Émile Miller

Émile Miller (born September 18, 1884 in Saint-Placide , Québec as Émile-Ladislas Miller , † August 3, 1922 in Contrecœur , Québec) was a Canadian geographer , author and university professor .

Live and act

Émile Miller was born on September 18, 1884 in the village of Saint-Placide on the shores of Lac des Deux Montagnes in the Canadian province of Québec as the seventh of 13 children of the shoemaker Théophile Miller and Éléonore Ladouceur (nee Léonard) and subsequently to the name Baptized Émile-Ladislas . During his primary school days, Miller was noticed, among other things, because of his hard work and his friendly nature. At that time he was already well-read. Around 1899, the von Saint-Placide family moved to the city of Montreal further east . At the insistence of his father, Miller enrolled rather reluctantly to study pharmacy and graduated in 1902. Soon after, he boarded one of the first ships to Europe without informing his family . With no real goal or even financial means, he got a job as a worker and went in search of adventures, which brought him to England and France , among other places .

After difficult times overseas, he returned to his homeland and then studied again regularly at the École Normale Jacques-Cartier in Montreal. He was introduced to geography by Abbot Adélard Desrosiers , who was deputy headmaster at the time , and after completing his studies in 1906 he was employed in the municipal office of the village of Lorimier near Montreal. He later also worked in the Montreal City Archives office. On July 12, 1908, the 23-year-old married in the Montreal Parish Saint-Jacques Albertine Maillé, with whom he had nine children. He was still interested in geography and published, among other things, in 1912 a book entitled Terres et peuples du Canada ( Eng : Countries and Peoples of Canada ), which included a foreword by his mentor Adélard Desrosiers. This volume occupied an important place among Miller's writings and in the geographic area, as it was the first time that serious questions about the geography of Canada and the relationship between the people living here and their environment were examined. He also published articles on this topic in the Revue trimestrielle canadienne ; among other things in 1915 the article La géographie au service de l'histoire (Eng .: geography in the service of history ). In addition to his work as a writer, he taught geography classes at the school in Montreal sponsored by the Council of Arts and Manufactures of the Province of Québec .

In 1917 he left the city archives to a position as managing director ( s. : Executive secretary ) of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal to accept. He held this position until his early death in 1922. As early as 1918, at the urging of the Société, he taught public geography classes at the Monument-National and the Union Catholique de Montréal , as well as at other institutions. During this time he was also the editor or editor of the magazine Le Courrier de la Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal , which was first published in 1921 and was supposed to report on the activities of the Société branches. In 1920, Miller accepted the call to the new Faculty of Applied Arts at the University of Montreal and only a year later published his second volume, entitled Pour qu'on aime la geographie , which contained both previously published and unpublished articles. Using the geographers' new approach, Miller explained how the environment can serve as a source of information for settlement methods and for the development of basic activities. Miller was also the author of numerous articles in various journals such as the Bulletin de la Société de geographie de Québec , L'Action française and the Revue trimestrielle canadienne .

On August 3, 1922 Miller died at the age of 37 years in the southern shore of the St. Lawrence River nearby village Contrecœur in southwestern Quebec, when he wanted to save one of his sons from drowning. Miller was considered to be one of the earliest French-Canadian geographers, if not the first. It was not until the French geographer Raoul Blanchard , who had traveled frequently to Canada during his time as a professor at Harvard (1922 to 1936) and especially afterwards, devoted himself to French Canada, especially Québec, especially in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s several works and thus revived the interest in the geography of Canada. After Miller's death, Abbot Desrosiers collected his manuscripts and published a so-called Géographie générale in Beauceville in 1924 , which was intended to fill a gap in geography textbooks.

literature

• Emile Miller, géographe méconnu (HISTOIRE QUEBEC, March 2003)

Web links

• Michel Boisvert: Miller, Émile . In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography . tape 15: 1921-1930 . University of Toronto Press, Toronto 2005, ISBN 0-8020-9087-7 ( English , French ).