Like France, the Portuguese First Republic Killed Its Own Children

Danton

Machado dos Santos

There is an old image in the history of revolutions that has crossed centuries and borders: a moment comes when a revolution, after destroying its opponents, begins to destroy those who made it. This happened during the French Revolution, when some of the men who had helped overthrow the monarchy eventually became victims of the same revolutionary dynamic they had unleashed, and it happened, with its own characteristics and in a very different context, in the First Portuguese Republic, when Machado Santos, Carlos da Maia and other protagonists of 5 October were murdered during the Bloody Night of 19–20 October 1921. For a historian, the comparison is not intended to suggest that the two events were identical, because they were not, but rather to understand a political dynamic that can recur when a revolution loses control of the violence it has itself legitimised.

In France, the Revolution began in 1789 with the promise of destroying a political order considered unjust and building a society founded on liberty, equality and national sovereignty. The fall of the Bastille became the symbol of a new era, the monarchy was progressively dismantled and the Republic was proclaimed in 1792. But the revolution entered a spiral of radicalisation in which the political opponent gradually ceased to be merely someone with a different opinion and came to be regarded as an enemy of the revolution itself.

It was in this atmosphere that the Terror emerged.

The guillotine, which initially sought to represent a more equal form of execution, became one of the most terrifying symbols of the French Revolution. What had begun as a revolution against a political order gradually became an internal struggle to determine who was revolutionary enough to remain alive. The Revolutionary Tribunal judged those suspected of opposing the new regime and, as revolutionary factions confronted one another, those who had been fellow revolutionaries yesterday could become the accused of today.

Danton is perhaps the most striking example of this tragedy.

Georges Jacques Danton had been one of the great figures of the French Revolution, a prominent member of the revolutionary movement and one of the key figures in the fall of the monarchy. Yet in 1794, after confronting the radicalisation of the Terror and advocating a less bloody policy, he was accused, tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal and guillotined. Camille Desmoulins, his friend and also one of the voices of the revolution, suffered exactly the same fate. The revolution they had helped build came to regard them as dangerous to the revolution itself.

History has preserved ever since this extraordinary irony: the revolution begins by killing those who oppose it and ends by killing those who support it, but who are no longer considered revolutionary enough.

More than a century later, Portugal would experience a tragedy that was not a repetition of the French Revolution, but which allows for a particularly powerful historical comparison.

On 5 October 1910, the Constitutional Monarchy fell and the Republic was proclaimed. Among the men who played a decisive role in the republican victory was António Maria de Azevedo Machado Santos, the man who would become known as the hero of the Rotunda. When the military situation in Lisbon became decisive, Machado Santos assumed command of the republican forces at the Rotunda and resisted the monarchist troops, becoming one of the most important military figures in the establishment of the Republic.

Machado Santos was therefore much more than simply a republican: he was one of the men who had made the revolution.

And that is precisely why his end is so significant.

During the early hours of 19–20 October 1921, Portugal experienced one of the darkest episodes in the history of its First Republic. The so-called Bloody Night culminated in the assassination of several political and military figures, among them António Granjo, then President of the Council of Ministers, Machado Santos and Carlos da Maia, both associated with the establishment of the Republic, as well as Freitas da Silva and Botelho de Vasconcelos. Cunha Leal was also attacked and seriously wounded. The episode became associated with the image of the so-called “ghost van”, which transported some of those condemned to their deaths.

A historian cannot look at this episode merely as a macabre succession of assassinations. He must ask what it meant politically for the Republic to murder men who had participated in its own foundation.

Machado Santos had helped overthrow the Monarchy.

Carlos da Maia had participated in the republican revolution.

António Granjo was a republican and had headed the Government.

And, eleven years after 5 October, some of these men were dead as a result of violence emerging from within the republican camp itself.

This is where the comparison with France becomes particularly powerful.

