Parkman Vol. 4, Chapter 20

The intellectual progress of The Enlightenment and the Revolutions passed French Canada by.

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

Previously in The Old Regime In Canada. Concluding chapter 19.

We have seen already that, besides this seminary for boys, Laval established another for educating the humbler colonists. It was a sort of farm-school, though besides farming various mechanical trades were also taught in it. It was well adapted to the wants of a great majority of Canadians, whose tendencies were anything but bookish; but here, as elsewhere, the real object was religious. It enabled the church to extend her influence over classes which the ordinary schools could not reach. Besides manual training, the pupils were taught to read and write; and for a time a certain number of them received some instruction in Latin. When, in 1686, Saint-Vallier visited the school, he found in all thirty-one boys under the charge of two priests; but the number was afterwards greatly reduced, and the place served, as it still serves, chiefly as a retreat during vacations for the priests and pupils of the seminary of Quebec. A spot better suited for such a purpose cannot be conceived.

From the vast meadows of the parish of St. Joachim, that here border the St. Lawrence, there rises like an island a low flat hill, hedged round with forests like the tonsured head of a monk. It was here that Laval planted his school. Across the meadows, a mile or more distant, towers the mountain promontory of Cape Tourmente. You may climb its woody steeps, and from the top, waist-deep in blueberry-bushes, survey, from Kamouraska to Quebec, the grand Canadian world outstretched below; or mount the neighboring heights of St. Anne, where, athwart the gaunt arms of ancient pines, the river lies shimmering in summer haze, the cottages of the habitants are strung like beads of a rosary along the meadows of Beaupré, the shores of Orleans bask in warm light, and far on the horizon the rock of Quebec rests like a faint gray cloud; or traverse the forest till the roar of the torrent guides you to the rocky solitude where it holds its savage revels. High on the cliffs above, young birch-trees stand smiling in the morning sun; while in the abyss beneath the snowy waters plunge from depth to depth, and, half way down, the slender hare-bell hangs from its mossy nook, quivering in the steady thunder of the cataract. Game on the river; trout in lakes, brooks, and pools; wild fruits and flowers on meadows and mountains, — a thousand resources of honest and wholesome recreation here wait the student emancipated from books, but not parted for a moment from the pious influence that hangs about the old walls embosomed in the woods of St. Joachim. Around on plains and hills stand the dwellings of a peaceful peasantry, as different from the restless population of the neighboring states as the denizens of some Norman or Breton village.

Above all, do not fail to make your pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Anne. You may see her chapel four or five miles away, nestled under the heights of the Petit Cap. Here, when Aillebout was governor, he began with his own hands the pious work, and a habitant of Beaupré, Louis Guimont, sorely afflicted with rheumatism, came grinning with pain to lay three stones in the foundation, in honor probably of Saint Anne, Saint Joachim, and their daughter, the Virgin. Instantly he was cured. It was but the beginning of a long course of miracles continued more than two centuries, and continuing still. Their fame spread far and wide. The devotion to Saint Anne became a distinguishing feature of Canadian Catholicity, till at the present day at least thirteen parishes bear her name. But of all her shrines none can match the fame of St. Anne du Petit Cap. Crowds flocked thither on the week of her festival, and marvellous cures were wrought unceasingly, as the sticks and crutches hanging on the walls and columns still attest. Sometimes the whole shore was covered with the wigwams of Indian converts who had paddled their birch canoes from the farthest wilds of Canada. The more fervent among them would crawl on their knees from the shore to the altar. And, in our own day, every summer a far greater concourse of pilgrims, not in paint and feathers, but in cloth and millinery, and not in canoes, but in steamboats, bring their offerings and their vows to the “Bonne Sainte Anne.”

[For an interesting account of the shrine at the Petit Cap, see Casgrain, Le Pélérinage de la Bonne Sainte Anne, a little manual of devotion printed at Quebec. I chanced to visit the old chapel in 1871, during a meeting of the parish to consider the question of reconstructing it, as it was in a ruinous state. Passing that way again two years after, I found the old chapel still standing, and a new one, much larger, half finished, nearby.]

