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Salazar: The Dictator Who Refused to Die Hardcover – September 1, 2020

by Tom Gallagher (Author)

157 ratings

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Fifty years after his death, Portugal's Salazar remains a controversial and enigmatic figure, whose conservative and authoritarian legacy still divides opinion. Some see him as a reactionary and oppressive figure who kept Portugal backward, while others praise his honesty, patriotism and dedication to duty. Contemporary radicals are wary of his unabashed elitism and skepticism about social progress, but many conservatives give credit to his persistent warnings about the threats to Western civilization from runaway materialism and endless experimentation.
For a dictator, Salazar's end was anti-climactic--a domestic accident. But during his nearly four decades in power, he survived less through reliance on force and more through guile and charm. This probing biography charts the highs and lows of Salazar's rule, from rescuing Portugal's finances and keeping his strategically-placed nation out of World War II to maintaining a police state while resisting the winds of change in Africa. It explores Salazar's long-running suspicion of and conflict with the United States, and how he kept Hitler and Mussolini at arm's length while persuading his fellow dictator Franco not to enter the war on their side.
Iberia expert Tom Gallagher brings to life a complex leader who deserves to be far better known.

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"The humane and open-minded story of a man whose legacy has been erased but who could well be regarded as the most consequential minor statesman of the 20th century."--Wall Street Journal

"A vivid, balanced and enormously enjoyable biography of Antonio Salazar, head of Europe's longest-lived right-authoritarian regime. The best introduction to Portuguese affairs in the middle decades of the twentieth century."-- Stanley Payne, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and author of A History of Spain and Portugal

"A long-overdue outsider's approach to the controversial Salazar and his regime. Building on a wide array of sources and interpretations, this insightful portrait of Salazar's political persona offers a remarkable analysis of his foreign policy and geopolitical views. A great read!" -- Lívia Franco, Professor of Political Studies, Catholic University of Portugal, and Associate Researcher, European Council on Foreign Relations

"An insightful account of one of Europe's lesser-known but truly intriguing twentieth-century statesmen. Gallagher's comprehensive biography helps explain how, over four decades, Salazar kept an iron grip on an unruly country, and outfoxed bigger international powers arrayed against him."-- Barry Hatton, author of Queen of the Sea: A History of Lisbon and The Portuguese: A Modern History

"Salazar remains a mystery, even to the Portuguese, but this book goes a long way towards deciphering him. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, this is both a biography and an intellectual portrait. Salazar was a normal man, but a very unusual dictator, whose thought and action continue to pose a challenge to democratic politics in Europe and elsewhere. A much-needed and long-awaited book." -- Bruno Maçães, former Europe Minister of Portugal and author of The Dawn of Eurasia

"Tom Gallagher's immensely detailed portrait of a fascinating man is itself fascinating. The author is a distant presence, coolly objective and disinclined to judge his huge cast of politicians, soldiers, diplomats and bishops. He allows readers space to come to their own conclusions."-- The Telegraph

"Sketches a clear-eyed account of liberalism's alternatives." -- The American Conservative

Book Description

.A nuanced and thoughtful biography of the elusive, much debated Portuguese dictator.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hurst
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 1, 2020
Edition ‏ : ‎ Illustrated
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 360 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1787383881
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1787383883
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.35 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.3 x 1.4 x 8.6 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #1,505,208 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #380 in Fascism (Books)
- #1,039 in European Politics Books
- #2,769 in Political Leader Biographies
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157 ratings

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Tom Gallagher

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Tom Gallagher is a Scot who pursued an academic career as a historian in England for over three decades and is currently Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Bradford. He lives in the Lake District and travels widely in Europe and further afield.

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Eriberto Soto
A fair appraisal of Salazar
Reviewed in the United States on December 6, 2020
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Excellent and eye-opening book on a personality so enigmatic in so many ways. I learned a lot on who Salazar was and had corrected many wrongful ideas concerning his life and work. As 9ne who lived for 10 years in Brazil I normally only heard negative, uninformed information concerning Salazar. This book should be translated into Portuguese so that Brazilians, especially, will have a more adequate view of who Salazar was. Without denying Salazar's defects he also should be known for his virtues as even his enemies recognized.

