Jean Talon. Opened: 1966, Orange Line; 1986, Blue Line

Among the traitors to French Canada identified by Lionel Groulx were the young men, Radisson and Grosselliers among them, who in the seventeenth century did not hesitate “between the sedentary life of the pioneer and the seductive existence of the coureur de bois”. Attracted by the land’s  “vast prospect, its immensity, served by the most magnificent network of rivers”, the coureurs de bois dispersed throughout the continent in pursuit of a “life of easy profit, full of the unexpected and adventure, unrestrained liberty and too often libertinage”. 

Radisson and Grosselliers were far from alone. Between 1668 and 1683, Groulx notes that the population of New France had grown by only four thousand souls, a figure which he is unable to reconcile with the “marvelous fecundity of Canadien families favoured by a period of peace”. He finds some of that shortfall in the 500 to 800 coureurs de bois, who abandoned their farms and wives for a life of adventure.

For the colony, this figure, more than half its married men, was a near disaster and was strictly against the policy of Versailles.  By venturing forth into the uncharted territory, the coureurs de bois destroyed the beaver population, upset the trading relationship between the French colonizers and the pre-existing Cree and Iroquois populations, and took France into dangerous competition with other European colonizers. With the colony emerging from one war with the Iroquois and France already at war with Holland, the 1660s were a period of consolidation. Repeated letters from Versailles to Indendants of New France from made the position clear:

It is better to restrict ourselves to a space of earth which the colony will able to maintain than embrace too large a quantity, part of which we may one day we be obliged to abandon  with some diminution of the His Majesty’s reputation and that of his crown.

Jean-Baptiste Colbért to Indentant Jean Talon, Count d’Orsainville, 5 April 1668.

Explore to this  limit … it is better to occupy less territory and people entirely than expand without measure and have weak colonies at the mercy of the least accident.

Louis XIV to Indendant Jacques Dushesneau de la Doussinère et d’Ambault, 15 April 1676

Yet for the officials on the ground, this was a impossible policy. The dispersal of men was not as frivolous as Groulx pretends.  Extortion by the French merchants supplying the colony more or less forced farmers to supplement their incomes by trapping beaver, whose fur was the colony’s most lucrative commodity. Even he concedes that the primary reason for dispersal was economic and, hardly a proponent of the free market, quotes the economist Adam Smith that “Of all the measures compromising the progress of a colony, this without doubt is the most effective.” Unfortunately for the colony, Groulx observes, the  situation continued throughout the history of New France with “the evil one can imagine”.

Even the most powerful men in colony suffered from its hardships, as Governor General Argenson made clear:

I foresee great difficulty in subsisting in this land, and it has been difficult for me to go far in my appointments. You cannot imagine the expense of living, beyond the difficulty of having it. The habitants are in an extreme poverty, insolvable by merchants; this poverty proceeds in part from the debasement of trade.

To address these problems, in 1660 Versailles took direct control of colonial administration and appointing Jean Talon as Indendant of the colony in 1665. Under Talon, new policies were instituted to make the colony agriculturally self-sufficient and less dependent on France. Seigneurs were encouraged to clear their property of trees on pain of losing their fief, immigration from France was increased, especially of skilled labour and women, marriage and childbearing was encouraged with measures which saw the fathers of unmarried boys and girls having to account for their delinquency while the fathers of the largest families were rewarded with hundreds of livres, provided their offspring did not join the church. It was forbidden on pain of death to linger in the forests for more than twenty four hours. Such severe punishments were useless though. As Frontenac wrote in 1679, “The county is so open and so great is the difficulty of knowing when exactly they leave or when they return by secret correspondence with those with whom they live and even the principal merchants …”

When Talon set out from France he dreamed of extending French military reach “to Florida, New Sweden, New Holland and New England” with the hope that the French  might be the first to reach Mexico. It was not to be, but by the time he left in 1672 New France was on a surer footing and the landscape of the St Lawrence Valley established.  The problem of a scattering population remained, and the economic realities of despoilation and the feared wars with the Iroquois and Europeans meant that it was Frontenac who delivered the expansion Talon had dreamt of.

Consulted for this post

Lionel Groulx, La naissance d’une race. Montreal: Libraririe d’action canadienne-française, 1930.

André Vachon, “Talon, Jean” Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online. University of Toronto/Université Laval

Lionel-Groulx. Green and Orange Lines. Opened 1978.

The stations of the Montreal Metro system are not named after people. They are named after streets and places, which themselves may or may not be named after people. So when people call for Lionel-Groulx to be renamed after Oscar Peterson, they are actually calling for the street to be renamed. There is no Peterson near Lionel Groulx Metro, but, in an accident recalling the deliberate irony of Wolfe, named after the British general at the Battle of Quebec, running alongside Montcalm, his French counterpart, the street parallel to Lionel-Groulx is named Delisle. By the logic of the metro system itself, an obvious replacement for the historian who gave French Canada a vision of itself as rural, traditional, independent, and ethnically French, is, by historical accident, the same name as Esther Delisle, the PhD candidate who in 1992 accused Groulx and his followers of racism, fascism, and contempt of the French Canadian population itself. *

Groulx, Delisle argued, had implausibly fabricated a French-Canadian race drawn from Norman stock. This Norman blood, together with the force of history, providence and a miracle of leadership ensured that this nation would inevitably achieve its destiny in a French Catholic State. For Groulx, it would begin, and end, with the French Canadian.

From the start there were problems. Groulx’s own figures in La naissance d’une race suggest Normans made up only a quarter of the French colonizing population before 1680 and ignore the presence black slaves and other European colonizers before the Wolfe’s victory in 1765. In this milieu, French was the language of the colony long before it had been standardized across France itself.) To Groulx’s delight, despite the policies of Versailles and successive governors of New France, intermarriage French colonials and the older populations of North America met with failure. Jean Talon may have larded the Jesuits in their missionary zeal, but “after fifty years of work, [they] were unable to teach the barbarians of the New World neither the French language nor the manners of Versailles”. Forgetting that human reproduction does not require the blessing of the Church, Groulx finds no descendants of the 94 marriages recorded before 1685, their offspring dying before the end of the eighteenth century.

How could it be otherwise? In his novel, L’Appel de la race, Groulx’s hero observes the fate of his own children’s mixed French Catholic and English Protestant heritage:

“The blood of the race remains the same through the centuries!” And the unhappy father surprised himself frequently ruminating on this painful reflection: “So it’s all true, the cerebral disorder, the psychological disorder that comes from mixing races”

Groulx vilified the perceived traitors of French-Canada, who, seduced by “the peril of individualism,” abandoned their feudal farms, “scattering” across the continent seeking adventure, profit and fur. Equally treacherous were upper class French Canadians, who fell under the sway of capitalism, democracy, and federalism. Admiring of British and American institutions and economic success, they “commit treason and kill themselves off as a group of as much as they construct themselves.”

Placed in more direct, closer relations with the conqueror or the oppressor, you can see how they succumb in an ineluctable series of falls: self-interest leads them to practice assiduous social relations with the foreigner; then, in contact with the richest, they yield little by little to the temptations of vanity … And then, through pride, through absence of nation faith, they accept marriage, the mixing of blood: this is their downfall and their end.

In their self-serving treachery, the upper classes had ushered in parliamentary democracy to the ruin of the humble French Canadian. “Parasitic individualism” was particularly rife in the Liberal party of Laurier and Bourassa, where it was “awakening appetites, cupidity of every type, especially of high finance, that insatiable oligopoly that prowls the alleyways of government, subjugating it to the point that government and oligarchy become one.” Employers, “held back by outdated fads of economic liberalism … infect us daily with the virulent germ of the worst social cankers”. Quoting the Portuguese dictator, Oliveria Salazar, “the least noisy, but, in my view, the most constructive, the greatest of the contemporary dictators”, Groulx asserted that “the State is not free, because it is manipulated more or less consciously by economic concentrations”.

Forced from their tenant farms by these “economic concentrations”, the French Canadian middle classes give themselves up to sport, the imported pleasures of the United States, even emigrating to the United States “out of sheer capriciousness” while the lower classes were swallowed up in the cities”. “From father to son, they will live in the same slums, they will be under the same bondage, with no ambition to better their lives, content to obey a master, especially if this master is a foreigner.”

