I

In recent years there has been a renewal of interest in the history of the Portuguese transition to democracy by scholars calling for a broader perspective of the process, taking more seriously the role played by collective actors, such as the labour, agricultural workers’ and urban movements which led to factory, farm and housing occupations throughout the country.Footnote ¹ While this interest is to be welcomed, the nature of its focus on a time-limited process, bookended by the military coup of April 1974 and the confrontation between radicals and moderates in November 1975, has tended to remove these events from their historical context. This is apparent in the way in which most of these studies fail to problematise the historical emergence of the issues that motivated these movements and the way in which they relate to political traditions in Portugal. To do so may help to explain not just the trajectories and strategies of such movements and their role in the transition, but also to put forward more general questions regarding contemporary Portuguese history.

The urban social movement active during the transition is a case in point. Across the city, starting out in its poorest areas, residents created neighbourhood committees to pressure the transitional authorities into providing social housing and other urban services, including public transport, nurseries and healthcare. These committees organised self-build schemes for playgrounds, nurseries or sports centres; decided on the allocation of social housing to local families; and, in some cases, led to the occupation of vacant housing and its distribution to the poor. This rapid and intense mobilisation took the transition government by surprise and forced a number of concessions that confirmed a commitment to housing provision by public authorities and forceful intervention in the housing market. Due to its popular appeal, this urban movement became a coveted ally for the political factions of the revolution, and I have argued elsewhere that it played an important role in the transition to democracy in Portugal.Footnote ²

Previous studies of the movement have tended to assume a more or less mechanical connection between urban conditions (or class positions) and the mobilisation of affected populations. As such, they fail to address a crucial question that becomes apparent if the movement is regarded in the context of the history of popular political mobilisation in Portugal. What is striking about the urban movement is that it was essentially concerned with social rights, understood as entitlements of citizenship.Footnote ³ The idea that housing conditions and shortages were problems to be addressed by state provision, which previous research has taken as read, was in fact new to the political vocabulary of Portuguese popular politics. For much of the previous two centuries, governing elites and the general population shared an understanding of citizenship that entailed very limited expectations regarding social welfare. Both the liberal monarchy and the republican state limited the very notion of the right-holding citizen to a minority of the population.Footnote ⁴

Furthermore, in the absence of a large urban population and with the escape valve provided by emigration, few broad-based popular movements appeared throughout the modern period, allowing state power to be exercised without resorting to the kinds of cross-class alliances that were crucial in the process of bartering the terms of citizenship elsewhere.Footnote ⁵ For large sectors of the population a distant and limited state was more often seen as an enemy or a hindrance than as a potential deliverer of social improvements.Footnote ⁶ Even when working-class organisations developed in major urban centres towards the end of the nineteenth-century, reformist, state-oriented political strategies soon lost ground to anti-state ‘excluded’ ideologies such as anarcho-syndicalism, in the face a political system consistently impervious to popular demands.Footnote ⁷ The interplay between state structures, ruling ideologies and popular strategies combined to produce a form of citizenship in which social rights did not go beyond scattered programmes (in comparison with other European countries) in the spheres of education, working conditions and social insurance.Footnote ⁸

The same applies to the history of urban and housing conditions as a social problem. Hygienist concerns regarding urban squalor dated back at least to the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Yet well into the First Republic (1910–26) housing was rarely envisaged as field of direct public intervention, and the problem was most often put in terms of the relation between wages and living costs, with solutions sought in labour legislation or private philanthropy.Footnote ⁹ Between 1910 and 1918, parliament failed to approve several legislative projects inspired by state-driven housing policies elsewhere in Europe.Footnote ¹⁰ It was not until the short-lived dictatorship of Sidónio Pais in 1918 that legislation on state-supported social housing along such lines was published. However, it is telling that the motivation for the breaking of the traditional boundaries of liberalism was inspired not by popular pressure but rather by an ideology that would find its fullest expression under Salazar's regime. Samara has suggested that Sidónio Pais's reforms were driven by the desire to ‘hygienise and moralise’ the labouring classes, creating the conditions for the ‘good worker’ to resist sedition. These welfare programmes were aimed at undercutting the independent mobilisation of ‘citizen Lenin’, and hence it is unsurprising that such gifts were regarded with suspicion by most workers’ organisations.Footnote ¹¹ While it was as a result of this new legislation that work started on the first state-sponsored workers’ neighbourhood in Lisbon, Arco do Cego, it is a measure of the government's commitment that building work was halted in 1922 and that the project would not be completed until 1935, when a much more comprehensive housing programme was undertaken by Salazar's Estado Novo (new state) between 1933 and 1974.Footnote ¹²

