by Mário Eloy (Lisbon: Verbo, 1987–).Works by António Ferro, vol. I. 22
cm.

A recent study puts forwards a somewhat different view, emphasising the merely
rhetorical nature of Ferro’s avant-gardism and pointing to his political activity in
the 1930s and 40s as being clearly antimodern in meaning, the product also of a
‘contrition’ of the modernist and futurist that had occurred in the early 1930s. 63
According to this author, Ferro ‘wanted to put the arts at the service of the
dictatorship and not the dictatorship at the service of the arts’ with the ‘logical
result’ of the ‘domestication of modernism’. To illustrate Ferro’s antimodernist
change of direction, the author quotes an 1932 article in which Ferro attacks ‘false
vanguardism, cheap “futurism”, shabby “futurism” consisting of red blobs,
hanging triangles and verbal delirium.’ In the 1930s and 40s, Ferro even
developed ‘some of the most refined antimodern arguments’. His ‘conciliatory
rhetoric’ didn’t conceal ‘Manichaeism and a yearning for purity which, in every
circumstance, nourishes intolerance, even artistic intolerance.’64

The great moment that defined the undeniably antimodern significance of

‘Politics of the Spirit’ was the already mentioned speech that Ferro gave on 21
February 1935 in the presence of Salazar at the award-giving ceremony of the
first SPN literary prizes. The speech was a long indictment against ‘everything
that soils the spirit’, ‘everything that is ugly, coarse, brutish, everything that is

62
França, O Modernismo na Arte Portuguesa, p. 105.
63
Rosmaninho, ‘António Ferro e a propaganda nacional antimoderna’, op. cit., p. 294.
64
Idem, pp. 295-96.
wicked, sick, for the sake of voluptuousness or Satanism’, against the ‘amorality
and morbidity’ of ‘certain depraved paintings of depravity’, against ‘the
renaissance of a sadistic literature’ and ‘Freudian digging’. The man who had
written Mar Alto ten years before, now pointed to Céline’s Voyage au bout de la
nuit (1932) as an example of despicable and reprehensible ‘shamelessness’ (it is
noteworthy that Ferro knew the novel). Disquiet — a key word within the
modernist sphere of influence — was now, thanks to Ferro, associated with
something diabolical and nihilist that produced ‘deliberately morbid literature and
art’. ‘Non-conformist literary works’, some of which could even be admired
according to Ferro, although they were ‘corrosive and dangerous’, were not
favoured or given prizes by the New State although it could ‘perhaps’ not prevent
them. In any case, what really mattered was to ‘set up a spiritual environment’ in
which dangerous and sick works ‘will not be possible or that any appetite to
create them will fade as a matter of course’. ‘Politics of the Spirit’ would thus
promote ‘healthy art’ of ‘abundantly constructive intentions’, criteria which,
according to Ferro, would be enlightened by reading Salazar’s speeches and the
‘moral principles contained therein.’65 Ferro’s long speech, filled with erudite
citations and references in which Jean Cocteau and Katherine Mansfield stand
shoulder to shoulder with Charles Maurras and Giovanni Papini in substantiating
his antimodern theses, was complemented by Salazar at the end, who spoke of the
social responsibility of writers and artists in the new regime and thereby justified
the ‘imposition’ not only of ‘limits’ (censorship) but also ‘directives’ in literary
and artistic creativity. 66 Fernando Pessoa, who had not gone to the ceremony to
receive his award for the book Mensagem, reacted with indignation to the
dictator’s ideas. However, every reflection in Ferro’s speech about the allegedly
‘immoral’ and ‘dangerous’ art could not but be totally rejected by Pessoa, who
had always courageously come out in defence of so-called ‘immoral’ and
‘dangerous’ writers — doubtlessly one himself. This celebratory occasion in
which the New State’s cultural policy was presented could also have led to the
consecration and recruitment of Pessoa as the poet of the regime; instead, it
marked the writer’s definitive break with Salazar’s dictatorship.67 Ferro was
mistaken if he thought that a prize and the prospect of collaborating with the
regime could buy or ‘tame’ Pessoa (‘the great philosopher of the new spirit in
Portugal’ as he had called him in 1929) and turn him into the prophetic poet of the
new regime. As the undeniable emblematic figure of Portuguese modernists,
Pessoa offers an ideal counterpoint to the evaluation of Ferro’s modernist
consistency and of the authenticity of his ‘new spirit’, all the more so because
politically they both were nationalists and sceptical about Portuguese democracy.

