The Kingdom of Portugal under the House of Braganza was a constitutional monarchy from the end of the Liberal Civil War in 1834 to the Republican Revolution of 1910. The initial turmoil of coups d'état perpetrated by the victorious generals of the Civil War was followed by an unstable parliamentary system of governmental "rotation" marked by the growth of the Portuguese Republican Party. This was caused mainly by the inefficiency of the monarchic governments as well as the monarchs' apparent lack of interest in governing the country, aggravated by the British ultimatum for the abandonment of the Portuguese "pink map" project that united Portuguese West Africa and Portuguese East Africa (today's Angola and Mozambique).

The situation culminated in a dictatorship-like government imposed by King Carlos I, in the person of João Franco, followed by the king's assassination in the Lisbon regicide of 1908 and the revolution of 1910.