Paulo Francis

Who was Paulo Francis?

Paulo Francis was a Brazilian journalist, political pundit, novelist and critic.

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