Exposição "Mário Soares. Portugal: Que Revolução?"

In this exhibition, images speak and words reveal, forming an alliance in which they complement and enhance one another.

In a long interview with the French journalist Dominique Pouchin (Le Monde), which he revisited and updated three decades later, Mário Soares recounted the Portuguese Revolution, expressing his views on its decisive turning points and pivotal moments. It is a vivid conversation, conducted in the heat of events and in close proximity to both the events and their protagonists, unfolding like a film, with the relentless tumult of sounds and slogans of the Ongoing Revolutionary Process (PREC) as its soundtrack.

“Portugal: Que Revolução?” (“Portugal: What Revolution?) The question itself conveys the sense of an uncertain and contradictory time, unpredictable and fraught with risk, in which the Revolution, amid a clash of competing legitimacies and opposing projects, advanced and retreated in a frenetic and confused zigzag.

Soares narrates and explains, interprets and argues, asserting his positions and offering his judgments. From all that was said in this intense and at times uncomfortable dialogue, the passages selected are those that allow us to grasp the decisive events, in all their often impetuous and heightened drama.

The photographs presented here, by various renowned photographers, speak with a visual voice as clear, forceful, vertiginous and swift as the feverish events they portray.

As we move through this exhibition, we come to understand how Mário Soares experienced and perceived the events in which he was one of the main protagonists, in a struggle that helped make Portugal a European democracy.

Dominique Pouchin (b. 1949) met Mário Soares for the first time in Paris, on the eve of the Revolution, in March 1974. A young journalist for Le Monde, he would shortly afterwards become the newspaper’s special correspondent in Lisbon. As a student, he had taken part in May 1968 and had been involved with the Unified Socialist Party (PSU) and the Revolutionary Communist League. In Portugal, he closely followed the events of the Ongoing Revolutionary Process (PREC), interviewing political and military figures as well as the people who took to the streets across the country. He witnessed demonstrations, strikes, occupations, rallies and press conferences.

During those months, he was in Portugal 17 times, spending more time in Lisbon than in Paris. Years later, he would recall: “Looking back, I would say that the Portuguese Revolution was a pivotal moment in post-war history.” Pouchin later became editor-in-chief and then editorial director of Libération, and briefly served as director of France-Soir.

Mário Soares. Portugal: que Revolução? Diálogo com Dominique Pouchin, the result of several days of conversation between Soares and Pouchin about the events of the Portuguese Revolution (1974-1976), was launched shortly before the legislative elections, in April 1976, at the Sá da Costa bookshop in Lisbon. The book, originally published in French (Calmann-Lévy, 1976), was translated by Isabel Soares and published by Perspectivas & Realidades. It was also released in Italy (La Nuova Italia, 1976), Brazil (Paz e Terra, 1976) and Venezuela (Monte Ávila Editores, 1977).

In 2001, the journalist interviewed the politician again, this time for the French television channel Histoire. This interview led to a new book, published in France the following year in the “Mémoire Vivante” collection (Flammarion). In 2003, the work was published in Portuguese under the title Memória Viva (Quasi Edições). Passages from both books by Soares with Pouchin were selected for inclusion in this exhibition text.

“I was in Bonn, at the invitation of my friends from the Social Democratic Party (SPD). On the evening of the 24th, I was invited to dinner with the Minister of Defence. Once again, I had to resign myself: they listened to me with sympathy and clear interest, but they did not believe me. (…) I knew I was right. I had never felt the end of fascism so near. (…) It was he, however, who had me woken at six in the morning. The tone had changed: ‘You were right, very serious things are happening in Lisbon. It seems the Revolution is in the streets.’ I was due to meet Willy Brandt that very day, but I hurried back to Paris, where I had an important network of information.”

“I was in Bonn, at the invitation of my friends from the Social Democratic Party (SPD). On the evening of the 24th, I was invited to dinner with the Minister of Defence. Once again, I had to resign myself: they listened to me with sympathy and clear interest, but they did not believe me. (…)

I knew I was right. I had never felt the end of fascism so near. (…) It was he, however, who had me woken at six in the morning. The tone had changed: ‘You were right, very serious things are happening in Lisbon. It seems the Revolution is in the streets.’ I was due to meet Willy Brandt that very day, but I hurried back to Paris, where I had an important network of information.”