The economic and cultural power of the United States was not the only threat to the moral purity of the French Canadian. More insidious was “the Jew”, an economic power able to control democracy and the newspapers, including the larger circulation Montreal daily, La Presse, and dupe the unwitting French Canadian into his economic downfall with Jewish-edited dailies bought from Jewish newspaper boys on the street corner.

The Jew went to the right school. With universal experience, he is essentially cosmopolitan, the natural vehicle of internationalism in all things. He knows how his cousin in Frankfurt or Warsaw, a newspaper boy like himself, when about boycotting the papers that didn’t please him or his race: he also knows how his uncle Jacob of Vienna, who made his fortune in the clothing business, controlled the newspapers that accepted his paid prose.

For writers at Le Devoir, the Jew was both physically identifiable and invisible. For all that his nose and the odour of garlic gave him away, he was effectively disguised by changing his name and that of his business. French Canadian businesses on Ste Catherine were not signs of progress but of “regression”, said Paul Anger. “French Canadian places of business should be really called Oriental,” he continued. “The Jews steal our names because they are worth something. They are the only thing we have left”.

Helpfully identified by Groulx as “the American microbe” and “the sons of Israel”,  others elaborated on there effects. While without question the Jewish and American interests controlled all aspects of business and industry,  ”Judeo-American Finance with Bolshevkik sympathies” were especially powerful in the media and “the Jews rule in Russia just as in Hollywood.  “Advertising, a field dominated by our Judeo-American rulers, has decided that sex appeal sells. They use it all the time, without the slightest concern for relevancy”. Conspiracy theories extended even to the lengthening of dresses which signaled not a return to decency but the “Jews passion for profit … Women would be forced to go out and buy”.

In the city itself, “while entire Montreal districts are ruined just like Warsaw, smaller municipalities like Plage Laval are also complaining that Jews have destroyed real estate values.” Others worried about the arrival of the Wailing Wall in Square St Louis. When anti-semitism gained the attention of parliament Groulx, noted that “in Montreal we have drawn safe electoral districts for him” and protested their “elevation to the rank of privileged class of ethnic minority.” It could only entail one thing:

To what end are all these absolutely unjustifiable priviledges being accumulated if not to encourage the establishment of a veritable Jewish commercial tyranny – tyranny which Israel’s international influence ensures will be formidable and easily implanted  – in Quebec and first, and foremost, in Montreal.

To combat the predations of international capital and the solidarity of international Jewry, economic and political measures were needed, including the errecting of dykes around Quebec. Most explicit was André Laurendeau writing in Le Devoir in 1933 as a founding member of Jeune Canada:

The actions of the trust, i.e. Foreign capital, are felt everywhere. The trust is master in Ottawa, and master in Quebec. The hour is too late for equivocation. It is time to make them fear the indignation, the rage of a people that awakens from its deep lethargy …. one day, we will do to the trusts here what they did to the Jews in Germany. We’ll give them the boot. And if they don’t get up safe and sound on the other side of the forty-fifth parallel, well, just to bad.

Under a pseudonym, Groulx  endorsed the Achat chez nous, or Buy At Home, campaign.

In six months or a year our watchword will be understood and followed, and the Jewish problem will be resolved in Montreal and across the entire province … Of the Jews, none would remain except those who could make a living solely off their own people. The rest would scatter, or of necessity disband to make their living in other sectors other than business.

As well as political and economic isolation, re-education and leadership was needed. Again, Groulx looked Europe; to Germany, where “teachers, mobilized in special camps as if preparing for important pedagogical manoeuvres, heard their country’s leaders express their plan for the national training of young Germans;” to Italy, where “the present strength of Il Duce’s government is due to the generation of young Italians trained according to Fascist principles;” and the U.S.S.R., where the extraordinary and mysterious longevity of the Soviet regime is in large part due to the revolutionary mystique with which an entire army of masters inspired Russia’s youth.” Just as Italians had the “blood of Cesar running through their veins” so Groulx reminded “the cowardly nation that is contemporary French Canada that they are the direct descendants of northern America’s conquistadors”.

While “Weak minds which believe in democracy at the expense of the Church and Christ react with horror to Fascism in all its shapes and forms” Groulx saw “a glorious kind of rebirth under this political system”. To Groulx, a French Catholic state was the “legitimate and necessary destiny” of French Canada. To his followers, including André Laurendeau, this state was Laurentie and would “rise out of the realm of desire” with the inevitable break up of the United States”, its borders corresponding with Quebec for some, reaching into northern Ontario, New Brunswick, and New England for others”. Defined by loyalty “to blood, to history and culture”, the Ligue d’action nationale, publisher of L’action nationale, the day of St John the Baptist (24 June) declared a national holiday and the fleur-de-lys the flag of the new nation.

To achieve this glorious state, all that was needed was a leader. Some despaired of the situation. Others found their leader in Groulx. And for his part, Groulx knew that Providence would not fail him. Only French Canadians could do that.

Whether the miracle of a savior – for which we hope and beseech Providence – is granted today or tomorrow, we have to look realistically at our chances of developing a truly national policy. French Canadians know nothing about nationhood. They are a poor people with plenty of feeling, to be sure, but they have never attended any call beyond their stomachs.

Finding solidarity only in the political party, “the most destructive form of individualism”, French Canadian businessmen rejected the Achat chez-nous campaign, preferring to “found branches or sub-branches of the Rotary Club, the Kiwanis, the Knights of Columbus. Like the old aristocracy from New France, “the anti-patriotic, anti-nationalist bourgeois population … will succeed in eliminating [its] own kind”. Their “pomaded, painted whipper-snappers” receive instruction from teachers more interested in sport than the cultivation of souls and patriotism while  French Canadians merely follow:

… worse than the revolting regime is the perfect idiocy with which we tolerate it. Every week, and sometimes two or three times a week, there are ten or twenty thousand, at the hockey games in Montreal, yelling and shrieking as wildly as savages. Out of these twenty thousand, you will find no more than five hundred who would be capable of opening their mouth to end the tyranny of Ottawa.

In the French Canadian himself, Groulx’s bucolic ideal collapsed on itself: “all the country people who persist in the stubbornness, petrifying themselves in a their frantic individualism … traditional and apparently incorrigible individualism.” Paradoxically, given calls to erect dykes and to isolate of French Canada, French Canadians themselves are “unable to see what is going on, in their country, in North America, persuaded they can live indefinitely, in isolation, in their goldfish bowl”. The degeneracy of the French Canadian race, previously the manifestation of “all goodness in their elegant maintenance of the native nobility” is seen in its language and posture by “the flabby, soft pronunciation, the talk of just about, the sentence half spoken and half swallowed” and “the stooped back and the rounded shoulders … of weak people or slaves”. In love with all flags, their balconies are draped with a profusion of flags, the Union Jack, the Canadian flag, the Stars and Stripes, the French Tricolore, anything except the fleur-de-lys and ignored calls to celebrate St Jean Baptiste (24 June) as a national day. “The great misfortune of French Canadians”, Groulx dared to say, “is that there are no French Canadians”.

* If you want to pursue this change, good luck to you. A healthy society is able to look its past in the eye. The other alternative is St Jacques.

Consulted for this post

Esther Delisle. The Traitor and the Jew: anti-semitism and the delirium of extremist right-wing nationalism in French Canada from 1929-1939. Trans. by Madeleine Hébert with Claire Rothman and Käthe Roth. Montreal: Robert Davies Publishing, 1993.

Lionel-Groulx. Green and Orange Lines. Opened 1978.

Of all the stations in the metro system, Lionel-Groulx is the most controversial. Named after the priest and historian, he dominated a strand of French Canadian intellectual culture from the 1920s to his death in 1967. To his admirers, including former students at Université de Montréal, André Laurandeau, a future editor of Le Devoir, and Jean Drapeau, who became Mayor of Montreal, he was a “shepherd,” guiding French Canadians, often unwilling, away from the evils of the city and international capitalism to an “earthly paradise free from English domination”.

