Louis joseph janvier biography graphic organizer

Julian Gantt, Class of 2007

This summer, my research focused on a specific individual—Louis Joseph Janvier.

Louis joseph janvier biography graphic organizer

Janvier was an eminent, if today largely unknown, turn-of-the-century Haitian statesman, doctor, and novelist. He was born in Port-au-Prince in 1855 to a prosperous Protestant family and at the age of twenty-two left his beloved homeland to complete his medical studies in France.

The cultural and intellectual life of France during the early years of the Third Republic nurtured the young Janvier and he published a number of articles in the leading avant-garde journals of the day. As he matured, Janvier, along with other expatriate Haitian scholars of his generation, began to challenge the racist and colonial order which constituted the metropolitan milieu of the Third Republic.

Janvier took up his pen innumerable times to defend what he identified as the black race and to extol its ability for rational progress as symbolized by his patrie, Haiti. I am particul