ABSTRACT

In June 2005 a crowd of 100,000 thronged the streets of central Lisbon for an event that had complex political significance. That event was the funeral of Álvaro Cunhal, former secretary-general of the Portuguese Communist Party. To an outsider, it might seem surprising that the death of a communist leader in Western Europe should occasion such a massive tribute. After all, Cunhal’s party had seen its vote dwindle inexorably over the three decades that followed the 1974 revolution, when it had enjoyed a brief but significant influence; and Cunhal himself had relinquished all formal political roles years before his death at the age of ninety-one. But the funeral was also a demonstration that brought together several generations of communists, fellow travellers, and democrats with broadly left-wing sympathies, who congregated around the memory of an era of

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“the last icon”.1 This would seem to prove Paul Connerton’s suggestion, in How Societies Remember, that the master narratives that have informed our political world can retain their hold on the collective imagination long after they have ceased to determine our actual beliefs (Connerton 1989: 2 and passim). In fact, the tribute paid with such (last) rites was manifold: its object was a man whose firm ideals and determination, from early youth, had landed him in prison for eleven consecutive years, made him internationally renowned and the unquestionable leader of his party for several decades, until he chose to retire; but many in that crowd will also have been honouring the stern intellectual, the multi-talented artist and man of letters, the author of muchadmired drawings, of a series of novels in the neo-realist mould, and of an acclaimed translation of King Lear-a version with a poignant origin and an intriguing publication history.