Paulo Francis

Paulo Francis (Rio de Janeiro, September 2, 1930 – New York City, February 4, 1997) was a Brazilian journalist, political pundit, novelist and critic.

Francis became prominent in modern Brazilian journalism through his controversial critiques and essays with a trademark writing style, which mixed erudition and vulgarity. Like many other Brazilian intellectuals of his time, Francis was exposed to Americanization during his teens. In his early career, Francis tried to blend Brazilian Nationalist Leftism in Culture and Politics with the ideal of modernity embodied by the USA. He acted mostly as an advocate of Modernism in cultural matters, later becoming embroiled in Brazil's 1960s political struggles as a Trotskyist sympathizer and a Leftist nationalist, while at the same time keeping a distance from both Stalinism and Latin American populism. After spending the 1970s as an exile and expatriate in the US, in the 1980s he forsook Leftism for Americanism's sake, performing a sharp political turn into aggressive conservatism, defending the Free Market and political liberalism, and became an uncompromising anti-Leftist. In this capacity, he estranged himself from the Brazilian intelligentsia and became mostly a media figure, a role that entangled him in a legal suit until his death in 1997. Critical evaluations of his work have been made by Midia scholar Bernardo Kucinski and historian Isabel Lustosa.

Born as Franz Paul Trannin da Matta Heilborn into a middle-class family of German descent, Francis received his early education in various traditional Catholic schools in Rio de Janeiro. He attended the National School of Philosophy (at the time a general humanities course) of the University of Brazil in the 1950s, but dropped out before graduating. In college, he was admitted into the student troupe (Teatro do Estudante) managed by the critic Paschoal Carlos Magno, with whom he toured northeastern Brazil. On the trip, he was shocked and disgusted by what he described as poverty, backwardness, [and an] unawareness of welfare and civil society."

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