To his critics, he was a fascist anti-semite who held his compatriots in contempt, guiding them only towards a Catholic dictatorship modeled on Mussolini, Dolfuss and Portugal’s Salazer, whom he cited with admiration. Understandably they might prefer to see the name of the jazz musician, Oscar Peterson, in place of Groulx’s on Montreal’s most familiar map.

Groulx’s vision of Quebec was modeled on the rural communities of the pre-revolutionary France. At first drawn from the areas of Dieppe and Rouen, the Norman founders of the colony were later supplemented with arrivals from other areas of France, notably the orphans Paris and from La Rochelle. These formed the basis of the French Canadian race and “the ethnic influences that shaped it’s soul. Those who arrived after 1700, even 1680, found the young race fully formed … its essential lines ever fixed”. The colonizers were scrupulously selected: no deformity was permitted and impotents, male or female “were unpityingly sent back to France”. Their intellectual development also did them honour: untouched by the Republican spirit of the Revolution, it is shown, by whom is not clear, that before the taking of the Bastille, “there were collective liberties, well-being, joie de vivre, and even sufficient public education”.

It was true, there had been the wars of religion, but “the good rural people recovered from the disasters soon enough” and, in any case, the militias were not instituted until 1688. Under Henry IV, the peasants enjoyed “an amiable repose”, which thanks to the good king, they savoured in “their rural cabins”. Where the nobility did not move to Paris, they remained to do good work among the people. Where they had, the people could still rely on the clergy, “the soul of French rural life and all its progress.” Yet, for all their deference, the colonizers of New France were not servile and citing earlier historians of social reform in France, Groulx  presents an image at once egalitarian and hierarchical, traditional and advanced. “‘Many were landowners, especially in Normandy, where servitude disappear first and peasants and petty nobility cultivated the land with their own hands … It was these fecund and energetic families that colonised Canada, where their descendants religiously conserved the mores we  [in France] have lost’. By the end of the Middle Ages, culture was more advanced in Normandy than in any other part of France”. Transported across the Atlantic it could only flourish. “The old Canadiens, of excellent French race, manifested all goodness in their elegant maintenance of the native nobility”.

For all its contradictions, the image of a docile, agrarian population, benevolently guided by the Catholic Church was a image popular long before Groulx. The bucolic fantasy is seen in the the writings of the politician J-C Taché, who, in 1854, wrote: “We had feudalism which is to the good, and it is probably in part due to this institution that we have chivalrous morals and the exquisite manners of our population.” Groulx quotes him approvingly, going on to remark that Voltaire would have been surprised, by the ease of habitant life which had remained agricultural and had escaped the predations of commercial interest afflicting the French peasantry. It is  seen in the writing of Louis-Joseph Papineau and of his grandson, Henri Bourassa, the politician, editor of Le Devoir and sometime mentor to Groulx. Nostalgic, sentimental, in the hands of Lionel Groulx it was a call to French Canadians shake off the political, economic, and moral lethargy of outside interests and define themselves as a nation.

In 1992 Esther Delisle, a PhD candidate at Université Laval, shattered this image by accusing Groulx and his followers in the French Canadian political and intellectual elite of anti-semitism.

Her accusations, their repercussions, and Groulx’s legacy are all stories for future posts. A suivre!

Consulted for this post

Ramsay Cook. “The Triumph and Trials of Materialism”. The Illustrated History of Canada. (Toronto: Key Porter, 2007)

Lionel Groulx, La naissance d’une race. (Montreal: La Libairie d’action canadienne-française. 1930)

Esther Delisle. The Traitor and the Jew: anti-semitism and extremist right-wing nationalism in Québec from 1929 to 1939. Trans. by Madeleine Hébert with Claire Rothman and Käthe Roth. (Montréal: Robert Davies Publishing, 1993.)

Laurier. Orange Line. Opened 1966.

Canadian Confederation was a marriage of convenience performed under the shotgun of the U.S. Civil War. The country created by Macdonald and Cartier existed on paper but was one dominated by English imperialists often hostile to a suspicious French-speaking minority, themselves more dominated by a local Catholic clergy than their English neighbours. Ten years after Confederation, Wilfrid Laurier, prime minister from 1886 to 1911, took the first towards a national identity. Perhaps of necessity these steps could only be taken by Canada’s first French-speaking prime minister.

In its early years, Confederation was tested by the integration of the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Relationships between French Catholics and English protestants were a constant source of unease. The inevitability of closer relations with the United States strained strong loyalties to the British Empire. Crises came thick and fast. Louis Riel’s defence of the Métis in Manitoba; separate French schools in Ontario and the new provinces; the settlement of the Klondike in British Columbia; disputes over the border of Alaska and free trade with the US; the Boer and First World Wars all tested Canadians’ commitment to their new country. Famous for his “sunny ways” and patient compromise, Laurier, attempted to guide Canada through these crises to distinct vision of itself able to deal with Washington, London, and the Vatican on its own terms as a single, united nation.

Surprising then that on the great question of Confederation itself Laurier was vehemently against the plan of Macdonald and Cartier. He might have made declarations about the human family on Canadian soil, as he did in his speech as valedictorian at McGill saying that “the race hatreds [between the English and French] are finished on Canadian soil” and that “[i]t matters not the language people speak or the altars at which they kneel”, but this human family did not go so far as having a single federal government. Rather there were two neighbouring Canadas, each protected from the United States, not by a Pax Canadiana, but a Pax Britannia.

As editor of the Le Défricheur, Laurier saw no advantage to Confederation and predicted  that it would be “the tomb of the French and the ruin of Lower Canada”.

Union is strength, yes, but only when the elements united are homogenous. It will be vain for you to throw together incongruous elements; there will be no strength, there will not be union … In this strange nation every contrary element will meet face to face; the Catholic element and the Protestant element, the English element and the French element. From this moment there will be strife, war, anarchy; the weakest element, that is to say the French and Catholic element will be dragged up and swallowed by the strongest.

Confederation, Laurier predicted, would bind French Canadians “hand and foot to the English colonies’. Written during the near collapse of the federation of the United States, Macdonald’s federal government pulled power to the centre. For Laurier, and many other French Canadians this was insupportable. “All important questions are within the sphere of the federal Government, that is to say, the Government of the English Colonies, and all the acts of our little local Parliament can be modified, corrected, cut, enlarged, annulled by the same Government.”

But Laurier was also a pragmatist, and when in Confederation became a reality in 1867,  he along with many other French-speaking Liberals accepted it as a fait accompli. In many respects his predictions were right and during his premiership of “this strange nation”, the contrary elements would dog him at every turn. That was to be expected; the task he had taken upon himself was to make the elements to work together. But on the important questions, he was wrong: there was no war, there was no anarchy, and without undoing a constitution on which the ink was still wet, he defended the power of the provinces and French identity within Canada even if that meant being called a traitor by his French-speaking friends and English-speaking imperialists.

Cartier. Orange Line. Opened 2007.

“Canada,” Pierre Elliott Trudeau is supposed to have said, “is a country built against any common, geographic or historical sense”. Prime Minister from 1968 to 1979 and again from 1980 to 1984, Trudeau was a smart man: he did not to say that it made no political sense. He also had the good sense not say that the modern, multicultural, bilingual Canada for which he is so much responsible, Charter Rights and all, was built on internal division, fear, and, bribery.

Created in the aftermath of the Rebellions of 1836, the unified Province of Canada was fracturing by the 1850s and was had run its course by the 1860s. With Canada East, modern Quebec, and Canada West, modern Ontario, equally represented in the parliament, the more populous western half resented the “French-Canadian dominance” of its eastern neighbour. This power enforced on the largely English speaking and Protestant westerners, a guarantee of French and Catholic values, particularly in education. In Toronto, George Brown, leader of the Reform Party and editor of the Globe, forerunner to the Globe and Mail, neatly defined the problem:

We have two countries, two languages, two religions, two habits of thought and action, and the question is can you possibly carry on the government of both with one Legislature and one executive.

For some the only answer was separation. For the more moderate but no less fiery Brown, the solution was representation by population and the separation of church and state. For a rapid succession of governments the internal divisions were forgotten in a series of scandals, including the location of the capital in Ottawa. Still, the problem could not be ignored for long: French speakers were unlikely to give up their political advantage, but the westerners had an undeniable point.

