Date Published:

Biographies of Prominent Quebec and Canadian

Historical Figures

Jules-Paul Tardivel

(1851-1905)

Damien-Claude Bélanger

Department of History

McGill University

Journalist and novelist, was born at Covington, Kentucky. The son of recent immigrants to the United States from England and France, Julius Tardeville (his Americanized name) was sent to Canada in 1868 by his maternal uncle, Father Julius Brent, a parish priest in Mount Vernon, Ohio, to study at the Séminaire de Saint-Hyacinthe. After graduating, he began his career as a journalist at Le Courrier of Saint-Hyacinthe. Shortly thereafter, he briefly worked at Montreal's La Minerve before settling down in Quebec and joining the staff of Le Canadien in 1874. In 1881 he founded La Vérité, French Canada's most influential ultramontane newspaper, which he would continue to edit until his death in April 1905. Jules-Paul Tardivel was French Canada's leading ultramontane and nationalist thinker of the late nineteenth century. First published in France, his influential essay on La situation religieuse aux États-Unis (1900) provided conservative Catholic clergymen and thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic with an arsenal of arguments to counter theological modernism. In 1895, Tardivel published a novel entitled Pour la patrie [translated as For my Country in 1975]. In this futuristic novel, set in 1945, Tardivel outlined his catholic and separatist dream for Quebec.

[Consult the biography of Tardivel at the Canadian Biographical Dictionary ]