Background
Gilles Henault was born on August 1, 1920, in Saint-Majorique, Quebec, Canada to Octavien and Edouardine Joyal Henault. His family moved to Montreal soon after, where Henault was raised in a blue-collar environment.
Gilles attended College Mont-Saint-Louis.
Gilles attended Universite de Montreal.
Gilles attended College Mont-Saint-Louis.
Gilles attended Universite de Montreal.
Gilles Henault was born on August 1, 1920, in Saint-Majorique, Quebec, Canada to Octavien and Edouardine Joyal Henault. His family moved to Montreal soon after, where Henault was raised in a blue-collar environment.
A talented student in the field of science, Henault graduated from secondary school and entered the College Mont-Saint-Louis with a scholarship. However, he was forced to leave the college due to financial difficulties at home. Later, he studied social science at the Universite de Montreal.
After some years of part-time employment, Henault took up journalism at the papers Le Jour, Le Canada, and La Presse; he wrote copy at Radio-Canada and for radio station CKAC. From 1949 to 1956, Henault lived in northern Ontario and worked in support of miners' unions. Returning to Montreal in 1957, he worked as an art critic with several publications. He became an editor of Le Devoir in 1959, and foreign-policy columnist for Le Nouveau Journal in 1961.
Spending his early jobless days in the late 1930s in the Montreal City Library, Henault built his poetic philosophy around European artists. Henault's literary influences were the works of turn-of-the-century Symbolist poets like Rimbaud, Mallarme, and Valery, who inspired Henault's "L'Invention de la roue" ("The Invention of the Wheel").
During the tumultuous early 1940s, Henault published work and fine-tuned his artistic intent. His work was published in the pages of periodicals such as La Nouvelle Releve, Amerique Francaise, and Gants du ciel.
Gilles found new influence in the writings of Guillaume Appolinaire, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, and Jean-Paul Sartre; and he met critics Robert Elie and Guy Viau, as well as Paul-Emile Borduas, "intellectual leader, painter, and essayist" as Giguere remarked. At this time, he produced some work in the style of automatic writing, but having difficulty publishing he formed an organization with Eloi de Grandmont called Les Cahiers de la File Indienne. Through Les Cahiers de la File Indienne, Henault published his first collection of poetry.
Henault's next collection of poems, Totems, appeared in 1953 after he had left the Communist Party. In this volume, Henault focuses on the goal of the writer, which, as Giguere put it, is "arousing the consciousness of others in order to stimulate change." Irony figures heavily into these poems, employed for the purpose of subversion. Voyage au pays de memoire, released in 1959, delves into the concept of Utopia. Voyage appeared once again in an issue of Semaphore. Gilles died from Alzheimer's disease on October 6, 1996 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Henault's political views made him rather infamous. An avid union supporter, he assisted several organizations around Montreal. Henault's membership in the Canadian Communist Party from 1946 to 1950 made him the target of criticism.
Theatre en plein air reveals Henault's social philosophy. He calls for humanity to turn away from modern society and return to primitive and natural living. Informed by surrealism, Henault called for an "age de la parole (word)," in which the civilization of reason would join with the intuition of the primal. This theme runs though all of Henault's poetry. Henault intensified his message in "Dix poemes de dissidence," which appeared in Signaux pour les voyants. Written from 1945 to 1949 and 1959 to 1963, these poems advocate revolutionary change. Giguere wrote that "he calls for rejection of the image of the French-Canadian as Catholic, obedient and submissive." Henault envisions "the international man, sprung from the fiery mirror/of the proletarian bound to the land, to the hammer, to the mine." He refers, supportively, to Communistic struggles in Greece and China, and looks forward to a universal revolution: "the great leap forward, the ascent, the rising tide, the shaken earth" as translated in Giguere's essay.
Gilles was married and had two sons.