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T. Graczewski
Portrait of an Introvert-Pessimist Dictator
Reviewed in the United States on January 24, 2025
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Antonio Salazar was born the fifth and last child to devout peasant parents in the coastal city of Vimieiro in 1889, a time when roughly eighty percent of Portuguese were illiterate. The future dictator was a brilliant scholar and a sincere Catholic who believed the teachings of the church were a necessary foundation for guiding society toward a more just world. Politics in Portugal were turbulent during his most formative years. The monarchy was overthrown in 1910. An unprepared Portuguese Army stumbled into World War I on the side of the allies in 1916. Forty-four governments came and went by the time the Portuguese First Republic expired in 1926 after just sixteen years.

During these years Salazar emerged as an influential and prestigious conservative Catholic thinker who believed that all authority emanates from God and not from any kind of social contract. He believed that the idea that politics could shape and improve the human condition was dangerous nonsense. He was distrustful of all outside powers – especially the naive, capricious, and giant United States – and anything besides religion that possessed a mass popular character, including soccer and fado music, two of Portugal’s greatest passions. Likewise, he was deeply suspicious of democracy. In 1961 he would tell a reporter: “If democracy consists of a process of levelling down and refuses to acknowledge natural inequalities; if it believes that power emanates from the masses and that government ought to be the work of the masses and not of the elites; then in truth I am convinced that democracy is a fiction.” Gallagher claims that Salazar was an instinctive Hobbesian – a man with a naturally realist, pragmatic or even cynical attitude to governance and human behavior, which explains his entrenched pessimism.

Salazar became one of the youngest tenured professors (economics) at the University of Coimbra and then entered government in 1928, filling senior roles in budget administration and financial affairs. From the very start he was known for being honest, frugal, retiring, and understated. He never married and had few, if any, close friends, and thus no “yes men.” He eschewed ambitious social programs believing that handouts softened the character of the people.

The National Union (UN) was formed in 1930. It would be the sole recognized political party in Portugal for nearly half a century, although Gallagher says it was an ancillary body, not a source of political power. “Salazar’s aim was the depoliticization of society, not the mobilization of the populace,” Gallagher says. “He believed that order and progress would go hand in hand if political activity was diluted and poured into the empty vessel of the UN.” Salazar would avoid the tight alignment between church and state exhibited in Franco’s Spanish dictatorship next door. Catholic influence in Portugal was directed away from politics and into education and charitable activities. The author holds Salazar in much higher esteem than Franco, who he calls opportunistic, cynical and dim. Whereas Franco was flamboyant and theatrical, Salazar was inscrutable and out-of-sight. In the words of veteran Belgian politican Andre de Staercke: “one was an amateur [Franco], the other was a technician [Salazar]; one was boastful, the other modest; one had sacrificed a nation for the sake of prestige politics, the other had shelved his prestige for the prosperity of the nation.”

“In terms of background, temperament, intentions, and ambitions,” Gallagher writes, “Salazar was an unlikely fascist.” He never developed a mass party, never engaged in street level agitation, never held mass rallies, and never showed any appetite for developing an extremist phalanx to prop him up when necessary. Rather, he was a reactionary, one with strong Christian conservative principles. His was a moderately totalitarian, rules-based, nationalist regime, not a violent party dictatorship. In short, Gallagher says, “[Salazar] ran Portugal very much like a punctilious head butler in charge of a sprawling country estate.”

Gallagher calls Salazar “a political entrepreneur unmatched in skill and effectiveness.” He would develop into a “micro-managing autocrat.” When he came to power in 1934 he announced the arrival of a “New State” (Estado Novo), a corporative and unitary republic with a single authoritarian leader. His primary aim was to turn down the political temperature of the country in order to restore equilibrium, stability and predictability. He would remain far more low-key and unobtrusive compared to the other European dictators of the mid-twentieth century. The Estado Novo was supposed to be tailored to Portugal’s unique conditions and not a version of some foreign model of government. It was to be centered around associations and not the state. Labor strikes were forbidden, as was divorce for marriages inside the church. All employers were expected to enroll in guilds centered around their area of economic activity. Gallagher says that the cooperative structure of the Estado Novo was ideally suited to Salazar’s partneralist and micro-managing tendencies. In a population of just over six million in 1930, only twenty percent (1.2 million) were eligible to vote. The National Assembly met just three months a year and possessed no lawmaking powers.

