Eugène Le Roy

Eugène Le Roy (29 November 1836, Hautefort – 6 May 1907, Montignac, Dordogne) was a French writer.

Eugène Le Roy was the son of parents who were servants of the baron Ange Hyacinthe Maxence, baron de Damas, a former minister who owned the château d'Hautefort. Their circumstances forced his parents to place him with a wet nurse at a peasant's house in the neighborhood.

From 1841 to 1847, Le Roy studied at a rural school in Hautefort at a time when the majority of children remained illiterate. In 1848 he lived at Périgueux, where he attended the École des Frères. One prominent memory of his childhood was the planting of a tree of freedom (arbre de la liberté) to celebrate the advent of the Second Republic.

In 1851, he refused to enter the seminary and became a grocer in Paris. He joined with socialists, such as described in his novel Le Moulin du Frau, and assisted in the establishment of the Second Empire. In 1855 he enlisted in the 4th regiment of French cavalry and participated in military campaigns in Algeria and then Italy. He served for 5 years, but then resigned after being reduced in rank for insubordination.

In 1860, after success in a civil service examination, Le Roy became an assistant tax collector in Périgueux. During the Franco-German War of 1870, he joined the francs-tireurs. In 1871, he rejoined the tax collection service in Montignac. He became very sick and recovered slowly over the course of a year.

On 14 June 1877 Le Roy married in a civl ceremony his mistress Marie Peyronnet, by whom he already had a three-year-old son. His non-conformity and his republicanism resulted in his dismissal, along with (and for the same reason) thousands of other government officials, by the government of Mac-Mahon. Soon after his dismissal, he began to write voluminously.

In 1877 Le Roy applied for admission to the Masonic lodge Les Amis Persévérants et l'Étoile de Vesone Réunis in eastern Périgueux. But the Prefect of Dordogne was ordered by the Minister of the Interior, Oscar Bardi de Fourtou, to closed some Masonic Lodges, including the one Le Roy had joined. Le Roy was reinstated as a tax collector in 1878 after Mac Mahon lost the elections of October 1877.

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