Léo Taxil, originally Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pagès (March 21, 1854–March 31, 1907), was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 writer and journalist who became known for his strong anti-Catholic and anti-clerical views.

Leo Taxil was born in Marseille

Marseille

Marseille , known in antiquity as Massalia , is the second largest city in France, after Paris, with a population of 852,395 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Marseille extends beyond the city limits with a population of over 1,420,000 on an area of...

 and at the age of five was placed into a Jesuit seminary. After spending his childhood years in the seminary he became disillusioned with the Catholic faith and began to see the religious ideology as socially harmful.

La Bible amusante

Taxil first became known for writing anti-Catholic books, notably La Bible amusante

La Bible amusante

La Bible amusante pour les grands et les enfants was a book by Léo Taxil with illustrations by Frid'rick published in 1882 by Libraire anticléricale. At the time of publication the author was accused of irreverently mocking the bible. The Times called for the book to be suppressed....

(The Amusing Bible) and La Vie de Jesus (The Amusing Gospel) in which Taxil satirically pointed out what he considered to be inconsistencies, errors, and false beliefs presented in these religious works. In his other books Les Debauches d'un confesseur (with Karl Milo), Les Pornographes sacrés: la confession et les confesseurs, and Les Maîtresses du Pape, Taxil portrays leaders of the Catholic Church as hedonistic creatures exploring their fetishes in the manner of the Marquis de Sade

Marquis de Sade

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade was a French aristocrat, revolutionary politician, philosopher, and writer famous for his libertine sexuality and lifestyle...

. In 1879 he was tried at the Seine Assizes

Assizes

Assize or Assizes may refer to:Assize or Assizes may refer to:Assize or Assizes may refer to::;in common law countries :::*assizes , an obsolete judicial inquest...

 for writing a pamphlet A Bas la Calotte ("Down with the Cloth"), which was accused of insulting a religion recognized by the state, but he was acquitted.

The Taxil hoax

In 1885 he professed conversion to Catholicism, was solemnly received into the church, and renounced his earlier works. In the 1890s he wrote a series of pamphlets and books denouncing Freemasonry

Freemasonry

Freemasonry is a fraternal organisation that arose from obscure origins in the late 16th to early 17th century. Freemasonry now exists in various forms all over the world, with a membership estimated at around six million, including approximately 150,000 under the jurisdictions of the Grand Lodge...

, charging their lodges with worshiping the devil and alleging that Diana Vaughan had written for him her confessions of the Satanic "Palladism" cult. That book had great sales among Catholics, although Diana Vaughan never appeared in public. In 1892 Taxil also began to publish a paper La France chrétienne anti-maçonnique. In 1887 he had an audience with Pope Leo XIII

Pope Leo XIII

Pope Leo XIII , born Vincenzo Gioacchino Raffaele Luigi Pecci to an Italian comital family, was the 256th Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, reigning from 1878 to 1903...

, who rebuked the bishop of Charleston for denouncing the anti-Masonic confessions as a fraud and in 1896 sent his blessing to an anti-Masonic Congress in Trent.

Doubts about Vaughan's veracity and even her existence began to grow, and finally Taxil promised to produce her at a lecture to be delivered by him on April 19, 1897. To the amazement of the audience (which included a number of priests), he announced that Diana was one of a series of hoaxes. He had begun, he said, by persuading the commandant of Marseille that the harbour was infested with sharks, and a ship was sent to destroy them. Next he invented an underwater city in Lake Geneva

Lake Geneva

Lake Geneva or Lake Léman is a lake in Switzerland and France. It is one of the largest lakes in Western Europe. 59.53 % of it comes under the jurisdiction of Switzerland , and 40.47 % under France...

, drawing tourists and archaeologists to the spot. He thanked the bishops and Catholic newspapers for facilitating his crowning hoax, namely his conversion, which had exposed the anti-Masonic fanaticism of many Catholics. Diana Vaughan was revealed to be a simple typist in his employ, who laughingly allowed her name to be used by him.

The audience received these revelations with indignation and contempt, and Taxil was mobbed on leaving the hall so that policemen had to escort him to a neighbouring café. He then moved away from Paris. He died in Sceaux

Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine

Sceaux is a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the center of Paris.-Wealth:Sceaux is famous for the Château of Sceaux, set in its large park , designed by André Le Nôtre, measuring...

 in 1907.

Leo Taxil's books

• The Amusing Gospel (La Vie de Jesus)
• The Amusing Bible (La Bible amusante)
• Les Debauches d'un confesseur
• Les Pornographes sacrés: la confession et les confesseurs
• Les Maîtresses du Pape

External links

• A.E. Waite, Devil-Worship in France With Diana Vaughan and the Question of Modern Palladism complete e-text of Waite's debunking of Taxil.
• The Prague Cemetery
  The Prague Cemetery
  The Prague Cemetery is a novel by Italian author Umberto Eco published in October 2010. The book is a worldwide bestseller that sold millions of copies .-Plot summary:...
  
  , novel
  Novel
  A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
  
   by Umberto Eco
  Umberto Eco
  Umberto Eco Knight Grand Cross is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose , an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory...
  
  , 2010