George-Édouard Desbarats

George-Édouard-Amable Desbarats (5 April 1838 – 18 February 1893) was an influential Canadian printer and inventor.

The Desbarats were an established printing family. The first of the family to settle was Joseph Desbarats from Auch in France, and who arrived in with the Régiment de la Sarre in New France in 1756.

Joseph's son Pierre-Édouard co-purchased the Nouvelle Imprimière (New Printing Office) from William Vondenvelden in 1798; the printer was responsible for printing the Lower Canadian Statutes, and also published newspapers such as the Quebec Mercury and other publications. Pierre-Édouard's third son George-Paschal Desbarats took over the business in 1828 and was named Queen's Printer in 1841.

George-Édouard was born to George-Paschal and his first wife Henriette, daughter of Amable Dionne. He was sent to College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1846. He studied law at the Université Laval, and was called to the bar of Lower Canada on 2 May 1859. In 1860 he married Lucianne (Lucie-Anne) Bossé, who was the eldest daughter of Joseph-Noël Bossé. They had two daughters and five sons together.

On his father's death Desbarats became co-Queen's Printer with Malcolm Cameron for the Province of Canada. Desbarats had the Desbarats Block building constructed in Ottawa when the city was chosen as capital of the newly confederated Dominion of Canada. The building housed printing and binding equipment and employed up to a hundred people. Numerous government publications were among the works published there. It was burned down by arson in 1869; among the losses were the lithographic plates for a scholarly on Samuel de Champlain that his grandson Peter Desbarats stated was to have been his "monument as a publisher".

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