Equality, Justice and Fraternity. The identity of the Lisbon tobacco workers (1860-1936)

Abstract

Accepting William Sewell’s perspective that all social relations are discursive, but that they are never exhausted in their discourse, we propose to address the specific identity of Lisbon’s tobacco workers within the working class. We will do this through the available written sources, such as the newspapers of the time, workers or bourgeois, and the texts written by and about tobacco workers,  between the 1860s and the first decade of the Estado Novo. The articles published in the tobacco workers’ newspaper A Voz do  Operário (The Workers Voice), will necessarily stand out. Through this approach, we intend to show the relevance of the study of the  various segments within the working class, for an analysis that, against any totalizing intentions, goes beyond the concept of a  unitary class with a mere theoretical existence, to a class in which the workers were torn in multiple directions.