The Rest Is History - 273: Portugal: The Carnation Revolution

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

In today's World Cup episode, Tom and Dominic return to the history of Portugal to discuss military coups, defence of dictatorship, Castro in Cuba, and the creation of a post-Salazar state. Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. hello welcome to the rest is history we are whistling our way through all the various contenders in this year's world cup and dominic uh portugal one of our favorite countries isn't it we've done four episodes on the history of portugal and we actually left that series on a cliffhanger we did indeed so. So, bom dia, everybody. You'll be treated once again to our splendid Portuguese. We did our four-part Portuguese history series, and we did end on a cliffhanger.

So, for those people who didn't listen, Tom. Why didn't they listen? Well, obviously, madness. Madness, yes. I won't say stop listening to this, go back and listen to it. Listen to this and then go back and listen to it. But this is a slight spoiler, isn't it? I mean, you're kind of giving away the end.

So we described in the final episode how since 1926, Portugal had been ruled by this extraordinary figure, Antonio Salazar, an incredibly conservative, you know, sort of openly, literally reactionary Catholic university professor, who was regarded as a sort of Portugal's great sort of economic mind. And he had presided over as prime minister, this regime that some people would describe as fascist or near fascist. I don't think fascism is quite the right word because it's fascism tries to stir people up salazar was trying to sort of calm things down calm things down to

the point of utter inertia indeed to actually turn the clock back um you know he was sort of still fulminating about how terrible the reformation was in the middle of the 1960s and also wasn't it that um oil gets discovered in angola and they come rushing to tell him the good news and he says how terrible. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So Salazar presided over this regime. And at the end of the 1960s, Salazar had a stroke in August 1968, which basically marks the end of his political hegemony. But Portugal was the backwater of backwaters. It was by far the poorest, the most economically, culturally backward.

I mean, I hate to use the word, but it was as though it was asleep in European terms while everybody else had kind of forged ahead. So the 60s, London's swinging, Soissons-Oastika in paris are throwing cobblestones at police all that kind of stuff exactly portugal's basically in still in the 1860s yeah now we ended that podcast by saying we would do this episode for our world cup series about what happened next about the end of the regime and the so-called Carnation Revolution of 1974, and the extraordinary political turmoil and turbulence that followed as Portugal became a modern democracy. So we should probably start by saying the man who takes over. So when Salazar was kind of knocked out at the

end of 1968, the man who succeeds him is an old lieutenant of his, yet another incredibly reactionary kind of Catholic academic, who's a guy called Marcello Caetano. And Caetano was a law professor. He'd been the rector of the University of Lisbon. I mean, it's an extraordinary thing. They have this very authoritarian regime through much of the 20th century that is basically run by university professors. And Caetano is exactly that. And he has quite an unenviable inheritance. He looks like he's a bespectacled... They all look the same. They're all kind of bespectacled men in suits. That's what he is. Not only is Portugal very economically backward, and it's obviously politically repressive, but they're also fighting these colonial wars in

Africa because Portugal, almost uniquely in Europe, has decided that it is not going to give an inch to the forces of colonial liberation, that it is going to hold on to its colonies. They say, we don't have an empire, we have a global Luciferian community. But how are they affording that? Well, this is the thing. So these wars in Africa, Tom, they're fighting particularly in Angola and Mozambique. By the time Caetano takes over at the end of the 1960s, these wars are consuming about 40% of the Portuguese budget. And the Portuguese budget is pretty small by European standards anyway. So that gives you a kind of sense that they are massively overstretching themselves

to fight these wars and wars that have become increasingly bloody. So to give you just one example, in the summer of 1973, Caetano was due to visit Britain to mark the anniversary of the Anglo-Portuguese alliance. Our oldest ally, Portugal, something we had talked about at the beginning of our Portuguese series. And to his horror and embarrassment just weeks before he comes to britain a british catholic priest tom i know you love a british catholic priest called adrian hastings he exposes a massacre that has taken place in mozambique at a place called wiriyamu where portuguese commandos have killed about 150 african villagers so it's that classic yeah you know sort of colonial peacekeeping by shooting shooting people that has just gone horribly

horribly wrong and this is terribly embarrassing for kaitan and there's a lot of um stuff in the british press which he finds you know he's very cross about it and all this as he he wants to move the regime um to a slightly more liberal. I mean, you couldn't get less liberal, but he wants to slightly liberalize it. So slight Gorbachev-esque quality. A tiny bit. He eases the press censorship. They have the first independent trade unions that they've had since the beginning of the Estado Novo, since the beginning of the regime.

