Researching Urbain Gohier

Urbain Gohier (born Urbain Degoulet, December 17, 1862 in Versailles – June 29, 1951) was a French lawyer and journalist best known for his publication of the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in France. His nom de plume for two books was Isaac Blümchen.

Orphaned as a young man, Gohier took the surname of his adoptive father, and the issue of his family origin remained a lifelong personal issue. A brilliant high school student at Collège Stanislas in Paris, he obtained a BA and a law degree.

In 1884, he became editor of the royalist daily Le Soleil. In 1897, upon the foundation of the socialist daily L'Aurore, its director Ernest Vaughan called Gohier to join the writing team. He became a leading journalist there, along with Georges Clemenceau.

An indefatigable pamphleteer, Gohier - a "monarchist-unionist" - maintained a policy that was pro-Dreyfus, anti-Semitic, anti-militarist, and socialist. He took a strongly anti-military position in the Dreyfus affair. Perhaps because his willingness to stand up for justice was stronger than his anti-Semitism, Émile Zola was one of his friends. He provoked the resignation of Clemenceau from L'Aurore.

In 1898, he was prosecuted after the publication of the anti-militarist pamphlet L'armée contre la nation (The Army Against the Nation); he was ultimately acquitted. In December 1905 he was sentenced to a year in prison for his participation in an international anti-militarist action allied with anarchists.

At the turn of the century, he joined the neo-Malthusian movement alongside Paul Robin, André Girard, Clovis Hugues, Albert Lantoine, A. Daudé-Bancel, Laurent Tailhade, and George Yvetot. Gohier edited the newspaper Grenoble The Right of the People in 1902, then The Old Friar in 1903 and the Cri de Paris in 1904, then became editor of the anti-Semitic Vieille France from 1916 to 1924. Gohier was also a leading publisher of the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in France, circa 1920. He also contributed to The Libertarian.

During World War II, Gohier supported the Vichy government.

Convicted in 1944, he died in oblivion in 1951, leaving a considerable body of pamphleteering along with other such anti-Semitic polemicists of his time as Édouard Drumont, Léon Daudet, Henri Béraud, Dominique Pierre and René Benjamin.