Blowitz began life as Heinrich Georg Stephan Adolf Opper, called Jindřich in the Czech spelling, in a family of Jewish ancestry at Blowitz (now Blovice) in Bohemia, and left home at the age of fifteen to travel, acquiring a wide range of languages in the process.

When financial constraints led him to plan emigration to America, he by chance met M. de Falloux, the French minister responsible for public education, and was appointed as a teacher of foreign languages at the Tours Lycée in around 1849.

[1] When, in 1869, Ferdinand de Lesseps ran for election as deputy from Marseilles, Blowitz became involved in a scandal due to supplying information to a Legitimist newspaper.

In 1875, the duc de Decazes, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, informed him of a confidential despatch from the French ambassador to Berlin, discussing German plans to attack France, and requested Blowitz publish an exposé; he did so, provoking a storm of public opinion, and effectively preventing any chance of the German intention being carried out.

[1] Blowitz appears as a character in the novella "The Road to Charing Cross" in Flashman and the Tiger (1999) by George MacDonald Fraser.