100 years of Portugal’s National Revolution

Can nations rise, phoenix-like, from the dead? On May 28th, 1926, with the country facing calamity, the Portuguese Army decided to act. “Crushed under the weight of an immoral and tyrannical minority, the nation feels it is dying. For my part, I openly revolt. To arms, Portugal, for liberty and the honour of the nation!” It was with these words that General Gomes da Costa, a hero of the First World War, launched the coup. For Portugal, the consequences would be immense. Unbeknownst to its leaders, the events of May 1926 would lead to the end of Portugal’s chaotic First Republic and to the rise of a discrete, unassuming professor of political economy from Coimbra, António de Oliveira Salazar. The coup would mature into a revolution—and the revolution became a regime that would last almost fifty years.

The 1926 revolt should be understood in its national as well as international context. In the turmoil that followed the end of the Great War, a wave of insurrections had toppled liberal regime after liberal regime. The first of those had been Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, in 1917. The unspeakable horrors committed by Bolshevism radicalised and mobilised the European Right, wary that communism could spread and do in their own countries what it had in the former Romanov empire. In 1920, in Hungary, Admiral Horthy had re-established stability following the profound trauma caused by the Marxist despotism of Béla Kun. Soon after, in 1922, Mussolini’s Blackshirts had marched triumphantly on Rome. In 1923, General Miguel Primo de Rivera established a conservative authoritarian government in Spain. In 1925, General Pangalos followed in Greece. 

But this wind of right-wing radicalisation wouldn’t have reached Portuguese shores if it wasn’t for the profound, existential crisis the country was facing. Just one hundred years before, Portugal was still a great power. With Brazil as its new emerging centre, its empire spread from the Amazon rainforest to Africa, Goa, and Macau. Despite suffering deeply from three invasions launched by Napoleon, the country still had the resources for geopolitically daring moves, such as Queen Carlota Joaquina de Bourbon’s project of annexing much of Spain’s American possessions into the Portuguese crown.

By the mid-18th century, Portugal’s per capita GDP is estimated to have been on the same level as the wealthiest regions in Europe, such as Britain, northern Italy, or the Netherlands — and well ahead of others like Spain, France, Germany, or Sweden. The spectacular sequence of national disasters that then unfolded led to a period of steep national decay. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the wars with revolutionary France, the separation of Brazil in 1822, and the catastrophic mismanagement of the country by the new, post-1834 liberal-parliamentarian régime would botch both industrialisation and modernisation.

By 1820, despite the terrible devastations of the Napoleonic Wars, in which it had lost as much as 10% of its European population, Portugal’s per capita GDP was still at around 80% of the Western European average. By 1926, it had fallen to a shocking 30%, on par with pre-industrialisation USSR. Such figures are shocking and offer, perhaps, one of the most egregious examples of governance failure in the modern era.

Although Portugal’s monarchical (1834-1910) and republican (1910-1926) experiences with liberalism are lionised to this day by establishment historiography, its results were indeed appalling. By 1926, 63% of Portuguese couldn’t read or write, worse even than the Russian Empire—generally seen as Europe’s most backwards state—in 1914. Only 4% of households had electricity (compared to 50% in Sweden or 30% in France by the same period); only 7% had running water (compared to 60% in Sweden and 40% in France). The country was broadly seen as a British protectorate with no agency of its own, with the great powers freely haggling about how to best carve up its empire among themselves. The government was bankrupt; it covered its deficits by printing money, thus leading to mass inflation. 

During the Republic, political chaos became the norm: while the regime only lasted 16 years, it saw 45 different governments, 40 prime ministers, eight presidents, and seven parliaments. In 1918, left-wing assassins killed conservative strongman Sidónio Pais. In 1921, in what would become known as the “Bloody Night”, Republican radicals drove around Lisbon in a truck, stabbing moderates and conservatives with bayonets. One of them was the then-prime minister, António Granjo.

In hindsight, it defies comprehension that it could have taken so long for the country to get its act together. The 1926 revolution united virtually the whole of society against the ruling Jacobins of the Democratic Party, from conservative republicans to monarchists, philo-fascist integralists and Catholics. Incredibly, even some far-left factions joined in, as was the case of some anarchist groups. Ultimately, the whole country understood that Portugal, as a polity, was nearing the end of the road. But it took a near-death experience for society to finally react.

After the revolution’s success, the army’s first instinct was to govern on its own. While the ensuing military dictatorship would only prove the political ineptitude of the Armed Forces, the movement’s leaders nevertheless deserve respect for wasting no time to recognise this. After purging both its more pro-establishment and its more radical, pro-fascist factions, the generals settled on a compromise solution: there would neither be a return to a ‘cleansed’ parliamentary republic, as desired by Admiral Mendes Cabeçadas, nor a fascist revolution, as desired by those close to the movement’s original leader, Manuel Gomes da Costa. Instead, another general, Óscar Carmona, would use the window of opportunity opened by the May Revolution to establish a nationalist, conservative, and developmentalist dictatorship. His man for the job was Salazar.

Salazar would lead Portugal for almost forty years. His government would be decidedly authoritarian. He was a committed opponent of multiparty democracy, which he—understandably, perhaps, given recent experience—regarded as incompatible with the national interest. Under his regime, the press was tightly censored. There were no free political parties or elections. There were political arrests under his watch—though not anywhere near as numerous as in Starmer’s Britain, where an estimated 12,000 a year are now arrested for the things they say online. When Salazar’s heir, Marcelo Caetano, was deposed in 1974, the revolutionaries could only find 128 prisoners of conscience to liberate.

While those realities cannot be denied, it can similarly not be disputed that Portugal’s disastrous predicament allowed for little else. Salazar’s goal was to stabilise the country, pacify the streets, normalise its finances, rebuild the state and launch the groundwork needed for modernisation. 

He was stunningly successful in each of these tasks: by 1974, when his Estado Novo regime was deposed, Portugal’s GDP per capita had risen to about 60% of the Western European average, the highest levels seen since the early 19th century. Child illiteracy had fallen to almost 0%, and overall illiteracy stood at just 20%. Life expectancy had doubled from 36 (by 1926) to 69. 71% of Portuguese households were electrified. Portugal had virtually no government debt. Its gold reserves amounted to almost 900 tons and were among the world’s largest. By the 1960s and ‘70s, the economy was enjoying a golden age: at a 6% annual growth rate, it was Europe’s best performer. This was despite the fact that Lisbon was simultaneously funding and managing a counter-guerrilla war in three separate theatres in Africa: Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea. The conflict took an enormous toll on Portugal’s limited resources, with the country mobilising over a million soldiers over 13 years to resist rebels supported by the USSR, China, and the United States.

Naturally, Portugal remained poor by the standards of the developed world—but the objective truth is that, under Salazar, it rapidly converged with the rest of Western Europe and erased much of the pre-existing gap. The post-May regime reversed the calamitous decay of the century that preceded it. These are indisputable facts that no serious person would try to obfuscate or deny. 

But what May 1926 does tell us is that decay and collapse are not inevitable. One hundred years ago, a crumbling nation decided it wanted to live. It took hold of its destiny, restored trust in politics, and called on those of different branches of the right and even on men of good will of the patriotic left to join hands in a grand project of national salvation. And it worked. By looking beyond petty rivalries and embracing good faith collaboration for the common good, so can patriots today help bring their countries back from the abyss.