Les congrégations religieuses. De la France au Québec, 1880–1914 (review)

Les congrégations religieuses. De la France au Québec, 1880-1914. Tome 1: Premières bourrasques, 1880-1900; Tome 2: Au plus fort de la tourmente, 1901-1904. By Guy Laperrière. (Sainte-Foy, Canada: Les Presses de l'Université Laval. 1996, 1999. Pp. xii, 228, 597. Paperback.)

For a period of thirty-four years, from 1880 to 1914, a republican government was in power in France. One of its primary concerns was to ensure on the one hand that the lay and republican values proclaimed by the French Revolution were securely established in French society, and on the other hand that the Catholic Church's influence be limited to the ecclesiastical and religious spheres understood in a narrow sense. This meant that the extensive influence of the French clergy, religious congregations in particular, needed to be curtailed, especially in public education. In order to achieve these objectives, beginning in 1880 the government of France legislated a series of measures that restricted the rights of religious congregations to teach in public schools, imposed three years of military service on all young men, and ultimately (1904) forbade any member of a religious congregation to teach in a French public school; then, in 1905, diplomatic relations between France and the Vatican were severed.

Because of these progressively more restrictive measures in France, a growing number of French Catholic religious congregations of men and women undertook to send more and more of their members to work in French Canada; they came either as reinforcements for the thirty-three French congregations that were already established there before 1900, or more often as members of another twenty-five congregations that had never worked in Canada before 1900. It is noteworthy that several French congregations were refused entry into Canada by various Québec bishops who felt that they had more than their share of priests, sisters, and brothers.

Professor Guy Laperrière, of the University of Sherbrooke, believes that this major influx of new priests, brothers, and sisters, constitutes a major event in the religious history of Québec, the province where most of them settled. His study documents the historical background of his topic in France and analyzes the coming of thousands between 1880 and 1914; more than 1,200 of these religious men and women came to Québec between 1902 and 1904 alone. He explains the reasons for this major transfer of Catholic religious personnel from France to Canada. Because of the conflictual setting wherein the Catholic Church of France was perceived by its lay and republican adversaries as favorable to the monarchy of the ancien régime and opposed to republican and liberal values, and because the French expatriate clergy, as well as many French-Canadian clergy, felt that they were being persecuted by an oppressive, lay, republican, masonic, liberal regime, the arrival of so many refugee French clergy in Québec would have been a major factor in establishing and reinforcing a reactionary and antiliberal policy and mindset in the Catholic Church of Canada, of Québec in particular.

Laperrière has divided his study into three parts, and three distinct volumes. The first, published as tome 1 in 1996, was a review of the religious situation in France and Québec during the nineteenth century, particularly as it pertained to religious congregations of men and women. This first volume is largely based on secondary sources. It provides a good review of a period when Catholic religious congregations of men and especially of women were growing at a phenomenal rate in France. Indeed, several hundred congregations of women alone were founded in France during the nineteenth century. This explains in large part the major international missionary thrust of the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century; a large percentage of these missionaries were French, whether in Canada, the United States, Africa, or elsewhere in the world.

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