In the mountain of papers left by the cassocked historian Lionel Groulx (1878-1967), there is little mention of the patriots of 1837-1838. The historian Gilles Laporte, a specialist in these events, brought to light in the archives the canon’s course notes collected on this question around 1923.
“From the 19th centurye century, the radicals, the reds, the liberals, like Laurent-Olivier David, Louis Fréchette and others, had a strong awareness of the importance of patriots,” explains Gilles Laporte. But for several dominant executives of society, conservatives and members of the clergy, there was no question of talking about it other than to condemn them. The priest and historian Lionel Groulx will be the first in this camp “to try to reconcile with the history of the patriots, while constantly repeating that they made many mistakes,” adds the historian.
This is well expressed in the imposing notes written by Groulx and never published. Gilles Laporte gives them his attention with a view to possible publication. These notes, very developed, will be used by Groulx for his courses at the University of Montreal. The following year, 1924, he delivered six substantial lectures on the subject. Each is nourished by around fifty pages of notes. “It’s tough!” But those who expect that Groulx, in this, will save the patriots from their condemnation by the conservatives will be disappointed. He calls them unconscious. Suicidal. He’s constantly dropping sugar on their backs. For him, they are too radical. They are anticlericals. »
Groulx’s documentation at the time is mainly drawn from official government sources and the correspondence of governors, in short, from what is available in the public archives in Ottawa. Groulx, however, shows that he also masters British sources, “notably those from the Colonial Office”.
These patriots gathered around the figure of Louis-Joseph Papineau are atheists who lead to anticlericalism, affirms Groulx. To recover them, we must rally them to deep struggles that go beyond them, that swallow them up. Groulx, notes Laporte, was very “attentive to the slightest radical deviation”. With regard to the patriots, he “dives into psychological and ethical history”.
Such a conservative priest, openly reactionary, obviously cannot defend patriots outright. Yet Groulx manages, observes the historian Laporte, to find links with a French-Canadian national struggle. However, Groulx constantly comes up against a pitfall. “For him, French Canadians are intrinsically incapable of violence. To explain the violence of the patriots, he always has to look elsewhere, on the side of the Protestants, of the English. » It is a constant avoidance of the reasons for direct confrontation. “It is symptomatic of his relationship to violence. »
To the great surprise of Gilles Laporte, the whole thing is “much more philosophical than patriotic”. In many respects, Groulx seems “more to express his conservatism than his nationalism”. To the point of engaging in a “laborious exercise consisting of justifying the attitude of the clergy during the uprising”.
A salutary first centenary
The questions raised by the history of the patriots of 1837-1838 have never ceased to be relevant, notes Gilles Laporte. A century after the events, in 1937, that is to say in the midst of an economic crisis, while the nauseating scents of a new world war float and the spider of Nazism rears its head, no one expects what the history of the patriots resurfaces in French Canada. And yet.
In this year 1937, three major books appeared which mark out the territory of interpretation from 1837-1838 to this day, notes historian Gilles Laporte. The first is that of Donald G. Creighton, The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence. Creighton exposes the idea that the patriots were traitors, that the country owes its life to the merchants. “Creighton is extremely famous in Canada. It’s in a way their own Lionel Groulx. » Also appeared, still in 1937, The Birth of Canadian Democracy. “In this book, Stanley Ryerson makes patriots precursors of the class struggle”, pioneers of democracy who fought against an archaic feudal regime. Finally, Gérard Filteau published, still in 1937, his History of the Patriots. “Filteau says word for word what Lionel Groulx tells him to say, situating the patriots in a national narrative. »
Gilles Laporte observes that it is, to say the least, unusual that the Day of the National Flag of Canada, heir to the colonial power fighting for its survival in 1837-1838, is now celebrated on February 15. Particular in that on February 15, 1839, François-Marie-Thomas Chevalier de Lorimier, a notary with revolutionary enthusiasm, was hanged by the British colonial power, in front of the Montreal prison. That day, at 9 a.m., four other patriots, accused of having been involved in the uprisings in Lower Canada in 1837-1838, were executed with him. This prison, of which the body of the building and part of the surrounding wall remain, is located a stone’s throw from where the Jacques-Cartier Bridge is located today.