Pelletier

The name is the trade. Old French pelletier came from pel, a skin, and behind that the Latin pellis; the pelletier dressed, cut and sold the hides of various animals, for leather or for fur. It was skilled town work in a Europe where fur meant warmth and rank at once, and the man who could turn a raw pelt into a lining fit for a magistrate had a byname worth keeping. France kept it in more than one shape: Pelletier and the older Le Pelletier.

The extraordinary chapter is what became of that trade across the Atlantic. New France was founded to send skins to Paris, and the fur trade was the colony's whole account book before it was anything else. A word that in France named a shop counter named, in Canada, the commodity the country existed to move.

Didace Pelletier, born in 1657 and dead in 1699, is the earliest Canadian of the name with a life attached to it: a religious of the colony whom the Church afterwards declared blessed. He belongs to the first colonial generation.

What the family left instead is on the map, thickest along the Bas-Saint-Laurent, where two hamlets are called simply Pelletier, one in the town of Matane and one at Pohénégamook. A Rivière Pelletier runs into the Saguenay at Saint-Fulgence; another, fed by a Lac Pelletier, flows into lac Beauchastel at Rouyn-Noranda. A second Lac Pelletier sits in the Qu'Appelle watershed in Saskatchewan, with a hamlet and the rural municipality of Lac Pelletier No. 107 centred on it.

Jacques Peletier du Mans, 1517 to 1582, is the most distinguished Frenchman of the name before the Revolution, and he is known under both spellings, Peletier and Pelletier: the orthographic problem of the whole family in one man. He was a humanist, a poet and a mathematician of the Renaissance. The Le Pelletier form produced two more men of the study: Jean Le Pelletier, 1633 to 1711, an alchemist, and Dom Louis Le Pelletier, 1663 to 1733, a Breton linguist working on a language the French state had already decided it did not need.

The road from the alchemist's furnace to the chemist's bench runs through the name twice more. Bertrand Pelletier, 1761 to 1797, and Pierre Joseph Pelletier, 1788 to 1842, were both French chemists, working either side of the Revolution in the discipline Jean Le Pelletier's century had only guessed at.

The Revolution caught the name at both ends of the blade. Nicolas Jacques Pelletier, born about 1756, was a highwayman, and when he was executed in 1792 he became the first person in France put to death by guillotine. Jacques Pelletier, 1749 to 1839, sat in the Convention nationale: two men of one surname, one inside the Revolution's central assembly and one recorded for good as the first the machine took.

The Empire put an unusual number of Pelletiers into a general's uniform: Louis Pelletier, 1754 to 1814, Louis François Élie Pelletier, 1771 to 1854, Aimé Sulpice Victor Pelletier, 1772 to 1813, Jean-Baptiste Pelletier, 1777 to 1862, and Laurent Augustin Pelletier de Chambure, 1789 to 1832. None of them are known to be kin; this is what a very common surname looks like in a country that spent a quarter of a century at war.

Étienne Anatole Pelletier, 1847 to 1927, was a brigade general who served in 1917 as liaison officer to General Pershing; Georges Pelletier-Doisy, 1892 to 1953, was a pioneer of French aviation and a flying ace of the First World War; Willy Pelletier, 1914 to 1944, was a member of the Resistance, and his dates say the rest of it.

Madeleine Pelletier was born Anne Pelletier in Paris on 18 May 1874 and qualified as a doctor in her twenties. She trained first as an anthropologist, with Charles Letourneau and Léonce Manouvrier and in the line of Paul Broca, on the supposed link between skull size and intelligence; when she left the field she turned on the premise and attacked skull size as any measure at all of a difference between the sexes. She became the first woman in France to take a doctorate in psychiatry.

In 1903 she ran a campaign, backed by the feminist paper La Fronde, to open every medical specialisation to women, the examination for psychiatric internships above all. In July 1906 she, Caroline Kauffmann and other suffragists got into the French Chamber of Deputies and showered pink slips of paper down from the gallery, every one an appeal for the vote. The books followed: Le Droit à l'avortement in 1913, La question du vote des femmes in 1919, the novel La Femme vierge in 1933. A stroke in 1937 left her hemiplegic and she went on writing regardless, until her death in 1939.

Marie-Euphrasie Pelletier, 1796 to 1868, was a French religious sister who founded the congregation of Notre-Dame de Charité du Bon Pasteur and was afterwards canonised: the second of the name the Church has honoured, after the blessed Didace in the colony.

Anne-Marie Pelletier, born on 13 June 1946, took a doctorate in the sciences of religion and has taught scripture and hermeneutics at the Collège des Bernardins since 1993. Women in the Church have been her subject throughout, in Le christianisme et les femmes in 2001 and Le signe de la femme in 2005. On 17 June 2014 the Vatican's Joseph Ratzinger Foundation named her a laureate of the fourth Ratzinger Prize, the first woman to receive it, and in April 2017 she wrote the meditations for the Way of the Cross at the Colosseum in Rome, the first laywoman entrusted with that text in her own name.

Quebec's musical life carries an unusual density of the name. Romain-Octave Pelletier the elder, 1843 to 1927, was a pianist, organist, composer and teacher, and Romain-Octave Pelletier junior, 1904 to 1968, a violinist and music critic. Wilfrid Pelletier, 1896 to 1982, began as a pianist and became a conductor, and Montreal's principal concert hall is named for him.

Colombe Pelletier, born in Montreal on 12 May 1923, took her Bachelor of Music at the Conservatoire national de musique in 1940 with the gold medal, made her solo debut in March 1944, and in September 1949 went to the École Normale de Musique de Paris on bursaries from the Government of Quebec, graduating in 1952 as a specialist in the art of accompaniment. That is a career spent inside other people's names: she toured Canada for Jeunesses Musicales Canada in 1952 and 1953, giving 35 concerts, played for Colette Boky, Joseph Rouleau, André Turp and Richard Verreau, and coached for the CBC, the Opera Guild of Montreal and the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde until she stopped playing in 2018.

The stage kept the name as well. Denise Pelletier, 1923 to 1976, was an actress whose name is now on a Montreal theatre and on the Prix Denise-Pelletier, one of Quebec's arts awards.

The name sits heavily in the French-Canadian press. Georges Pelletier, 1882 to 1947, was the lawyer and journalist who directed Le Devoir; Gérard Pelletier, 1919 to 1997, was a journalist and then a politician; Aimé Pelletier, 1914 to 2010, was a doctor who wrote novels and plays under the name Bertrand Vac. A judgment known as the Arrêt Pelletier, given by the Tribunal des conflits in 1873 over the seizure of newspapers by military authority, still marks the line in French law between the fault of the service and the fault of the man.

The strangest life of the name went the other way entirely. Narcisse Pelletier, 1844 to 1894, was a cabin boy abandoned on the coast of the Cape York Peninsula in Australia in 1857, who lived seventeen years among Aboriginal people before returning to France. He is the far edge of a surname that began in a workshop full of skins and became the word for the trade a whole colony was built on, and he came home carrying it.