No one ever succeeded as he did in finding words that appealed to the mob, and which in a few words expressed so much. . . . He believed in nothing, not even in himself; respected nothing, loved nothing . . . and he never hesitated before uttering one of his bon mots, or writing one of his bitter scathing articles, even when he was perfectly aware that by doing so he was hurting innocent people — people who had done no wrong, and who had only incurred his displeasure by being either related or connected with those who had become the subject of his criticism.”¹

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”).

The Second Empire, founded in 1852 by Napoleon III through a coup d’etat against an oligarchic and politically unstable republic, was then still in its staunchly authoritarian phase where freedom of expression was extended only to those willing to sing the praises of Bonapartism. For authors associated with the republican opposition who refused to follow Victor Hugo into exile, self-censorship, prudence, and veiled allusions were necessary evils in the process of getting published. Despite this stifling atmosphere, Rochefort found it relatively straightforward to adapt the risqué, tongue-in-cheek wordplay that had peppered his dramatic output to the demands of popular journalism. Conscious that Parisian audiences already viewed everything, including dramatic political sagas like Garibaldi’s campaign in Italy, through the theatrical prism of staged conflict and sensationalism, Rochefort decided to make the most of his experience as a vaudevilliste. “The vaudeville mentality [vaudevillisme]”, he observed in an editorial, “when applied to the real world . . . is a malady that is hard to cure. Faced with the calembour, reason is bereft of force and logic goes silent.”⁴

Though literary journals like Le Charivari were explicitly forbidden from publishing on politics, Rochefort’s columns were almost invariably political in nature, notwithstanding the thin façade of silly wordplay and frivolous gossip that, more often than not, kept him from running afoul of the censors. Whether singing the praises of Abraham Lincoln (at a time when Napoleon III unofficially supported the Confederate cause), ridiculing the expensive failure that turned out to be the Second French Intervention in Mexico (1861–1867), deploring the vulgar excesses of the arriviste bourgeoisie, or ironizing the small-minded and jingoistic attitudes of the popular classes, Rochefort excelled at provocatively poking holes in the nation’s most cherished myths while revealing very little about his own convictions. His critics, like the Catholic author Louis Veuillot, argued that Rochefort was merely pouring vitriol on everything and everyone out of sheer misanthropy and contrarianism; his admirers, however, agreed with Victor Hugo that there was a “profound and piercing irony” at play in his writings.⁵

An early critic of colonialism as such (not merely of its worst excesses), Rochefort minced no words in lampooning Europe’s project of liberating distant peoples by force. In an article entitled “Deplorable Peoples”, published in Le Charivari in 1862, he decried the fact that “influential thinkers” in Europe (whom he refrained from naming) continued to refer to “the citizens of South and even North America” as “unfortunate peoples”, and pointed to the insidious way in which middle-class humanitarianism (parodied in many of his vaudevilles) and governmental newspapers stoked up jingoistic fever. As he explained:

In vain do these [native] populations [go about their lives] like the happiest of people, for when our well-meaning journals hear of them laughing and minding their own business with not a care in the world, they can't help but cry out: “Good God! See what wretchedness these people have to struggle with.” The peoples in question are not even aware of France's torments over their fate, and yet a day comes by when they are told: “Look here, this situation cannot go on, would you not like us to send you a bit of happiness in the form of an occupation army that will help you freely change your situation, since we do everything freely?” To which the unfortunates reply: “We appreciate the intention, but we do not care for changing our position, even freely. . . . Those who have led you to believe that we are miserable have been led astray by an excess of philanthropy.” Unfortunate people! So unfortunate in fact as to not even perceive their own misfortune. . . . We believe the moment is coming when we shall have to make Mr. Lincoln understand that the unfortunate people he is leading might easily see an end to their misfortunes if only he allowed us to intervene. . . . As for the Argentine or Haitian republics, they are misfortune incarnate.⁶

An avid controversialist and duelist — at a time when journalistic conflicts often ended on the field of honour — Rochefort soon attracted the attention of more prestigious publications like Le Figaro and Le Soleil, for which he contributed articles throughout the mid-1860s.

