Arthur Meyer (journalist)

Arthur Meyer (16 June 1844 in Le Havre – 2 February 1924 in Paris) was a French press baron. He was director of Le Gaulois, a notable conservative French daily newspaper that was eventually taken over by Le Figaro (run by François Coty at the time) in 1929.

This grandson of a rabbi from a modest Jewish family eventually became a royalist, an "anti-Dreyfusard" (a non-supporter of the victim of the Dreyfus affair) and a Catholic. He was an unusual personality, a key player at the crossroads of society life, the press, and politics under the French Third Republic.

In 1882, Arthur Meyer, who had hired Octave Mirbeau as a secretary two years earlier, took over the newspaper Le Gaulois permanently. The paper had been founded in July 1868 by Edmond Tarbé des Sablons and Henri de Pène, and it was essentially the main daily social paper of the nobility and the elite of the bourgeoisie in France. Catering to the high-class socialites, Le Gaulois had a relatively small circulation, between 20 and 30 thousand copies, but it had a very real influence on French society. It was the first newspaper to have a column about films, which first appeared in March 1916. From June 1897 until August 1914, Le Gaulois du dimanche (the Sunday edition of Le Gaulois) was the weekly literary supplement of choice and it contained many serials over the years; it was in Le Gaulois du dimanche that Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus appeared.

In 1881, Meyer had the idea, along with Alfred Grévin, to represent the personalities that made the front page of the news section as wax mannequins, which allowed visitors – in an era before photography was used in the press – to put a face to the names in the news. This was the beginning of the Musée Grévin, which opened its doors on June 5, 1882 and swiftly became successful.

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