Léandre Bergeron

Léandre Bergeron is a Québécois writer, historian, linguist, and cartoonist.

Early life
Léandre Bergeron was born in St. Lupicin, Manitoba, in 1933, the eighth child of his French mother and French-Canadian father.

After first completing a Bachelor of Arts at the French-language Université de Saint-Boniface, he studied at the University of Manitoba in 1956, graduating with a Bachelor of Education. For a short time afterwards, he was a teacher at a high school. Having received a scholarship from the French government in 1959, he left his teaching position and travelled to France to study at Aix-Marseille University, where he completed his doctorate on Paul Valéry.

Career
After returning to Canada, he became an assistant professor at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario. Three years later, he taught at Sir George Williams University in Montreal, modern-day Concordia University. During this time, he was involved with the Marxist Parti pris magazine, the Socialist Party of Quebec, and the prolific Québécois writer, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu. Beaulieu would go on to create multiple different publishing houses, including Éditions de l'Aurore, VLB Éditeur, and Éditions Trois-Pistoles, all of which would publish books by Bergeron.

Bergeron wrote several works, most notably a dictionary of the Québécois language, as well as historical manifests calling for radical sociopolitical changes in Quebec. The first of these was Petit manuel d'histoire du Québec (A Short Guide to the History of Quebec), which critically summarized the history of Quebec through the lens of class struggle and national liberation, paying particular attention to the role of the clergy. The book was claimed to have sold more than 125,000 copies, making it a best-seller in Canada. He translated a few of these works into English, seeking to expose the anglophone world to the Québécois perspective and provide an answer to the question "What does Quebec want?".

Bergeron now lives in western Quebec in the region of Abitibi-Temiscamingue.