In 1927, in New Brunswick, members of the Ku Klux Klan repeatedly set fire to large wooden crosses in the middle of summer nights. These cagoulards dressed in white make life difficult for the Acadians.
One of the great leaders of the KKK in America at the time was called Eugene Farnsworth. He grew up in New Brunswick. For him, white America must confront blacks, Jews, Catholics. The latter, in Canada at least, are largely Acadians, French Canadians. In the public square, they are most often treated as pariahs.
Documentary filmmaker Phil Comeau, director of The secret order, dwells little on the corrosive effect of the KKK on this world. However, the establishment of a French-Canadian secret society, the Order of Jacques-Cartier, occurred at exactly the same time. It is also, in a way, a response to the aggressions suffered by the Acadians.
In Moncton
On his deathbed, Phil Comeau’s father told him that he had belonged to “la Patente”, as the Order of Jacques-Cartier was also called. Could that explain, wonders his son, the fact that this father was such an absent man with his family? By following the trail of his own family history to the archives, Comeau manages to trace, sometimes a little laboriously, the thread of the great Acadian history.
In Moncton, recall various witnesses interviewed in this documentary, it was almost impossible for a long time to consider speaking French in broad daylight without fear of being “looked at askance”.
For what reason, if not because of systemic discrimination, were Acadians so long pushed to the most uncomfortable margins of society? How can we consider today the difficult legacy of this past?
In all the Acadian urban centers, businesses conformed to the idea that everything had to be in English only.
Like other Canadian provinces, New Brunswick had set up a unilingual English school system. By a law of 1871, New Brunswick rejected the teaching of French. Dedicated teachers made efforts in the school to ensure that the children learned French. Often, they did it from English texts, for lack of anything better, explains a witness.
Still at the end of the 1960s, higher education in French was suppressed, while the Anglophone community enjoyed rich institutions. Who has forgotten the scenes of the Acadian student struggle of Acadia, Acadia? ! ?, the great film by Pierre Perrault and Michel Brault? This documentary was not censored for nothing.
It was not until 1977 that French was officially recognized as the language of instruction in New Brunswick.
masked men
What was the role of the Order of Jacques-Cartier in Acadie? Born in Ontario in 1926, the Order had many followers in French Canada. Especially in Quebec. Various studies since the 1960s have been devoted to it. However, the place of this secret society in Acadia remains generally unknown. It is the merit of Phil Comeau to draw attention to this dimension.
These are pillars of the Acadian community who were recruited by the Order. The newcomers were subjected to an initiation rite. This was no different from the practices of other organizations of the time. Although it was opposed to the Freemasons or the Orangemen, the Patente shared with these groups and others, for example the Knights of Columbus, a sense of showmanship and a great appetite for the culture of secrecy. .
Only men within the Order of Jacques-Cartier. Women are scrupulously kept in the dark about its existence. The organization had at least recourse to a secretary, says this documentary. La Patente had agreed, as a salary, to pay him… the services of another woman capable of carrying out, in her place, the domestic tasks of her home! This anecdote already says a lot about the social model supported by the Order.
The members of the organization swore never to say anything about him. They tried, in principle, to encourage, through games of influence, social and economic perspectives capable of improving the condition of all Francophones.
In practice, the Order of Jacques-Cartier reinforced, by doubling them, parochial and national structures. Indeed, members of the Order often belonged to other social clubs. Members of the Patente tended to engage in many other social organizations. A close community network, which makes it difficult to follow the sole thread of the Patente.
Witnesses interviewed by Phil Comeau also explain that the meetings could easily be concealed on the pretext that they were meetings of the Lacordaire movement, an anti-alcoholic society dedicated to combating all use of alcohol, or meetings of the Richelieu club. , another French-Canadian mutual benefit society.
What credit?
What social and political credit can we give to the Order of Jacques-Cartier? Figures of primary importance were there, such as André Laurendeau, Jean Drapeau, Bernard Landry and Louis Robichaud. However, the interest shown in such a group may have the counter-effect of exaggerating its features. Especially since the members of the Order had, as in several more or less secret organizations, a tendency to attribute many merits to themselves.
Is Phil Comeau going too fast when he examines the real effects of the Ordre de Jacques-Cartier on French-Canadian society? In any case, he endorses the idea that the appearance of bilingual names at the doors of public buildings is largely due to the influence of the Patente. This is to reduce to the action of the commanderies of the Order the complexity of the struggles of the time to obtain a quantity of bilingual mentions, for example checks and postage stamps. Should we also believe, as Phil Comeau does, that the Le Havre bridge in Montreal was renamed Jacques-Cartier in 1934 solely because of the influence of the Patente? That would be to minimize the magnitude of the celebrations of the 400e anniversary of the Saint-Laurent sailor’s first trip to the waters of the St. Lawrence.
Cells
Patente archives consulted by Phil Comeau indicate that this organization had 72,000 members. The movement is structured in cells. In principle, each is waterproof. Young men who join the organization learn, on the day of their initiation, that their father has been a member for years.
The organization, hierarchical as possible, is attached to the doctrine of the Catholic Church. Moreover, it will not survive for long the collapse of the latter, in the wake of the social changes that occur in the early 1960s.
Phil Comeau indicates that special attention, at least in Acadia, was given to recruiting members from rural areas. Why ? The official discourse of the Church preached that the providential mission of French Canada passed through a conquest of the territory which would first be attached to the mastery of agriculture and the rejection of modernity, symbolized by urban life. In the cities, the members of the Order often belonged to the lesser notability of the parishes.
Studies have been devoted to the Order of Jacques-Cartier. Director Phil Comeau leafs through some of them, staging himself on screen. To energize this rather linear achievement, theatrical reconstructions, embodied by actors, try here and there to revive, always a little heavily, the decorum of the secret evenings of the Order of Jacques-Cartier. Despite the shortcomings of this documentary, there are too few documents devoted to the history of Acadia to deprive yourself of watching it.