There's a lot of rural workers who've been shut out of, sort of peasants basically, who've been shut out of social security. And he says, let's give them a pension. So these kinds of things. He wants to show that he's a new broom. But there are two, I mean, apart from the colonial wars, the 1970s is an age of very high inflation because of world commodity prices. So, you know, everybody's under tremendous economic pressure. Then you have the 1973 oil crisis. And basically what happens is that blows him completely off course. And the hardliners in the regime, in the army and so on, they put pressure on him to abandon a lot of these reforms.

They swing back towards- Double down. Yeah, to be reactionary. Now, there's one reform in particular that is absolutely fatal for the regime and it's kind of not what you would expect so obviously the colonial wars the army has expanded and it's very very expensive and um portugal doesn't really have many friends left because it's fighting these extremely nasty colonial campaigns so it's getting sort of advice

from rhodesia from south africa from people like that not from the cia because that's a stereotype isn't it that in the 70s yeah wherever there's a colonial war shadowy cia operatives and we we talked about that in the or maybe we haven't yet talked about it in the euroquai episode we did and in fact the cia or at least the Americans, will come into this story later on. But I don't think it's so – I mean, it's actually not the Americans who are the key players at this moment. It's actually the Rhodesians, so the breakaway white separatist regime,

white supremacist regime in Rhodesia, because they say to Caetano, it is very expensive fighting colonial wars, yes. One way you could do it is actually bring into the army and promote. You don't have to go through all this incredibly rigorous training. And you can promote people who've just been in the militia. So people who have maybe served abroad, you can give them, you can treat them as regular officers and promote them and build them up and stuff without having to go through all the expensive years of the military academy and all of that kind of thing first.

Cotone says, great, what a good plan. And he passes a law in the summer of 1973 to do this. Now, the issue with this, and it sounds like such a sort of boring bureaucratic thing, but the issue with this is that in Portugal, there are an awful lot of people who couldn't afford to go to university. And so what they would do, they would enter the military academy and that was their way up. That was their way to status and so on. So there's a whole sort of generation of young officers who, for them, being commissioned as an officer after undergoing all this training was a real badge of status it was a source of great pride for their families and they see that their positions and their careers and

their prestige threatened when the government is just sort of handing out promotions willy-nilly to all these people who've purely been in the militia so there's intense discontent within this sort of whole generation of youngish officers who think, God, I worked really hard for this. And they're just handing them out like baubles. So by the end of 1973, there's a group of junior officers who are thinking, this is rubbish. I'm really cross. The old men have sort of betrayed me and all this sort of stuff. And once you've got that going on, once army officers are kind of meeting to say this kind of thing, that's very dangerous for your regime.

In dark glasses, presumably. Well, I think some of them are wearing dark glasses. Some of the older ones are wearing dark glasses, Tom. So you get this group of what they call the captains. People call them, so they're kind of quite junior officers. And they become known as the MFA, the Armed Forces Movement. And they start to, in their middle meetings and stuff, they start to say, listen, we should get out of Angola and Mozambique.

This is a complete disaster. It's a nasty war. We're clearly not going to win. We should have a new start, you know, new regime, maybe have elections, get rid of the secret police at home, all of these kinds of things. And some of these officers have sort of left-wing ideas and left-wing connections.

The Communist Party is still there. It's gone underground, but it has still been there all this time. They also have a figurehead. There's a guy called General Spinola, Antonio Spinola. Now, he is quite a conservative figure. He was in his 60s. Amazingly, he had been a military observer at the siege of Leningrad in the 1940s. Yeah.

Goodness. With the Germans. Yeah. That seems very out of time. Well, I suppose it is quite out of time, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So he'd been the commander in Guinea-Bissau in the late 60s.

And he said, oh, this is an absolute disaster. You know, this is not a – these African wars are terrible for our international reputation. Loads of our boys are dying. It's incredibly expensive. We're not going to win. And he wrote a book called Portugal in the Future when he came back saying, let's get out of Africa. This is a disaster. He is fired in early 1974 by the regime for doing this.

And that, again, is a great error because it gives these grumpy captains a possible figurehead. They've also got a chief strategist who we'll talk about a lot in this podcast. He is a great character. He is a man called Colonel Othello Sariva de Carvalho. And everybody just calls him Othello. Othello, Tom. His name is Othello. But he's not black.

Well, he had been born in Lorenzo Marques in Maputo in Mozambique in 1936 to Luso-Goan parents. So parents who were Portuguese Goa. The Portuguese colony that gets taken over in the 60s. And they call him Othello. So in his very name, there's a hint of Portuguese colonial history. And he had served in guinea he'd served in angola bizarrely he'd been photographed weeping over salazar's coffin in when salazar died in a in 1970 and were these were these crocodile tears or genuine tears of grief very

hard to tell tom he has a very interesting life and basically at the end of this podcast his life will take a very unexpected twist which i think you will will enjoy. Can't wait. He's a great- He's a great showman. He's a very theatrical figure. And by the early 70s, Othello has become very, very left-wing. And he's the sort of guiding figure. He basically, he's a colonel. He gets all the captains together and he says, listen, we should have a coup. Enough is enough. We should get rid of the old guard, new regime, get out of Africa. So the coup is planned for the night of the 24th and 25th of April, 1974. And it starts in a tremendous way. It starts with two songs on the radio, which are the signals to the captains.

