Miguel Bombarda: the shooting at Rilhafoles on the eve of the Republic

On Monday 3 October 1910, Miguel Bombarda was at work in the consulting room of Rilhafoles, Lisbon's hospital for the mentally ill, when a servant announced a visitor. It was a former inmate, Lieutenant Aparício Rebelo dos Santos of the army staff. Bombarda had him shown in and, as the young officer stood in front of his desk, remarked kindly on his surprise at seeing him so well.2 sources

The lieutenant said nothing. He took a Browning pistol from his coat pocket and shot Bombarda in the chest, then in the belly. The doctor got up and grabbed him, but the man kept firing until one of the hospital guards overpowered him. The first news bulletins spoke of three shots.1 source

Bombarda walked to the hospital gate, climbed into the carriage that had brought his attacker and told the driver to take him to the São José hospital. There, before the operation, he took some papers from his pocket and carefully burned one of them. According to the conspirators, it was the list of the civilian groups who were to fight in a revolution due to start within hours.1 source

He died a little after six that evening. He was 59, the director of Portugal's first psychiatric hospital and one of the men organising the overthrow of the monarchy. Two days later Portugal was a republic, and he became one of its first martyrs.4 sources

Near the end, according to the Museu da Presidência, he told his friend Pinto de Magalhães that he had been ready to fight and die for the Republic. Instead he was dying a 'stupid' death at the hands of a 'madman'.1 source

In 1910 Portugal was still a constitutional monarchy, ruled under the Constitutional Charter of 1826 and its later amendments. Its king, Manuel II, had come to the throne after his father, King Carlos, and his elder brother, Luís Filipe, were shot dead in Lisbon on the afternoon of 1 February 1908.2 sources

Republican deputies had sat in parliament since 1878, campaigning for civil registration, divorce, press freedom and limits on the religious orders. In the last election of the monarchy, in August 1910, the republicans won 14 seats. Their leaders were already plotting an armed rising at the same time.1 source

The plot had several layers. A republican congress in 1909 set up a military committee, led by the naval officer Carlos Cândido dos Reis, and a civil committee. In June 1909 the Freemasons of the Grand Orient set up a secret 'resistance committee' to pull the scattered revolutionary groups together. Its members included Miguel Bombarda, the naval commissary officer Machado Santos and the businessman Francisco Grandella.2 sources

From a certain point the committee met daily at the Centro de São Carlos, a republican club by the opera house, with Bombarda in the chair. Every night soldiers, corporals and sergeants came there to pledge themselves to the cause. Simões Raposo, the committee's secretary, later remembered him as remarkably regular in attendance and devoted without limit.1 source

Miguel Augusto Bombarda was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1851 and trained at the Lisbon medical school, the Escola Médico-Cirúrgica. His graduation thesis of 1877 was on the delusion of persecution. He went on to teach at the school, worked at the São José hospital, founded an institute of histology and organised the 15th International Congress of Medicine, held in Lisbon in 1906.3 sources

Rilhafoles had opened in 1848 in a former convent, on the orders of the Duke of Saldanha, as the country's first hospital for the mentally ill. When Bombarda was appointed director in July 1892 he found it badly run down. He rebuilt its administration, put up new pavilions, improved hygiene, diet and occupational therapy, and published reports on its work until 1909.3 sources

His best-known building was the Pavilhão de Segurança, or 8th Infirmary, for patients sent by the courts. It is a perfectly symmetrical ring around an inner courtyard, with rounded walls and no sharp edges to protect its patients. Vítor Albuquerque Freire, who studied the building, thinks it was perhaps influenced by panoptic prisons, designed so that inmates could always be watched. The Mensagem de Lisboa dates its opening to 1896; Aires Gameiro gives 1892, the year Bombarda took over.3 sources

Bombarda was a firm defender of the principle that the insane could not be held criminally responsible for what they did. He argued it in the much-publicised case of the painter Josefa Greno, who shot her husband dead in 1901.1 source

He was also a combative public intellectual. He held that mind and matter were one and that science, not religion, explained life and consciousness. In 1900 he answered the Jesuit Manuel Fernandes Santana, who had attacked his materialism, with a book called A sciencia e o jesuitismo (Science and Jesuitism). He was widely known for his anticlericalism.3 sources

His politics came late. He entered parliament in 1908 while still a monarchist, joined the Republican Party in 1909 and was re-elected as a republican in August 1910. His programme had socialist leanings: labour laws, progressive taxation, separation of Church and State, civil divorce and public health measures. With the neurologist Egas Moniz and Cândido dos Reis he founded the Junta Liberal, which campaigned for a secular state.3 sources

Aparício Rebelo dos Santos was born in Braga in 1878. Much of what is known of his early life comes from Joaquim da Silva Gomes, a Braga historian who traced his records. His father had made a fortune in Brazil and been made a viscount by King Carlos. Braga's baptism register gives his birthday as 5 August; the University of Coimbra's records give 5 July.1 source

He chose the army, then went to study at Coimbra, where the first signs of illness appeared. He went back to the army and became a lieutenant on 1 December 1907. On 21 March 1909, according to a later army medical report, he was admitted to Rilhafoles with auditory hallucinations, ideas of persecution and violent outbursts, and was diagnosed with primary paranoia and a delusion of persecution.3 sources

His father had him discharged on 3 December 1909, after repeated requests, although the psychosis was, in the doctors' words, in full activity. He then took his son to Paris to see the neurologists Ballot and Babinski. Back in Portugal the young man got worse, and when he went out friends or the police kept watch on him.2 sources

