Émile De Girardin

Émile de Girardin (; 22 June 180227 April 1881) was a French journalist, publisher and politician. He was the most successful and flamboyant French journalist of the era, presenting himself as a promoter of mass education through mass journalism. His magazines reached over a hundred thousand subscribers, and his inexpensive daily newspaper ''La Presse'' undersold the competition by half, thanks to its cheaper production and heavier advertising. Like most prominent journalists, Girardin was deeply involved in politics, and served in parliament. To his bitter disappointment, he never held high office. He was a brilliant polemicist, a master of controversy, with pungent short sentences that immediately caught the reader's attention.

Biography

Early life and career

Girardin was born in Paris, the bastard son of General Alexandre de Girardin and of his mistress Madame Dupuy (''née'' Fagnan), wife of a Parisian advocate.

His first publication was a novel, '' Émile'', dealing with his birth and early life, and appeared under the name of Girardin in 1827. He became inspector of fine arts under the Martignac ministry just before the revolution of 1830, and was an energetic and passionate journalist. Besides his work on the daily press he issued miscellaneous publications which attained an enormous circulation. His ''Journal des connaissances utiles'' had 120,000 subscribers, and the initial edition of his ''Almanach de France'' (1834) ran to a million copies. He founded the illustrated literary magazine ''Musée des familles'' in 1833.

In 1836 he inaugurated penny press journalism in a popular conservative organ, ''La Presse'', the subscription to which was only forty francs a year. It was the first newspaper anywhere to rely on paid advertising to lower its price, extend its readership and increase its profitability and the formula was soon copied by all titles. This undertaking involved him in a duel with Armand Carrel, the fatal result of which made him refuse satisfaction to later opponents. In 1839 he was excluded from the Chamber of Deputies, to which he had been elected four times, on the plea of his foreign birth, but was admitted in 1842. He resigned early in February 1847, and on 24 February 1848 sent a note to Louis Philippe demanding his resignation and the regency of the duchess of Orléans.

Political career

In the Legislative Assembly he voted with the Mountain. In 1850, Girardin wrote an article called ''Le Socialisme et l'Impot''. In his article, Girardin suggested that there was a "good" socialism and a "bad" socialism. This article was reviewed by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels