Louis Hémon
Vagabond Genius

For many non-Canadians, especially Europeans, the mere mention of Québec is enough to stir memories of Louis Hémon’s famous novel, Maria Chapdelaine, the widely read classic translated into more than 20 languages. It is as closely associated with Canada as is Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables.

Unfortunately, Louis Hémon, born in Brest, France, on October 11, 1880, did not witness the international acclaim of his book: he was killed by a train near Chapleau, Ontario, on July 8, 1913, a few months before the publication of Maria Chapdelaine. Coming to Canada from London, England, where he lived from January 1903 to October 12, 1911 and leaving behind him his companion, Lydia O’Kelly, and their daughter, Lydia-Kathleen, he arrived in Québec City at the end of October 1911. After working for a few months as a bilingual stenographer for a Montreal insurance company, he moved to Péribonka in the Lac Saint-Jean area and worked as a labourer on the farm of Samuel Bédard where he wrote the text of his famous novel. While in England, Hémon had written many articles and short stories for a French sports magazine, Le Vélo, later renamed L’Auto, and three novels which were published after his death: Colin-Maillard (1923), Battling Malone, pugiliste (1924), and Monsieur Ripois et la Némésis (1950). His short stories were collected in La Belle que voilà (1923). However, Hémon’s literary reputation rests on Maria Chapdelaine.

La Société St. Jean Baptiste de Montréal erected this graveside memorial in Chapleau, Ontario, to honour Louis Hémon in 1920. [Photo, courtesy Charles J. Humber Collection]

Published for the first time as a serial in the Parisian newspaper, Le Temps, January 27 to February 19, 1914, Maria Chapdelaine was at the time noticed by a French-Canadian man of letters, Louvigny de Montigny. Immediately enthusiastic over the novel and eager to give his countrymen a model of a well-written and edifying novel with Canadian content, de Montigny published it as a book in Montréal in December 1916. A few months later, February 18 to March 25, 1917, it was republished as a serial in Le Nationaliste.

The novel was warmly received by a group of French-Canadian writers advocating a national literature putting emphasis on Canadian content and promoting the defence and illustration of ancestral traditions and such national values as patriotism, attachment to the family and to the French language, and the practice of Catholicism. They also strongly advocated the superiority of agriculture over industry, of rural life over urban life. A monument honouring Hémon was erected in Péribonka by the Société des Arts, Sciences et Lettres as early as December 1918. Damase Potvin and Alonzo Cinq-Mars adapted the novel for theatre production the next year. Yet it would be a gross exaggeration to suggest that the publication of Maria Chapdelaine in Québec created a stir in the intellectual circles of the province. The regionalist credo was far from unanimously approved. In fact, the Canadian edition of 1200 copies did not sell very well. It was quite a different story in 1921 when the French publisher, Bernard Grasset, launched Maria Chapdelaine: récit du Canada français.

Thanks to a well-organized publicity campaign, Hémon’s novel became almost immediately a bestseller in postwar France, and its heroine, Maria, a legend. In Switzerland, the Journal de Genève serialized the novel and published it in June and July 1921; in France, it appeared in the Action française from January 16 to February 17, 1922, and, in Québec, in La Presse from April 15 to July 22, 1922. While the French nationalists and the press of the right praised the novel as a perfect illustration of an ideal life, French-Canadian nationalists were quick to put it to good use and interpret it as an unequivocal message of resistance to change. They were particularly pleased to hear the voice of Québec telling them: “For thus it is that we must abide in that Province where our fathers dwelt, living as they have lived, so to obey the unwritten command that once shaped itself in their hearts, that passed to ours, which we in turn must hand on to descendants innumerable: In this land of Québec naught shall die and naught shall suffer change.” The “voice of Québec” was comforting to those unable to curb the rural drift from the land who were were commending the beauty and advantages of agriculture and peasant life and denouncing the power of money, the illusions of industrial progress, and the attraction to the United States. “These people are of a race that knows not how to perish. We are a testimony.”

For the advocates of regionalism in literature, the success of Maria Chapdelaine abroad seemed to confirm their theories. Hémon’s novel became a model frequently imitated: Sylva Clapin, for instance, imagined a sequence to Maria Chapdelaine and, in 1925, published it under the title Alma-Rose. Of course there were voices decrying that vogue. The population of Péribonka, in particular, did not appreciate the way they had been described by Hémon. Some also took exception to his use of a few Canadianisms, vieux parler, as if these intentionally made fun of the French-Canadians; others considered this language a lesson for French-Canadian writers blind to both the beauty of the land and the French-Canadian idiom. In the end the words of praise were dominant over all criticism.

The popularity of Maria Chapdelaine intensified in 1934 with Julien Duvivier’s movie based on the novel. It had a huge success. In 1938, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of his death, the house in Péribonka where Hémon had lived was converted into the Maria Chapdelaine Museum and inaugurated in the presence of the daughter and sister of the novelist. Lydia Hémon and her aunt, who were very warmly received during their stay in Québec, also attended a ceremony in Chapleau where a monument was erected. The following year, on August 23, the University of Montréal honoured Louis Hémon posthumously with a doctorate honoris causa. In 1951, a second movie was shot, this time by Marc Allégret; in 1963, a monument was erected in his honour in Péribonka.

Although Maria Chapdelaine is still read today, it has no serious impact on contemporary Québec literature. Actually, the message of resistance which that novel conveyed to many French-Canadians has become rather suspect even in the eyes of nationalists, for the ideology of survival has progressively been replaced in the last thirty years by a more affirmative form of nationalism that does not confuse the meaning of living with the concept of survival. Yet the author of Maria Chapdelaine is not forgotten in Québec. In 1986 a Musée Louis Hémon was inaugurated in Péribonka. Moreover, in the eighties, Gilles Carle made the third movie adapted from Maria Chapdelaine. Works such as Maria Chapdelaine ou le Paradis retrouvé (1992) by Gabrielle Gourdeau and La Promise du lac (1992) by Philippe Porée-Kurrer, not to forget the Franco-American novel Au nouveau pays de Maria Chapdelaine (1988) by Henri Chapdelaine make obvious reference to it. A sign of the times – Gourdeau’s heroine is an eighty-years-old Maria who has become a feminist and Quebec sovereigntist!

Several books on Louis Hémon have been published in Québec in the last thirty years; his Lettres à sa famille appeared in 1968. More recently, from 1991 to 1995, a beautiful edition of his complete works was published in three volumes.

Jacques Cotnam