Portuguese Republican Revolution
By 1910 the Portuguese constitutional monarchy had been hollowed out by rotativismo — the cynical alternation in office of the Progressista and Regenerador parties without reform — and discredited by the 1890 British Ultimatum, which forced abandonment of the Mozambique-Angola corridor and humiliated national pride. The 1908 regicide, in which King Carlos I and the crown prince were assassinated in Lisbon, left the young Manuel II on a tottering throne. On 4-5 October 1910, a coordinated revolt by republican-aligned army and navy units together with armed civilian revolutionaries seized Lisbon. King Manuel II fled into exile and the Republic was proclaimed from the balcony of Lisbon's city hall. The revolution drew on a galvanised urban educated youth and republican press but inherited a country still 75% illiterate in the countryside. Structurally it was a mass-plus-elite overthrow of the dynastic regime, ending nearly eight centuries of monarchy and inaugurating the unstable First Republic.
- Year: 1910 CE
- Category: Political
