31 January 1891: the sergeants' revolt that proclaimed a republic in Porto

At about six on the morning of Saturday 31 January 1891, a column of soldiers came down the Rua do Almada in Porto. The night's fog was lifting. At its head the band of the 10th Infantry Regiment, with some musicians of the 9th, played A Portuguesa, a patriotic march written the year before, and on both sides of the long, narrow street the windows were open.3 sources3 sources

People leaned out to cheer the army and the Republic. Women waved handkerchiefs. Civilians walked alongside the troops, sure the 18th Infantry was coming over too. Few of the men in the ranks had an officer over them: sergeants had led them out of their barracks in the dark.3 sources3 sources

He was right. Within a few hours the revolt was over, its dead lying on the Rua de Santo António and its survivors hiding or under arrest. It was the first attempt to overthrow the Portuguese monarchy by force. The monarchy fell nineteen years later, and the street where the shooting happened now carries the date.3 sources3 sources

On 11 January 1890 Britain demanded that Portugal pull its forces out of the Shire region and the lands of the Makololo and Mashona, near Mozambique. The government gave way quickly, and the humiliation turned much of the country against the politicians and the young king, Carlos I. The ultimatum itself has its own article on this site.2 sources2 sources

The republicans made the wounded nation their cause. Students founded papers with names like O Ultimatum, edited by Afonso Costa and António José de Almeida, the generation that would make the revolution of 1910. The proclamation of a republic in Brazil on 15 November 1889 encouraged them, and the Anglo-Portuguese treaty of 20 August 1890, which many thought gave away too much, brought the protests back. On 17 September Municipal Guards burst into the Café Martinho in Lisbon and fired on the customers.2 sources2 sources

The party was growing, but slowly. Portugal had 69 republican centres between 1885 and 1891, five of them in Porto. Most citizens could not vote, yet republicans had won a Porto seat several times since 1878, and in 1890 Lisbon elected three republican deputies. Outside the two big cities the cause had made little headway.1 source1 source

Its leaders believed the Republic would come by evolution: through schools, newspapers and elections. Their directory, dominated by José Elias Garcia, kept to that line in public, to the fury of a younger, radical wing that saw 1890 as the moment to strike.2 sources2 sources

In private, though, the directory agreed late in 1890 to coordinate with the Porto plotters and sent one of its members, General Francisco de Sousa Brandão, north to look at their preparations. At the party congress in Lisbon on 4 to 6 January 1891, Elias Garcia and Sousa Brandão lost their seats on the directory, and the new strongman, Francisco Homem Cristo, ruled out any revolutionary action.3 sources3 sources

On 25 January the directory warned members to leave “any disruptive group” to its “selfish isolation”. Two days later an article by Homem Cristo in the republican paper Os Debates suggested that the rumoured rising in Porto was a monarchist provocation.3 sources3 sources

João Chagas, a young journalist, later explained the choice of Porto. Lisbon was too large and divided; Porto, the city of the liberal revolution of 1820, seemed “the only centre of Portuguese population capable of letting out the first cry of liberty”. The historian Fernando de Sousa thinks the real reason was simpler. Since the 1870s Porto had a small radical group that wanted revolution, led by the lawyer Augusto Alves da Veiga and the journalist Henrique dos Santos Cardoso.2 sources2 sources

Santos Cardoso, a big, combative man, had been calling for revolution by arms for ten years in his paper A Justiça Portuguesa. Chagas had founded A República Portuguesa in Porto. From September 1890 sergeants and soldiers of the garrison crowded into both newsrooms and into Santos Cardoso's house. Alves da Veiga, a lawyer, journalist and teacher with great standing among Porto republicans, became the civilian chief. The writers Basílio Teles and Sampaio Bruno helped prepare the movement.3 sources3 sources

The sergeants were the driving force. The Ultimatum had stung their pride as soldiers, and a recent law had made it harder for them to rise to officer. Santos Cardoso had written that the Republic would be made “with the non-commissioned officers and with the soldiers, hand in hand with the popular alliance”. Few officers shared that view.3 sources3 sources

Secrecy failed in January 1891. The sergeants planned to send the government a written ultimatum of their own on promotions; an informer at the meeting gave the list of signatories to his superiors in the 18th Infantry, and orders went out to transfer sergeants away from Porto. In a panic they told Veiga and Santos Cardoso they would rise at once. Veiga wanted more time to link up with plotters elsewhere. Basílio Teles warned them it would be an isolated, purely military attempt. They would not wait.3 sources3 sources