Separation was an absurdity, and John A. Macdonald, leader of the Conservatives in Canada West and George-Etienne Cartier, their leader in Canada East, both saw the necessity of each part to the other. Trade would still pass have to along the St Lawrence, but without Canada East, the westerners would be denied direct access to the Port of Montreal and the Atlantic. Equally, self-government and prosperity had changed Canada East and the appetite for separation had diminished. In 1836 Cartier had fought with Papineau against the British; by 1858, he was in London presenting an early version of Confederation to Queen Victoria. So comfortable was he in the British Empire that he stated that the Lower Canadian was an Englishman who spoke French.

Beyond the divisions between the two Canadas stood the United States. Thomas Jefferson’s glib claim that removing the British from north America was simply a matter of marching had been proved wrong in 1812, but the memory and the fear of annexation lingered long. If separation looked illogical from the perspective of Canadian self-interest, to their imperial masters in London it looked like an administrative and military nightmare. The Canadians would have to sort it out themselves.

When Brown, Cartier and Macdonald came together their solution was an audacious dodge. Rather than confront the internal divisions, they would simply build on top of them and persuade the other colonies of British North America to confederate in one self-determining territory. London would not only endorse the undertaking, but bless it with political powers whose scope would be matched by the grant of the enormous tracts owned by the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Clearly such an implausible scheme met with resistance. The Atlantic colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, and Prince Edward Island saw no advantage in helping Canada solve its political problems and, thanks to abundant fish and timber, were doing just fine by themselves. So strong was this feeling that Newfoundland saw no attraction in joining Canada until 1949. London too saw little advantage in this confederacy, which could only export the problems of a difficult and expensive colony to other quieter ones.

In 1861 all this changed. The war in the United States over the abolition of slavery might have been a Civil War, but it was a reminder of the violence of the War of 1812 and the American belief in Manifest Destiny. At the time Yankee newspapers in New York and Chicago declared “Just wait till this war is over, and then we’ll fix you.” In 1867, the year of Confederation and the American purchase of Alaska, US Secretary of State W. H. Seward declared that the whole North American continent “shall be, sooner or later, in the magic circle of the American Union”. Fear of a violent and expansionary US meant that if Canada was to survive and Britain to avoid another war in North America, some form of political union was needed between the Britain’s colonies. With war raging to the south the arguments for Confederation became overwhelming: “Look around you,” said Thomas D’Arcy McGee, “in this age of earthquake to the valleys of Virginia, the mountains of Georgia, and you will find reasons as thick as blackberries.”

In 1864, Cartier went to London again. This time the Colonial Office fell on the plan and Cartier returned with a mandate for “peace, order and good government,” the most sweeping powers ever granted by the Empire. Witnessing the carnage to the south, Macdonald saw that the new union needed a federal government stronger than Washington. He assured the elites of Quebec and Ontrario that he would use them more invasively than London ever had.

While London was eager to divest itself of responsibility of the its colonies, the Maritimes remained unconvinced. The War of 1812 had been less fiercely fought in the coastal regions, with trade only moderately disrupted. With the Civil War in the US concluded in 1865 Maritime fears about invasion receded still further and with them the reasons for confederating with the two divided Canadas. Confederation became a question of what the Canadas could offer the coastal populations. The answer was railways and money.

Sparsely populated and covering huge distances, without railways Canada would be impossible to govern. The promise of easy rail connection with the inland economic centres were used by Macdonald to cajole and bribe the Maritimes in to Confederation. The Intercolonial Railway from Halifax to Quebec City was written into the British North America Act of 1867. A railway lawyer and representative of Alexander Galt’s Grand Trunk Railway which the Intercolonial would extend, Cartier was more than happy with this constitutional obligation. The railways ensured the economic prosperity of both Canada and Cartier, and in 1867 the four provinces of Qntario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia confederated.

For tiny Prince Edward Island a railway could hardly suffice and so its parliament negotiated, demanded and received from Macdonald a ferry and a debt allowance double that of all of the other provinces. When the first Governor-General of Canada visited in Charlottetown in 1873 it seemed that it was the Island that had annexed Canada.

Cartier understood that the railways were essential to the success of a country uniting Britain’s colonies in North America. Newfoundland might be a hold out but there was still British Columbia on the Pacific coast. And for this there were two obstacles: money and the vast lands owned by the Hudson’s Bay Company which separated Ontario on the Great Lakes from the British Columbia beyond the Rocky Mountains.

The one problem would solve the other, and in 1869 Cartier left once again for London discuss the largest property deal in British and Canadian history. The obvious question was the price. In 1867 the Americans had paid $7.2 million for remote Alaska. Prince Rupert’s land was considerably bigger, in large parts fertile, and had a border with the United States. One suggestion was $40 million. In the end Cartier bought the lot of $1.5 million and gave a twentieth of the fertile land back to the HBC.

With a border between British Columbia and Canada there was a point to talking about confederation of the Pacific colony. Cartier’s methods were the same as with the maritimes; when, they arrived in Ottawa, after taking a ferry to San Francisco and the railway through the United State, the delegation from B.C. asked for a wagon road. Cartier offered them a railway, and with the right to parcel up and sell Prince Rupert’s Land – from which would be carved Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta – he had means to pay for it.

When that railway, the Canadian Pacific, was completed in 1885 and the final spike driven into the ground at Craigellachie, B.C. it was possible to travel from Halifax in Nova Scotia to Vancouver in five days. The exceptional speed and expense which the construction of a continental railway system required defied any economic sense; the 11,000 settlers in British Columbia were as well connected as the half million in California, and at 3.7 million, the population of Canada was less than a tenth of the United States. But the railway was never really about economic sense, and as the dollars blew down the tracks so they blew though Ottawa and Montreal too.

In the years immediately following Confederation political scandals involving railways and politicians abounded. Cartier was far from immune. Land sales could not happen fast enough and in a final irony, the Canadian Pacific Railway was funded by money from the United States, specifically from the American financiers of the rival Northern Pacific Railroad. Of this money, $350,000 ended up in the coffers of Macdonald and Cartier’s Conservative Party. Cartier himself received $85,000. Obviously the government had to resign, but by then the railway held down a single unified nation, Canada. And if Canada ran from sea to sea while standing determinedly outside the magic circle of the American Union, this was in part because the railway had been built with American money.

Consulted for this post

Peter Waite. “Between Three Oceans: Challenges of a Continental Destiny”. The Illustrated History of Canada. Ed. Craig Brown. (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2002) pp. 277-376.

J-C Bonenfant. “Cartier, Geroge-Etienne”. Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online (University of Toronto/Université Laval)

Berton, Pierre. The National Dream: the Great Railway, 1871-1881. (Toronto: Anchor Canada, 1970)

Place d’Armes. Orange Line. Opened 1966.

Canada has just now to witness the most foul and barbarous murder of several of her citizens and MONTREAL is about to become no less famous than Manchester, in the annals of Military despotism, outrage and assassination.

One of the things that I enjoy most about this project (and the reason why this post has taken so long) is discovering the connections which exist not just between the stations but between the lives and events they mark. These connections give a sense of how the rivalries and friendships which shaped the Montreal, Quebec and Canada. The 1832 Montreal West by-election in Place d’Armes is a case in point.

The election, which took place over a number of weeks, ended on 21 May with three men dead at the guns of the British militia. Of the dead men, François Languedoc, Pierre Billet, and Casimir Chauvin, all of whom were apparently going about their ordinary business, only Chauvin had a connection with the two candidates, being an apprentice printer at the Vindicator, the paper edited by the victor, Daniel Tracey.

In his editorial the next day, the newly elected Tracey clearly laid the blame at the door of the authorities. Others were less certain, and over the next couple of years, numerous inquiries followed, with much of the focus being on the appropriate and correct use of the Riot Act, the same legislation that had been used in Manchester’s Peterloo Massacre in 1811 and in Bristol in 1831. These inquiries are a story in their own right, with the last by the Legislative Assembly itself widened to include correct procedure in the earlier inquiries. By then though Lower Canada was well on its way to rebellion; any pretence of a quest for truth was abandoned and the deaths took their place in the 92 Resolutions, delivered to the Governor General by Louis-Joseph Papineau‘s Patriotes.

