Mocidade Portuguesa

Portuguese Youth

Mocidade Portuguesa
Formation	1936
Dissolved	1974
Type	Youth organisation
Legal status	Defunct
Region served	Portugal
Parent organization	National Union

The Mocidade Portuguesa (Portuguese pronunciation: [musiˈðaðɨ puɾtuˈɣezɐ], English: Portuguese Youth) was a Portuguese youth organisation founded in 1936 (dissolved in 1974) under the authoritarian regime of Prime Minister Salazar's Estado Novo. Membership was compulsory between the ages of 7 and 14, and voluntary until the age of 25.^[1] A documentary film made in 1939 gives an insight into its activities, attitudes and values.^[2]

Founded in 1936 by Tiago Franco, the Mocidade was originally inspired by the models of the Italian Fascist Opera Nazionale Balilla and the Nazi Hitler Youth. During 1936 and 1944 the Mocidade had close relations with the Hitler Youth, Opera Nazionale Balilla and the Spanish Frente de Juventudes. However, in 1940 the Germanophile National Secretary Francisco Nobre Guedes was replaced by the anglophile Marcelo Caetano, who took the organisation in a different direction after World War II, because it was seen by many as a fascist organisation. With the defeat of Nazism, the Mocidade backed away from the Hitler Youth mode of organisation. It abandoned its paramilitary feature, adding more features from Roman Catholic youth groups and other youth organisations such as the Scout Movement. But these changes only came to full realisation after the death of Salazar, because in many ways throughout his lifetime the Mocidade still retained some fascist ideas such as the cult of the leader (Salazar) and the Roman salute. When Caetano assumed the leadership of Portugal in 1968, still under the Estado Novo, he largely forgot the Mocidade, and many older members of the organisation even claimed that he was a democrat and an Anti-fascist. A number of dissents left the Mocidade at this time and created the Movimento Juventude Portugal (Portuguese Youth Movement), which was a strongly fascist and Salazarist youth organisation resembling the Mocidade in the days of Salazar, although it was not supported by the Government and was dissolved after the Carnation Revolution.

Members of the Portuguese Youth were divided into four groups by age:

• Lusitos: 7 to 10 years;
• Infantes: 10 to 14 years;
• Vanguardistas: 14 to 17 years;
• Cadetes: 17 to 25 years.^[3]

By decree 29453, White Portuguese citizens living in the then Portuguese colonies, as well as "assimilated" indigenous youths, were permitted to join the Portuguese Youth.^[4]

The "Female Portuguese Youth" was founded in 1937 as the female division of the Portuguese Youth. The goal of the Female Portuguese Youth was to teach young women "the proper mission of a woman's performance in the family and the state".

Both groups were dissolved in 1974, after the Carnation Revolution, because of its connections to the far-right Estado Novo regime.

• National Union (Portugal)
• Legião Portuguesa (Estado Novo)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Mocidade Portuguesa" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (January 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Portuguese. (April 2017) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Portuguese article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 504 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Portuguese Wikipedia article at [[:pt:Mocidade_Portuguesa]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|pt|Mocidade_Portuguesa}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.