To return to Laval’s industrial school. Judging from repeated complaints of governors and intendants of the dearth of skilled workmen, the priests in charge of it were more successful in making good Catholics than in making good masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, and weavers; and the number of pupils, even if well trained, was at no time sufficient to meet the wants of the colony; [1] for, though the Canadians showed an aptitude for mechanical trades, they preferred above all things the savage liberty of the backwoods.

[1 Most of them were moreover retained, after leaving the school, by the seminary, as servants, farmers, or vassals. La Tour, Vie de Laval, Liv. VI]

The education of girls was in the hands of the Ursulines and the nuns of the Congregation, of whom the former, besides careful instruction in religious duties, taught their pupils “all that a girl ought to know.” [2] This meant exceedingly little besides the manual arts suited to their sex; and, in the case of the nuns of the Congregation, who taught girls of the poorer class, it meant still less. It was on nuns as well as on priests that the charge fell, not only of spiritual and mental, but also of industrial, training. Thus we find the king giving to a sisterhood of Montreal a thousand francs to buy wool, and a thousand more for teaching girls to knit. [3] The king also maintained a teacher of navigation and surveying at Quebec on the modest salary of four hundred francs.

[2: A lire, à écrire, les prières, les mœurs chrétiennes, et tout ce qu’une fille doit savoir. Marie de l’Incarnation, Lettre du 9 Août, 1668.]

[3: Denonville au Ministre, 13 Nov., 1686.]

During the eighteenth century, some improvement is perceptible in the mental status of the population. As it became more numerous and more stable, it also became less ignorant; and the Canadian habitant, towards the end of the French rule, was probably better taught, so far as concerned religion, than the mass of French peasants. Yet secular instruction was still extremely meagre, even in the noblesse. “In spite of this defective education,” says the famous navigator, Bougainville, who knew the colony well in its last years, “the Canadians are naturally intelligent. They do not know how to write, but they speak with ease and with an accent as good as the Parisian.” [4] He means, of course, the better class. “Even the children of officers and gentlemen,” says another writer, “scarcely know how to read and write; they are ignorant of the first elements of geography and history.” [5] And evidence like this might be extended.

[4: Bougainville, Mémoire de 1757 (see Margry, Relations inédites).]

[5: Mémoire de 1736; Detail de toute la Colonie (published by Hist. Soc. of Quebec).]

When France was heaving with the throes that prepared the Revolution; when new hopes, new dreams, new thoughts, — good and evil, false and true, — tossed the troubled waters of French society, Canada caught something of its social corruption, but not the faintest impulsion of its roused mental life. The torrent surged on its way; while, in the deep nook beside it, the sticks and dry leaves floated their usual round, and the unruffled pool slept in the placidity of intellectual torpor.

[Several Frenchmen of a certain intellectual eminence made their abode in Canada from time to time. The chief among them are the Jesuit Lafitau, author of Mœurs des Sauvages Américains; the Jesuit Charlevoix, traveller and historian; the physician Sarrazin; and the Marquis de la Galisonnière, the most enlightened of the French governors of Canada. Sarrazin, a naturalist as well as a physician, has left his name to the botanical genus Sarracenia, of which the curious American species, S. purpurea, the “pitcher-plant,” was described by him. His position in the colony was singular and characteristic. He got little or no pay from his patients; and, though at one time the only genuine physician in Canada (Callieres et Beauharnois au Ministre, 3 Nov., 1702), he was dependent on the king for support. In 1699, we find him thanking his Majesty for 300 francs a year, and asking at the same time for more, as he has nothing else to live on. ( Callères et Champigny au Ministre, 20 Oct., 1699.) Two years later the governor writes that, as he serves almost everybody without fees, he ought to have another 300 francs. (Ibid., 5 Oct., 1701.) The additional 300 francs was given him; but, finding it insufficient, he wanted to leave the colony. “He is too useful,” writes the governor again: “we cannot let him go.” His yearly pittance of 600 francs, French money, was at one time reinforced by his salary as member of the Superior Council. He died at Quebec in 1734.]