This article argues that the transformation of housing from a private concern to a social right in the eyes of the majority of the population was a by-product of the Estado Novo's policies. Through them, certain categories of goods (housing in this case, but it is possible to make similar claims regarding health provision and social insurance) became politicised; that is, they were first instituted as an object of direct intervention by the state.Footnote ¹³ From these beginnings, two developments followed. First, the regime's centralisation and strengthening of state power created the conditions for the development of a logic of technocratic intervention that generated internal pressures for a rolling-out of the state's responsibilities. Second, although initial programmes were highly segmented – with different categories of recipients and entitlements – they set the precedent for the principle of provision of social rights, making the case for their universalisation plausible.Footnote ¹⁴

II

Although draped in conservative rhetoric, the Estado Novo had a utopian goal at heart: the creation of a corporatist society based on Catholic values. For all its glorification (and reinvention) of a mythicised past, it was an essentially modern project which sought to transform society.Footnote ¹⁵ Its ideas drew on the Catholic movements in which Salazar had been active before his ascent to power, combining contemporary conservative nationalism, fascism and Catholic social thinking.Footnote ¹⁶ Inspired by these traditions, Salazar regarded the art of government as guided by a moral goal and the exercise of political power not as an end in itself or as a tool of economic progress, but rather as an instrument for moral discipline, for the creation of a new man, released from the ‘acquired vices . . . of education, of mentalities’ and guided by Christian morals.Footnote ¹⁷ Only in ‘spiritual life’ would the country find ‘progress worthy of that name’.Footnote ¹⁸ In Salazar's view, the pursuit of this moral goal and the proper rule of the nation were not possible in a parliamentary pluralist system that constrained the actions of the executive. The moral state had to be strong, ‘so strong that it does not need to be violent’.Footnote ¹⁹ If the guiding principle of society was spiritual, the family was its vessel: ‘civil society will . . . see how its morality, consistency and cohesion depend directly on the morality, consistency and cohesion’ of the family, the ‘purest source of the moral values of production’.Footnote ²⁰ Moral regeneration would only be possible if the institution of the family was protected from disaggregating trends such as women's work outside the home, materialism and collectivist ideologies. This ideology also regarded private property as the basis of moral independence, making housing a key instrument with which to create and sustain the ideal family, a theme already explored in the historiography by Baptista and Medina.Footnote ²¹ The 1933 Constitution stated that ‘in order to defend the family, it falls to the State and the municipalities to encourage the constitution of independent and salubrious family homes . . . [and] take measures that seek to avoid the corruptions of mores [costumes]’.Footnote ²² The design both of houses and of housing programmes was conditioned by this preoccupation with the welfare of the family as the perpetuator of Christian moral values. Collective housing blocks, which Salazar, along with much of contemporary opinion, considered ‘repellent to the reserve and modesty inseparable from family life’, were rejected in favour of single-family dwellings with gardens – ‘proper homes, around whose hearth familial love is warmed and the bonds of moral life strengthened’, as Pedro Teotónio Pereira, then secretary of state for corporations and welfare, put it.Footnote ²³

