Afonso Costa dies in Paris: the First Republic's strongman in exile, 1937

On the afternoon of Tuesday 11 May 1937, the Lisbon evening paper Diário de Lisboa went on sale with a line under its masthead: “This issue was seen by the Censorship Commission.” The left-hand column belonged to London, where crowds were filling the streets for the coronation of George VI. In the middle, under a headline in heavy type, was a dead man: “Dr. Afonso Costa”.1 source1 source

The unsigned text said only that he had died in Paris. It printed what it called one of the last portraits of him, taken recently in Paris, and spoke of “the pain of absence in a foreign land”. It did not explain why a former head of government, aged 66, had been living abroad, or who now ruled the country he had left.2 sources2 sources

The next day's front page showed the man who did rule it. António de Oliveira Salazar, head of the government since 1932, was photographed leaving Lisbon's Anglican church after a service for the coronation, followed by the British ambassador. Costa had led the parliamentary republic that the dictatorship replaced in 1926, and he had spent his last eleven years opposing it from Paris.3 sources3 sources

Afonso Augusto da Costa was born on 6 March 1871 in the parish of Santiago in Seia, a small town in the district of Guarda, in central Portugal. He studied law at Coimbra and stayed to teach it, rising to a full professorship there before moving to the law faculty in Lisbon. Even a hostile modern critic, the legal historian António Menezes Cordeiro, calls him an excellent jurist.2 sources2 sources

He made his name as a republican in parliament. In 1906 he was elected deputy for eastern Lisbon alongside António José de Almeida, and joined the directorate of the Portuguese Republican Party. On 20 November that year he told the Chamber that Louis XVI had gone to the scaffold for fewer crimes than King Carlos had committed, and was expelled from the chamber for it.2 sources2 sources

In January 1908 he was among the republican leaders arrested over a failed rising, the story told in our article on the Elevador da Biblioteca coup. In August 1910 eastern Lisbon elected him again, with Almeida and Bernardino Machado. Two months later the monarchy fell, and Costa became Minister of Justice in the Provisional Government.3 sources3 sources

He set the pace on religion. Between October 1910 and April 1911 the government expelled the religious orders, legalised divorce, made civil marriage the only legal one and, on 20 April 1911, separated church and state by a 196-article law that Costa drafted. Our articles on the divorce law and the Law of Separation tell those stories.3 sources3 sources

The republicans split almost at once. In February 1912 António José de Almeida founded the Evolutionist Party because he rejected the line Costa was taking, and days later Manuel de Brito Camacho announced his Republican Union. What remained of the old party, under Costa, became known as the Democrats.2 sources2 sources

Republicans had long promised the vote to all adult men, and the Democrats' programme still did. In power they drew back. In 1913, when an elected parliament wrote an electoral law for the first time, the result was narrower than the rules of 1911. Illiterate heads of family, who had been allowed to vote, lost the right, and the law now said in so many words that women could not vote. Only a minority of deputies argued for votes for all men.1 source1 source

The historian Miriam Halpern Pereira links the retreat to fear of a monarchist and Catholic comeback, and of socialists and anarchists, among a population most of whom could not read. A restricted vote could also, she argues, protect the Democrats' hold on power. A party study of the municipal elections of 1913 showed that the less literate regions had voted more for the Evolutionists and Unionists.1 source1 source

On 9 January 1913 President Manuel de Arriaga swore in the first government drawn from a single party, with Costa as head of government and minister of finance. Supported in parliament by the Unionists and independents, it made a balanced budget its first priority.2 sources2 sources

It cut spending with the so-called brake law of 15 March 1913 and a law of 14 June on officials kept on the payroll without posts, and it raised revenue by reforming the industrial and property taxes and the tax on transfers of property. The state accounts for 1912-13 and 1913-14 closed in surplus, the Democratic ministry's first victory.1 source1 source

The sums were modest. Economists working from Nuno Valério's historical statistics put the 1914 surplus at about 7,000 contos (a conto was 1,000 escudos), roughly 1 per cent of national output. War spending turned it into a deficit of 4.2 per cent by 1916, and every later year in their tables, up to 1926, shows a deficit.1 source1 source

Costa was no friend of the trade unions, and his policy earned him the nickname “racha-sindicalistas”, the union-breaker. Strikes nonetheless fell, from 35 in 1912 to 19 in 1913 and 10 in 1914. His enemies were busy elsewhere: the revolutionary veteran Machado Santos inspired a civilian and military protest on 27 April 1913, and monarchists attempted risings in Lisbon in July and October.1 source1 source

As pressure grew, Arriaga sounded out the three party leaders about a government above party. Costa asked to be relieved on 26 January 1914, and on 9 February Bernardino Machado took over.1 source1 source

Out of office, Costa still steered his party. In January 1915 Arriaga put General Pimenta de Castro at the head of a government that ruled without parliament. On 14 May the navy, part of the army and large numbers of civilians, organised by the Freemasons, rose in Lisbon and overthrew him. Costa, the Museu da Presidência writes, played a prominent part behind the scenes. Warehouses and bakeries were looted for food.1 source1 source

Costa returned as head of government on 29 November 1915. Within months Portugal seized the German ships in its ports at Britain's request, and Germany declared war on 9 March 1916, a story told in our article on the declaration. Costa handed the premiership to a coalition, the Sacred Union, under Almeida, and kept the finance ministry. In the summer of 1916 he led the mission to London that settled the charter of the seized ships and the loans Portugal needed to fight.3 sources3 sources

Costa's Democrats wanted troops in France, not only in Africa, because only full commitment to the Allies would secure grain and raw materials and a voice at the peace conference. His biographer, Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses, argues that the policy failed at home. Outside Lisbon and Porto the enthusiasm of Costa's followers did not catch on, indifference soon turned to hostility, and the government made little effort to win people over.3 sources3 sources

