(Pour la Patrie is a futuristic roman à clef by Jules-Paul...)
Pour la Patrie is a futuristic roman à clef by Jules-Paul Tardivel published in Montreal in 1895. Written from an ultramontane Catholic point of view and featuring miracles, it describes the overthrow of a satanic plot in government and the establishment of a separatist Quebec under the name New France.
Jules-Paul Tardivel was an American-Québécois writer and a significant promoter of Quebec nationalism.
Background
Jules-Paul Tardivel was born on 2 September 1851, in Covington, Kentucky, and emigrated to Canada, in about 1869. He was the son of Claudius, a joiner, and Isabella (Brent) Tardivel. Tardivel and his sister Anna were sent to live with a maternal aunt after their mother died, so he was raised by Julius, his uncle who was a parish priest, and Frances Brent, his aunt.
Education
Tardivel studied classical studies at Saint-Hyacinthe Seminary in Quebec, from 1868 to 1872.
Following the completion of his accelerated education at Saint-Hyacinthe Seminary in Quebec, Tardivel returned to the United States only to feel like a foreigner in his native land so he returned to the province of Quebec.
Tardivel became the editor, director, and owner of La Verite; the first issue appeared on 14 July 1881, and he continued to publish the paper until his death in 1905. La Verite was associated from its beginning with Tardivel and was to become the principal organ for French-Canadian nationalism, Catholicism, and the defense of the French language and French minority rights in Canada.
His paper had the constant support of the Jesuits (as did Tardivel in all his undertakings), and in spite of distribution of only three thousand copies per issue, it was widely used in colleges and schools, contributing to the promulgation of the ultramontane doctrine prevalent in Quebec at that time. That is not to say that Tardivel did not have his share of adversaries. His bitter attacks on the French liberals of Quebec and France, on modern decadence - exemplified, for him, by current fiction and theater - and on the Freemasons, whom he considered totally godless agents of subversion, caused him to have many critics.
This native-born American would arouse national pride in generations of young people in his adoptive country. For him, religion and nationality were essentially linked. By binding them together he furthered the survival of French Canadian culture and at the same time, strengthened its Catholic element. Overlooking his excesses and his shortcomings, posterity has preserved an image of Tardivel which is mainly that of a pioneer in the cause of a politically independent press and a polemicist fully devoted to the defense and illustration of a Catholic and French Canadian nation in North America.
Personality
Tardivel naturalized as Canadian on January 21, 1896. In spite of his prejudices and limitations, or perhaps because of them, Tardivel expressed the spirit of the majority of French Canadians of that period. While perhaps aesthetically limited, there is no doubt that he was a perspicacious analyst of language and thought, and is to be considered one of the main influences on his adopted compatriots in the late nineteenth century.
Connections
On February 5, 1874, Tardivel married Henriette Brunelle. They had five children, Isabella, Alice, Albertine, Paul and Georgine.