Warm words about a political adversary

Montreal Gazette
Sunday, December 02, 2001

We have to-day the mournful duty devolved upon us of recording the death of our late confrère L. Duvernay, Esq., of the Minerve. Opposed as we have been to the political opinions of M. Duvernay, we have no reason to believe that the principles which he so ardently advocated were not always honestly held, and maintained from a love of his country and his race. That is enough for us, or his intimate friends, to know.

- Gazette, Wednesday, Dec. 1, 1852

We were swallowing hard, for indeed Ludger Duvernay's political and social opinions were anathema to The Gazette. The reform-minded journalist was profoundly dissatisfied with the smug conservatism of the political and commercial establishment. He was a doughty supporter of the Patriote party and allied his newspaper, La Minerve, with the party in Lower Canada's ceaseless battle of ideas. To celebrate French Canadian nationhood, he inaugurated an annual banquet in the name of John the Baptist on June 24, 1834, out of which, by 1843, had evolved the Société St. Jean Baptiste. He fought with the Patriotes in the rebellion of 1837 and fled to exile in the United States. After his return in 1842, he revived La Minerve and moderated its tone but used the newspaper, among other things, to promote responsible government, a notion that left The Gazette cold.

He was not our sort of person. Yet he was a fellow newspaperman and an undoubted public figure, and when he died at the age of 53 at his Montreal home, on Nov. 28, 1852, The Gazette's editors strove mightily to rise to the occasion.

"Beyond the grave," we wrote, "politics no more can trouble him, and we have reason to hope that the honest citizen, the kind and true-hearted friend and relative, the merciful and charitable neighbour, the earnest believer in his God and Saviour, will sleep that sleep well which knows no earthly waking, and waken happily from it, in those realms where the petty strifes and turmoils of earthly contests are forgotten."

The day that Duvernay died, the Société St. Jean Baptiste held an emergency meeting at which members resolved to organize and pay for a funeral worthy of their comrade. (It might be a sign of the society's broad appeal in those days that the principal motion was moved by the decidedly anglophone mayor of Montreal, Charles Wilson, and was seconded by George Étienne Cartier, soon to be a Father of Confederation.) It was resolved at the meeting "that each member of this Association will provide himself with mourning insignia for the funeral, and that said mourning shall be worn for one month."

The funeral would be held in Notre Dame Church, in Place d'Armes, and the bishop of Montreal, Ignace Bourget, offered to officiate. By paying this tribute to its founder, Bishop Bourget sought "to recognize the keen interest he felt for the great and benevolent St. Jean Baptiste Society."

The cortége made its way slowly through the streets of the city to the great church. Along the way, many shops were closed and hung with signs of mourning; the Sulpician seminary beside the church, we reported, "displayed sables." The sombre air was in sharp contrast to the rousing procession through those same streets 30 years before when Duvernay, having served a jail term in Quebec City for daring to print that the Legislative Council was a "great nuisance," returned to the cheers of his fellow Montrealers, passing in a flower-decked carriage beneath triumphal arches erected in his honour.

After the funeral, Edouard-Raymond Fabre wrote a letter to the aging Patriote leader Louis-Joseph Papineau noting that Duvernay's death left a vast gap in the ranks of those fighting for democracy. "Because writers of strength are rare," Fabre added, "the loss of such a one is all the more heartfelt and sad." Papineau, still bitter that La Minerve had begun rejecting his brand of radicalism about four years before, had declined to attend the funeral.

On Dec. 3, La Minerve wrote that its late proprietor was "a man who was without wealth but was full of generosity and devotion toward those who were unhappy and suffering." His life was nothing if not "a career of perpetual agitation." And so, in a sense, would be his death, at least for a while.

The old Catholic cemetery in Rue St. Antoine, where Duvernay was interred, was nearly full. The fabrique, or corporation, of Notre Dame purchased 115 acres on the western slopes of Mount Royal to establish Côte des Neiges cemetery and allotted a plot to the Société St. Jean Baptiste. The cemetery opened in June 1855 and one of the first to be buried there was none other than Ludger Duvernay.

The society decided that the remains of its founder should be moved there and honoured not with a mere headstone but with a striking pyramid 30 feet high. On Oct. 21 of that year, Duvernay's corpse was reverently removed from the old downtown cemetery and taken to Mount Royal. Thousands followed Duvernay's second hearse under sunny skies through the streets to his new resting place. By the time the cortége arrived, an immense crowd of 10,000 people was on hand to hear Cartier, now president of the society, deliver a eulogy so eloquent that henceforth there could be no doubting his ascendancy in French Canada - indeed, in Canada as a whole.

And when the long day was finally over, perhaps then the agitated spirit of Duvernay was able to enter on the eternal rest that The Gazette had once wished for him.

- John Kalbfleisch's E-mail address is lisnaskea@attcanada.ca.