“Everything was possible”: emotions and rerceptions of the past among former Portuguese antifascist activists

Abstract

In this article, I analyze how former activists opposed to Estado Novo, Portugal's fascist regime, see their past, as well as the emotions and perceptions associated with it. I argue that what Antonio Costa Pinto called a “double legacy” shapes these activists' process of remembering. This means that the legacies of dictatorship in Portugal's consolidated democracy are strongly shaped by how it ended and by how democracy was implemented in the country—that is, through a revolution and a radical “cut with the past.” I use semistructured interviews and open questionnaires to study how former activists are affected by and contribute to building this double legacy. By adopting an interactionist perspective and by bridging the scholarship on transition and oral history, this research aims to strengthen the dialogue between social movement and memory studies, and also stresses the relevance of the co-construction of individual and collective memory.