Taking to the Streets by Dan Horner

Author:Dan Horner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2020-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

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CACOPHONY AND AWE: POPULAR PIETY AND PUBLIC ORDER IN AN AGE OF SECTARIAN CONFLICT

In August 1843, an announcement in Montreal’s French-language newspapers invited readers to attend a celebration in Place d’Armes, the public square that faced the city’s imposing parish church. They were being called to witness an impressive feat of engineering. Massive bells, forged at a British foundry and shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, were set to be installed in the recently constructed church towers – named Persévérance and Tempérance – that dominated the city’s skyline. First, though, a construction team headed by a man named Poitras – who had established a reputation for pulling off these sorts of challenging tasks – had set up scaffolding and pulleys to bring the existing bell in the older of the two towers down to the ground. The Catholic Church, headed by the energetic and politically shrewd Bishop Ignace Bourget, decided to turn this event into a celebration of the prominent role that the church was increasingly playing in Montreal society. This event took place three years into a decade in which the clergy had begun using popular rituals to draw people into a deeper engagement with institutional Catholicism. Montrealers who participated in religious processions and other rituals and commemorations were inundated with rhetoric and visual cues that communicated the growing social and cultural authority of the church. These sorts of events must be read as audacious rebukes of the cultural chauvinism of Montreal’s British Protestant minority, many of whom believed that the assimilation of the city’s French and Catholic community was inevitable.1

In a raucous environment like Montreal, however, these occasions did not always turn out the way their organizers had in mind. This one quickly began to unravel, thus providing us with a rare glimpse into the delicate and socially constructed boundaries between order and disorder. Word had fanned out across the city that the removal of the bell would begin just after four o’clock. The crowd of curious onlookers grew so large that several police officers arrived on the scene to keep them at a safe distance. As the labourers shifted the weight of the bell onto the scaffold it immediately became apparent that Poitras had miscalculated its weight. The scaffolding groaned under the pressure and planks of wood began snapping in two. Within seconds the scaffolding collapsed, and the bell, supported by a single cable, swung perilously over the church and its adjoining buildings. When the cable eventually snapped and the bell plunged to the ground “avec un fracas qui fait trembler la terre,” it narrowly missed both the buildings and the stunned crowd. Seemingly frozen in shock for several instants, according to an eyewitness account published in La Minerve, the crowd soon burst into frantic activity and “un espèce de culte se manifeste bientôt.” Some people even overwhelmed the police barrier, swarming the collapsed debris from which they pulled off shards of wood and handfuls of nails to keep as relics.2

The scene on Place d’Armes was spontaneous, but it speaks to the demonstrative brand of religiosity that the church fostered during these years.

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