Raoul Blanchard taught at the University of Grenoble from 1906 and devoted most of his research to Alpine and Canadian geography.
15 Facts About Raoul Blanchard
1.
2.
The son of an inspector of the Department of Water of Orleans, Blanchard attended Holy Cross School and Pothier Secondary School, where he studied under the geographer Louis Gallouedec.
3.
Raoul Blanchard was admitted to the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1897, he became excited by geography, which was taught by Paul Vidal de La Blache.
4.
Raoul Blanchard received his agregation in 1900 and became a professor at the school of Douai, France.
5.
Raoul Blanchard prepared a thesis on the regional geography of Flanders, which he defended in 1906 under the title Flanders, Geographic Study of the Flemish Plain in France, Belgium, Holland.
6.
Raoul Blanchard collaborated with the institute and its journal for 50 years, and both still exist today.
7.
Raoul Blanchard was appointed professor in 1913 and became known as the head of geography at the University of Grenoble.
8.
Raoul Blanchard taught at the University of Grenoble until his retirement, in 1948.
9.
Raoul Blanchard was appointed an instructor at Harvard University, in Massachusetts, in 1917 and was named a full professor from 1928 to 1936, which gave him the opportunity to spend a few months a year in North America.
10.
Raoul Blanchard began to produce documents about Quebec with a strictly-geographical method.
11.
Raoul Blanchard was appointed the first director of the institute until illness struck, when one of his students, Pierre Dagenais, took over.
12.
At the 1939 founding of the Geographical Society of Montreal, Raoul Blanchard was appointed honorary president, and in 1952, he became president of the Association of Geographers.
13.
Raoul Blanchard never claimed to be an economist historian and yet, in his investigations, he never neglected the temporal dimension of the spatial phenomena he studied.
14.
Raoul Blanchard is considered the father of modern geography in Quebec.
15.
Raoul Blanchard wrote about 290 works covering a wide range of subjects such as Flanders, the French Alps, the Middle East and North America.