On both sides, the leaders of these events were a close knit group of men, all of whom knew each other personally as well as in their political and professional relationships. Often they were related. Papineau, for example, was the cousin of Jacques Viger, who in April that year, had been appointed the first mayor the newly incorporated City of Montreal, and of Denis-Benjamin Viger, who was negotiating with the Colonial Office in London over reform when the shootings took place and took up the deaths with Lord Goderich.

Political positions were far from full time and the same names pop up in different places. William Robertson, one of the founding physicians of the Montreal General Hospital and among the first professors at McGill College, was the city’s chief magistrate. In this capacity, Robertson who read the Riot Act at Place d’Armes and ordered the miltia into the place of election.

The politically difficult job of coroner was given to Jean-Marie Mondelet, who like many of French-speakers had willingly defended the colony in the wars of 1812 with the USA, but now sought reform of colonial rule with Tracey and the Patriotes. Despite issuing the order for the arrest of the militia’s commanding officer, his investigations satisfied no-one. Still people had to get on and although clearly of different political persuasions, Mondelet and Robertson worked together on the Board of Health, formed almost immediately after the election to meet the cholera epidemic.

As for Tracey, the election’s victor, he had arrived in Montreal from Ireland in 1825 and established himself in the influential circle gathered around the Papineau and Viger families. He also established a newspaper, the Irish Vindicator. Following the success of Daniel O’Connell with Catholic Emancipation in Ireland, subscriptions to the paper fell off and it was rescued by among others Denis-Benjamin Viger and Ludger Duvernay of La Minerve. Early in 1832, both newspaper editors were imprisoned for printing vehement calls for reform. Upon their release, Tracey became the Patriotes candidate in the election. This same vehemence is seen in his editorial written on day after the shootings. His anger and the deaths were a step to the Rebellion of 1837 and in the subsequent reforms leading to a unified Province of Canada. Tracey however saw neither; along with thousands of others that summer, he died in the cholera epidemic.

Consulted in this post

James Jackson. The Riot That Never Was: The military shooting of three Montrealers in 1832 and the official cover up. Montreal: Baraka Books, 2009.

Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online

The Vindicator, 22 May 1832. The text of Tracey’s editorial is available from the BAnQ’s digital collections here. Turn to page 2.

L’hommage aux fondateurs de la ville de Montréal by Pierre Gaboriau and Pierre Osterrath at Berri-UQAM. Opened 1967. Green, Orange and Yellow Lines.

Other associations are more deliberate, and as Clairoux explains here, Drapeau and the cartoonist, Robert La Palme, in charge of commissioning works for the first stations, foresaw “nothing less than a huge art gallery”. There are the murals, like those at Papineau and La Palme’s own at Berri, but much of the resulting art is stained-glass. Also at Berri, passengers on the green line hurtle beneath the dramatic curves of Hommage aux fondateurs de la ville de Montréal by Pierre Gaboriau and Pierre Osterrath. Further west, at McGill, they wait beneath an enormous and soon to be restored installation showing the first city’s first two mayors, Jacques Viger and Peter McGill, in front of scenes from the 1830s. Place des Arts too houses a stained-glass, Frédéric Bach’s L’histoire de la musique à Montréal, alongside changing exhibitions in the gallery above the platform. The tradition of stained glass continues with Du College station, opened in 1984, housing a number of clean, light abstract glasses by Pierre Osterrath and Lyse Charland Favretti.

The stained-glass panels are perhaps my favourite – for obvious reasons there are no windows, though some of the entrances, like that at Champs-de-Mars, include staining in their glasswork. There are the ceramics, and the tiles at Peel never fail brighten my day with their colour and simplicity, but in the poured concrete caverns, the fragility of glass seems an incongruous delicacy against the monumentalism of the stations themselves.

Lionel-Groulx. Green and Orange Lines. Opened 1978.

And that poured concrete, especially in the first two phases of construction, is itself a spectacle. In combination with bright colours, often orange, it belongs to a time of confidence, when the future was not something to be planned or hedged against, but to be imagined and embraced. Lucian L’Allier, the chief engineer, and the architects he commissioned for the first stations seem to have been entranced with the flexibility of concrete. I feel this most on the walkway at Peel which floats above the platforms without reaching the walls. The interchange, Lionel-Groulx, has something of this too. Like many of the stations it has wide open spaces, quite different to the London Underground or Paris Metro. Being a meeting of lines, the orange and the green, it is on two levels, and the openness exposes one to the other so that travellers on the lower level are conscious of the rush of traffic above them.

Pic et Pelle by Germain Bergeron at Monk. Green Line. Opened 1978.

But the metro is more than a gallery filled with static works mounted on walls. Place-des-Arts station is not just the entrance to a concert hall and theatre, but a venue and performance space itself, hosting small (and not so small) concerts during the summer festivals and children’s dance workshops to go with this year’s production of the Nutcracker. Other stations, like Monk, make full use of their space for sculptures few galleries could contain. Later this month, Berri, the system’s busiest station, will host the physical theatre of the Cirque Alfonse.

As with London and Paris, Montreal’s metro is also the venue of hundreds of small concerts a year as buskers give otherwise hurried travellers a blast of song or a moment of fleeting contemplation. At Guy there is usually a singer or a musician to accompany my wait for the escalators and alleviate the tedium of what must be the system’s ugliest station. Often there is opera to be heard and writing this I realize I have not heard the Chinese harpist for a while.

Perhaps because of the architecture or perhaps because Montreal winters are so cold, the metro is much more than a means of transport or even the gallery intended by La Palme and Drapeau, and is more like the streets above. In the underground city downtown, thanks to the spontaneity of the buskers, the metro becomes the street, a lively and communal counterpoint to the slick commercialism of interconnected shopping malls and corporate offices. The metro is the space of common man; hence the fanfare.

McGill. Green Line. Opened 1966.

A big welcome to all my new readers and followers since Marian Scott’s piece in the Gazette. I hope you’ll feel free to ask questions, give advice, offer corrections, and above all enjoy the posts. And with posts in mind, here’s this weeks.

In recent years fears of global pandemic have hardly been out of the news. It is only with the meeting of the clinic and the corridors of power that deaths have been kept to a minimum. As in cities from St. Petersburg to Philadelphia, this meeting only occurred in Montreal in the face of the  cholera epidemic of 1831-32. From the devastation arose the first public hospitals, refuse collections and new powers to enforce public sanitation.

In 1821, Dr. William Robertson, his protegé, Dr John Stephenson, Dr. Andrew Fernando Holmes, all educated at Edinburgh University, and Dr. Henri-Pierre Loedel, also educated in Britain, set up the Montreal Medical Institute and with it the Montreal General Hospital, with a view to professionalizing the medical community in Canada. At the same time the Royal Institute for the Advancement of Learning was struggling with other heirs of the Scottish merchant, James McGill, himself educated at Glasgow University, to establish a school on his estate at Burnside Place within a ten year deadline. As physics professor, Martin Grant writes in a post on the McGill Science Faculty’s blog, dating the origins of the University is a hard task, but we can certainly say that in 1829, the two institutes joined forces  to form the Faculty of Medicine at McGill College, issuing its first degree to William Leslie Logie four years later.

The new doctor had his work cut out. Measles, smallpox, typhoid and dysentry were all virulent killers, and this is before the mortality rate takes account of death caused by a harsh environment and the rigours of childbirth for both infant and mother. In 1831 a new challenge appeared on the horizon; cholera, incurable and its cause unknown, was devastating cities such as London, Edinburgh, and Paris. It was only a matter of time before the disease appeared on the shores of the north America, and with the arrival of the first passenger vessels in June 1832 the disease landed in Montreal in the shape of an Irish immigrant named McKee whose fearful sweats and collapsing organs attracted crowds to the wharf-side tavern where he met his end.

