Nicolas-Germain Léonard

{{short description|18th century Guadeloupean writer}}

{{Infobox person/Wikidata | fetchwikidata=ALL}}

Nicolas-Germain Léonard (16 March 1744 – 26 January 1793) was a poet and one of Guadeloupe's first writers.{{cite book |title=Revue du traditionnisme français et etranger |date=1908 |location=Paris |pages=165–6 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=pQ2gAAAAMAAJ&pg=RA2-PA165 |access-date=6 October 2021 |language=fr |chapter=Bibliografie des Provinces {{!}} Ile-de-France |via=Google Books |trans-title=Review of French and foreign traditionism}}{{cite book |editor1-last=Wilson |editor1-first=James Grant |editor2-last=Fiske |editor2-first=John |title=Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography. Volume III |date=1887 |publisher=D. Appleton and Company |location=New York |page=691 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TGFIAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA691 |access-date=6 October 2021 |chapter=Léonard, Nicolas-Germain |via=Google Books}}

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 during the period of the French Revolution. Slavery was an important issue in the colonies, and Léonard was white.{{cite book |last1=Jack |first1=Belinda Elizabeth |title=Francophone literatures : an introductory survey |date=1996 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=Oxford, England |isbn=9780198715061 |page=119 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=rgYm4pYVuPYC&pg=PA119}} 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".{{cite book |first=Hans Ulrich |last=Gumbrecht |author-link=Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht |translator-first=Glen |translator-last=Burns |title=Making sense in life and literature |publisher=University of Minnesota Press |year=1992 |isbn=0-8166-1954-9 |page=213}}

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 {{lang|fr|chargé d'affaires}} (diplomat) at Liège. There Léonard wrote "{{lang|fr|Les lettres de deux amants habitants de Lyon}}" (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.