No-one has yet planted here apple trees, except some which bring very good apples and in quantity, but there are very few of these trees. It is apple-picking season in Quebec, which makes for a fun day out with students . It also reminds me at least of the sheer insanity of the climate here. […]
Tag: Jean Talon
I am Jean Talon
With Université de Montréal, I completed a full tour of the four sections I have divided Canadian history into, New France, British Rule, Confederation to WWII, and WWII to the present. There are gaps aplenty; they will be dealt with as I review these blog posts and attempt a coherent whole. This is a somewhat […]
Montmorency
Quebec’s Catholic heritage is inescapable. As Mark Twain noted when he visited Montreal, “This is the first time I was ever in a city where you couldn’t throw a brick without breaking a church window”. Like the censer’s heady fragrances, the contradictions of this heritage fill the air, and if sometimes the odour is repugnant, it […]
Jean Talon, his ambitions and his orders
Jean Talon arrived in Quebec as Intendant of New France on 12 September 1665. His ambitions were to expand the glory of France and as far south as Mexico “to Florida, New Sweden, New Holland and New England”. Louis XIV and his Minister of Finance, Jean Baptiste Colbert, had different ideas about how Talon should […]
Longueuil-Université de Sherbrooke
When the fifteen year old Charles Le Moyne left his father’s inn at Dieppe for New France in 1641 he was heading for a war zone. In 1535 Jacques Cartier found a palisaded town of some three thousand Huron below Mont Royal. By the time Champlain visited in 1611, the town was gone, abandoned with […]
From Jean Talon, New France
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 […]
