The Secrétariat aux relations avec les Québécois d’expression anglaise
The Quebec government has created the Secretariat for Relations with English-Speaking Quebecers. We have become a mystery to them, perhaps from as early as Josée Legault’s 1992 publication L’invention d’une minorité: Les Anglo- Québécois. We, the “invented minority,” seem to lack a strong sense of belonging. Of course, the Secretariat’s existence acknowledges that we exist, and the idea that we are a fictional minority seems to be understood, generally, as false. The Secretariat’s first job, according to an excellent article written by Guy Rex Rodgers for the Fall ’21 issue of Quebec Heritage News, was to figure out who we are. Though well-intentioned and welcomed, the Secretariat’s creation is a good example of how difficult it is for a colonizing power to understand how to decolonize itself, to examine its own history thoroughly and with an open mind before drawing conclusions about its minorities.
I know, your first reaction is to wonder how I can call Quebec a colonizing power, but there is little question that Quebec has dominated and colonized its territory. There are many Indigenous examples of this, the first one that comes to mind is the Oka Crisis, but there are many other incidents, before and since, that indicate a cultural/religious hierarchy inherited from France.
We, the remaining members of the English-speaking communities, are those who chose to stay in Quebec when we did not have to. We endured the closed attitude to hiring our children in the public service and the slow decline of our cultural voice, until our only significant number was in Montreal. There are expectations that we will die out and whoever of our descendants remain here will become real Québécois, somehow. The Secretariat and the majority thinking may not rise to the challenge of decolonization, but they are inviting us to share our voices.
The first item on the list is to tell the truth about our history. If Quebec was abused in its past, it was by the Catholic Church. Both here and in France, the Church looked after its parishioners and was responsible for over half the services we receive today from our provincial government, but beyond its tithe, the price it charged was to reformulate its people, changing the way they thought and functioned. Its influence was mitigated in a lot of other European countries, for better or worse, during the Wars of Religion, but Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s prime minister, set in motion the destruction of the French protestants, the Huguenots, and Louis XIV completed it.
New France was the dream of the Huguenots who made four or five attempts to establish it in South America and the Carolinas before settling here, but the homogenizing vision of Richelieu left no room for minorities. In the 1620s, the cardinal forbade Huguenots from doing business in New France, and all births, marriages and deaths could only be recorded by the parish priest. That served to define French culture almost up to the present. Even the French Revolution did not kill it. Difference is not tolerated.
With no Huguenots allowed legally in the colony, the Church took over administration, and their shared objective was to create a Catholic colony by converting the people who were here already, and by accepting colonists who were obliged to declare themselves as Catholic. Even so, a great number of those colonists were Huguenot and that is coming out in genetic research today. They were oppressed in France and hoped to be able to find greater freedom here. Many became the independent-spirited Canadiens. Many others moved on to New Amsterdam, where there was religious freedom.
In 1629 a French Huguenot, David Kirke, sailing for the English king, took Quebec, but then England was forced to return it to France. The colony would remain French Catholic until 1763 when it was transferred again to the British, under the guidance of Jean Louis Ligonier, the 77-year-old Huguenot general who masterminded the British side in the Seven Years’ War. Once again, New France, Quebec, became a British colony where Christian religious freedom was accepted. Still, the homogenizing of culture is there, in our French history. It goes beyond its roots in the Catholic Church and guides policies of immigration and assimilation in both France and Quebec. For Quebec to properly decolonize itself, it must first accept that it is a North American culture, that its greatest victory was earned through the recognition of its people, les Canadiens, as a nation at La Grande Paix de Montréal in 1701. It must also acknowledge that the Church stole that victory and did it again, in the 1830s, when it undermined – instead of assisting in establishing – the secular and multicultural vision of Louis-Joseph Papineau. For the first time, Quebec became Roman Catholic during that decade, a step deeper into the Catholic culture than the Gallican, or French, Catholicism that prevailed in both France, and in the French and then British colony. This change happened when Bishop Jean-François Lartigue of Montreal began to suspect that the British Colonial Office, perhaps preoccupied with the Patriote Party, was not paying attention to the Catholic Church.
When the British took over the colony seventy years earlier, Bishop Henri Pontbriand, Bishop of Quebec, declared to the church that “The Christian religion requires for victorious princes who have conquered a country all the obedience, the respect, that is owed to the others . . .” and “The king of England now being, through conquest, the sovereign of Quebec, all the feelings of which the apostle St Paul speaks are due him.” He died three months before the surrender of Montreal, but his successor and personal secretary, Vicar General Jean-Olivier Briand, executed his instructions with humility and great skill. He guided the church to accept its role so successfully that the British administration consulted with it, and General James Murray recommended Briand as the new bishop of Quebec.
