Titaÿna (real name Élisabeth Sauvy, 22 November 1897 — 16 October 1966) was a French journalist and writer. She is considered one of the most significant female reporters in the first half of the 20th century.
Biography
Sauvy was born in 1897 in Villeneuve-de-la-Raho in southern France. She was an older sister of the sociologist
Alfred Sauvy
Alfred Sauvy (31 October 1898 – 30 October 1990) was a demographer, anthropologist and historian of the French economy. Sauvy coined the term Third World ("Tiers Monde") in reference to countries that were unaligned with either the Western ...
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 ...
. She also published a number of books based on her materials. Titaÿna received a license to fly an airplane, and is sometimes considered an aviation pioneer.
Titaÿna met and interviewed, among others, Adolf Hitler (in 1936),
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (29 July 188328 April 1945) was an Italian politician and journalist who, upon assuming office as Prime Minister of Italy, Prime Minister, became the dictator of Fascist Italy from the March on Rome in 1922 un ...
,
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk ( 1881 – 10 November 1938) was a Turkish field marshal and revolutionary statesman who was the founding father of the Republic of Turkey, serving as its first President of Turkey, president from 1923 until Death an ...
, and
Hubert Lyautey
Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey (17 November 1854 – 27 July 1934) was a French Army general and colonial administrator.
After serving in Indochina and Madagascar, he became the first French Resident-General in Morocco from 1912 to 1925. In earl ...
. However, at the end of the 1930s, her journalist career was already on the decline. After the German occupation of France in 1940 she took a collaborationalist stance. She was indeed accused in collaboration and after the war was imprisoned for about a year and left for the United States, where she lived until her death. Titaÿna died in 1966 in
San Francisco
San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...
.
In 1994, journalist Benoît Heimermann wrote a book about Titaÿna. The second edition was published in 2011.