Edouard-Raymond Fabre

Edouard-Raymond Fabre

Édouard-Raymond Fabre (born September 15, 1799 in Montreal , † July 16, 1854 ibid) was a Canadian politician , bookseller and publisher . From 1849 to 1851 he was mayor of Montreal.

biography

The son of a carpenter received his education at the Petit Séminaire de Montréal . At the age of 14 he began to work in Arthur Webster's department store, where he became familiar with all areas of management in the years that followed. In 1822 he went to Paris to improve his knowledge in the renowned bookshop Galeries Bossange (Hector Bossange, the owner's son, had married Fabre's sister Julie six years earlier). In 1823 Fabre opened his own bookstore, the Librairie Française , on Rue Notre-Dame in Montreal ; from 1828 to 1835 it operated under the name Librairie Fabre et Perrault , when a business cooperation existed with the printing company of Fabre's brother-in-law Louis Perrault. The bookstore was popular with students and teachers, and eventually with the Catholic clergy.

From the late 1820s, Fabre supported the Patriotes , who sought economic and democratic reforms. His shop served as one of the meeting places of this movement. In 1832 he saved the newspaper La Minerve , which was closely related to the Patriotes , from bankruptcy, and he also acquired the English-language newspaper Vindicator and Canadian Advertiser , which also spread the ideas of the reformers. In 1835 Fabre was one of the founders of the Maison canadienne de commerce and the Banque du peuple . With these French - Canadian institutions, the almost monopoly-like supremacy of Anglo-Scottish businessmen was to be broken. Fabre was a close friend of Louis-Joseph Papineau , one of the leaders of the Lower Canada Rebellion of 1837 . During the uprising, he went into hiding for over a year; he was arrested in December 1838 but released a month later for lack of evidence.

Fabre took advantage of a business trip to Paris in 1843 to visit his friend Papineau, who was in exile there. Thanks to Fabre's efforts, the rebels were pardoned by the colonial government in 1846, after which they were able to return. In 1848 Fabre was elected to the Montreal city council, and in the same year he was appointed chairman of the finance commission. He acquired such a good reputation that the city council elected him mayor in 1849; he held this office until the end of February 1851. In the first few weeks of his tenure, angry Conservatives demonstrating against financial compensation for the rebels set fire to the Provincial Parliament of Canada . The unrest was quickly brought under control, but Montreal lost its status as the capital of the province of Canada. Fabre restructured the city's finances and introduced measures to contain cholera .

Fabre had been married to Luce Perrault since 1826 and together they had eleven children. Two sons also achieved prominence, Hector Fabre as the Canadian Senator and Édouard-Charles Fabre as the first Archbishop of Montreal . Daughter Hortense married the influential politician George-Étienne Cartier .

Web links

• Edouard-Raymond Fabre . In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography . 24 volumes, 1966–2018. University of Toronto Press, Toronto ( English , French ).
• Biography on the website of the city administration (French)