Rochefort, HENRI

Rochefort, HENRI, whose full style is Victor Henri, Comte de Rochefort-Lucay, a stormy-petrel of French politics, was born in Paris, 29th July 1832. He studied medicine, and became a clerk in the hôtel-de-ville, but was dismissed for neglecting his duties, and now cast himself entirely upon journalism, contributing to the Charivari, the Figaro, and other papers, until in 1868 he started his own notorious weekly, La Lanterne, which was quickly suppressed by the government. To avoid fine and imprisonment Rochefort fled to Brussels, but returned in 1869 on his election to the Chamber of Deputies for Paris. He now started the Marseillaise, in which he renewed his bitter attacks on the imperial regime. One consequence of the cowardly murder of its contributor, Victor Noir, by Prince Pierre Bonaparte, was the suppression of the paper and the imprisonment of its editor. The fall of the empire gave him his release, and opened up a rôle for the frothy rhetorician in the government of National Defence. In February 1871 he was elected by Paris to the National Assembly, and soon made public his Communism in the pages of Le Mot d'Ordre. As soon as he foresaw the end of the Commune, about the middle of May, he left his dupes and comrades to their doom, and made his escape from Paris. But the Prussians caught him at Meaux and sent him to Versailles, where he was sentenced to imprisonment for life. Later he was deported to New Caledonia, whence he escaped in 1874. In London and Geneva he tried to revive the Lanterne and influence the Parisian press, but at length he was enabled to return by the general amnesty of 11th July 1880. In his newspaper, L'Intransigeant, he showed himself as impracticable as ever, sat in the National Assembly (1885-86), took up Boulangerism, and returning to France in 1895, published The Adventures of My Life (1896; Eng. trans. abridged, 1896).