The plot at the library lift: Lisbon's failed coup of 28 January 1908

At two in the afternoon of Tuesday 28 January 1908, José Maria de Alpoim walked into the Elevador da Biblioteca in Lisbon with a group of friends. Alpoim was a monarchist politician who had led a faction out of the Progressive Party, and he had come to help overthrow the government. With him, according to the republican journalist Jorge d'Abreu, were João Pinto dos Santos, the doctor Egas Moniz, Cassiano Neves and Batalha de Freitas.1 source1 source

It was Lisbon's first open-air vertical lift, and it carried passengers between the Largo de São Julião, beside the town hall, and the Largo da Biblioteca on the slope above. It had been out of order for days. The men shut themselves in a small room, with a lookout at the door who was relieved at regular intervals.3 sources3 sources

They were waiting for a car. When it drove through the Largo do Pelourinho, the square in front of the Câmara Municipal, carrying the republican leader Afonso Costa, they were to run with their weapons to the town hall, take it with him and proclaim a provisional government. The order had come in writing the night before.1 source1 source

Four o'clock, the hour set for the rising, came and went. Towards evening Lieutenant-Colonel Amâncio de Alpoim came in to tell them the revolt had failed and the police were on their trail. By nightfall the police were closing in, and some of the plot's leaders were walking into a trap.1 source1 source

Portugal was a constitutional monarchy, and for most of the reign of Carlos I, king since 1889, the Regeneradores and the Progressistas had taken turns in office. Between 1901 and 1906 this rotativism came apart. João Franco left the Regeneradores to found his own party, Alpoim took a group out of the Progressistas to form the Dissidência Progressista, and a new generation revived the Portuguese Republican Party.2 sources2 sources

In May 1906 the king made Franco prime minister, although he had no majority in parliament. Franco promised clean government, then ran into the question of the advances: loans that earlier governments had made to the royal household. In November the monarchist opposition, including men who had authorised such loans in the past, attacked his government over them, and the republicans used the row to attack the monarchy itself.1 source1 source

In the spring of 1907 the Progressistas withdrew their support. Instead of replacing Franco, the king dissolved parliament without calling elections, and Franco ruled by decree. Historians call the months from May 1907 to January 1908 the dictatorship of João Franco. The press laws were tightened, newspapers were suspended, and a student strike at Coimbra turned into a protest against the government.2 sources2 sources

The quarrel over money went on. A decree of 30 August 1907 wrote off the royal household's debts, although Monico notes that Carlos himself disagreed with it. Then, in an interview with the Paris daily Le Temps in November 1907, the king backed Franco and mocked the old parties and parliament. On 24 December elections were called for 5 April 1908. The government party always won elections, so the prospect frightened both the monarchist opposition and the republicans.2 sources2 sources

By the Viscount of Ribeira Brava's own account, the plot began in July 1907. Of all Alpoim's friends he was the one most ready to give up on the monarchy. When the republican Alberto Costa urged him to lead a revolt, he answered that the popular support was all in the Republican Party, and agreed to meet the republican journalist João Chagas. They met at midnight by the bandstand on the Avenida, on 10 July, he thought. The National Library's chronology of 1908 instead dates a discussion of the plans between Chagas and Ribeira Brava to 10 January 1908.2 sources2 sources

The next day a committee met at his house: Afonso Costa, Alexandre Braga, Egas Moniz, França Borges, Mascarenhas Inglês, Marinha de Campos and Alpoim. Two committees then ran the conspiracy. The civilian one included Bernardino Machado and António José de Almeida from the party's directorate, with Chagas, Afonso Costa and Augusto José da Cunha; the military one included the naval officer Cândido dos Reis and Álvaro Pope.1 source1 source

The dissidents brought money and guns. Abreu, who wrote in 1912 from conspirators' accounts, says Alpoim and his friends raised funds, paid for arms and helped smuggle them into Lisbon. Alpoim never joined the Republican Party. Days before the rising, Afonso Costa and Chagas pressed him to. He said he could not abandon followers who were mostly monarchists, but would give the revolution his person, his son and his money.1 source1 source

The third partner was the Carbonária, the secret society where the most radical republicans gathered. Luz de Almeida led its high lodge, the Alta Venda, and the writer Aquilino Ribeiro, then a young conspirator, describes him as António José de Almeida's lieutenant for the civilian side of the rising. Alfredo Costa, a former travelling salesman from the Alentejo, was in a group meant to attack the royal palace and, after a change of plan, the Municipal Guard barracks at the Lóios.2 sources2 sources