These ideas also shaped the terms of access to housing. Not only did programmes discriminate in favour of families (only married couples could hope to access state housing), they also used property as a means of reinforcing family ties through a complex system of ownership and inheritance. In the flagship ‘Economic Houses’ scheme, tenants would earn ownership of the house after twenty-five years, but, on death, heirs were liable for outstanding rents until the end of that period. Selling the house was also subject to official consent, even after ownership had passed to the tenant. In cases of divorce (rarely legal in any case), ownership could not be allocated to one or the other of the parties. These stringent regulations sought to bind home and family together, looking to create in the city the strong attachment to place that Salazar so admired in his vision of rural society.Footnote ²⁴

The regime devoted substantial energy to its housing programmes, and their importance is attested by the fact that one of its rising stars, Duarte Pacheco, was chosen to spearhead them in his dual role as minister for public works and president of the Lisbon municipality. Pacheco was also given specific responsibility to prepare the capital for the 1940 ‘Double Centenary’, a monumental propaganda exercise meant to be a demonstration of the regime's authority and a reassertion of Portugal's imperial destiny.Footnote ²⁵ In preparation for the celebrations, whole areas of Lisbon were to be redeveloped, large shanty neighbourhoods cleared and re-housing hundred of families rehoused, creating space for new monumental squares, parks and boulevards. This great transformation was to include the construction of several new state-built neighbourhoods, mostly through the Economic Houses programme (1933) and, later, through the ‘Housing for Poor Families’ scheme (1945). With these initiatives, the Estado Novo went beyond anything previously attempted, placing the state at the centre of efforts to resolve the housing question. According to Gros, the regime passed about sixty pieces of housing legislation between 1928 and 1963, in comparison with the handful of decrees, most often directed at regulating private developers, passed between 1910 and 1928.Footnote ²⁶

Despite this, the Estado Novo's housing programmes of the 1930s and 1940s were limited in output, partly because of the economic constraints imposed by the war, and made little difference to the overall housing conditions of an urban population that continued to expand on the back of a steady rural exodus. Nevertheless, these programmes did have important political repercussions, creating a space where the use of public resources in the solution of urban problems could be freely discussed, and contributing to the creation of a class of technocrats invested in state-driven forms of development. These in turn generated a momentum for the expansion of state welfare that would be a dominant theme from the 1950s onwards and a defining characteristic of Marcello Caetano's attempts to save the dictatorship in its final years. Furthermore, by coming into contact with these programmes and the agencies that delivered them, by being exposed to a growing rhetoric of housing as a right, the urban poor developed strong feelings of entitlement and expectations that would ultimately be frustrated, serving to delegitimise the regime, and that would be the basis of the widespread urban mobilisations of 1974–6.

III

The first two of these effects, the politicisation of housing and the development of a ‘technocratic’ class, are related. Until the 1960s the debate on housing and urban welfare was driven by experts, often under the auspices of the regime. Starting in technical domains such as meetings of urban experts or in fringe intellectual publications, these debates gradually moved to more openly political fora, accompanying, and no doubt often stimulating, new policy interventions. From the 1940s calls for an extension of housing programmes could be heard from a number of different quarters. Under the cover afforded by the government's admission of urban housing as a problem, someone like Manuel Vicente Moreira, a physician, philanthropist and social reformer, could write a series of pamphlets exposing the poor housing conditions of the population of Lisbon and call for further state provision in such a way that, although interspersed with praise for the regime's achievements, it was a call to action framed in moral terms.Footnote ²⁷ Political insiders such as Júlio Martins, a Lisbon municipal councillor, publicly argued that the state needed to do more to solve the housing problem, ‘which today is common to the poor and middle classes, raising moral, social and sanitary issues so alarming that neither the State nor the Municipality can ignore’.Footnote ²⁸ Throughout the 1940s there was strong debate and no little criticism of the regime's housing policies in technical circles. Architects and urban planners, influenced by Le Corbusier's Athens Charter, called for a shift towards high-rise building as a means of solving the housing problem. At the First National Congress of Architects in 1948, ‘promoted . . . with the government's sponsorship’, participants openly criticised the existing model of single-family dwellings as ‘not viable for the mass of the population’ for economic reasons or because it fostered an ‘egoistic spirit’ divorced from ‘human fraternity’.Footnote ²⁹ The shared assumption was increasingly that it was the duty of the state to provide housing. Crucially, this idea could be framed within the regime's ideology, as one contributor to the 1948 Architectural Congress argued:

