La Maison de Balzac welcomes Adeline Wrona for her biography of Emile de Girardin, which the museum is particularly fond of because the founder of La Presse was a friend of Balzac’s and he published it in his daily. We paid tribute day for day, last year to his wife the journalist and novelist Delphine de Girardin. They will thus be gathered under the Balzacian roof with a affectionate and scientific gaze. Forgotten for a long time, Émile de Girardin was, however, a major figure in the literary and media world of the 19th century, "the Napoleon of the press" as it was said at that time when newspapers made their owners millionaires, where a daily newspaper was blackmailing the governments and its director could haggle over its political influence. Émile de Girardin, illegitimate son of a general of the Empire, raised far from the lights of the capital, will be the early creator of the extraordinary character he was to become, man of power, member of the House, prolific author and, above all, the creator of dozens of newspapers: he is the inventor of a whole system, the 'Girardin model', which financed newspapers as much by readers as by advertisers and indexed advertising rates on the number of buyers. A revolution. This gifted entrepreneur did everything to steal his existence from posterity. Adeline Wrona has tracked down and found a multitude of testimonies—letters, memoirs, confidences from contemporaries, reports from scammers. With this harvest, she reconstructs the itinerary of this hurried man, evokes his somewhat interested relationships with successive regimes, tells about the glamorous couple he forms with his wife, Delphine, a prolific novelist and prized columnist in her newspapers, traces their friendships, sometimes stormy, with the greats of the time – Lamartine, Balzac, George Sand, Théophile Gautier, Alexandre Dumas, Thiers – and restores the splendors of their salon open to all of Paris. It is the whole century that revolves around this Citizen Kane and that this book brings to life: not only the worlds of the press, but also the world of letters, artistic creation, business networks, the giants of nascent industry, ministers, diplomats, without forgetting the princes of the half-world. At the end of the meeting, the author will sign her book. Adeline Wrona is a university professor in the Faculty of Arts at Sorbonne University Informations Free within the limit of available places. 30 minutes before the start of the meeting

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