Henry Du Pré Labouchere

Henry Du Pré Labouchere (born November 9, 1831, London, England—died January 15, 1912, near Florence, Italy) was a British politician, publicist, and noted wit who gained journalistic fame with his dispatches from Paris (for the Daily News, London, of which he was part owner) while the city was under siege during the Franco-German War (1870–71). The dispatches, which he sent via balloon to Henrietta Hodson, an actress whom he later married, were widely read and later published as Letters of a Besieged Resident (1872). He was also the author of the 1885 law – known as the Labouchere Amendment – which for the first time made all male homosexuality acts illegal in Great Britain.

The grandson of a financier whose fortune he inherited, Labouchere served in the British diplomatic corps (1854–64) and then sat in the House of Commons as a Liberal (1865, 1867–68) and as a Radical (1880–1906). He urged the abolition of the House of Lords and opposed the expansionism of Joseph Chamberlain and other Liberal imperialists that led to the South African War (1899–1902). His periodical Truth (founded 1877) was devoted to the exposure of organized frauds. He also helped to expose (1889) the Irish journalist Richard Pigott as the forger of an incriminating letter ostensibly written by the Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell.

The Labouchere Amendment was the law under which Oscar Wilde, Alan Turning, and many others were convicted of committing homosexual acts.