Monument des Braves

One response of Quebec francophones to the cult of memory surrounding Wolfe and the battle of Sept. 13, 1759, has been to emphasize the Battle of Ste-Foy fought the following year on April 28th. In this battle the Chevalier de Lévis, whom most historians regard as a more capable tactician than Montcalm, but who was away from the city in September 1759, attacked the English forces led by James Murray in an attempt to retake Quebec. He was able to inflict significant casualties, and then beseige the fortified city, but when British ships arrived two weeks later and relieved Murray, Lévis' effort failed, and the focus shifted to Montreal. Because the French carried the day at Ste-Foy, commemorations of this battle have been used as a counterweight to Wolfe and the Plains of Abraham. So when military reenactment hobbyists proposed activities on the occasion of the 250th anniversary in 2009, they promised to reenact both battles. And likewise when the National Battlefield Commission began designing the park, they included the Monument which already stood at the sight of the former Dumont mill, around which the Ste-Foy battle had been fought. Here is a reproduction of a painting of the battle by Joseph Legaré, on a signboard at the park.

The text of the signboard contains a detailed account of the military maneuvers which led Lévis to victory. It also explains how "in 1849, workers discovered bones and remains of weapons near the presumed site of the Dumont mill. Excavations conducted in 1852 seem to confirm that the remains were those of soldiers, both French and British, who died in the Battle of Sainte-Foy. ON June 5, 1854 a translation ceremony was held, at the end of which a casket containing the soldiers' remains was lowered into a grave on the battlefield, where the monument was later erected."
The battlefield commission seems reluctant to endorse the authenticity of these finds. I also like the way the verb "translated" has the obscure meaning of "the removal of the body or relics of a saint to another place of interment" [OED I 1. a]. As we have seen, translation between English and French is also an important element of the commemoration process.

The monument is at the north end of the Avenue des Braves, a street of sumptuous residences, which runs from the eastern end of Battlefields park. It's about a kilometer to walk, and so few tourists who see the Wolfe Monument and other sites in the park are likely to make the trip, although in the high season there is a shuttle bus.

The monument itself was commissioned by the Societe Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Québec (the francophone social/political club, which had purchased the land in 1855), designed by celebrated architect Charles Baillargé, and erected in 1860. It has the Roman goddess of war, Bellona, on top, and plaques on opposite sides honoring Levis and Murray.

 So it seems clear that the SSJB wanted to reply to the Wolfe monument and the Dalhousie one by putting up their own to the 1760 battle, which was a French victory, but they made it appear non-partisan by using a design similar to the Dalhousie monument, with paired French and English heroes, plaques with the name of each facing away from each other on opposite sides of the monument even as they faced toward each other on the battlefield.

There are also, in an adjoining shelter added much more recently, two bronze statues of the two heroes. The francophones were already in the mid 1800s adept at monumental balance, at giving equal time to both sides so as to avoid offending the Anglophones who held greater economic clout in the city. The same kind of delicacy is often required today when building historical monuments and composing plaques and texts, whether in the U.S. or Canada, and whether the issue is the Civil War, or slavery, or what-have-you.

The only way the francophones can celebrate their own side is to do so obliquely. Thus, for instance, the first stone in the construction of the monument was laid in June 1855 by the captain of the Capricieuse, the first French military vessel to reach Quebec since the Conquest 96 years earlier. In our next posts we will see more examples of this oblique patriotism.