As a columnist for Le Figaro — a bi-weekly strictly devoted to cultural news and society gossip before its 1867 transformation into a political daily — Rochefort could not afford to broach overtly political topics the way he had done at Le Charivari. However, he compensated for this involuntary tameness by further defining and sharpening the very thing that had first won him some degree of fame: his polemics against decadence, including the decadence of France in particular and that of Western civilization more broadly. Ernest Bersot, a noted philosophe moraliste of the day, thought Rochefort remained very much a man of the popular press but saw in him a budding moralist in the Enlightenment tradition of Voltaire, with a gift for “talking lightly about serious things”.⁷ “[Rochefort] scourges social impurities”, the novelist Camille Debans noted, “in a manner that is all the bloodier for evincing more disdain and contempt than rage.”⁸ While to the Provençal poet Paul Arène, the Le Figaro satirist already embodied a new brand of political humour, “so much so that today editors-in-chief can be heard saying: Give us a Rochefort, just as the publishers of former times would say: Give us something in the style of [Montesquieu’s] Persian Letters. And, in fact, everyone imitates Rochefort at present, even Rochefort”.⁹

To Rochefort, decadence was embodied in two distinct yet connected social phenomena: the predominance of a fraudulent, socially liberal yet politically conservative elite on the one hand, and the gullibility of the masses who consented to be ruled and influenced by this elite on the other — two themes that were already at the heart of the vaudeville tradition Rochefort was so versed in. This duality is also reflected in the title of his 1867 book, Les Français de la décadence (an anthology of his articles in Le Figaro), which can be read either as “the French who embody decadence” (for their own nefarious ends) or “the French nation in the midst of decadence” (oblivious to, yet permanently adrift in it).

Unable to target specific members of Napoleon III’s government or the powerful elites that supported it, Rochefort sublimated his hatred of the regime into a sarcastic critique of the conspicuous consumption and promiscuity permeating the “new Paris” of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann (whose radical urban renewal schemes were then transforming the troubled French capital into an orderly and glitzy metropolis). The relentless touristification of Paris, the gaudy fashions trickling down from the ladies and gentlemen of the Imperial court, the sanctimonious religiosity of people who gleefully applauded blood sports and the death penalty (which Rochefort opposed), the charlatanism of self-appointed “experts” of all sorts, the ostentatious Anglophobia of small-minded “patriots”, and the pompous fanfaronnade of “this mass of dupes we call the French nation” — all these themes and variations thereon frame the first series of articles Rochefort produced for Le Figaro with an ease, directness, and humour that, though far from timeless, has retained much of its original sparkle.

Rochefort’s rhetorical device of insulting (playfully yet convincingly) the French nation granted Le Figaro’s nearly fifty thousand readers — overwhelmingly drawn from the ranks of the middle and haute bourgeoisie, and politically conservative or moderate even when opposed to the Empire — permission to laugh at their sacred cows (from Joan of Arc to French Algeria) and vicariously vent the fears and resentment triggered by the rapid pace of social and cultural change. The paper was then — and was perceived to be so well after — an obligatory accessory for the blasé dandy of the boulevards who asked his “club valet [for] ‘My absinthe, my toothpick and my Figaro’”.

The publications that Rochefort wrote for in the 1860s were not as accessible to the working-class reading public as the ubiquitous and highly affordable Petit Journal (launched in 1863 and covering a wide variety of topics), but his brand of political satire undoubtedly found an audience across the class divide. Forced to resign from Le Figaro in 1867 after his barbs against the Second Empire became too explicit for the censors, Rochefort finally launched his own publication a year later, when censorship laws had become less stringent. Entitled La Lanterne and appearing every Sunday, it was a rambling, opinionated, and sarcastic review of various political and cultural events, written entirely by Rochefort himself. His style, mutatis mutandis, calls to mind both the anarchic gonzo journalism of a century later and the mocking diatribes of today’s TV political satirists. Its pocket-size and crimson-red covers immediately marked it out as a subversive and countercultural artefact, an allure that only grew once the authorities endeavored to shut it down. With an initial readership of over 120,000 (a figure exceeded only by cheap dailies like Le Petit Journal), it quickly became clear, however, that Rochefort’s “little red book” was being passed around Paris and even in provinces with a meme-like fervour.

