Jules Lefèvre-Deumier 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. 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, 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 for his own Dernier Jour d’un condamné. He was strongly opposed to the death penalty and his poem, Méditation d’un proscrit sur la peine de mort, is one of the very first French poetic text to advocate its abolition. Towards the end of his life he was among the first to experiment with prose poetry in his Livre du Promeneur. 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 and Lazare Eusèbe.
Publications
Le Parricide, poème, suivi d’autres poésies
Le Clocher de Saint-Marc, poème, suivi d’une ode sur la mort de Bonaparte, et de divers fragments
Les Pélerinages d’un Childe Harold Parisien, published under the pseudonym D. J. C. Verfèle
Œuvres d’un désœuvré. Les Vespres de l’abbaye Du Val
Les Vespres de l’Abbaye du Val
Poésies par Jules Le Fèvre-Deumier. La Crédence : l’Herbier ; les Confidences
Le Livre du promeneur, ou les Mois et les jours
Études biographiques et littéraires sur quelques célébrités étrangères, par J. Le Fèvre-Deumier. Le cavalier Marino, Anne Radcliffe, Paracelse, Jérôme Vida
La Pâque fleurie de 1856, poëme lyrique
Célébrités d’autrefois, essais biographiques et littéraires
Célébrités françaises, essais biographiques et littéraires, par Jules Le Fèvre-Deumier. Rabelais, Montchrestien, Chapelain, Brébeuf, Scarron, l’abbé Cotin, La Motte-Houdard, Marivaux, Bernis, Thomas, Rulhière, Rivarol, Bailly, l’abbé Maury, Joséphine de Beauharnais, Delatouche, Soumet
Entretiens sur l’immortalité de l’âme
Leçons de littérature allemande : morceaux choisis des poètes et des prosateurs classés par genres, avec une table des pièces et des auteurs ; ouvrage précédé d’un coup d’œil sur la littérature allemande, depuis Luther jusqu’à nos jours
Célébrités allemandes, essais bibliographiques et littéraires
