Louis Ménard

Louis-Nicolas Ménard , born with Paris the October 19th 1822 and died in Paris the February 9th 1901), was writer and Poète French, its nephew Emile-Rene Ménard was a painter Symbolist.

School-fellow of Baudelaire to the Louis-the-Large college, it entered then to the Teacher training school. To have published shortly after in 1843 a work entitled Prométhée delivered under the Pseudonym of Louis de Senneville, it left suddenly, the literary studies to launch out in the Chimie. He discovered the Collodion in 1846, and its discovery was even presented in front of the Academy of Science, but gave later place to a mistake with an American named Maynard, as explains it Jules Verne in a note of chapter IX of Of the Earth to the Moon :

In this discussion president Barbicane asserts for one of its compatriots the invention of collodion. It is an error, with due respect to the honest J. - T. Maston, and it comes from the similarity of two names. In 1847, Maynard, medical student have Boston, had the idea well to employ collodion with the treatment of the wounds, but collodion was known in 1846. It is with a French, a very distinguished spirit, a scientist all at the same time painter, poet, philosopher, hellenist and chemist, Mr. Louis Ménard, who returns the honor of this great discovery. - J.V.

At the time of the revolution of 1848, which it supported with enthusiasm, it published a book ( Prolog of a revolution, February-June 1848 ) which was worth to him to be threatened of prison and obliged it to leave in exile to London then to Brussels, exile during which it met Karl Marx. This period brought back it to the poetry and the study of the Greek Antiquité. Returned in Paris after the amnesty of 1852, it published a first collection of poems in 1855 in which it tested, like his/her friend Leconte de Lisle, to make revive Antiquity. Conscious of its limits, it was devoted to extremely thorough and serious studies of the companies and ancient religions from which it drew two important works: morals before the philosophers (1860) and Hellenic Polytheism (1863). Changing interest again, it was made painter during the following years, and côtoya the painters of the École of Barbizon. Its new poetries were however published in the contemporary Parnassus . Although being in London in 1871, it did not defend of it less with strength the Commune of Paris, but was not worried about it. In 1876, it published its most remarkable book, the Rêveries of a pagan mystic , where mystical poetry and philosophy mix, which had a great influence on some of its contemporaries who describe Ménard as the man most passionately Greek that one can imagine (Maurice Barrès lengthily evokes it in the first chapter of sound Voyage in Sparte ). It became in 1887 professor with the École of decorative Arts, and in 1895 professor of universal history to the Town hall. In its last years it tried to reform the orthography by “simplifying it”, and republished its Poèmes and Rêveries of a pagan mystic in 1896.

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