Jules Lefèvre-Deumier

Jules Lefèvre-Deumier (14 June 1797 – 11 December 1857) was a French author and poet.

He was deeply influenced by romanticism; his models were André Chénier and Lord Byron. Learning in March 1823 of Byron’s involvement in the Greek War of Independence, he tried to join him but was delayed in Italy after a shipwreck. He was still in Venice when he learned that his hero had died and Ipsara Island had been captured by the Turks. In 1831, he went to Warsaw to help the Polish insurgents and was appointed aide-de-camp to General Henryk Dembiński. He was wounded and taken prisoner by the Austrians.[1]^: 6-21

His father, a civil servant for the Ministry of Finance, was a fierce opponent of Romanticism; which he ridiculed through poems and parodies. This made Lefèvre's relationship with his father all the more difficult. The title of one of his early poems, Le Parricide (1819), bears testimony to their tense relationship. From a very young age he was greatly admired by the new generation, including Alexandre Soumet and Victor Hugo, who may have drawn inspiration from Lefèvre's poem Méditation d’un proscrit sur la peine de mort (Meditation of an outcast on death penalty) for his own Dernier Jour d’un condamné (Last Day of a man sentenced to death).

He was strongly opposed to the death penalty and his poem, Méditation d’un proscrit sur la peine de mort, is one of the first French poetic text to advocate its abolition.[1]^: 6-21

Towards the end of his life he was among the first to experiment with prose poetry in his Livre du Promeneur (Hiker's book). He gave his support to Napoleon III, who subsequently appointed him librarian of the Elysée and later of the Tuileries.

His given name was Lefèvre, to which he later added Deumier in honor of an aunt who had bequeathed him her considerable fortune. In February 1836 he married sculptor and writer Marie-Louise-Roulleaux Dugage, with whom he had two sons, Maxime (born 1837) and Lazare Eusèbe (born 1841).