José Protacio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda better known as Jose Rizal was a Filipino polymath, patriot and the most prominent advocate for reform in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial era. He is regarded as the foremost Filipino patriot and is listed as one of the national heroes of the Philippines by National Heroes Committee. His execution by the Spanish in 1896, a date marked annually as Rizal Day, a Philippine national holiday, was one of the causes of the Philippine Revolution.
Rizal was born to a rich family in Calamba, Laguna and was the seventh of eleven children. He attended the Ateneo Municipal de Manila, earning a Bachelor of Arts, and enrolled in medicine at theUniversity of Santo Tomas. He continued his studies at theUniversidad Central de Madrid in Madrid, Spain, earning the degree of Licentiate in Medicine. He also attended the University of Parisand earned a second doctorate at the University of Heidelberg.
Rizal was a polyglot conversant in twenty-two languages. He was a prolific poet, essayist, diarist, correspondent, and novelist whose most famous works were his two novels, Noli me Tangereand El filibusterismo. These social commentaries on Spanish rule formed the nucleus of literature that inspired peaceful reformists and armed revolutionaries alike.
As a political figure, José Rizal was the founder of La Liga Filipina, a civic organization that subsequently gave birth to the Katipunan led by Andrés Bonifacio and Emilio Aguinaldo. He was a proponent of achieving Philippine self-government peacefully through institutional reform rather than through violent revolution, although he would support "violent means" as a last resort. Rizal believed that the only justification for national liberation and self-government is the restoration of the dignity of the people, saying "Why independence, if the slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow?" The general consensus among Rizal scholars is that his execution by the Spanish helped to bring about the Philippine Revolution.
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