Dictionary of Literary Biography on Jacques Hebert
As a journalist, political critic, novelist, travel writer, and publisher Jacques Hébert has influenced Quebec's Quiet Revolution during the past generation. Critical of the regime of Maurice Le Noblet Duplessis and of Quebec's judicial and penal systems, he has devoted several books to these social concerns. Complementing these "regional" books, the travel books cover almost every continent--Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas--thereby extending Hébert's Quebecois perspective to cover most of the rest of the world. As the head of Les Editions du Jour, Hébert has published the work of Marie-Claire Blais, which has helped gain an international reputation for his publishing house.
Born in Montreal to Louis-Philippe Hébert, a physician, and Denise Saint-Onge Hébert, Jacques Hébert received his classical college training at Collège Sainte-Marie and then spent two "years in Prince Edward Island at St. Dunstan's College. On his return to Montreal, he completed a degree in commerce (M.Comm.) (1945) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales and began his career in journalism, writing for La Patrie and Le Devoir, where his travel chronicles appeared before being published in book form. In October 1951 Hébert married Thérèse Desjardins, with whom he eventually had five children. In 1954 he founded Vrai, a weekly free of political allegiance, and in 1958 he became the secretary and administrator of the literary magazine Cité Libre. In the late 1950s he also launched Editions de l'Homme, and in 1961 he founded Les Editions du Jour, where he was president and director general until 1974.
The travel books begin with Autour des trois Amériques (1948), an account of the author's fourteen-month Pan-American automobile tour. This book was soon followed by a similar account of African travels, Autour de l'Afrique (1950), in two volumes, subtitled La Route du désert and La Route Noire. Aicha Africaine (1950) consists of eighteen sketches of African life illustrated with engravings, like many of Hébert's other books. Later travel books cover the Far East, India, and Moslem Asia. Deux innocents en Chine rouge (1961), written in collaboration with Pierre Elliott Trudeau and translated to English in 1968, attempts to describe the reality behind life in Communist China.
After these books of voyages Hébert's work focuses on Quebec's social, penal, and judicial conditions. In the pamphlet Coffin était innocent (1958) he defends the Gaspé prospector Wilbert Coffin, who had been hanged for allegedly murdering three American hunters in 1953. Other pamphlets associated with the Coffin case are Scandale à Bordeaux (1959), which describes the terrible conditions in a prison near Montreal; J'accuse les assassins de Coffin (1963; translated, 1964); and Trois jours en prison (1965; translated in the 1982 volume The Coffin Affair), to which he appended "Souvenirs de prison" by Jules Fournie, depicting the political and judicial systems in 1909. As a result of his involvement in the Coffin case he was fined and imprisoned.
In the midst of all of the legal proceedings against him, Hébert wrote his only novel, Les Ecoeurants (1966), translated to English as The Temple on the River (1967). The eighteen-year-old narrator, François Sigouin, the son of a prominent Quebec judge, reveals with considerable irony and bitterness the corruption among various members of his family who form part of Quebec's political and judicial establishment. Through the medium of François's coarse prose Hébert attacks the pretensions in Quebec society.
At the age of eleven François is sent to the resort town La Malbaie to act as a companion for his "retired" grandfather, another judge forced to retreat because of a scandal involving the rape of a Dominican's niece. During his three years at La Malbaie the young boy meets Sévérine, the severely pious housekeeper, and Mireille, the young girl with whom he falls in love. After that period he returns to Quebec City to enroll in the collège classique and soon encounters Mireille, who has become involved in separatist activities and manages to press François into joining Cell 315. The group is apprehended after bombing the armory, but the members are immediately set free because of the Sigouin family's influential contacts. When François attempts to reveal the truth, he is placed in a mental institution where he will be "cured" so that in the future he will become a "true" Sigouin pursuing justice. From his own experience with the Coffin case Hébert demonstrates in fiction that justice does not always prevail and that the innocent are sometimes punished.
Since the publication of Les Écoeurants , Hébert's works include Bla bla bla du bout du monde (1971), a travel book which ranges from Panama in 1946 to the Ivory Coast in 1969, and La Terreest ronde (published and translated in 1976), about youth in Canada and in the Third World.
Of special interest, too, is Faites-leur bâtir une tour ensemble (1979), a book on public affairs translated to English as Have Them Build a Tower Together (1979). This volume deals with Katimavik (an Inuit word meaning "meeting place"), a program founded by Hébert in 1977 to bring together youth from across Canada as volunteer workers in Canadian communities. When this program was abandoned by the Conservative government in 1986, Hébert--who was appointed a Liberal senator in April 1983--went on a hunger strike to protest.
Critical reception of his only novel has not been entirely favorable, perhaps because Hébert's theme is public injustice; yet Hébert has demonstrated through his expository writing that engagement may be found in those who are in disagreement with separatism, for Hébert, the travel writer of the Third World, is an internationalist who writes to promote justice around the world.
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