Políticas da memória da I Guerra Mundial em Portugal, 1918-1933: entre a experiência e o mito

Abstract

Constituting one of the most traumatic events of the history of the Twentieth Century, the Great War ended a global affection and turned neurologically all mobilized societies. In this paper, the politics of memory of the First World War in Portugal are placed in a European context, both as part of the sphere of cultural history and of political and social history as well. Recognizing the existence of an European culture of war, both homogenous and hegemonic, it seeks to understand the nature of the myth of the war experience in Portugal in an analysis that considers the profound divergences within Portuguese participation in the conflict within Europe, such as the disastrous effects that determined the specific process of commemoration and those that relegated to the possible condition of a mutilated victor. In dialectic between official, public and group memory, it attempts to examine in detail the politics of memory through official projects of commemoration with respect to the following points of analysis: the veterans as protagonists, their social integration and associated regulation; the processes of monumentalization of war memory (forms, rhythms of enactment and rituals of reassessing their significance). These axes can clarify particular questions: first, they explain up to what point the the First Republic's incapacity to project a consistent political memory and to deal with the traumas inflicted by the war reflects its fragility, precipitating its collapse in 1926; second, considering the historical definition of public spaces of memory, they can identify whether an official conception of commemoration actually existed in the base of the historical legitimization of republican politics; finally, considering the nature of commemorative processes, they can reveal whether the appropriation of the experience of the front for the war culture cultivated and legitimized the discourse of the political transformation after the war. In this sense, this exercise seems to deconstruct, on the one hand, the idea that the genesis of authoritarian regimes was a direct consequence of the war and, on the other, the notion that the war culture inaugurated a modernity rupture with liberal societies.