Belo Horizonte, 1905 — Rio de Janeiro, 1990

 

Politician, writer, memorialist

 

A descendent of old clans from Minas Gerais which produced numerous politicians and intellectuals, he was the son of Afrânio de Mello Franco, the first Minister for Foreign Relations after the Revolution of 1930. A few years later, when his family broke away from Vargas due to political differences, he continued in opposition to the government and was one of signatories of the “Manifesto dos Mineiros”, which anticipated the fall of the Estado Novo in 1945.

 

He had contact with Stefan Zweig in 1936, through his brother-in-law Jaime “Jimmy” Chermont, the diplomat charged with chaperoning the Austrian writer during his first trip to Brazil. On the following visits, in 1940 and 1941, due to Zweig’s relationship with the family, they met again, although he was displeased by how the visitor was besieged by the group of academics lead by Cláudio de Sousa. He helped in the preparation of Brazil, Land of the Future, especially when Zweig, later in Petrópolis, decided to launch himself into developing a profile of the French humanist Michel de Montaigne, an author which Afonso Arinos had studied in a work about Brazilian Indians. He lent the writer Montaigne’s Essais (the edition by Fortunat Strowski, who was also a refugee in Rio), visited him in Petrópolis not long before his suicide, and was one of the recipients of a farewell letter from Zweig, left beside one of the notebooks of the work about Montaigne. He wrote Zweig’s obituary in the newspaper A Manhã.

 

One of the founders of UDN, he was a long-term congressman and lead a stubborn opposition to the second Vargas government (1951-1954), something he later regretted. Elected senator, he began his mandate in 1959 but interrupted it to become Minister for Foreign Relations in the Jânio Quadros government, in 1961, when he introduced the so-called Independent Foreign Policy. He returned as Minister in 1962, in the João Goulart government, and to the Senate until 1967. In 1986 he was elected senator once again and played an important part in the Constitution of 1988.

 

He produced a vast literary oeuvre, including memoirs and works of history, sociology and law, and in 1958 he became a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

 

Address listed: de Cesário Pereira (?) Rua Santos Dumont, Petrópolis. Tel. 3882 (Frei-Mo)