Joao Franco

Joao Franco was given a free hand to clean up Portuguese politics and ended it by making the king a dictator's employer. He was a lawyer and a career politician of the Regenerator party who broke away to found his own, on a platform of ending the rotativismo - the arrangement by which two parties alternated in office by agreement and shared the spoils, with elections managed to produce the result already decided. Carlos I appointed him prime minister in May 1906. When parliament obstructed him over the royal household's debts, the king dissolved it in May 1907 and let him govern by decree. He then ruled without a legislature for nine months, censoring the press, deporting political opponents without trial, and settling the king's overdraft by decree - which is precisely the charge the republicans had been making about the monarchy for thirty years, now demonstrated. A republican rising planned for late January 1908 was betrayed and its leaders arrested. On 1 February two men shot the king and the heir in an open carriage in the Terreiro do Paco. He was dismissed within days by the eighteen-year-old Manuel II, went into exile, and took no further part in politics; the monarchy fell to revolution in October 1910. His defenders argue he was attacking a genuinely rotten system and was given no lawful means to do it. What is not arguable is the effect: a reformer who accepted dictatorial powers from a king made the king personally responsible for the dictatorship, and the republicans were handed the argument they had been unable to prove.

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