Ideology of social equality and popular demands during the Interregnum of 1383-85

Abstract

Ideologies are the forms of existence for the class struggle in the domain of the significant social practice (speech, gesture, habits, attitudes, behaviour, norms), a definition that must not be interpreted as something transferring ideologies to the field of symbolic interactions. The analysis of the speeches, the gesture and the behaviour of the social classes rebelled during the Interregnum of 1383-85 in Portugal shows the existence of an ideology that, within certain limits, may be called equalizing as far as it was against the privileges of the nobility and the clergy. But it was not an equalitarian ideology: the demands of equality were expressed under the form of exigency of privileges. It was not even an ideology with a national scope: the privileges demanded were those of the local or corporative fractions of the bourgeoisie, not those of this class in its whole. Only from the peasantry, the class that «bore all the weight of the social building», could indeed come an equalitarian conception of society. Anyway the Portuguese «bellies in the sun», like the French «jacques», were too caught in the net of seigneurial relations and too isolated in their toil to be able to express themselves through something else but simple inconsequent cries of revolt.