In many respects, Lower Canada was well prepared. With the rate of immigration expected to be seventy to eighty thousand  in 1832, and three thousand arriving in the first week of June alone, the government undertook a series of measure including the notorious quarantine centre at Grosse Ile in the St Lawrence at Quebec City. Legislation was passed creating Boards of Health. With them came the first public hospitals, street cleaning services and refuse collections, public toilets, and new housing regulations and limits on occupancy. This entailed an unprecedented involvement of the government in the lives of citizens, including orders for construction and maintenance privies of a depth of six feet, weekly scrubbing of all uncarpeted floors and weekly inspections of all dwellings by Health Wardens to ensure the new obligations had been met.

For obvious reasons, cholera was associated with migrants, many of them poor and escaping the starvation of the “Potato Famine” in Ireland. For less obvious reasons it was associated with the poverty of working poor of Montreal. It was in the poor neighbourhood which had grown up around the newly opened Lachine Canal that the cholera hospital was established, despite the offer of a seminary in the town.

The rapidly refurbished buildings were openly referred to as sheds and their gruesome conditions provoked outcry.Samuel Jackson, Charles Meigis and Richard Harlan, visiting on behalf of the City of Philadelphia found no beds, only straw with no blankets ‘where the destitute might die beneath a roof instead of the canopy of heaven’. Benjamin Workman, editor of the Canadian Courant, thundered that ‘no farmer would consider them as comfortable accommodation for his cattle, and yet to these miserable sheds are persons brought labouring under a malady which, for all the others that afflict the human frame, requires warmth, prompt attention and comfortable beds. They might properly be called dying houses’.

As well as establishing the public hospitals, the Board of Health divided the city into thirteen wards and issued a panoply of measures to control the spread of the disease. These take up nearly a full page of close print in the Gazette of 12 June 1832 and I have reproduced some of the below. Some like the measure on keeping hogs in the city fell on the poor, for whom the animals were both an additional source of income and diet. Others, like the inspections, indicate the powers given to the Board of Health and the urgency with which the disease was met.

Despite the measures, between June and September 1832 Montreal was decimated with 1,900 recorded deaths from cholera in a city of a population of twenty thousand. Many were among the poor, and the disease fell particularly hard among the male labouring population, leading to the establishment of collections to meet the needs of their widows and orphans. Still, money in the bank was neither a prevention nor a cure. Speaking in 1835 at lecture to the students at the new university, Workman recalled how despite a high death rate among the poor, ‘cholera’s death carnival was not complete and the devastations were now extended beyond the houseless and indigent’.

That carnival would be brought to a more certain end when money was turned into sewers, filtration, and chlorination. Until then, there was high probability that human feces, the real cause of the cholera, would enter the water supply and so cause an outbreak of a disease which is always present and which according to the WHO continues to affect 3 to 5 million people for the lack of clean drinking water and public sanitation.

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The Rules and Regulations of the Montreal Board of Health, The Gazette, 12 June 1832.

Chapter Second: Of Cleanliness

1. No person whomsoever shall throw or cause to be thrown any dirty water, vegetables, ashes, filth or dirt of any kind in the streets of the City, Banlieue, or Port of Montreal

2. No person shall keep any hog or hogs in any dwelling-house within the City, Banlieue, or Port of Montreal, nor in any building within twenty feet of such dwelling-house, nor in such a manner as to be offensive to the neighbourhood, or to the passengers in the Streets or Highway; and in no case shall more than two Hogs be kept on the same premises; such Hogs to be kept in a pen or stye. [...]

5. All Dead Animals or Offals of Animals shall, within four hours, be removed beyond the Banlieue, and be immediately buried and covered, at least three feet beneath the surrounding surface.

6. All refuse Vegetable Substances shall be removed beyond the Banlieue, on Wednesday and Saturday in each week, in covered carts, to be furnished by the Board of Health, each cart to be provided with a large bell.

7. The Yard of every Premises in the City and Suburbs shall be swept clear of every other substance not abovementioned (excepting stable manure) on every Friday, from the first day of May to the first day of November, and the contents of the sweepings deposited in the Street, at the expense of the occupier or occupiers of such Yard in sufficient time to be removed by the Public Scavengers  And, during the winter, each Yard shall be cleaned at least once a month, and the contents or sweepings deposited on the ice, excepting Stable Manure, at a distance of not less than half a mile from the Shore, and not less than fifty yards from any Public Road. The Public Scavengers shall carry away the contents or sweepings mentioned in this Section in close covered tight vehicles, so that no part of the load shall escape.

8. The Proprietor of every Dwelling-house within the City, Banlieue, and Port of Montreal shall be bound, within one month from the Publication of these Rules and Regulations, to construct a Privy at least six feet deep, for each house so situated, within the yard or premises appertaining thereto. [...]

15. Live Horned Cattle, Sheep, Lamb, Goats, Calves, Hogs, or other Animals of a marketable nature, shall be exposed for sale in the Market Place situated in the Main Street of the St Lawrence Suburb, and no where else.

Chapter Third: Of Proprietors, Tenants, Sub Tenants and Occupiers of Houses and Dwellings

1. Every Proprietor of House within the City and Banlieue, who have leased or shall hereafter lease such a House or Building or any part thereof, shall, within ten days after the publication of these Rules and Regulations, give to the Health Warden of the Ward in which such a House or Building is situated, a Statement, in writing, setting forth the names of the Proprietor and Lessee or Lessees, the number of rooms occupied by each Lessee, and the number of persons occupying each room, together with the name of the Street in which such a House or Building is situated and the number of boundaries of such a House or Building, and, on the subsequent change of Tenant or Tenants, the name shall be notified within twenty-four hours after such a change.

2. All Lessees of Houses, who hold the same directly from  the Proprietor, shall be held liable for the acts of those persons to whom they may Sub-let.

3. The Tenant or Tenants of any House or Building, holding or leasing the same directly from the Owner, shall be jointly or severally proceeded against for any filth, manure, or nuisance of any description which may be found in the Street, opposite the House or Building occupied by them, or in the Court-yard, Privies, or any such place appertaining to such House or Building, and which may be used in common by the Tenants.

4. All Occupants of Houses shall be bound to scrub or cause to be scrubbed all floors therein, not carpeted or otherwise covered, at least once every week, and the walls and ceilings in each House shall, by the Occupant or Occupants there of, be  washed or whitewashed in the spring and autumn of each year; and as much oftener as shall, in particular cases, be deemed necessary by this Board, and within forty-eight hours after notice from the Board to that effect.

5. In no case shall the number of persons lodging and sleeping in any one Tenement exceed the ratio of four persons to a Room of twelve feet square: nor shall any person or persons be allowed to lodge in any cellar or basement story of any House or Dwelling house within the City and Banlieue of Montreal, without permission from the Board of Health. [...]

Chapter Sixth: Of the Health Wardens

There shall be thirteen Health Wardens, one to each Ward of the City and Banlieue, as divided by the foregoing Rules and Regulations, who shall respectively be governed by the following Orders and Directions, in the execution of their respective duties.

1. Immediately on the appointment of each Health Warden, or as soon thereafter as possible, he shall receive from the Secretary of the Board, -

Firstly, A certificate of his appointment signed by the Chairman of the Board, for the time being. A copy of these Rules and Regulations, and also such others as may be hereafter adopted. The names and places of residence of the Chairman of the Board, the Commissioners of Health, the Health Officer, the Inspector of Roads and his Deputy, the Inspector or Constable of the Beach, and the High Constable. All Rules of Police having reference to the cleanliness and the health of the City and Banlieue.

Secondly, Immediately on his appointment, he will receive a sign on which will be painted his name and the title of his office, which he shall cause to be affixed in the most conspicuous place on the outside of the house in which he resides. He will also receive a medal or other distinctive badge indicating his office, which he shall always wear in the execution of his duty.

Thirdly, He will immediately make out a list of the houses in his ward, designating the number of each, the name of the street, of the proprietors, and of the tenants or other occupants in each street, the number of apartments in each house, when the same is occupied by different individuals, and by whom each apartment, distinguishing Justices of the Peace and Constables. A copy of the list he shall furnish to the Committee of Superintendence at the Office of the Board of Health without delay.

