Amédée Baillot de Guerville
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Amédée Baillot de Guerville (1869-?) was a minor newspaper correspondent and editor best known for his staunch defense of Japan in the aftermath of the alleged Port Arthur Massacre of November 1894 and as author of a few books of travel-journalism.
A.B. de Guerville, as he was more generally known, immigrated to the United States from his native France in 1887. He taught French briefly at Milwaukee Women's College while also establishing Le Courier Francais newspaper for the Milwaukee and Chicago francophone community. Named a Special Commissioner for the World Columbian Exposition (the Chicago World's Fair) of 1893, de Guerville traveled widely in Europe and the Far East promoting the event to kings, emperors and heads of state. Soon thereafter de Guerville became a newspaper correspondent, banking in on his Far Eastern contacts to secure a position covering the First Sino-Japanese War, then known simply as the China-Japan War, for the New York Herald under the direction of James Gordon Bennett, Jr.. His primary competition was James Creelman, writing for The New York World. Creelman and de Guerville soon came to journalistic blows regarding the alleged massacre of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops at the Chinese city of Port Arthur on November 20-21, 1894. While Creelman, and other correspondents present, described a widescale and cold-blooded massacre, de Guerville alleged in the pages of the New York Herald that no such massacre occurred. The dichotomy of the accounts is illustrative not simply of how American rivalries to sell newspapers boiled over into reporting, but of divergent Western views of the period regarding Japan. While some viewed Japan as the "Civilizer of Asia" or "Britain of the East", others saw in her the "Yellow Peril" that threatened to overrun Asia. The fact that at the time of the war Japan was in the process of renegotiating the unequal treaties forced upon her by Western powers in the 1850s and 1860s lent further impetus to attempts to both elevate and denigrate her in the foreign press.
De Guerville went on to become part-owner and general manager of the American periodical The Illustrated American in 1897. In 1898, following a fire at the journal's offices in New York City and the onset of a heretofore latent tuberculosis, de Guerville left America for his native France. By his own account he experienced a near miraculous recovery from his tuberculosis while a patient at the pioneering Nordach Clinic for consumptives in Germany's Black Forest region. Thereafter he continued to travel and write for a short while, producing his memoirs of his experiences in the Far East entitled Au Japon (1904) and writing a very well-received travelogue of British Egypt entitled New Eypgt [1] [2](1906). De Guerville settled in Lausanne, Switzerland in the last years of his life. He wrote nothing more after 1907, and though he was reported gravely ill in London in 1911, the precise date and place of de Guerville's death remains unknown.
