Léo Taxil

Léo Taxil was the pen name of Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pagès, a French writer and journalist born in Marseille on March 21, 1854, and died on March 31, 1907. He first became known for sharply anti-Catholic and anti-clerical writing, using humor and controversy to attack religious institutions.

His lasting fame comes from the Taxil hoax of the 1890s. After presenting himself as a convert to Catholicism, he published sensational stories claiming to expose Satanic practices within Freemasonry. The stories were false, and in 1897 he publicly admitted the deception.

That confession secured his place in cultural history: not simply as a polemicist, but as a reminder of how easily dramatic, conspiratorial claims can spread. Today he is remembered less for any single book than for the remarkable fraud that still bears his name.