On 25 April 1974, a military coup in Lisbon—enshrined in popular imagination as the “Carnation Revolution”—overthrew the dictatorial regime of the Estado Novo [New State] that had been ruling the country for almost 50 years. Portugal thus became the scene of the most exemplary popular revolution in Western Europe, a revolution based on the promise contained in the three “D’s” of its programme: “Democratise, Develop, and Decolonise.” Delivering on this promise, the new revolutionary government put an end to the Colonial Wars that the Estado Novo colonialist regime was waging in Africa on three fronts—Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau—against the liberation movements organised in these territories. Pressured by the African national liberation movements, international agendas, and by a war-weary domestic public opinion, the provisional governments, disposing of very little room for manoeuvre in their negotiations, consented to the immediate independence of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé e Príncipe in 1974 and 1975. The country finally joined in the wave of decolonisation that began in the wake of the Second World War and that the Salazar regime had insisted on resisting, at the cost of thousands of lives sacrificed on both sides of the conflict. The Portuguese Empire, which had been the first maritime European Empire, was now the last of those empires to be dissolved.