Prévost-Paradol

Prévost-Paradol, LUCIEN ANATOLE, French journalist, was born at Paris, son of an actress, 8th August 1829, passed with distinction through the Collège Bourbon and École Normale, and became in 1855 professor of French Literature at Aix. Hardly a year later he was at work in Paris on the Journal des Débats and Courrier du Dimanche, and from time to time he published collections of essays on literature and politics, of which the best is his Essais sur les Moralistes Français (1864). In 1865 he was elected to the Academy, and in 1868 he visited England, and was honoured at Edinburgh with a public entertainment. He had always been, as a moderate liberal, an opponent of the empire, but the accession of Ollivier to power in January 1870 seemed to open up a new era for French policy, and he allowed himself to accept the post of envoy to the United States. Scarcely was he installed when the war with Germany broke out, and Prévost-Paradol, his mind unhinged by the virulent attacks made upon him by the republican press, and hopeless of the issue of the great struggle before his country, solved his own difficulties by suicide at Washington, July 20, 1870.