Louis Delaprée (20 April 1902 - 8 December 1936) was a French screenwriter, journalist and war correspondent in
Madrid
Madrid ( ; ) is the capital and List of largest cities in Spain, most populous municipality of Spain. It has almost 3.5 million inhabitants and a Madrid metropolitan area, metropolitan area population of approximately 7 million. It i ...
for the newspaper
Paris-Soir
''Paris-soir'' () was a French newspaper founded in 1923 and published until 1944 when it was banned for having been a collaborationist newspaper during the war.
Publication history
The first issue of ''Paris-soir'' came out on 4 October 1923 ...
during the
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War () was a military conflict fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Republican faction (Spanish Civil War), Republicans and the Nationalist faction (Spanish Civil War), Nationalists. Republicans were loyal to the Left-wing p ...
.
Paris-Soir had National/Rebel sympathies and Louis Delaprée's articles reporting the horror of the National bombings over the city were not too well received. He eventually renounced his position at the newspaper. The last article he wrote, under the title (borrowed from
Émile Zola
Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola (, ; ; 2 April 184029 September 1902) was a French novelist, journalist, playwright, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of Naturalism (literature), naturalism, and an important contributor to ...
) "J’accuse...!", ended with the following sentence:
''"Christ has said: Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing. I think, after the
Massacre of the Innocents
The Massacre (or Slaughter) of the Innocents is a story recounted in the Nativity narrative of the Gospel of Matthew ( 2:16– 18) in which Herod the Great, king of Judea, orders the execution of all male children who are two years old and u ...
(perpetrated) in Madrid, we should say: Do not forgive them, for they (the National side) do know what they are doing!"''
After resigning, he died in a plane crash near Guadalajara, Spain in unclear circumstances that have given room to speculation. He was posthumously made a Knight of the
Legion of Honor
The National Order of the Legion of Honour ( ), formerly the Imperial Order of the Legion of Honour (), is the highest and most prestigious French national order of merit, both military and civil. Currently consisting of five classes, it was ...
. After his death,
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, vicomte de Saint-Exupéry (29 June 1900 – 31 July 1944), known simply as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (, , ), was a French writer, poet, journalist and aviator.
Born in Lyon to an French nobility, aristocratic ...
replaced him as Paris-Soir's correspondent in Spain.
In 1933, he was co-screenwriter, with
Julien Duvivier
Julien Duvivier (; 8 October 1896 – 29 October 1967) was a French film director and screenwriter. He was prominent in French cinema in the years 1930–1960. Amongst his most original films, chiefly notable are ''La Bandera (film), La Bandera'', ...
and Pierre Caldmann,
of
La Tête d'un homme, a film adaptation of the novel of the same name by
Georges Simenon
Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (; 12/13 February 1903 – 4 September 1989) was a Belgian writer who created the fictional detective Jules Maigret. One of the most prolific and successful authors of the 20th century, he published around 400 ...
.
References
French journalists
Journalists killed while covering the Spanish Civil War
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