Francisco Manuel Homem Cristo

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Francisco Manuel Homem Cristo, Member of Parliament during the First Republic

Francisco Manuel Homem Cristo (8 March 1860 – 25 February 1943) was a Portuguese military officer and politician. He made a name for himself as one of the Portuguese Army officers involved in the events surrounding the 31 January 1891 revolt, which he had opposed, and then as a Republican MP. He was also a university lecturer, writer and journalist, a notable pamphleteer and an important politician in the times leading up to the 1910 revolution.

Biography

He was born in the city of Aveiro, to which he remained connected throughout his life and where he died. He began his career in the press there, aged just 17, publishing several articles in the newspaper O Trinta. He also adhered to republican ideals at an early age, becoming one of the most prominent militants of the nascent Portuguese Republican Party in the last decades of the 19th century.

Despite his interest in journalism, a passion that would dominate his life, he soon abandoned his studies. In 1876 he joined the Portuguese Army as a volunteer, where he intended to become an officer. As a young ensign, he founded the weekly newspaper Povo de Aveiro. During the more than 50 years in which that periodical was published, albeit with interruptions, he was its main, and sometimes only, editor.

FIn 1891, at the age of 31, he was a lieutenant in the Portuguese Army. At the time, he belonged to the Republican Party, which is why he found himself involved, albeit without supporting it, in the republican revolt of 31 January 1891. His opposition to the movement was due to the understanding that the revolutionary movement was doomed to failure, given the obstacles posed by the relationship with the British Empire, which was in turmoil at the time due to the ultimatum of January 1890, and the situation of Portuguese public finances, which at the time had an apparently uncontrollable deficit.

Despite this opposition, he was arrested following the uprising and put on trial, becoming one of the central figures in the proceedings. He was acquitted because his opposition to the movement was proven. He went on to publish a monograph about this period of his life.

In 1894, he was promoted to captain and posted to the 14th Infantry Regiment in Viseu, where he realised that only three soldiers in a company knew how to read and write. In view of this, he decided to become a primary school teacher in the barracks, in his spare time from military instruction, which earned him a commendation in Order of the Army. On the subject of education, Homem Cristo wrote the following sentence in his book Pro Pátria, which is now the motto of the foundation that bears his name: Instruction and learning is the nation's first and most urgent need.

He became involved in a violent polemic with Afonso Costa, which culminated in a challenge to a duel, refused by Homem Cristo. As a result of this dispute, he was forced to leave the army in 1909.

Accused of having betrayed republican ideals when the Republic was established in 1910, he was forced into voluntary exile in France. Having therefore left Aveiro and suspended publication of his weekly newspaper, he edited a periodical in Paris called Povo de Aveiro no Exílio (People of Aveiro in Exile). With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, he returned to Portugal and became a convinced interventionist and staunch supporter of Portugal's participation in the conflict. He resumed publishing his newspaper in Aveiro under the title O de Aveiro.

In 1918 he was appointed full professor at the newly created Faculty of Letters of the University of Porto, a post he held until he reached the age limit, although he took a few years off from teaching due to incompatibility with other professors, notably Leonardo Coimbra, with whom he had a violent polemic.

Without having stood as a candidate, and to his surprise and that of the entire political class, Homem Cristo was elected to the Congress of the Republic for the constituency of Portuguese Timor. The election, which took place in 1919, came as such a surprise that, at first, he didn't even want to believe it, since he hadn't been consulted about his candidacy. In his newspaper, he said: "It is a rare case, I believe unique in our constitutional history, for a citizen to be elected a deputy without wishing it, without expecting it, without being consulted, by the mere discretion of the voters." As the minutes of the election were either lost or deliberately mislaid and withheld, his parliamentary debut didn't take place until 20 months after the election, as he was only proclaimed a member of parliament on 27 January 1921 and took his seat in the Chamber of Deputies in the second half of March that year. His time in parliament was short, as the Congress was dissolved at the end of that year, but he still had a relevant and courageous parliamentary activity.

