Londres was a French journalist and writer. One of the inventors of investigative journalism, he criticized the abuses of colonialism such as forced labour in some of his articles. Albert Londres gave his name to a famous journalism prize for French journalists. Londres was born in Vichy in 1884. After finishing secondary school, he went to Lyon in 1901 to work as a bookkeeper, then moved to Paris in 1903. He wrote occasionally articles for newspapers from his native region, and published his first poetry works in 1904. The same year, he started working as a correspondent in Paris for the Lyon newspaper Le Salut Public. Also in 1904, his daughter Florise was born, but his concubine Marcelle (Marie) Laforest died one year later. In 1906 he became parliamentary correspondent for Le Matin. His job was to listen to the gossip in the corridors of the French parliament and report it in his anonymous columns. When war broke out in 1914, Londres, declared unfit for military service due to ill health and a weak constitution, became the military correspondent for the newspaper at the Ministry of War. Subsequently made war correspondent, he was sent to Reims during its bombing, alongside the photographer Moreau. Londres' first big article told of the fire in the cathedral on 19 September 1914; the report was published two days later.

Londres wanted to go to the Orient; the editors of Matin refused. So he left to become a foreign affairs reporter for one of the most read newspapers in France - Le Petit Journal. In 1915 he went to south-east Europe to report on combat in Serbia, Greece, Turkey and Albania. Moving from front to front, he saw, observed and reported. On his return, he covered the end of the war in France. In 1919 he was sacked by Le Petit Journal under the direct orders of the French Prime Minister Clemenceau. Continuing to follow his vocation, Londres reported that "the Italians are very unhappy with the peace conditions concocted by Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Wilson." He then worked for the illustrated daily Excelsior which had sought him out. In 1920, Londres succeeded in entering the USSR, described the nascent Bolshevik regime, profiled Lenin and Trotsky and told of the suffering of the Russian people. He was not comfortable with the situation. "Albert Londres was stunned. Sickened by what he had discovered. This was no bourgeois propaganda but rather brainwashing driven home by the Russian papers".

From 1922 his fame did not stop growing and his articles began to be published in the form of books by Albin Michel through Henri Béraud, another great reporter who had become the literary editor of Le Petit Parisien. Londres started investigating stories for Le Petit Parisien. In 1923, he went to the penal colony of Cayenne in Guyana. Describing the horrors he saw, his reports produced strong reactions both in public opinion and the heart of the French Establishment. It must be said that we in France have erred. When someone - sometimes with our knowledge - is sent into forced labour, we say "He has gone to Cayenne". Londres also denounced an often ignored fact - the "doubling". "When a man is sentenced to five to seven years forced labour, once the sentence is completed, he must stay in Guyana for the same number of years. If the sentence is more than seven years, he must stay there for the rest of his life.

His book was a gallery of portraits - prisoners are people too! - even if they tend to become animals in that place. In 1924 he continued his investigation into forced labour in North Africa, where military prisons welcomed convicts of courts-martial who hadn't finished atoning for their great crimes. (Dante n'avait rien vu (Dante hadn't seen anything)). He then became interested in the Tour de France, which he saw as a pitiless and intolerable physical exertion demanded of the cyclists in this "Tour of Suffering", and criticised the stupidity of the rules. (Les Forçats de la route (The convicts of the road) and Tour de France, tour de souffrance (Tour de France, Tour of Suffering))

His next topic of investigation was the lunatic asylum. He exposed awful treatments, abuse of antipsychotics, sanitary and nutritional incompetence, and reminded his readers that "Our duty is not to rid ourselves of the mad, but to rid the mad of their madness." (Chez les fous (With the Mad)). In 1928, still with the Petit Parisien, he travelled to Senegal and French Congo, and discovered that railway construction and the intolerable exploitation of the forests was causing a terrible number of deaths among the African workers. After visiting Palestine he next went to the Balkans to investigate the terrorist actions of the Komitadjis, ethnic Macedonian nationalists protesting about the alleged division of their land between Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia. (Les Comitadjis)

This was to be his last completed report. He was killed in the fire on the Georges Phillipar. the ocean liner that was taking him from China back to France. He seemed to have uncovered a great scandal - "It was a matter of drugs, arms, of Bolshevik interference in Chinese affairs" reported Pierre Assouline's biography of Londres. But his notes were destroyed in the fire. Questions surround the fire - accident or attack? Even so, the only people to whom he confided the contents of his report - the couple Lang-Villar - died in a plane crash.