It is said that reality surpasses fiction. But is it always true? In the series Tales and Facts, The duty explores the real and fictional dimensions of Quebec’s legendary stories and tales. Today, the fourth and last text in the series, the death row inmate Marie-Josephte Corriveau.
They said she was beautiful. Then, she was transformed into a man-eater, a prostitute, a matricide, a serial murderer.
However, if she had been tried today, Marie-Josephte Corriveau, whose body was exposed in a cage for 40 days in Lévis, in 1763, after she had been condemned for the murder of her second husband, would have been acquitted.
At least that was the conclusion of the court convened by the Young Bar of Quebec, which re-arranged its trial in 1990, before three judges: a judge from the Court of Appeal of Quebec, a judge from the Superior Court and a judge of the Court of Quebec.
It was the lawyer Serge Ménard who represented Marie-Josephte Corriveau, more than two centuries after the events. She was found not guilty due to lack of evidence.
“They added that she should have been judged by her peers and in her language,” adds Isabelle Cadrin, who organizes an annual show telling the story of Corriveau in Saint-Vallier, on the south shore of the Saint-Laurent. , where Marie-Josephte was born in 1733.
“The act of condemnation is reversed and Marie-Josephte is declared not guilty… more than two hundred years too late, write, in a very detailed book on the question, La Corriveau, from history to legend, Catherine Ferland and Dave Corriveau. A work of reconstruction of the memory can then begin. From an evil and unrepentant she-devil, Corriveau is gradually transformed, in the collective imagination, into a feminist icon.
The act of condemnation is reversed and Marie-Josephte is declared not guilty… more than two hundred years too late. A work of reconstruction of the memory can then begin.
Every August, since 2013, the municipality of Saint-Vallier organizes, in addition to the show, a tour of the key places in the life of Marie-Josephte Corriveau, with multiple extras. And this year, the Open Eye Theater has created a whole sumptuous musical theatre, The Thirst of Crowson the theme of the Corriveau trial.
However, barely a few decades ago, the history of Corriveau was a taboo subject in Saint-Vallier. “People were ashamed of it,” says Isabelle Cadrin.
When, in 1988, the municipality decided to give the name of Marie-Josephte Corriveau to the municipal library, protests were heard. Then, in 2013, on the occasion of the 250e anniversary of the Corriveau trial, the National Battlefields Commission put on a play, which is now presented in collaboration with the municipality of Saint-Vallier.
Special moment in history
It must be said that the hanging, which took place on the Plains of Abraham, and the gibbeting of La Corriveau come at a very special moment in the history of Quebec. In 1763, the British had just taken New France. Moreover, it is said that the first husband of Marie-Josephte Corriveau, Charles Bouchard, father of her three children, died of fevers after having served on the battlefield of the Plains of Abraham alongside Montcalm.
People referred to it as Bonhomme Sept Heures. We told the children: if you can’t sleep, Corriveau will come and get you.
It is therefore in this context that the new masters of the colony may have wanted to establish their power by exposing the corpse of a woman sentenced to death, in the heart of the city, for five weeks. No wonder the legend came to invent in Corriveau the murder of seven husbands, whom she would have killed, one with lead in the ear, the other with a pitchfork or with a hay wire, d others still with poisons, with the help of a needle stuck in the heart, or by strangulation… Centuries after his death, all the storytellers will get into it and will put it, from Louis Fréchette to Philippe Aubert de Gaspé, from James MacPherson Lemoine to William Kirby, or, closer to home, Gilles Vigneault and the group Mes aïeux. A myth and a legend were born. From a murderess, Corriveau becomes a witch, even a ghost.
“People talked about it like Bonhomme Sept Heures,” says Isabelle Cadrin. We told the children: if you can’t sleep, Corriveau will come and get you. »
In fact, Louis Étienne Dodier, Corriveau’s second husband, died of a pitchfork on January 17, 1763, then trampled by his horses, and buried the same evening, before there was an autopsy. In February of the same year, an exhumation was ordered by Governor Murray, due to suspicions coming from the family of the deceased, and an autopsy confirmed a murder.
At the beginning, it is Father Corriveau who surrenders and accuses himself, claiming that it was he himself who killed his son-in-law, with the help of his daughter. Father Corriveau is first condemned. But at the last minute, he confesses to the abbot that he only accused himself to cover up his daughter, who carried out the murder alone. She will then confess to having killed her spouse with a small ax (while the latter would have been killed with a pitchfork), and will receive the punishment that we know.
A case of domestic violence?
In La Corriveau, from history to legend, Catherine Ferland and Dave Corriveau also note that a year before the murder, Marie-Josephte would have tried to flee her husband by taking refuge with her uncle. From there to digging up a case of domestic violence and pleading self-defense, there is only one step.
The English court obviously did not see it that way. In his eyes, Marie-Josephte was all the more guilty in that she had attacked the man to whom she had to subordinate herself. And why not take advantage of this crime to frighten the whole population before British justice?
“The gibbet displayed in a cage was unheard of in New France,” notes historian Catherine Ferland, who notes that at that time, in England, gibbets were placed at crossroads.
“We saw the body for a few weeks and then we buried it. It captured the imagination. It was so unusual and traumatic. »
The cage itself would have been exhumed in the middle of the XIXe century, then presented from museum to museum, until the Regional Historical Society of Lévis found it in the collections of the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, in 2011. Since then, it has been repatriated to Quebec and is now part of from the collection of the Musée de la civilization du Québec.
But the skeleton itself of Marie-Josephte Corriveau continues to be debated. “Marie-Josephte Corriveau was buried in a hurry, in a corner of unconsecrated land,” says Catherine Ferland. No headstones or tombstones.
In Saint-Vallier, “the old people said that their ancestors had said that they had gone to look for the body at night”, says Isabelle Cadrin, who affirms that the body of Corriveau is buried in the municipality, even if it n There is no headstone in his name in the cemetery. Others claim that bones remained in the cage, in the cemetery of the Saint-Joseph-de-la-Pointe-Lévy church in Lévis, when it resurfaced in the middle of the 19th century.e century.