In partnership with RetroNews, the press site of the National Library of France, The duty offers a series that goes back to the media sources of the France-Quebec relationship, from the War of the Conquest to the visit of General de Gaulle, including the tour of Sarah Bernhardt on the banks of the St. Lawrence. Fifth text.
In 1885, the priest Antoine Labelle landed in France in search of colonists whom he intended for the “pays d’en haut”. It won’t be the only time.
This thunderous character, nicknamed the King of the North, relies on French immigration to realize his utopia of a French and Catholic Canada that can extend, without interruption, from Quebec to Manitoba, via the land. arid regions of the Laurentians and northern Ontario. “I am charged by the government of Ottawa to seek in the old countries good settlers for our Canadian Northwest,” he wrote.
Native of Sainte-Rose, within the current limits of Laval, Labelle is “a Frenchman of origin”, specifies the Catholic daily L’Univers. Reading this newspaper, the British Conquest would not have changed the status of the former subjects of Louis XV. “Canada, I cannot stress it enough, it is a France in America, it is the France of the New World”, explains the author of the article.
The rush towards the pays d’en haut that the priest calls for will be propelled by the merger of French and English capital. His words are paraphrased by the daily: “The Canadian nation, emerging from the first two peoples of the world, raised in the principles of the broadest and most solid freedom, shaped by the handling of British institutions, would become severe in its country, but fertile and healthy, the nation of the future! “
Labelle’s tour is a great success if we trust The Gazette de France, who plays the go-between in its edition of July 10, 1885: “Our venerated compatriot of Canadian New France is still for a few months in Paris, where he is at the disposal of the future colonists, 3, city of Retiro, faubourg Saint -Honored. “
There, a stone’s throw from the Madeleine, Antoine Labelle says his mass every morning. He set up a sort of colonial recruiting office there. Can this priest, dressed in a cassock not always very clean, change the fate of his society? In a letter to his mother, while reporting having lost 15 kg, Antoine Labelle writes that “a man in France is a drop of water in the sea”.
A northern Hercules
Throughout this stay, which ran from February to August 1885, Labelle also traveled to Belgium, Italy and Switzerland. He sees notables and many people of dress. His goal: to promote colonization as much as possible, in the name of his dream of a French America. To this end is distributed, in thousands of copies, a Guide of the French colonist in Canada.
The aspiring pioneers of the Third Republic will swell the ranks of a Canada resulting from the best of the Old Bourbon Regime: “Entire branches of noble, bourgeois or working-class families did not hesitate to cross the seas, and to transport there -based on their traditions of honor, work, race, ”writes the reporter from The Gazette.
Molière would not be disoriented on the shores of the St. Lawrence: “The French spoken in Canada is of great purity: it even has the peculiarity of ignoring neologisms, slang in short, which have gradually infiltrated. little in our mainland language. It is the French of the XVIIe and XVIIIe centuries, with a few old colorful words, forgotten here, and whose archaism is one more charm. “
The Quebec of Curé Labelle has complete autonomy, always according to The Gazette, who took the opportunity to instruct his readers: “Canada is divided into seven provinces, each of which forms an independent state, having its special budget, its parliament, its governor. “
Based on the most recent “statistical calculations”, the daily estimates that Francophones in the Dominion will number nearly forty million within “a hundred years”, ie in 1985. This is without counting a birth rate that will soon end. by diving the nose.
The silhouette of Curé Labelle, a colossus, impresses the correspondent of Universal monitor. He portrayed him as a “hercules cut with a plane”, speaking “in the old Norman language”. “Nothing surprises him… not even the refinements of Europe, to which he understands nothing. “
The journalist does not hide his admiration for the crusade of “this rustic, in good humor and good appetite”: “Pronounce his name in the seven states of Canada, that one sees you in its wake, that one for you. know his friend, all the doors and all the hands will be opened to this magic and sacred name, which France must repeat with gratitude, because the king of the North aims above all to maintain, to extend the contingent which speaks our language, which keeps our cult, which is proud of its French filiation and intends never to repudiate it! “
Against Victor Hugo
The writer Victor Hugo died on May 22, 1885. His body, placed on a catafalque, is exhibited under the Arc de Triomphe. The author of Miserable has the right to a state funeral. All of Paris takes to the streets. Millions of people are there. Antoine Labelle witnesses all this surge around the giant of letters with a pout of disgust.
“Victor Hugo is the incarnation of modern socialism”, writes Jean-Baptiste Proulx, the parish priest who acts as Antoine Labelle’s secretary during this trip. “Revolutionaries of all colors and shades give themselves movement, lead mourning; the girls follow; the curious watch; and good Catholics, out of pity, out of respect for talent and death, are silent. Antoine Labelle does not think differently from his devoted scribe.
The newspaper Universe is pleased that this fat priest who is considered to be an incarnation of Old France is scandalized by this gigantic homage granted to Hugo. Universe said he was “particularly happy to report” the disapproving feeling shown by “the Canadian colony”, at least if we stick to the point of view of Curé Labelle, “on the day of the impious funeral of Victor Hugo”.
Rather than honoring Victor Hugo, the small group of ensoutan Canadians who accompany the priest Labelle, “having at heart to protest against this unworthy masquerade”, decides, as “true friends of the true France” just as much “as for the Catholic consciences, ”to return to pray“ at the tomb of Louis Veuillot ”, reactionary polemicist, monarchist, ultra Catholic and also founder of the newspaper The Universe.
Around the priest Labelle, reports The Universe, at the tomb of Veuillot, he “who loved to celebrate the male virtues of Catholic Canada”, a wreath of flowers, the frame of which contains a crucifix, with this inscription: “To the valiant defender of the Church.” “And by way of signature, as if it seemed natural to him to speak on behalf of all his society, this:” French and Catholic Canada “.