The February 1927 revolt: Porto and Lisbon rise against the dictatorship

At about six in the evening of 9 February 1927, a car with a white sheet tied to a broom handle drove along Rua da Escola Politécnica in Lisbon. At each barricade a rebel officer in it called out the news. The surrender was coming. There was no ammunition left. Civilians should run.1 source1 source

For three days sailors, Republican Guards and armed civilians had held a strip of the city from the Jardim de São Pedro de Alcântara to the Largo do Rato. That morning aircraft had bombed their positions, and from about midday the military governor's order was going up on the walls: anyone found with a weapon would be shot without trial.2 sources2 sources

Around seven (eight, in another account), Colonel Mendes dos Reis, the rebel commander in Lisbon, telephoned the government's headquarters. “I cannot continue the fight because I have no ammunition,” he said. He was waiting, he added, with Lieutenant Agatão Lança and two other officers in a grocer's shop by the Largo do Rato.2 sources2 sources

In Porto, where the rising had begun six days earlier, the rebels had already given up. The first armed attempt to bring down the dictatorship was over.2 sources2 sources

On 28 May 1926 a military coup ended the First Republic, the parliamentary regime founded in 1910. The President, Bernardino Machado, handed his powers to Mendes Cabeçadas, the naval officer who had led the coup in Lisbon, on 31 May. The victors soon fell out. Cabeçadas and then General Gomes da Costa were pushed aside, and the most conservative faction won: General Óscar Carmona took charge, with General Sinel de Cordes, later finance minister, influential in the background.3 sources3 sources

Many republicans had expected a short, cleansing dictatorship followed by a return to the constitution. Instead the new rulers imposed prior censorship of the press on 22 June 1926, banned political groupings and deported people they thought dangerous. An attempted military coup in Chaves in September 1926 was quickly put down.2 sources2 sources

Over the winter a broad conspiracy took shape. It joined officers who had fought in the First World War, left-wing republican parties, the writers of the reformist review Seara Nova, and some trade unionists and anarchists. Their minimum programme was a provisional government of “competent men”, the removal of the dictators and the return of public liberties under the constitution.3 sources3 sources

The plan was for risings across the country at once, centred on Porto and Lisbon. It was an open secret. The rising was set for 23 January, then for 31 January, when Carmona and two ministers were in Porto; each time rumours put the troops on alert and the date moved. The government had already moved suspect officers away from Lisbon or confined them to fixed addresses. When the rising came, it had no surprise on its side.3 sources3 sources

Before dawn on Thursday 3 February, officers of the 9th Light Infantry (Caçadores 9) roused their men in Porto. Republican Guards from the Bela Vista barracks and companies from other units joined them. They marched to the Praça da Batalha, the square at the top of the old city, and seized the military headquarters, the civil governor's office and the central post and telegraph office.3 sources3 sources

The revolutionary committee was headed by General Adalberto de Sousa Dias, a 61-year-old republican who had commanded the army division in Porto until the coup. With him were Colonel Fernando Freiria, the naval doctor Jaime de Morais, Captain Sarmento Pimentel and the army doctor and historian Jaime Cortesão, who took over the civil governor's office. The rebels arrested the civil governor, the regional army commanders, the head of the local censorship board and the ministers of Commerce and Education.4 sources4 sources

Reinforcements arrived during the day from Penafiel, Póvoa de Varzim, Guimarães, Vila Real and Amarante, whose artillery came by train to Campanhã station. Hundreds of civilians took up arms: civil servants, students, journalists, railwaymen and workers. A parish priest from Guimarães took up a machine gun and marched to Porto with the soldiers. A column from Valença arrived on 5 or 6 February.3 sources3 sources

But much of the Porto garrison stayed neutral, and the rest of the country did not follow. Risings at Figueira da Foz and in the Algarve were put down within days; Lisbon stayed quiet. At eight that morning the Minister of War, Colonel Abílio Passos e Sousa, left Lisbon by train. By late afternoon he was on the Serra do Pilar, the hill in Vila Nova de Gaia that looks straight across the Douro at the centre of Porto, and the government's guns opened fire.4 sources4 sources

The rebels held the Batalha, the streets around it and the approaches to the Luís I bridge, behind barricades on Rua 31 de Janeiro, Santa Catarina and Santo Ildefonso. On 4 February they beat back a cavalry charge at the bridge. They could hold, but they could not advance, and they began to run short of food and ammunition.2 sources2 sources

The government ringed the city. Troops from Coimbra and Aveiro gathered in Gaia; units from Braga and Viana closed in from the north; a column came down from Bragança and Régua in the east. On 7 February the steamer Infante de Sagres brought more men from Lisbon to Leixões, the port just north of the city. Accounts of their number differ: Farinha writes of 1,200 men under General Farinha Leitão, Ventura of 600 under Colonel Farinha Beirão. Aircraft flew over Porto to intimidate the rebels and later to drop leaflets demanding their surrender.3 sources3 sources

The shelling from the Serra do Pilar and the Monte da Virgem set fire to houses in the centre. Hotels, banks, cafés and fire stations were hit. Rebel guns answered, and Gaia suffered too.1 source1 source

Through the Uruguayan consul the rebels asked for an armistice. Jaime de Morais, Major Inácio Severino and Captain Aresta Branco crossed to the government headquarters in Gaia, blindfolded. Passos e Sousa offered only unconditional surrender, and they went back. Sources date the talks to 5 or 6 February. Asked by reporters why the rebels would not give in, the minister said that “everyone gives orders” and that the civilians were pressing the troops not to surrender.4 sources4 sources

