Gérard Tougas

Gérard Tougas, professor and essayist (born in 1921 in Edmonton, Alberta; died 3 October 1996). He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in literature from the University of Alberta and McGill University, respectively. He then continued his graduate studies in literature at Université de Paris and Stanford University, where his doctoral thesis dealt with criticism of the work of Marcel Proust. Tougas served as an interpreter with the United Nations in Geneva from 1948 to 1950. He then held positions as a professor at Stanford University from 1951 to 1953 and the University of British Columbia from 1953 to 1985. He subsequently chaired the Department of French Studies at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario from 1961 to 1962. In 1962, he began a series of research trips that took him to every French-speaking country in the world. He was elected a member of the Royal Society of Canada in 1973 and received the Halphen prize from the Académie française in 1974.

Tougas was a novelist (Les Onusiens, 1950) and a bibliographer (Liste de références d'imprimés relatifs à la littérature canadienne-française, 1958), but achieved his greatest fame as a pioneering historian of French-Canadian literature, with the publication of his impressive Histoire de la littérature canadienne-française (1960, republished several times). Professor Réginald Hamel, in his biographical entry on Tougas for the Dictionnaire des auteurs de langue française en Amérique du Nord, praised this work for its “wealth of documentation, elegant style, and insightful, nuanced assessments.” A champion of the francophone cause (Littérature romande et culture française, 1963; La francophonie en péril, 1967; Les écrivains d'expression française et la France, 1973), Tougas was nevertheless also one of the very first French-Canadian authors to draw his compatriots’ attention to the development of American literature (Puissance littéraire des États-Unis, 1979; Destin littéraire du Québec, 1982). His very last essay, C.G. Jung: de l'helvétisme à l'universalisme, published in 1976, dealt with Jungian psychoanalysis.