With its two turrets and neo-Gothic façade, this old Vichy house does not go unnoticed. It was here, rue Besse, that Albert Londres was born. The master of great reporting, whose name has been associated since 1933 with the most famous prize rewarding French-speaking journalists each year, was born on 1er November 1884 in this house erected in the 1820s and subsequently acquired by his grandparents. Although he only lived there for the first few months of his life, he often came back to visit them. “Later, when I’m dead, we’ll put a plaque on this house, knock on wood”, he said one day to his daughter, Florine.
The city granted this wish for the twentieth anniversary of his death, in 1952. This Tuesday, May 17, the house, whose renovation work continues as it fell into ruin, was officially inaugurated with the opening of an exhibition devoted to the tutelary figure of French journalism, who died ninety years ago in the Gulf of Aden, and famous for his reports – from the bombardment of Reims cathedral in 1914 to the penal colony of Cayenne, via the Tour de France.
But in Vichy, a historic city listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2021, nothing is simple when you look back on the past. Of course there is the “Vichy regime” whose mayor, Frédéric Aguilera (LR), no longer wants to hear about it, demanding, including from the Shoah Memorial, in Paris, that we talk about the “Petain’s regime”. Many times accused by historians of having refused to face this reality, the elegant sub-prefecture of Allier (25,000 inhabitants) has promised to devote a quarter of the permanent space of the future museum to the Occupation its two thousand years of history which could see the light of day in 2026.
A positive birth figure
With Albert Londres, Vichy therefore had a positive native figure. Yet, for decades, nothing was done to maintain and glorify his memory. If the house has not disappeared, it is thanks to a handful of volunteers. Starting with the president of the Maison Albert Londres association, Marie de Colombel, to whom the mayor pays tribute: “Without her, the house would not be where it is today. » Since 2008, this retired management consulting specialist has been fighting to preserve the memory of the man whose life and work she knows by heart. Arrived in the Allier in 1976, keen on architecture and history, she was sorry to see the inhabitants pass in front of the building without knowing who London was.
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