This created a dilemma.
Briand sailed to England for discussions with the colonial authorities and he charmed them into holding the conviction that he would be the ideal person to run the church in New France. But neither the Anglican church nor the colonial office could name a Catholic as bishop of a British colony. Briand expressed his desire to see his family in France, where he was named Bishop of Quebec, a title bestowed by the pope but subject to Gallican Catholic rules meaning that it must be endorsed by the king of France. He resolved the dilemma for the Anglican Church and the colonial authority.
Over the ensuing years, the Catholic Church of Quebec respected Gallican Catholic rules, obtaining secular endorsement for any appointments where they could and finding other solutions where they could not.
Being a bishop carries a certain authority in the Catholic hierarchy, and the colonial office was not always willing to see that authority bestowed. When the church determined that Montreal needed a bishop, rather than go through the onerous process of creating a bishopric, the church named Lartigue as titular bishop of a no-longer-existing diocese in the Ottoman Empire.
Carrying the title of Bishop, he could do the work of a bishop in Montreal without the need to ask for colonial permission. The clergy could not easily have gone to France to have a title bestowed, as Briand had done. While Napoleon was gone and France had a king, the power relationships between the new kingdom and the pope were no longer the same. The French (Gallican) Catholic Church was in disarray and there was a movement to recognize the pope independently of the king, removing secular influence in the naming to offices of the Catholic Church.
This may seem like religious triviality, but Lartigue saw its importance. After having served as bishop for over a decade, he calculated that if the pope were to recognize him as the Bishop of Montreal, rather than a bishop working in Montreal, the colonial authorities might well accept it as a trivial matter. He made his request without addressing the colonial authorities, and in May 1836 he was named Bishop of Montreal. The clergy of Catholic Lower Canada cringed in anticipation of British reprisals, but to the astonishment of many of them, within two weeks Bishop Lartigue received a simple letter acknowledging his status. To test the new independence he had sought, he named his officers without consultation, again breaking Gallican protocol, and received no further reaction from the colonial office. With those gestures, the Roman Catholic Church of Lower Canada was created, an entity independent of secular authority, reporting directly to Rome. Through its church, Lower Canada had achieved independence.
Lartigue’s next step was to aggressively undermine his cousin Louis-Joseph Papineau’s attempts to secularize Lower Canada and create a republic.
The British Colonial Office had created the assemblies and wanted them to take on greater responsibilities, but slowly. The Church could work with that. In fact, through providing education, health and social services, and having responsibility for the registry of marriages, births and deaths, the Church already had a lot of power. Mother Church could easily take on the power of controlling how people would vote, as long as they had the time to do it – slowly. Papineau had to be stopped.
After Papineau’s failed rebellion, the church was only just warming up. With Catholic France still re-establishing itself, many of its religious orders were open to coming to this new Roman Catholic British colony and, by the time of the election of the Province of Canada’s first prime minister, Louis-Hippolyte-Lafontaine, political decisions were made with a view to assuring the consent of the Catholic Church, not the other way around.
Throughout the 1800s, this new Roman Catholic Church drove its people ever deeper into the Catholic hierarchy, even to the point of raising the first international military force in Canadian history, the Zouaves, to protect the Papal States. The Grande Noirceur was not caused by the English, but by the Church. If the British Colonial Office had a role, it was in being completely outflanked by the extraordinary minds at work in the Church.
We, those minorities that the Secretariat wonders about, succeeding those Canadiens who came for religious freedom, are the spiritual heirs of the Huguenots, those people who sought a state that allowed for freedom of religion, freedom from the insidious control of the Catholic Church. Our claim to Quebec runs very deep, right back to its founding, and while Captain David Kirke was capturing Champlain’s Quebec in 1629, the English navy was attempting to save the French Huguenots at La Rochelle from ethnic cleansing at the hand of Cardinal Richelieu. While a Huguenot general guided the British to recapture the Huguenot dream of freedom of religion, the Catholic Church went underground and rose to continue its mission. Our ancient minority, opposing the homogenizing force of the Catholic Church, has been a part of Quebec since the beginning.
Joseph Graham’s new book, Insatiable Hunger, reinterprets our historic understanding of the colonial period, here and in New England. It tells some of the stories that we were not taught in school.
