MONTREAL – Demonstrations turn violent as protesters smash windows and vandalize stores. A bomb rips through the home of a prominent anglophone newspaper publisher. A member of the provincial assembly tables a motion calling for Quebec independence. The federal government declares martial law. Troops fire on demonstrators, killing innocent bystanders.
No, we’re not talking about the turbulent 1960s and ‘70s, when the rise of the sovereignty movement roiled Quebec society.
Long before the Maple Spring student protests of 2012, long before the 1970 October Crisis, Quebec’s sense of alienation from the rest of Canada had its defining moment.
The 1917-18 conscription crisis bitterly divided French- and English-speaking Canadians and doomed the federal Conservative Party to spend most of the 20th century in opposition. It marked the point when leading Quebec intellectuals stopped believing in the dream of Canada as the union of two founding cultures. It sowed the seeds of resentment that 50 years later would sprout into the Quebec independence movement.
But what was the conscription crisis really about? In fact, the social unrest in Quebec over compulsory military service defies easy interpretation, says historian Béatrice Richard, an associate professor and head of the department of humanities and social science at St-Jean Royal Military College.
Canadians tend to perceive the Great War through the lens of cultural stereotypes, she said.
“When you read an English-Canadian version of the First World War, it is very much focused on military operations, heroic feats and especially Vimy,” she said, referring to the battle of Vimy Ridge on April 9-12, 1917, a brilliant victory that cost 10,000 Canadian lives and came to symbolize Canada’s emergence as an independent nation.
The fact that French-Canadians resisted conscription “reinforces the idea that they were cowards, that they didn’t want to fight, that they were not loyal,” Richard said.
In contrast, for many Quebec francophones, the conscription crisis is the pre-eminent event of the First World War.
“In Quebec, Vimy means absolutely nothing to people. But for Quebec francophones with a bit of education, the First World War was about the conscription crisis,” she said.
“For French-Canadians, it’s a marker of identity, and also of pride, for having resisted,” she added.
As historian Desmond Morton has noted, in Quebec, the deaths of the four people killed during the Easter riots of 1918 in Quebec City loom larger than those of the 60,000 Canadian soldiers who died and the countless more injured in the Great War.
“We’re stuck with this storyline, that the French-Canadians rebelled against a law forcing them to take up arms to fight overseas to defend an imperialist war,” Richard said.
“It’s much more complicated than that,” she said, “And I would say that is true as much on the English-Canadian side as on the French-Canadian side.”
On May 13, 1918, Mme. Paul J. Cloutier, a widow with eight children in Notre-Dame-du-Lac, near Rivière-du-Loup, wrote to Colonel Joseph-Philippe Landry, the commanding officer for the Canadian Forces in Quebec City, begging him to spare her eldest son from military service.
Without the help of her boy, who had just turned 20, she could not support the family, wrote Cloutier, who ran a temperance hotel (one where no alcohol was served) and had a small farm. “If my sole support is taken away, which would certainly contribute to killing me, what would become of my other children in the difficult circumstances we are in?” she pleaded, adding she was placing her letter “under the protection of the Sacred Heart.”
Such stories were legion in a province with a large rural population facing rising prices and a shortage of manpower because of the war.
“We shouldn’t forget that Quebec in that era was still a largely rural, pre-industrial society where subsistence farming was predominant, a type of agriculture with little mechanization that required abundant male labour. That meant that every pair of arms counted,” Richard said.
Jingoistic appeals to British imperial pride fell on deaf ears in Quebec, while the idea that Quebecers should spring to the defence of their former mother country, France, failed to galvanize support.
“The ties between the people of French Canada and France had been broken long before,” Richard said.
“On top of that, there’s the fact that French-Canadians’ religious education had left them with the memory of a France that had abandoned them, a France that had had a revolution, that was a secular republic, a republic with no religion, an anti-clerical republic,” she said.
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Francophones, who represented almost 30 per cent of the population, made up only about four per cent of Canadian volunteers. Many of those who did sign up were scattered into different English-speaking units where they had few chances to speak their own language and few opportunities for advancement.
