Bélanger

The name began as Beranger, an old given name still alive in the feminine Berangere, and it was Germanic before it was French: *beran, the inflected form of the common Germanic *bero, the brown one, the bear, the same element buried inside Bernard, joined to *gari, spear, from *gaizaz, which also produced Gerard and Anger.

What turned Beranger into Belanger was a shift from [r] to [l] that French makes elsewhere too, in surnames and in ordinary nouns alike, because the apical or rolled [r] is articulated close enough to [l] for one to slide into the other. Bellanger, Bellenger, Belange and Balanger are the same name under different pens. The accident of that one letter is that a warrior compound came out sounding like bel, fair, and lost every trace of what it had meant.

In the spring of 1634 a young man of the name left Mortagne, in Perche, with the first party of colonists recruited at Robert Giffard's call. Francois Belanger was a mason, and in New France he worked with the master mason Jean Guyon on Giffard's manor at Beauport. On 12 July 1637 at Quebec, aged twenty-five, he married Guyon's daughter Marie, born at Mortagne on 18 March 1624 and then thirteen. Where he himself was born is still open: the only baptism of the period found in the registers is at Seez, on 7 October 1612, of a Francois Bellenger, while the confirmation list at Chateau-Richer for 2 February 1660 gives him as coming from the bishopric of Lisieux.

He settled on the Cote de Beaupre at Chateau-Richer and held fifty arpents by 1667. In 1677, as captain of the Cote de Beaupre militia, he was granted the ground that became the seigneurie de Bonsecours in the parish of L'Islet, and he was probably buried at Cap-Saint-Ignace. Twelve children and eighty-seven grandchildren came of the marriage, and 706 descendants were counted in 1729; four of his five sons carried the name onward. He shares the ancestor's title with a second pioneer, Nicolas Belanger dit Catherine, first recorded at Beauport in 1655.

Francois-Joseph Belanger (1744-1818) was born in Paris and trained at the Academie Royale d'Architecture from 1764 to 1766 under Julien-David Le Roy and Pierre Contant d'Ivry. He never won the Prix de Rome and so never studied there, but Le Roy's circle put him in front of advanced neoclassical designers such as Charles-Louis Clerisseau. From 1767 he worked at the Menus Plaisirs du Roi, designing the ephemeral decorations that court fetes were built out of, and by 1777 he ran the department: the funeral arrangements for Louis XV and the coronation coach of Louis XVI were his responsibility.

Under the protection of the marquis de Voyer he bought the post of chief architect to Monsieur, the comte d'Artois, brother of Louis XVI. For Artois in 1777 he designed and built the pavilion of Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne, finishing the house in sixty-three days and nights to win his patron's bet with the Queen and bringing in decors in the style Etrusque as he went. The Folie Saint James, a landscape garden at Neuilly, occupied him from 1777 to 1780; he also built the Chateau de Mereville for Jean-Joseph de Laborde in 1784-86 and fitted out the interiors of the Hotel Baudart de Saint-James at 12 Place Vendome.

The Revolution put Belanger in the prison of Saint-Lazare for a time, and the second half of his career was the harder work. Between 1808 and 1813 he rebuilt the cupola of the Halle au ble, the old Paris grain market that is now the Bourse de commerce, and that dome stands among the earliest attempts anywhere to enclose a long-span interior in iron. In 1813, when Alexandre-Theodore Brongniart died with the Paris Bourse unfinished, Belanger put himself forward to complete it and was chosen. He died in Paris in 1818, and the architect Joseph-Jacques Ramee came out of his atelier.

Jean-Baptiste Charles Joseph Belanger was born at Valenciennes on 4 April 1790, son of a master locksmith. He studied at the Ecole Polytechnique and then the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees, and as an engineer of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussees took his first posting at La Reole in 1816. From 1821 he was on the Somme navigation canal and after 1826 on the Ardennes canal, and it was on those two jobs that he studied what water does in an open channel when its depth changes gradually along the way. His 1828 treatise was the result: the backwater equation for steady, one-dimensional gradually varied flow, the step method that calculates distance from depth, and the idea of critical flow conditions.

He saw that the hydraulic jump was a rapidly varied thing but applied Bernoulli's principle to it wrongly in 1828; the correct momentum treatment came ten years later, published in 1841 as lecture notes that grew into a full treatise in hydraulic engineering, re-edited repeatedly and read at the Ponts et Chaussees, the Ecole Centrale, the Polytechnique and the Ecole des Mines. Bresse, Darcy, Bazin, Saint-Venant and Boussinesq worked from him, and after them Forchheimer and Bakhmeteff.

He lectured at the Ecole Centrale from 1838 to 1864, at the Ponts et Chaussees from 1841 to 1855, and at the Polytechnique from 1851 to 1860, where he rebuilt the mechanics course from the ground up: inertia, action and reaction, and a constant ratio of force to acceleration at any point, with statics treated as a limiting case of dynamics, which few in France were prepared to say then. Ernst Mach listed his 1847 notes among his handful of basic references in mechanics. One of his students at the Ecole Centrale was Gustave Eiffel, who had his old teacher's name cut into the first floor of the tower with seventy-one other men of science. Belanger died at Neuilly-sur-Seine on 8 May 1874.

Francois-Xavier Belanger (1833-1882), born at Saint-Vallier on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence, taught in rural schools and then worked at the Courrier du Canada in Quebec City, mostly as a proofreader. He taught himself natural history and specialised in the Microlepidoptera, the small moths nobody else wanted. Leon Provancher read his papers on insects and in 1868 invited him to write for the newly founded Naturaliste Canadien. In 1869, on Provancher's word and that of Thomas-Etienne Hamel, he was made curator of the zoology museum of the Universite Laval. What he inherited was William Couper's gift: fewer than fifty mammals, reptiles and fishes, some two hundred birds and three thousand insects. He brought in a large collection from the naturalist Alfred Lechevallier and a bird collection from the crown lands commissioner Pierre-Etienne Fortin, and by the 1870s the museum held 1,300 Canadian birds, a hundred mammals and more than thirty thousand insects. V.T. Chambers named two new species for him in 1875.

Jean Belanger, born 22 December 1782, took his commission as a notary on 20 February 1805 and practised at Quebec until his death. He was a captain in the militia during the Anglo-American war of 1812, was named justice of the peace for the district of Quebec on 17 June 1814, and from April 1823 held the commission for the upkeep of the insane. In the summer elections of 1820 he was returned for the Basse-ville de Quebec to the House of Assembly of Lower Canada and held the seat through the elections of 1824 and 1827, generally voting with the Parti canadien as it turned into the Parti patriote. He died at Quebec on 21 August 1827.

Louis Belanger, born at Beauport in 1964, brother of the harmonica player and songwriter Guy Belanger, took a degree in communications at UQAM and turned to film. Post mortem, in 1999, took the best direction prize at the twenty-third Montreal World Film Festival, the Independent Voice Award at Santa Barbara the following year, and Jutra awards for best film, best screenplay, best direction, best editing and best actor. Gaz Bar Blues took the jury's special grand prize at Montreal in 2003, and Les Mauvaises Herbes the audience and screenplay prizes at Angouleme in 2016. He wrote all three himself as well as directing them.