Abel Clarin de la Rive

Abel Clarin de la Rive (pseudonym of Pierre Abel Clarin Vivant, Chalon-sur-Saône, France, 1855 – Chalon-sur-Saône 1914) was a French historian, essayist, journalist, and anti-Masonic writer. Pierre Abel Clarin Vivant was born in 1855 in Chalon-sur-Saône in a Catholic family. He attended a high school of the Dominican Order and, despite his young age, participated in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 after joining the Army of the East of general Charles-Denis Bourbaki. After the war, he continued his military career in French Algeria, where he developed an interest in Islam; some even believed he had become a Muslim, although he denied it. Reportedly, his knowledge of Islam caught the attention of the French secret services, who asked him to travel throughout North Africa, dressed as a native and using the pseudonym of Shaykh Sihabil Klarin M’ta El Chott, and report to them. He left the Army in 1873 and started a career as a journalist, working for the Courrier de la Saône-et-Loire, La Belgique, La Côte d’Or, La Gazette du Centre et Le Franc-Bourguignon, writing among others articles on the history of Burgundy. On the latter subject, he published, in 1881 and 1885, two volumes of a Histoire épisodique de Bourgogne (Episodical History of Burgundy) that he never completed. In 1881, he had already published a novel, Une date fatale (A Fatal Date), where he criticized Spiritualism from a Catholic point of view. His second novel, Ourida, was published in 1890 under his old military pseudonym of Shaykh Sihabil Klarin M’ta El Chott and, although he declared to write as a Catholic, introduced several occult themes. In 1883, he had used information he collected while working for the Army to publish a Histoire générale de la Tunisie, depuis l’an 1590 avant Jésus-Christ jusqu’en 1883 (General History of Tunisia from 1590 BCE to 1883). From 1893 on, under the pseudonym of Abel Clarin de la Rive, Vivant emerged as a Catholic journalist and crusader against Freemasonry, writing for the national Catholic newspaper La Croix and for the specialized anti-Masonic magazine La Franc-Maçonnerie demasquée (Freemasonry Unmasked), founded by the French Catholic bishop Amand-Joseph Fava.