In partnership with RetroNews, the press site of the National Library of France, The duty offers a series which goes back to the media sources of the France-Quebec relationship, of the war of the Conquest at the visit of General de Gaulle, including Honoré Mercier’s diplomatic tour in Europe. Ninth text.
In this 1er April 1918 in Quebec, the soldiers of Her Majesty’s army patrol the still snow-covered streets of Lower Town. Bayonet with rifle, in foggy weather, they crisscross the Saint-Roch district. There must be held a popular assembly against conscription. For several days, tension has been mounting. A special train took General François-Louis Lessard, the highest ranking French Canadian in the army, from Halifax to Quebec to crush these spontaneous uprisings. Soldiers are dispatched to the scene. The atmosphere is explosive.
Place Jacques-Cartier, nationalist lawyer Armand Lavergne is expected. Will he speak? It is conspicuous by its absence. According to rumor, this close friend of Henri Bourassa would have been thrown in the dungeon. This noise spreads as horsemen, sabers in hand, drive their horses onto the sidewalks to intimidate the crowd.
Citizens smash commercial windows. They already have to their credit the destruction of an enlistment office and some stunned police officers. How to explain that the soldiers, for their part, do not do much better by looting, like grown-up children, a candy store, while the owner of the place is beaten with rifle butt?
In this 1er April, a column of soldiers deploys on Langelier Boulevard, in the heart of the riding of Wilfrid Laurier, the leader of the opposition in Ottawa. In this working-class district, the soldiers are received by a shower of snowballs and fragments of ice, interspersed with bricks and stones. Shots are also heard from the rooftops. Are they just blank balls?
Stung to the quick, Major Gooderham Mitchell rushes into the working-class suburb of Saint-Sauveur. The Toronto officer leads his men to the crossroads of Saint-Joseph and Saint-Vallier streets. He orders his soldiers to open fire on a disparate crowd, in the front row of which are several children. Explosive bullets whistle. A Lewis machine gun then sprinkles this unlikely battlefield. The shooting left four dead and sixty wounded. The account remains uncertain: many are in hiding, for fear of reprisals.
Among the dead, no one has the slightest political record. Georges Demeule, a 14-year-old machinist shoemaker, is the youngest to be deposited in the morgue. He was shot in the chest just as he was just coming back from a game of cards. That evening he had released a brand new game, bought with his meager wages as a worker.
Father Evain rushes to help one of the many injured passers-by. Man will die at the end of his blood. “ Go to hell », Launches an overexcited soldier to him while the soldiers continue their maneuvers while shouting francophobic insanities that the press dares not reproduce. They can be read in the voluminous investigation report by Coroner Jolicoeur.
In its edition of April 2, Catholic Action do not mourn the dead and the wounded. On the contrary, the clergy newspaper hammers home the need for the authorities to impose their order by all means. The reader reads there that “it is necessary first that the order is reestablished, and that the seeds of anarchy which foreign leaders propagate secretly in our city are torn up”. On the whole, the local press adopts the point of view of the army, which moreover agrees with that of the principal executives of the good company. This world asks the popular classes to regain their usual place, to submit, to obey.
To explain these popular uprisings, the military authorities will accuse foreign agitators, while letting circulate the name of the Industrial Workers of the World, a union based in Chicago. This completely fabulous infiltration makes it possible at the same time to curb any impetus in favor of social reforms. For fear of the foreigner, unable to consider the autonomy of thought of the local population, the ferry service to Lévis, on the south bank of the river, was interrupted, while to the north the drawbridges of the Saint- Charles are relieved. Scenting for good business, the Pinkerton detective agency of New York landed in Quebec, in search of the leaders of the alleged conspiracy.
War measures
Martial law is proclaimed on April 4, 1918. This War Measures Act, the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau will use in turn, half a century later, during the crisis of October 1970. In this spring 1918, thehabeas corpus is suspended. The arbitrary has right of the city. Power does not deprive itself of taking advantage of it. Resistant to these maneuvers, the newspaper The duty is not, however, “suppressed”, as recommended by a senior army officer.
This forced peace allows federal police officers, nicknamed the ” spotters », To set out again in search of conscripts. The clumsy zeal of these men is also at the origin of the monster demonstrations that preceded the massacre of Easter Monday, concludes the report of Coroner Jolicœur filed on April 13.
While Paris was bombed, Canada was consolidating its military hold over the popular classes by force of arms. The affair was carried out by an iron fist, that of Major General Lessard. Familiar with the practices of repression, this high-ranking officer, raised in Quebec, has already fought the Métis of Western Canada and the Boers of South Africa. His feats of arms also included the repression of a workers’ revolt in his hometown, when he was still a private in the Queen’s Own Canadian Hussars.
In an attempt to calm the spirits, Lessard gives an interview to the To have to, main body of the opposition to conscription. Lessard claims that a French-Canadian regiment would have claimed more victims if it had been entrusted with the repression of rioters. “The death toll, instead of being 4 or 5, would be more than 200,” he said in the air, while paying tribute to the discipline of the soldiers in Toronto.
During his stay in Quebec, the Major General never saw fit to take the pulse of the population other than through the testimonies of the few notables he met in his opulent suite at the Château Frontenac. There, the mayor of Quebec is one of the first to show his perfect submission to military power.
“Do you think we went there to kill people? »Asks the senior officer during the coroner’s inquest. “On the contrary, it hurt me enormously. I don’t want to pass here for the Kaiser or some individual who comes here as a murderer, I came here to restore the peace. “
General Lessard will refuse outright to recognize his responsibility in the tragedy. Posters had been posted in the streets of Quebec, he said, in order to warn the people that it would be “hazardous” to gather in public places.
Self-defense ?
Major General Lessard pleads self-defense by pointing out that around thirty soldiers were wounded on the evening of 1er April, not to mention the dozen scratched horses, one of which had to be finished. This narrative is taken up by the Chicago Tribune April 6. ” Rioters fire upon the troops, who returned the fire “, We read the front page of the Illinois daily.
Passed through the sieve of military censorship, the unrest in Quebec hardly found any echo in France struggling with a new German offensive on the Somme. “Conscription is applied as vigorously in Quebec as in the rest of the Dominion”, relates the newspaper Freedom April 18, 1918. In Europe, in several countries, soldiers refuse to march towards the butcher’s shop. Several countries will crack down on movements opposing the war as censorship bares its teeth.
Prime Minister Robert Borden, whom Canadians now see in effigy on the $ 100 bills, downplays the massacre in Quebec. On April 29, his speech was reported in France by Free speech, a far-right newspaper: “The unrest in Quebec has been greatly exaggerated. The vast majority of the citizens of this province loyally accept the conscription law. “
Everything quickly returned to order in Quebec, if we can trust the Loire and Haute-Loire memorial May 24 of the same year. “The number of volunteers in the Franco-Canadian province is increasing considerably. An enthusiastic crowd accompanies the volunteers, who parade to Quebec to embark. The streets and quays resound with cries of: “Long live the allies! Long live Canada ! Long live France !” The French Canadians had been deceived, but their background was good. They are ready to fight like their ancestors or their parents overseas. “
In truth, the matter is more complicated, less clear-cut. However, the war effort was in full swing in Quebec. The tragic experience of bereaved families on Easter Monday is hushed up. They will wait in vain for compensation and an apology.