Louis-Xavier de Ricard


Louis-Xavier de Ricard was a French poet, author and journalist of the 19th century. He was founder and editor of La Revue du progrès which was the first to publish a poem by Paul Verlaine in August 1863. He and Catulle Mendès edited the first volume of Le Parnasse contemporain, published by Alphonse Lemerre in 1866. He was a member of the Commune de Paris and Félibrige, a group founded by Frédéric Mistral to promote and defend Provençal literature and the Provençal language.

Life

His father was general and marquis Joseph-Barthélemy de Ricard.
Ricard's first collection of poetry, Les chants de l'aube was published in 1862 by Poulet-Malassis. In March 1863, after receiving an inheritance from an aunt, he founded La Revue du progrès. Among the contributors to the Revue were Charles Longuet and a young Paul Verlaine. The Revue lasted one year; the atheist sentiments of the Revue lead to a Monseigneur Dupanloup taking legal action against the Revue on the grounds that it was an outrage to public morals and good mores. Ricard was defended by a talented young attorney, Léon Gambetta, and was sentenced to eight months in prison, reduced to three, at Sainte Pélagie, and had to pay a fine of 1,200 francs. After serving his sentence, his friends manifested an active support, and this small group of supporters was the origin of the politico-literary salon that met every Friday at the home of Ricard's mother, 10 Boulevard des Batignolles. Ricard was happy to entertain these boisterous republican and anti-clerical youths. Many great French poets and writers of the future attended: Anatole France, Sully Prudhomme, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Paul Verlaine, François Coppée; and Raoul Rigault, the future attorney of the Commune de Paris.
In March 1866, Ricard and Catulle Mendès were appointed by editor Alphonse Lemerre to be directors of a now famous and pivotal collection of poetry called Le Parnasse contemporain, a collection that gave the name Parnassian to a group of poets that came to be known as Parnassians. Ricard also contributed 8 poems to that first collection. In 1867 Verlaine, a friend of Ricard, dedicated his Les Vaincus to Ricard, a poem on the vanquished of 1848.

Works