Richard D. McClellan and Dr. Donald Cannon, Church History

Louis A. Bertrand (originally John Francis Elias Flandin) had traveled most of the world when he decided to “settle down” in Paris and became a leader in the Red Republican Party just before the Revolution of 1848. He was working as the political editor of the largest communist periodical in France at the time he was converted to Mormonism by John Taylor, and he thereafter played a pivotal role in the translation of the Book of Mormon and taught Victor Hugo the gospel. After leaving his wife and two boys for four years to emigrate to Utah, where he resided in Brigham Young’s home, Bertrand returned to France as the mission president. While there, he employed his literary genius and powerful connections to catch the attention of Paris’s public and countered the myriad anti-Mormon publications then being printed in France with his own Memoirs d’un Mormon. When he applied to Louis Napoleon III for permission to preach, the emperor tore his request to pieces laughing, and in 1864 the mission was closed; Bertrand returned to Utah, begging Brigham Young for only “a good young Zion wife, and a little farm.” In Utah, he perpetuated a series of wine debates in the Deseret News and was intimately involved with sericulture; at the head of Brigham Young’s cocoonery, he brought silk to its peak production before he was fired as incompetent. He died in 1875 after a short bout of dementia, having never had his “Zion wife.”

The above summary represents an abbreviated form of two years’ research on Louis A. Bertrand. During the summer of 2000 I had the opportunity to travel to Denmark, where I presented a lecture on Bertrand’s life at the annual conference of the Mormon History Association; but the capstone of my work has been the 130-page thesis I completed in August 2000, which constitutes the first biography of this extraordinary, but little known Frenchman. It is called “Louis A. Bertrand: One of the Most Singular and Romantic Figures of the Age” and can be found at the BYU Library and at the Paris Institute Library, among other places. I have also prepared articles on Bertrand that have been or will be published in The Encyclopedia of Latter-day Saint History, Mormon Historical Studies, and other LDS publications.