Forced to take refuge in Brussels in 1868 — where he was warmly greeted and hosted by his close friend and mentor, Victor Hugo — Rochefort continued publishing La Lanterne from exile, arranging for copies to be smuggled into France from Belgium. French authorities attempted to stop the operation, but it was likely a half-hearted affair given Rochefort’s popularity. As Gustave Flaubert noted some years later in a letter to a friend: “The first to sing the praises of La Lanterne to me was a magistrate (M. Censier) and the first to make me read it was a priest (the vicar of Ouville). The president [of the Civil Court of the Seine] Benoist-Champy read from it during the soirees he hosted at his house . . . and all the members of the Emperor’s entourage, not counting the Emperor himself, were enraptured by [Rochefort’s] obscenities.”¹⁰

Rochefort was tried and sentenced in absentia to more than a year in prison and 10,000 francs in fines, but continued undeterred in his self-proclaimed mission as “errant journalist and literary poacher”, writing his weekly tirades from Brussels, Amsterdam, or London.¹¹ Translated into English, German, and even Russian, La Lanterne became the ultimate embodiment of subversive flair for scores of Francophile literati across Europe and the wider world.¹² Copycat publications sprang up throughout Paris as well as in a number of other places, including Madrid and Montreal.¹³ The success was so massive that by 1869, Rochefort was brazenly contemplating his entry into French politics, despite being a wanted fugitive in his homeland. An inveterate gambler who never shied away from a good bet, he returned to France in November 1869 to run in a Paris constituency as a radical republican candidate. He was, predictably enough, arrested as soon as he set foot on French soil, but was immediately released at the request of the Minister for the Interior for fear of sparking the sort of street rioting that had already rocked the capital earlier that year.

“Not a politician”, the mantra underpinning the populist leader’s aura of inviolable authenticity, was as powerful then as it is today, and there is no doubt that it helped project Rochefort court voters in the highly contested elections of 1869. His moderate republican rival — the highly respected and influential Jules Favre — was perceived by the mainly working-class voters in the Seine Department’s seventh constituency as overly inclined to compromise with the Imperial regime’s reformist wing. Rochefort turned this growing mistrust of yet another establishment man to his advantage by positioning himself as an all-or-nothing democrat and socialist; he ultimately far exceeded expectations, losing to Favre by only two thousand votes. Riots broke out in the streets of Paris following the news of Rochefort’s defeat and his popularity only continued to grow the more the press (including mainstream republican newspapers) rallied against him.

As Léon Gambetta, the leader of the republican opposition, correctly intuited, Rochefort was no longer dismissible as a clownish controversialist. Already victorious in two separate races, Gambetta vacated his seat in the first constituency of the Seine Department and indirectly endorsed Rochefort’s candidacy in the ensuing by-election. The latter easily triumphed over the moderate republican candidate Hippolyte Carnot by more than four thousand votes, but played down the thrilling outcome, careful not to taint his outsider credentials with the stench of careerism: “I would enter the Chamber [of Deputies]”, Rochefort declared defiantly in the wake of the election, “only to make one or two uproars . . . [and for] a call to arms at a favourable moment.”¹⁴

He took his seat at the extreme left of the Chamber’s hemicycle, sparking a storm of controversy by supporting a string of uncompromising anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and secularist reform proposals, going so far as to mock the Emperor’s military uniforms and demand the reestablishment of the 1789 Paris Commune in his maiden speech. As the editor-in-chief of a new daily newspaper, La Marseillaise, Rochefort pressed on with his journalistic crusade, routinely and gleefully savaging the Emperor and his entourage with every opportunity.

However, in the heat of the moment, Rochefort proved curiously reasonable and conciliatory. A duel ensued in January 1870, which, though it did not directly involve Rochefort, led to the death of Victor Noir — a junior contributor to La Marseillaise — at the hands of Pierre-Napoléon Bonaparte, the Emperor’s cousin. Noir’s funeral in Neuilly-sur-Seine attracted a huge crowd of more than 100,000 people and threatened to degenerate into a full-scale revolt against the regime. Aware of the inevitable bloodbath that would follow any attempt to “take Paris”, Rochefort twice spoke to the crowds and called for calm instead of insurrection, urging them to turn back.¹⁵ The momentum was soon dissipated, averting a crisis such as the Emperor had not yet faced.

