Léo Taxil, an atypical journalist from Marseille, first became known as an anticlerical republican polemicist with a marked extreme left wing, in Marseille in the 1870s, then in Paris in the early 1880s. Rediscovering the faith in 1885, he asserted himself, during the second part of his career, as an anti-republican publicist, fervent Catholic and author of anti-Masonic writings, before publicly revealing in 1897 that he had produced forgeries in the denunciation of a Masonic conspiracy presented as the work of Satan.