Montreal, City of Spires: Church Architecture During the British Colonial Period 1760-1860

Conclusion

207 T he Association of Universities and Colleges in Canada established a commission in the 1970s to assess the state of research on Canada, which concluded that no country in the world spent so little time studying itself.1 Decades later, countless polls and surveys continue to reveal that a majority of citizens cannot name the first prime minister nor identify many significant events in the Canadian collective experience. Uncoordinated attempts to raise awareness of past accomplishments by various federal and provincial agencies, however, have merely compounded the confusion rather than contributed to any sense of historical grounding. It is not difficult to understand why the small and dispersed population of Canada, the second-largest country in the world in terms of land mass, remains relatively 1. Margaret Conrad et al., History of the Canadian Peoples, vol. II, Toronto: Copp ClarkPitman 1993, p. 557. ignorant and ambivalent about its past. If a national identity is to exist, then an educational curriculum that thoroughly incorporates Canadian history must be conceived with municipal, provincial and federal elements intertwined. It was largely owing to my own poor grasp of these interrelationships that I undertook the present study. In the course of examining religious architecture as it relates to the city’s cultural and social development, I found myself addressing lacunae in the fields of Montreal, Quebec and Canadian historiography. In A History of Canadian Architecture,2 Harold Kalman offered a methodological framework for more than 500 years of building. He proposed a“mosaic”model referring to structures as disparate as wigwams,lighthouses and grain elevators as symbols of architectural identity. 2. Harold Kalman, A History of Canadian Architecture. 2 vols. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1994. C o n c l u s i o n 208 MONTREAL, CITY OF SPIRES Unfortunately, this bold attempt to thread together such building moments could not provide a balanced portrait of the contributions of every community from sea to sea to sea.As difficult as it is for any federalist to accept, regionalism dictates national perception in Canada, most notoriously in Quebec.3 Consider how Fernand Braudel and the Annales School instigated a near tribalist fervour within FrenchCanadian academic circles in the late 1960s.Braudel asserts that when a culture eventually frees itself, another form of originality is born, this emerging form being just as unique as the one from which it broke free.4 For members of the Quebec intelligentsia who felt stifled by the Catholic clergy on one side and the English-speaking elite on the other, his words added fuel to the nationalist fire. In an attempt to correct these apparent social injustices through revisionist approaches, many of these French-Canadian intellectuals compromised their academic objectivity to serve political ends. For the present generation of scholars, exploring the notion of “belonging” as it relates to national identity has demanded a clarification of the popular Braudelian approach.5 Definitions of the“self”and“other”have evolved since the Quiet Revolution.As far as this terminology relates to the present work,what became most intriguing was how layers of identity seem to vary according to individuals in their perceived environments.Distinguishing a Montrealer from a Quebecker, a Quebecker from a Canadian, and a Canadian from a Montrealer is dependent on a person’s sense of belonging to one or several of these places. Is it feasible to belong to all three? Invariably,as I delved into the issue of multiple identifications,it became critical to situate the “other” in order to define the “self.” In the 1860s, Rosanna Leprohon (1832-1879) published a novel that focussed on cultural identities in 3. Louis Rousseau and Frank W. Remiggi’s Atlas historique des pratiques religieuses: Le SudOuest du Québec au xixe siècle, Ottawa: Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1998, is one example of the methodological approach employing regionalism and identity. 4. Taken from Fernand Braudel’s discussion of Oswald Spengler’s theories. On History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 186. 5. See Anthony D. King,“Colonial Cities: Global Pivots of Change,”in Colonial Cities: Essays on Urbanism in a Colonial Context, edited by Robert Ross and Gerard J. Telkamp, Dordrecht : Martinus Nijhoff, 1985, p. 17. conflict. An author of Irish and French-Canadian parentage , she explored the duality of her own heritage through the themes of unrequited love and personal rejection. Leprohon set Antoinette de Mirecourt: or, Secret Marrying and Secret Sorrowing: a Canadian Tale6 in Montreal in the excitable days after...