Background
His father was general and marquis Joseph-Barthélemy de Ricard (who successively served Napoléon I, then the Bourbons and finally was premier aide-de-camp of Jérôme Bonaparte in 1852).
His father was general and marquis Joseph-Barthélemy de Ricard (who successively served Napoléon I, then the Bourbons and finally was premier aide-de-camp of Jérôme Bonaparte in 1852).
He and Catulle Mendès edited the first volume of Le Parnasse contemporain, published by Alphonse Lemerre in 1866. Ricard"s first collection of poetry, Les chants de l"aube (Songs of Dawn) was published in 1862 by Poulet-Malassis. Among the contributors to the Revue were Charles Longuet and a young Paul Verlaine (his first published poem).
After serving his sentence, his friends manifested an active support, and this small group of supporters was the origin of the politico-literary salon that met every Friday at the home of Ricard"s mother, 10 Boulevard des Batignolles.
Ricard was happy to entertain these boisterous republican and anti-clerical youths. Many great French poets and writers of the future attended: Anatole France, Sully Prudhomme, Villiers de l"Isle-Adam, Paul Verlaine, François Coppéest
And Raoul Rigault, the future attorney of the Commune de Paris (1871). In March 1866, Ricard and Catulle Mendès were appointed by editor Alphonse Lemerre to be directors of a now famous and pivotal collection of poetry called Le Parnasse contemporain, a collection that gave the name Parnassian to a group of poets that came to be known as Parnassians.
Ricard also contributed 8 poems to that first collection.
He was a member of the Commune de Paris (1871) and Félibrige, a group founded by Frédéric Mistral to promote and defend Provençal literature and the Provençal language (a Langue d"oc language). Ricard was defended by a talented young attorney, Léon Gambetta, and was sentenced to eight months in prison, reduced to three, at Sainte Pélagie, and had to pay a fine of 1,200 francs.