The Portuguese “May 68”: Politics, Education and Architecture

Abstract

By 1968, Portugal had been living for 42 years under authoritarian regimes, for 35 of those years under the Estado Novo regime led by António de Oliveira Salazar, a former law professor at Coimbra University.2 During the 1960s Salazar’s authority was weakened, and in September 1968 he was replaced, ostensibly for health reasons, by Marcelo Caetano. This transition raised expectations for greater freedom in Portuguese society, but these hopes would only to be realised by the revolution of April 1974. Students at Porto, Lisbon and especially Coimbra Universities played a central role in opposing the authoritarian regimes, a role which was triggered as much by domestic political developments (the presidential elections of 1958) as by influences from abroad (the student protests in Paris in May 1968). This article will examine the background to the student reform movement, and the contribution made to it by the students of the Escola Superior de Belas Artes do Porto (ESBAP), the leading Arts School in Portugal. Groups from ESBAP supported the Coimbra students’ demands for university autonomy in 1962, and later, from August 1968 onwards, they linked up with faculty and initiated a movement for reform at the Arts school itself. As a result, the architecture department was closed at the end of 1969, to be revived in April 1970 with an experimental apparatus jointly run by lecturers and students.