Minister of Militia and Defence Sam Hughes distrusted francophones and Catholics and at first refused to authorize any French-language units.
But the second contingent of troops included the 22nd Infantry Battalion, a French-speaking unit which went to France in 1915 and fought with distinction in every major Canadian engagement until the end of the war.
“The 22nd Battalion was French-Canadians’ star battalion. They are very proud of it. It was the battalion that proved that they were not cowards, so it is enormously important,” Richard said.
While the disparity in rates of enlistment between French- and English-Canadians is well known, few people are aware that fully two-thirds of the Canadian volunteers who signed up at the start of the war were born in Britain, noted military historian Desmond Morton.
“The key thing about them is that they’re mostly British-born. This was a period of a great deal of emigration from Britain,” said Morton, Hiram Mills emeritus professor at McGill University.
With high unemployment in the wake of an economic downturn in 1910-11, British immigrants jumped at the chance of steady pay in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, he said.
But as the war dragged on, with staggering loss of life, enrolment sagged, and Prime Minister Robert Borden turned to conscription — the main issue in the bitterly fought election of December 1917, where Conservative Borden’s Unionist team swept English Canada but was shut out in Quebec.
Anglophone voters sent the message that “conscription is something they want for Frenchmen, for the French are yellow, cowardly,” Morton said.
The issue “tore the country apart because here was the majority using its power to enforce service through conscription on young French-Canadians whose parents and friends (didn’t want them to go), and who they themselves didn’t want to go,” he said.
While the issue polarized French- and English-Canadians, Richard noted that the impact of conscription on ordinary people in Quebec and the rest of Canada was not that different.
“The fact is that we know there were people across Canada who didn’t want to submit to conscription, for all kinds of reasons,” she said.
There was also resistance to conscription in rural Ontario and the West and some minorities, like the Doukhobors, a religious group of Russian descent, lost the right to vote in 1917 because of their pacifist beliefs.
But in English Canada — where women handed white feathers, symbolizing cowardice, to men who were not in uniform — there was much greater public pressure to serve.
“The French-Canadian elite in Quebec cooperated much less with the war effort than the elites in English Canada. That’s what made the difference,” Richard said.
Opinion leaders like Henri Bourassa, a grandson of Patriote leader Louis-Joseph Papineau who is best remembered as the founder of Le Devoir, attacked the Borden government for calling on Quebecers to defend the French in Europe while failing to stand up for the rights of francophones at home.
Ontario had recently adopted Regulation 17, eliminating French schooling beyond Grade 2. For Bourassa, a Canadian nationalist who saw Confederation as a pact between the two founding language groups, it was an abject betrayal.
“French-Canadians are being exhorted to fight the Prussians of Europe in the name of religion, liberty and loyalty to the British flag. But shall we allow Ontario’s Prussians to impose their domination at the very heart of Canada’s Confederation, aided and abetted by the British flag and British institutions?” he asked.
The Ontario schools issue “mobilized nationalists like Henri Bourassa,” said Richard, who noted that Bourassa’s nationalism was pan-Canadian at a time when British imperialism was the dominant ideology in English Canada.
“He said yes, Canada has a moral duty to rescue France. But there is a little ‘but’ in there: it’s on the condition that Canada respect the rights of its own citizens at home, that is, Franco-Ontarians,” she said.
“And that issue, the schools issue and Regulation 17, becomes the bone of contention from the start of the war.”
By June 1917, when the government tabled the Military Service Act, opposed by almost all of Quebec’s 53 MPs, anti-conscription sentiment was running high in Quebec, with nightly demonstrations in Montreal and civil disturbances across the province.
Enacted on Aug. 29, it made all male citizens between ages 20 and 45 subject to military service. Exemptions initially granted for farmers were later revoked.
Captain A. Fournier, who toured Montmagny, east of Quebec City, in May and June to recruit volunteers, encountered stiff resistance.
