Talking Lightly About Serious Things Henri Rochefort and the Origins of French Populism
A man who “believed in nothing, not even himself”, Henri Rochefort is now a minor footnote in the annals of modern journalism. However, at the height of his notoriety, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, his writings, political activities, imprisonments, and escapes were the stuff of newspaper gossip around the world. How did a self-described “errant journalist and literary poacher” rise to power on the wings of sarcasm and ridicule to reshape France’s political landscape? Vlad Solomon explores the life and times of this populist forerunner.
This is how the high-society raconteur Princess Catherine Radziwiłł poignantly recalled her onetime friend Henri Rochefort in her 1914 memoirs, a year after his death at eighty-two. It was a largely true-to-life portrait, and, like all other portraits of Rochefort — whether crafted with words, painted on canvas, or carved in stone — it hinted at the fascinating enigma of a man both feared for his unscrupulous malice and beloved for his unsparing wit and journalistic bravado. Rochefort’s funeral cortege had drawn massive crowds in his native Paris and news of his demise peppered the pages of newspapers everywhere, from Trinidad to Transylvania.2 The North China Herald noted that he had been “too utterly unbalanced to be an effective force” in French politics, but paid tribute to “the undoubted power of his writing”.3
Born on January 30, 1831, to an impoverished Parisian playwright and the daughter of a veteran of the French Revolutionary Wars, Victor-Henri-Jules de Rochefort-Luçay was, from a very young age, steeped in a world of theatre and politics. His father, Claude-Louis-Marie de Rochefort-Luçay, had been active as an ultra-royalist journalist during the 1820s and, despite his lifelong financial troubles, remained a well-known author of vaudevilles into old age, as well as a close friend of Alexandre Dumas père. Hungry for fame from the moment he was old enough to put pen to paper, Henri’s first literary efforts spanned multiple genres: from the 1846 school poem eulogizing the marriage of King Louis-Philippe’s son (for which he won a prize), to a religious dithyramb devoted to the Virgin Mary, to humorous short stories published in Le Mousquetaire, one of Dumas père’s short-lived literary journals. His talent was not of the same caliber as that of his contemporaries Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, or Jules Vallès, but, as Princess Radziwiłł would observe decades later, Rochefort was a force to be reckoned with when it came to amplifying and mainstreaming the fears and prejudices of a silent majority that cut across social classes. A petty functionary in the Paris City Hall bureaucracy by day, the young Rochefort moonlighted as an author of vaudevilles and operettas in order to secure a place in the bustling tout Paris of his time and fund his lifelong passion for gambling and collecting art and antique furniture. Unwilling to step into his father’s shoes as a mere scribbler of entertaining trifles, Rochefort staked his claim in the more prestigious world of literary journalism, debuting in 1859 as a columnist for the illustrated satirical daily Le Charivari, an iconic publication that set the standard for virtually every other satirical journal to follow (the equally famous British Punch would pay homage to it by taking on the subtitle of “the London Charivari”).
