Jean-Philippe Gunet
Posted in Modified .
In exile, 13 Portuguese people who fled Salazar’s dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s recounted their exile. Pau historian Victor Pereira sheds light on this mass exodus that owed not everything to the economy.
It is a rare and honest book that sheds light on a phenomenon still unknown in France. In the 60s and 70s, many young Portuguese people fled their country, the dictatorship of Salazar, but also from a 4-year military service where soldiers had to defend the colonies of Angola or Mozambique.
By “exiles” (Ed. Chandeigne), the history of Portuguese emigration in France, particularly in Béarn, but also elsewhere, in Belgium or in Sweden or in Algeria, indicates the number of political motives that also drove the younger generation to flee the country . Victor Pereira, a former lecturer at the University of Pau and now a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History of the University of New Lisbon, who wrote the book’s foreword, sheds light on an era in its context.
