A Vision called Montréal
The Setting
At the limit of his westerly journey Jacques Cartier described a mountain rising from an island above the town of Hochelaga sitting in a wide, flowing river of drinkable water. He called it Mons realis – Latin for mount royal. Forty years later, in 1575, in the modestly titled Cosmographie universelle de tout le monde, François de Belleforest recorded it as Montreal.
In the early 1600s French Protestants (Huguenots) settled in the Maritimes and the St. Lawrence valley and in 1608 Samuel de Champlain, working for their leader Pierre Dugua deMons established a colony at Quebec. Two years later, the French king, remembered as Good King Henri, their protector, was assassinated. Dugua deMons was his agent in the colonies. Reflecting a move away from the values of his father, when he reached majority Louis XIII named Cardinal Richelieu as his first minister. In 1627, Cardinal Richelieu established the Company of 100 Associates to take the colony from the Huguenots in a continuation of a war of religion that the assassinated king had brought to a halt. Champlain had opted to cooperate with the Catholics, putting the colony’s survival first. He answered to Jean de Lauson, the intendant, or director, in France, acting for Cardinal Richelieu in the latter’s absence.
Over the course of the century, the French hold on the colony was tenuous and they were faced with very hostile neighbours to the south. The Iroquoian people that Cartier had met were gone – absorbed into the ranks of the Mohawk, Oneida and Wendat, while others joined non-Iroquoian neighbours like the Algonquin. Iroquoian people in the valley were agricultural and shared their crops with their neighbours in a gift culture. Champlain, the Recollets and the Jesuits worked to bring the Wendat from the Lake Simcoe area and the Algonquin people into their Catholic fold, but they lost the colony to the Huguenot Kirke brothers, fighting for the English king, for three crucial years between 1629 and 1632. When Champlain was reinstated following negotiations between the kingdoms of France and England, the colony had irrevocably changed. The Five Nations had taken control of the St. Lawrence, and the French settlers had to be armed and on guard at all times to keep their hosts at bay as war canoes moved up and down the river with impunity.
Jean de Lauson, after negotiating the return of the colony, staked claim to most of the territory in his own name or that of his sons. In the process, he became the first French owner of the island of Montreal. While he was acquiring property up and down the river, the Five Nations were masters of the river. As their power increased, threatening the very existence of the colony, an unlikely series of events was unfolding in France.
The Naming
A tax collector named Jerome Le Royer de la Dauversière had a spiritual experience in which he heard a voice instructing him to acquire the island of Montreal and set up a hospital there to minister to the local pagan population. Absurd as the notion sounds – and to be sure, his spiritual advisor, Father Chauveau, dismissed it as a pious chimera – he could not get it out of his head.
Le Royer had inherited responsibilities that he did not seek. He wished to become a Jesuit, but when his father died unexpectedly, he inherited his father’s role as tax collector and supported his family. He soon married and eventually had five children. By 1639, when he experienced his vision, he had already answered another spiritual request in which a voice instructed him to set up a mission of hospital workers, sisters dedicated to helping those in need. While Chauveau also dismissed this more feasible undertaking, Jerome Le Royer did manage to establish les Filles Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph in La Flèche, France in 1636.
To augment his income, Le Royer rented out a room in his home, and a wealthy student named Pierre Chevrier de Fancamp rented it. Fancamp became absorbed by Le Royer’s religious obsession to create a hospital on an unexplored island on the other side of the world, inhabited, to the best of their knowledge, by a hostile band of what they considered uncivilised savages. Somehow this seemed like a good idea. Together, they began to solicit support for their project, calling themselves the Société Notre-Dame de Montréal, or the Société des Messieurs et Dames de Notre-Dame de Montréal pour la conversion des Sauvages de Nouvelle-France, but soon the adherents became known simply as the Montréalists. When they approached Jean de Lauson to buy the island, the businessman is reputed to have quoted the astronomical sum at the time of 150,000 livres. With the help of the influential priest and Montréalist Father Charles Lalemant, they managed to acquire the island in 1640. Soon a group of Montréalists led by Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve and including Jeanne Mance and other historical notables headed off on their missionary quest.
Arriving in separate ships and weeks apart, the party’s plans were delayed until the spring of 1642. De Maisonneuve met an elderly man, Pierre de Puiseaux de Montrénault, the owner of two seigneuries, whom he convinced not only to house their party for the winter, but also to donate his seigneuries and join their expedition in the spring. Throughout the winter, though, they were encouraged to stay put – in fact they were told that they did not have permission to proceed upriver, that the colony did not have the means to protect them. The governor, Montmagny, even offered them Île d’Orléans if they would abandon their irresponsible mission, but de Maisonneuve, speaking on their behalf, declined the offer. The intrepid and determined missionaries ignored all advice to the contrary and paddled upriver to their destiny in the spring of 1642, landing at the place we now call Pointe à Callières, where they established the mission of Ville Marie.