So the first song, Tom, you'll be delighted to hear, is Paulo de Carvalho's song, E depois do adeus, a song I'm sure you know well, because it was Portugal's entry in the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest. Okay, but presumably that would be played quite a lot on the radio, wouldn't it? Well, it's at a particular time. It's the combination of the two songs, you see. Oh, I see.

So that's played... And there's only the one channel then? It's not like there's kind of, hello and welcome to Eurovision FM. No, there are multiple radio stations. You have to be listening. Listen, I'm the coup planner. Okay, all right. The coup people have clearly got loads of radio listening to. You see, I would choose a less obvious track.

Well, it's not a very successful Eurovision entry because I checked. It came 16th and it got only three points. Okay. So maybe it wasn't being played very often out of shame. Who knows? Staying on national honour. So at 10.55 in the evening, that is played on Lisbon radio.

Because they've already taken it over, have they? Or do they have a kind of, they have a friendly DJ? They have a friendly DJ. They have contacts in the DJ community. So then a few hours later, 20 minutes past midnight, on a different radio station, Radio Renaissance Radio, Tom. On Renaissance Radio, they play a song called Grandola Villa Morena,

this sort of lament, Grandola, it's called, Grandola is a place. And it's by a sort of protest singer, a folk protest singer called Zica Afonso, very left-wing kind of, who toured Portugal singing these.

Yeah, because these are not the songs that you'd associate with an army coup in the 70s. Eurovision and then a sort of folk, a very mournful folk ballad. Well, we know from our previous podcast, we did one episode, didn't we? We were talking about Fado. The Portuguese love a very mournful song. They do.

Yes, they do. So the mournful song is played. And this is the sort of the cue. So they've got this particular guy who they said, you lead the troops into Lisbon. He's a guy called Salguero Maya. And he's a captain. He's the son of a railway worker. And he assembles all his troops and he gives a famous speech. And he says, gentlemen, as you all know, there are various forms of state. There are socialist states, there are capitalist states, and there's the state that we are in. And in in this solemn night we're going to put an end to this state so anyone who wants to come with me

let's go to lisbon and let's finish it and they all volunteer they pitch up in lisbon at the government quarter at about six o'clock in the morning there's then a sort of scene there's a little bit of shooting but not not actually that much. The government, Caetano and the other government ministers, they hole up at a barracks at the Lago del Camo in the sort of center of town, and they're surrounded by these troops. Most government forces go over to the rebels. So the rebels have it kind of all their own way. So Salguero Maia, who's the captain, the railway worker's son,

he's leading his men, he's addressing them on a megaphone and all this. Caetano says, I'm not going to surrender to you because you're a mere captain. He says, it would be like throwing my power into the gutter to surrender to a captain. So they go out and they get that old general, the guy from the siege of Leningrad, General Spinola, because he's got the right rank. He pitches up. He accepts the surrender of Caetano. And the government ministers are all led away. And actually, it's pretty bloodless. So is that the coup?

We'll never do a podcast with more coups than this episode. We should take a break. No, no. Because you've underestimated the number of coups in the... Oh, God. I've planned the break. No, no. Because you've underestimated the number of coups in the... Oh, God. I've planned the break. It's very exciting. Okay.

So only four people were killed that day, and they were shot by the secret police. The crowd, as is always the way when these things happen, great crowds poured into the streets, and they assembled outside the headquarters of the secret police, the PID, shouting and roaring and stuff. The secret police fired at them, killed four people.

But by and large, by the standards of coups, this is very, very bloodless. And actually, these are pretty much the only people who die in the whole of this podcast. Now, the thing that becomes the symbol of this sort of semi or nearly bloodless revolution are the carnations, flowers. Now, why does this happen well salgaro maya and his troops when they're sort of going through lisbon they pass a self-service restaurant called sir which was celebrating its its one year anniversary that day the story goes and there i mean this is there is some debate whether this is a slightly apocryphal story that the restaurant had decided that for his anniversary would hand out flowers to everybody

