Murder at Rossio: the assassination of Sidónio Pais, 14 December 1918

Late on the night of Saturday 14 December 1918, Sidónio Pais, President of the Republic, arrived at Rossio station in the heart of Lisbon to take the night train to Porto. Officially he was going to open an exhibition of fine art. The real purpose, it was said, was to calm a monarchist conspiracy among the army officers of the north.2 sources2 sources

His aide, Captain Eurico Cameira, had tried to get him to board at Alcântara instead, because a hostile demonstration was rumoured. Sidónio insisted on Rossio. Eight days earlier a young man had tried to shoot him, and the station was full of police. Struck by the display, he remarked that he was not the Tsar of Russia and would walk next time.2 sources2 sources

The band of the Republican National Guard (GNR) struck up the anthem. Sidónio walked towards the second passenger entrance with Cameira, his aides-de-camp, his brother Alberto and his son António, a little ahead of the escort. A man who had been waiting in the station shot him in the chest. The president fell at the feet of the station doorman, Anastácio Trindade.2 sources2 sources

Shooting broke out all round. When it stopped, four more men were dead or dying: a station porter, a labourer, a greengrocer and Luís Furtado Saraiva, a 33-year-old commercial traveller and fervent admirer of the president, who had come to tell a policeman on duty there about a burglary at a neighbour's house. He died, people said, cheering his idol.1 source1 source

The gunman, José Júlio da Costa, made no attempt to escape. Cadets from the Army School saved him from being lynched on the spot and drove him away. Sidónio was rushed to the São José hospital, where, according to the Museu da Presidência, he died. António Araújo, his most recent biographer, puts his death at about 23:50 at the station entrance itself. Ilustração Portugueza, the illustrated weekly of O Século, put the shooting at 23:45.3 sources3 sources

A month later the medical examiner Asdrúbal d'Aguiar examined the body in the lower cloister of the Jerónimos monastery. A bullet from a .32 Browning had entered the right side of the chest and torn through the lung, the liver and the inferior vena cava, the great vein that returns blood to the heart. Sidónio could have lived no more than ten or fifteen minutes. The examiners could not say whether one, two or three shots had hit him.1 source1 source

Two reporters, one of them Reinaldo Ferreira of O Século, invented a dying cry: 'I die well! Save the Fatherland!' A plainer version had him plead, 'Don't squeeze me, lads.' His son António, who was there, said years later that his father said nothing at all.2 sources2 sources

Portugal had been a republic since the revolution of October 1910. Its constitution of 1911 kept the president weak and put power in parliament, which made and unmade governments at a dizzying rate: historians count 45 between 1910 and 1926. The dominant force was Afonso Costa's Democratic Party.4 sources4 sources

Germany declared war on Portugal on 9 March 1916, after Lisbon seized the German ships in its ports. By 1917 a Portuguese Expeditionary Corps (CEP) of about 50,000 men held a sector of the Western Front in Flanders. At home, prices rose by 22 per cent in 1916, 18 per cent in 1917 and 80 per cent in 1918, and food ran short. In May 1917 hungry crowds in Lisbon and Porto looted shops in the 'potato revolt', which Costa's government put down at the cost of more than 40 lives.2 sources2 sources

Sidónio Bernardino Cardoso da Silva Pais was born in Caminha, in the far north-west, on 1 May 1872, the eldest child of a notary who died when he was eleven. He enlisted as a volunteer at 16, trained as an artillery officer in Lisbon and took a doctorate in mathematics at Coimbra in 1898, with a thesis that, his biographer Armando Malheiro da Silva judged, broke no new ground. He taught calculus at the university and ran the city's industrial school.2 sources2 sources

He had kept out of politics and took no part in the revolution of October 1910, but he welcomed it, and posts followed fast. His patron, Brito Camacho, had him made minister of development in 1911, and he was then minister of finance until June 1912. Later that year he went to Berlin as Portugal's envoy. He tried to keep Portugal out of the war and stayed until Germany declared it.3 sources3 sources

On his way home he dined in Paris with João Chagas, the republican writer and diplomat, who wrote in his diary that Sidónio was 'thin as a dog', spoke deplorable French and was 'so insignificant'. Asked when he had last spoken to the Kaiser, Sidónio answered candidly that he had spoken to him only once. Being underestimated served him well. When someone suggested in 1917 that he was plotting a revolution, the foreign minister, Ernesto de Vilhena, scoffed: 'You gentlemen are mad. As if that man could make a revolution!'2 sources2 sources

