The morning Portugal became a republic: 5 October 1910

By half past eight on the morning of Wednesday 5 October 1910 the shooting in Lisbon had stopped. Soldiers who had fought for the king were firing their rifles into the air, and crowds waving white flags were embracing the men they had been shooting at a few hours before.1 source

At the Paços do Concelho, Lisbon's City Hall, José Relvas stepped onto the balcony with Eusébio Leão and other leaders of the Portuguese Republican Party. Relvas, a Ribatejo landowner, proclaimed the Republic to the square below, and the names of a provisional government were read out. The telegraph carried the news to the rest of the country.3 sources

The monarchy had lasted since the beginnings of Portugal in the twelfth century. Only a day earlier, the revolt that ended it had looked like a disaster. Its chief was dead, most of its officers had left their positions, and its political leaders were in hiding.4 sources

The trouble began in January 1890. On the 11th, Britain sent Portugal an ultimatum to give up its claim, drawn on the “rose-coloured map”, to the land between Angola and Mozambique. The new king, Carlos I, gave way. Public anger fell on the crown, and at the election that March the Republican Party won three seats in Lisbon.3 sources

A patriotic march written that year, A Portuguesa, with music by Alfredo Keil and words by Henrique Lopes de Mendonça, was printed in more than 22,000 free copies. When republicans in Porto rose on 31 January 1891, they marched to it. The rising failed.1 source

Money made things worse. The state went into partial bankruptcy in 1891 and 1892. Politics, meanwhile, ran on rotativismo: the Regenerador and Progressista parties took turns in office by agreement, and local bosses delivered the votes. Carlos I appointed and dismissed governments and created batches of peers to give them majorities.2 sources

From 1901 the old parties split. João Franco left the Regeneradores to found his own party, and in 1907 and 1908 he ruled as a dictator. On 1 February 1908, in the Terreiro do Paço, gunmen shot dead Carlos I and his heir, Luís Filipe. The king's younger son was acclaimed as Manuel II in May. He reigned for two years.2 sources

The republicans grew with each crisis, above all in Lisbon. They won 7 seats in April 1908, two months after the regicide, and 14 at the last election of the monarchy, on 28 August 1910, 11 of them in Lisbon. With a narrow franchise and rigged elections, that was as far as the ballot could take them.3 sources

So the party prepared a revolution. Its congress of 1909 set up a directorate, a civil committee and a military committee under a retired admiral, Cândido dos Reis. In the navy a conspiracy network recruited sailors, sergeants and junior officers. On the streets the party relied on the Carbonária, a secret society that the historian João Freire calls probably the most decisive instrument of the rising.4 sources

The plot began badly. Around midday on 3 October Miguel Bombarda, a psychiatrist and one of the republican leaders, was shot in his hospital office by a former patient; he died that evening. That evening, while a banquet for the visiting Brazilian marshal Hermes da Fonseca was held at the Belém palace, some fifty conspirators crammed into a flat at 106 Rua da Esperança. They agreed that the warships on the Tagus would fire a 31-shot salvo at one in the morning as the signal.2 sources

At about a quarter to one, by the navy's account, Lieutenant Mendes Cabeçadas seized the cruiser Adamastor and fired three shots. The leaders waiting at the São Paulo baths heard only three cannon shots, at about twenty past one by their reckoning.2 sources

On the São Rafael the sailors rose without a single officer of their own, led by a gunner, José de Carvalho, and held the ship's officers prisoner. The naval barracks at Alcântara rose too. On land, Machado Santos led civilians to the Infantry 16 barracks at Campo de Ourique, and that regiment and Artillery 1 came out.2 sources

Little else went to plan. According to the historian Ricardo Raimundo, most members of the Carbonária had no weapons and stayed away; only about 200 turned out, and the officers and sergeants in the plot succeeded in only two of the city's three regiments. The column marching on the Necessidades Palace ran into the Municipal Guard and turned instead to the Rotunda, the circle at the top of the Avenida da Liberdade.3 sources

Believing the revolt had failed, Cândido dos Reis left his sister's house soon after five in the morning. He was found dead at about six in the morning in the Travessa das Freiras, in Arroios. It was called suicide at the time, and doubts remain. As the morning wore on, most of the officers at the Rotunda left, among them Captain Afonso Palla, who had placed the guns.3 sources

One stayed. Machado Santos, a second-class naval commissary (an administrative officer) and a leader of the Carbonária, asked the sergeants of Artillery 1 whether they would accept his command. They said they would fight to the end. By midday some 400 men were dug in behind barricades he himself called “platonic”.3 sources

In the cafés of the Chiado that morning, the talk was that the revolution had failed. Yet according to Raimundo, the command of the Lisbon military division never seriously attacked, because its officers had no wish to defend a government that did not represent them. The exception was Paiva Couceiro, whose horse battery from Queluz shelled the rebels from near the Penitentiary that afternoon, until headquarters ordered it to stop.2 sources

The navy turned it. Around midday on 4 October, messengers reached the rebel sailors at Alcântara with news that the Rotunda was holding. Their officers ordered the cruisers to bombard the Necessidades Palace, where Manuel II was living and where the troops defending it were massed.2 sources

According to the navy's own history, the ships fired more than forty shells at the palace. They hit the cornice of its chapel and the king's bedroom. The servants fled, and those who stayed persuaded Manuel to leave. He crossed the Tapada, the palace grounds, to a car called from a private garage and was driven to the palace-convent at Mafra.2 sources