Gomes writes that his father then decided to take him to see Bombarda, who had examined him before. Jorge d'Abreu, a republican journalist who published a history of the revolution in 1912, tells it from what Bombarda himself told colleagues at the São José hospital. He says only that a servant announced a former patient.2 sources

When he was seized, Gomes writes, he called out that he could be let go, since the bullets had run out, and that nobody need be afraid. He never showed remorse. While he was still at Rilhafoles a nurse asked him if he regretted what he had done, and he gave a flat answer.2 sources

As for motive, he blamed Rilhafoles for his illness and said he was tormented by the 'voices of Rilhafoles'. The 1929 army report records him saying that he had been Bombarda's enemy because he was the enemy of the Hospital, and that he blamed his hallucinations on a system of suggestions worked on him by an entity he called 'the Hospital'. The forensic examination of 1 November 1910 concluded that he had acted under his delusion and was not responsible for the crime.2 sources

The date of the rising had been settled the day before. On the afternoon of 2 October, while crowds cheered the visiting Brazilian marshal Hermes da Fonseca outside the Belém palace, about forty officers met in the Chiado consulting room of the republican doctor Eusébio Leão. They swore to rise and fixed the start for the early hours of 4 October. Bombarda was to pass the password to the leaders of the civilian groups.1 source

The password was a question and an answer: 'Did you send for me?' and 'Pass, citizen.' The news from Rilhafoles reached the evening papers around lunchtime on 3 October, and crowds gathered in front of the bulletin boards. When Bombarda died, just after six, word went out to the republican press to avoid inflammatory headlines. A riot might have pushed the government into precautions that would wreck the plan.1 source

His death also left a gap in the organisation. That evening the leaders of the civilian groups were called to the Centro de São Carlos to collect weapons and orders, at a meeting Bombarda should have chaired. His place was taken by Simões Raposo, the resistance committee's secretary, who knew the burned list by heart.1 source

At eight o'clock some fifty conspirators crowded into a third-floor flat at 106 Rua da Esperança, lit by a single paraffin lamp. Among them were Cândido dos Reis, Afonso Costa, José Relvas, João Chagas and António José de Almeida. Cândido dos Reis told them that if he could not lead the sailors to victory he had no right to live. By 10.30 the plan was set: a 31-gun salute from the warships in the Tagus at 1 a.m. would start the rising.1 source

The killing has sometimes been said to have hurried the revolution on. In 2020 Joaquim da Silva Gomes gave a talk for Braga's public library called 'the man from Braga who hastened 5 October 1910'. Abreu's account, drawn from the conspirators, does not support that. The warships had orders to change anchorage on the morning of 4 October, which made that date the natural one. Cândido dos Reis named it at a meeting on 28 September, and the officers confirmed it the day before the shooting.2 sources

The night went badly at first. The 31-gun salvo never came, and the first regiment on the streets was the one the plotters had least counted on, the 16th Infantry. For some hours the leaders waiting at the São Paulo baths thought all was lost.1 source

Cândido dos Reis thought so too. He withdrew to a house in Rua de Dona Estefânia, left it at about five in the morning and was found dying of a head wound in a lane in Arroios, a pistol beside him, at around half past six. Jorge d'Abreu, writing in 1912, thought it most likely that he had shot himself in despair, believing the rising had failed. Others suspected a trap laid by the Republic's enemies, since it seemed too great a coincidence that two of the revolution's leaders should die on the eve of victory.1 source

In fact the rising held. Warships in the Tagus came over to the rebels, and Machado Santos dug in at the Rotunda with soldiers and armed civilians. On the morning of 5 October the Republic was proclaimed in Lisbon, and the royal family sailed into exile from Ericeira.2 sources

The new regime gave Bombarda and Cândido dos Reis a joint funeral, and a republican publication of 1911 called them the 'martyrs' of the revolution. O Século reported the funeral on its front page on 16 October 1910, and photographs show large crowds watching the cortège pass through the city.1 source

Aparício Rebelo dos Santos was never brought to trial. Because doctors found him mentally ill, he was kept in institutions for the rest of his life and died at the Casa de Saúde do Telhal on 24 April 1943. In 1929, when the army reviewed his case, its doctor found that twenty years of psychosis had not left him demented, but that he had never given up his delusions.3 sources

In 1911 Rilhafoles was renamed the Hospital Miguel Bombarda. It kept that name until it closed, a century later.1 source

The hospital Bombarda ran outlived him by a hundred years. Most sources date its closure to 2011, when the last 24 residents were moved to the Júlio de Matos hospital; RTP says the closure was announced in 2011 and carried out the following year. Two other state psychiatric hospitals, Lorvão and Arnes, closed in 2012.4 sources

The buildings are still there, on one of Lisbon's hills in Arroios. In 2006 the security pavilion was in the process of being listed as a protected building, and in 2023 the Mensagem de Lisboa described the former hospital as classified as a property of public interest. Over the years there has been talk of a hotel and of housing for homeless people; in 2023 a cultural cooperative, Largo Residências, was negotiating to use part of the site.2 sources

The patients' own traces have survived too. Over 120 years the hospital gathered about 4,000 works, some of them art brut made by patients, and about 5,000 photographs, registers and clinical files. In March 2025 the state heritage body, Museus e Monumentos de Portugal, opened proceedings to protect 518 of these objects as a set of public interest. They include patients' letters, poems, paintings and sculptures made of matches, and medical objects such as a straitjacket.1 source

Bombarda's principle that the insane could not be held criminally responsible was applied to his own killer. Aparício never stood trial and spent his last 32 years in psychiatric hospitals.3 sources