Jules Fournier

Jules Fournier

Georges-Jules Fournier (born August 23, 1884 in Coteau-du-Lac , † April 16, 1918 in Ottawa ) was a Canadian journalist, essayist, translator and newspaper publisher.

Fournier, who came from a humble background, attended the Collège de Valleyfield , from which he was expelled in 1902 because of a dispute with the director. His first articles appeared in Le Monde illustré as early as 1899 and 1900 . In 1903 he got a job as a reporter for the newspaper La Presse , in the following year he moved to Le Canada as a columnist . 1905-06 he published a series of articles on the economic, social and religious situation of the French Canadians in New England. The 1904 novel Le crime de Lachine appeared in sequels the following year in Le Canada magazine . A foreword to the novel, which he dedicated to his critics, friends and enemies and which was the prelude to a dispute with the critic Charles ab der Halden , appeared in 1906 in the Revue Canadienne . In 1907 Founier became an author under the pseudonym Pierre Beaudry for the magazine Le Nationaliste of his friend Olivar Asselin , in 1908 its editor.

He was sued several times for satirical contributions and was imprisoned for seventeen days in 1909. After his release, he was publicly celebrated at the Marché Saint-Jacques in Montreal and published the souvenirs de prison , in which he settled the conditions of detention. After working briefly for Le Devoir , he traveled to France in 1910 as a correspondent for La Patrie , where he a. a. Anatole France , Jules Lemaître , Frédéric Mistral and Henri Rochefort and attended election meetings of Maurice Barrès .

In 1911 Fournier founded the magazine L'Action , in which articles by Asselin, Arthur Beauchesne , Ferdinand Paradis and Édouard Montpetit , Marcel Dugas , Robert La Roque de Roquebrune , René Chopin , Albert Lozeau and Paul Morin as well as excerpts from works by classical and contemporary French authors published. After an unsuccessful lawsuit by the publisher of La Patrie , Louis-Joseph Tarte in the first year of the newspaper's existence, he was sued in 1915 - also unsuccessfully - by the mayor of Montreal, Médéric Martin , whom he had called a "big thief".

In 1916 Fournier was a city councilor in Montreal for a short time, in 1917 he got a job as a translator at the Senate of Canada , but died a few months later at the age of thirty-three of pneumonia, possibly also of the Spanish flu .

Founier's Anthologie des poètes canadiens , which was first published in 1913 , went through several editions . His widow published a collection of his articles, essays, satires and travelogues in 1922 under the title Mon encrier . In 1980 the Conseil de la Langue Française endowed the Jules Founier Prize for journalists.

source

• Jules Fournier . In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography . 24 volumes, 1966–2018. University of Toronto Press, Toronto ( English , French ).