The bloodless end of the Salazar regime, fifty years on
"IN ALL REAL REVOLUTIONS one must go slowly and warily.” Thus António de Oliveira Salazar to António Ferro, his propaganda chief, in an interview in the 1930s. The fascist dictator was speaking proudly of the Estado Novo, or New State, his nationalist project to remake Portugal, begun in 1933. Four years after his death in 1970, a further real revolution – cautious in the planning but decisive in delivery – ended his own.
At about 11pm on April 24, 1974, shortly after the Portuguese entry for the Eurovision Song Contest had aired on national radio, a group of junior soldiers launched a coup that toppled the New State. It was relatively bloodless; just four people died, when the secret police opened fire on a crowd outside its Lisbon headquarters. The non-violence associated with “flower power” came to define the revolt: soldiers took red carnation stems from street sellers and placed them in the barrels of their guns as they marched through the capital.
Led until 1968 by the seminary-trained Salazar, the New State had preached “God, Fatherland and Family”, punished its opponents with jail, exile or death, and enforced censorship. Regime insiders expected a coup after student protests swelled and dissent increased. But even they were surprised by the swift actions of the self-declared Captains of April. (As José Augusto Matos and Zelia Oliveira observe in Carnation Revolution, a two-part study, the deputy head of the secret police was abroad and heard the news not from his officials, but from the director of France’s foreign intelligence agency.) This band of brothers had a number of motives. Inflation was high and Portugal had been hit hard by the 1973 oil crisis. Yet chief among the drivers of revolution, argue four new books about its causes and aftermath, was the country’s long and costly participation in conflicts in Africa. Even as its European neighbours were feeling “the wind of change” identified by Harold Macmillan in 1960, Portugal was determined to retain its colonies.
In April 1974, under the banner of “Democracy, Decolonisation and Development”, the soldiers seized key infrastructure and radio and television stations, driving out Marcelo Caetano, Salazar’s successor as president, in the country’s third