The Quebec government has created the Secretariat for Relations with English-Speaking Quebecers. We have become a mystery to them, perhaps from as early as Josée Legault’s 1992 publication L’invention d’une minorité: Les Anglo- Québécois. We, the “invented minority,” seem to lack a strong sense of belonging. Of course, the Secretariat’s existence acknowledges that we exist, and the idea that we are a fictional minority seems to be understood, generally, as false. The Secretariat’s first job, according to an excellent article written by Guy Rex Rodgers for the Fall ’21 issue of Quebec Heritage News, was to figure out who we are. Though well-intentioned and welcomed, the Secretariat’s creation is a good example of how difficult it is for a colonizing power to understand how to decolonize itself, to examine its own history thoroughly and with an open mind before drawing conclusions about its minorities.
I know, your first reaction is to wonder how I can call Quebec a colonizing power, but there is little question that Quebec has dominated and colonized its territory. There are many Indigenous examples of this, the first one that comes to mind is the Oka Crisis, but there are many other incidents, before and since, that indicate a cultural/religious hierarchy inherited from France.
We, the remaining members of the English-speaking communities, are those who chose to stay in Quebec when we did not have to. We endured the closed attitude to hiring our children in the public service and the slow decline of our cultural voice, until our only significant number was in Montreal. There are expectations that we will die out and whoever of our descendants remain here will become real Québécois, somehow. The Secretariat and the majority thinking may not rise to the challenge of decolonization, but they are inviting us to share our voices.
The first item on the list is to tell the truth about our history. If Quebec was abused in its past, it was by the Catholic Church. Both here and in France, the Church looked after its parishioners and was responsible for over half the services we receive today from our provincial government, but beyond its tithe, the price it charged was to reformulate its people, changing the way they thought and functioned. Its influence was mitigated in a lot of other European countries, for better or worse, during the Wars of Religion, but Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s prime minister, set in motion the destruction of the French protestants, the Huguenots, and Louis XIV completed it.
New France was the dream of the Huguenots who made four or five attempts to establish it in South America and the Carolinas before settling here, but the homogenizing vision of Richelieu left no room for minorities. In the 1620s, the cardinal forbade Huguenots from doing business in New France, and all births, marriages and deaths could only be recorded by the parish priest. That served to define French culture almost up to the present. Even the French Revolution did not kill it. Difference is not tolerated.
With no Huguenots allowed legally in the colony, the Church took over administration, and their shared objective was to create a Catholic colony by converting the people who were here already, and by accepting colonists who were obliged to declare themselves as Catholic. Even so, a great number of those colonists were Huguenot and that is coming out in genetic research today. They were oppressed in France and hoped to be able to find greater freedom here. Many became the independent-spirited Canadiens. Many others moved on to New Amsterdam, where there was religious freedom.
In 1629 a French Huguenot, David Kirke, sailing for the English king, took Quebec, but then England was forced to return it to France. The colony would remain French Catholic until 1763 when it was transferred again to the British, under the guidance of Jean Louis Ligonier, the 77-year-old Huguenot general who masterminded the British side in the Seven Years’ War. Once again, New France, Quebec, became a British colony where Christian religious freedom was accepted. Still, the homogenizing of culture is there, in our French history. It goes beyond its roots in the Catholic Church and guides policies of immigration and assimilation in both France and Quebec. For Quebec to properly decolonize itself, it must first accept that it is a North American culture, that its greatest victory was earned through the recognition of its people, les Canadiens, as a nation at La Grande Paix de Montréal in 1701. It must also acknowledge that the Church stole that victory and did it again, in the 1830s, when it undermined – instead of assisting in establishing – the secular and multicultural vision of Louis-Joseph Papineau. For the first time, Quebec became Roman Catholic during that decade, a step deeper into the Catholic culture than the Gallican, or French, Catholicism that prevailed in both France, and in the French and then British colony. This change happened when Bishop Jean-François Lartigue of Montreal began to suspect that the British Colonial Office, perhaps preoccupied with the Patriote Party, was not paying attention to the Catholic Church.
When the British took over the colony seventy years earlier, Bishop Henri Pontbriand, Bishop of Quebec, declared to the church that “The Christian religion requires for victorious princes who have conquered a country all the obedience, the respect, that is owed to the others . . .” and “The king of England now being, through conquest, the sovereign of Quebec, all the feelings of which the apostle St Paul speaks are due him.” He died three months before the surrender of Montreal, but his successor and personal secretary, Vicar General Jean-Olivier Briand, executed his instructions with humility and great skill. He guided the church to accept its role so successfully that the British administration consulted with it, and General James Murray recommended Briand as the new bishop of Quebec.
