Victor Noir

Origins and early life

Victor Noir was born Yvan Salmon at Attigny in the Vosges on 27 July 1848, the son of a Jewish mother, Joséphine Élisabeth Noir, who had converted to Catholicism; the association of the Père-Lachaise cemetery, which holds his grave, states her Jewish origin, and this fiche notes plainly that this is a single specific source, the general reference works consulted being silent on the point rather than contradicting it.

Work and career

He took his mother's maiden name, Noir, as his pen name out of attachment to her. He came to Paris as a young man, worked as a journalist for the republican opposition press under the Second Empire, and joined La Marseillaise, the paper of Henri Rochefort, at twenty-one. On 10 January 1870 he was sent with a colleague as a second to arrange a duel between Rochefort's paper and Pierre Bonaparte, a cousin of the emperor who had insulted Corsican republicans; Bonaparte received them, quarrelled, drew a revolver and shot Noir dead at point-blank range.

The killing of an unarmed young journalist by a Bonaparte, and the prince's acquittal by a special court, turned into one of the great political scandals of the end of the Second Empire: more than a hundred thousand people followed the funeral procession at Neuilly on 12 January, and the regime came close to insurrection. His recumbent bronze effigy by Jules Dalou, moved to Père-Lachaise in 1891, remains one of the most visited monuments of the cemetery.