“Self-effacing, dedicated to his duties, shunning uniforms or bombastic displays, it was a benevolent autocrat who seemed to be in charge of Portugal,” Gallagher writes. However, Salazar also possessed many valuable skills and traits, such as energy, tenacity, clarity of expression, and nerves of steel. Between 1936 and 1945, Salazar simultaneously held the roles of prime minister, foreign minister and minister of war. The author believes that Salazar’s unusual self-effacing demeanor – “austere and puritanical,” he says – played a large role in the longevity of his reign. He was a paternalist, Christian leader without Caesarist or totalitarian tendencies. He was a self-avowed nationalist who was content with a small army and no parades. “Self-restraint and composure,” he says, were “Salazar’s abiding hallmark.” His primary aim was to keep Portugal out of World War II (the country’s humiliating performance in World War I weighed heavily on him). He saw Soviet Russia as the primary threat to both Europe and Portugal. In 1965, Salazar’s most dangerous and committed political opponent, the communist agitator Humberto Delgado, was found murdered just across the border in Spain.

The Portuguese colonial empire spanned the globe and covered millions of square miles. To Salazar and many other nationalist allies, Portugal was only a small and irrelevant country without her colonies, many of which were under her control for 400 years. “Salazar was the most stubborn and implacable 20th-century European colonial leader,” Gallagher says. Combined, the colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Goa, Timor, Cape Verde, Sao Tome, and Macau, known collectively as the Ultramar, were larger than Spain, France, England, Italy and Germany. Angola, in particular, was growing rapidly. Portuguese settlers grew from roughly 45,000 in 1940 to 175,000 in 1960. At the height of the struggle to retain Portuguese Africa, Lisbon had over 100,000 troops deployed to the continent. Over 8,000 Portuguese soldiers lost their lives trying to hold on to the empire between 1961 and 1974. The most strategic and enduringly important colonial asset Lisbon possessed was also the smallest and most remote. The Azores are an archipelago of nine islands of less than one thousand square miles located just less than one thousand miles off the coast of Portugal. The Azores were a critical refueling point in the middle of the Atlantic that gave Salazar leverage over his vastly more powerful western allies for decades. Britain, Portugal’s most long-standing and strategic ally (treaties signed in 1661 and 1899 committed Britain to defending Portugal’s colonies), was granted access to the Azores in 1943 (yet Lisbon flew flags at half-mast for Hitler in 1945). Portugal and Salazar ultimately survived World War II by taking a cautious, wait-and-see approach. “Let things be to see how they work out” was his “golden rule,” according to Gallagher.

American foreign policy towards Portugal has long been “messy and disorganized,” Gallagher says, which often worked to Salazar’s advantage. The ambassadorship to Lisbon was not a prestige assignment and often fell to unqualified men more easily manipulated by the regime. However, none other than George F. Kennan served in Portugal during World War II. Gallagher calls Kennan “a rare soulmate” to Portugal’s benevolent dictator, who once called Salazar “the nearest approach in our time to Plato’s philosopher-king.” Portugal’s status as a founding member of NATO with possession of the strategically important Azores allowed the country to punch above its weight against the “undisciplined giant” across the Atlantic.

In 1968, while sitting in a deck chair awaiting a haircut, Salazar’s chair collapsed and he hit his head on the stone floor. Roughly a month later he suffered a brain hemorrhage and slipped into a month-long coma. He would never fully recover. For the final years of his reign he was largely incapacitated. He died on July 27, 1970. Salazar, the all-powerful dictator of an imperial nation for nearly four decades, died possessing only a small bank deposit and a three-bedroom apartment in a drab Lisbon neighborhood. Even though he died in the jet age, Salazar had only once flown in an airplane and made only trip outside of the Iberian peninsula. There’s no denying that one of the longest serving autocrats in European history was a man of simplicity, sincerity and determination.

The Estado Novo fell on April 25, 1974 without a shot being fired in its defense. Calls for democracy at home and decolonizaiton in Africa ultimately undermined the edifice that Salazar had created and tended to. Sweeping nationalizations and land seizures promptedly occurred. “No other Western country had ever seen such a radical switch in economic relations,” Gallagher says. A left-wing version of Salazar’s corporatism captured the country; the power of the state over the economy and civil society far surpassed that of the Estado Novo. By 1977 Portugal had the worst unemployment rate (25%) and the highest inflation rate (30%) in all of Europe as the country struggled to absorb some 700,000 people returning from the now liberated colonies. As of today, over a third of Portugal’s ten million citizens receive some sort of pension from the state. Much of Salazar’s political legacy in Portugal has been erased, but his reputation for honesty, simplicity and patriotism continue to fascinate his people. “Nothing against the Nation, All of the Nation,” was his motto – and the Portuguese love him for it.