Sidónio began conspiring in the summer of 1917 with Camacho's officers, at the offices of the Unionist paper A Lucta and in the Farmácia Durão in the Chiado. On the afternoon of 5 December he put on a borrowed uniform with a major's braid and at 17:50 walked into the barracks of the 7th Cavalry. By nightfall about 1,500 men, most of them soldiers, held the high ground of the Parque Eduardo VII, the traditional rallying point of Lisbon revolutions.2 sources2 sources

For three days Lisbon was a battlefield. Warships loyal to the government shelled the city; aboard one of them, the Gil Eanes, Sidónio's brother António directed the fire against him. Sidónio watched, chain-smoking and eating chocolates. Mobs from the poorer quarters looted shops and sacked Afonso Costa's house. The government resigned on 7 December and the fighting ended on the 8th. António Araújo counts 109 dead and more than 500 wounded; Rui Ramos says the city morgue took in about 100 bodies.2 sources2 sources

Costa was arrested and the president, Bernardino Machado, was deposed and sent into exile. Sidónio led a revolutionary junta, became head of the government on 11 December and took the presidency as well on 27 December. A film crew recorded him at the Rotunda signing decree after decree; he had the scene shot three times until it looked right.3 sources3 sources

On 8 January 1918 sailors loyal to the Democrats rose and the cruiser Vasco da Gama trained its guns on the Terreiro do Paço. Sidónio went up to the São Jorge castle and directed the artillery himself; after three shells the crew surrendered. Then he toured the north, the south and the centre, and crowds filled the squares to see him.3 sources3 sources

At Évora he promised a 'New Republic' with room for everyone, monarchists and Catholics included. A decree of 30 March 1918, issued without parliament and known as the 'Constitution of 1918', had the president elected directly by every man over 21, whether or not he could read. The president would appoint and dismiss ministers freely and command the armed forces. Camacho's Unionists broke with him in April.3 sources3 sources

On 28 April Sidónio, the only candidate, was elected. The old republican parties told their supporters to stay at home and many did. Sources disagree on the numbers, as the table shows. On 9 May he was acclaimed from the balcony of Lisbon City Hall, where the Republic had been proclaimed, and that afternoon, on horseback with his sword drawn, he reviewed a military parade on the Avenida.3 sources3 sources

He governed as a personality. He seldom called the cabinet together. He visited slums, prisons and hospitals, entered typhus and flu wards to comfort the sick, and in May freed every prisoner in Porto's jail on the spot: 'Go. You are all free.' His charity, the Obra de Assistência 5 de Dezembro, opened soup kitchens across the country, remembered as the 'sopa do Sidónio'.3 sources3 sources

He was slim and always in uniform, and women adored him, as the papers noted. His estranged wife never set foot in the Belém palace until his body lay there. The writer Raul Brandão called him 'half prince, half condottiere'.2 sources2 sources

He also made peace with the Catholic Church. A decree of February 1918 softened Afonso Costa's Law of Separation of 1911; on 15 May he became the first republican head of state to attend Mass, for the soldiers killed in Flanders; and on 10 July relations with the Vatican were restored.2 sources2 sources

Sidónio sent no more troops to France; the British, short of shipping, had already stopped carrying the monthly drafts in 1917. On 9 April 1918 a German offensive on the Lys overran the Portuguese sector. Ramos gives about 614 dead and 6,535 prisoners; the official figures cited by Araújo give more than 400 dead and 6,000 prisoners. Opponents blamed Sidónio's supposed sympathy for Germany.3 sources3 sources

Then came the pneumónica, the 1918 flu. It reached Portugal in the spring and peaked in October, when 31,471 flu deaths were registered in mainland Portugal alone. The official total for 1918 was 53,975, but many victims died without a doctor and were recorded under unknown causes. Historians long put the real toll at 60,000 to 100,000; recent studies estimate 117,764 or 135,257.2 sources2 sources

Discontent grew with the dying. On 12 October Democrat officers rose in Coimbra and Évora and were crushed; thousands were arrested. Four days later shooting broke out round a column of about 140 to 150 political prisoners being marched through Lisbon to the Cais do Sodré station. Most accounts give three dead in this 'leva da morte', the 'death column'. The Museu da Presidência says the police killed seven republicans; José Luís Andrade suspects an attempt to free some of the prisoners. A general strike on 18 November fizzled out but led to more than 300 arrests.4 sources4 sources

On 6 December, as he left a ceremony in Belém for survivors of the minesweeper Augusto de Castilho, sunk by a German submarine, an 18-year-old navigation student named Luís Maria Baptista (19, in one account) aimed a pistol at him. It jammed. Some accounts, among them the Presidency's own website, date the attempt to 5 December. Because Baptista's father belonged to a Masonic lodge, soldiers and civilians sacked the headquarters of Portuguese Freemasonry, the Grémio Lusitano, on the night of 8 to 9 December.5 sources5 sources

