Amédée Baillot de Guerville

Who was Amédée Baillot de Guerville?

Amédée Baillot de Guerville, or A.B. de Guerville, was a free-lance war correspondent, editor, and commercial agent, most frequently cited for his travel writing. He was best known in his day for his staunch defense of Japan in the aftermath of the alleged Port Arthur Massacre of November 1894.

A.B. de Guerville was born the son of Paul-Louis-Amédée Baillot, clerk, commercial agent, and teacher of the French language, and his third wife, Antoinette Luce. He immigrated to the United States from his native France in 1887.

De Guerville began teaching French at Milwaukee Women's College in 1889. In 1890 he established the Le Courrier Francais newspaper for the Milwaukee and Chicago francophone community. Baillot began his career as commercial agent in 1891 with a stereopticon presentation of the 1889 Exposition Universelle de Paris to an audience in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1892 de Guerville traveled to Japan, Korea, China, Ceylon, and Europe as a Special Commissioner for the World Columbian Exposition of 1893, where he promoted the event to kings, emperors, and heads of state.

In 1894 de Guerville returned to Asia, banking on contacts he had made during the brief time he spent there in 1892 to secure an assignment as special correspondent covering the 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 Baillot came to journalistic blows regarding the 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 had occurred.