A commemorative monument will be erected on October 11 in La Durantaye, on the site of a clandestine cemetery where French Canadians rallied to the ideals of the American Revolution of 1776 were buried. “They are our first patriots,” explains the historian Gaston Cadrin, who is at the origin of this atypical place of memory.
The cemetery, of which no traces remain, was located along the Chemin d’Azur, which formerly formed the 4e Rank of the village of Saint-Michel-de-Bellechasse, about thirty kilometers downstream from Quebec. Between 1781 and 1788, five individuals were buried in this clayey land bordered by a stream.
Like their French-Canadian compatriots, the inhabitants of the 4th Tier supported to varying degrees the American armies which occupied Quebec between 1775 and 1776. These “bad subjects” took risks by going against their oath of loyalty to King George III and to the sermons of Catholic priests who advocated respect for the established order.
The inhabitants buried on the Chemin d’Azur in the decade following the American invasion were not formally excommunicated, as legend has it, they were rather excluded from the parish cemetery by a particularly zealous priest. This is evidenced by the will of Marguerite Racine who died in 1785 at the age of 29. “ She wanted masses of Requiem », explains Gaston Cadrin, specifying that this wish means that she visibly hoped to be buried in the shadow of the church of Saint-Michel.
One of them, however, would have been buried of his own free will in the unblessed ground of the Chemin d’Azur. This is Pierre Cadrin, the historian’s ancestor, who never set foot in the church again after 1775. According to Gaston Cadrin, this entire man would be the anonymous parishioner who interrupted the sermon of the priest of Saint-Michel in the first days of the American invasion, telling him that it had been “preached for too long for the English”!
Ghosts
It is through a brochure by the independence activist Raoul Roy, published by Editions Bias, that Gaston Cadrin heard about the La Durantaye cemetery for the first time, in 1978. “When I saw the brochure, I questioned my father, who knew the whole story,” explains the native of Saint -Vallier. In the family, it was a bit shameful to talk about the excommunicated, to remember that one of our ancestors had been buried in the open field. »
Gaston Cadrin found the exact location of the La Durantaye cemetery thanks to Jean-Claude Pouliot, the owner of the land, who died last year at the age of 89. “He stood in the place his father had indicated to him,” relates the historian, who published the results of his research in The excommunicates of Saint-Michel-de-Bellechasse in the 18th centurye century (GID, 2015).
The construction of a memorial monument more than two meters high on the Chemin d’Azur testifies to a complete memorial reversal, shame having turned into pride for the descendants of the “infamous”. “I like to thumb my nose at history,” exclaims Gaston Cadrin.
The cemetery established in the 1780s remained visible for a generation or two, until its wooden crosses and arrowhead-shaped slat fence decayed. Its incongruous presence in the hinterland of the Côte-du-Sud has naturally fueled ghost legends. Especially since the site was only three kilometers from the lands of La Corriveau, the “witch” of Saint-Vallier, hanged and caged in 1763 by a British military tribunal for the murder of her second husband.
Oversight
In 1880, the owner of the land where the rebel cemetery was located obtained permission from the Archbishop of Quebec to exhume the coffins, which he had to bypass each year by pulling his plow. The skeletons buried a hundred years earlier were found intact. However, they were thrown pell-mell into a chest, which was then buried in the part of the Saint-Michel cemetery reserved for unbaptized children.
The translation of the remains is making the rounds in the newspapers. She inspired Louis Fréchette, who paid tribute to the heroic resistance of the deceased in a controversial poem published in The legend of a peoplein 1887: “Do you see, on the edge of this muddy path, this ruined enclosure where the large oxen graze? Here, five peasants – three men and two women – had the ignoble burial of the infamous! »
The clandestine cemetery of La Durantaye would not be the only one of its kind, if we rely on Philippe Aubert de Gaspé. “We used to notice several of these tombs along the southern coast,” wrote the famous novelist in 1863.
Gaston Cadrin’s research in parish registers seem to support the words of Aubert de Gaspé, the historian having identified three other inhabitants of Saint-Michel-de-Bellechasse whose death was not registered by the priest. Their bodies may still lie in the clay of the Chemin d’Azur.