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Bobby K. Daugherty
Decent biography
Reviewed in the United States on June 26, 2021
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
It is hard to find any books about such men in English and impossible to find them in a bookstore in California. Well written and detailed in it's subject. Politics are for the individual to decide on their own but as a human being it is easy to appreciate Salazar's ability to keep Portugal out of the second world war and spare his people any major inconvenience.

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Filipe Lopes
Factual
Reviewed in Germany on July 28, 2021
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Factual and interesting

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J Lisbon
Finally a biography on Salazar from a scholar
Reviewed in Spain on May 6, 2021
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
This is a must read book. The first full-length English-language scholarly biography of a key Portuguese political leader written by a non Portuguese scholar.

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R. SA NOGUEIRA SARAIVA
A factual rendering of Salazar's dictatorship
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 22, 2021
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
This book is yet another biography of Salazar.

Comparing it with Ribeiro de Meneses' book I got the impression that Gallagher somewhat warmed to the personality of Salazar, even though he presents the facts objectively. Salazar was not a terrible, blood-thirsty dictator, he was no fascist; he viewed himself as a kind of platonic ruler. The author portrays him as such –there is objective facts to support it– without ever eschewing from the fact that Salazar kept the country poor and the countryside in an almost miserable condition. This was a deliberate move: Salazar thought that richness brings about a lack of spirituality.

In the present times, when so many people complain about over-industrialization and alienation because of technology, this book should be a warning of the results of such policies.

The financial renovation Salazar achieved, his diplomatic efforts to keep Portugal and Spain out of the war are objectively portrayed. And so is his apparent indifference towards the miserable state of the countryside. In fact, this is actually the only book that objectively portrays these two sides of Salazar.

To return to the comparison between the books by Meneses and Gallagher. The former is sometimes partial against Salazar even if the facts presented are quite objective; the later digs rather more into Salazar's mind, but has less political information (it is, it must be acknowledged, a much smaller book) but Gallagher did have access to information not available when Menezes wrote his book.

Both are good books. You might as well read them both.

Salazar was an extremely complex person, a deep introvert, an objective observer of reality. He was extremely intelligent, cultivated, the possessor of an almost inhuman capacity of self-control; all that is, indeed, admirable. But he had a view of what society should be that is radically opposed to the present one and that I confess I find puzzling. This, alone, should make one read about him.

To finish: I am perhaps well placed to pass judgement on the book: in my family some people (they are objectively portrayed in the book) served the regime and others were imprisoned by it. I actually know the two sides of it.

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daniel
Learned A Lot
Reviewed in Canada on November 3, 2021
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
I found it especially interesting to get an insight into Portuguese politics and a different side of geopolitics in the mid century.

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Robert McDowall
"An absorbing analysis of a Political Enigma"
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 29, 2022
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
This was a fascinating analysis of the Political Enigma, Dr. Salazar. By far the most intelligent of the Dicttaors in the inter-War and post WWII , DR Slazar had an almost instinctive dislike of Politics and Poliitcians. The author is clearly forminhg his opinion as he writes- no bad approach on such a complicated character. The events, Political, personal and social form the backdrop against which the analysis is performed. Perhaps, more analysis could have been performed of the diifficult WWII situation of Portugal's neutrality, where Dr Salazar performed a perfect tight rope walk. The analysis of Dr. Salazar's thoughts about the USA are now even more pertinent. Robert McDowall

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Salazar: The Dictator Who Refused to Die Hardcover – September 1, 2020

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5.0 out of 5 stars A fair appraisal of Salazar

4.0 out of 5 stars Portrait of an Introvert-Pessimist Dictator

4.0 out of 5 stars Decent biography

Top reviews from other countries

5.0 out of 5 stars Factual

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally a biography on Salazar from a scholar

5.0 out of 5 stars A factual rendering of Salazar's dictatorship

5.0 out of 5 stars Learned A Lot

4.0 out of 5 stars "An absorbing analysis of a Political Enigma"

A fair appraisal of Salazar

Portrait of an Introvert-Pessimist Dictator

Decent biography

Factual

Finally a biography on Salazar from a scholar

A factual rendering of Salazar's dictatorship

Learned A Lot

"An absorbing analysis of a Political Enigma"