Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Aurélio Quintanilha (1892–1987) had very different political allegiances from those of Armando Maugini, the main colonial agriculture expert of fascist Italy, or Joachim Caesar, the head of the Auschwitz plant-breeding research. The Portuguese scientist biography seems to confirm instead the traditional narrative about the difficulties of conducting scientific research under fascist regimes. Quintanilha’s dismissal and compulsive retirement in 1935 from his position as Full Professor of the Botanical Institute of the University of Coimbra, when his scientific reputation in the field of cytology and genetics was indisputable, is in accordance with the well-known purges of scientists under the dictatorial regime that ruled Portugal from 1926 until 1974.[89] His expulsion of the University was part of the Portuguese version of Gleichschaltung imposed by the 1935 decree that ordered the “retirement or firing of civilian or military State functionaries who have revealed or reveal a spirit of opposition to the fundamental principles of the Political Constitution [of 1933] or that don’t guarantee cooperation in fulfilling the superior ends of the State.”[90] The decision by the Minister of Education, Eusébio Tamagnini (a physical anthropologist at the same University of Coimbra, an enthusiast for eugenics, and a local leader of the fascist movement—the blueshirts) to shut down Quintanilha’s laboratory has been perceived as proof of the antiscientific nature of Salazar’s dictatorship.[91] By denying Quintanilha access to his laboratory, the results of seven years of research on cytology and genetics of fungi were totally lost.

In addition, Salazar, who had been also a professor of financial sciences at the University of Coimbra, felt strong personal reluctance toward Quintanilha, a supporter of anarcho-syndicalism who embodied all he stood against. In the years they coincided in Coimbra, the would-be dictator would even refuse to shake hands with him. Salazar, always in his severe black suit, felt insulted by a character that dared to show up in public wearing tennis sportswear and exhibited the cosmopolitan manners earned in his Berlin and Paris years.[92]

In 1936, after the shutting down of his laboratory, Quintanilha escaped the regime’s repression and left Portugal for France to work at the Parisian Natural History Museum. But four years later fascism would stand on his way again. He voluntarily joined the French Army to fight the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, and after the defeat he returned to Portugal where his previous scientific connections promised him a warm welcome. His fellow geneticist Antonio Câmara, not making much of a case of political divergences, assured Quintanilha of a position at the National Agricultural Experiment Station. Although Câmara, as we saw in chapter 2, was one of the main figures of the scientific establishment of Salazar’s New State, the dictator himself interceded personally to prevent Quintanilha to be hired by the Experiment Station. In the next two years, Quintanilha could only count with a part-time job at the institution’s canteen to maintain himself and his family.

^{Figure 5.6 Aurélio Quintanilha speaking at a conference in 1933.}

^{(Arquivo Torre Tombo PT/TT/EPJS/SF/001–001/0025/0310H)}

In 1943, Quintanilha was finally recruited by the Board of Export of Colonial Cotton (Junta de Exportação do Algodão Colonial—JEAC), to direct the newly created Center for Cotton Scientific Research (Centro de Investigação Científica Algodoeira—CICA) in Mozambique, Portugal’s colony in Eastern Africa. Quintanilha was thus sent to a far-away post, isolated from the political intrigues of the metropole, following the regime’s policy of sending opposition members to its African Colonies. He would remain in Mozambique until 1982.

I intend to suggest that his Mozambique years shouldn’t be seen just through the lens of forced internal exile. Delving into Quintanilha’s scientific practices by paying attention to his object of research in the period—cotton—reveals the limits of the traditional historical approach of studying the relations between science and fascism as two separate entities. This is in fact an extreme case in which the individual political preferences of a scientist, totally contrary to fascism, prove to be irrelevant when inquiring the role of his research for the expansion of the regime. One of the scientists more vocal in his opposition to Salazar became involved through his apparent innocuous scientific practices in what was probably the darkest story of Portuguese fascism.