In 1794, Danton was accused of betraying the revolution he had helped to make. In 1921, Machado Santos, who had helped establish the Republic, became a victim of a Republic plunged into deep political and institutional crisis. Danton died on the guillotine; Machado Santos was assassinated. Revolutionary France had revolutionary tribunals and a political machinery of terror; Portugal experienced conspiratorial, military and political violence of a different nature. We must not erase these differences, because doing so would mean ceasing to do history and turning it into mere rhetoric.

But there is an analogy that deserves to be preserved.

When a revolution ceases to accept disagreement among its own protagonists, it begins to devour its children.

This is one of the great lessons historians encounter when comparing different revolutionary processes. Political violence has a dynamic of its own: once legitimised as an instrument for defending the revolution, it may cease to distinguish between the external enemy and the internal opponent. The moderate revolutionary becomes suspect. The former comrade becomes a traitor. The man who was a hero yesterday may tomorrow be accused of representing the threat that the revolution needs to eliminate.

That was precisely the logic that made the French Terror so devastating.

And it was a similar logic of political radicalisation, although in a completely different context, that helps us understand the tragedy of the First Portuguese Republic.

The fundamental question is therefore not to claim that Portugal experienced a second French Revolution. It did not. The point is to understand that Portuguese republican instability reproduced an old revolutionary contradiction: a regime that claimed to have come to liberate its citizens ended up tolerating levels of political violence that destroyed confidence in the very institutions it was supposed to represent.

The First Republic was not simply a disguised dictatorship. There were elections, Parliament, political parties, a free press and intense political life. But democracy is not measured only by the formal existence of its institutions. It is also measured by their ability to guarantee the rule of law, limit violence, protect opponents and allow political alternation without every conflict becoming a struggle for survival.

And it was precisely here that the First Republic revealed its weaknesses.

Between 1910 and 1926, governments and political crises followed one another, alongside military revolts, assassinations and confrontations between different republican factions, while the authority of the state was repeatedly challenged. Political violence ceased to be an exception and became part of the environment in which Portuguese public life unfolded. The Bloody Night did not create the Republic's crisis on its own, but it brutally revealed how far the system had deteriorated.

Because when a prime minister can be assassinated after leaving office, and when Machado Santos, the hero of the Rotunda, can be killed by men acting within the context of the republican crisis itself, the question is no longer simply who fired the shots.

The question is what kind of Republic could no longer protect the men who had founded it.

It is at this point that history ceases to be merely a memory of the past and becomes an explanation of the future.

Five years after the Bloody Night, on 28 May 1926, a military movement would overthrow the First Republic. It marked the beginning of a long political transformation that would lead to the Military Dictatorship and, subsequently, the Estado Novo. It would not be historically correct to say that Machado Santos died and, because of that, the dictatorship was born five years later. History rarely operates through a single cause. But it would also be a mistake to ignore the fact that the succession of crises, political violence and the inability of republican institutions to guarantee order helped create an environment in which the promise of authority and stability gained increasing strength.

The tragedy of the First Republic was, in part, this: it was born in the name of liberty, but failed to build a sufficiently strong democratic authority to protect that liberty from the violence of its own revolutionaries.

And here we return to France.

The French Revolution destroyed the monarchy, proclaimed the Republic and eventually witnessed revolutionary factions fighting among themselves. Danton went to the scaffold after having been one of the great figures of the revolution. Portugal, under incomparably different circumstances, witnessed in 1921 the assassination of Machado Santos, one of the men who had made the republican revolution of 1910 possible.

Two countries, two centuries, two different revolutions.

But one common historical warning: when a revolution begins to demand absolute purity, its own children can become its next enemies.

Machado Santos was therefore one of the most symbolic victims of the First Republic. The man who had stood at the Rotunda when the Monarchy fell ended up dead when the Republic could no longer control the violence that had taken root within it.

The revolution began by seeking its enemies.

It ended by seeking its children.

And perhaps that is why history continues to look at Danton and Machado Santos through the same question: what happens to a revolution when it no longer knows how to live with those who made it?

Paulo Freitas do Amaral

Professor, Historian and Author