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Biography in French

Biography is the study of a life. It reveals a personality and an analysis of an individual's work in the context of the age in which it existed. Biography has always been popular in French Canada. For a people with limited education and a limited standard of living until very recently, this literary genre was often, in its most elementary form, th...

The First Biographies of French Canada

These were "edifying lives," popularized or frankly distorted, and they hold an important place in the history of Québec literature. Until about 1880, biography was closer to medieval hagiography than to true biography. After 1840, the Catholic church began the rise which brought it control of society for a good century. It sought to consolidate it...

The First True Biographies

The end of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th century saw the birth and development of the first true biographies. Now well established, the Québec church, allied with the bourgeois elite, concerned itself with the preservation of economic, cultural and social strength in French Canada. The idealization of a glorious past, of an exe...

After WWI

After WWI, which coincided with Abbé Lionel GROULX's entry on the historiographical scene, the biography changed its tone. It remained moralizing and romantic, lacking sufficient grounding in historical reality (eg, Groulx wrote in the course of a polemic about Dollard des Ormeaux: "I retain my admiration for and devotion to these 17 young men of L...

After WWII

After WWII, in fact, biography in Québec, as in France, went into a period of disfavour, especially in intellectual circles. The new historiographic trends, which emphasized economics and social matters, pushed the individual to the background of history. Moreover, the quantitative approach inspired by American sociology, which thought it unscienti...

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