Henri Opper de Blowitz

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Opper de Blowitz at the vanity fair on December 7, 1889

Henri Georges Stephane Adolphe Opper de Blowitz (born December 28, 1825 in Blowitz ; died January 18, 1903 in Paris ) was a French journalist .

Blowitz was born in the Austrian Empire as the son of a Jewish family. He left his native Bohemia at the age of 15 and acquired a wide range of language skills while traveling. After he initially wanted to emigrate to America for financial reasons, he accepted a position as professor of German at the Lycée von Tours after graduating in 1849 . He ended his academic career in 1859 after working in Limoges , Poitiers and Marseille in favor of a career as a journalist. He became editor of the Gazette du Midi , later of La Décentralisation in Lyon . In the same year he married.

Opper de Blowitz was involved in several scandals as a journalist, for example in 1869 during Ferdinand de Lesseps's candidacy for the French parliament. Early in 1870 he predicted the collapse of the Second Empire in the Franco-German War . He countered efforts to deport him as an undesirable foreigner by being naturalized as a French citizen in the same year .

In the course of the war Adolphe Thiers made him his colleague and after the war offered him the post of French consul in Riga . Blowitz went instead to the London Times , whose Paris chief correspondent he became in 1873 after the death of his predecessor. He also wrote for other magazines, such as Harper's Magazine .

As one of the best-known journalists of his time, Opper de Blowitz was involved in many political and diplomatic events, including the war-in-sight crisis of 1875, in which he published a dispatch sent to him by the French foreign minister about German war plans. In 1878 he managed to publish the text of the Berlin Treaty concluded at the Berlin Congress at the same time as it was signed, after he had previously provided internal information from the congress sessions, much to the annoyance of the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck . In the same year Opper de Blowitz became an officer in the Legion of Honor .

As a journalist, Opper de Blowitz conducted interviews with many personalities of his time. In addition to many French statesmen, these included Bismarck, Pope Leo XIII. , the Spanish King Alfonso XII. and the Romanian King Karl I. His report on the inauguration trip of the Orient Express , in which he took part on October 4, 1883 at the invitation of Georges Nagelmackers , is still known today . At his destination in Constantinople , he was one of the first Western journalists to conduct an interview with Sultan Abdülhamid II .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.jewish-route.eu/deutsch/mesta/02_blovice/blovice.htm (accessed on July 25, 2011)
  2. ↑ There are such scoops and such ( Memento from August 2, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) (accessed on July 25, 2011)
  3. ↑ Facsimile of the order register in the database of the French Ministry of Culture (French, accessed on July 25, 2011)
  4. ↑ Werner Sölch: Orient Express. The heyday, decline and rebirth of a luxury train, 3rd edition, Alba-Verlag Düsseldorf 1998, ISBN 3-87094-173-1 , p. 9 f.

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Opper de Blowitz, Henri
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Opper de Blowitz, Henri Georges Stephane Adolphe
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French journalist, chief Paris correspondent for the Times
DATE OF BIRTH December 28, 1825
PLACE OF BIRTH Blowitz
DATE OF DEATH January 18, 1903
Place of death Paris