Henri Georges Stephane Adolphe Opper de Blowitz (28 December 1825-18 January 1903) was a Bohemian journalist

Journalist

A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...

.

He was born to a family of Jewish ancestry at Blovice

Blovice

Blovice is a town in the Pilsen Region of the Czech Republic. It lies on the River Úslava, some to the South-East from the regional capital of Pilsen....

 (Blowitz) in Bohemia

Bohemia

Bohemia is a historical region in central Europe, occupying the western two-thirds of the traditional Czech Lands. It is located in the contemporary Czech Republic with its capital in Prague...

, and left home at the age of fifteen to travel, acquiring a wide range of languages in the process. When financial constraints led him to plan emigration to America, he met by chance M. de Falloux

Frédéric Alfred Pierre, comte de Falloux

Frédéric-Alfred-Pierre, comte de Falloux was a French politician and author, famous for having given his name to two laws on education, favorizing private Catholic teaching.-Life:He was born at Angers, Maine-et-Loire...

, the French minister responsible for public education, and was appointed professor of foreign languages at the Tours Lycée in around 1849. He thereafter transferred to the Marseilles Lycée. He resigned his professorship there in 1859 when he married in order to devote himself to literature and politics.

When, in 1869, Ferdinand de Lesseps

Ferdinand de Lesseps

Ferdinand Marie, Vicomte de Lesseps, GCSI was the French developer of the Suez Canal, which joined the Mediterranean and Red Seas in 1869, and substantially reduced sailing distances and times between the West and the East.He attempted to repeat this success with an effort to build a sea-level...

 ran for election as deputy from Marseilles, Blowitz became involved in a scandal due to supplying information to a Legitimist newspaper. This led to calls for his expulsion from France, which he countered by retiring to the country. The next year, the calls began again, as he began to predict the collapse of the Empire during the Franco-Prussian War

Franco-Prussian War

The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and...

; this time, he evaded them by naturalising as a French subject whilst the Battle of Sedan

Battle of Sedan

The Battle of Sedan was fought during the Franco-Prussian War on 1 September 1870. It resulted in the capture of Emperor Napoleon III and large numbers of his troops and for all intents and purposes decided the war in favour of Prussia and its allies, though fighting continued under a new French...

 was being fought.

Once naturalised, he returned to Marseilles, where he worked for Adolphe Thiers

Adolphe Thiers

Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers was a French politician and historian. was a prime minister under King Louis-Philippe of France. Following the overthrow of the Second Empire he again came to prominence as the French leader who suppressed the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871...

. He later worked gathering information for him at Versailles

Versailles

Versailles , a city renowned for its château, the Palace of Versailles, was the de facto capital of the kingdom of France for over a century, from 1682 to 1789. It is now a wealthy suburb of Paris and remains an important administrative and judicial centre...

, and as a result Thiers offered him the French consulship at Riga

Riga

Riga is the capital and largest city of Latvia. With 702,891 inhabitants Riga is the largest city of the Baltic states, one of the largest cities in Northern Europe and home to more than one third of Latvia's population. The city is an important seaport and a major industrial, commercial,...

. Shortly before he was to accept this, Blowitz became the assistant to Laurence Oliphant, the Paris correspondent of The Times

The Times

The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

, whilst the second correspondent was absent. When the second correspondent, Frederick Hardman, succeeded Oliphant, Blowitz remained as assistant, and when Hardman died in 1873 he himself became chief Paris correspondent.
In this role he became famous, both as a journalist and for his insights into diplomacy. In 1875, the duc de Decazes

Louis, duc Decazes

Louis-Charles-Élie-Amanien Decazes de Glücksbierg, 2nd Duc de Decazes and 2nd Hertig af Glücksbierg, was a French statesman.-Biography:...

, the Minister of Foreign Affairs

Minister of Foreign Affairs (France)

Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs ), is France's foreign affairs ministry, with the headquarters located on the Quai d'Orsay in Paris close to the National Assembly of France. The Minister of Foreign and European Affairs in the government of France is the cabinet minister responsible for...

, informed him of a confidential despatch from the French ambassador to Berlin, discussing German plans to attack France, and requested Blowitz publish an exposé; he did so, provoking a storm of public opinion, and effectively preventing any chance of the German intention being carried out. In 1877 and 1888 he successfully exposed internal conspiracies against the Republic.

His most famous achievement was in 1878, when he managed to obtain the text of the Treaty of Berlin

Treaty of Berlin, 1878

The Treaty of Berlin was the final act of the Congress of Berlin , by which the United Kingdom, Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Abdul Hamid II revised the Treaty of San Stefano signed on March 3 of the same year...

 and publish it at the very moment that the Congress of Berlin

Congress of Berlin

The Congress of Berlin was a meeting of the European Great Powers' and the Ottoman Empire's leading statesmen in Berlin in 1878. In the wake of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, the meeting's aim was to reorganize the countries of the Balkans...

 was finally signing it.

External links

• Images of Henri Blowitz at the National Portrait Gallery (UK)