António de Oliveira Salazar ruled Portugal for 36 years without ever being elected by the people he governed. His regime ended not through an uprising or an invasion, but when a deck chair collapsed beneath him on a seaside patio west of Lisbon. He was 79 years old, and his head struck the hard floor. A few weeks later, surgeons removed a blood clot from his brain.
He slipped into a coma, and the country waited for him to die. He did not. Born in 1889 in the village of Vimieiro in central Portugal, Salazar was the son of an estate manager. He studied at a seminary, took minor orders, and nearly became a priest before choosing law instead.
He took a chair in political economy at the University of Coimbra and expected to remain there for life. In 1928, two years after the army had overthrown the parliamentary republic, the generals brought him in to fix the national budget. He agreed only on condition of full control over state finances. The escudo stabilized, deficits became surpluses, and by the summer of 1932 the quiet finance minister was prime minister.
He held that position without interruption for the next 36 years. The state he built was called the Estado Novo, the New State. On paper it was corporatist, with workers and employers organized into syndicates, a national assembly composed entirely of regime supporters, and a political body Salazar marketed as a non-party. There were no real elections.
Newspapers went to the censor before going to the printer. Citizens were offered three official slogans: God, fatherland, and family. Critics summed up the culture as fado, Fatima, and football. The public space in which Portuguese could disagree about anything important narrowed every year.
The force that kept that space narrow was the secret police. Founded in 1933 and renamed PIDE in 1945, it became one of the most efficient repressive forces in twentieth-century Europe. A network of informers made ordinary citizens suspicious of one another. Across the regime’s lifetime, around 30,000 people passed through its political prisons.
The system did not need to be enormously violent. It needed only to be predictable, and it was. It was seriously tested only twice. In May 1958, Air Force General Humberto Delgado ran for the presidency against Salazar’s chosen candidate.
Asked at a rally in Porto what he would do if elected, Delgado said he would dismiss Salazar. The phrase electrified the country. Official results, which nobody trusted, gave him about a quarter of the vote. He fled into exile.
In February 1965, Portuguese secret police agents lured him to a meeting near the Spanish border and killed him there, along with his Brazilian secretary. Three years earlier, in April 1961, the regime had nearly been removed from within. Defense Minister General Botelho Moniz judged that Salazar’s African policy was leading Portugal into a war it could not win and sought his removal under the constitution. The plan failed within hours, and Botelho Moniz was dismissed before lunch.
From then on, the African colonies became the regime’s untouchable principle, even as the army that would have to defend them was slowly reaching the opposite conclusion. By the summer of 1968, Salazar had outlived Delgado, the generals who had appointed him, and most of the European political class he had known in the 1930s. He had never married and had never named a successor. The constitutional question of what would happen if he died had been left unanswered, partly because he disliked the idea and partly because nobody around him dared to raise it.
On 3 August, the deck chair collapsed. By early September, doctors concluded Salazar would not return to office. The constitution gave the president the power to appoint a new prime minister. President Américo Tomás, a man Salazar had personally arranged to install ten years earlier, chose Marcelo Caetano on 27 September 1968.
Caetano was 62, a law professor who had helped draft the Estado Novo constitution in 1933 and had served the regime most of his adult life. He was more worldly and open to the changing Europe outside Portugal’s borders, but he was trusted to keep the regime running. Then Salazar woke up. He was paralyzed on his right side, his speech was impaired, and his perception of the world was badly damaged.
But he was awake, and he could still talk, read, and reason. He asked for the day’s newspapers. He asked when the next cabinet meeting would be. He asked who had been managing things.
The men around him made a choice. They could tell him the truth, that he had been replaced and that his 36 years in office had ended on a patio in Estoril. Or they could lie. They lied.
Former ministers visited and held meetings as if the cabinet still convened around him. They brought papers for him to sign, papers with no legal force. The editor of his preferred newspaper printed a single bespoke daily edition for him, removing references to the Caetano government and substituting older stories. Visitors were briefed on what to say.
Some accounts say he was never told that Americans had walked on the moon in July 1969. The fiction held for nearly two years. Salazar lived inside it until 27 July 1970, when he died at the age of 81. Whether he ever truly understood what had happened is a question historians still argue about.
Some aides claimed he quietly grasped the situation and played along. Others argued the deception was real and largely successful. The regime had been doing a version of this to Portugal for forty years. The single fake newspaper printed for Salazar was a small-scale version of what the censor’s office had been doing to every other newspaper in the country since 1933.
The Portuguese had been living inside a curated edition of their own country for so long that printing one for the dictator himself was simply the regime turning its own techniques inward. Outside the bedroom, the country was no longer pretending so successfully. The colonial wars that began in 1961 were in their eighth year. Conscripts continued to leave Lisbon for Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau.
Caetano had inherited the wars without inheriting the authority his predecessor had commanded. The fiction of Salazar’s continuing rule lasted until July 1970. The fiction of the Estado Novo’s continuing legitimacy lasted four more years. For about a year, it almost looked as if things might change.
Caetano’s slogan was “Evolution within Continuity. ” The press called the period the Marcelist Spring. He introduced a monthly pension for rural workers who had never paid into the social security system. He renamed the secret police, which became the DGS and continued its work with a new letterhead.
He authorized Portugal’s first independent labor union since the 1920s. The press laws were rewritten in 1972, but prior censorship was retained. The trouble was that the order the regime promised was now expensive. The wars in Africa had begun in March 1961 in northern Angola, spread to Guinea-Bissau in 1963, and Mozambique in 1964.
Salazar had declared Portugal would go to Angola quickly and with force. “Quickly” turned out not to apply. Thirteen years later, the wars were still being fought across three theaters. Portugal, a country of about nine million people, was sustaining one of the largest armies in NATO to fight them.