who came for lunch but because of the coup lunch is cancelled so they've just got all these flowers on their hands and uh one of the sort of waitresses who's called celeste caillero she's a left-wing sympathizer and she basically has got our arms full of all these red and white flowers and she thinks oh i'll give them to the soldiers so they put them in the muzzles of their guns oh yes that's very 60s behavior yeah or their tanks and so there's and more flower sellers get come and give them flowers and there's there's flowers everywhere it's lovely there is some suggestion this may be a bit of a myth that's been that's been that's been exaggerated after the event which is a shame i think we should go with it yeah of course we should go purposes

of this episode of course we should go with it so the coup has succeeded caetano that's the end of him he's flown to madeira to start with and then he's flown off to brazil brazil has a dictatorship so basically anyone who wants to go to brazil they go to brazil so he just hangs out there he hangs out and rio de janeiro and dies of a heart attack in 1980. And that is the end of him. Okay. So we can park him. We can forget all about him. Now the guy from the siege of Leningrad, General Spagnola, he was sort of intended to be a vague figurehead for the coup, but not really the main man. But because Caetano wouldn't surrender to a captain and would only surrender to a general,

Spagnola is suddenly in the limelight and he thinks, great, fantastic. So he actually becomes the new president of the Republic. So lots of broadcasts with him, flags behind him. Precisely. Gold braid, cap. All that stuff. All that stuff. Exactly.

Classic post-coup behavior. And also very classic post-coup. He's the head of something called the National Salvation Junta. I mean, or I suppose they would say Junta in Portugal because they pronounce the Js. Anyway, so you've got to have a Junta or a Junta in the 1970s, haven't you? We'll just be a bit more liberal. Let's crack on. Everything is great. But within days, the revolution, as is always the way, spirals completely out of control. Portugal has been asleep for basically 50 years and suddenly within days wakes up in a very dramatic way. All across the country, you have workers who are taking over their shops from their bosses. You have all these peasants on the greatest states in the Alentejo in the south of Portugal,

the Latifundia. People say these are literally the Roman agricultural estates that have been preserved almost untouched. They haven't been enclosed. They haven't been divided up. They have massive landowners who treat their peasants very badly. And now the peasants are occupying them, taking the land for themselves, all of this kind of stuff. Even hospitals, you have sort of junior staff kicking out the bosses of the hospitals, kicking out the senior doctors and saying, we're taking over, we're in charge now. This is all about the revolution. So within weeks of the coup in the spring of 1974, Portugal is spiraling out of control.

Nobody knows where it will end. In Washington, D.C., people are looking at this and saying, Portugal is the new Cuba. This could be the beginning of some kind of domino effect through Western Europe. Because the head of state is quite right wing. Yeah. The captains are quite left wing. Yes. But now the mass movement is quite right wing. Yeah. The captains are quite left wing. Yes. But now the mass movement is very left wing.

Yes. You know, who knows where it's going to go, Tom? And on that cliffhanger, now I think we should take a break. Well, that's very exciting. Yes, you were right to wait. And I apologise for trying to hurry you. No, no. We will be back to find out what the denouement is in this dramatic tale.

I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com.

That's therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are in Portugal and we are, Dominic is taking us through the Carnation Revolution. And in a way, this is a coda to the four-part series we did earlier in the year on portugal dominic take it away okay so when we ended the first half portugal was in chaos a man called general spinola was in charge the there were all these left-wing captains who knows where it's going to go so general spinola actually do you know what tom i've had i said he was at the siege of leningrad but i've actually undersold him. He'd also fought in the Spanish Civil War on General Franco's side.

Okay. And he wore a monocle. That's very Tintin. Yeah. So he's a tremendous character. He watches all the occupations and stuff that I was talking about right at the beginning of the first half. And he says, well, this is not what I bargained for at all. This is very bad.

And he says, right, I need to bring in somebody, sort of prime minister, who will calm everything down. And he sees a bloke who's going to be a new character for us in the second half, Tom, who's called Vasco Gonçalves. Now, Vasco Gonçalves, I shall come to in a second. He's a splendid figure. He's very entertaining. He's this sort of very gaunt, sort of tall military man

who's from a very rich background. So Spinola thinks this guy will be great. You know, he'll be a bulwark against the radicals. This doesn't happen at all. Vasco Goncalves immediately says, right, we'll get out of all the African colonies, decolonize straight away. Now Spin bizarrely having written that book saying let's get out of africa he's alarmed by this and he says well i didn't mean all africa i think we

should actually keep on to angola so they fall out spinola decides i'm going to organize a new coup get rid of the left-wing captains. He organizes this coup in September 1974, and it's a complete disaster. Basically, nobody turns out for him. So he's the president, but he's organized a coup against his own government. Against himself. And it hasn't worked.

So he's forced to resign. That's the end of him. And what happens to him? Well, for a while, he lurks around Portugal for a few months. So he doesn't get sent off to an education camp or anything? No, not yet. Because in March 1975, so what's that, about six months after his last coup? He tries another coup.