This created a dilemma.
Briand sailed to England for discussions with the colonial authorities and he charmed them into holding the conviction that he would be the ideal person to run the church in New France. But neither the Anglican church nor the colonial office could name a Catholic as bishop of a British colony. Briand expressed his desire to see his family in France, where he was named Bishop of Quebec, a title bestowed by the pope but subject to Gallican Catholic rules meaning that it must be endorsed by the king of France. He resolved the dilemma for the Anglican Church and the colonial authority.
Over the ensuing years, the Catholic Church of Quebec respected Gallican Catholic rules, obtaining secular endorsement for any appointments where they could and finding other solutions where they could not.
Being a bishop carries a certain authority in the Catholic hierarchy, and the colonial office was not always willing to see that authority bestowed. When the church determined that Montreal needed a bishop, rather than go through the onerous process of creating a bishopric, the church named Lartigue as titular bishop of a no-longer-existing diocese in the Ottoman Empire.
Carrying the title of Bishop, he could do the work of a bishop in Montreal without the need to ask for colonial permission. The clergy could not easily have gone to France to have a title bestowed, as Briand had done. While Napoleon was gone and France had a king, the power relationships between the new kingdom and the pope were no longer the same. The French (Gallican) Catholic Church was in disarray and there was a movement to recognize the pope independently of the king, removing secular influence in the naming to offices of the Catholic Church.
This may seem like religious triviality, but Lartigue saw its importance. After having served as bishop for over a decade, he calculated that if the pope were to recognize him as the Bishop of Montreal, rather than a bishop working in Montreal, the colonial authorities might well accept it as a trivial matter. He made his request without addressing the colonial authorities, and in May 1836 he was named Bishop of Montreal. The clergy of Catholic Lower Canada cringed in anticipation of British reprisals, but to the astonishment of many of them, within two weeks Bishop Lartigue received a simple letter acknowledging his status. To test the new independence he had sought, he named his officers without consultation, again breaking Gallican protocol, and received no further reaction from the colonial office. With those gestures, the Roman Catholic Church of Lower Canada was created, an entity independent of secular authority, reporting directly to Rome. Through its church, Lower Canada had achieved independence.
Lartigue’s next step was to aggressively undermine his cousin Louis-Joseph Papineau’s attempts to secularize Lower Canada and create a republic.
The British Colonial Office had created the assemblies and wanted them to take on greater responsibilities, but slowly. The Church could work with that. In fact, through providing education, health and social services, and having responsibility for the registry of marriages, births and deaths, the Church already had a lot of power. Mother Church could easily take on the power of controlling how people would vote, as long as they had the time to do it – slowly. Papineau had to be stopped.
After Papineau’s failed rebellion, the church was only just warming up. With Catholic France still re-establishing itself, many of its religious orders were open to coming to this new Roman Catholic British colony and, by the time of the election of the Province of Canada’s first prime minister, Louis-Hippolyte-Lafontaine, political decisions were made with a view to assuring the consent of the Catholic Church, not the other way around.
Throughout the 1800s, this new Roman Catholic Church drove its people ever deeper into the Catholic hierarchy, even to the point of raising the first international military force in Canadian history, the Zouaves, to protect the Papal States. The Grande Noirceur was not caused by the English, but by the Church. If the British Colonial Office had a role, it was in being completely outflanked by the extraordinary minds at work in the Church.
We, those minorities that the Secretariat wonders about, succeeding those Canadiens who came for religious freedom, are the spiritual heirs of the Huguenots, those people who sought a state that allowed for freedom of religion, freedom from the insidious control of the Catholic Church. Our claim to Quebec runs very deep, right back to its founding, and while Captain David Kirke was capturing Champlain’s Quebec in 1629, the English navy was attempting to save the French Huguenots at La Rochelle from ethnic cleansing at the hand of Cardinal Richelieu. While a Huguenot general guided the British to recapture the Huguenot dream of freedom of religion, the Catholic Church went underground and rose to continue its mission. Our ancient minority, opposing the homogenizing force of the Catholic Church, has been a part of Quebec since the beginning.
Joseph Graham’s new book, Insatiable Hunger, reinterprets our historic understanding of the colonial period, here and in New England. It tells some of the stories that we were not taught in school.