Carnation Revolution
Portuguese army officers overthrew the Estado Novo before dawn on 25 April 1974, and almost nobody was hurt. The regime had lasted forty-eight years, the longest in western Europe — built by Salazar from 1932 and continued by Marcelo Caetano after a deckchair collapsed under him in 1968 — with a secret police, censorship, a single party, and colonial wars in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique running since 1961. Those wars are what ended it. They consumed nearly half the state budget, conscripted a generation, and produced an officer corps that had concluded there was no military solution. António de Spínola, a general who had commanded in Guinea, published a book in February 1974 saying so, and was dismissed. The Armed Forces Movement, formed by captains and majors over grievances about promotion and about the war, took the country in a night. The signal was a banned song broadcast on the radio, Grândola, Vila Morena. Caetano surrendered at the barracks of the National Republican Guard and was flown to Brazil. Crowds came into the streets against instructions to stay home, and a flower seller began handing carnations to soldiers, who put them in their rifle barrels. Four people were killed, by the secret police firing on a crowd. What followed was two years of revolutionary turbulence, nationalisations, and a failed communist-aligned coup, before a constitution and elections settled it. Every colony was independent within eighteen months, and some 600,000 Portuguese returned from Africa. The date is Portugal's national holiday, and the carnation is still its symbol.
- Year: 1974 CE
- Category: Political