Ferro’s afore-mentioned vision as a modernist who abandoned the vanguardist,

cosmopolitan ideals of his youth when he met Salazar in order to become the
great ‘tamer of modernism’, is a half-true and simplistic thesis, the result of a
mistaken understanding of Ferro’s place in the Portuguese modernist movement.
His own nationalism, although certainly more cosmopolitan than Salazar’s, dated
back not to the 1930s but to his youth. It is, however, a defensible thesis insofar as
Ferro’s position on censorship is concerned. In this matter, as a writer and a

65
‘Política do espírito e sua definição’, in António Ferro, Prémios Literários, pp. 17-30.
66
A. Oliveira Salazar, ‘Para servir de prefácio’, in Discursos, I t., (Lisboa: Coimbra Editora,
1935).
67
Barreto, ‘Salazar and the New State in the Writings of Fernando Pessoa’, pp. 188-201.
journalist, he did betray his old values. In 1935, the propaganda chief of the
regime became also the first president of the Sindicato Nacional dos Jornalistas,
the government-sponsored union of Portuguese journalists. In that quality he
publicly supported the maintenance of the censorship introduced in 1926 by the
military (which was to last until 1974), in response to a petition against censorship
signed by two hundred journalists, writers and artists. In a violent speech he then
declared ‘war on the tyranny of freedom of thought, on free intellectuals [...], who
poison the world!’68

As we’ve seen, although Ferro had been well acquainted with Sá-Carneiro and
Pessoa in his youth, he neither collaborated with nor belonged to the Orpheu
literary group. On the contrary, he publicly broke with Pessoa in 1915 and
prohibited his name from appearing as publisher of that magazine. Young Ferro’s
poems and plays were at an abysmal distance, in every sense, from the artistic
work of the group. Ferro never published poetry or prose in any of the modernist
magazines that appeared during the war or even later (he didn’t contribute to
Contemporânea nor to the Athena magazine, which Pessoa directed in 1924-25).
In 1918, 23-year old Ferro was still making fun publicly of modernist and futurist
writers, and he would do so again later in the 1930s. Only some of his writing
between 1920 and 1925 might be considered modernist, although with a mundane
and frivolous flavour, apart from being excessively indebted to contemporary
influences. Ferro’s integration, as a writer, in the modernist sphere was belated
and superficial, and his work lacked depth or originality, in spite of the quality of
his writing. His only work ever translated into another language is the book of the
Salazar interviews. It was in journalism, especially in the ‘art’ of interview-report,
that Ferro revealed his greatest talent, in close relation with his concept, and a
very ‘modern’ one at that, of political marketing — together with the promotion
of his own activities and his own person.

Ferro kept up with or adhered to the spirit of modernism more truly as a result of
his modernist sociability, through creating a network of connections with the
national and foreign artistic world, as well as the comparative updatedness of his
aesthetic taste as an appreciator of modern art and literature. It was his modernist
sociability and cosmopolitan taste, together with his intelligent political marketing
that led the head of the New State’s propaganda, despite the prevailing
reactionary political and cultural environment, to organize pioneering exhibitions
of modern art, the first in 1935, and give out prizes to many modern artists — but
not to any modernist writer other than Pessoa. In this manner, the supporter of
censorship, the creator of rituals, spectacles, commemorations and monuments
glorifying the past (the main example being the Portuguese World Exhibition 69
held in 1940) and the champion of folk art, rurality and the cult of the traditional,
also left an image of the defender of modernity. Summing up the direction of
António Ferro’s cultural policy, one historian situated him somewhere ‘between
Goebbels and Malraux’.70 Perhaps one might specify: between a non-aggressive
Goebbels and an anti-democratic Malraux, whatever that may mean.

68
Idem, pp. 183-84 and 189-91.
69
See David Corkill and José Almeida, ‘Commemoration and Propaganda in Salazar’s Portugal:
The Mundo Português Exposition of 1940’, Journal of Contemporary History 44 (2009), 381-99.
70
Graça dos Santos, Le spectacle dénaturé, pp. 57-111.