I have long believed that my street Chambord owes its name to the Loire Valley castle, the residence that King François Ier was particularly fond of, saying to his friends: “Let’s go to my place.” But according to the historical street directory of Montreal, the Count of Chambord would rather be Henry V, who never reigned, but who, it is said, had “sympathizers in Canada.”
The Count of Chambord is here, in La Petite-Patrie, in good company. A few blocks further east, the explorer Christopher Columbus himself stretches his reign over miles of asphalt, crossing Montreal from Gouin Boulevard to La Fontaine Park. So much space for a single person, even a bloodthirsty conqueror, is still a lot.
Between the two, the streets of La Roche and Normanville pay homage respectively to Troilus de Mesgouez, known as the Marquis of Laroche, and to Thomas Godefroy de Normanville, companion of Father Jacques Buteux, who, it is said, met an atrocious end at the hands of the Iroquois.
Further south, Amherst Street became Atateken in 2019. The word means “brotherhood” in Frenchified Mohawk, and reflects a clear effort to forget the smallpox-infested blankets that General Amherst once offered to the Indigenous people to exterminate them.
Personally, I much prefer descriptive place names, which are presented as an invitation to explore places. This was generally the approach of the First Nations, who rarely attached a person’s name to a place. Their place names were anchored in the territory, or could refer to events that had taken place there. The Commission de toponymie du Québec notes that “the symbiosis between Aboriginal people and the territory is such that some of them argue that Aboriginal people do not name places, but rather that it is the places that inspire their names.”
This is also what is revealed by a fascinating animation designed by this Toponymy Commission, installed in the permanent exhibition Quebec, in other wordsat the Quebec Museum of Civilization. Okayto the golden fish of the lake. Essipit means “seashell river”, and Tasiujaq what looks like a lake. While 10% of Quebec place names have indigenous origins, other names given by French speakers also have their charm. Trout, for example, in all its variations, has lent its name to 340 place names and 223 lake names, and even to two no-trout lakes. But these are still better provided than Pas d’eau lake, “whose water level is so low that it looks empty!” we read on the installation. I remember paddling for a long time on Lac Sans bout. Lac Vlimeux surely conceals little-known traps, and the Pitounes Volantes waterfall, in Jacques-Cartier Park, bears witness to the log drive that once blocked our rivers, and to the logs that were sometimes thrown from the top of this waterfall.
Giving a proper name to a place, if it is intended as a tribute, gives the territory a scent of ownership. The French, upon their arrival in America, understood this well.
In a memoir written in 1689, and cited by BAnQ cartographer Jean-François Palomino, the cartographer Franquelin suggests dividing New France into “provinces to which we would give boundaries, and stable and permanent French names.” He also suggests abolishing “all the wild names that only cause confusion because they change very often, and each nation names places and rivers in its own language, which means that the same thing always has different names.”
Franquelin, however, recalls another direct advantage of a new French toponymy: “This work would not only make the maps more intelligible, but would also confirm the possession of the countries contained therein.”
The toponym can be a poetry of the world, noted the anthropologist Serge Bouchard. And it is not too late to do well. In his book Toponymy. A science, a vocabulary, a managementgeographer Henri Dorion estimates that 90% of Quebec’s lakes—which number one million—do not yet have names. Serge Bouchard lamented that the Hochelaga River, a name that once referred to “big rapids” or a “beaver causeway,” became the St. Lawrence River because Jacques Cartier explored it on the saint’s feast day. I learned that Saint Lawrence, who also names an avenue and a city here, died a martyr on a grill in 258 in Rome, far, far away from America. For the Anishinaabe, the river was called Magtogoekthe path that walks. Does anyone say better?