Assassination of Sidónio Pais

Late in the evening of 14 December 1918, at Rossio station in Lisbon, the President of Portugal, Sidónio Pais, was shot. At about 11 p.m. he had come onto the platform to take the night train to Porto. The man who fired at him was José Júlio da Costa, 25, a former army sergeant from the Alentejo. The wounded president died less than an hour later in Lisbon’s São José Hospital. He was 46. He was killed almost exactly a year after the coup of December 1917 that had brought him to power. The British chronology of the war records his death under the same date.

A country in crisis

In the autumn of 1918 Pais’s “New Republic” was going through a severe crisis. In the spring Pais had been elected president by popular vote and had concentrated in his own hands the powers of head of state and head of government. Yet 1918 brought high prices, food shortages, strikes and epidemics. According to the historian Rui Ramos, typhus and the Spanish flu killed more than 60,000 people in Portugal that year. After the defeat on the Lys in April the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps no longer received reinforcements. At the time of the armistice Portugal had about 30,000 soldiers in France, most of them used behind the lines as auxiliary troops. Opponents accused Pais of having abandoned them to their fate. From the summer, plots and mutinies multiplied. In mid-October, after another attempted uprising, the government declared a state of siege on 13 October and dealt harshly with the opposition. At the same time garrison officers, mostly monarchists, formed “military juntas” on the Spanish model, ready to take over command should anything happen to the president. Pais was going to Porto precisely to settle matters with the military command there.

A few days earlier, on 5 December, during the celebrations of the first anniversary of the revolution, the president had already survived one assassination attempt. According to Portuguese studies it took place during a ceremony decorating the surviving sailors of the Augusto de Castilho, an armed trawler that in October had fought a German submarine to shield the passenger ship it was escorting. Rui Ramos writes that a young student on a pilots’ course tried to shoot Pais as he was leaving the Belém Palace, but the weapon jammed. Because the would-be assassin’s father was a Freemason, a gang of Pais’s supporters ransacked in the following days the headquarters of the Grand Orient Lusitano, the most important Portuguese Masonic obedience. According to some accounts the president’s protection was then reinforced, but Rui Ramos writes that little was done to prevent another attempt.

Shots on the platform

On 14 December the president arrived at the station with his brother and his son. The platforms of Rossio station are on an upper floor, above the level of the square. Pais walked ahead of his entourage, surrounded by a cordon of police and the National Republican Guard, while a band played to welcome him. The assassin was waiting in the crowd. He had hidden his weapon under a wide shepherd’s cape from the Alentejo. He broke through the cordon and fired two shots. According to Portuguese studies the first bullet hit the president in the right arm and the second in the abdomen. Rui Ramos writes of a shot in the chest. Pais fell to the ground. In the confusion the guards began firing blindly. According to Portuguese sources four bystanders were killed.

The president was taken to São José Hospital. According to the entry in the hospital register he died there at about 11.45 p.m. In government documents the time of death was given as 11.55 p.m. Within days there was already a dispute over his last words. According to one version he said only to those holding him up: “Don’t squeeze me, boys.” According to another, far more theatrical, he took his leave with the words: “I die well! Save the fatherland!” It was the second phrase that passed into legend.

The assassin

José Júlio da Costa was born in 1893 in Garvão in the Alentejo, into a family of wealthy landowners. In 1910 he took part as a volunteer in the revolution that overthrew the monarchy. He served with the colonial troops in Timor, Mozambique and Angola, and in 1916 left the army with the rank of sergeant. According to Portuguese biographers he became radicalised in 1918, when he mediated in a dispute with striking farm workers from Vale de Santiago. The government did not recognise the agreement he had negotiated, and the strikers were severely punished, some of them deported to Africa. To the radical left Pais was a dictator, a traitor to the soldiers fighting in France and a man preparing the return of the monarchy. The assassin made no attempt to flee. The crowd beat him badly, and the police arrested him. At home he had left a folder entitled “The Death of Doctor Sidónio”.

That same night the Grand Master of the Grand Orient, Sebastião de Magalhães Lima, with whom Costa had spoken a few days earlier, was arrested. Pais’s supporters accused the Freemasons of organising the assassination. No evidence of a conspiracy was ever found. Magalhães Lima admitted only that the assassin had once visited him, but maintained that he had not known his intentions. Most historians regard Costa as a lone perpetrator, driven to the deed by the atmosphere of political hatred. He never stood trial. He died in 1946 in Lisbon’s Miguel Bombarda psychiatric hospital.

“The President-King”

Pais’s death removed the centre on which the whole system of the “New Republic” rested. That same night the secretaries of state assumed full executive power, and on 15 December they chose as their chairman the secretary of state for the navy, Admiral João do Canto e Castro. The dead man’s supporters gave him a funeral worthy of a national hero. The body lay in state, and long queues formed at the coffin. Tens of thousands of people attended the funeral. The procession was repeatedly interrupted by violent incidents. Pais was buried in the Jerónimos Monastery, beside Vasco da Gama and Camões. In 1966 his remains were moved to the National Pantheon.

Among conservative Catholics the dead man quickly became a martyr. Flowers and votive offerings are still left on his grave today. Fernando Pessoa called him the “President-King” in a poem of 1920. For the republican left he remained a dictator, and it greeted his death with relief.

Without Pais his camp quickly fell apart. The dead man’s republican associates and the monarchist military juntas began fighting for power. In January 1919 monarchists in Porto proclaimed the restoration of the monarchy, the so-called Monarchy of the North, which was defeated in less than a month. The parties of the old republic returned to power, but the Portuguese First Republic never regained its stability. It fell in the military coup of 28 May 1926.