The Portuguese Carnation Revolution. Historical Essay

On 25 April 1974, a group of Portuguese soldiers overthrew one of the last Western European dictatorships of the 20th century, and presented a political programme to the country based on three pillars: Democratise, Decolonise and Develop. What came to be known as the Carnation Revolution started the ‘third wave of democratisation’ (Samuel P. Huntington), which then reached Spain, Greece and dozens of other countries in Latin America, Asia and the Pacific, Africa and Eastern Europe.

A year earlier, in April 1973, an essay that José Medeiros Ferreira had sent from exile in Switzerland had been presented to the 3rd Congress of the Democratic Opposition in Aveiro. In this essay, which was received with suspicion by various sectors of the Opposition, but which turned out to be prescient, the author stressed the need for the Armed Forces to be involved, firstly to put an end to the dictatorship and the war in the African colonies, and then to support the implementation of a national action plan that would lead to decolonisation, democratisation and development.

From the pen of Medeiros Ferreira—who, having returned from exile shortly after the Revolution, played an important role in opening up Portugal’s young democracy to Europe and the world, later establishing himself as one of the most brilliant contemporary history academics of his generation—his historical essay on the Carnation Revolution would be published in 1983, and is now being offered to English readers.

In this first pioneering and daring attempt to record a history of the Portuguese Revolution, recognising the risks of the proximity of the text to the object of study, as well as the proximity of the narrator to the historical action in which he was involved, the author made a redoubled effort of methodological rigour, through the selection, analysis and interpretation of the available sources, bequeathing a work that remains fundamental and intellectually challenging.