The Wolfe Monument

The Wolfe Monument is the is the most highly charged monument in the entire city. Not because of its appearance, more because of its location and its history. Wolfe’s heroic image and the commodification of it in England and the Empire (see Alan McNairn's book Behold the Hero) has aroused resentment among some Francophone partisans and Quebec nationalists. And the location of the monument directly in front of the national museum of art is a position of privilege exceeded only by that of the Champlain and Laval monuments at the brink of the bluff in the old city, and monuments in front of the Capitol building. An heroic bronze equestrian statue might be more provocative in suggesting Wolfe's military might, and huge bronze statue of Wolfe is found in Greenwich park near London, but of course Wolfe did not ride a horse into the battle on Sept. 13, 1759. The Wolfe column is a memorial not a statue, on the top are a bronze helmet and a sword, a neoclassical symbol for the fallen warrior. It marks the spot (supposedly) of Wolfe’s death, and suggests a metonymic connection with his body, much like the relics of a saint.

That's me at the monument, which stands in a traffic circle directly in front of the entrance to the national art museum, and just a few meters off the Grande Allée. But the monument predates the civic buildings (including the city's main jail, only recently transformed into a wing of the art museum). The travel writer John Lambert reported that in 1807 he "went sadly to the place where Wolfe had given his life for the glory of the Empire, deploring that sacriligeous hands had taken the large stone against which the motrally wounded general had been held up by his officers, and indignant that his compatriots did not show more respect." Lambert suggests and English pilgrims were so eager to take home a piece of this sacred rock that they finally destroyed it altogether. Adjacent to the site, but now effaced by the construction of a new building for the Musée de Beaux Arts de Quebec, was a well, from which Wolfe was supposedly given water in the last moments of his life. Like the name Plains of Abraham, (which had an entirely secular origin in the name Abraham Martin, who sailed with Champlain), this story gives a biblical weight to Wolfe's heroic image. He sacrificed so that his people (the English) might become God's chosen and might reign over Quebec and the world.

The plaque explains that this column is the fifth monument on the site. The fourth was destroyed on March 29, 1963 in an act of vandalism that some attribute to the Front pour la Libération de Québec, a radical nationalist group. In my photo here you can see faded evidence of a red X across the plaque on the left. I will update with more about the attack.

I believe that the reason this monument is so provocative is not simply that it is devoted to Wolfe but that it lacks the balance carefully observed in the obelisk at the Jardin des Gouverneurs and in the Monument des Braves, which will be the subject of my next post.

The other monuments of Quebec City either show a careful balance between English and French communities and heroes, or they use an allusive rather than direct method of favoring one side over the other. The Wolfe monument here is direct and partisan.