Arthur Ranc

Arthur Ranc

Arthur Ranc (born December 20, 1831 in Poitiers , † August 10, 1908 in Paris ) was a French politician , journalist and writer .

Life

Arthur Ranc studied law in Paris and also attended the École des Chartes . He was an ardent Republican and in 1853 involved in a conspiracy against Napoleon III. involved but was acquitted. Shortly thereafter, he was jailed for membership in a secret society. In 1855 he was arrested again for his involvement in Edmond Bellemare's assassination attempt on the emperor and deported to Algeria without trial , from where he was able to escape in June 1856. He then settled in Geneva . Returned to France in 1859 as a result of an amnesty, he worked as a proofreader for the Opinion nationale as well as for several opposition newspapers, which incurred a few punishments on him.

After the fall of Napoleon III. on September 4, 1870, Ranc Maire became the 9th Parisian district . During the siege of Paris he left the city on October 14, 1870 in a balloon and went to Bordeaux to Léon Gambetta , who appointed him a kind of police director. He then organized the espionage service, through which General Trochu was informed about the distribution and strength of the Prussian armed forces around Paris.

On February 8, 1871, Ranc was elected to the National Assembly by the Seine department . He voted against the peace preliminaries and resigned his mandate after they were accepted. In March 1871 he became a member of the Paris Commune and was a member of the Committee on Justice and Foreign Affairs. He tried in vain to mediate peace between the Paris Maires and the Communards. Since he disapproved of the decree on the shooting of hostages, he withdrew from the commune on April 6, 1871.

In November 1871, Ranc joined the editorial team of the République française , the body of his patron Gambetta. Since July 30, 1871 a member of the Paris municipal council, he was elected to the National Assembly of the Rhône department on May 11, 1873 and stayed on the extreme left. When a month later legal proceedings were opened against him for his participation in the Paris Commune, he fled to Belgium . There he published a pamphlet in which he justified his behavior during the time of the commune. On October 13, 1873, he was sentenced to death in absentia. In the same year he held a duel with Paul de Cassagnac in Brussels .

Ranc stayed in Belgium until 1879, returned to France after the amnesty issued by Jules Grévy that year and continued to write as an avid gambettist for the République française and Voltaire , as he did during his time in exile . On September 4, 1881, he was elected a member of the Chamber of Deputies . In 1885, however, he was defeated in the elections and thus lost his mandate. For this he became a senator in January 1891 . From 1890 he acted as editor-in-chief of Paris . He vigorously defended the republic against the agitation of Georges Boulanger and played an equally courageous role in the Dreyfus affair . During the duel between Marie-Georges Picquart and Hubert-Joseph Henry , he acted as Picquart's second. Overturned by the influence of the nationalists in 1899 and no longer elected to the Senate on January 28, 1900, he was sent back to the Senate from Corsica in February 1903 . He succeeded Georges Clemenceau in March 1905 as editor of the Aurore , in which Zola's letter J'accuse had appeared. He was also President of the Association of Republican Journalists. He died in Paris on August 10, 1908 at the age of 76.

Works (selection)

• Le roman d'une conspiration , 1869 (dramatized by Fouquier and Carré)
• Histoire de la conspiration de Babœuf , 1869
• Sous l'Empire, roman de mœurs politiques et sociales , political novel about the Second Empire , 1872
• De Bordeaux à Versailles. L'assemblée de 1871 etc. , history of the National Assembly, 1877; new edition 1880

literature

• Arthur Ranc . In: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon . 4th edition. Volume 13, Verlag des Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig / Vienna 1885–1892, pp. 569–570.
• Ranc, Arthur . In: Encyclopædia Britannica , 11th edition, 1910-11, Vol. 22, pp. 884 f.

Web links

• Ranc, Arthur on the website of the Sénat français (French)