With the king gone, the defence fell into disorder. The cruiser D. Carlos was still flying the blue and white flag of the monarchy. At about half past seven that evening, Abreu writes, a boarding party under Lieutenant Carlos da Maia, who had come from the Alcântara barracks, took it after a gunfight with its officers. The navy's history says the ship went over under Second Lieutenant Silva Araújo. Abreu names him as the one officer on board who was in on the plot, and the only one allowed to stay.3 sources

The end came by accident. Shortly before seven on 5 October, the German chargé d'affaires asked General Manuel Rafael Gorjão, commander of the Lisbon military division, for a one-hour truce so that foreigners could reach their ships. Gorjão agreed and sent the diplomat to the Rotunda with a cavalry orderly carrying a white flag.1 source

The crowds took the flag for a surrender. Soldiers left their ranks and mixed with people waving white flags. At a hurried council Paiva Couceiro told Gorjão he no longer had any soldiers, said he was going north, and left with his battery for Queluz. At the Rotunda Machado Santos refused a truce, then granted one from 8.45 to 9.45 on his own terms, and marched down to Rossio at the head of armed civilians to take over the headquarters.1 source

Then came the balcony. Jorge d'Abreu, writing in 1912, and the historian Vítor Neto put the proclamation at about nine; the navy's history and Fernando Rosas put it at about eleven. Either way it was Relvas who spoke, and the veteran positivist Teófilo Braga who would lead the government.4 sources

The rest of Portugal learned of it by wire. Fernando Rosas calls the Republic a “profoundly urban” creation of Lisbon, and the journalist João Chagas had predicted as much in a conversation the writer Raul Brandão recorded.2 sources

Telephones were few, and the telegraph was slow to reach some places. Lamego, in the north, took seven days to learn that Manuel II no longer reigned. In Timor, the monarchy lasted in people's minds until the end of October.1 source

The king spent the night of 4 October in the convent at Mafra. On the morning of the 5th his mother, Queen Amélia, and his grandmother, Queen Maria Pia, drove over from Sintra. After lunch, breathless messengers arrived from Cascais with the news that the Republic had won, and another with word that the royal yacht Amélia was waiting off Ericeira.1 source

The sea was rough. A courtier, Serrão Franco, promised a large reward, and the crews of two fishing boats agreed to row the family out: the two queens in one, the king in the other. Amélia's luggage was a tin trunk of linen; Manuel's, a box with half a dozen handkerchiefs. Before he left, he gave a letter for the prime minister saying that he was not abdicating, only withdrawing for a time.1 source

The yacht sailed round the Berlengas islands and on to Gibraltar. Abreu puts the departure at four in the afternoon; the photograph of the embarkation is dated at three. Manuel II went into exile in England, and Portugal's last king never ruled again.2 sources

Nobody kept a single official count, and the estimates differ by more than double. Most of the victims were civilians. There was fighting along the Avenida da Liberdade, all around the Necessidades and in Pedrouços, as well as on the ships. The naval hospital alone treated about 50 wounded sailors, soldiers, police and civilians.3 sources

Cândido dos Reis, who planned the rising, did not live to see it succeed. A long avenue in Lisbon, the Avenida Almirante Reis, now carries his name.1 source

The provisional government was not the one the conspirators had planned. Bombarda and Cândido dos Reis were dead, so Teófilo Braga became its president. Afonso Costa, who had played no major part in the revolution, took Justice and Worship; António José de Almeida took the Interior, Bernardino Machado Foreign Affairs and Relvas Finance. The Carbonária was left out, and so was Machado Santos.2 sources

It governed by decree, and fast. Its first act, on 8 October, expelled the Jesuits. Decrees of 12 October replaced the religious holidays with civic ones celebrating the new regime. By Christmas, marriage had become a purely civil contract, and divorce was legal.1 source

The new flag came from a commission named on 15 October that included the painter Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro, the writer Abel Botelho and João Chagas. Its green and red replaced the blue and white of the Braganças, and the argument it caused was, as the Diário de Notícias put it later, almost as heated as the choice of a site for Lisbon's new airport.1 source

The anthem was the march of 1890. A Portuguesa, written in anger at the British Ultimatum and sung by the Porto rebels of 1891, became the national anthem on 19 June 1911, the day the Constituent Assembly first met.2 sources

Relvas, at Finance, investigated the illegal advances the monarchy had paid to the royal household and on 22 May 1911 replaced the real with the escudo. The Constitution, approved on 21 August 1911, abolished titles of nobility and made education secular. It did not give the vote to women or to people who could not read, in a country where about 68 per cent of people were illiterate.4 sources

Former monarchists rushed to join the winners, and people called them “adesivos”, the sticky ones. The writer Ramalho Ortigão joked that when the fighters of the Rotunda counted their losses on the morning of 5 October, they found that of the five hundred who had started the revolt, only five thousand were left.1 source

The regime never settled. Between 1910 and 1926 Portugal had 8 presidents and 45 governments and faced 10 armed conspiracies. Rosas argues that it had no social policy and lost the workers who had helped make the revolution, and that entering the First World War, for which the country was not prepared, did it great damage.2 sources

Some of the men of October 1910 died by violence. On the night of 19 to 20 October 1921, the Noite Sangrenta, armed men killed the prime minister António Granjo and two heroes of the revolution, Machado Santos and Carlos da Maia. A military coup on 28 May 1926 dissolved parliament; the military dictatorship that followed led to the Estado Novo.3 sources

5 October, the Implantação da República, is one of the compulsory public holidays in Portugal's Labour Code. For three years it was not. A labour law of June 2012 cut four holidays from 1 January 2013: Corpus Christi, 5 October, 1 November and 1 December.2 sources

The same law said the cut must be reviewed within five years. It took less. Lei n.º 8/2016, published on 1 April 2016, restored all four, and 5 October was a holiday again that autumn.2 sources