That's very Tintin. So the 11th of March 1975, he tries another coup. That doesn't work either. So he's tried a coup against a government that he's the leader of. He's tried a coup against the successor government. Yeah. At this point, he decides he's going to go to Brazil as well, like the person that he is.

Hang out with Catano. Right. And, yeah, he actually, in Brazil, he tries to set up a thing called the Liberation Army of Portugal. He's incredibly right-wing. He tries to set up an extreme right wing paramilitary group so so a right wing dictator is a left-wing dictator who's had two failed coups yeah yes i guess i guess so so that doesn't work out at all that's the end of him let's forget about him so

you can cross him off your your list okay all right so now who's in charge of portugal well basically there are two people i think you need to worry about. So one is Othello. So Othello, we talked about him before. While all this has been going on, he's gone off on a little trip to Cuba, would you believe? He goes to Cuba. He meets Fidel Castro.

And this is what the CIA are worried about. Yeah, precisely. And he is absolutely delighted to meet Fidel Castro. He says, Castro is splendid. I can't get enough of this he comes back so i'll tell her who had you know he remember in the first half he was weeping over salazar's coffin yeah in 1975 five years after he was doing that he comes back from cuba and he says listen the cumans have got the right idea we should scrap all political parties we should have revolutionary councils instead that's the the path to Portuguese happiness.

Let's do that. So he's lurking around and he's got all these plans. He's the sort of face of the revolution. The other person is that bloco I mentioned, Vasco Gonçalves, this sort of gaunt man from a very posh background who Spinola had brought in but had disappointed him. Vasco Gonçalves is, I found, I mean, I know this is a ludicrous source to be quoting in this podcast, but this is a bit from the Daily Telegraph. The Daily Telegraph obituary said, a gaunt soldier with a history of depressive illness and taste for badly fitting clothes

and political rhetoric, he held, as one of his own colleagues put it, quote, the sort of Marxist views you would find in a rather immature university student. Born into Portugal's prosperous middle classes, he also possessed a considerable fortune, which remained miraculously immune from the expropriation he ordered for others. So basically, Gonçalves comes in, very rich family, he's very left wing in this sort of slightly, dare dare I say without alienating my audience, a slightly Jeremy Corbyn way. He says, right, we're going to nationalize everything. Nationalize the banks, insurance, petrochemicals, fertilizers, tobacco, cement, wood, iron, steel, breweries, shipping, public transport, radio, glass, mining, fishing, and the agricultural sector. Now, there are only two parts of the economy that are immune, that are not touched by his nationalization plans. And they are foreign exchange, so changing money, and construction. And by this miraculous coincidence, his father runs a foreign exchange firm

in which he has a large shareholding. And he also is the manager personally of a massive construction firm. So this is not a terribly good advert for the revolution. And do people know this at the time? Yeah, they do know this. So people are grumbling about it. So Portugal, which has been asleep for so long, is in utter chaos. So across half a million people have fled to Portugal from the African colonies. But the Portuguese have sort of done a Belgium. They've treated their colonies pretty badly and then suddenly said, right, we're going. Goodbye. And presumably the guys who are coming from the Portuguese colonies, are they very right wing in the way that... I think some of them are. Some of them feel terribly betrayed, exactly. Meanwhile, in the south of Portugal, in the Alentejo, in these huge farms, agricultural

labourers have seized the farms, or they've been confiscated and turned them into collective farms. So about 2,200,000 acres worth of the Alentejo have been taken over by their own workers. Meanwhile, the government is giving some to the workers, is trying to give some back to their owners and trying to kick out the workers. It's a complete and utter shambles. And what's the role of the Soviet Union in this? Any? That's a good question, actually.

I'm sure they are hovering a little bit. I mean, the Soviet Union are definitely very interested in the Portuguese colonies, so Angola and Mozambique. But in Portugal itself? In Portugal itself, I don't know. I think it's more actually the communist party i haven't mentioned the communist party so the leader of the communist party guy called alvaro cuñal he had been an exile he had come back and he's he's

again a very big player in all this his activities are reported all the time a lot of people think that he might end up being the beneficiary of all this. And he is an out-and-out, card-carrying Stalinist. You know, he's of that generation of sort of, you know, affiliated foreign communist leaders who are completely loyal, who are more Stalinist than the Stalinists, basically. So it's perfectly possible that this whole confused, chaotic story could have ended up with him in charge and Portugal veering wildly to the kind of pro-Soviet left. Now, meanwhile, Portugal is a complicated country because the North is quite