Abreu admits that the plan cannot be reconstructed in full, and it changed several times. A radical minority wanted to attack the Necessidades palace and force the king abroad. The majority preferred to strike while the royal family was out of Lisbon, and after Carlos left for his estate at Vila Viçosa, in the Alentejo, on 6 January 1908, an officer of the general staff drew up the final scheme.2 sources2 sources

Everything hung on one act. Between 4 and 6 pm a civilian group was to seize Franco as he left his house at the top of the Avenida for the Terreiro do Paço and take him aboard the fishing steamer Dinorah, then to a warship in revolt. Only when they saw the signal of his capture would the army and navy units in the plot rise.1 source1 source

Naval officers were then to take the sailors' barracks, the Navy Arsenal and the warship São Gabriel. Ribeira Brava's men would occupy the arch of the Rua Augusta and the roofs of the ministries on the Terreiro do Paço, and teams with dynamite would keep the Municipal Guard shut in its barracks at the Carmo.1 source1 source

To attack the barracks, João Chagas organised civilian groups of 30 to 60 men, doctors, engineers, lawyers and shop workers among them. Each group was named after a flower, and its members wore a painted cardboard disc inside their coats, to be shown only to a comrade or a leader. Abreu saw Chagas's pencilled list: seven groups, 280 men, armed with revolvers and automatic pistols with 50 rounds each.1 source1 source

Arms were bought from pawnshops and gunsmiths, paid for by the party directorate, the landowner José Relvas and others, and stored at the Armazéns Leal, a shop in the Rua de Santo Antão. Even Abreu, who admired the plotters, thought too many people knew the secret and that the arms were handed out too early.1 source1 source

The leak came from below. Victor de Sousa, who led one of the civilian groups, recruited a policeman who was a friend of his and, it seems, on duty at Franco's door. He showed him the weapons at his house in the Rua Luz Soriano and named Chagas and Alfredo Leal, the owner of the Armazéns Leal, as the men handing out arms. Victor de Sousa was arrested the next morning.1 source1 source

Afonso Costa and Chagas heard in time and telephoned Leal. On 20 January, while police watched the front of the shop, Leal, his son and a trusted servant carried the remaining guns out through a small door onto the steps opposite the Coliseu, rolled in rugs, to a carriage where Ribeira Brava waited to hide them at his house on the Avenida da Liberdade. The police search found nothing.2 sources2 sources

The arrests began anyway. Leal was taken at Dafundo, and Chagas as he left the Charcuterie Française in the Rua Nova do Carmo, where the two had dined. The National Library's chronology of 1908 puts the arrest of Chagas and the journalist França Borges on 21 January and that of Luz de Almeida, in the Largo da Estrela, on 25 January. António José de Almeida was taken too.2 sources2 sources

The plotters hurried instead of stopping, convinced that Franco would show them no mercy. Afonso Costa took charge with Ribeira Brava, Álvaro and Ernesto Pope, Marinha de Campos and Artur Cohen, from a house in the Rua do Desterro where dozens came for arms and instructions. The password was Jasmim, jasmine.1 source1 source

On 27 January an anonymous letter threatened to denounce them, and Costa rented another house at 32 Rua de São Julião, close to the lift. He and Ribeira Brava sat up writing orders on scraps of paper until dawn. The hour was fixed at 4 pm on the 28th, when the streets were busiest and the barracks least watchful.1 source1 source

Franco was never seized, so the signal never came. In the late afternoon a rumour spread that the rising had been put off again. Marinha de Campos, Álvaro Pope and the Viscount of Pedralva drove round the barracks with arms and ammunition. The dissidents left the lift when they heard the revolt had failed, then regrouped an hour later in a Lieutenant Furtado's house next door.1 source1 source

How the police found them is told in two ways. Reto Monico writes that the building's guard grew suspicious at so many people going into a lift that had been broken for days; Time Out Lisboa's history of the lift says a policeman noticed and called his colleagues. Egas Moniz, told that Afonso Costa and Ribeira Brava had gone into the lift, went to join them and was caught with them. Costa drew a revolver, Abreu writes, and Ribeira Brava stopped him firing it.3 sources3 sources

Alpoim got away. The porter showed the dissidents a narrow door and a dark corridor full of cobwebs that led down to the Calçada de São Francisco; the lock had not been turned for years, and outside there was not a single policeman. The Viscounts of Ameal and Pedralva fled towards Spain by train. Alpoim spent the night at the house of the politician Teixeira de Sousa, moved the next evening to the mansion of Henrique de Mendonça and escaped from there to Spain by car.1 source1 source

