Henri Jeanson

Henri Jules Louis Jeanson (6 March 1900 in Paris – 6 November 1970 in Équemauville) was a French writer and journalist. He was a "satrap" in the "College of 'Pataphysics".

Jeanson was born on 6 March 1900 in Paris. His father was a teacher. Before becoming a journalist, he had several casual jobs, including being depicted as a soldier on a good-luck card for a postcard seller, belying his future pacifism. In 1917, he started work for La Bataille, newspaper of the Confédération générale du travail. Noted for his strong writing, he was a journalist throughout the 1920s, with intervening stints as reporter, interviewer and film critic. He was distinguished by the potency of his style and a taste for polemic. Jeanson worked for several papers including the Journal du peuple, Hommes du Jour and the Canard enchaîné, where he defended complete pacifism.

He resigned from the Canard enchaîné in 1937, in solidarity with Jean Galtier-Boissière.

He was sentenced to 18 months in prison in July 1939, for publishing an article in Solidarité internationale antifasciste, a periodical founded in November 1938 by Louis Lecoin, in which he congratulated Herschel Grynszpan for his assassination of Ernst vom Rath, an official of the German embassy in Paris. He was arrested in November 1939, at which time he had already joined his regiment in Meaux, for articles which had appeared in March and August 1939, and for having signed Louis Lecoin's tract "Paix immédiate". On 20 December 1939, he was s…