The duty continues its journey back to the sources of French America, focusing on the exploration of Quebec newspapers and archives. To broaden our horizons, we will travel from the northern confines of the Hudson to the sunny dreams of Florida, while tracing the thread of a shared history. Today: the memory of Chénier and the patriot movement.
Jean-Olivier Chénier rushes through one of the windows of the church of Saint-Eustache, where he has barricaded himself with his last comrades in arms. On December 14, 1837, the 31-year-old doctor tries to escape the flames that set the building besieged by the British army on fire. Chénier landed in the cemetery then collapsed, near a small ravine, after being hit by two bullets in the chest. Ex-communicated by the clergy, who support the attackers, he will have to wait 150 years before his remains are entitled to a religious burial.
In the fall of 1837, the Battle of Saint-Eustache put an end to the first patriot uprising. In Lower Canada, the ancestor of Quebec, the recourse to arms is the tragic culmination of decades of demands for profound political reform. The arrest warrants issued against the leaders of the movement set fire to the powder in mid-November. After subduing the patriots of the Richelieu Valley, Queen Victoria’s armed forces turned to the insurgents of the county of Deux-Montagnes, north of Montreal.
The Patriot workforce in Saint-Eustache has melted. As General John Colborne’s 1,500 troops and volunteers approached, they dwindled from 900 to 250 fighters armed with simple shotguns, odds and ends. Their leader, Amury Girod, a Swiss of origin, himself spun in the English to seek reinforcements which will never arrive. His ride will take him to Pointe-aux-Trembles, where he commits suicide in troubled circumstances. He leaves to posterity a diary written in French, German and Italian.
Left to himself, “Major” Chénier barricaded himself in the village core. He is no match for Colborne, who fought Napoleon at Waterloo. The British general enjoys an overwhelming numerical superiority and has cannons and even “Congreve” rockets, which however prove to be more impressive than effective. The bombing of the church continued until a fire lit by soldiers forced the patriots to flee through the windows. “We are on fire! Chénier would have declared before rushing into the void. The patriots count about sixty dead. Only a few soldiers were hit.
field of ruins
Three days later, the correspondent of The Daily arrives in Saint-Eustache. “We went to the church, which is now a heap of ashes, and looking among the debris of the tin roofing that had collapsed, we discovered several bodies in a horrible state in to see. The journalist counts a dozen others lying in the middle of the crosses in the cemetery adjoining the church. These men were not all killed in action. Some were finished off by the unleashed soldiery. The village has been torched. The ensuing looting is such that a British veteran of the Spanish Civil War compares it to the sack of Badajoz in 1812.
The day after the fight, it was the turn of the neighboring village of Saint-Benoît to be set on fire by the men of Colborne, now nicknamed the “Vieux Brûlot”. This second destructive momentum by fire takes away the only copy of the manuscript of theCanadian history of Jacques Labrie, Chénier’s father-in-law. It was not until François-Xavier Garneau, in 1845, that a first historical synthesis was published in French Canada.
Upon entering the Anderson Inn, the correspondent of The Daily crosses a dozen patriot prisoners, including one, “horribly burned”, who has defenestrated the church alongside Chénier. The corpse of the latter is exhibited like a hunting trophy on the counter of the bar-room. “He was split in four and his heart had been extracted from his chest, we read in the pen of the anonymous journalist, it was a horrible and repulsive sight for humanity. “Who is telling the truth?
From the end of December 1837, this macabre version of the facts was disputed by Farnden, one of the surgeons who carried out Chénier’s autopsy. “The body was cut open simply to find out the direction the bullet had taken,” he wrote in a letter to the newspapers, “no part of the entrails was in any way removed, and his remains were in no way outraged. Father Paquin of Saint-Eustache also denied the rumor that Chénier’s heart had been paraded at the end of a bayonet.
This story of indignity towards a corpse will resurface in 1875, when the liberal Laurent-Olivier David, author of a history of the patriots, intends to embarrass the conservative Maximilien Globensky, whose father was one of the Colborne volunteers. Globensky retorts with a voluminous work in order to clear the family honour, while insisting on Chénier’s irresponsibility: “During his lifetime he raised heads, after his death he made them turn! »
the urn
Chénier’s body is buried in the desecrated part of the cemetery, reserved for children who died without baptism. In 1891, the remains were collected in an urn, on the initiative of Dr. David Marsil, a Liberal supporter, who wanted to deposit them in the Côte-des-Neiges cemetery. The ceremony is canceled by the archbishop: the Church refuses the lifting of the ex-communion.
The urn remains under lock and key, at the Marsil home. Her son, Tancred, puts her in a safe at the Birks jewelry store. It then passed into the hands of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society of Montreal. It was not until 1987 that the remains were finally buried in Saint-Eustache, after a ceremony where the Quebec government was represented by Minister Claude Ryan, the former director of the Homework. His benevolent speech is followed by a sermon by Mrs.gr Valois, also in the same tone. The ceremony takes place in the church whose stone facade still bears the marks left by cannonballs.
Ex-communicated by the clergy, who supported the attackers, he [Jean-Olivier Chénier] will have to wait 150 years before his remains are entitled to a religious burial.
This is too much for the deputy and poet Gérald Godin. “They try to make us believe that the patriots were not so keen on independence as on respect for democracy,” he says to The Press. That’s why I went out to get some fresh air. We’re running out of oxygen in there. Its leader, Pierre Marc Johnson, is more conciliatory. He shakes the hands of the dignitaries as the hearse containing the remains of the patriot drives off, followed by a battalion of Knights of Columbus wearing bicornes, capes and operetta swords.
A monument
In 1895, admirers of Chénier launched a popular subscription to erect a monument to him. The budget is limited: $5,000. Instead of expensive bronze, preference is given to steel, coated with copper. The original model, proposed by the sculptor Louis-Philippe Hébert, must be set aside. It will be a serial model, signed by Alfonso Pelzer, a German established in the United States. The artist adds, to look good, local elements: the hero’s sideburns, an arrowhead sash, a coat made of local fabric. The monument becomes a place of political gatherings.
The work was erected in Square Viger, places whose Victorian serenity was soon altered by the arrival of industries, then, in the 1960s, by the passage of the Ville-Marie highway. But it was also vandalized many times, before being removed during the construction of a new hospital. In the spring of 2021, seven months afterThe duty reported that its base was lying in a vacant lot, the monument is put back in place.
In 1968, Chénier found himself crowned with the pompous title of “hero par excellence” during a Radio-Canada competition. The writer Jacques Ferron evokes it in a play.
The revolutionary romanticism of the time fueled the cult of Chénier, who shared his title of doctor-combatant with Che. Like the Lower Canadian patriot, Guevara’s corpse was also displayed on a table in the midst of his victors celebrating the return of the established order. At the height of the October crisis, the commando responsible for the kidnapping and death of Minister Pierre Laporte took the name of Chénier cell. This memorial improvement will subsequently decline, in part to the benefit of the figure of the Chevalier de Lorimier, executed on February 15, 1839.