Socialist MP proposes to erect a monument in Paris to honor the arrival of Portuguese immigrants

Socialist MP Natalie Oliveira proposed to the city council of Paris to erect a monument in honor of the thousands of Portuguese who arrived at the Austerlitz station to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 25th April Revolution.

“I have already passed the Austerlitz station many times, and it bothered me that I did not find anything at this station that would indicate the passage of so many immigrants, thousands of Portuguese. At the end of August, I drove there again and felt a very strong presence from our side. I went to look again and nothing, I called the historian Vitor Pereira, who confirmed that there was nothing, and I said: “This cannot be so,” the deputy said in statements. to the Luz agency.

For example, this week Nathalie Oliveira, the first French-born elected to the Portuguese Parliament, met with Laurence Patrice, Parisian memory advisor, and proposed a monument to mark the Portuguese crossing to the Gare de Austerlitz.

“I was a little afraid that this idea would not attract much attention, but no, the adviser was delighted,” said the socialist deputy.

In the 1960s and 1970s, many Portuguese hopped to the border between Spain and France, and more specifically to the French city of Hendaye, and then made the rest of the way to Paris by train and arrived at the emblematic Austerlitz station. Many settled in the 13th and 14th districts closest to this station, where there were many factories at that time, while others left for the outskirts of the capital.

So many Portuguese arrived in Paris through this station that, since 1966, the Lutey committee, which specialized in helping migrants, had a banner in Portuguese to welcome arrivals, and in the next decade, the Portuguese consulate even opened a service station for its social workers. networks. services at the station.

“The question is to know what form it will take, many times a work has been commissioned from an artist and I thought of a Manuel Alegre poem that has accompanied my life since my father made the trip by leaps and bounds and I suggested this option. We are still at the initial stage of reflection, information exchange and verification to find out where the monument will be placed,” explained Natalie Oliveira.

The poem proposed by the MP is titled “Portugal in Paris”, in which the Portuguese poet describes how he saw his “homeland flowing into the Gare de Austerlitz” on the streets of Paris, alluding to Portuguese immigration to France.

Now the project has to pass the approval stage of the elected representatives of Paris, and Nathalie Oliveira is preparing a proposal in collaboration with historians Vítor Pereira, principal researcher at the FCSH Institute of Modern History and one of the greatest specialists in the history of the Portuguese language. emigration in a century, and Yves Léonard, a French historian specializing in the history of Portugal, who recently published the book History of the Portuguese Nation (Tallandier editions).

For Natalie Oliveira, the inauguration is scheduled to take place in 2024 as part of the official 50th anniversary celebrations on April 25, as many of the people who arrived in France were exiles forced to leave their country by the Salazar regime.

“Now we are entering this sequence of celebrating the 50th anniversary of Portuguese democracy and I thought it was the right time to make a connection between those who were born and raised without hope, freedom, in silence and with no choice but to leave the country and come to France,” he explained.

By the inauguration, the deputy is already thinking of repeating the path of the Portuguese who arrived 50 or 60 years ago, not only with emigrants, but also with high-ranking figures of the Portuguese state, in order to pay tribute to the Portuguese community in France.

“It is good that the people who did this 50 or 60 years ago and important Portuguese politicians made the symbolic journey together between Hendaye and Gare Austerlitz in Paris, even if that route is no longer in use today. I think it’s important. “It was unfair and sad not to celebrate these arrivals until now,” he concluded.