On 7 February government troops crossed the Douro upstream and closed the last way out of the city at Campanhã. That afternoon the rebel headquarters in the São João theatre sent the civilian volunteers home. Sousa Dias offered to surrender if only the officers were held responsible. The government would spare only corporals and privates. At 3.15 on the morning of 8 February the rebels telephoned their acceptance; the promise to spare the lower ranks, Daniel Silva notes, was not kept. At 9.30 government troops marched in over the Luís I bridge. The Diário de Lisboa and Ventura put Passos e Sousa at their head, but one 1927 account has him handing the Porto command to Colonel Craveiro Lopes the day before and leaving for Lisbon.3 sources3 sources

Lisbon was meant to rise within hours of Porto. Instead its conspirators hesitated, partly, Jornal Mapa suggests, for fear that the revolution would fall into the hands of the street. The government declared a state of siege and a night curfew, shut down opposition papers and arrested suspects. Railwaymen of the South and Southeast line went on strike, and crowds burned copies of the government paper in the Rossio.2 sources2 sources

At about nine on the morning of 7 February some 150 sailors left their barracks at Alcântara under Lieutenant Agatão Lança, with armed civilians beside them. Companies of the Republican Guard and several police stations joined, about 600 men in all. Colonel Mendes dos Reis set up his headquarters in the Hotel Bristol at São Pedro de Alcântara. The rebels took the Navy Arsenal and the Navy and War ministries on the riverfront, and the cruiser Carvalho Araújo in the Tagus came over to them.2 sources2 sources

They never reached the Rotunda, the roundabout at the top of Avenida da Liberdade. Government artillery at the Rotunda and on the Torel hill shelled the rebel lines, and machine guns at the Mãe d'Água reservoir in Amoreiras swept the Largo do Rato. On 8 February thousands of reinforcements arrived from Amadora, Mafra and Entroncamento, some of them fresh from Porto. That day soldiers searching the home of the republican leader and war veteran Américo Olavo shot him dead.3 sources3 sources

On 9 February Passos e Sousa, back from the north, took command. Guns on the Castle of São Jorge, Campolide and the Torel pounded the rebel positions, the Carvalho Araújo was attacked and surrendered, and aircraft bombed the Arsenal and the Bairro Alto. Some rebels escaped by boat across the Tagus while others covered them. That evening Mendes dos Reis made his call.2 sources2 sources

There is no agreed toll, and censorship limited what the papers could print. Estimates differ, and many of the dead were civilians caught in the shelling and crossfire.3 sources3 sources

When the Lisbon papers reappeared on 11 February, the Diário de Notícias filled a page with the names of the dead and wounded in the city's hospitals. Civilians outnumbered soldiers three to one, and a striking number of the victims were women, most of them hit by shell fragments. A jeweller's daughter and his maid were killed by a shell as they watched the fighting from a fourth-floor window on Rua da Prata. The page also recorded 35 unidentified bodies at the morgue.1 source1 source

Passos e Sousa told the newspaper La Nation that the revolt was “a regrettable, but perhaps providential, incident”. It showed the regime where its enemies were. The state of siege lasted through March, and the government used it to purge the army, the police and the civil service.2 sources2 sources

Decree 13 137 of 15 February allowed the government to remove from service, on half pay, the magistrates, civil servants and army and navy officers who had taken part. Decree 13 138 of the next day dissolved the Republican Guard units involved and every political centre or organisation that had joined in. Jaime Cortesão and the writer Raul Proença lost their posts at the National Library. Unions were closed, and in April a Special Military Tribunal was set up to try political cases.2 sources2 sources

The ships were bound for distant Timor and left the leaders in the Atlantic colonies on the way. Agatão Lança was put ashore in Angola; Sousa Dias, Freiria and other leaders in São Tomé. Hundreds more filled the Lisbon penitentiary and the forts of Sacavém and Elvas. About a thousand people were held in prison, and more than a thousand were deported, jailed or confined to fixed residence in the islands and colonies.3 sources3 sources

Others fled. Many crossed into Galicia, where the first exile groups formed; in March Lisbon asked Madrid to move them more than 100 kilometres from the border. Bernardino Machado, the president deposed in 1926, was expelled, after the revolt by the Presidency's account and on its eve by the Presidency Museum's, and went first to Galicia, then to France. In Paris, Cortesão and other exiles joined Afonso Costa in the League for the Defence of the Republic, the Paris League, which published its manifesto in July 1927.5 sources5 sources

Farinha calls February 1927 the only revolt that really shook the military dictatorship. Its defeat did the opposite of what the rebels wanted. The dictatorship broke up the republican networks in the army and closed opposition papers, parties and unions. Much of the surviving press now presented it as the guarantor of order.4 sources4 sources

Ten years later, at a lunch for the victors, Major Ricardo Durão called the fighting “the baptism of blood of 28 May”. In 1928 the regime brought in António de Oliveira Salazar, a Coimbra economics professor, as finance minister. In 1933 a constitution drafted under Salazar, by then prime minister, founded the Estado Novo, the authoritarian regime that lasted until 1974.3 sources3 sources

The Reviralho went on. Sousa Dias, moved from São Tomé to the Azores and then Madeira, was chosen to lead the Madeira revolt of April 1931. After it failed he was deported to Cabo Verde, where he died at Mindelo on 27 April 1934, still under fixed residence. Sarmento Pimentel, in Brazil, was still leading exiled opponents when the dictatorship fell in April 1974.3 sources3 sources

Historians are still finding new material in military and private archives. The arts faculty of the University of Porto will hold an international conference for the centenary on 25 and 26 February 2027.2 sources2 sources