This year’s Prix Albert Londres, France’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, will be awarded on 27 November. It bears the name of a legendary French journalist who travelled the world reporting – and both fascinated and appalled readers with what he described.
“We stopped counting the blows. They were falling relentlessly. We left the porch and went across the street, a hundred metres away.
“We looked up at the cathedral. Ten minutes later, we saw the first stone fall. It was 19 September 1914, at 7.25 in the morning.”
In fact, by the time the French public was reading those lines, it was two days later.
The great cathedral of Reims was in ruins, and Albert Londres had his first big splash in morning paper Le Matin.
It was a time when newspapers were still the primary form of mass media, and a dispatch was still worth reading even days after the event.
Londres’ first-person account of the bombing of Reims cathedral by German troops early into World War I would establish him as one of France’s most compelling correspondents.
It launched a career that took him across four continents, brought distant lands and unknown people onto French front pages, changed public policy, and set a new standard for deeply reported, deeply felt journalism that continues to inspire today.
His writing prioritised “the human side of stories”, says Claire Meynial, a correspondent for French magazine Le Point who was drawn to journalism thanks thanks in part to reading Londres as a teenager.
The profession looks very different today, she says. “But I still think there is value in descriptions and humanising stories – I still believe in this.”
Listen to Claire Meynial on the Spotlight on France podcast:
From poetry to papers
Londres was six weeks shy of his 30th birthday when he wrote the story about Reims. Born in November 1884 to a middle-class family in Vichy, after high school he moved to the closest big city, Lyon, and started off as an accountant.
But his leanings were more literary and after a couple of years he left for Paris, where he began publishing poetry.
Around the same time, he had a daughter. Her mother died less than a year later.
Perhaps by vocation, perhaps to pay the bills, he began picking up work for as a Paris correspondent for papers in Lyon, before becoming Le Matin’s parliamentary reporter.
Eight years later, a war broke out unlike any before it, and gave Londres his first taste of the field.
Observing the world
It was the right place for him. From Reims he travelled to frontlines throughout Europe, sending back dispatches from Belgium, Serbia, Greece, Turkey, Albania.
Readers were quickly drawn to his immediate, illustrative style: packed with anecdotes and observations, crafted without sounding pompous.
His editors didn’t always agree. One of his bosses at Le Matin told him his articles had introduced “the germ of literature”; it wasn’t a compliment. The paper soon sacked him.
Londres found work elsewhere throughout World War I and after it, roving southern Europe and the Middle East.
He became one of the few outside journalists to report from the newly formed Soviet Union, sketching the gulf between Bolshevik ideals and realities in columns that were quoted by The New York Times.
He travelled to Japan and described the disorientating experience of finding himself a clumsy stranger there. From India, he observed the swelling movement for independence, and in China he met warlords, pirates, traffickers and spies.
But he wasn’t interested in simply painting exotic portraits for his readers back in France.
“I’m going to go and observe, write about everything I see,” Londres would write to his daughter. “There are too many misfortunes in this vast world for us to be content with sitting still.”
Devil’s Island
In 1923 he found a profusion of them on Devil’s Island, a penal colony in French Guiana, on the northern coast of South America.
Conditions in the bagne, as the remote prison was known, shocked even worldly Londres. His indignation blazes through his lengthy reportage, which was published first in a Parisian paper and quickly turned into a book.
It ends with an open letter to France’s minister of the colonies, calling for urgent reforms.
“I have finished. Now it is the government’s turn to start,” Londres wrote. The colonial minister promptly formed a commission and temporarily halted convicts being shipped to French Guiana.
Londres had gone from reporting the news to making it happen.
A voice for the voiceless
He wrote a flurry of exposés in the years that followed: on other penal colonies in French Algeria, on abusive psychiatric asylums, on trafficked sex workers in Argentina, on an escapee from Devil’s Island who he tracked down in Brazil and helped return to France a pardoned man.
In 1928 he spent four months travelling from Senegal to the Congo, where he uncovered grievous and often fatal abuses of African labourers forced to build the Congo-Ocean railway for French colonisers.
The resulting book, Terre d’ébène (“Land of Ebony”), is a haunting work, says Meynial, who has herself reported extensively from West Africa.
“It really stuck with me,” she tells RFI. “When you ride that train, you can see how difficult the terrain is – the trees, the forest, the mud everywhere. And he describes how ‘slaves’ [as Londres referred to them] were working with their bare hands, being beaten by the white colonial bosses.
“And I remember thinking how much time you needed to report correctly on this. Albert Londres’ whole work reflects a bygone era, when it was OK to take time to do good journalism.”
Out of time
Months-long reporting trips – Londres would sometimes go weeks without filing, simply getting a feel for his subject – seem like a dream today.
But even he felt rushed. “Up to the age of 45, I wrote fast, too fast; you had to, that was the job,” he wrote in the early 1930s. “From now on, I want to write like an author: am I up to it?”
He would never find out. In 1932 he set out to report on China, where imperial Japanese troops had just invaded Manchuria.
He sent back a few dispatches, but informed his editors he was working on a longer investigation. It promised to be “dynamite”, he’s said to have told them.
On 16 May that year, he was sailing back to France when an electrical fault on the liner caused a catastrophic fire. Londres was one of 49 people killed.
People have speculated ever since about the subject of his final story. When two friends with whom he’d discussed his investigation, who managed to escape the burning ship, died in a plane crash a few days later, it only stoked the conspiracy theories.
No record remains. Instead Londres left a different legacy: a prize in his name, awarded each year to a French journalist under 40.
His daughter, Florise, created it months after his death and the first one was announced in 1933. This year will be the 90th time it has been awarded.
Empathy
Meynial won it in 2016 for her reporting on West Africa. The jury told her they appreciated her empathy with the people she interviewed, something she says she took from Londres’ work.
“Nothing can ever replace travelling somewhere and talking to people and understanding whether they’re hungry, disappointed, sad, angry,” she says.
“And that’s probably the way I feel close to him: just listening to people, trying to put yourself in their shoes.”
Listen to more on this story on the Spotlight on France podcast, episode 103.