Veiga gave in. On 30 January he persuaded a retired general, José Maria Correia da Silva, to take military command if no more senior officer came forward. Two days before the rising Elias Garcia, in Lisbon, received a letter from Veiga saying the date had been brought forward against his will and asking for one or two regiments to rise there too; Garcia's circle sent a sergeant north to stop the rising, who found the troops already in the streets. Chagas was not even free: he was in jail for a press offence.2 sources2 sources

At about two in the morning of 31 January, the 9th Caçadores (light infantry) and the 10th Infantry marched out of their barracks for the Campo de Santo Ovídio, today's Praça da República. Only two officers came with them, Captain António Amaral Leitão and Lieutenant Manuel Maria Coelho. A second lieutenant, Augusto Malheiro, joined on the way with the detachment guarding the Relação prison. Leitão, by Sousa's account, had only been told that his regiment was going out.2 sources2 sources

The square faced the barracks of the 18th Infantry, whose men the rebels hoped to win over, and about a hundred customs guards of the Guarda Fiscal joined them there. So little had been kept secret that reporters and onlookers were already waiting. The church bells nearby rang the alarm. Civilians hacked a hole in the barracks gate with axes and poured in, and in the confusion the colonel, João de Lencastre e Meneses, told Leitão that his regiment would soon follow.3 sources3 sources

At about six the rebels gave up waiting and marched for the city centre, following the route of the liberals of 1820. On the Praça de D. Pedro, now the Praça da Liberdade, stood the old town hall, since demolished. The troops formed up around the square, and civilians led by Santos Cardoso appeared at the windows. A man with a rifle fetched the red and green flag of a Porto republican club, the Centro Democrático Federal 15 de Novembro, and Santos Cardoso had it run up the flagpole.3 sources3 sources

Alves da Veiga spoke from the balcony and proclaimed the Republic. When he began to read the names of the provisional government, the actor Miguel Verdial took the paper from his hands and read it out. It named Porto worthies, among them José Joaquim Rodrigues de Freitas, the first republican elected to parliament, the banker Licínio Pinto Leite and General Correia da Silva. Of those named, Sousa notes, only Veiga was there. The others later denied ever agreeing, and four said so in the papers.4 sources4 sources

The music mattered. A Portuguesa, by the composer Alfredo Keil and the poet Henrique Lopes de Mendonça, had been written in 1890 as a protest against the Ultimatum, and the monarchy had banned it. After the rebels marched to it in Porto, it became the hymn of the Republican Party.2 sources2 sources

Then nothing happened. The 18th Infantry did not come, and no other officers appeared. “We have been betrayed,” Leitão told Coelho. Someone in the crowd warned him that the Municipal Guard, the armed police, was holding the Praça da Batalha above, where the military headquarters and the telegraph office stood. The three officers decided against splitting their force to surround it. They were sure the guard would change sides once it saw the army and the people united.2 sources2 sources

Leitão led the column up the Rua de Santo António, band in front, intending to present himself to the general. The crowd made it feel like a victory parade. At the top, Major José Maria da Graça had drawn up the guard on the stepped terrace of the church of Santo Ildefonso. Halfway up, the people at the front hesitated. Leitão stopped two customs guards from shooting, then raised his arms to show the guard he meant no harm.3 sources3 sources

The guard fired a volley, aiming low. Why it fired has never been settled. Revez writes that it opened fire without warning; the Gaia municipal archive says two shots, thought to have come from the crowd, were heard first. Jorge d'Abreu adds that the guard's buglers had sounded the halt, which Leitão could not hear over the band.3 sources3 sources

The column dissolved. The 10th Infantry, at the rear, fell back to the town hall; Coelho and Malheiro were trapped in the houses where they had taken cover, and Leitão, grazed on the head, reached the square only later by climbing over garden walls. Some soldiers and customs guards fired back from doorways and from the windows of the Café Suisso on the square until their ammunition ran out.2 sources2 sources

The government's forces then brought up two guns from the Serra do Pilar, across the river. About 300 rebels were barricaded in the town hall when a cannon shot broke open its door. Basílio Teles and two companions tried to get a socialist leader to bring the workers out and barricade the outer streets, but the factories were shut and there was no time. By mid-morning it was over.4 sources4 sources

The authorities never published a reliable count. A day after the revolt the figure going round was twelve dead, most of them municipal guards, and twelve dead and about 40 wounded is the number repeated today. Porto did not believe it: for a long time people said the rebels' bodies in the city cemeteries ran into the hundreds.3 sources3 sources