different from the South. And in the North, there are no big farms. The farms are much smaller. And the North is much more conservative. So that's around Porto, the Douro Valley, all that kind of stuff. And there, there is a massive backlash against the revolution. People start firebombing kind of communist or left-wing party offices and and that's where a lot of the the british that's right port families are based so is there is there mi is there mi6 involved i'm not sure i don't think taylor's dow's graham cockburns yeah exactly i don't think they're all they're all piling in i'm not saying that they are but but presumably the british government feels that britain has a stake in

yeah what happens there we will come to britain tom you'll be delighted to hear there is a role for james callaghan in the story oh wonderful no i don't know about the british i do know about the archbishop of braga i know what he said what did he say he said this is uh this is this is a struggle not of man against man but it's a struggle of christ against satan so i mean you'd expect that from an archbishop i suppose i kind of like that language do you from from bishops i think that's how they should talk i absolutely i could not agree with you more do you hear that talk from justin will be you do not and i think that's a weakness i would like to hear more of that kind of language on thought for the Day. Yeah, it's humanists. It's all humanists now on Thought for the Day, isn't it, Tom?

Yeah. Sorry, we're spiralling into golf club. This is the kind of stuff that Caetano and his men were saying in Brazil. Thought for the Day. Portuguese Thought for the Day is not what it was. They've got all humanists on. It's terrible. Bring back Salazar.

Now, we're in the summer of 1975, and there's this kind of absolutely crazy factionalism. I know you have a horror, Tom, of acronyms.ionalism. I know you have a horror tom of acronyms. I do. There's billions of different political parties with acronyms. Can we just cut all that? There's anarchists, there's communists. Simplify that.

Skip all that. Well, this is the simplified version. What do you mean? I don't want any acronyms. Abroad, people are now looking at this with real anxiety. And they think particularly that guy, Artelo, who's come back from Cuba, absolutely fired up. They think he's going to launch some sort of new coup, you know,

yet another coup. Yeah. And Portugal will be the Trojan horse. It'll be the sort of vanguard of communism. So this is what Time Magazine said on the 11th of August, 1975. It said, the Troika of generals that has just assumed unlimited power in Lisbon

could well transform Portugal into Western Europe's first communist nation. It might well be an orthodox Marxist state, as envisaged by one of the continent's few remaining Stalinist bosses, Alvaro Cunhal. The New York Times, as we often say, Tom, never wrong in its reporting of international affairs. A communist takeover of Portugal might well encourage a similar trend in Italy and France. And presumably at this point, the New York Times wasn't in favor of that. No, no, that's right. That will come later.

Yeah. Affects the succession in Spain and Yugoslavia and send tremors through Western Europe. So recently declassified US State Department documents show that the CIA were sending money to officers in the army who are not so left wing. So officers who worry that the revolution is going out of control. And to the Archbishop of Braganza or whatever it was. Archbishop of Braga.

I don't know. He's getting money from God. He doesn't need to worry about the CIA there's also a document from the 15th of September 1975 that shows a discussion between Henry Kissinger

Helmut Schmidt very much a friend of the rest of his history yeah and another friend of the rest of his history James Callaghan and they agree

that if there is a full-scale civil war in Portugal Britain and America will send arms to anti-communist forces and send them aid because Portugal cannot be allowed to fall to the communists. And Henry Kissinger is a great sort of – we have never really done much about Henry Kissinger in the rest of his history. But you can't have a kind of 70s Cold War hotspot without Kissinger popping up.

But Kissinger is a bit of a hysteric, I always think. Kissinger, hysteric is probably a bit unfair, partly because of his own personal background, you know, fleeing Nazi Germany and so on. He fears disaster at every turn. And he sort of thinks, oh my God, Portugal is going to go communist, Western Europe is going to collapse, all this kind of stuff. And actually, his State Department sort of thinks oh my god portugal is going to go communist western europe is going to collapse all this kind of stuff and actually his state department sort of juniors who know portugal quite well they say to kissinger you know what actually it does look very chaotic and stuff

but the portuguese are actually pretty conservative people and we reckon it's going to be fine don't do anything you know don't start sending in cia made with dark glasses and kind of homemade torture kits you know just hold off for a little bit because we think it'll be fine they are talking to a group called the group of nine which is a group of military officers group of nine honestly yeah i know i know you didn't want an acronym but that's not an acronym no the group i'm a sinister sounding dan brown type secret societies i'm fine with them so the group of nine are actually not very sinister they're quite centrist they're centrist dads tom like you are they yeah right that's disappointing they say uh we reject either sort of right-wing stuff or

left-wing stuff we support a model of socialism based on democracy, pluralism, and human rights. What's not to like? So that's very primary school assembly kind of – it's your kind of politics, basically. Yeah, white bread. Anodyne. So amidst all this, Vasco Gonçalves, the prime minister,

