João Chagas becomes Prime Minister of Portugal

On 15 May 1915, the day after the fall of General Pimenta de Castro’s dictatorship, President Manuel de Arriaga appointed a new government of Portugal. It was to be headed by João Chagas, who also took the Ministry of the Interior. The candidate had been named by the revolutionary Constitutional Junta, which had seized power in Lisbon. In accordance with the wishes of its leaders, the cabinet was to be a national government rather than a party one. The leaders of the republican parties, including Afonso Costa, refused, however, to join the government, and two of the ministers appointed, Basílio Teles and Alves da Veiga, declined their portfolios.

Journalist and conspirator

Chagas was 51. He was born in 1863 in Rio de Janeiro, the son of a Portuguese emigrant, and came to Portugal as a child. He could not afford to study. As a teenager he moved to Porto, where he began writing for newspapers. He was one of the best-known publicists of the republican movement. For his part in the failed republican uprising in Porto in 1891 he was sentenced to exile in Angola, from which he escaped. He was repeatedly imprisoned for articles directed against the monarchy. After the revolution of 1910 he became Portugal’s minister in Paris, and in the autumn of 1911 he headed the republic’s first constitutional government for about two months.

Chagas was a firm supporter of Portugal’s entry into the war on the side of France and Great Britain. From Paris he sharply criticised the government of Pimenta de Castro. In the spring of 1915 he returned home and published pamphlets against the dictatorship in Porto, including “Portugal perante a Guerra” (“Portugal in the Face of the War”). The young officers who prepared the uprising of 14 May regarded him as their mentor.

Shots on the train

Chagas never took office. During the night of 16–17 May he was travelling with his wife by train from Porto to Lisbon. At Barquinha station, near the railway junction of Entroncamento, Senator João José de Freitas, a politician from Trás-os-Montes linked to the moderate Evolutionist Party, entered his compartment. He fired five shots from a pistol. Three bullets grazed Chagas’s head, and one cost him an eye. The attacker was overpowered by Paulo Falcão, who was accompanying the prime minister and had been named Minister of Justice, and handed over to the National Republican Guard. When Freitas tried to break free, he was lynched by the crowd and, according to some accounts, finished off with a shot by a guardsman. The motives for the attack are unclear. The sources say only that the senator could not accept the choice of Chagas as head of government.

The seriously wounded Chagas was taken to hospital in Lisbon. As early as 17 May the government was taken over on an interim basis by the 67-year-old José de Castro, a lawyer and journalist and the father of one of the leaders of the uprising, Álvaro de Castro. Chagas was formally dismissed on 29 May, and in June José de Castro took office permanently. After his recovery Chagas withdrew from domestic politics and returned to his post in Paris, from where he continued to work for Portugal’s entry into the war.