Portuguese Republic

Overview

The Portuguese Republic (First Portuguese Republic, 1910–1926) was the parliamentary regime that replaced nearly eight centuries of monarchy between the 5 October 1910 revolution, which overthrew King Manuel II, and the military coup of 28 May 1926 that opened the way to Salazar's Estado Novo. For this survey its significance is imperial: the Republic inherited and ruled Portugal's vast African empire—Angola, Mozambique, Portuguese Guinea, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe—totaling over 2 million km², and defended it through World War I.

History

The Republic began in fractious optimism. A 1911 constitution created a weak presidency and a bicameral Congress; Afonso Costa's Democratic Party dominated a political scene marked by eight presidents and 45 ministries in 16 years. Its most radical domestic legacy was militant anticlericalism: religious orders were expelled and property confiscated in October 1910, divorce was legalized, and the 1911 Law of Separation of Church and State drew Pope Pius X's encyclical Iamdudum. Monarchist revolts (Chaves 1912; the "Monarchy of the North," 1919) were crushed.

The empire shaped the Republic's fate. Fearing German designs on Angola and Mozambique, the Democrats led Portugal into World War I in 1916; German colonial troops invaded Mozambique (the Ngomano campaign), while Portuguese forces occupied the Kionga Triangle of German East Africa—confirmed as Portuguese by Versailles—and a 12,000-man expeditionary corps was shredded at the Lys in France (1918). War costs, inflation, and unpaid soldiers deepened instability; Sidónio Pais's charismatic "President-King" dictatorship (1917–18) prefigured later authoritarianism. In Africa, the Republic kept the colonies under the authoritarian indigenato labor regime, conceding little reform; colonial revenues and territory were a point of national pride that no party dared surrender.

Decline and legacy

Chronic instability, corruption scandals, and military discontent culminated in the 28 May 1926 coup, which met almost no resistance and installed the Ditadura Nacional. Historians judge the First Republic a failure of "raised hopes and meager deeds," yet its legacy endured: civil-law reform, mass education initiatives, church-state separation, the national flag and anthem, and the overseas empire itself, which survived until 1975. In Africa, the republican interlude changed little for colonized peoples, but it preserved intact the empire whose late and bloody decolonization (1961–1975) would define modern Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau.