Liberal Revolution of 1820 (Porto)
After the French invasions of the Peninsular War, Portugal was left a hollowed-out periphery of its own empire. The Braganza court had sailed to Brazil in 1807, the capital had effectively moved to Rio de Janeiro, and the homeland was governed by a Regency Council under the de facto authority of the British marshal Beresford. The humiliation of being administered as a British protectorate while the king remained overseas, combined with severe post-war economic distress, produced acute grievance among the army officer corps and the commercial bourgeoisie. In August 1820 officers in Porto launched a revolt that spread rapidly to Lisbon. The revolutionaries expelled the British officers, convened an elected Cortes, and drafted Portugal's first written constitution (1822), modelled on the radical Spanish Constitution of 1812. They demanded the king's return and sought to reverse the economic inversion by which Brazil had become more dynamic than the mother country, attempting to restore Lisbon's commercial monopoly over the colony. The revolution's central paradox was that this very attempt to re-subordinate Brazil drove the colony to independence: when the Cortes ordered Crown Prince Pedro back to Portugal, he refused, and in September 1822 declared Brazilian independence. The Liberal Revolution thus inaugurated Portugal's long nineteenth-century cycle of constitutional struggle while simultaneously dissolving the empire it had hoped to reclaim.
- Year: 1820 CE
- Category: Political