Military forces grew from 79,000 men in 1961 to 217,000 by 1974. About 40% of the national budget went to the military. Conscripts served three-year terms, most of it in Africa. By 1974, Portuguese figures counted 8,831 dead and 15,507 wounded.
African losses across the three theaters ran higher, by some estimates much higher, and were never officially counted. Tens of thousands of Portuguese refused the draft and emigrated illegally, mainly to France and the United States. The composition of the army changed as the wars went on. In 1961, about 18% of Portuguese forces fighting in Africa were African.
By 1974, that figure was over half. The regime that called Angola and Mozambique overseas provinces was defending them with armies that were majority African. In December 1972, a Portuguese commando unit swept across five villages along the Zambezi River in Mozambique’s Tete province. The largest was Wiriyamu.
Estimates of the dead vary, from around 150 by the Red Cross to around 400 in the original report. All of them were civilians. The story would not have traveled without three priests: two Spanish priests who gathered survivor testimony and a local Mozambican priest, Padre Domingo Farao, who compiled the list of the dead. The account reached a British missionary named Adrian Hastings, who published it in The Times of London on 10 July 1973 under the headline “Portuguese massacre reported by priests.
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The article appeared a week before Caetano was due in London for a state visit. He went anyway and denied the massacre at a press conference. The fiction the regime had perfected did not hold this time. Then the economy started to break.
From 1970 onward, Portugal ran double-digit inflation. In October 1973, after the Yom Kippur War, the price of oil quadrupled. The argument that the wars could pay for themselves out of Angolan oil revenue ended. The men noticing all of this clearly were the ones doing the fighting.
Junior officers, mostly captains, spent their twenties moving between Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, watching colleagues die and promises about a winnable war turn into longer rotations. They began to talk among themselves and formed a movement they did not yet have a name for. In February 1974, General António de Spínola, who had commanded forces in Guinea-Bissau, published a book arguing the colonial wars could not be won militarily and required a political settlement. It became a best-seller within days.
Caetano read it and removed Spínola from command. The captains were already meeting in private. They had failed once in March 1974 when a unit at Caldas da Rainha rose against the regime and was contained within hours. Caetano took that as proof the army was loyal.
The captains took it as a reason to plan more carefully. They had six weeks. At 22:55 on 24 April 1974, a disc jockey in Lisbon played a song called “E Depois do Adeus,” Portugal’s Eurovision entry from two weeks earlier. That it played at that minute was the signal.
Just over an hour later, a Catholic radio station broadcast Zeca Afonso’s “Grândola Vila Morena,” confirming the first signal. Across Portugal, units of the Movimento das Forças Armadas began moving. It was not a generals’ movement. It was a captains’ movement of junior officers in their twenties and thirties who had reached the same private conclusion after multiple tours in Africa.
Its strategists included Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, Vasco Lourenço, and Vítor Alves. Captain Salgueiro Maia, 29, led a column of armored vehicles from Santarém toward Lisbon. By dawn, his column reached the Terreiro do Paço, the great square on the Tagus where the government ministries stood. A brigadier arrived with loyalist forces and ordered them to fire.
They did not. One corporal, ordered point-blank to fire from his tank, locked himself inside the vehicle. Maia later called it the most beautiful insubordination of that day. Caetano had slipped out of his official residence and taken refuge in a barracks of the National Republican Guard at the Largo do Carmo.
Maia’s column surrounded the building. What happened next was not planned. The captains had broadcast appeals asking civilians to stay indoors. The civilians ignored them.
They came into the streets in their thousands, then their tens of thousands. The Lisbon flower market was full of carnations that morning, and the delivery had just arrived. People handed them to the soldiers, and some soldiers put them into the muzzles of their rifles. The image gave the day its name.
Inside the barracks, Caetano was negotiating his surrender. He told the officers around him he could not hand over power to a captain. It had to be a general. The captains sent for Spínola, the general Caetano had removed from command two months earlier.
By evening, Caetano had handed over power. Four people were shot dead in Lisbon that day, civilians demonstrating outside the headquarters of the secret police when officers inside opened fire. They were the only fatalities of 25 April 1974. The longest-running authoritarian regime in twentieth-century Europe ended in a square full of flowers and four deaths the regime itself had caused.
Caetano was flown to Madeira and then into exile in Brazil, where he died in 1980 after writing books defending the regime he had inherited and lost. The new government opened negotiations with the African independence movements within weeks. By the end of 1974, Portuguese forces had withdrawn from Guinea-Bissau. By the end of 1975, Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe were independent states.
East Timor declared its own independence, only to be invaded by Indonesia within days. The end of the wars produced its own catastrophe. Between 500,000 and one million Portuguese citizens left Africa for a country most of them had never lived in. They were called the retornados, the returnees.
Most arrived with what they could carry. For the Africans who had fought on the Portuguese side, there was no equivalent welcome. The Portugal that emerged from the next two years of revolutionary turbulence was a parliamentary democracy. It joined what would become the European Union in 1986 and still observes 25 April as Freedom Day.
The Aljube prison, where the secret police once interrogated suspects, became a museum about the dictatorship, but not until 2015. Political scientist Samuel Huntington later argued that the world’s third great wave of democratization began in Lisbon on 25 April 1974. Within 18 months, the colonels in Greece had fallen, and Franco’s regime in Spain had ended with his death. Within 15 years, the same wave reached Latin America and then Eastern Europe.
None of those transitions were quite like Portugal’s, where the army sent to fight a colonial war ended both the war and the dictatorship that had ordered it, and the population came out to give them flowers. Six years earlier, in a bedroom in the São Bento Palace, an old man had been reading a single newspaper printed for him alone. Whatever he believed about the country he thought he was still governing, the country itself had stopped believing it long before he did.