Chagas Franco

Researcher and publicist. He studied at the Colégio Militar, where he also taught. An ardent republican and fervent defender of Portugal's intervention in the Great War, he was civil governor of Lisbon in 1916, a position he would exchange for a risky departure to the bloody battlefields of Europe, from where he returned wounded and ill. He retired with the rank of major and left for France, where he then began a career as a researcher and journalist, as a correspondent for the newspaper O Século. Shortly thereafter, he received an invitation from the Faculty of Letters at the University of Rennes, where he began to teach a course in Portuguese Language, Literature, and History. With the outbreak of the Second Great War, he returned to Lisbon, joining the editorial staff of the newspaper O Século, for which he had already provided some brilliant reports. His work, most of which is didactic in nature, falls within the scope of historical research, and much of it was written in partnership with other writers, notably a brief but interesting collaboration with the poet Américo Durão.