St. Sauveur

Examining why a place’s name is chosen is sometimes less about the place itself and more about a snapshot of the times when it was chosen.

Many people have asked me why so many places in Quebec are named for saints. A good number of those names were taken from the name of the parish or the mission that the Catholic Church created, and starting with the Montreal bishop Ignace Bourget, an aggressive new style of church activity began to dominate the lives of the Catholic congregations. We have looked at the naming of Ste. Adele and Morin Heights in previous articles, but St. Sauveur’s naming is worth examining to understand these saints. Established as a parish in 1855, it was the first of many villages that expanded beyond the seigneuries into the northern townships. Saint Sauveur means holy saviour, and Ignace Bourget chose the name for the parish in the 1850s. Bourget, who succeeded Bishop Lartigue in 1840, dedicated his office to creating a veritable army of religious men and women. He became bishop after the failed Rebellion of 1837-38, a time of great change in French Canada and, as though recognizing that a political vacuum had formed, solicited every conceivable Catholic religious order in France to fill the void. He also organized the creation of a number of new home-grown ones. There were at least fourteen significant orders and institutions that he had a hand in establishing. These include the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary and the Sisters of Sainte Anne, the first he inspired and second he founded. Both of these institutions have spread across the continent. Bourget succeeded in consolidating power and turned Quebec into a religious society. When he became bishop, only 40% of Quebec Catholics attended mass regularly, but forty years later, when he retired, Catholics who did not regularly attend mass were a shunned exception.

Bourget was confronted with the challenge of maintaining a growing flock in the frontier environment of these northern townships and was anxious about the protestants, already established in Arundel. The good farmland in the seigneuries of the St. Lawrence Valley could no longer support its population and farmers had begun to expand into this ‘upper country,’ a vast forest with no large rivers or roads for transport. These new areas would need to be developed into parishes. One of the first new parishes was St. Sauveur, partly in the seigneurie of Mille Iles and partly in the newly formed Abercrombie Township. The Church established a mission to serve a small number of colonists, and as more people arrived it grew into the parish. St. Sauveur is one of a group of parishes whose names express a theme, but Ste. Adele and Morin Heights, to the north, are the odd ones out. They did not begin as a parish or mission, but as an experimental farm, the initiative of A.-N. Morin. That centre was named for Morin’s wife, Adèle Raymond, and two outlying areas, Morin Heights and Val Morin, for Morin himself. The parish missions of the style of St. Sauveur can be found again in the upper regions of Ste. Adele’s original territory and beyond it to the north. These parishes were named in the latter part of the 1800s and many return to the theme of the life of Jesus, the Saviour. Some of the communities were established before the Church could get to them, and their original names suggest a non-religious beginning. L’Annonciation’s name was changed from Ferme du Milieu (Middle Farm) in 1885, while L’Ascension was first called Ferme d’en Haut and La Conception was La Municipalité du canton de Clyde. In each one, the Church set up a mission. Labelle, once called Chute aux Iroquois and Ferme d’en Bas, was the mission, and then the parish, of La Nativité, while Brébeuf was the mission of La Présentation de la Sainte Vierge. Most of these parishes developed under the guiding eye of Bourget’s first lieutenant, Curé Antoine Labelle of St. Jerome.

The naming of these communities reflects the growing influence of the Church and sometimes links with our history were lost in the renaming. Chute aux Iroquois describes a scene from another time, as does Grand Brûlé, the original name for St. Jovite, and the three farms, Ferme du Milieu, Ferme d’en Haut and Ferme d’en Bas describe a period of colonization that is not evident in the religious names that replaced them. Ferme-neuve avoided the change to Notre-Dame-du-Très-Saint-Sacrement probably simply because the parish mission was established in 1904, three decades after the death of Bishop Bourget.

The names, secular and religious, reflect two different power bases that had been competing for the hearts and minds of French Canada from the time of the American War of Independence. On the one hand, there were the secular, educated forces represented by the Institut Canadien espousing a republican model of government and separation of church and state, and on the other, there was the Church. Thanks to the formidable resources of Bourget and his strategic alliance with, and support of, the Conservative Party, the Church virtually destroyed the Institut Canadien. Watching the names appear on the map as colonisation progressed north across the Laurentians, one can witness this battle unfolding. The tables eventually turned in favour of the secular, and the naming of Mont Laurier reflects this, but it would take until the 1960’s for the people to express their desire for a secular society, and some of the ideas and goals of the Institut Canadien are still being implemented.

Almost every town has changed its name over time, and St. Sauveur is no exception. When Bourget chose the name St. Sauveur, he probably did so less to honour the saviour than to protect His honour. When the mission was first established in 1850, it was called La Circoncision, and while the name fits with some of the parishes further north, it may have been a bit much for a lot of the residents to accept.

In 1875, the post office in St. Sauveur was called St. Sauveur des Montagnes, even though at that time there could have been no knowledge of St. Sauveur’s eventual vocation. The name was modified to St. Sauveur des Monts in 1957 and in 2002, after amalgamation with surrounding municipalities, was shortened back to St. Sauveur.

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