Jules-Paul Tardivel

Tardivel, Jules-Paul

Jules-Paul Tardivel, journalist, novelist (b at Covington, Ky 2 Sept 1851; d at Québec C 24 Apr 1905). Tardivel came to Québec in 1868 to study French. After working for Le Courrier in St-Hyacinthe in 1873, La Minerve in Montréal 1873-74 and Le Canadien in Québec 1874-81, he founded his own weekly paper, La Vérité, in Québec in 1881. Until his death he devoted himself to this newspaper, concentrating on 2 lifelong obsessions: ULTRAMONTANISM and nationalism. Tardivel was a strong proponent of the ultramontane, conservative doctrine that dominated Québec in the second half of the 19th century. A ferocious adversary of liberalism, socialism, democracy and freemasonry, he relentlessly promoted his plan for a rural, agricultural, hierarchical society controlled by the Roman Catholic Church. After CONFEDERATION Tardivel was the first Québecois to envision Québec's separation from Canada and to recommend creation of an independent French Canadian republic. In 1895 he published Pour la patrie, a futuristic novel in which he synthesized separatist thinking, a position that he first outlined in 1885 but received little support during his lifetime.