Chapter 20

The mission period of Canada, or the period anterior to the year 1663, when the king took the colony in charge, has a character of its own. The whole population did not exceed that of a large French village. Its extreme poverty, the constant danger that surrounded it, and, above all, the contagious zeal of the missionaries, saved it from many vices, and inspired it with an extraordinary religious fervor. Without doubt an ideal picture has been drawn of this early epoch. Trade as well as propagandism was the business of the colony, and the colonists were far from being all in a state of grace; yet it is certain that zeal was higher, devotion more constant, and popular morals more pure, than at any later period of the French rule.

The intervention of the king wrought a change. The annual shipments of emigrants made by him were, in the most favorable view, of a very mixed character, and the portion which Mother Mary calls _canaille_ was but too conspicuous. Along with them came a regiment of soldiers fresh from the license of camps and the excitements of Turkish wars, accustomed to obey their officers and to obey nothing else, and more ready to wear the scapulary of the Virgin in campaigns against the Mohawks than to square their lives by the rules of Christian ethics. “Our good king,” writes Sister Morin, of Montreal, “has sent troops to defend us from the Iroquois, and the soldiers and officers have ruined the Lord’s vineyard, and planted wickedness and sin and crime in our soil of Canada.” [6] Few, indeed, among the officers followed the example of one of their number, Paul Dupuy, who, in his settlement of Isle aux Oies, below Quebec, lived, it is said, like a saint, and on Sundays and fête days exhorted his servants and _habitans_ with such unction that their eyes filled with tears. [7] Nor, let us hope, were there many imitators of Major La Fredière, who, with a company of the regiment, was sent to garrison Montreal, where he ruled with absolute sway over settlers and soldiers alike. His countenance naturally repulsive was made more so by the loss of an eye; yet he was irrepressible in gallantry, and women and girls fled in terror from the military Polyphemus. The men, too, feared and hated him, not without reason. One morning a settler named Demers was hoeing his field, when he saw a sportsman gun in hand striding through his half-grown wheat. “Steady there, steady,” he shouted in a tone of remonstrance; but the sportsman gave no heed. “Why do you spoil a poor man’s wheat?” cried the outraged cultivator. “If I knew who you were, I would go and complain of you.” “Whom would you complain to?” demanded the sportsman, who then proceeded to walk back into the middle of the wheat, and called out to Demers, “You are a rascal, and I’ll thrash you.” “Look at home for rascals,” retorted Demers, “and keep your thrashing for your dogs.” The sportsman came towards him in a rage to execute his threat. Demers picked up his gun, which, after the custom of the time, he had brought to the field with him, and, advancing to meet his adversary, recognized La Fredière, the commandant. On this he ran off. La Fredière sent soldiers to arrest him, threw him into prison, put him in irons, and the next day mounted him on the wooden horse, with a weight of sixty pounds tied to each foot. He repeated the torture a day or two after, and then let his victim go, saying, “If I could have caught you when I was in your wheat, I would have beaten you well.”

[6: Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu St Joseph, cited by Faillon.]

[7: Juchereau, Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 511]

– The Old Regime in Canada, Chapter 20 by Francis Parkman

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Introduction.

If, at times, it may seem that range has been allowed to fancy, it is so in appearance only; since the minutest details of narrative or description rest on authentic documents or on personal observation.

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them, he must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

With respect to that special research which, if inadequate, is still in the most emphatic sense indispensable, it has been the writer’s aim to exhaust the existing material of every subject treated. While it would be folly to claim success in such an attempt, he has reason to hope that, so far at least as relates to the present volume, nothing of much importance has escaped him. With respect to the general preparation just alluded to, he has long been too fond of his theme to neglect any means within his reach of making his conception of it distinct and true.

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