Max O'Rell
Max O'Rell was born Léon Pierre Blouet on 3 March 1847 in Avranches,[1] a small town adjoining the Abbey of Mont St Michel in Normandy at the border with Brittany.
Passing out in 1869, he was commissioned as a lieutenant into the French artillery, spent five months in Algeria, and then after a short stay in the Versailles garrison was posted to fight in the Franco-Prussian War.
John Bull et son île was published in Paris by Calmann-Lévy in 1883 under the pseudonym Max O'Rell, which he had assumed to preserve the dignity of his teaching post.
The book gives an overview of English customs, peculiarities and institutions, discussing very diverse aspects – from British colonial ambitions to the Anglo-Saxon concept of home.
By December 1883, Max O'Rell, with the aid of his wife, had created an English version which eventually sold 275 000 copies in England, and 200 000 in the United States.
[3] The success of John Bull and his Island encouraged Max O'Rell to continue producing collections of amusing anecdotes about morals and manners.
In 1894, O'Rell did a world lecture tour which brought him to the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa over the period of almost two years.
In March 1895 O'Rell engaged Mark Twain in a heated argument about French morals and the writer's inability to grasp the character of a nation in travelogues over several articles published in the North American Review.
[4] O'Rell set to create an adaptation of Eugène Labiche's immensely successful comedy Le Voyage de M. Perrichon with the title On the Continong.
Featuring him in the lead role, the play enjoyed reasonable success in industrial cities including Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow from April to July 1897.
O'Rell had always considered himself a mediator between England, the United States and France and believed the press to be the most efficient tool to achieve a political rapprochement.
At the height of the Zola-Dreyfus affair, O'Rell made a public statement in a letter to the London Chronicle, which was reprinted in several American newspapers, urging foreigners to abstain from showing sympathy for the Jewish officer.
He had succeeded in carving himself a niche in the Anglo-American media market as a connoisseur of the female world, playing on the widespread stereotype of the feminised Frenchman.
[9] His next three books Her Royal Highness Woman and his Majesty Cupid (1901), Between Ourselves: Some of the Little Problems of Life (1902) and Rambles in Womanland (1903) are mostly reworked versions of his lectures, containing many trivial anecdotes and aphorisms on the subject of women, love and marriage.
After returning from his final lecture tour in the United States in April 1902, O'Rell settled in Paris and continued acting as correspondent of the New York Journal.
To American and British audiences, O'Rell served as a reference for everything French and he made great efforts to affect the public discussion of political, social and cultural matters.
