Although not much of any length has been written about Jules-Paul Tardivel, he stands out as a controversial figure difficult to evaluate in his own time or today. Depending on the critic's inclinations, Tardivel has been variously interpreted as one of the greatest journalists of his era, a man imbued with a messianic nationalism for his adopted land, Quebec, and, conversely, as a religious fanatic, as one of the first writers to prostitute religion and patriotism as sources of inspiration, and as a precursor of racist novelists.

Born on 2 September 1851 in Covington, Kentucky, of a metropolitan French father, Claudius Tardivel, and an English mother converted to Catholicism, Isabella Brent Tardivel, he was raised in a religious atmosphere by Julius and Frances Brent, an uncle and an aunt. Tardivel had no real knowledge of the French language until in 1869, of his own choosing, he went to study at Saint-Hyacinthe...