author

A. de (Ausone) Chancel

1808–1878

Best known for vivid travel and colonial-era writing, this 19th-century French author moved between literature, administration, and public life in Algeria. His work ranges from poetry and songs to desert travel narratives and polemical essays.

1 Audiobook

Cham et Japhet, ou De l'émigration des nègres chez les blancs considérée comme moyen providentiel de régénérer la race nègre et de civiliser l'Afrique intérieure.

Cham et Japhet, ou De l'émigration des nègres chez les blancs considérée comme moyen providentiel de régénérer la race nègre et de civiliser l'Afrique intérieure.

by A. de (Ausone) Chancel

About the author

Born in Vindelle, in the Charente region of France, on August 2, 1808, and later dying in Mostaganem, Algeria, on November 5, 1878, Ausone de Chancel was a French writer and colonial administrator. Bibliographic records and reference sources consistently identify him in both roles, and they show a career that crossed literature, politics, and the French colonial world.

His published work was wide-ranging. National library records link his name to poems and song texts as well as prose, while book records and digital editions show him as the author of Cham et Japhet and as the co-author, with Eugène Daumas, of Le Grand désert, a travel narrative centered on the Sahara and the kingdom of Haoussa. A surviving 1850 letter to Victor Hugo also suggests that he was connected to the literary circles of his time.

Because the most readily available sources are mainly bibliographic and reference entries, many personal details remain sketchy. Even so, they portray a writer whose books reflect the concerns and assumptions of 19th-century France, especially its fascination with empire, travel, and North Africa.