Pimenta de Castro becomes prime minister of Portugal

On 25 January 1915 the President of Portugal, Manuel de Arriaga, entrusted the leadership of the government to General Joaquim Pimenta de Castro. He replaced Vítor Hugo de Azevedo Coutinho, whose cabinet of Democrats had lasted only six weeks. Sources give different dates for the general’s assumption of power. Arriaga approached him by letter as early as 23 January, the appointment was made on 25 January, and the other ministers took up their portfolios only on 28 January. Until then Pimenta de Castro ran all the ministries himself.

The Movement of the Swords

The Azevedo Coutinho government fell as a result of a protest by the military. Many officers accused the Democratic Party of Afonso Costa of bringing party politics into the army and, moreover, of seeking to drag Portugal into the war in Europe. The spark was the transfer of Major João Carlos Craveiro Lopes from one regiment to another, which the army regarded as an act of political revenge. On 22 January a group of officers of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, led by Captain Martins de Lima, set off for the Belém Palace to hand their swords to the President in protest. They were arrested and confined on the frigate Dom Fernando II e Glória. That same afternoon Commander Machado Santos, one of the heroes of the 1910 revolution that had overthrown the monarchy, laid down his sword at the palace. From this gesture the events were called the Movement of the Swords (Movimento das Espadas).

The protest was supported by moderate republicans, monarchists and part of the Church. President Arriaga, who had long been looking for a counterweight to the Democrats, took it as a sign that the government had lost the confidence of the army. On 25 January the Azevedo Coutinho cabinet resigned.

A general outside the parties

Pimenta de Castro was then 68. He was born in 1846 in Monção in the north of the country, studied mathematics at the University of Coimbra and spent his whole life in the army. Under the monarchy he commanded the military district in Porto and was aide-de-camp to King Manuel II. After the 1910 revolution he was minister of war in the republican government for less than two months in 1911. He belonged to no party, and for precisely that reason Arriaga considered him a suitable candidate to head a government that was to calm the country and hold fair elections.

The general kept the war ministry for himself. His cabinet, made up of non-party experts, was supported by the Evolutionists of António José de Almeida and the Unionists of Brito Camacho, as well as by the conservative part of the army. The Democrats, who had a majority in parliament, regarded the appointment as an attack on the constitution.

The first dictatorship of the republic

The new government soon earned the name of a dictatorship. Congress did not sit, and Pimenta de Castro ruled by decree. When on 4 March the Democratic deputies tried to meet in parliament, the police would not let them into the building. They met elsewhere and declared that the government was acting unconstitutionally. In February the government issued a new electoral law, and in April it proclaimed a broad amnesty from which monarchists also benefited, among them Henrique de Paiva Couceiro, leader of the armed incursions against the republic in 1911–1912. This alienated the republicans from the general still further.

His opponents also accused him of disregarding the alliance obligations to Britain and of sympathising with Germany. The general was opposed to Portugal’s participation in the war in Europe, which the Democrats were seeking. He halted the preparation of the so-called auxiliary division, which was to fight alongside the Allies in France. He did not, however, neglect the defence of the colonies. His government sent further reinforcements to Angola, attacked by the Germans since the autumn, and command of the forces there was taken over by General António Júlio da Costa Pereira de Eça. Some modern historians, indeed, judge the general’s government more mildly than his opponents did, seeing it above all as a failed attempt to bring conservative order to an unstable republic.

The dictatorship lasted less than four months. On 14 May 1915 a military and naval uprising, prepared by the Democrats, broke out in Lisbon. The fighting, in which more than a hundred people were killed, brought down the government, and Pimenta de Castro was arrested and exiled to the Azores. A dozen or so days later President Arriaga resigned. The Democrats regained power, and less than a year later Portugal was at war with Germany.