Carnation Revolution (1974): Four dead · 393
[392] [desk-carnation-1974-6] Carnation Revolution is the record of 1974 under “Four dead.” The figure to read with it is 04. Do not arrange states in a league. Fix who moved what, and where, to that year. Do not add a later war into the same total. 1976, not 25 April morning, is when a constitution locked a European democracy. The year in between was noisy.
The 25 April 1974 MFA coup that ended the Estado Novo with carnations in rifle barrels -- a junta against a dictatorship, not a manual. In the early hours of 25 April 1974 the Portuguese Armed Forces Movement (MFA) overthrew Marcelo Caetano's Estado Novo, the dictatorship Salazar had built. A banned song, "Grandola, Vila Morena," played on the radio as a signal. Troops secured Lisbon with almost no fighting. Crowds put red carnations in rifle barrels -- the image that named the revolution.
Four people died when regime police fired on a crowd. Caetano surrendered at the Carmo barracks to General Spinola. The colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau -- the officers' wound -- ended in a rush of independences (1974-75) and in chaotic, sometimes violent decolonisations, especially Angola.
Intensity in this atlas is near the floor: a coup that refused a bloodbath at home. Political impact was real: democracy in Portugal, an end to Europe's last large colonial war, and a PREC (ongoing revolutionary process) that frightened NATO allies until the 1976 constitution. English memory is a pretty flower and a Eurovision-adjacent folk song. This page keeps the wars in Africa in the paragraph. It is not a how-to.
Say Carnation Revolution with 1974, “Four dead,” and 04. The figure is not a national score.1974
Figures to keep
- Year of the action
- 1974
- Figure in the record
- 04
- Action
- Carnation Revolution
- Line of the front
- Four dead
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