Louis-Honoré Fréchette
Canada’s Victor Hugo

Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, honorary doctor of four universities, one of the founding members and president of the Royal Society of Canada, honorary president of the École littéraire de Montréal, Louis-Honoré Fréchette was undoubtedly, to his countrymen at the end of the nineteenth century, the most famous French-Canadian living writer. Known as the French-Canadian Victor Hugo, Fréchette, who had a great admiration for the French poet and author that he imitated throughout his life, had acquired by then the reputation of a Poet Laureate.

Born in 1839 at Lévis, Québec, Fréchette, after his graduation from the Collège de Nicolet in 1859, studied law at the newly established Université Laval where he came under the influence of such French Romantic poets as Lamartine and Hugo. Leading a bohemian life and devoting much of his time to poetry, Fréchette published a collection of patriotic and lyrical poems in March 1863 under the title of Mes Loisirs.

Called to the Bar in 1864, Fréchette was no more successful as a lawyer than as a businessman: two newspapers he founded: Le Drapeau de Lévis (November 3, 1864 – December 28, 1864) and Le Journal de Lévis (April 13, 1865 – November 20, 1866) were short-lived. He had made his début, however, as a fearsome polemicist.

Unsuccessful in his profession, ignored by the public, disheartened by the hard times and political atmosphere of the period, in 1866 Fréchette decided to move to Chicago where his brother practised law. Shortly after his arrival, he wrote La Voix d’un exilé, a virulent verse attack on George-Étienne Cartier. The first part appeared in Le Pays on March 27, 1867 and was reprinted in other newspapers. A second part was added in 1868, and a third, the following year. That same year, the whole poem came out as a book. It confirmed the poet’s reputation as a radical liberal and made his name familiar to a wider audience.

Most of Fréchette’s writings during his stay in Chicago were destroyed in the great fire of 1871. In April of that year, Fréchette returned to Canada and settled in Lévis. He did not wait long before taking up his polemical pen. In a series of eight letters published in L’Évènement from November 14, 1871 to January 16, 1872, he entered into a public argument with Adolphe-Basile Routhier, a leading conservative, who had criticized his poetry and political views. Under the title of Lettres à Basile, these letters appeared in the form of a book in 1872. Fréchette also became active in politics and, after having run unsuccessfully in the provincial election of 1871 and the federal election of 1872, he was finally elected as a liberal to represent Lévis in the House of Commons from 1874 to 1878. During this time, he published still another collection of poems, Pêle-mêle, in June 1877, sending copies to several well-known French writers. The year before, on July 10, 1876, he married Emma Beaudry, daughter of a wealthy Montréal merchant.

On June 5, 1880, the French Academy awarded the Montyon Prize to Fréchette for Les Fleurs boréales and for a collection of sonnets, Les oiseaux de neige. Fréchette went to France where he officially received, on August 5, 1880, his prize of 2,500 francs. He was welcomed back to Canada with celebrations and banquets in Montréal and Québec City. A few months before, his two new plays, Papineau and Le Retour de l’exilé had been well received in Montréal. Fréchette had become famous!

The warm reception given by the ultramontanes to General Athanase de Charette, who was linked to the French Bourbon family, stirred Fréchette’s republican blood and, as a result, he published, first in La Patrie as a long serial from July 8, 1882 to February 10, 1883, and later as a book, an anti-monarchical pamphlet entitled Petite histoire des rois de France, in which he denounced the horrors committed by the Kings of France.

In 1887, Fréchette, who had returned to France to give a series of lectures, offered a history of Québec in verses under the title of La légende d’un peuple, thus recalling Victor Hugo’s La Légende des siècles. In 1892, Originaux et détraqués appeared as a collection of portraits of eccentric and picturesque Québec characters. Today it is probably, with his Mémoires intimes, published in 1900, his best-known book.

Fréchette became embroiled in still another controversy in 1893 when he wrote 13 virulent letters entitled “À propos d’éducation” which appeared in La Patrie and Le National from April 7 to July 1. In each of these addressed to a priest, Father Baillargé, Fréchette advocated a huge reform of the education system and defended the merits of a non-religious state education that would attach greater importance to teacher training, to the teaching of the sciences and of the English language – all considered offensive to the clergy.

Fréchette published in 1900 a collection of short stories, in both French and English, under the title of Le Noël au Canada/Christmas in French Canada. An edition of Poésies choisies appeared a few months after his death on May 31, 1908. The intellectual climate of Québec was changing, however, and Fréchette quickly became one of those famous writers of yesterday whose name is well known but whose works are for the large part ignored.

Jacques Cotnam