My Favourite Crime. Deni Ellis Bechard
pacify the French and to cement the role of the Catholic Church in British rule.
For those like my grandparents and great-grandparents, who lived 4,800 kilometres of blustery North Atlantic winds away from Paris, in as remote a place as Gaspésie, it was difficult to imagine that the French Revolution had so greatly shaped their lives. But while revolutionaries in Paris were reconfiguring the deck of cards, replacing the kings with images of Rousseau and Voltaire and destroying religious monuments, the priests they had exiled were arriving in Québec, determined to create what they saw as the last bastion of true Christianity. Just as it had struggled against British rule, the Church now sought to prevent the spread of nationalist and democratic ideas from France and the United States. It already had a policy of encouraging population growth, with the aim of absorbing or outnumbering other ethnic groups who had smaller families. The priests determined that the best barrier against the infiltration of French and American ideas would be large agrarian families who did not enter the merchant class and remained relatively uneducated. Until the 1840s, the Church struggled to provide priests for a population that doubled every twenty-five years and to confront a growing educated elite that aspired to leadership within Québec and espoused nationalist and liberal values, including freedom of speech. In order to stay in power, the British sided with the Church on all of these issues, and when British troops crushed the nationalist rebellions of 1837 and 1838, the Church was positioned to solidify its power.
For the next 120 years, it worked to Christianize every aspect of life in Québec. It built convents and colleges, ran schools and hospitals and charity organizations, trained thousands of new priests and created a Catholic political elite. Québec became a virtual theocracy. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum – the Church’s list of banned books – was enforced, movies censored or bowdlerized, and conservative newspapers published for the masses.
In Gaspésie, the priests struggled to preserve order during the long frustrating winters when the cod fisheries shut down and there was no work. They hung black flags before the houses of men who drank, to shame them and protect families from the threat of violence and incest. However, if a married woman went two years without having a child, the curés refused to let her say confession, insisting that childbirth was a woman’s duty and that failing to maintain this duty constituted a sin. My grandmother did her part with ten children from two marriages; some women even had families twice that size. As a result, some have claimed that the population of Québec grew more rapidly than any other in recorded history.
Whereas in Europe the Church often vied with the state for power, it became the authority in Québec, guaranteeing the docility of its people to the British in exchange for near autonomy. In resisting so much, it had grown stronger than its European counterpart. It had endured hardship, lawlessness, and revolutionary ideas as well as English colonialism, a new wave of immigration, and the encroachment of Protestantism. It created a homogenous French-speaking people from what it saw as a mongrel crowd of Acadian and Norman, French and Métis, Irish and English and Scot, and, in doing so, it preserved a spoken French more likely to resemble the language of Balzac than anything to be heard in or near Paris. Just as vessels carried men across the Atlantic, Catholicism became the vessel that would carry the French language into North America’s twentieth century.
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My paternal lineage traces itself not back to France but to the island of Guernsey, another piece of land that, like Québec, the English and the French contested. The Channel Islands, however, were passed back and forth far more frequently and over many centuries before ending up under English sovereignty and serving as a buffer against attacks from the French, who briefly occupied them during both the Hundred Years’ War and the War of the Roses. Much later, James, Duke of York, sought refuge in Jersey during the English Civil War and later, upon his ascension to the throne, granted Sir George Carteret, the island’s governor, land in the American colonies that was to be named the Province of New Jersey.
The Channel Islanders had long taken interest in the New World. Skillful sailors and merchants, they had spent centuries as middlemen between the French and English, and had exploited the cod fisheries in Newfoundland since the seventeenth century. With the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, they found themselves in a privileged position. Many of them spoke both French and English and, as British subjects, could manage the French populations in the St. Lawrence, once again in the familiar role of middlemen. The companies of Charles Robin and the Le Boutillier brothers managed cod shipping for so long that my grandmother often spoke of her Jersey village and les Jerseys who ran it.
William Thomas Bichard (later changed to Béchard), my first ancestor to arrive from Guernsey, did so as a fourteen-year-old orphan. He debarked on May 6, 1835, and later married Ellen Henley, the daughter of a family whose ancestors had presumably fled to Gaspésie during the Irish Famine of 1740–1741. Their eldest son, Thomas, had another Thomas, who was the father of my grandfather Alphonse. Over that half-century, the Béchard family spread down the Gaspé Peninsula, many of them along the Baie des Chaleurs and into northern New Brunswick, where they mingled with Acadian refugees from the British deportations. Over the years, the Béchards gained an infusion of Indigenous blood, my grandmother and uncles occasionally mentioning their New Brunswick cousins who “walked like Indians.” Once, my grandmother, in insisting that my grandfather’s darkness did not indicate métissage, mused that she had always wondered at his lack of body hair, a trait that, according to her, was more common among Indigenous people.
Like the first French settlers of the history books, my grandfathers and uncles – sailors and fishermen and merchant marines – are portrayed in family stories as hardy travellers. In them, I have found echoes of les coureurs des bois, the Canadiens fur trappers. Québec’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authorities wanted its people to stay in agricultural zones and leave the lucrative trapping to the Indigenous Peoples, but les coureurs des bois refused and journeyed deep into the continent, intermarrying with the original inhabitants, learning from them the arts of voyage and survival.
In the nineteenth century, the term Canadien was used for any French-speaking North American, whether from New Orleans, Québec, or the Great Lakes. Les Canadiens were known for itinerancy, many born of Métis and Indigenous mothers, their identities as close to the bloodlines and demarcations of the original inhabitants as to the Europeans whose studied mapping had yet to reveal the continent’s interior. The American government often employed them for their skills. They served as watermen to take Lewis and Clark west. In the 1804 expedition, les Canadiens were enlisted as temporary, as engagés, in the U.S. Army Corps of Discovery. My favourite character, Pierre Cruzatte, was the principal waterman who piloted the canoes and keelboats during the long journey. He was a lover of dog meat and a fine fiddler who entertained both his own men and their Indigenous hosts with his skill. Blind in one eye and nearsighted in the other, on one hunting expedition he accidentally shot Captain Lewis in the left thigh, mistaking him for an elk.
Two hundred years later, it is easy to forget how so much history is distilled into a ramshackle village on a desolate coast in Gaspésie, a place now reasonably sedentary, though centuries earlier it was the site of endless crossings and miscegenation. In many ways the Church was both the flame and alembic in the process of homogenization. Until the end of her life, my grandmother’s piety was unflinching, her prayers and devotion constant, echoing centuries of doctrine learned from priests who themselves were taught that men do not have rights, but rather duties, and that change leads only to secular chaos and immorality. She insisted that the modern world has failed us and that someday, so that people can return to wholesome lives, we will embrace the Church again and the old ways of living.
But those old ways also bred men with grammar-school educations and a love for profanity and stories and revelry – and above all, a hatred for authority. Of everyone I have known, my father was the person who most powerfully expressed his hatred of religion, unable to speak of the village curé without rage, without at least once referring to him as “the fucking priest.”
“Those priests,” he would say, gritting his teeth when speaking of the Québec that he hadn’t visited in over a decade, “those fucking priests.”
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