On October 5, 1910, the Portuguese Republic was proclaimed from the balcony of the Lisbon city hall, two days after the rising began, and King Manuel II, who was 20, boarded a yacht at Ericeira and sailed for Gibraltar and then England. The navy had bombarded the palace and then mutinied against the crown. About 100 died.
The monarchy had been losing ground for thirty years. Portugal had been humiliated by the British ultimatum of 1890, which forced it out of the territory it claimed between Angola and Mozambique, and the king and the governments that followed were blamed for it. The rotativist system, in which the two main parties took turns in office with the results arranged beforehand, meant that by 1910 the king was governing by decree through a dictatorial ministry.
The assassination of 1908 was the turning point. Carlos I and his heir Luis Filipe were shot in their carriage in the Terreiro do Paco on February 1 by two republican gunmen, and Manuel, the younger son, took the throne. The Carbonaria, the republican secret society built on the Italian model, had been organising in the army since the 1890s, and the tariff and colonial scandals of the last years gave it the officers it needed.
The First Republic lasted 16 years and had 45 governments, eight presidents and a coup roughly once a year. It disestablished the church. The religious orders were expelled in 1910 and their property confiscated, which broke relations with Rome until 1918. Portugal entered the First World War in 1916 and sent about 55,000 men to Flanders, where the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps was destroyed at La Lys in April 1918.
The regime never stabilised. The military rising of May 1926 ended it. Salazar, the finance minister who came to power in 1928, ran the Estado Novo from 1933 to 1968, and the dictatorship lasted until the Carnation Revolution of April 1974. The revolutionaries of 1910 gave the country its flag, its anthem and its republican institutions, and not the stability they had promised.