That first summer was the easiest one they would have. Somehow the Five Nations did not know they were there. Among their greatest challenges, once a fort was built, was not losing courage completely when floodwaters threatened to wash them away near the end of their first year. As the waters rose up towards their settlement, splashing against the gates of their fort, de Maisonneuve exercised leadership by declaring that if the floodwaters resided, he would carry a large cross to the summit of the mountain and erect it there. His faith in this appeal gave the others courage and once the waters subsided he fulfilled his promise.
Eventually the Five Nations did find them. They were as few as about 70 men and women, and the Iroquoian warriors numbered in the hundreds. De Maisonneuve wisely forbade his men from going on the offensive, limiting their strategy to defence, holing up in their fort when necessary. Jeanne Mance tended to the wounded. On one occasion, de Maisonneuve did authorize a foray against their painted opponents, discovering rapidly how ill equipped they were. De Maisonneuve was forced to call for a quick retreat, holding off the enemy himself to allow the others to get to safety inside the fort. Grabbed by a powerful Iroquois chief, he managed to push his musket into the chief’s naked chest and fire it, killing the man. This was hardly the mission that Jerome Le Royer had described in his vision. There was no ministering to hundreds of angry, taunting warriors, although between skirmishes they did receive visits from the mountain people to the north, the Algonquin. Faithfully, their supporters in France kept them supplied, responding to their needs and even finding other Montréalists to join them.
The names of these early missionaries and their supporters live on in place names, street names and institutions in Montreal and elsewhere in Quebec. Among them, Lambert Closse who became Chomedey’s right-hand man, Marguerite Bourgeoys who followed in Jeanne Mance’s path, Mme Claude de Bullion in France who silently backed Mance and the hospital she founded, as well as Father Jean de Brébeuf, captured among the Wendat, who was killed, most likely by non-Catholic Wendat, Mme de Peltrie who joined them from her mission in Quebec for a while but returned, and of course Jerome Le Royer himself. One other that is less recognizable is Jean-Jacques Olier, the effective founder of what would become the most influential and powerful force in New France and is still very influential to this day. Vincent de Paul, Jean Eudes and Olier, all resident in France, began the Concile de Trente, their goal being to retrain French priests from wealthy families and to give meaning back to the priesthood of their time. Only priests could benefit from their retreats and training programs. There was no congregation and there were no initiates from the lay community. Their role was pivotal in rebuilding the community and self-image of priests and through it they gained enormous influence. Their initiative soon came to be known as the Company of the Seminary of Saint Sulpice, more commonly known as the Sulpicians. Olier was also a Montréalist.
By the mid 1650s, in spite of their great faith in the efforts of the missionaries in far-away Montreal, the members of the Société Notre-Dame de Montréal in France were aging and not being replaced with younger benefactors. Even though they found men to send to the defence of the mission, their fundraising efforts were producing less fruit. The Five Nations still dominated the river, and even Lauson, by then governor of New France and living in Quebec, declined to stand up to them. In one telling incident in May 1656, three hundred Five Nations warriors attacked a Wendat village allied with the French on Île d’Orléans, burning it and taking the survivors prisoner. As they paddled their war canoes back past Quebec, they hurled insults at the French, who stayed put, incapable of an adequate military response.
In this atmosphere, the missionaries in Montreal, even less well defended than Quebec, held on as their backers in France melted away and French colonists further down the river contemplated abandoning the colony and returning en masse to France. Responding to a plea from Jeanne Mance, by this time an older woman with a disabled arm, Olier, who was himself nearing the end of his life, committed the Sulpicians to supporting the missionaries.
It is hard to understand to what extent the Montréalists and Sulpicians in France understood that Ville Marie was not capable of fulfilling its mission of ministering to the infidels. There were certainly Indigenous people in their care, but their major task was to fight for survival against a superior military force, and the Hôtel Dieu, the hospital that Jeanne Mance founded to care for the pagans of this far-away island, was busy with the sick and wounded French soldiers. Jerome Le Royer was also nearing the end of his life and soon support for the missionaries fell almost completely to the Sulpicians. In 1657 the Société Notre Dame de Montréal donated their title of the seigneurie to the Sulpicians, and the European colonization of the island picked up its pace. Finally, at the beginning of the 1700s, the Five Nations and the French signed a peace treaty, and a number of years later the Sulpicians, still mindful of the mission they had inherited, asked the French king to give them a new seigneurie in order to relocate their new Indigenous allies.
Over time, the mission of Ville Marie grew into a colony of French immigrants and the name of the mission became eclipsed by the name of the place, Montreal.