Max O'Rell

Max O'Rell was the pen name of Léon Paul Blouet (3 March 1847 – 24 May 1903), French author and journalist.

Max O'Rell was born Léon Pierre Blouet on 3 March 1847 in Avranches, a small town adjoining the Abbey of Mont St Michel in Normandy at the border with Brittany. He later preferred the name Léon Paul Blouet.

His paternal grandfather, Jean-François Blouet, was the warden of the prison of Mont St Michel from 1806 to 1818. He moved to Paris at the age of twelve where he attended the conservatoire and the collège in Paris and went on to take a B.A. degree in 1865 and a BSc in 1866 at the Sorbonne. After 1866, he enrolled at the École Militaire which he left in 1869 with the rank of lieutenant in the French artillery, spending five months in Algeria and, after a short stay in the Versailles garrison, was called up to fight in the Franco-Prussian War. He participated in the Battle of Wörth in August 1870 and was taken prisoner at Sedan. Once released, he was immediately employed against the Commune in Paris. On 14 April 1871, he was wounded, honourably discharged and granted a small pension.

With little prospects in France, Blouet decided to become a journalist and left for London in 1872. In 1874 he obtained a post as senior master of French at the prestigious St Paul's London boys' school. Later that year, he married Mary Bartlett in Devonshire. Their daughter Léonie was born in 1875. At the beginning of the 1880s, Blouet started to prepare a book of sketches about England, probably inspired by Hippolyte Taine's Notes sur l'Angleterre. 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. The French version became an instant success and went through at least fifty-seven editions within two years. It quickly found its way across the Channel. 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. The book was translated into seventeen languages. The success of John Bull and his Island encouraged Max O'Rell to continue producing collections of amusing anecdotes about morals and manners. John Bull's Womankind and Les Filles de John Bull were published in Paris, and over the next twenty years, O'Rell was to produce twelve more books, most of which were simultaneously published in Paris, London and New York.

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