José Júlio da Costa came from Garvão, in the Alentejo, and was 25. A former army sergeant, he had fought at the Rotunda in the revolution of 1910 and served in Africa and in Timor, and his sympathies were on the left.2 sources2 sources

He always denied having accomplices. The motive usually given is revenge: a strike by farm workers at Vale de Santiago, near Odemira, inspired by anarchists, had ended with peasants deported to Africa. Rui Ramos describes him as one of the left-wing militants convinced that Sidónio was about to restore the monarchy, and says he left at home a file headed 'The death of Dr Sidónio'.2 sources2 sources

In the days before the shooting he had called once on Sebastião de Magalhães Lima, Grand Master of the Grande Oriente Lusitano, Portugal's main Masonic body, who was staying at the Hotel Francfort beside the station. After the murder Magalhães Lima was arrested there, with a harmless letter from the killer in his pocket, and narrowly escaped a mob shouting 'Kill him!'.3 sources3 sources

Costa was never tried. Held in the Lisbon penitentiary, he was freed during the revolt of October 1921 that ended in the Noite Sangrenta, the night of political murders in which two of Sidónio's former ministers, Machado Santos and Carlos da Maia, were killed. He hid in the north until he was caught in Matosinhos in January 1927. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, he spent his last years in Lisbon's Miguel Bombarda mental hospital and died on 16 March 1946, aged 52, still never brought to trial. His mother took his body home to Garvão.2 sources2 sources

The body was embalmed at Belém and laid out in the Louis XV room, where crowds broke down one of the palace gates to see it. On 18 December it was taken to Lisbon City Hall. The Red Cross post there treated 230 people for fainting by mid-afternoon and about 400 by the end of the day. One shop in the Rossio sold 2,000 pairs of black gloves and flowers doubled in price. The press called him the 'Grande Morto', the Great Dead.2 sources2 sources

On 21 December the cortege wound from City Hall through the Chiado and along the river to the Jerónimos monastery. Newspapers claimed a million mourners, although Lisbon did not have half that many people. Some 300 or 400 beggars and cripples walked behind the coffin. In the Baixa the crash of a falling shop sign was taken for a bomb, panicking police opened fire and four people died, shot, crushed or of a heart attack.2 sources2 sources

In his will Sidónio, who said he was not religious, had asked for no pomp and a plain grave without a cross. He was buried at the Jerónimos with two crucifixes round his neck, to Beethoven's Eroica sung by pupils of the Casa Pia. A month of official mourning followed, and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people were arrested for disrespecting his memory. In January 1919 Teófilo Duarte, one of his young officers, came back from Cape Verde, where Sidónio had made him governor, smashed the glass lid of the coffin with his sword to embrace the body, and fainted.2 sources2 sources

Fernando Pessoa, then an office clerk in Lisbon, had admired Sidónio. He began an essay on 'the meaning of Sidonism' and a detective story in which his Dr Abílio Quaresma investigated the murder, and finished neither. Instead, on 27 February 1920, he published in issue 4 of the paper Acção a 240-line ode of 60 quatrains.3 sources3 sources

The poem fuses its 'soldier-king' with King Sebastian, the young king lost at Alcácer Quibir whom Portuguese legend says will one day return, the 'Desejado' or Desired One. 'In him, for one hour, King Sebastian took flesh,' Pessoa wrote.2 sources2 sources

In Acção the title read 'To the Memory of President Sidónio Pais'. Pessoa later added 'King' by hand to his own copy, and the 1940 edition, printed at the height of Salazar's Estado Novo, fixed 'Presidente-Rei' for good.2 sources2 sources

On 16 December Congress, under the 1911 constitution now restored, elected Admiral João do Canto e Castro president, and on the 23rd João Tamagnini Barbosa became prime minister. The experiment with American-style presidential rule was over. Sidónio's followers split, and in January 1919 royalists proclaimed a Monarchy of the North in Porto.2 sources2 sources

In the 1919 elections the Democrats won 53 per cent of the vote. The Republic returned to its old instability until the military coup of 28 May 1926, which led to Salazar's dictatorship. That regime adopted Sidónio, naming an avenue after him in 1948 and moving his coffin in 1966 to the new National Pantheon in the church of Santa Engrácia.2 sources2 sources

The Museu da Presidência sees in his populism and personal rule an early sign of the totalitarian, fascist-leaning tendency of interwar Europe. Rui Ramos calls the fascist label a distortion, pointing out that Sidónio was a republican and a Freemason. António Araújo concludes that 'Sidonism' was so bound to one man that it could not outlive him, and all three agree that it died with him.3 sources3 sources

Flowers are still left on his tomb in the Pantheon, one of the few there that are regularly decorated, by anonymous visitors said to be spiritists.1 source1 source