Charles-Louis Havas
Charles-Louis Havas (born July 5, 1783 in Rouen , † May 21, 1858 in Bougival ) was a French publicist and founder of Bureau Havas , today's news and press agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) and the PR group Havas Group .
life and work
1783–1805: Childhood and Adolescence
Charles-Louis Havas was born in 1783 into a wealthy Jewish family in Rouen, France, as the second of five children of Charles-Louis Havas (1752-1834) and Marie-Anne Belard († 1834). Havas still had three sisters and a brother.
His father of the same name was a businessman, publisher of a local newspaper and worked as a civil servant in the French government. This also gave Charles-Louis Havas Junior access to all ministers who often shared confidential information with him. Even at a young age, Havas was considered a man with very good social contacts. He was fluent in French, German and English and could also speak some Greek and Latin.
1805–1815: Working life as a trader and starting his own family
After his military service as a supply officer, Havas met Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard, a friend of the family, in 1805. The respected merchant had generated a considerable fortune as a supplier to the Napoleonic army and now offered Havas the opportunity to come to the port city of Nantes to also work as a trader there. Havas also quickly became a supplier to the imperial armies and learned to wholesale, buy and sell wheat, cotton and other colonial goods such as sugar, coffee and cocoa. In the course of the continental blockade initiated by Napoleon , Havas was sent to Lisbon . By speculating with 3,000 tons of cotton, which Havas imported by ship from Brazil to Portugal at a strategically right point in time and then sold at horrific prices to the French spinning mills, which were isolated from the world market, Havas suddenly became a wealthy and respected man in December 1807 . On February 4, 1808, Havas married Jeanne Durand-Guillaume de Roure, the daughter of a business partner, in Lisbon.
During the British occupation of Portugal in August 1808, Havas and his family returned to Rouen, France. Charles-Louis Havas worked there again as a merchant with the support of his two uncles Prosper Tranquille Havas and Charles Constant Havas, the assistant to Napoleon's confidante Joseph Fouché . On January 19, 1809, Havas' wife Jeanne gave birth to their eldest daughter, Jeanne Caroline, in Rouen. The family moved to Paris in 1811 . In the same year, on October 14, 1811, their son Charles-Guillaume Havas was born. On February 23, 1814, Auguste Jean Pierre Havas, the second son, followed.
Charles-Louis Havas was now a specialist in public credit trading. The Napoleonic Wars had increased the deficit of the state and the need for credit grew enormously in the course of this. Historians assume that the young Havas successfully dissolved a trade blockade during the Napoleonic Wars with his contacts and appropriate funding. As a reward, he became a co-owner of the Gazette de France newspaper , where Havas first came across the world of the news press. As a result of his lifestyle, Havas was intermittently accused of being a spy for Napoleon Bonaparte . In the course of the defeat of the Napoleonic troops at the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, Havas not only lost all shares in the newspaper, but also lost all of his assets and went bankrupt personally. Havas had to start all over again.
1815–1832: Working as a translator
With the fall of the empire, his friend Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard began again with international financial speculation. Commuting between Paris and London, he needed a correspondent in Paris to deliver the latest news. Someone who was able to quickly and reliably translate and summarize the content of the world's major newspapers. Hava's own language skills were complemented by his Lisbon-born wife, who was fluent in Spanish and Portuguese. In the years to come, Havas sold information coming from abroad to diplomats, bankers, business people, politicians and the national press. There was a steadily growing interest in such international news in the French business, political and media landscape. The Havas couple were at the head of business and financial information bureaus in the 1820s, and Charles-Louis Havas was one of the most sought-after publicists in the country. But in 1825, Charles-Louis Havas and his family were again completely financially ruined by the British economic crisis triggered by a large-scale stock fraud.
After this crisis, his friend Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard asked him again for a favor: Havas should set up a network of European informants. Their job was to read everything to do with the activities of competing banks: wars, trade, commodity prices, ships. Charles-Louis Havas was now responsible for the English and German press. Spanish and Portuguese for his wife Jeanne. Brazil, Louisiana, Egypt, they dissected world news, from politics to the stock market. Every day they received a letter from James Collans, Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard's agent on the London Stock Exchange. Despite all the work, Havas was still in debt, as he confessed in a letter from his sister in 1831.
1832–1840: Foundation of Bureau Havas and Agence Havas
King Louis-Philippe I , who came to power through the July Revolution of 1830 , was extremely liberal and campaigned for a French state with a free press. Havas recognized the emerging need for improved organization of the messaging and trade in news. Accordingly, Havas founded the translation agency Bureau Havas in 1832 at 4 Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau ⊙ in the 1st arrondissement of Paris opposite the Poste centrale du Louvre , which operated as the Agence des Feuilles Politiques - Correspondance Générale . Due to its exclusive location, Havas only had to cross the street every morning to pick up letters and newspapers at the largest post office in town. The carrier pigeon served as another most important means of communication in the era before the telegraph technology , which was only introduced in 1839 . Havas had established carrier pigeon lines between London, Brussels and Paris. With the latest news and morning prices on the London Stock Exchange, the pigeons flew from London to Paris every morning at 8 a.m., where they landed at Havas six hours later. So Havas was the first to sell the latest news and stock market prices from England to interested parties every day from 2 p.m. Another main part of his business was the brokering of French dispatches abroad. His office was also a bookstore and developed into a center of international politics and information.
