Henri Blowitz

Henri Georges Stephane Adolphe Opper de Blowitz (28 December 182518 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.

When, in 1869, Ferdinand de Lesseps 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; this time, he evaded them by naturalising as a French subject whilst the Battle of Sedan was being fought.

Blowitz finally retired from his work for The Times in 1902, to be replaced by the newspaper's Vienna correspondent, William Lavino. He died a few months later, in January 1903.

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 is also referenced in Robert Harris’s An Officer And A Spy as “the most famous foreign correspondent in the world”. He was one of the members of the press who attended the criminal court of the Seine where Georges Picquart was facing charges relating to the Dreyfus affair.

He appears as a character in the video game 80 Days.