Naming Ste. Adele, Morin Heights, Val Morin and…La Minerve
When places, including schools and even mountains and rivers have their names chosen, it is best to look at the world and the locality to understand the temper of those times. What would have caused that choice, the story behind that name? Does the choice seem odd, or has it stood the test of time?
In the first generation after the Proclamation of Quebec in 1763, English-speaking non-Catholics rapidly populated the western portion of the colony and the French were becoming a minority in their own home, just like the First Nations had become. Exactly 28 years later, the colony was divided into two, and the French majority was reconfirmed, albeit in a smaller colony now called Lower Canada.
Coupled with this change, the educated French learned about the American Republic to the south and how it worked and also began to absorb the ideas and ideals of the French Republic. In the next generation, young intellectuals began imagining that it could happen here. By the 1820s Montreal was growing under the weight of displaced farmers and immigrants from war-torn Europe. The European and colonial structures were being challenged by the new industrial age and the New World beckoned to the poor, the desperate and the ambitious. The ports were full and there were no proper accommodations for the newcomers while French Canadians, experiencing the same kinds of shortages, were arriving in these burgeoning centres, often disadvantaged by their language.
The government could not help. It consisted of a governor appointed by the British parliament who in turn was advised by an appointed Executive Council and a Legislative Council, both dominated by favoured British businessmen. The voice of the people was the elected Assembly, but its power was largely advisory. This made the Assembly weaker than a modern trade union, with the Executive Council forming management. It was not a democracy in our modern sense.
The Assembly was composed of parties, much as today, and the Parti des Patriotes, originally called the Parti Canadien, tried to unite the educated French and other republican-minded people. In 1826 in Montreal, Augustin-Norbert Morin launched the newspaper La Minerve, meant to be a voice of the party.
Keeping the different factions of the Parti des Patriotes united fell to the charismatic leader Louis-Joseph Papineau. Seigneur of the Petite Nation seigneury situated in present-day Montebello, Papineau was an unusual man. His grandfather had been a hard-working farmer, but his father became a successful surveyor and notary who bought the seigneury from the Church. Papineau knew both sides of French society, but he had also benefited from the prosperity that allowed his family to so drastically change its status. He was a man who could present himself as a republican, a seigneur, a lawyer, a politician, the grandchild of a farmer or whatever the occasion demanded, and he was so popular that songs were written about him. Even the original ditty that Bowser and Blue made famous in recent times “C’est la faute du fédéral” had a precursor in the 1830’s that went “C’est la faute de Papineau.” Today when people talk about that period, Papineau’s name dominates our memory, but one of the real workhorses of the movement was another lawyer, Augustin-Norbert Morin. He came from a poorer family and probably would have lived the life of a God-fearing farmer if his health had permitted it, but instead, thanks to one of those series of events that occur in all of our lives, he became the founder and editor of the newspaper La Minerve. He was also the author of the 92 Resolutions, a series of demands made of the British Parliament and often associated with this period as strongly as is Papineau himself.
In 1832, while Papineau was struggling to get the Assembly to speak with one voice, a cholera pandemic, which had broken out in Bengal in 1826 and spread across the world, arrived with boatloads of Irish immigrants. Having killed 32,000 people in Britain and another 25,000 in Ireland, it would take 6,000 souls in the small port of Montreal.
Some radicals blamed the British for the disease and xenophobia took hold among the French. In this atmosphere, Papineau received his wish, and by 1834, the Assembly voted on the 92 Resolutions. Governor Lord Matthew Whitworth-Aylmer, sympathetic to the Patriotes, offered serious concessions, but the party, insisting on even more concessions, split into a radical core and a small, disunited opposition.
In this tinderbox atmosphere, the main crop, wheat, failed. Then the business climate became unstable when the American government under President Jackson refused to renew the mandate of its central bank, forcing the American currency to find its own level. This was the first time that the American economy would strut onto the world economic stage. Many institutions had invested in United States ventures based on the guarantees of the central bank, and without it confidence rapidly seeped away. The whole banking system began to unravel, causing a collapse of confidence in banks and currency in the United States and the northern colonies, and leaving British investors with red ink in their ledgers.
In Montreal, the crisis added to the daily problems of an already stressed populace as prices began to jump around. Market confidence was limited to your personal feelings about whomever you were dealing with. In an attempt to stabilize daily exchange, two well-respected businesses, Molson’s of Montreal and Hart’s of Three Rivers, each issued company dollars engraved with their names and emblems.
It is amusing to imagine the whole colony suddenly converting to a brewer’s standard, bottles of beer as a measure of the worth of everything else: “Okay, 2 brew for the loaf of bread, but you’ll have to throw in the cucumber.” In fact, these families were involved in other businesses including banking and transportation, and their dollars could be traded easily for products and services that they supplied, and from there, confidence in them radiated out until other businesses began to accept them.
While the currencies were accepted, tensions remained high. The flashpoint came with rural uprisings that the leaders of the Parti des Patriotes could not contain. The troops were called in and by the time the dust had settled, over 350 people had lost their lives. Papineau fled to the United States, accompanied, according to some accounts, by a large, boisterous lumberman, who became the Paul Bunyan of American mythology.
Morin was a reticent hero of this epoch. An idealist and sometime poet, he pops up like a cork in a rushing stream. He arrived with Papineau in the middle of the battle at St. Charles to try to talk their rural followers out of taking up arms. He was arrested in the confusion and then released but soon learned that a warrant for high treason had been issued against him. While he was encouraged to leave the colony, he went into hiding, but eventually surrendered. He was held for ten days and then released.
Morin, who had clerked for the lawyer Denis-Benjamin Viger, was admitted to the Bar in 1828. During that time, he worked with Papineau, Viger, Ludger Duvernay and the other core members of the Parti des Patriotes. He sold La Minerve to Duvernay almost as soon as he got it going because he did not have the business head to run it, but he stayed on as editor. In that capacity, he followed and participated in the actions of the Parti des Patriotes and of the Assembly, even becoming an elected representative. He had made common cause with the others around Papineau, who espoused a fully elected government with non-denominational schooling, demands that were radical at the time, but seem obvious today.
The violence of the uprisings and the departure of Papineau encouraged him towards the side of compromise. He eventually made common cause with Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin, supporting the new government that was created. The two Canadas were now subject to one administration and, with greater powers accorded to the elected Assembly, French Canada had a seat at the table of government.
Morin eventually became Commissioner of Crown Lands in the new government. This gave him the opportunity to begin a colonization project on the North River, conceived to stem the flow of rural French-Canadians to New England’s factory towns. He began an experimental farm, encouraging farmers to grow potatoes after the 1837 failure of their wheat crops, and he built mills and roads. Never a good business manager, he invested in early railway projects that came to nothing, but all his actions were aimed at promoting his settlement at Ste. Adele.
Morin showed his greatest strength as Speaker of the Assembly from 1848 to 1851. He demonstrated a calm fairness and maintained the confidence and respect of his adversaries. He was Speaker during the burning of Parliament in Montreal in 1849, when angry English protesters set fire to the building because they felt the government was catering to the French. With the curtains burning and the chamber filling with smoke, Morin calmly insisted on a motion of adjournment before he would allow an evacuation. The fire ultimately forced the removal of Parliament to Kingston, and subsequently to Ottawa because of concerns that Kingston was too close the border.
He was not a charismatic man, and he had many detractors. At a time when a man’s influence was measured in part by the size of his library, Morin’s contained such a preponderance of books on the natural sciences and agriculture that his credibility as a lawyer was put in question. Even so, he became the first Dean of Law of Laval University, a minister in the LaFontaine-Baldwin united Canadian government from 1851 to 1854, and eventually co-prime-minister in the Hincks-Morin and McNab-Morin governments. In 1855, he was made a judge, and it was in that capacity that he and the other judges of the Cour Spécial dismantled the seigneurial system. He was also a co-author of the Code Civil du Bas-Canada, one of the great accomplishments of his times.
From his student days where he trained initially for the priesthood, it was said of Morin that he would give to anyone in need, even to his own detriment. He married Adèle Raymond; they had no children. He had also managed his personal estate poorly, as if to demonstrate his commitment to the common good through his own poverty. Colonists newly arrived in the Laurentians, thanks to Morin’s efforts, eventually wanted to name their new town for him. They suggested Morinville, but he demurred. They responded by naming it Ste. Adele for his wife, Adèle Raymond. His own name lives on in the township of Morin, Val Morin, Morin Heights, the St. Norbert Parish in Val Morin, Rue Morin in Ste. Adele and Boulevard Morin in Ste. Agathe, while his newspaper’s name survives in the naming of La Minerve, first declared in 1892. His wife may well have been honoured again in the naming of Lac Raymond in Val Morin.
Further exploring brought me to a confusing exchange. Jean-Nicholas Perrault had co-authored a history of Ste. Adèle for the municipality. Because of my admiration for Morin and because Perrault was an acquaintance, I went to the book launch. In a quiet moment after, I congratulated him on his work and shared my concern that Morin was not better known. “Are you for him or against him?” Perrault asked. I could not imagine being either. He had died in 1865 and I did not know how to respond to Perrault’s question. I learned later what he was referring to. To many people at that time, Morin seemed more like a priest than a lawyer and he was close to the church although he had strange streaks of naivety. Among other issues, he argued against secular French schools and that the Church should maintain denominational French schools. Due to his defense of the Church, the clergy endorsed their party from the pulpit, maintaining support for Baldwin and LaFontaine.
Morin was plagued with rheumatism from childhood and soldiered on despite great pain throughout his life. He drove his co-authors to finish the civil code as though to meet his personal deadline and it was completed before his death. He passed away in 1865 in Ste. Adele, surprised that the clergy objected to a lot of the civil code. He was 62. He is remembered as one of the great intellectuals of Lower Canada and a major player in the most formative period of our country’s history. In fact, a lot of the problems and confusion in modern Quebec society sometimes feel like reflections of Morin’s thinking.