Fourthly, He shall cause to be executed by the proper person or persons, and without partiality, the law under authority of which he acts, as well as the Rules and Regulations adopted by the Board, relating to streets and other public places, and without waiting for special directions, he shall denounce all delinquents, that they may undergo the penalties of the law, and, when the case will permit, shall support his accusation by at least one witness.

Fifthly, He shall not inspect any private property before six o’clock in the morning, nor after seven o’clock in the evenings unless he receive special order so to do.

Sixthly, When he proceeds to inspect private property he shall, in the first instance, make himself known as a Health Warden, and request admittance. He shall point out verbally, when necessary, that which is not in conformity with the Regulations of the Board, to whom he shall report accordingly. In the execution of this duty, he shall act with discretion and civility, and shall not extend his researches beyond what is strictly requisite.

Ninthly, Until further orders, he shall visit every house in his Ward or Section, once every week and report his proceedings daily to the Committee of Superintendence, at the Office of the Board of Health, between the hours of three and four o’clock P.M. His report shall be in the form prescribed by the Board, and he shall mention therein all the streets, lanes, or avenues which to him it may appear requisite to fence up or otherwise inclose.

Tweflthly, He shall, when in the performance of his duties, suspend from his neck, by a blue ribbon, the medal or badge which shall be delivered to him, and shall return the same to the Chairman of the Board, whenever he may go out of office. It is also ordered by the Board, that no person except a Health Warden shall wear this distinctive badge, and the Wardens respectively are required to report every individual who may do so without authority.

Thirteenthly, The remuneration of each Warden is fixed at the sum of five shillings per dat, from the period at which he may enter upon and fulfil the duties of his office.

[...]

By order of the Board of Health,

J. Guthrie Scott, Secretary.

Office of the Board of Health, Montreal, June 11, 1832

PRESENT

The Hon. C. W. Grant, Chairman

The Hon. John Molson, The Hon. P. De Rocheblave, William Robertson, M.D., Adam L. Macnider, Joseph Roy, Olivier Berthlet, John Stephenson, M. D., Henry Corse, William J. Vallée M. D., John Turney and Andrew Doyle, Esquires, The Rev, John Bethune, J. Guthrie Scott, Secretary.

The following ADDITIONAL RULES, REGULATIONS, ORDERS, and DIRECTIONS were unanimously adopted -

First, That all Passengers landed in the Port of Montreal, from Steam or other Vessels, shall within two hours after landing, remove from the Wharves.

Secondly, That one or more Public Privies shall be created as contiguous as possible to the Wharves.

By order of the Board of Health,
J. GUTHRIE SCOTT, Secretary

A separate notice succinctly details the penalties

By the 19th section of the Act 2. William IV, chap 16, it is enacted, that any person who shall violate any order or Direction made by the Board of Health, in exercise of the powers vested in them, shall, for every such offence, incur a Penalty not exceeding One Hundred Pounds, Currency, and shall be imprisoned until such Fine be paid, or for a term not exceeding six months.

By order of the Board of Health,

J. GUTHRIE SCOTT, Secretary.

Consulted for this post

Peter Waite. “Between Three Oceans: Challenges of a Continental Destiny” The Illustrated History of Canada. Ed. Craig Brown. Toronto: Key Porter, 2007. 277-376.

Walter Sendzik. The 1832 Montreal Cholera Epidemic: a study in state formation. McGill University: unpublished MA thesis, 1997.

David S. Crawford. “Montreal, Medicine and William Leslie Logie: McGill’s first graduate and Canada’s first medical graduate”. The Osler Library Newsletter, 108 (2008): 1-7.

Place d’Armes. Orange Line. Opened 1966.

On 25th April 1849, a group of Montrealers set out from Place d’Armes and burnt their country’s parliament to the ground. The army and police did little, despite warnings. Afterwards, among those arrested was the editor and owner of the Gazette.

In 1849, the effects of the previous decade’s Rebellions were still vividly felt, and with the passing into law of the Rebellion Losses Bill, a mob of English-speaking Montrealers marched on the parliament to protest the “insanity” of a law which they saw compensating the very rebels who they had fought against twelve years previously. This was perhaps inevitable, given that the reforms of the Durham report were designed to correct the flaws in colonial government which had led to the Rebellions by giving more power to the elected assemblies. As the rebels included popular politicians such as Papineau, it is hardly surprising that they were re-elected and so in a position to devise such a compensation scheme.

Still, it is easy to see why those who fought to preserve the authority of the Crown in 1837 and 1838 might feel betrayed when it’s representative assented to that widely drawn compensation scheme, and below the reporter from the Gazette gives a graphic account of the ensuing conflagration.

But the Gazette’s role in the events was more than that of recorder. Since the introduction of the Bill in Februrary 1848, James Moir Ferres, the editor and proprietor of the Gazette, had been leading petitions against it, and when Parliament met the day after the fire, in Bonsecours Market, questions were raised about an Extra that had been printed on the evening of the fire. This had led Members to speak with military before the protests. No military action was taken, perhaps unsurprisingly, but Ferres was arrested on the morning of the 26th April. He was not charged however, and in one account of the events of 25th April he is working on the Petition for the recall of the Governor-General, Lord Elgin. Nevertheless, this account is not without its confusions.

Their labours [in preparing the petition] were soon disturbed by cheering in the streets, and on looking out, a number of men were seen in advance of a calêche, in which two persons were seated, bearing the Mace of the House of Assembly, the crowd singing the national anthem, and cheering for the Queen.

For the remainder of the proceedings we are indebted our contemporaries and our Reporter. We refer to their reports. The city remained perfectly quiet during the night.

Clearly with the cheering, the singing crowd, and the Mace of Parliament proceeding through the streets, things were not “perfectly quiet”. But was this the moment when Ferres was arrested? Or had he left his drafting to join other men, “too respectable to have aided in the incediarism,” and stand and look silently on the burning parliament? The slip seems to have been lost in the “awful and thrilling beauty” of the night’s proceedings, which are recounted here by the Gazette‘s unnamed reporter.

Sacking and Burning of the Parliament House

The writer of this Report, on proceeding to the House of Assembly,on Wednesday evening, at about nine o’clock, to take his place in the Reporters’ Gallery, fell in with a crowd of persons marching towards the House by different streets from the directions of the Place d’Armes. It speedily surrounded the House and commenced throwing stones through the windows. The crowd was large but not very dense; the writer was able to walk about through every part of it. The excitement appeared to be intense. A party of the more violent among the crowd proceeded to burst open the halldoor, which they succeeded in doing in the space of a few moment, smashing the door to atoms. They then rushed up the main stairs into the Hall of the Assembly, a few members only having remained, among whom were Messrs. Stevenson, Galt, McConnell, and Dr. Fortier, – the first named, with great coolness planted themselves in such a manner as to escape the volleys of stones, and like philosophers cooly surveyed the scene: the last screaming and yelling from very fear. The mob proceeded to demolish everything in the Hall. One fellow took possession of the Speaker’s Chair, and declared, in a solemn voice, that he dissolved the Parliament in the Queen’s name, and that the members had better take themselves off, or he would not answer for their lives. The remaining members, together with other individuals and four or five ladies, had in the meantime taken refuge behind the Speaker’s Chair. One of the Reporters jumped from a window in the second story. This, however, was needless, for instead of having to pass through a lobby full of yelling demons, as hon. gentlemen anticipated, they had simply to walk out.

The writer proceeded round the house on the outside; the crowd appeared to be composed, as far as he was able to observe, of merchants and other respectable citizens of Montreal for the most part.

The number of persons inside the House was not very large; there was a party in the lobby, engaged in breaking up the Committee Rooms, Clerks Offices, and knocking windows out. On the outside he saw five or six rough looking fellows, beating in the window panes with sticks and axe-handles. A few boys were throwing stones through the windows. The writer heard some expression to the effect that it was not  improbable that the mob in the building would set fire to it; these expressions did not seem unnatural from the manner in which the work of demolition was going on. On arriving at the west end of the building, he saw a few men break open a wooden gallery, which was employed as a store room for stationary. When the boarding (a kind of panelling) was broken through, some loose papers seem to have been strewed on the floor, which the writer thought were leaves of printed bills, as these were flying about in all directions. The men then fired these loose papers and threw them about the room. The wind was very high and in a very few moments the wooden gallery and a canvas covering above it were enveloped in flames. The crowd stood at some distance watching in an apparently impassive manner the progress of this handful of incendiaries. The anxiety of the moment was painful. Five or six resolute men might have arrested the incendiaries, and saved the catastrophe. The writer’s first impulse was to hasten for the police; he did not take this step, as the wild fire rapidity, with which the flames spread rendered it useless.

