Prayers, Petitions, and Protests: The Catholic Church and the Ontario Schools Crisis in the Windsor Border Region, 1910–1928 by Jack D. Cecillon (review)

In 1912 the Ontario government legislated changes to French-language instruction in the province’s bilingual schools, limiting it to the first years of school, and then to only one hour a day. An important episode in the protracted battle over the place of language and religion in Canadian schools, the conflict over Regulation 17 alternately raged and simmered in Ontario for close to a decade. The greatest resistance was offered by Franco-Ontarians in the eastern regions of the province, but the conflict also played out elsewhere. In Prayers, Petitions, and Protests, Jack Cecillon offers the first comprehensive study of the crisis in the Windsor border region, seeking to understand why the resistance to Regulation 17 failed there.

The answer lies in large part in the heterogeneous nature of the francophone population. Thus, Cecillon analyzes the French-speaking community in the Windsor area, making important distinctions between two different subcultures: the Fort Detroit French (descendants of eighteenth-century French soldiers, trappers and traders) and French Canadians (migrants from Quebec, whose numbers grew dramatically from the mid-nineteenth century), who continued to trickle into the area in the first decades of the twentieth century. Cecillon shows how these groups could occasionally find common cause; however, more often than not, living in different areas and belonging to different social classes, professions, and trades, the subcultures did not agree on how to respond to the provincial government’s regulation. This disunity was pivotal in the failure of the resistance.

Cecillon deftly weaves social history together with vivid portraits of the personalities whose swords crossed in this decade-long crisis. Thus, for example, he analyzes petitions signed at various points in the conflict in order to better understand the social standing and subcultural affiliation of the signees and thereby ascertain who offered resistance to the loss of French in schools and parishes. Alongside this close-grained social history, Cecillon depicts the lead characters in the drama. Looming large is the bishop of London, Michael Fallon. Convinced that Catholics would be better served by English-language instruction in their schools, this volatile and controversial figure did not shy away from open conflict, battling his priests and parishioners in ecclesiastical and secular courts in order to further his agenda. Besides Fallon, Cecillon introduces lesser-known francophone protagonists – local priests and people, Fort Detroit French and French Canadian: a handy glossary at the end of the book aids in keeping all of the players straight.

The work is highly readable, with Cecillon skilfully building up the momentum, which reaches a climax in chapter 5 in the autumn of 1917 with the Ford City riots – a showdown in which parishioners armed with knitting needles and shovels fought off policemen with billy clubs to prevent Fallon’s newly appointed pastor from taking up his position in Our Lady of the Lake parish.

Finally, throughout the work Cecillon draws parallels between this Windsor-area conflict, which pitted bishop against faithful, and similar ones in Franco-American communities, and even in France. Further, the conflict had a transatlantic aspect, because both Fallon and his flock wrote to Rome seeking arbitration in their numerous skirmishes. Consequently, this study of a fairly small region in Ontario also speaks to larger issues such as French-Canadian nationalism, Roman views of Catholicism in North America, Christian churches and the media, and even the process of secularization.