Nicolas-Germain Léonard (16 March 1744 – 26 January 1793) was a poet and one of Guadeloupe's first writers. Léonard was born in Guadeloupe, but spent most of his life in France, travelling back and forth frequently. He first moved to France while young, receiving his education there, and was spurred to return later in life by the political situation in the

French colonies From the 16th to the 17th centuries, the First French colonial empire stretched from a total area at its peak in 1680 to over , the second largest empire in the world at the time behind only the Spanish Empire. During the 19th and 20th centuri ...

during the period of the

French Revolution The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in coup of 18 Brumaire, November 1799. Many of its ...

. Slavery was an important issue in the colonies, and Léonard was white. He died in Nantes, aged 48. His fairly conventional poetry is most interesting today for its "astonishing evidence for the experience of living through revolutionary France during the months after the declaration of the republic and the trials against

Louis XVI Louis XVI (''Louis-Auguste''; ; 23 August 175421 January 1793) was the last King of France before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution. He was referred to as ''Citizen Louis Capet'' during the four months just before he was ...

". O lovely place! O Happy Land! O France, sanctuary of the fine arts! I bewail the people whose fate distances them so far from you They will come, those Days of Darkness, Where the heavy Finger of Age Will cover the Images of my Spring With the Veil of Death. The French minister Chauvelin was interested in Léonard's poetry and appointed him (diplomat) at Liège. There Léonard wrote "" (1783), a popular romance that was translated into English and Italian. In 1787, he published the fourth edition of his work in three volumes. His work would later attract literary critic

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (; 23 December 1804 – 13 October 1869) was a French literary critic. Early life He was born in Boulogne, educated there, and studied medicine at the Collège Charlemagne in Paris (1824–27). In 1828, he ...

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