The French thinker Ernest Renan insisted on the importance of shared memories for nations: “Or, l’essence d’une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun et aussi que tous aient oublié bien des choses … Tout citoyen français doit avoir oublié la Saint-Barthélemy.” As Benedict Anderson, a more recent theorist of nationalism, points out, Renan states that French citizens must have forgotten the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre of French Protestants on 24 August 1572, but he felt no need to explain to those very citizens what “laSaint-Barthélemy” was. For Renan, France was produced by history,...

The history of Montréal is comprised of a series of crossroads where a multiplicity of pasts intersects. A brief overview of Montréal’s history cannot truly capture such diversity, but it forms the starting point for our discussion of the city’s public history. The city itself sits at the intersection of two great rivers, each penetrating deep into the North American continent, that together form the middle section of a vast inland navigation system that extends from the Atlantic Ocean, through the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, and up the Saint Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers to meet with the Great Lakes. These...

Montréal’s commemorative record changed significantly as the heritage movement took off in the 1890s in response to Canadian modernity. Modernity encompasses the experience of the self and others under the capitalist revolution that began to transform the northern half of North America in the mid-nineteenth century. It describes one’s lived experience of social upheaval amidst the unremitting process of rapid change that characterizes capitalist society. In brief, modernity is an environment that anticipates, indeed even orchestrates, change. Montréal, as the centre of Canada’s emergent modernity, felt its pressures acutely. A loose circle of middle-class professionals organized themselves into groups and...

Public memory is a human construction. It involves a ruthless selection of people, places, and events from the past and holds them up as a collective canon. It thus relies on human effort. In the Montréal of 1891 to 1930 a loose cohort of lawyers, politicians, notaries, archivists, teachers, and librarians guided a broad heritage movement. In many ways these men can be grouped together as one “heritage elite.” But they were not exempt from the ethnic, linguistic, and religious distinctions that separated Montréalers from one another, and the fissures that divided them into fragments were as great as their...

A cold wind swept through Montréal as the city’s “clans” gathered at Dominion Square on a Saturday afternoon in October 1930. The sounds of pipe and drum bands, coupled with the light rain, prompted one reporter to remark how Scottish Montréal seemed that day. It was a fitting comment. The clans had converged to witness the inauguration of a monument to Robbie Burns, Scotland’s “national poet.” But not only Scotsmen held their heads high. Rodolphe Lemieux, the francophone Speaker of the House of Commons, asked the crowd not to forget that “Franco-Scottish friendship [had] long ago taken root in the...

Every Montréaler knows the cross that looks out over the city from atop Mount Royal. By day its metallic frame gleams in reflected sunlight. By night electric light perpetuates its radiance. Its never-ending vigil over Montréal has become an enduring symbol of the city, appearing on postcards and souvenir t-shirts. This simple cross now serves as an emblem of the great metropolis for tourists to carry home with them. But it was never intended for commercial gain. The nationalist SSJBM incorporated the inaugural blessing of the cross in its 1924fête nationaleceremony. The traditional parade reached Parc Jeanne Mance...

Anyone with reason to venture near Montréal’s City Hall on 23 June 1930 would have seen an unusual event. Certainly a visitor to Montréal would have recognized the trappings of a holiday in the city. Every building on Notre-Dame Street sported Union Jacks and French RepublicanTricouleursthe full four blocks from Notre-Dame Church to the Chateau de Ramezay. Twenty thousand people jammed the street, rendering streetcar traffic impossible. As the trapped tramways lined up behind the crowds, their occupants spilled out into the throng, inflating it further. And at Place Neptune between City Hall and the Court House a...

Public memory is more than just the static representation of the past found in monuments and historic plaques. While these reflect conceptions about the past and Montréalers’ developing historical consciousness, they offer a fairly narrow vision of public memory. The planners and designers of monuments did not represent the masses. Popular subscriptions to monument funds do not give us insights concerning any popular input into the decisions that shaped such representations of the past. Civic festivals, on the other hand, can be participatory. Parades offer a truer representation of popular memory because they are open to wider participation¹ and thus...

Historic markers suffer the ravages of time. Many do not survive as long as the history they tell. The seven plaques in the first Christ Church Cathedral in Montréal, for example, were destroyed when the old church burned down in 1856.¹ But accident is not the only threat to historic markers. Weather can destroy plaques as the HSMBC learned when investigating Montréal’s history in the early 1920s. In a memorandum written in July 1922, the board’s secretary, A.A. Pinard, noted two obscure plaques on the old custom house at Place Royale. The text of the first he could make out,...

Marc Levine introduced Canadian historians to the reconquest of Montréal. According to Levine, political action and public policy produced major social and economic changes in Montréal between the years 1960 and 1989. Montréal’s linguistic character had long remained English despite the return of its French-speaking majority. But Levine characterizes language legislation’s post-1960 re-francization of Montréal as an attempt to undo the results of the Conquest two centuries after the fact.¹ Led by nationalist language policies and economic development policies, Montréal was transformed from “an English city containing many French-speaking workers and inhabitants” into the city it is today.² In brief,...