Réginald Hamel

Career Highlights

Early on, Réginald Hamel demonstrated an encyclopaedic mind and an insatiable curiosity that enabled him to switch from business studies to the humanities, then join the army as an artillery officer. He was alternately an explorer (Arctic, Northwest Territories, Greenland, Alaska), anthropologist, archaeologist, and globetrotter, and he became a technical advisor at the Musée national of Man du Canada (now the Canadian Museum of History) in Ottawa, and a conservator at the Musée historique of the National Archives (1958). At the same time, he enrolled at the University of Ottawa where he completed a master's degree (1961) on the poet Charles Gill and a doctorate (1971) on Gaëtane de Montreuil, one of the first female journalists in Quebec. (See also Twenty Pioneering Newspaperwomen in Canada.)

Named a professor at the Université de Montréal, Hamel founded the Centre de documentation des lettres canadiennes-françaises in 1964 and ran it until it closed in 1969 for political reasons. Hamel’s academic career was not restricted to Quebec – he taught in the rest of Canada, the United States, England, France, Israel, and China. He was among the major current researchers in Québécois and francophone literature as attested to by his countless articles in French, English, Hebrew and Chinese, and his indefatigable activity as a bibliographer, literary historian and essayist. Passionate about the 19th century, he was also the most knowledgeable about the work of Charles Gill.

Research on Alexandre Dumas

Réginald Hamel was also one of thirty specialists on French novelist Alexandre Dumas. In 2002, during his research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Hamel found an unpublished work by Dumas — Les voleurs d'or is a play in five acts inspired from an account written in 1857 by one of Dumas’ mistresses, Céleste de Chabrillan. In 2002, Hamel published, in collaboration with his wife Pierrette Méthé, le Dictionnaire Dumas, an analytical index of characters (4,194 in all) who appeared in Dumas' works.

Hamel was personally invited by President Chirac to assist in the transfer of Dumas' ashes to the Panthéon on 30 November of that year.

Honours

In 2000, Réginald Hamel was decorated with the Order of les francophones d'Amérique. The ministre de l’Éducation nationale de France announced Réginald Hamel’s nomination as Officier de l'Ordre des Palmes académiques in 2002.

Selected Works

• Le Préromantisme au Canada français, 1744-1864 (1965)
• Cahiers bibliographiques des lettres québécoises (1966–69)
• Bibliographie sommaire sur l'histoire de l'écriture féminine au Canada, 1769-1961 (1974)
• La Louisiane créole 1762-1900, littéraire, politique et sociale (1984)
• Dictionnaire des auteurs de langue française en Amérique du Nord (1989)
• Panorama de la littérature québécoise contemporaine (1997)
• Dictionnaire des poètes d'ici de 1600 à nos jours (2000)
• La littérature et l'érotisme (1969)

On Alexandre Dumas

• Dumas... insolite (1988)
• Dictionnaire Dumas (1990)

On Charles Gill

• La correspondance de Charles Gill, 1885–1918 (1969)
• Charles Gill, œuvres poétiques complètes, édition critique (1996)
• Charles Gill: Contes, chroniques, critiques, prose annotée (2000)
• Charles Gill, peintre, 1871–1918 (2000)