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 diplomatic tour of Honoré Mercier in Europe. Tenth text.
It was to a Marshal of France that Montreal entrusted, on May 13, 1917, the official inauguration of its brand new library, a vast neoclassical building in gray granite planted on Sherbrooke Street, in front of a former dump transformed into a green space, the La Fountain.
The affair makes event. Think about it: Montreal is the last big city in America to have a public facility of this kind. The clergy, until then, did not support the idea of a library accessible to all. So much so that it took the army, in 1875, to bury the body of Joseph Guibord, accused by the clergy of defending free access to books as a member of the Canadian Institute. Books were constantly turned away until we could inaugurate this public library. And it is Marshal Joseph Joffre, wearing the warrior’s halo, who is responsible for celebrating this victory.
Four years later, another French marshal, Ferdinand Foch, was invited with great pomp to visit this same library in turn. On site, happy with the reception he received, Foch signed a souvenir poster, printed in series with his effigy. Wrapped in golden laurels, a bushy mustache, the 69-year-old marshal embodies the victory of the Allied forces at the end of this immense butchery that was the Great War, as the conflict of 1914-1918 is still called.
On December 11, 1921, Foch arrived from Ottawa, aboard a “magnificent convoy of steel wagons”. His arrival is expected. He is followed by the media for the reception that the United States has just given him. At the White House, President Warren Harding received it with the highest honors. Everywhere, the single name of Foch is synonymous with victory, in the name of a heroisation of the war that the nations are trying to maintain, beyond the unspeakable disaster that this war of a new kind represents.
Foch arrives in Montreal, the “fourth French city in the universe”, proudly emphasizes The duty of the time. Canada’s metropolis is just recovering from the Spanish flu. The last sources of contagion of a third wave died out the previous year, without our coming to be understood more than its disappearance.
Montcalm’s heir
The reception given to Ferdinand Foch is dissected by the French correspondent of the newspaper The morning. The reporter cannot help drawing a parallel between the Generalissimo and his distant predecessor, the Marquis de Montcalm, defeated in 1759 on the Plains of Abraham. “Marshal Foch touched Canadian soil and it is as if a whole past was linked to it. In fact, Montcalm’s white shadow seemed present, just as the snowy land touches the blue horizon. Elsewhere there were cheers and cheers and delirious enthusiasm. Here it was mostly emotion, an emotion that could not be translated into screams. “
Like Montcalm, Foch is a Southern “not very tall”, writes the journalist of the To have to Ernest Bilodeau. “We recognized the features made so familiar by advertising, but even more appealing than painting or photography could make them. […] When Marshal Foch speaks to someone, it is with all his vigorous mountain and half-Gascon temperament. “
The soldier parades through the snow-covered streets of the metropolis aboard a luxury pram, followed by a column of distinguished guests crammed into black automobiles. This procession goes up Sherbrooke Street, stopping at the library, where Foch is received by Hector Garneau, the grandson of the great historian, archivist, librarian.
In front of his audience, the marshal hammers out a speech where war corresponds to a normalizing cultural function. “Without victory, it was the death of civilization and humanity that we represented,” says the Marshal, imagining the consequences of a war won by the Germans and their Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Bulgarian allies. Throughout the conflict, both sides tried to demonize the enemy.
After a jump to the École des Hautes Études commerciale where he was offered an honorary doctorate, Foch was taken in his landau to the Carabiniers arsenal, avenue des Pins. There, he harangues the French expatriates of the metropolis who, many, are engaged in the conflict. “Marshal Foch did not go to the Sainte-Marie college, to greet the Jesuit Fathers, whose French colleagues trained the great Christian wrestler, deplores The duty. General Armstrong claimed the schedule was too busy. The commander of the military district of Montreal, however, finds time to pass it to the Canadian Club, a circle of wealthy English-speaking businessmen from the metropolis.
The marshal crosses Montreal “like a meteor”, notes the president of the Alliance française de Montreal, Mr. Gonzales Desaulniers. “In the crowds who cheered you earlier and who will cheer you tomorrow, there are only people, with a few exceptions, from Brittany, Normandy, Touraine and Provence, who have cultivated, in the St. Lawrence Valley, the old qualities and even a little the faults of your breed. “
Gonzales Desaulniers shortens his speech so as not to exhaust the visitor who we imagine stunned by the repetitive effect of these tributes which have been added for days: “What is the point of talking more? Tomorrow, at the bottom of the river, on the citadel of Quebec, these things will be said to you better and will be more intelligible to you, because to the sweetness of the words will be added the seduction of the landscapes and the attraction of the historic plains on which our own destinies were played out one day. “
Travel memories
On the morning of December 12, 1921, Foch was taken to Quebec aboard his special train. At the Gare du Palais, the former commander of “the largest army mentioned in history” is received by Prime Minister Louis-Alexandre Taschereau who, in power for less than a year, extends a long reign of the Party. liberal started in 1897. The procession crosses the capital, where we seem to have already forgotten the riots against the conscription which had left four dead and sixty wounded among civilians three years earlier.
Foch is dropped off at the citadel of Quebec where the Royal 22 awaits hime Regiment, of which he is honorary colonel. The newspaper correspondent The morning does not hide his emotion at the sight of a Marshal of France reviewing a unit of French-Canadian soldiers, under the reign of a light blowing snow. All the more so since the scene, filmed by “the operators of animated views”, takes place “above the Plains of Abraham, in which, a century and a half ago, the supreme battle was fought.”
The Generalissimo passes in a gust of wind at Laval University. He was awarded a second honorary doctorate in the seminary’s promotion room, among the students singing the popular song “He won his epaulettes”. Foch makes a final stop in the Red Salon of the Parliament, on the throne of the President of the Legislative Council.
“Marshal, I present to you the descendants of the Hurons who fought with Montcalm”, launches Prime Minister Taschereau by introducing the great chief Ovide Sioui, the president of a “delegation of the Huron tribe of Loretteville”, as reported The sun. “The passage in the old capital of the first Marshal of France could not take place without the descendants of the children of the woods bringing to the latter a testimony of their deep admiration”, adds The homeland.
The mustached hero smokes a last cigarette at the Palais station before taking the train back to New York, via Sherbrooke. The transatlantic liner on which the Marshal embarked left Manhattan on October 14, 1921. In his luggage, bulky souvenirs, including mechanical dolls intended for Foch’s granddaughter, costumes offered by the Sioux of the American West , a stuffed fighting cock and a sword set with sapphires, whose ivory hilt comes from “African elephants”, underlines the agency text published in The duty. Between two travel trunks filled to the brim, we can hear the cries of Theodora, the wild cat donated by the State of Wyoming.