the gaunt man who's nationalized everything but his own businesses, he starts to sort of crack under the strain. And he gives a speech, a famous speech, Tom, in Portuguese history, on the 18th of August, 1975, in which he starts sort of shouting and rambling wildly and says the capitalist countries want to, they're trying to put the portuguese working class they're treating them as stokers for the boilers of capitalist europe and he goes on to

this huge rant i've actually watched on youtube now admittedly i watched it in portuguese which to tell you the truth i don't really understand so all i saw was a man in his shirt sleeves who look very like an open university lecturer from the 1970s just shouting at some students but clearly this had a great effect on people because most Portuguese people thought he's gone completely mad you know he's he's lost the plot so it's a left-wing academic having a rant yeah basically so it's it's like twitter yeah exactly that it's basically do you know what i i in in my own sort of as a real work i wrote about the polytechnic of north london in the 1970s where people were always giving rants about imperialism you know all this capitalism history man yeah very this time yeah it's just like that his his rant is just like that but he's the head of state you know

he's the head of government sorry head. But he's the head of state. No, he's the head of government. Sorry, head of government. Who's the head of state? Another random general called General Costa Gomez. Suddenly Costa Gomez, like a tortoise from beneath his shell, emerges and sacks Fosco Gonsalves. And everybody says, oh my God, they've sacked the big man. This is civil war.

This is going to be civil war. So by the end of August 1975, early September, basically Portugal is not working as a country. There are great mobs of people shouting in the streets all the time. Soldiers are occupying random buildings in Lisbon, sort of TV stations. They're having rallies. There's actually an amazing account of this, which gives you a sense of the sort of utter chaos of it,

by Ben Pimlott, the biographer of Harold Wilson, who is a very young man, as a student, I think, went over to Portugal to see what was going on in 1975. And he wrote a journal of the Portuguese Revolution, which you can find in Ben Pimlott's book, Frustrate Their Navistrix. And to my mind, it's actually the best essay because he wrote it when he was very young. And what it completely captures is that sense that you get in revolution. So you actually also get it in, have you read, a guy called Colin Jones wrote a book about the last day of Robespierre's life and about the end of the terror that came out about two years ago.

I've got it right here. I've got it right here. And he wrote it in the present tense. Yeah. What's great about it is that unlike most accounts of the terror that came out about two years ago. I've got it right here. I've got it right here. And he wrote it in the present tense. Yeah. What's great about it is that unlike most accounts of the French Revolution, it doesn't assume the narrative. So it captures the complete uncertainty and chaos and the way in which all kinds of contingencies could have played out differently.

That's what it's like for me. I don't know what's going to happen. Well, this is what it was like. This is what it's like when you read Ben Pimlott's journal, because he describes how he just travels around lisbon and he goes from kind of occupied building to occupied building students revolutionaries anarchists right-wing officers whatever everybody's sort of occupied something or holding a rally and absolutely nobody knows what's going on i mean they're a bit like you in this podcast. They don't know who anybody is.

It's just a complete confusion of names. I'm waiting for the group of nine to strike. Well, this reaches its culmination in a very kind of Termidor kind of moment. So people have been waiting around. They've been waiting around to strike, just like you. Ben Pimlott's been waiting so long he actually actually goes home so his journal ends before the kind of climax um because he's i don't know his return ticket has run out of validity or whatever he's got to go and cover the labour party conference or something exactly that's probably what it is yeah but on the 25th of november othello decides to make his move and he sends paratroopers to occupy some air bases

then was like oh my god the coup is happening it's on it's on but at the same time his opponents that later that day they launched their own counter coup is this the group of nine yeah it is the group of nine tom brilliant it is the group and everyone is piling in they're all launching coups on this day yeah and actually what happens is that Othello's men are overpowered. But no casualties? And this is the thing. There are no casualties. That's amazing.

So after those four people who died on the very first day, basically nobody really has been killed. There's been no fighting. And I was thinking about this because when we did our Salazar podcast, we were talking about Salazar and his authoritarianism. And we mentioned in that how actually the death toll figures in Portugal under Salazar's admittedly extremely repressive and pretty unpleasant regime, the death toll figures by the standards of 20th century regimes are pretty low, a few hundred maybe, if you put aside the colonial wars.

And I wonder whether the fact that Portugal actually, by 20th century European standards, had had a pretty quiescent kind of stagnant history, whether that plays a part in all this. Because people are most likely to be violent when they're frightened of violence against themselves. And because it's never started, never does start if you see what right it's an extraordinary thing that nobody dies there's incredible lack of violence throughout all this so this 25th of november 1975 coup this is the real turning point basically artello had

launched this coup this was his chance to be the castro there are no shots fired. He's just rounded up and put into prison. And a new guy who had been a key figure in the counter coup, you don't have to worry about him, Tommy, we won't talk about him very much. Antonio Romalho Iannas, he becomes the big man. He gets the support of the Socialist Party, so sort of centre-left rather than hard-left, and centre-right social democrats. He's Macron. I think that's a pretty weird parallel, but... But he's kind of centrist.