If the corporative system could subsume the contradictions between capital and labour to the advantage of the nation, it was conceivable that it could do the same to the contradictions between capital and land. The regime's intervention had set on course a process whose logic could be (and was) used to demand the expansion of social provision.Footnote ³¹

Throughout the 1950s and until its demise in 1974, the dictatorship continued to expand the remit of its welfare provision. In the field of housing, having experimented with large-scale urban planning by directing the urbanisation in the 1940s and 1950s of what is today the neighbourhood of Alvalade, the regime moved towards massification of construction, the greater centralisation and professionalisation of urban planning, and housing, and the setting of increasingly ambitious targets for public provision.Footnote ³² In 1959, under government auspices, the Lisbon city council created a Technical Office for Housing, with special powers to lead the process of urbanisation of two large areas in the east of Lisbon, Chelas and Olivais. The aim was to build three thousand new dwellings a year, in apartment blocks set in park-like surroundings.Footnote ³³

This impetus was confirmed and reinforced by Salazar's successor from 1968, Marcello Caetano. The 1968 five-year plan, setting out how the ‘social state’ would be built, was candid in regard to the country's needs and the limitations of previous achievements. It was the first of the dictatorship's plans to include a section devoted exclusively to housing, where it was recognised that earlier schemes had failed to meet targets.Footnote ³⁴ A new state agency with responsibility for social housing was created, new powers of land expropriation for city council authorities were announced, the construction, by public and semi-public entities, of around 50,000 new houses by 1973 was promised, and, in Lisbon, the housing agency's remit was extended to include the elimination of all shanty neighbourhoods in that city.Footnote ³⁵ These commitments differed greatly from the beginnings of social housing provision essayed in the first decades of the dictatorship. Across the country, the state's contribution to overall numbers of new building had risen from 1.9 per cent in 1971 to 5.7 per cent in 1973.Footnote ³⁶ By 1970, state-built housing in its various forms accounted for 18.1 per cent of Lisbon's housing stock, up from 11.2 per cent in 1960, and the rate of new builds doubled.Footnote ³⁷

These commitments regarding housing were part of the wider policy shift that saw Caetano attempt to rebrand the regime as an ‘Estado Social’ (social state), giving public welfare provision a central role in the legitimating discourse of the dictatorship.Footnote ³⁸ Caetano's reforms must be understood in the context of the need to find new sources of legitimacy in the face of the social transformations of the post-war period and, from 1961, the looming issue of the colonial war. The regime found itself confronted by a number of challenges for which the old rhetoric, developed in reaction to the political conditions of the First Republic, was increasingly ill-matched. These included a growing pressure for liberalisation from diverse sectors across society, from business leaders to students, and the ever greater sacrifices being asked by the regime from its subjects as the war against African independence movements grew in intensity.Footnote ³⁹ In response, Caetano set out his vision for the development of Portuguese society. He rejected the idea of a small, regulatory state, arguing that war and economic crisis had forced states to intervene ‘boldly’ in order to address the needs of growing populations that could no longer be met by unplanned private charity. At the same time, Caetano warned of a ‘great crisis’ in the Western world, undermining the fabric of society through the weakening of the authority of the family, education and moral values. The state, Caetano argued, could not witness this ‘quietly and passively’, rather it must act to shore up the collective good threatened by excessive individualism.Footnote ⁴⁰ This was to be done through a programme of welfare expansion that would also serve to legitimise the regime itself, as Caetano himself admitted. Stating that calls for democratisation were misguided, he argued that