Some Fire Engines were immediately in the neighbourhood, but they did not play upon the fire. It was rumoured that the crowd would not permit them.

The writer again hastened to the hall of the House with the intentioin of endeavouring to aid in saving some part of the library or records. He found the hall dark and in confusion. He there were some persons engaged already in what he intended to do; and find that he could be of no use, again left the hall to watch the progress of the flames.

All this occurred in the space of ten or fifteen minutes. The wooden part of the building was now blazing with intense brightness. A dense smoke was visible inside the main building. A moment more and it belched through the windows and the chimneys with awful fury. It was now evident that any power less than the hand of God must be inadequate to save the building; and it would have been madness for human beings to have attempted.

All hopes of rescuing the Libraries were now at an end; but there was a rumour that a beautiful full length picture of our most Gracious Sovereign the Queen had been saved; and this simple act told eloquently, of the loyal feeling of the crowd. The centre part of the building, occupied by the library of the Assembly, in a short time fell in with a dreadful crash through the roof of the west wing of the building. In a little time more the whole building, from one end to the other, was enveloped in one sheet of living flame. It was now impossible to approach near the building, for the intense heat; the belching flames burst through the roof as it fell in. And the sight became awfully and magnificently beautiful! The night was clear and cold; and the high wind lashed the flames to maddening fury. Numbers of dazzlingly white flames, like balloons of fire, rose to some height above the raging flames, and were borne by the winds some distance. These fire-flakes appeared to be caused by burning scraps of paper being shot upwards by the fury of the flames. The whole heavens were illuminated; and the clear and beautiful blue firmament, with the moon and the stars brightly shining, contrasting with the maddened flames and white light below – made a picture of awful and thrilling beauty, such as it is rarely the lot of an artist to look upon, – and such a one that his pencil would vainly try to imitate.

The crowd was still not dense; it was not too much so to allow a horsemen to gallop through it. The expressions were various. Some were execrating the Governor General; some deploring the outrage; some speculating on the loss, more particularly of the two best and most extensive libraries in the Province; and some were exulting over the ruin; while others amused themselves with tearing to atoms numbers of bills which had been thrown through the windows. Some were making witty allusions to the warm and sudden dissolution of Parliament, comparing it to the long Parliament. There were various stories circulating about some fellows “taking away that bawble [sic],” the Mace; and some fellow taking possession of the chair, and declaring that the Parliament was dissolved. Some were wondering where the military were, and some gave out that they were coming; this did not, however, create the slightest alarm that the writer was so far able to perceive, except that a few Canadians catching the word, and on the hint respectively said, je m’en vais, which they immediately did. The feeling of the crowd might be divided in two divisions – deep regret on the part of the reflecting and better informed – and jesting exaltation among the unreflecting and ill-informed.

In the meantime the roofs of some houses on the opposite side of Commissioners’ Street had taken fire, and painful fears begun to excited that it would extend to the whole of St. Paul Street, the wind being so high. The Fire Companies, however, performed well their part, working in an intense heat and succeeding in putting down the fire; one or two houses only being burnt, of comparatively trifling value. The damage on the other side of the street, on the east side of the house, was confined to some wooden railings. The writer was on the spot until near two o’clock, when the rage of the flames had abated, all the flooring and roofing had fallen in, the bare walls alone stood, and the interior, from one end to the other, presented one mass of living embers.

It may be observed that it was a late hour before the Military arrived at the scene; and the writer observed no Police until the work of destruction had irretrievably commenced. This cannot be too much regretted, and the reason should be enquired into; for the writer affirms that five or six Policemen might have arrested the incendiaries, while the crowd, at some distance, looked passively on. The greater part of the crowd consisted of men too respectable to have aided in incendiarism; and it seems wonderful that they should have stood and looked silently on; the writer can only account for it by supposing that they had no idea of the sudden result.

The Next Morning

The House lies in smoking ruins. The stone of which was built being blue limestone, the walls are whitened, crumbled, and tottering in a very dangerous state.

Consulted for this post

The Gazette. Montreal. 27 and 30 April 1849.

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Topographical and Pictorial Map of the City of Montreal by James Crane, 1846. McCord Museum, Montreal. Used under a Creative Commons Licence.

In the case of Peel, I say that the street was opened in 1845. This, like the street is not completely, true; in fact, as you can see from this map from 1846, it’s only two blocks true and then Peel ran only for the two blocks between Sherbrooke and Ste Catherine. There is no Dorchester Square and the land west of the McGill College campus still remains to be developed. The 1840s gave us what Montrealers what is now its modern downtown, but as Roderick Macleod writes in his article on the development of the Redpath estate, this expansion was due the suburban aspiration of the new industrial middle class. Like Redpath, who made his fortune in sugar and gave Montreal de la Montaigne and Drummond, these men wanted to entertain the fantasy of rural living while being close to their business interests in Old Montreal. It also marked the city culturally by separating a wealthy Anglo-Protestant business elite from a poor French and Catholic working class, a disparity and vision of the Quebec countryside which would continue to fuel hostility between the French and English speakers for over a century.

Thanks to Marian for drawing this to my attention and for sharing Roderick Macleod’s article on the development of the Redpath estate.

Marian has also helped me straighten out some confusion about to whom Henri-Bourassa, the editor of Le Devoir, is referring when he castigates the abuses of that English-speaking elite Redpath was a part of:

Around 1800 to 1810, those who were awkward, like Panet and Bédard, who believed that they had acquired the right to speak for their compatriots [in the largely advisory Legislative Assembly], were imprisoned.

In short, the pairing of Bédard and Panet with the date 1810 is confusing and suggests Bourassa has muddled his Bédards.

In 1810 Pierre-Stanislas Bédard, the leader of the Parti Canadien (later Parti Patriote) and founder of the Le Canadien newspaper (later  Le Patriote), was arrested on the orders of Governor Craig. While seeing the British as a guarantor of freedoms and the constitution of Lower Canada, including the French language and the Civil Code, he sought more power for the assembly at the expense of the Governor. Alarmed by these demands in the context of both the Napoleonic Wars and the republicanism of the United States, Craig took steps to have Bédard silenced.

In 1838 Bédard’s son, Elzéar – he was born in 1791 so would have been 9 in 1800 – was suspended with his fellow judge Philippe Panet for assenting to habeas corpus when that right was denied by the Special Council set up following the Lower Canada Rebellion. Bédard fils played a significant role in the events leading up to the Rebellion by helping write the 92 Resolutions. These  developed the ideas of Bédard pére and were presented by Papineau to the legislative assembly in 1836 before he became leader of the Patriotes in the Rebellion later that year.

Villa Maria. Orange Line. Opened 1981.

Other corrections and clarifications will follow in due course, but in the meantime this week’s fun comes from Spacing Magazine, who have produced fridge magnets so you can build your own metro system. I suggest using a full size city map, photographing, and sending to the Ford or Applebaum of your choice. Thanks also to Taras Grescoe, author of Strap Hanger, for tweeting a link to the World’s 18 Strangest Train Stations. Some are truly bizarre, the station at Lyon Airport in France looks like an alien attack craft,  while in Stockholm, T-Centralen combines cave painting with massive floral design. Good to see the concrete cathedral that is London’s Canary Wharf on the list, but nothing from Montreal? With these circles?

As well as my conversations with Marian, other people have been in touch, often via Twitter, with encouragement. This is wonderful, but not everyone uses Twitter – I’m still getting used to it – so I have created a Facebook page to make following the blog easier. You visit and like the page here.

Consulted for this post

Macleod, Roderick. “The Road from Terrace Bank: Land Capitalization, Public Space, and the Redpath Family Home. Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 14.1 (2003): 165-192.