After the takeover of Correspondence Garnier and the acquisition of smaller correspondence companies, the world's first news agency, Agence Havas, emerged from the lithographic press service Bureau Havas on October 22, 1835 . Havas moved his place of work a few doors down to an 80 square meter office at 51 Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau ⊙ . On the outer facade of the office building, he had a sign with the company's motto Vite et bien (German: Fast and good ) attached. Havas has since been regarded as a pioneer and trailblazer in the collection and dissemination of news as a commodity and, as a result, as the founder of the international news and press agencies .
At Havas, Paul Julius Reuter , founder of the London news agency Reuters , which is still in operation today, and Bernhard Wolff , founder of the Berlin news agency Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau (predecessor of the dpa ), learned the business of running an international news agency at Havas . In 1846 five New York journalists founded the Associated Press on the model of the Havas agency .
Havas' agency grew steadily. For the flow of information with the continent Havas used the emerging telegraph lines, for which he received an exclusive concession from the French state. A worldwide network of correspondents reported from Crimea, Italy, Mexico and the United States. Havas' political connections went so far that he was considered the exclusive supplier of political information and developed an almost "indecent relationship between the state and the press". In the course of the 1830s Havas had made all 600 newspapers and periodicals in France largely dependent on the news that he distributed. Havas had also undoubtedly become the most important telegraphic news agency of its time in the world.
The French writer Honoré de Balzac expressed his criticism of these circumstances :
"Le public peut croire qu'il existe plusieurs journaux, mais il n'y a en définitive, qu'un seul journal. (...) Un bureau dirigé par Monsieur Havas."
"The public may believe that there are several newspapers, but in the end there is only one newspaper. (...) An office under the direction of Mr. Havas."
1840–1858: pioneer of the modern advertising industry and death
In order to cover the immense costs of his correspondent network, Charles-Louis Havas became increasingly concerned with advertising from the 1840s . The news mogul bought several advertising companies and had a monopoly on the advertising market by 1857 . He used different models to sell advertising content. In one of these models, the news agency offered a particular newspaper the opportunity to pay for some of the news it bought by leaving advertising space. This made it possible for Havas to resell this advertising space to industrialists and dealers who wanted to advertise.
After the death of Charles-Louis Havas on May 21, 1858, his company developed into the major news agency Agence France-Presse and the Havas Group , one of the largest worldwide agency networks with more than 20,000 employees in over 100 countries.
Phrase
The saying “This is a Havas” (meaning: this is a lie, nonsense or rubbish) is particularly common in Switzerland. The former French news agency Havas still lives ingloriously on many people's lips because of its false reports during the First World War .
Individual evidence
- ^ John Entwisle: The tale of two cities . In: The Baron , accessed March 4, 2020
- ^ Genealogy of the Havas family
- ↑ a b c d e Official biography of the Havas Group about its founder Charles-Louis Havas
- ↑ Terhi Rantanen: When News Was New. Page 30, Wiley-Blackwell Verlag, 2009
- ↑ a b Mark Tungate: Adland: A Global History of Advertising , page 179, publisher: Kogan Page, 2007
- ^ A b Bill Kovarik: Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age. Page 267, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015, 2nd edition
- ^ A b Terhi Rantanen: When News Was New. Page 31, Wiley-Blackwell Verlag, 2009
- ↑ Volker Barth: What (h) re facts: Knowledge productions of global news agencies 1835-1939. Page 20, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019
- ↑ a b Carole Bibily: October 22, 1835: creation de l'agence Havas, future AFP. Les Echos, October 22, 2011
- ^ Christoph Rosol: This Strippenzieher. Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 19, 2010
- ↑ Mark Tungate: Adland: A Global History of Advertising , page 180, Publisher: Kogan Page, 2007
- ↑ Havas ( Memento from April 28, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) . In: The Dictionary of Idioms . 2013.
- ^ Walter Heim: Newer newspaper fables . In: Swiss Folklore. Korrespondenzblatt , Vol. 44 (1954), pp. 68-75, ISSN 0048-9522 .
- ^ Walter Brunner: Poisoned sources. The First World War in Sundgau in the newspapers of Northwestern Switzerland , page 3.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Havas, Charles-Louis |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French publicist and founder of the "Bureau Havas", today's Agence France-Presse (AFP) |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 5, 1783 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Rouen , France |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 21, 1858 |
| Place of death | Bougival |