This paper analyses the consequences of political engagement on the life of Portuguese militants who mobilized between the mid Sixties and the mid Seventies, that is, in the last phase of the authoritarian regime Estado Novo. I will reconstruct – by means of in-depth interviews – the life trajectories of militants of the Portuguese Communist Party and two Maoist organizations: the FAP and the MRPP. The main objective is to understand how the militancy implied a secondary socialization and how this experience changed according to the changes occurring at a political level. The underlying idea is that mobilization in an authoritarian context has specificities in terms of biographical effects, only in part due to political repression. This specificity has significant consequences on the very possibilities to reinvest the activist’s skill, to conceive and foster family and friendship. These effects became paradoxically clearer at the moment when the regime ended.
