The First Republic, 1910–26

The new regime formed a provisional government under the presidency of Teófilo Braga, a well-known writer. A new electoral law was issued giving the vote only to a restricted number of adult males. The provisional government presided over the election of a constituent assembly, which opened on June 19, 1911. The constitution was passed by the assembly on August 20, and the provisional government surrendered its authority a few days later (August 24) to the new president, Manuel José de Arriaga. Despite initial hopes that the republic would solve the massive problems inherited from the monarchy, Portugal soon became western Europe’s most turbulent, unstable parliamentary regime.

Although a monarchist invasion led by Henrique de Paiva Couceiro in October 1911 was unsuccessful, the main danger to the new regime came from its internal divisions. For the moment, it was fairly united in support of abolishing the monarchy and disestablishing the Roman Catholic Church. The religious orders were expelled (October 8, 1910) and their property confiscated. New legislation banned the teaching of religion in schools and universities and annulled many religious holidays. Persecution of Catholics in the early years of the republic attracted international attention and brought the new political system into conflict with foreign diplomats, humanitarian organizations, and journalists. Indeed, though the government initiated advances in education, health, civic freedoms, and colonial development, positive results were overwhelmed by administrative instability, labour unrest, public violence, and military intervention in politics.

By 1912 the republicans were divided into Evolutionists (moderates), led by António José de Almeida; Unionists (centre party), led by Manuel de Brito Camacho; and Democrats (the leftist core of the original party), led by Afonso Costa. A number of prominent republicans had no specific party. The whirligig of republican political life offered little improvement on the monarchist regime, and in 1915 the army showed signs of restlessness. General Pimenta de Castro formed a military government and permitted the monarchists to reorganize, but a Democratic coup in May led to his arrest and consignment to the Azores, along with Machado Santos. Dominated by Costa’s oratory, partisan press, and political machine, the Democrats’ regime was in turn overthrown by another bloody military coup (December 1917), led by the former minister to Germany, Major Sidónio Pais.

The authoritarian, unstable “New Republic” of charismatic President Pais failed to pacify the feuding factions, and its collapse precipitated a brief civil war. Following Pais’s assassination in Lisbon (December 14, 1918), republicans and monarchists fought a civil war (January 1919) in which the final armed effort to restore the monarchy failed, and political power was restored to the chastened Democrats. Four key tensions characterized the republic’s troubled political system: (1) excessive factionalism, (2) the tendency of the factions to bear allegiance to personalities rather than to ideas, institutions, and the public interest, (3) disparity between the landholding patterns of the north (typified by minifundias—small subsistence farms) and the south (typified by latifundias—large estates worked by landless peasants), and (4) the concentration of economic development in Lisbon, at the expense of the provinces.

Though officially neutral, Portugal at the outbreak of World War I had proclaimed its adhesion to the English alliance (August 7, 1914) and on November 23 committed itself to military operations against Germany. On September 11 the first expedition left to reinforce the African colonies, and there was fighting in northern Mozambique, on the Tanganyika (now Tanzania) frontier, and in southern Angola, on the frontier of German South West Africa. In February 1916, in compliance with a request from Britain, Portugal seized German ships lying in Portuguese ports, and on March 9 Germany declared war on Portugal. A Portuguese expeditionary force under General Fernando Tamagnini de Abreu went to Flanders in 1917, and on April 9, 1918, the Germans mounted a major attack in the Battle of the Lys. Although the Allies won the war and Portugal’s colonies were safeguarded, the 0.75 percent of the war indemnity paid by Germany to Portugal was scant compensation for the heavy costs incurred both in the field and at home, including the casualties of the African campaigns and the Western Front, the alienation of a portion of the army officer corps, crippling war debts to Britain, intense inflation, and a scarcity of food and fuel.

Former Evolutionist Almeida became the only president to complete his term during the First Republic, but the cycles of bankruptcy, corruption, public violence, and military insurrectionism continued. Finally, on May 28, 1926, the parliamentary republic was overthrown in a bloodless military coup that instituted what was to become western Europe’s most long-lived authoritarian system.