Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Strong ideas about the national soil were central to Integralists’ visions of the organic nation. António Sardinha (1887–1925), the most famous of the Integralist intellectuals, celebrated sedentary Lusitan tribes that inhabited the Portuguese territory in pre-Roman times and allegedly constituted the core of the Portuguese race in spite of many subsequent “horrendous exotic alluviums.”[8] Sardinha warned against a republican race, produced by the contamination from Jewish and Black elements, responsible for the introduction in the country of a liberal abstract ideology completely detached from national traditions.[9] He exulted instead over a mythical “Atlantic Man” who year after year cultivated the same soil in which his ancestors were buried. For Integralists, the cult of the ancestors and the tilling of the land were deeply connected in a too-familiar mix of blood and land that they adapted directly from Maurice Barrès, the main inspirer of French radical reactionaries and of many fascist movements across Europe. By 1915, Sardinha had published a volume of collected poems titled The Epics of the Plain: Poems of Land and Blood.[10]

Sardinha’s telluric journey led him to the plains of Alentejo. For those familiar with the poet’s biography this was a natural choice, for his home town, Monforte, is located in Alentejo. The local abundance of megalithic funerary monuments from the Neolithic and Bronze Age materialized in the landscape the cult of the ancestors and surely contributed to Sardinha’s sense of communion with “the honorable farmers that have at all times stared at the horizon that I now stare at.”[11] However, for a reader informed about the political economy of Alentejo, with its large estates and their seasonal workforce, the region was a very unlikely setting for national epics.[12] Not only were the vast majority of properties not in peasants’ hands; there also was a consensus about the negative social effects of the divorce between land ownership and agricultural workers. Since the end of the eighteenth century, popular narratives had insisted on the lawlessness of the scarcely populated region and had attributed the extreme levels of burglary and vagrancy, which were among the highest in the country, to weak bonds between the population and the land.[13] Adding to this grim vision, extensive tracts of land, moors, and heaths were kept uncultivated until the first decades of the twentieth century, which justified the metaphor of Alentejo as a sort of Portuguese Wild West.[14]

^{Figure 2.1 The cover of José Pequito Rebelo’s book O Método Integral, 1923–1942 (Gama, 1942).}

Integralists had thus no easy task in making Alentejo’s soil the source of virtues of the organic nation. Indeed, most of the myths put in circulation by Portuguese intellectuals at the turn of the century had the northern regions of the country as the birthplace of the Portuguese nation, identifying the south, and Alentejo in particular, with bad influences of Jewish and Arab origin.[15] But although the political trajectories of the members of Luso-Integralism are usually described in terms of an aesthetic option for literary traditionalism that evolved into strong counter-revolutionary nationalism, they employed tools other than just poetry to make the southern lands produce morally upright Portuguese. And here we again stumble into Pequito Rebelo, who was occupied less with poetry than with the invention of new agricultural machinery for the application of his Integral Method for grain production, urging intensive care of each individual plant all year round.[16]