First and foremost, it was the revolutionary fever that stood out. It looked like a modern remake of Liberty Leading the People, Eugène Delacroix's famous painting inspired by the Paris revolution of July 1830, which toppled King Charles X. A van had replaced the barricade, but the jubilant human pyramid was there. The flag, too, was brandished by the Portuguese, like Marianne in Delacroix's piece. This shot, taken on May 1, 1974, in the streets of Lisbon by French-Haitian photographer Gérald Bloncourt (1926-2018), was clearly all about freedom, but it was also about a people.
A few days earlier, in the early hours of April 25, the Portuguese army had launched a coup d'état against the crumbling dictatorial regime established in 1933 by António de Oliveira Salazar (who died in 1970). However, nothing went according to plan. Instead of hiding in their homes, the people took to the streets to meet the soldiers. As they approached the flower market, they grabbed armfuls of carnations to hand out to the insurgent service members, who were soon stuffing them down the barrels of their rifles.
A close friend of Bloncourt, the Paris-based writer and former filmmaker José Vieira, 66, vividly remembers the events. "During the 40 years of the dictatorship, hypnotized crowds were summoned to parades for Salazar, this sort of falsetto-voiced priest who, incidentally, hated gatherings and always seemed embarrassed, not knowing how to behave in public," said the director of numerous French television documentaries. "From April 25 onward, these crowds became a people, a people on the move, shouting slogans. A people who, from May 1, would occupy land and factories, to bring down the regime, with the support of the military."
'Applause as the military trucks drove by'
On April 28, 1974, Bloncourt managed to jump aboard the caravel taking Álvaro Cunhal, general secretary of the Portuguese Communist Party, then exiled in France, from Paris to Lisbon. During the flight, the returning militants sang revolutionary songs while energetically stomping their feet, to the point of frightening the pilot, the photographer wrote in a booklet published in 2019 for the exhibition "Pour Une Vie Meilleure" ("For a Better Life") at the La Lanterne cultural center in Rambouillet: "Arriving without a visa, we were greeted by a huge crowd surrounding army tanks in revolt. Cunhal, hoisted onto one of them, addressed his supporters." Bloncourt then went night after night without sleep to capture "the laughter, the tears, the flowers on the rifle barrels, the encounters between newly freed prisoners and the applause as military trucks loaded with smiling soldiers drove by."
You have 56.46% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.