Rochefort’s more radical friends, like the socialist firebrand Jules Vallès, never forgave him this moment of counterrevolutionary hesitancy, but to the disaffected “good and honest people” he championed in his writings, the author of La Lanterne remained a credible spokesman. Arrested in early 1870 a second time for supposedly stoking the very insurrection that others on the extreme left had accused him of stifling, Rochefort was thrown in Paris’ infamous Sainte-Pélagie prison (the home of many a political prisoner) where he still lingered on July 19, as news of a war against Prussia began coursing like an electric shock through Paris. The French Empire was about to collapse not through revolution, but through the foolhardiness of its vainglorious and warmongering Emperor who, sick and overwhelmed by Prussian Blood and Iron, surrendered at Sedan on September 2, 1870. He would die in exile two years later.

The provisional Government of National Defense that stepped into the ensuing political vacuum needed to shore up its fragile credibility with a populace brutalized and incensed by an unwinnable war. As it convened at Paris City Hall to declare a new republic, its members — all lawyers, officers, and statesmen of repute — remembered Rochefort and his strange mesmeric hold over the Parisian masses. “Rochefort has been released from jail. Grim and threatening, he has just passed by our window, carried in triumph behind a red flag”, noted the diarist Geneviève Bréton.¹⁶ The man who had supposedly botched the insurrection of 1870 was now once again the revolutionary of the hour. The elitist Government of National Defense bowed before the will of the sans-culottes and drafted the vaudevilliste into its own ranks as Minister without Portfolio and, appropriately, President of the Barricades Commission. This did not last long. Despairing of the left’s internecine squabbles and disillusioned with the unbridgeable divide between conservative law-and-order ministers and the Parisian working classes hungry for radical change and real popular power, Rochefort resigned not even two months after his appointment. The peak of his notoriety was yet to come.

The Paris Commune was born, as Karl Marx noted, with the audacity of “plain working men to infringe upon the governmental privilege of their ‘natural superiors’” and with a refusal of “ready-made utopias” drafted by “gentlemen with pen and inkhorn”.¹⁷ Rochefort admired the Commune’s direct democracy and no-nonsense patriotism, but disapproved of its censorship tactics and violent crackdown on opponents. Attacked once again on the extreme left for being too conciliatory and demonized by the new right wing government in Versailles as an arch-rabblerouser, Rochefort retreated into his role of inconsolable cynic, railing against Versailles’ treasonous peace with Prussia and decrying the similarities between the Commune’s diktats and those of his former nemesis, the Emperor of the French. His insolence went unpunished until he was finally apprehended in late May 1871 by forces loyal to the Versailles government, just as the smoldering ruins of the defeated Commune were belying the new republic’s emancipatory claims and sowing the seeds of future discontent.

In spite of his ambivalence toward the Commune, Rochefort was scapegoated as a ringleader of the Communards by the Versailles authorities and sentenced (after almost two years of confinement in a military prison) to transportation for life in the recently established penal colony on the archipelago of New Caledonia in the South Pacific. Arriving in December 1873, Rochefort spent only a few months in the camp for political prisoners. He managed an unprecedented escape in the company of five fellow prisoners in mid-1874 and made his way over to the United States, stopping in Australia, Fiji, and finally Honolulu, where he and two of his companions were briefly entertained by the Francophile King of Hawaiʻi, David La‘amea Kalākaua (1836–1891).¹⁸ From San Francisco to New York (where he gave a public lecture on the Commune and the ravages of French colonialism) and finally Switzerland, Rochefort fascinated audiences with his incongruous mélange of aristocratic manners and zero-sum radicalism.¹⁹ The “great Communist” who “remain[ed] a Marquis to the finger-tips” proved a fascinating spectacle in Britain and America, and Rochefort came to embody “radical chic” a century before Tom Wolfe coined the phrase, managing to retain his upper-class art-collecting entourage despite his professed hatred of elites and privilege.²⁰

Returning to France in 1880, thanks to the amnesty granted to former Communards, Rochefort founded yet another publication, the daily L’Intransigeant, which, as the name implied, pulled no punches in dealing with the political, economic, and moral failings of the Third Republic. Increasingly receptive to the idea that the reactionary nationalism he had lampooned in his youth was the only cure for France’s seemingly unstoppable decline, Rochefort did not shy away from any of the major political scandals of the day and relished the thought of himself as chief opinion maker of tout Paris. Ever the gambler, he threw his lot in with the camp that promised to stir up the most controversy and sell the most copy. Such was the case of General Georges Boulanger, a charismatic military man turned populist crusader, whose cause Rochefort tirelessly championed throughout the mid-1880s.

