Vilmesan, Hippolyte de

Not having received a serious education, he first took up haberdashery trade in the province, but went bankrupt to Paris, where, with his characteristic enterprise and energy, he took up journalism and publishing , starting with the fashion magazine Sylphide . Coming together with the legitimists , Vilmesan in 1848-1852. He founded the leaflets " Lampion ", " La Bouche de fer ", " Chronique de Paris ", in which he opposed the republican government.

The coup d'état of December 2, 1851, and the regime that followed it, which silenced the free press, opened up to Vilmesen a new broad field. Brave, experienced, gifted with the scent of Parisian life and sufficiently free from moral principles, he decided to publish a newspaper that would correspond to the new public mood. For this, he purchased the Figaro weekly in April 1854 . No one could so quickly pick up all that scandalous and savory in Paris life and in the most entertaining way of doing it make it the common heritage of the reading public. The success of the publication was extraordinary; from the weekly magazine, it soon grew into a large daily newspaper. The government, constraining the political press, looked through its fingers at a continuous series of defamations and slander that filled the Figaro columns, seeing in it entertainment for restless Parisians. A series of duels and public blows did not dampen the ardent publisher, who, only briefly giving in to the editorial staff Vilmo and Juven, ^[1] , continued to be the soul of the publication.

In the last years of the Second Empire , when the opposition and general discontent in the country intensified, Vilmesan ordered one of the main employees of the newspaper, Henri Rochefort , to speak out against the same political figures for whom he had recently stood as a mountain. This, however, did not prevent Vilmesan from somewhat later becoming an ardent defender of Olivier .

After the Franco-Prussian war, he became a partisan of monarchist reaction, went to worship to Count Shambor , but even the monarchists themselves did not believe in the sincerity of his legitimism ; one of the legitimist journals aptly equated Vilmesan's royalism to the drum, which, with its emptiness, makes a sound - but from the dilapidation of the drum, the sound is made weak. Once as despised as popular, in recent years, Vilmesan only through eccentric antics and sensational articles could attract some public attention. He died in 1879, leaving a large fortune.

In addition to Figaro, Vilmesan at various times published Gazette de Paris , Gazette rose , Paris Magazin , Evénement (1865), and others.

• Mémoires d'un journaliste (1876-78).

• Vilmesan, Jean-Hippolyte-Auguste // Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron : in 86 tons (82 tons and 4 extra). - SPb. , 1890-1907.

• Villa "Sun" Vilmesana