He received his laurea in 1896 from the University of Palermo, where he was taught by Giovanni Battista Guccia and Francesco Gerbaldi.

[2] In 1909 Michele de Franchis and Giuseppe Bagnera were awarded the Prix Bordin of the Académie des Sciences of Paris for their work on hyperelliptic surfaces.

[6] De Franchis's works (after a few early papers devoted to the classification of linear systems on plane curves) are essentially concerned with the study of irregular surfaces, a central subject for the Italian school, with its many related topics (correspondences on curves, cyclic coverings, bundles of holomorphic forms).

... De Franchis introduced and used implicitly some of the most important tools of modern algebraic geometry, such as characteristic classes and the Albanese map.

... de Franchis's approach for the classification of hyperelliptic surfaces set the pattern for Lefschetz's works on general abelian varieties.