Yes, I guess he's kind of centrist. So, Othello comes out of prison after a little while. They have an election in 1976, presidential election. Romaglio Iannis wins 62% of the vote. Othello wins only 16%. And he gets all that from the Alentejo, from the areas, very poor, very rural, where peasants had occupied the big farms. And with that, after all this chaos and all this confusion, with that, it's as though they've pricked a balloon and the air just completely seeps out. And thenugal joins the the ec exactly um and the rest is history well there's another presidential election in 1980 again the same two this time uh romaglio ianis wins an absolutely stonking majority

artelo wins only one percent oh so i said to you that his career would end on an interestingly interesting trajectory he's very disappointed by all this because in 1975 he had clearly thought you know he was going to be the master of portugal he does what everybody does when they've lost in this period he becomes involved he goes even further to the extreme and becomes involved with the sort of terrorist paramilitary group so he sets up a group called the Popular Forces of the 25th of April. The 25th of April is the sacred day, the Carnation Revolution, when it all kicked off. They do what sort of left-wing terrorist groups do in the 70s and 80s. They organize bank robberies and bombings and stuff like that.

Kidnappings of children of industrialists. I don't know if they did do any kidnappings, but they did actually kill 14 people in their in their bombing so there is some some death toll later on yeah um he is put in prison eventually he's caught othello he i mean it's a weird thing because he's kind of the face of the revolution that the portuguese celebrate to this day but he then has kind of disgraced himself he's put in prison and then in the 1990s he's given an amnesty but this may give you some sense about why his political career didn't turn out as successfully as he had hoped he is a man of a degree of unreliability tom

right because he by the time he was imprisoned he was was married. But he met a female prison warder in the prison whom he also married. So he was a bigamist. Right. And he lived with his original wife on his release from Thursday to Sunday. And then he would go and live with the other wife, the prison warder, from Monday to Thursday. And was she still a prison warder? That's a good question, actually question actually i don't know i don't know if she was still working at prison that would be very weird wouldn't it quite odd yeah he well two other things um you asked if

he was on strictly he wasn't on strictly but he established a sideline appearing in erotic films so okay that's a that's quite a sort of, he must've been what? He was born in, I think, late 1930s. So he's in his 60s, 70s by the time he's appearing in these porn films.

I suppose. If you've got it. He was in a film called The Failed Revolution, which I haven't seen, but I read online that it involves him, and I quote, nuzzling a woman on a floor strewn with carnations. Oh,

so this is, this is the erotic film? Yeah. It's not a documentary about? About the revolution. About the revolution? No. But it nods to his revolutionary past because it has the carnations.

Yeah, of course. And when he's nuzzling, as the thing describes it, there are carnations present and perhaps the revolutionary symbols. And then the group of nine burst in. Unexpected twist. Anyway, he was very disappointed by what happened to portugal he died only last year tom and uh do you know what

he said before he died um let's have a coup he said uh portugal needs a good financial manager a man with intelligence and honesty like antonio salazar just without the fascism. God. So he'd gone full circle. He had. He'd gone absolutely full circle. Meanwhile, Portugal had become, you know, after that sort of crazy two years, just became a completely, you know, successful, incredibly successful, prosperous member of the European Union.

So it all ended happily. I mean, everybody kind of got, he got two wives. He got to appear in the erotic film yes yes yeah loads of people hanging out in in rio yeah which i'm sure you know worst places to be yeah in our glasses kind of moaning about humanist thought for the day and what happens to the group of nine they ran they basically they they i suppose they set the you love the group of nines i thought did they have kind of handshakes and secret codes? I don't think they do.

I don't think they do. I think maybe they still get together and they kind of, you know, drink a toast to Henry Kissinger or something. Anyway, they're sort of moderate officers. And they're kind of, I guess, the moderate center of Portuguese public opinion. They basically set the tone for the rest of Portuguese history. Well, wonderful, Dominic.

Thank you very much. So now we've done the whole of Portugal, haven't we? We've done the whole of Portugal. From the Carthaginians up to the erotic film

of Othello. Well, brilliant. What a story. Thanks very much. Thank you very much, Dominic. Thank you, everyone, for listening. And obviously,

we'll be back tomorrow with more of this stuff. so we'll see you then bye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early early access, ad-free listening and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, a splash of showbiz gossip.

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