His third government took office on 25 April 1917, as wartime prices soared. From 19 to 21 May, strikes and the looting of grocers in and around Lisbon, remembered as the potato revolt, were put down with dozens killed or badly wounded, and more than twenty people died in unrest in Porto. Further clashes in July brought a state of siege in the capital.1 source1 source

When postal and telegraph workers struck for higher pay in September, the government called them up into the army, and hundreds were held on prison ships in the Tagus. From then on, Meneses writes, Lisbon, once the bastion of the republican cause, was hostile to Costa's government.1 source1 source

The Museu da Presidência sums up where that left him: the unions opposed the war and the repression, employers feared disorder, and Catholics, re-energised by the apparitions at Fátima that year, feared Bolshevism. Even inside his own party he was accused of authoritarianism.1 source1 source

On 19 November 1917 Costa left for an Allied conference in Paris. He came back on 6 December to find Sidónio Pais's revolt under way in Lisbon. When the fighting ended on 8 December, with about 100 dead by Rui Ramos's count, his government had fallen. Crowds sacked the houses of his ministers, his own among them, and he was arrested.3 sources3 sources

In his autobiography, Seia's council says, he dated his imprisonment in the Forte da Graça, a fortress at Elvas near the Spanish border, to 25 March 1918. Our article on Sidónio's assassination tells the story of that year.2 sources2 sources

After his release Costa went to Paris, which became his base. Sidónio was shot dead in Lisbon in December 1918. On 16 March 1919 Costa replaced Egas Moniz at the head of Portugal's delegation to the peace conference, and on 28 June he and the former foreign minister Augusto Soares signed the Treaty of Versailles for Portugal. In 1920 he represented Portugal at the new League of Nations, and Pais de Sousa counts him among its founders.5 sources5 sources

He never returned to the premiership. In early 1922 his old rival Almeida, now president, invited him to lead a “government of national salvation”, and Costa, in Paris, declined. Almeida's successor, Manuel Teixeira Gomes, had become Costa's friend in London in 1916, and took office in 1923 meaning to build a national government around him. He asked him again and again.3 sources3 sources

He was still a figure at Geneva. When the League of Nations met in a special session in Geneva in March 1926 to admit Germany, Time reported that the “onetime Premier of Portugal” took the presidential chair to open it. The session broke up without admitting Germany, which joined that September.3 sources3 sources

Two months later the army overthrew the Republic. The coup of 28 May 1926 removed a Democratic government led by António Maria da Silva, and among the generals who took over, the most conservative faction soon won. A revolt against the dictatorship in Porto and Lisbon in February 1927 was crushed, and many of its leaders fled.3 sources3 sources

In Paris the exiles formed the League for the Defence of the Republic, known as the Paris League. Its leaders included Costa, António Sérgio, José Domingues dos Santos, Álvaro de Castro and Jaime Cortesão. Its founding manifesto, Ao País (To the Country), written by Sérgio and published in July 1927, called for reform of parliamentary institutions, the economy and education.2 sources2 sources

The League also campaigned against a large loan the dictatorship sought through the League of Nations. Costa signed its protest to the League's Council in late 1927, and in 1928 Lisbon turned down the loan because of the conditions attached.2 sources2 sources

Bernardino Machado, the president the coup had deposed, worked with Costa from exile to unite the opposition inside and outside the country. Meanwhile, in April 1928, a Coimbra professor, António de Oliveira Salazar, became finance minister on conditions that made him responsible for the conduct of every other ministry. His first aim was a balanced budget, the achievement Costa had claimed in 1913.2 sources2 sources

How much Costa himself did in these years is still debated. Reviewing Meneses's study of Costa's war years, the historian David Castaño notes that the book sets out to explain, among other puzzles, “his silence during exile”.1 source1 source

He died in Paris on 11 May 1937. The Diário de Lisboa wrote that he had never tired of working and studying, and that since settling in Paris his interests had widened from politics to philosophy, art and literature. Death, it said, had struck him down unexpectedly.1 source1 source

Even the censored tribute admitted the anger he had drawn. Crowds had cheered him in the first years of the Republic, it wrote; then came disillusion, and his fellow republicans, split into parties, turned on him “all the gall of their curses”. It ended by predicting that history, judging calmly, would rank him among the illustrious men of the age.1 source1 source

Historians still divide. Menezes Cordeiro sees calculation in the most provocative clauses of the separation law: by picking a fight with a weakened Church, he argues, Costa isolated his republican rivals and kept his Democrats almost unbeatable. Jorge Pais de Sousa stresses instead the grasp of public finance that produced the surpluses and, in his reading, sent Costa to the peace conference.2 sources2 sources

The harshest verdicts concern how he held power. Writing in Observador in 2017, the historian Rui Ramos called Costa's rule a violent autocracy: parliaments came out of rigged elections, the press was censored before publication, and opponents risked prison or exile. In his account Costa answered the wartime protests with killings and arrests, and the party used bands of armed volunteers to intimidate its critics.1 source1 source

His name kept a charge under the dictatorship. In January 1973 the new weekly Expresso, launched while censorship still applied, told readers on page 2 that it lived in a house once lived in by Afonso Costa, who had been thrown out of it by force.1 source1 source

In 2025 his home town gave him a museum. On 25 March, the anniversary of his imprisonment at Elvas, Seia opened the Centro de Interpretação da República Afonso Costa in a former primary school he had had built. His eldest living granddaughter, then 92, told the Lusa news agency that it was the first time she had heard her grandfather praised.1 source1 source