That Caetano turned to the state to save Salazar's project suggests the importance of the country's developing bureaucracy: such welfarist solutions were only possible because of the machinery created by the Estado Novo. A rigid, authoritarian and oppressive administrative system, designed to control as much as to deliver, it was nonetheless a much more efficient state than the historical norm in the country. In contrast to the other fascist dictatorships in Europe, power was exercised through the administrative system, rather than through a party or movement.Footnote ⁴² The Estado Social was to be created by a new technocratic bureaucracy endowed with a degree of autonomy and capacity and even a public service ethos rarely seen before in Portugal. In the field of housing, it is clear that there was a new generation of architects, urban planners and sociologists who looked to promote the expansion of the regime's commitments in terms of welfare delivery, developed experimental (and in some cases radical) methodologies and, perhaps most importantly, linked the question of housing to a language of rights that would soon become dominant. The 1969 Housing Congress, held under the under the sponsorship of the ministry for public works, shows how policymakers and government staff were experimenting with both discourse and forms of public intervention. The congress was held in the relative openness that preceded the 1969 elections. The discussion paper produced for the conference, taking its cue from the admissions of the 1968 five-year plan, noted the failures of housing policy in previous decades, and asserted that only the state could deliver affordable housing. This was not posed simply as a matter of expediency in the face of temporary shortcomings of private developers. Instead, the team who prepared the paper saw the role of the state in this field as an obligation:

Dozens of participants and speakers reiterated the right to housing, and the primary role of government in addressing it. This understanding was enshrined in the first conclusion of the conference's final report, which read, ‘each family unit needs a home. From this comes the concept of the right to housing which, being a right, has to be assured to all by the collectivity, under the responsibility of the State.’Footnote ⁴⁴

Another of the conference's papers proposed experimenting with housing co-operatives bankrolled by public funds, involving residents’ committees in the building process – a radical ‘participatory’ scheme in the context of a country under an authoritarian regime.Footnote ⁴⁵ According to one of the conference's organisers, Nuno Portas, this idea drew on Latin American experiences in slum rehabilitation with which he had become acquainted during the course of a fact-finding trip in the 1960s.Footnote ⁴⁶ In fact, this scheme would be rolled out after 1974 as the provisional government's flagship housing scheme, when Portas was appointed secretary of state for housing, and relied on the enthusiasm and ideas of a younger generation that had cut its teeth in the dictatorship's bureaucracy. There has been little research on this generation of technocrats, trained as a result of the regime's investment in technical education and who staffed important front-line sectors of the public bureaucracy. Many had come to hold liberalising, if not outright leftist, sympathies and regarded public service as a form of political action.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is no coincidence that in the later years of the regime, emerging oppositionist movements recruited extensively in these sectors, and that many of the men and women responsible for urban policy after the revolution started their professional careers in public service under the dictatorship.

The 1969 congress shows how Caetano's strategy was seized upon by the state bureaucracy, who explicitly linked the language of rights to housing. Once such commitments were made in public, it was possible for oppositionists to use them as a political weapon, particularly by pointing to the gap between the regime's promises and its achievements. Articles in the magazine A Habitação, published by the Lisbon Tenants’ Association – an organisation staffed by critics of the regime and operating at the limits of its tolerance – used quotes from the 1969 congress to highlight the limitations of the regime's interventions:

Other, more mainstream, publications also felt sufficiently emboldened to draw attention to urban squalor. In January 1971 the weekly magazine Vida Mundial published a thirteen-page report on the problem of shanty neighbourhoods in the Lisbon area. Only a few years earlier, when the daily Diário Popular had tried to run a series of articles on urban poverty and housing, censors had halted publication.Footnote ⁴⁹ Avoiding direct criticism of the authorities, items such as these nevertheless used extensive citations from the 1969 congress or other such official statements to call attention to the problem and frame it in the language of rights and to argue that the regime was still as far from solving these issues: ‘the “scandal” [of shanty towns] is today identical to the situation that called for emergency measures by the Government in 1938 . . . In any case, the problem exists and ignoring it will not contribute to its solution.’Footnote ⁵⁰ Going a step further, opposition groups explicitly linked the regime's record on housing to the need for democratisation. At the 3rd Congress of the Democratic Opposition, during the 1973 election campaign (elections were still held under the dictatorship, but with franchise and freedom of speech that were highly restricted, as well as widespread ballot rigging) the right to housing was used to leverage demands for civic and political freedoms. The rhetoric of rights employed by the dictatorship was called ‘a mystification, since the right to housing cannot be acknowledged in isolation from all rights that guarantee the full development of each person within the collectivity’.Footnote ⁵¹ Architect and oppositionist Keil do Amaral set out his assessment of the reasons for the regime's failure:

IV

The criticism of oppositionists was aided by the regime's failure to deliver, as it consistently fell short of its publicly stated goals. Caetano's reforms, despite all the publicity, failed to address Lisbon's urban problems. Space to build on was crucial and public land was scarce, not least because in many parts of it migrants had built shanty towns and illegally established neighbourhoods whose residents needed to be rehoused before any new building could start.Footnote ⁵³ New powers to expropriate private land for public use required long and complex processes, as well as expensive compensation. Officials in the new state agency for housing complained that a lack of organisation and communication with other government departments seriously hampered their work.Footnote ⁵⁴ Rising construction costs caused by growing inflation also meant that increasing proportions of houses built for low-income families were sold or let privately to make developments viable.Footnote ⁵⁵ At the same time, the private sector was unaffordable to those who most needed housing: in 1970, the average rent for newly built apartments in Lisbon represented from 73 to 116 per cent of an average industrial worker's wage.Footnote ⁵⁶

Perhaps even more importantly, existing social housing schemes came to be perceived by many as unfair. The regime's rhetoric had instituted a right to housing that was increasingly discussed in universal terms, while in reality access was both segmented and fragmented.Footnote ⁵⁷ This contrast contributed to an increasingly negative assessment of the performance of the dictatorship in delivering these rights.

The segmentation of the dictatorship's welfare system worked not only by privileging the family, but also by establishing different categories of recipients with access to differentiated benefits and making progress through them extremely difficult. The urban poor in the real sense – dependent on menial forms of casual employment, working in construction or even in the in-between world of agricultural labour in the small plots and market gardens that were dotted across the city – very seldom had access to the ‘ideal home’ of the Estado Novo's propaganda. Instead, their needs would be covered by schemes such as Homes for Poor Families, in most cases neighbourhoods of temporary prefabricated housing. Unlike in the grander neighbourhoods of ‘economic houses’, tenancy would not evolve into ownership and was always precarious. Tenants could only aspire to be upgraded to ‘economic houses’ if they were deemed to meet the right ‘social conditions’, which gave the local agents of state and church agencies that ran these neighbourhoods considerable of power over residents’ lives. Very few ever made the transition and temporary neighbourhoods, designed to last only five to ten years, were still in use four decades later, in very poor repair. Even in those lower-quality neighbourhoods, access was strictly controlled and the urban poor whose conduct fell short of the standards set by the regime were shut out of the system. Single people or unmarried mothers, for instance, were not considered to be worthy recipients of housing.Footnote ⁵⁸ Access was conditional on ‘good moral conduct’, attested by a hierarchical superior and enforced by the municipal police and housing authorities. Getting on the wrong side of either could mean forfeiture of tenure and all moneys paid towards the acquisition of the house; tenants could be evicted if deemed to be ‘unworthy of the right of occupation’ or to have caused a ‘public scandal’.Footnote ⁵⁹

This segmentation of benefits was intentionally designed into housing schemes from the outset and persisted in many ways until the end of the dictatorship. Speaking in 1930 Salazar asserted that the republican exaltation of democracy and equality had created a ‘downward levelling’, against ‘natural inequalities’ and ‘the legitimate and necessary hierarchy of values in a well-ordered society’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The regime's policies would see that this well-ordered society was rebuilt and preserved. Salazar explicitly laid out his Faustian bargain whereby access to welfare was conditional on ‘moral conduct’:

But there was another, more practical, way in which housing was used by the regime, and which jarred with the evolving discourse on rights. It was used to reward those in the employment of the state or its dependent corporations, securing their loyalty. Those on whom the regime relied were clearly favoured, especially as it sought to establish itself in its first decades: in the 1930s almost a quarter of heads of household in the ‘Economic Housing’ neighbourhoods in Lisbon belonged to either the military or one of the police forces, mainstays of the dictatorship. In the following decades, city council and government employees became major beneficiaries.Footnote ⁶² Overall, there was a marked preference in allocation for lower-middle class state employees, especially those who were members of the government-approved corporative trade unions.Footnote ⁶³

These biases would eventually become a source of resentment, as later schemes and programmes continued to build on the foundations laid by the regime in the 1930s and 1940s. Urban residents were confronted by a contradiction between an evolving discourse on rights and their own experience of such entitlements. But while it is relatively straightforward to chart how discussions on housing and urban issues gradually became an issue of elite political debates, it is rather more difficult to establish what popular opinion made of them, given tight control over the press, even during the relative openness of the electoral period. The everyday experiences of the urban poor under the dictatorship deserve to be the subject of detailed research that has yet to be done. In the meantime, the political demands and actions of grass-roots organisations during the transition to democracy can suggest how popular views of citizenship had come to be articulated, if not the exact process through which they came into existence.

There are few signs that housing was a source of political mobilisation during the first four decades of the Estado Novo, but by the 1970s instances of confrontation and mobilisation begin to appear in the sources. In 1970, forty-eight ‘ill-housed’ families decided to occupy illegally an empty estate in Odivelas. The authorities responded by cutting off water and electricity to the squatters before they were eventually evicted after a few months.Footnote ⁶⁴ Organisations such as the Lisbon Tenants’ Union encouraged the formation of occasional residents’ groups to petition the authorities, although these were short-lived and regarded with suspicion.Footnote ⁶⁵ In 1972 a group of residents from the shanty town of Curraleira approached a member of the National Assembly to complain of the ‘inhuman’ treatment meted out to them by the municipal police and the authorities’ ‘lack of consideration’.Footnote ⁶⁶ However, these were isolated incidents, and it was only with the removal of the dictatorship that the issue of housing could be articulated fully.

Virtually all the residents’ groups formed over spring and summer 1974 defined their claims in terms of rights. A group from a ‘Poor Families’ prefabricated neighbourhood stated that ‘the right to housing is a right of all working people’, and demanded an end to the distinction between tenants who could earn the right to own their state-built home and those who could not. Committees from Lisbon's shanty towns wrote to the new authorities highlighting their ‘subhuman’ living conditions, ‘barely fit for animals, let alone people for whom it is said the hour of freedom and fraternity has arrived’. They demanded their ‘right as human beings’ to homes of ‘bricks and mortar’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Crucially, these rights were not considered abstractly (say as human rights), but concretely, as duties of the state: all demonstrations, petitions and arguments by the emerging movement were state-oriented.