“I received more rocks and insults than new recruits, despite my hard work day and night throughout the county. People are very worked up; they are signing petitions, meetings against conscription are being held everywhere and the two or three recruits who have enrolled are being mistreated,” he reported.
In Shawinigan Falls, a recruiter, Lieutenant Léo van Borren, narrowly escaped being lynched by a mob of 400 chanting, “Down with conscription, down with the cowards, down with van Borren!” writes Jean-Pierre Gagnon in a 1986 history, Le 22e Batallion (canadien-français).
On Aug. 9, 1917, conscription opponents dynamited the summer home in Cartierville of Montreal Star publisher Sir Hugh Graham (shortly afterward granted a peerage as Lord Atholstan), a fervent imperialist and virulent critic of French Canadians’ lack of military spirit. No one was hurt.
On March 28-April 1, 1918, popular unrest climaxed with the Easter Riots in Quebec City, one of the most violent civil disturbances in Canadian history.
It started when two Dominion Police constables, sent to Quebec to track down people trying to evade conscription, stopped a young man, Joseph Mercier, in a bowling alley to ask for his exemption certificate. When Mercier said he didn’t have the paper with him, the constables arrested him. An angry crowd of 2,000 gathered, and refused to be appeased even when Mercier was later released. Rioters broke into a police station and beat up several officers. In the following days, violence spread as crowds hurling rocks and blocks of ice filled the streets.
The Borden government, which had been expecting civil violence, proclaimed martial law and dispatched 6,000 troops from Ontario and Western Canada to Quebec — a massive presence given the pressing need for soldiers on the European front. French-speaking troops were kept in their barracks because the government did not trust them to remain loyal. On April 1, troops fired on the crowd, killing at least four, with more than 150 injured, including soldiers.
The four victims, ranging from age 14 to 49, were all local residents with no known political affiliations. A coroner’s inquest concluded the main cause of the riot was the tactless way Dominion police enforced the Military Service Act.
The dénouement of the conscription crisis left lasting bitterness. For intellectuals like Bourassa, the vision of Canada as the partnership of two founding peoples had been shattered, Richard said.
An ardent Catholic who believed the pope should mediate an end to the war, Bourassa increasingly withdrew from politics into religion, she said.
“Basically, for French-Canadians, the First World War was the failure of Henri Bourassa’s conception of the country,” she said.
“What the First World War showed is that the Canada he believed in, that ideal Canada, was not possible,” Richard said.
“After Henri Bourassa, the person whose influence starts to rise is Lionel Groulx.”
Groulx — cleric, historian and polemicist — drew on the conscription debate to redefine French-Canadian nationalism as the narrative of a valiant people victimized by their French, British and finally Canadian masters: a viewpoint that would lay the foundations for the future independence movement, Richard said.
In the end, fewer than 48,000 conscripts were shipped overseas and half of those served at the front. “Conscription when it actually came didn’t make as much difference as all that. The death rate among conscripts was very, very low,” Morton said.
“So the actual blood cost of the Military Service Act was rather smaller than you might imagine. But a grievance can exist whether it was based on much,” he said.
While the conscription crisis is a potent symbol for Quebec intellectuals, it is not entirely clear why it aroused such passions among rural and working-class Quebecers, Richard said.
“We don’t really know where it came from. For the most part, these were spontaneous expressions of anger in reaction to a situation that people found intolerable,” she said.
“I’m sure that on the other side of the Ottawa River, the war was also causing problems. We have the proof. The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 shows that there were also very serious problems,” she said.
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Young Quebec francophones who did volunteer, like A.J. Lapointe, who joined the 189th Battalion in Gaspé in 1916 and served with the 22nd Battalion in France, faced incomprehension and even hostility from their own communities.
“And while we endure hardships, I know people back home in Canada who are gaily having fun today and don’t spare a thought for the little Canadian soldier who is valiantly doing the job he volunteered for,” Lapointe wrote in his memoirs, published in 1919.
“Others will spit scornfully when they think of us, and repeat for maybe the hundredth time that we were wrong to go and put our lives in danger for the sake of France and England.”