Rochefort, Victor Henri, Marquis De Rochefort-luçay

Related Category: French History: Biographies

(vēktôr´ äNrē´ rôshfôr´ märkē´ də rôshfôr´-lüsā´), 1831–1913, French journalist and politician. The editor of Le Figaro in 1863, he also founded and edited the bitterly anti-imperial journals La Lanterne (1868) and La Marseillaise (1869). After the Franco-Prussian War he founded Le Mot d'ordre (1871), supported the Commune of Paris, and was consequently sent (1873) to the penal colony of New Caledonia. He soon escaped and revived La Lanterne in Geneva, Switzerland. After the general amnesty of 1880 he returned to Paris and started L'Intransigeant. Twice elected a deputy, Rochefort, in a political switch from the extreme left to the extreme right, became an ardent supporter of Georges Boulanger and was forced to flee France. Tried in absentia, he remained in exile from 1889 to 1895. Later, Rochefort's extreme nationalism led him to take a violent stand against Alfred Dreyfus in the Dreyfus Affair.

See biography by R. L. Williams (1966).