The sources also show the strength of animosity in poor neighbourhoods towards housing authorities. Shortly after the April 1974 coup, shanty town residents mistrustful of the integrity of allocation processes seized social housing under construction across Lisbon. In the Salazar Foundation estate, occupied on 2 May, a woman told a newspaper how the decision to move in had followed rumours spreading across a neighbouring shanty town: ‘[People said:] do you think you'll get to live [in the new estate]? That's for the secret police agents! That's for police officers!’ Although the neighbourhood had been promised to the slum residents, the woman thought that was ‘only to shut them up’, and only those who could afford to bribe social services staff with ‘kilos of ham, jugs of olive oil and thousands of escudos’ were awarded houses. In the eyes of the occupiers, it was the undeserving who got the houses; Américo Tomás’ driver,Footnote ⁶⁸ an ‘engineer’ or a city council employee. Similar accusations were made by the occupiers of hundreds of apartments in Chelas, which they claimed were being allocated to police and army veterans ahead of the poor.Footnote ⁶⁹ In Musgueira, where the Lisbon municipality was building a housing estate and clearing local slums, residents organised to ask for the sacking of head of local social services, whom they accused of accepting bribes of ‘ham and olive oil’ in return for preference in housing allocation.Footnote ⁷⁰ In one of the city's largest and oldest shanty towns, Casal Ventoso, the residents’ commission organised a protest outside the local social services centre, accusing the priest who ran them of ‘never having done anything’ for them, and demanding to be given control over the community centre.Footnote ⁷¹ Elsewhere, social services were accused of ‘bad faith’ in assessing the incomes (and therefore priority rankings) of families on housing waiting lists.Footnote ⁷² Another common target was the municipal police who patrolled poor neighbourhoods, and whose references for ‘good conduct’ could guarantee a house, or whose disapproval could mean immediate eviction; the newsletter of the Relógio commission demanded the sacking of dishonest city council officials and

These examples reveal not only how far state-provided housing had come to be regarded as a fundamental social right, but also how much resentment had accumulated towards the regime and its agents perceived to be denying the people their entitlement. Without a doubt, housing and urban welfare were two of the fields that contributed to the deligitimisation of the regime, but these rising expectations were largely of its own making. As de Tocqueville said of the French monarchy's empty rhetoric on the right to work, ‘it was indiscreet enough to utter such words, but positively dangerous to utter them in vain’.Footnote ⁷⁴

V

Most accounts of the development of citizenship in Europe tend to emphasise the importance of social conflict – most often class-derived – in driving the expansion of the content and coverage of rights, but the roots of citizenship in Portugal seem to lie elsewhere. It was not until a relatively late stage in the life of the dictatorship that the issue of social rights became explicitly tied to the issue of political legitimation, at the time of Caetano's attempts to build an Estado Social. In this case, we have to consider the autonomous influence of authoritarian ideologies and the issue of a bureaucratic momentum, factors that have been hitherto neglected and require further investigation. Both are connected through a process of state building whereby, to quote Theda Skocpol and Edwin Amenta, policies created politics, and not vice-versa.Footnote ⁷⁵

In terms of the history of contemporary Portugal, this idea suggests some further considerations. First, it encourages research into the transformation of popular political beliefs and attitudes during the dictatorship as a way of understanding contemporary political culture. Having established how these were considerably different in 1974 from what they had been in 1928, it is striking how little we know about the changing opinions and life strategies of ordinary citizens under the dictatorship. Villaverde Cabral has recently linked the familistic attitudes and perceptions of distance from power prevalent in Portuguese society to a tradition of state authoritarianism.Footnote ⁷⁶ To what extent were these reinforced by the dictatorship's reformulation of state–society relations, how were democratic understandings of citizenship formed at the popular level, and how have these influenced contemporary attitudes towards the state? More broadly, this leads to considerations regarding the nature of the relationship between state and society in Portugal. South European countries are often described as having ‘weak’ civil societies. This article suggests that changes in the nature of the relationship between state and population created the conditions for broad-based social movements that belied this image of weakness, suggesting that state structures could be important in explaining patterns of low participation. Where states are isolated from citizens, formal and informal associations are less likely to support state-oriented mobilisations that have been taken to be the indicator of strong civil societies. Seen in this light, the Estado Novo presents a paradox. On the one hand, it stands with the tradition of authoritarianism and insulation of politics from society that is characteristic of Portuguese history. On the other, it also contributed, however unwittingly, to the creation of new forms of citizenship, whose active expression was most visible in a short period when the Portuguese state showed an uncharacteristic openness to popular demands, between 1974 and 1975.