Igualdade, justiça e fraternidade: a identidade dos operários tabaqueiros de Lisboa (1860-1936)

Accepting William Sewell’s perspective that all socialrelations are discursive, but that they are neverexhausted in their discourse, we propose to addressthe specific identity of Lisbon’s tobacco workers withinthe working class. We will do this through the availablewritten sources, such as the newspapers of the time,workers or bourgeois, and the texts written by andabout tobacco workers, between the 1860s and the firstdecade of the Estado Novo. The articles published in thetobacco workers’ newspaper A Voz do Operário (TheWorkers Voice), will necessarily stand out. Throughthis approach, we intend to show the relevance of thestudy 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 meretheoretical existence, to a class in which the workerswere torn in multiple directions.