Henri Blowitz
Henri Blowitz | |
---|---|
Born | Heinrich Opper 28 December 1825 Blovice, Bohemia |
Died | 18 January 1903 | (aged 77)
Nationality | Austro-Hungarian, later French (naturalised, 1870) |
Occupation | Journalist |
Henri Georges Stephane Adolphe Opper de Blowitz (28 December 1825 – 18 January 1903), previously Heinrich Opper and also known as Heinrich Opper von Blowitz, was a Bohemian journalist.
Biography
Blowitz began life as Heinrich Georg Stephan Adolf Opper, called Jindřich in the Czech spelling, in a family of Jewish ancestry at Blowitz (now Blovice) in Bohemia, 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 by chance met M. de Falloux, the French minister responsible for public education, and was appointed as a teacher of foreign languages at the Tours Lycée in around 1849. He thereafter transferred to the Marseilles Lycée. He resigned his job there in 1859 when he got married, in order to devote himself to literature and politics.[1]
When, in 1869,
Once naturalised, Blowitz returned to Marseilles, where he worked for
In this role Blowitz became famous, both as a journalist and for his insights into diplomacy. In 1875, the
Blowitz's most famous achievement was in 1878, when he managed to obtain the text of the Treaty of Berlin and publish it at the very moment that the Congress of Berlin was finally signing it.[1] The same year he was made an Officier of the Légion d'honneur.[2]
Blowitz finally retired from his work for The Times in 1902, to be replaced by the newspaper’s Vienna correspondent, William Lavino.[3] He died a few months later, in January 1903.[1]
In fiction
Blowitz appears as a character in the novella "The Road to Charing Cross" in Flashman and the Tiger (1999) by George MacDonald Fraser.
He also appears as a character in the video game 80 Days.
Notes
- ^ a b c d e f Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 4 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 89.
- ^ Ministère de la culture – Base Léonore. Culture.gouv.fr. Retrieved on 2014-06-14.
- ^ American national biography, Volume 10 (1998), p. 186
References
- This article incorporates text from a publication now in the Chamber's Biographical Dictionary. p. 106.
Further reading
- de Blowitz (1903), Memoirs of M. de Blowitz, New York: Doubleday Page and Co.