Though Boulanger’s faction — an uneasy alliance of far-right and far-left militants seeking broad social, economic, and constitutional reforms — experienced brief success at the polls, it soon collapsed as easily as it had materialized. Shunned by mainstream republicans due to his authoritarian impulses and monarchical connections, and threatened with prosecution for conspiring to overthrow the government, Boulanger went into exile in England, taking Rochefort — his unofficial aide-de-camp — with him. The General never recovered from his ill-considered political adventure (ending his own life in 1891 in a fit of emotional distress), but Rochefort returned to France in 1895 following yet another wave of amnesties for political offenders. Still the anti-politician of old in the eyes of his friends and admirers (which included anarchists like Louise Michel), Rochefort’s rightward drift became more and more explicit. A vocal supporter of unions and workers’ rights, Rochefort was also by now an antisemitic jingoist, decrying, in an early iteration of today’s “great replacement” theory, the flooding of France by “the Rothschilds” with “thirty-five thousand Jews . . . from the Danubian provinces whom they have found small jobs for . . . [and] naturalized as French citizens even if nineteen parts out of twenty do not speak a word of our language.”²¹ Predictably, when the Dreyfus Affair erupted in the late 1890s, Rochefort assumed the role directly opposite to Emile Zola (whose “J’Accuse…!” first shone light on the injustice perpetrated against the falsely accused Jewish captain), obsessively attacking Dreyfus, his supporters, and the “Jewish-Catholic elites” that strove only to “crush the common people and the poor”.²²

In his 1906 short story “The Informer”, Joseph Conrad had Mr. X — an art-collecting aristocratic dandy and nihilistic outrage peddler famous for a series of once popular “flaming red revolutionary pamphlets” — explain the source of his successful demagoguery:

“What I have acquired has come to me through my writings; not from the millions of pamphlets distributed gratis to the hungry and the oppressed, but from the hundreds of thousands of copies sold to the well-fed bourgeoisie. . . . Don’t you know yet,” [X] said, “that an idle and selfish class loves to see mischief being made, even if it is made at its own expense? Its own life being all a matter of pose and gesture, it is unable to realize the power and the danger of a real movement and of words that have no sham meaning. It is all fun and sentiment. It is sufficient, for instance, to point out the attitude of the old French aristocracy towards the philosophers whose words were preparing the Great Revolution. . . . The demagogue carries the amateurs of emotion with him. Amateurism in this, that, and the other thing is a delightfully easy way of killing time, and feeding one’s own vanity — the silly vanity of being abreast with the ideas of the day after tomorrow.”²³

The story was a thinly disguised portrait of Rochefort, who, by the time of its publication, had fallen into disrepute in his native France (despised by his former allies on the left; mistrusted by his allies of convenience on the far right) and near oblivion elsewhere. Rochefort’s death in 1913 briefly garnered international attention, but with the approach of World War I, the idiosyncratic Rochefort came to be regarded as a vestige of the past. His antisemitic bile was quoted approvingly by Louis-Ferdinand Céline in the 1930s and his La Lanterne was even briefly revived as a French Resistance newssheet in the 1940s, but by and large Rochefort’s name disappeared from all political debates following the triumph of the postwar order.

Today, the legacy of this populist forerunner and critic of liberal decadence is slowly reemerging. His name is once again in print: as an early proponent of French declinism, an early opponent of vaccination, and a precursor to xenophobic nationalism, such as that embraced by the modern French far right.²⁴ More importantly, Rochefort’s visceral appeals to emotion are no longer the empty “fun and sentiment” of Conrad’s self-seeking Mr. X, but the stuff of what is now termed “illiberal”, or, more accurately, “anti-liberal” democracy — a current that spans both the ideological left and right. “Nothing is as painful as feeling for one's country an attachment that is devoid of all respect”, joked Rochefort in 1865 in one of his trademark editorials.²⁵ As revanchist populism makes great strides around the world once again, few politicians would deny the truth and prescience of these words.