The newspaper lists show who stood in the street. Among the wounded were soldiers, municipal and customs guards, a cork worker, a cigar maker, a mason, a tailor, a hatter, a student and a newspaper editor. Maria Custódia Alves, a seamstress, was hit in the neck as she watched from a window. On Sunday crowds walked the Rua de Santo António and the squares to look at the damage.2 sources2 sources

Porto was put under a state of siege the same day, and the two rebel regiments were disbanded. Forty-eight hours later decrees gave military courts sole jurisdiction over the crime of rebellion. There were jails enough in the city, but the government feared the public would take too close an interest in the trials, so it held them at sea.2 sources2 sources

Three ships were anchored at Leixões, the harbour then being built near Porto: the navy transport Índia, the corvette Bartolomeu Dias and the mail steamer Moçambique, with an old hulk for the overflow. The Moçambique took Chagas, Santos Cardoso, Leitão, Coelho, Homem Cristo, whom Santos Cardoso had named as an arms supplier, and the civilians. The courts sat at the end of February. The exiles later wrote of trials held on a sea “beset by an exceptional winter”, and of a ship that broke loose one stormy night.3 sources3 sources

Few doubted, d'Abreu wrote, that the verdicts had been settled in advance. Some defendants answered back. First Sergeant Abílio of the 9th Caçadores, who by d'Abreu's account had raised the first cry of “Viva a República” in his barracks that night, was asked whether he was a republican of evolution, one of those who hoped to win a majority of the nation peacefully through propaganda. He replied:2 sources2 sources

Counts of the accused and convicted differ a little. Maria Antonieta Cruz gives 505 soldiers charged and 238 convicted, plus 22 civilians accused; A. H. de Oliveira Marques gives 480 tried and 268 convicted, 7 of them civilians. The Gaia archive sums them up as about 250 people sentenced to terms of 18 months to 15 years.2 sources2 sources

The heaviest sentences were years of cellular prison, followed by or exchangeable for degredo, penal exile overseas. D'Abreu believed only one of those sentenced to prison was ever taken to the Lisbon Penitentiary; the rest were shipped to penal settlements in the colonies.2 sources2 sources

In Madrid, Sampaio Bruno wrote a manifesto for the exiles, signed by Veiga, Teles, the lawyer António Claro and 46 others. It denied rumours that the rebels had meant to loot the city or sell out Portugal to Spain, and it answered the charge that the rising had come too soon. Had it been untimely, they asked, because it tried to end the monarchy before its time? “It will only be time when the monarchy has finished off Portugal.”1 source1 source

Almost everyone else disowned the revolt. The Republican Party stressed that it had no part in it, and the masonic Grande Oriente Lusitano suspended Veiga and any brother implicated. Porto's council condemned the rising on 12 February while blaming “errors of many years” for it, and when Carlos I visited the city that November he was cheered.2 sources2 sources

Clemency came unevenly. An amnesty in 1893 let civilians such as Chagas and Santos Cardoso come back from degredo, and Teles and Bruno from exile, but it did not cover the soldiers. The Republican Party went through a crisis and only regained weight about a decade later.2 sources2 sources

Historians still argue about what the revolt achieved. Rui Ramos sees its contribution to the Republic as insignificant; Fernando Catroga calls it premature and in the wrong place. For Sousa it was the first and most important forerunner of 5 October 1910, because it showed the republicans that power would come through revolution, not the ballot box.2 sources2 sources

After the Republic was proclaimed in Lisbon on 5 October 1910, the Provisional Government began restoring the expelled soldiers of 1891 to the army, with compensation that some thought unfair. A Portuguesa became the national anthem on 19 June 1911. The new flag was green and red, and Sousa argues those colours won because the Porto rebels had fought under them. Chagas became prime minister in September 1911, and Coelho led a short-lived government in October and November 1921.4 sources4 sources

Porto kept the memory. The Rua de Santo António became the Rua de 31 de Janeiro; according to the local historian Lynne Booker, writing in Portugal Resident, the new republican council renamed it soon after the Republic was declared. From 1911, Sousa notes, 31 January was kept as Sergeants' Day. A benefit association founded after the revolt raised a monument to the dead in the Prado do Repouso cemetery, and under the Estado Novo dictatorship democrats gathered there on the anniversary, often in the face of police repression.5 sources5 sources