In the 1922 general elections, he stood in the Aveiro constituency as part of an extra-party list called Aliança Regionalista (Regionalist Alliance), which included Jaime Duarte Silva, Manuel Alegre and Homem Cristo as candidates for deputies, and Augusto de Castro as a candidate for senator. The regionalist movement was defeated by the coalition of António Egas Moniz and Barbosa de Magalhães, and failed to elect any deputies or senators. In those same elections, he was a candidate, without knowing it, for the Mozambique constituency, but he didn't get elected.

Once the Congress of the Republic was dissolved again, in the general elections of January 1923 he was elected deputy for the Aveiro constituency, once again running for the Regionalist Alliance, this time victorious. In that parliamentary term, he was less assiduous than in the first, but he still took part in some of the most fiery debates, standing out for the vehemence of his speeches.

In Aveiro, in addition to his work as a publicist, he was president of the Aveiro Commercial and Industrial Association and of the Autonomous Board of the Ports of Ria and Barra de Aveiro (from February 1925 until 10 December 1930), where he played a notable role in the port and economic revival of the Aveiro region. He was particularly involved in the construction of the bar and harbour of Aveiro.

He also stood out in defence of keeping the Lyceum of Aveiro in its building, when in an attempt to devalue it, plans were made to relocate the institution to a smaller building in order to install some public offices there. This institution currently has him as its patron and is called the Homem Cristo Secondary School.

In his work as publicist and editor of O Povo de Aveiro, he was an enthusiastic and fierce propagandist for anything that magnified the city or the region. On the other hand, anyone who stood in the way of what he saw as Aveiro's progress and freedom could count on his fiery words.

Although an agnostic, he was deeply involved in the movement that in the 1930s aimed to restore the Diocese of Aveiro, which would succeed in 1938. In his weekly newspaper, he gave voice to the yearning of Aveiro's Catholics on several occasions.

Throughout his career he proved to be a convinced and enthusiastic apostle of popular education, carrying out valuable work against illiteracy, especially in the barracks where he was stationed.

In addition to his journalistic output and the monographs he published, he was a contributor to the Grande Enciclopédia Portuguesa e Brasileira and numerous other works, including Raul Proença's Guia de Portugal. His work can also be found in the bi-weekly newspaper O Académico (1880–1881) and in the magazines Arte e Vida (1904–1906), Contemporânea (1915–1926) and the Boletim do Sindicato Nacional dos Jornalistas (1941–1945).

His qualities as a publicist and pamphleteer led sociologist Léon Poinsard, in an article published in 1910 in the journal Les Documents du Progrès, to state that there were three great pamphleteers in Europe: Clemenceau, in France; Maximilian Harden, in Germany; Homem Cristo, in Portugal. Raul Brandão considered him to be the greatest Portuguese pamphleteer since Father José Agostinho de Macedo, considering that he was typically the pamphleteer, viscerally oppositional, ardent, cruel in his indignation, of a rudeness that almost shivered the common restraint in the profligacy of errors, vices, defects of every degree or what he had as such.

Francisco Manuel Homem Cristo died in Aveiro at the age of 82.

Private life

Homem Cristo was married to Laura Amelia da Silva Cristo. He was the father of Homem Cristo Filho (1892–1928), an intellectual, writer and defender of nationalist currents, and the great-great-grandfather of Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, a member of the electronic music duo Daft Punk.

Major publications

• Os Acontecimentos de 31 de Janeiro e a Minha Prisão (1891)
• Pro Patria (1905)
• A Anarquia em Portugal: Banditismo Politico (1912)
• Cartas de Longe: A Instrucçao Secundaria em Portugal e em França (1915)
• Cartas de Longe: Em Defesa da Instrucção do Povo (1922)
• Monarquicos e Republicanos: Apontamentos para a História Contemporãnea (1928)

References

• Gonçalves, Maria Alice Oliveira Lusitano; António Augusto Gonçalves (1975). Agitada Vida de Homem Cristo. Aronca: Edição dos Autores.

External links

• Official website
• Works by Francisco Manuel Homem Cristo at Hathi Trust