José Rizal

José Rizal was a Filipino eye doctor, novelist and campaigner for reform who became the leading voice of Filipino national feeling in the last decades of Spanish rule. His two novels exposed the abuses of colonial government and the friars, and his execution by the Spanish in Manila in December 1896 made him a martyr of the Philippine Revolution. Filipinos widely regard him as their national hero, although no law formally gives him that title.

He was born on 19 June 1861 in Calamba, Laguna, the seventh child of Francisco Mercado and Teodora Alonso, prosperous tenants who farmed land owned by the Dominican friars. The family had Chinese, Spanish and Tagalog ancestors. When he was a boy his mother was jailed for about two and a half years after a wealthy relative accused her of attempted poisoning, an episode that left a deep mark on him. In February 1872 the Spanish executed the three priests known as Gomburza, and his elder brother Paciano, who had lived with one of them, Father José Burgos, was linked to the affair. Enrolling at the Ateneo in Manila, José began to use the surname Rizal on his brother's advice.

After studies at the Ateneo and the University of Santo Tomas, where he switched to medicine on learning that his mother was going blind, Rizal sailed secretly for Spain in May 1882. He studied medicine and philosophy in Madrid, and completed his training as an eye specialist at Heidelberg in 1887. A gifted linguist, painter and sculptor, he moved among Filipino students campaigning for reform. In 1887 he published in Berlin his first novel, Noli Me Tángere ("Touch Me Not"), a portrait of colonial society that angered the friars and the Spanish authorities. A sequel, El filibusterismo, followed in Ghent in 1891, as well as an annotated edition of a seventeenth-century Spanish history of the islands.

Rizal wrote for La Solidaridad, the paper of the reformist Propaganda Movement, which asked for the Philippines to become a full province of Spain with representation in the Cortes, for Filipino priests in place of Spanish friars, and for free speech and equality before the law. At home, his family and other Calamba tenants lost a rent dispute with the Dominicans and were evicted. By 1890 he had fallen out with Marcelo H. del Pilar over the leadership of the movement in Europe, and he grew more sceptical of reform from Madrid.

He returned to Manila in 1892 and founded La Liga Filipina, a civic society seeking change by lawful means. Days later, on 6 July 1892, he was arrested and banished to Dapitan in Mindanao. There he ran a school, practised medicine, built a water supply and lived with Josephine Bracken, an Irish woman from Hong Kong. The secret society Katipunan, which planned armed revolt, named him honorary president, but he disapproved of an uprising.

In 1896 Rizal received permission to go to Cuba as a doctor treating victims of yellow fever. The revolution broke out while he was on his way, and on 6 October he was arrested in Barcelona and shipped back to Manila. A military court convicted him of rebellion, sedition and conspiracy, although he had condemned the revolt from prison. He was shot at Bagumbayan, now Rizal Park, on 30 December 1896, and buried secretly. A document in which he supposedly renounced his criticism of the Church was reported after his death; some historians accept it, others consider it a forgery. His farewell poem, Mi último adiós, was smuggled out hidden in an alcohol stove.

His remains were reburied beneath the Rizal Monument in Manila, unveiled in 1913. The revolutionaries had already used his name as a rallying cry, and the struggle went on under leaders such as Emilio Aguinaldo. A law of 1956, the Rizal Law, requires Filipino high schools and colleges to teach his life and writings.

Our 1880 and 1900 maps show the Philippines in Rizal's lifetime under the Spanish Empire and after its loss to the United States; see also the Philippines today.