Elsewhere the rising broke up into skirmishes: an attack on the police station at the Rato, where a policeman was killed, shooting in the Rua da Escola Politécnica, an attempt on the Campo de Santana police station and clashes in Alcântara. Aquilino Ribeiro writes that a group of about twenty under Alfredo Costa and the primary school teacher Manuel Buíça came under fire from the Guard near the Rua de Santa Bárbara while they waited for a mortar to give the signal.3 sources3 sources

The sources differ on how many were detained: Time Out says 93 conspirators, Monico 120 people. Abreu describes the civil governor's building filling up overnight, batches of prisoners sent to the forts and troops policing the streets from the early hours of the 29th. Egas Moniz was held in the jail at the Lóios.4 sources4 sources

Franco answered with a decree. Prepared on 29 January, it was taken to Vila Viçosa by the Minister of Justice, Teixeira de Abreu, for the king to sign. Carlos hesitated, writes Jorge Couto, then director of the National Library, but signed. The decree was dated 31 January. In Aquilino Ribeiro's summary of its terms, it let the government expel from the kingdom, or 'transport' to an overseas province, people recognised as guilty by the competent judicial authority whom the security of the state required it to remove. It also denied parliamentary immunity to anyone acting against the state.3 sources3 sources

Republicans read it as a sentence of exile on the men in the forts. In Aquilino Ribeiro's memoir the talk was that Franco had already chartered two liners to fill Timor with republicans. Couto writes that the decree caused great agitation among republicans, above all in the Carbonária. Alfredo Costa told Aquilino on the morning of 1 February that the king was now even more to blame than Franco.3 sources3 sources

At about 5 pm that day the royal family landed at the river station on the Terreiro do Paço, back from the Alentejo. As their open landau reached the corner of the Rua do Arsenal, Buíça fired with a Winchester carbine and Costa, on the carriage step, with a pistol. Carlos and his heir, Luís Filipe, were killed and the younger son, Manuel, was wounded in the arm; Queen Amélia was unhurt. Police shot both gunmen dead and killed a bystander, João Sabino da Costa.2 sources2 sources

The plot of 28 January is fairly well documented. Its link to the regicide is not. The case file on the killings disappeared, Monico notes, and the governments that followed showed little wish to find out more, perhaps because an inquiry might have touched politicians now in power.3 sources3 sources

Abreu, writing with the conspirators' help, argued that the regicide was no part of the plan of 28 January. He cites Alpoim's points that the rising was timed for the royal family's absence and that Buíça only got his carbine after it had failed.1 source1 source

Aquilino Ribeiro tells the same story from inside, from what one of the plotters and others told him. Costa's group of five waited for Franco in the Rua Alexandre Herculano, then at the Terreiro do Paço, but he slipped in through the Navy Arsenal. Costa's last message to Buíça was that Franco had escaped them again, and then, as the royal carriage came on at a slow trot, he asked whether they should finish off the whole lot.1 source1 source

Mónico divides Portuguese historians into two camps: those who see the regicide as the isolated act of Buíça and Costa, and those who see a conspiracy of the Republican Party and the monarchist opposition. Either way, the failed plot of 28 January armed hundreds of men, jailed their leaders and produced the decree that enraged the Carbonária.3 sources3 sources

The decree was never applied. Manuel II, aged 18, sent for Franco the next day and asked him not to stand in the way of a new government, and Franco left the country days later. On 4 February Rear-Admiral Ferreira do Amaral formed a cabinet of the old parties, known as the government of acalmação, or appeasement. It restored press freedom, released the republican leaders and annulled Franco's decrees.3 sources3 sources

On 5 February the Ministry of Justice asked the Crown's attorney-general, António Cândido Ribeiro da Costa, whether the government could annul Franco's press decree of 20 June 1907 and his decrees of 21 November 1907 and 31 January 1908 on crimes against the security of the state. In his opinion of 28 February he called the dictatorship and its decrees unlawful, issued in plain breach of the Constitutional Charter.1 source1 source

The men of 28 January did well out of the new mood. In April 1908 the republicans won the parliamentary election in Lisbon, and in November they won the city council, so the Câmara Municipal that Alpoim's men had meant to storm from the lift passed to them by vote. On 5 October 1910 José Relvas proclaimed the Republic from its balcony.3 sources3 sources

In the provisional government that followed, Afonso Costa took Justice and António José de Almeida the Interior. Egas Moniz, the dissident held at the Lóios, became Foreign Minister in October 1918 and won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1949. The revolution itself is told in our article on 5 October 1910.2 sources2 sources