History has been kind to Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, his fame and crest borne on the high-end cars built in the city he founded. It has no reason to be; Cadillac had no respect for history, faked his noble origins, and ensured that whatever scraps may be found about him before […]
Tag: montreal
En raison des vacances, un ralentissement de service
After several major service outages, the STM has started giving more frequent updates about what is delaying metro users. Following suit, I have the follow service update: Delays will be caused by a two week trip to Europe. It’ll be my first time back in since I arrived in Montreal 18 months ago so it’s […]
From Laurier, A Gilded Age, and Its Unravelling
With the news that in preparation for the G8 summit later this month, the small town of Fermanagh in Northern Ireland has been decked out in the image of a sadly lacking prosperity, it is worth recalling a similar event from the nineteenth century, albeit at a different stage of the economic cycle. The 1897 […]
From Lionel Groulx, The Birth of a Race
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 […]
At McGill, Cholera’s Death Carnival
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 […]
From Place d’Armes, a Picture of Awful and Thrilling Beauty
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 […]
On the Blog, Some Updates; On the Fridge, Some Magnets; On Facebook, a Page
This week I have been fortunate enough to have had a number of conversations with Marian Scott, of the Gazette. She has put me straight on a number points and the posts on Peel and Henri-Bourassa have been updated accordingly. In the case of Peel, I say that the street was opened in 1845. This, […]
On Peel, A Call for Annexation
Last week I looked at Louis-Joseph Papineau, the leader of the 1837 Lower Canada Rebellion who was exiled in France, largely at the behest of his fellow rebels, when the Rebellion failed. On his return to the newly re-named Province of Canada in 1845, he found a changed system of responsible government, which his former […]
Papineau – un canadien errant
And, I’m back! And with the pressing concern of the moment being keeping the T-1000 that is Mitt Romney out of the White House, I have been starting research on another Proteus, this time from Montebello, the politically fecund seigneurie on the banks of the Ottawa River. It was from Montebello that Henri Bourassa, the founder […]
Place des Arts and Social Reforms
The formula of political language doesn’t change: demonize one group, praise another, propose and justify a policy. Political content, though, does change, and to find a way into to the political, social and economic concerns of Canadians in the 1960s, I’ve been looking at the newspapers of the day. They show an attitude and set […]
Henri Bourassa – Between La Fête Nationale and Canada Day
When Mark Twain visited Montreal he famously remarked that ‘This is the first time I was ever in a city where you couldn’t throw a brick without breaking a church window’. The rest of his anecdote is less well known. He was told that a new church was going to be built. Where would the […]
Place des Arts, Montreal Normal and the October Crisis
Much has been made of the student protests that have been taking place here in Montreal. Too much. They do not require the invoking of the (in any case defunct) War Measures Act to bring them to an end, as one commenter suggests here. Nor, indeed, do they need special legislation like Loi 78, which […]
LaSalle
In the history of New France there is perhaps no figure more colorful than René-Robert Cavalier de La Salle. Born in Rouen, France, in 1643, he was educated by the Jesuits and temperamentally unsuited to religious or indeed any other settled life. In 1667 joined the Compagnie de Cent Associés and headed to Quebec. So great was […]
Berri-UQÁM – Where protests and history happen
You will have perhaps heard about the student protests which have been dominating Montreal this spring and summer. Each night since February students have been demonstrating against the provincial government’s proposed increase in tuition fees. You may have seen pictures of violence and confrontations with the police downtown and heard that at one point a […]
Jean Drapeau
Jean Drapeau did not expect to become mayor of Montreal in 1954. His previous ventures into politics had been at the provincial level and unsuccessful. When he was done in 1980 he left the city with a metro system, the landmarks and stadiums of Expo ’67, the Place des Arts, and the 1976 Olympics. His […]
New Documentary on Jeanne Mance, founder of Montreal
The Gazette has a good story about Jeanne Mance, who founded Montreal on this day in 1647. Less well remembered than Paul Chomedy de Maisonneuve, if only because de Maisonneuve is an unavoidable part of any trip downtown, she was in fact the driving force behind the foundation of a Christian community near the Iroquois […]
