Léon Daudet

Léon Daudet.

Léon Daudet (16 November 1867 – 30 June 1942) was a French journalist, writer, an active monarchist, and a member of the Académie Goncourt.

Move to the right

Daudet was born in Paris. His father was the novelist Alphonse Daudet and his younger brother, Lucien Daudet, would also become an artist. Léon Daudet married Jeanne Hugo, the granddaughter of Victor Hugo, in 1891 and thus entered into the higher social and intellectual circles of the French Third Republic. He divorced his wife in 1895 and became a vocal critic of the Republic, the Dreyfusard camp, and of democracy in general.

Together with Charles Maurras (who remained a lifelong friend), he co-founded (1907) and was an editor of the nationalist, integralist periodical Action Française. A deputy from 1919 to 1924, he failed to win election as a senator in 1927 — despite having gained prominence as the voice of the far right. When Maurras was released from prison after serving a sentence for verbally attacking Prime Minister Leon Blum, Daudet joined other fellow antisemites including Xavier Vallat, Darquier de Pellepoix, and Philippe Henriot to welcome him in the Vel d'Hiv in July 1937.<reference>Marrus and Paxton. Vichy France and the Jews. Stanford: Stanford University Press, reissued 1995. p250.

Scandals and later life

When his son Philippe died in mysterious circumstances in 1923, Daudet accused the republican authorities of complicity with anarchist activists in what he believed to be a murder, and lost a lawsuit for defamation brought against him by the driver of the taxi in which Philippe's body was found. Condemned to five months in prison, Daudet fled and was exiled in Belgium, receiving a pardon in 1930. In 1934, during the Stavisky Affair, he was to denounce Prime Minister Camille Chautemps, calling him the "leader of a gang of robbers and assassins". He also showed particular detestation for the subsequent Prime Minister Léon Blum, candidate of a coalition of socialists and other parties of the left.

A supporter of the Vichy administration headed by Marshal Pétain, Léon Daudet died in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.

Works

• A biography of his father
• Several novels
• Souvenirs des milieux littéraires, politiques, artistiques et médicaux (6 vol., 1914–21, tr. of selections, Memoirs of Léon Daudet, 1925)
• Le Voyage de Shakespeare (1927)

Further reading

• Kershaw, Alister, An Introduction to Léon Daudet, with Selections from His Writings, Typographeum Press (Francestown, New Hampshire), 1988. ISBN 0930126238.
• Weber, Eugen, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France, Stanford University Press (Palo Alto, California), 1962. ISBN 0804701342.