Paul Anthelme
| Paul Anthelme Bourde | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
23 May 1851 Voissant, Isère, France |
| Died | 27 October 1914 (aged 63) Paris, France |
| Nationality | French |
| Occupation | Journalist, author, colonial administrator |
| Known for | Tunisian olive industry |
Paul Anthelme Bourde (23 May 1851 – 27 October 1914) was a French journalist, author and colonial administrator. Self-taught, he became a respected contributor to Le Temps, writing on a broad range of subjects. He was hostile to the poets associated with the Decadent movement and positive about colonial enterprises. He did much to improve agriculture, particularly the cultivation of olives, in Tunisia.
Paul Anthelme Bourde was born at Voissant, Isère, on 23 May 1851. His father was a deputy sergeant in the Savoy customs. After Savoy was annexed by France in 1860, the family moved to northern France near the Belgian border, where Bourde studied at the local school in Harcy. He moved on to the Petit Séminaire of Charleville, where he was a classmate of Arthur Rimbaud and the future novelist Jules Mary. He was expelled from the séminaire in 1866 for having planned with his friends to escape and travel to Abyssinia to search for the sources of the Nile. Rimbaud took the plan seriously and began to learn the Amharic language.
For a while Bourde undertook farm work in the Bugey region, where his parents had retired. He then took a job in Lyon, where he met the poet Josephin Soulary, the curator of the library. Soulary helped him move to Paris, where despite being self-taught he wanted to become a journalist. At first he struggled to make a living. When the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) was declared he had to join the National Guard to avoid starvation. Bourde's first publication, under the pseudonym of "Paul Delion", was a violent attack on the members of the Commune and the Central Committee published by Alphonse Lemerre in 1871. By chance he met the chemist Marcellin Berthelot, who helped him get work at the Parisian newspaper Le Temps. In 1879 Le Temps chose him to accompany a parliamentary mission to Algeria. His account of this trip established his reputation as a journalist and a colonial publicist.
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