Saturday, February 26, 2011

#581 Portugal...Thanks Samuel!


The 0.47€ and 0.32€ stamps were issued in 2010 celebrating Centenary of the Republic of Portugal.

The revolution of 1910 was a republican coup d'état that occurred in Portugal on 5 October 1910, which deposed King Manuel II and established the Portuguese First Republic.

Prior to the coup, Prime Minister João Franco stepped down and went into exile. New elections were held, but factionalism prevented the formation of a stable government. On 1 October 1910, a visit by president Hermes da Fonseca of Brazil provided a pretext for extensive republican demonstrations. On 3 October the Army refused to put down a mutiny on Portuguese warships anchored in the estuary of the Tagus River, and instead took up positions around Lisbon. On 4 October, two of the warships began to shell the royal palace, causing Manuel II and the royal family to flee to Britain. On 5 October, a provisional republican government was organized with the writer Teófilo Braga as President.

The revolution and the republic which it spawned were anticlerical and had a "hostile" approach to the issue of church and state separation, like that of the French Revolution, the Spanish Constitution of 1931 and the Mexican Constitution of 1917. As part of the anticlerical revolution, the bishops were driven from their dioceses, the property of clerics was seized by the state, wearing of the cassock was banned, all minor seminaries were closed and all but five major seminaries. A law of 22 February 1918 permitted only two seminaries in the country, but they had not been given their property back. Religious orders were expelled from the country, including 31 orders comprising members in 164 houses (in 1917 some orders were permitted to form again). Religious education was prohibited in both primary and secondary school.

The involvement of mutinous warships in the revolution prefigured a similar involvement in both the October Revolution in 1917 Russia and the fall of the German Monarchy in 1918.

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