Day of the Implantation of the Republic | "From the monarchy to the republic" by José Miguel Sardica
On the 5th of October 1910, Portugal witnessed the most symbolic change of political regime in its long history, ceasing to be a monarchy, as it had been since its foundation in the 12th century, and becoming a republic, a form of regime which, in the European context of the time, only existed in France and Switzerland. The country was therefore original in two ways: it operated the only major transition in political regime in western Europe until the Great War and it pioneered the wave of republicanisation of the continent that would mark the post-War.
Endowed with the force of a salvific promise for the national decadent crisis, the republican propaganda before 1910 and the discourse - which much historiography would enshrine - of the regime after 1910 coined the image of the 19th century constitutional monarchy, deposed that day, as a outdated, reactionary and oppressive status quo. It is necessary to demystify this legend. The crisis of the final monarchy, of D. Carlos and D. Manuel II, was the Portuguese version of a wider European phenomenon, which touched several countries to varying degrees: that of the unsuitability of oligarchic and notable liberalism for the age of the masses, of the second industrialisation, of the urbanisation and of the democracy. The multiple problems resulting from social transformation, financial hardship, governmental instability and institutional erosion exposed the throne to a compromising usury, in the case of D. Carlos because he wanted to intervene, as the modern monarch that he was, with a corrective action on the system, in the case of D. Manuel II because he refused to intervene (affraid of ending up like his father, assassinated in 1908), adopting a lukewarm "calm down", which was in fact a monarchic resignation, opening up the vacuum that the military coup in Lisbon took advantage of, and later coined the image of a massive and triumphant popular revolution.
The 1st Portuguese Republic lasted sixteen eventful years and died in 1926 at the hands of the military of Gomes da Costa, in a state of internal erosion similar to that which had liquidated the monarchy. It was born on the promise of democratising and modernising the country, which, nevertheless, remained poor, rural and illiterate. It failed, however, as a regime, both because of the distance in so many aspects carved, between the republican idea and its daily implementation, and because of the suicidal decision to have the country take part in the First World War, plunging it into a renewed crisis... from which came the Military Dictatorship and, later, Salazar and the Estado Novo. Ill-advised or betrayed, democratic or Jacobin, modernising or chaotic, the 1st Portuguese Republic will be an eternal case study, like a critical conscience from the past about the possibilities and the limits or mistakes of democracy in Portugal.
As for the 5th of October, its historical revisitation should serve to recall how what happened in 1910, similarly to what would happen later in 1926 and in 1974, reveals that regimes in our country fall by implosion, because they fall apart, in an autophagic way, in their incapacity for self-regeneration, reform and direction. Today, I do not wish for the current democracy to collapse in this way. But for that not to happen, perhaps what the famous counsellor João Franco (leader of the last government of King D. Carlos) wrote at the end of his life (and of the republic) in 1924 is still useful: "regimes succumb and disappear less by the force of the attack than by the laxity of the defence. Only those who know how to defend life have the right to it".