Portuguese Republican Revolution
A rising of soldiers, sailors and armed civilians in Lisbon overthrew the Portuguese monarchy in two days in October 1910. The Braganças had ruled since 1640 and had been failing publicly for two decades. The British ultimatum of 1890, which forced Portugal to abandon its claim to the territory between Angola and Mozambique, was a national humiliation that the republicans never let anyone forget. The state defaulted in 1892. The king appointed a dictatorial prime minister in 1906, and in 1908 King Carlos and his heir were shot dead in an open carriage in the Terreiro do Paço. His younger son Manuel II reigned for two years while governments changed every few months. The revolution began on 3 October with mutinies in two barracks and aboard two cruisers in the Tagus, and it very nearly failed — the organisers had lost their leader to appendicitis, several units did not move, and the rebel positions were confused. What settled it was the cruisers Adamastor and São Rafael shelling the royal palace, and the rebels' possession of the telegraph. The republic was proclaimed from the balcony of the city hall on 5 October, and Manuel sailed for England, where he lived another quarter-century. The first republic was chaotic: forty-five governments in sixteen years, church property seized, entry into the First World War, and a coup in 1926 that produced Salazar's dictatorship for the next forty-eight years. The 5th of October is still a national holiday. Portugal was the third European monarchy to fall in the twentieth century, after Serbia's dynasty changed by assassination and before the Russian and Austrian collapses. It is the only one of them overthrown in peacetime by a republican movement rather than by defeat in war.
- Year: 1910 CE
- Category: Political
