II. Prologue: Patriarchs and Patriotes

The Catholic Church of the erstwhile New France first unsheathed the sword of excommunication against the Patriote rebels in a desperate bid to undermine the size and vitality of their abortive uprisings against the federal government in the late 1830s. Driven to armed revolt by lack of government responsiveness to their desire for greater representation, the Patriote movement gave voice to widespread political frustration and the deprivations caused by economic hardship.

The Patriotes represented a clear and perfect danger to the position of the Catholic Church in 1830s Quebec both ideologically and practically. Their collective veneration of the trio of secular values – liberté, égalité, fraternité – of the French Revolution alarmed conservative Canadian clerics, both because they represented a potential rival ideological basis for Québécois collective identity and because the Church strongly associated these values with anarchic violence. Horrified by the harrowing stories of the many priestly refugees they had received and sheltered, fresh from France, since the 1790s, the Québécois hierarchy held revolutionary ideology responsible for the anarchic Terror and the orgy of bloodletting it unleashed. Always alert for signs of its pernicious germination on New World soil, the clergy sought to eradicate revolutionary ideology from Canada, root and branch, by banning the dazzling, subversive works of Voltaire and his fellow philosophes. The troubling espousal of these values by a popular movement bent on overthrow of what the Church considered to be a God-ordained and thus licit, if little-loved, government caused consternation and alarm in clerical ranks.

But the threat that the Patriotes posed for the Church was more than simply ideological. It also menaced the Church’s preferred role of acting as a privileged intermediary between the government and the French-Canadian people. In the unlikely event that the Patriotes had succeeded in their Quintoxic aspirations, claiming power, the Church would have lost much of its clout and relevance. Moreover, if the Church failed convincingly to demonstrate its authority by quashing participation in the revolt, then the reigning government would likely renege on their sweetheart deal with the Church on the grounds it had failed to control French-Canadians and ensure their submission to British rule.

From the first intimation of trouble in 1837, then, the Church sought to arrest the momentum of the Patriote cause by wheeling out the biggest weapon in its arsenal: excommunication. Bishop Jean-Jacques Lartigue of Montreal, a Sulpician, issued a dark promise: that not just the fighters but anyone who supported or financed the Patriote cause would heretofore be considered an excommunicate: a vitandus. Footnote ¹² Such a threat upped the ante of participation considerably. For non-combatants, there was the uncomfortable prospect of pledging their reputation and their livelihood on what might prove to be a fool’s errand, only to be left holding the bag as a public enemy of both Church and State should the infant populist movement falter. But for those who risked their blood and their lives in what promised to be an ill-armed, David-and-Goliath battle, the threat was yet more dire. Even those influenced by revolutionary philosophies might privately baulk at the prospect of extreme unction being withheld from them in their dying moments, and perishing unshriven, without the comfort of the bland, sacred flavor of the holy sacrament on their tongues. And if they were unmoved for their own plight, what about the shame of their families, to whom they would bequeath not just mourning, but humiliation: the shame of being unable to bury their loved one in consecrated ground, or to have a Latinate word said against the grave’s encroaching darkness.

It was not in the instigation of this policy that the Church demonstrated its true determination, but in its implacable enforcement of it even in the grimmest of circumstances, when the population could easily have turned against them for their unbending harshness. The Church’s resolve was certainly tested following the battle of Saint-Eustache. On December 13, 1837, the outnumbered and outgunned Patriotes, facing an onslaught of government troops, sought refuge in the parish church named for the early Christian saint best known for his unusual vision of a white stag that bore a crucifix in his antlers. Their sanctuary abruptly turned into a hell on earth, however, as the unscrupulous government army set the building alight (Fig. 3). Many Patriotes died in the resultant inferno or succumbed to smoke inhalation. Those who attempted to escape through the church’s broken stained-glass windows, including their leader, Jean-Olivier Chénier, a doctor, were gunned down by snipers.

Figure 3. The Battle of Saint-Eustache by Charles Beauclerk. Note the flaming church and its outbuildings in the background.

Image courtesy of McCord Museum, Montreal.

The dynamics of the battle are evident in its uneven death toll. The Patriotes, already a small host, lost some 70 men. Government forces, by contrast, had only three casualties. Despite strong public sympathy for the fallen: their horrifying choice of death by fire or death by bullet and the searing irony that their holy sanctuary had been turned into an auto-da-fé, the Church remained firm: refusing to bury in consecrated ground those who had, despite their warnings, taken up arms against what they deemed a licit earthly authority.

But despite the ultimate failure of their movement, the Patriotes, who had dared to defy not just their state but also the worst threat of their Church had succeeded, however briefly, in articulating an alternative basis for French-Canadian collective identity: one based not on confessional identity but on the values of revolutionary France. The failure of their abortive uprisings was due to many complex factors. But one was doubtless that the Church’s threats had depressed the number of those willing to risk not just blood and treasure, not just life and limb, but eternal life itself on a chancy venture. The Church’s success in suppressing the number of Catholics willing openly to defy its power would provide a valuable blueprint for its actions in the decades to come. Even if excommunication had failed to achieve a total victory, it had nonetheless managed fatally to weaken a rival movement, leaving only a small, radicalized remnant that could be thwarted by other means. This lesson would be put to good use by the Church when it next unsheathed the sword of excommunication, provoking the infamous “Guibord affair,” three decades later.

III. The “Guibord Unpleasantness”Footnote ¹³

The Guibord affair of the 1870s was arguably the most famous – or infamous – case of excommunication in nineteenth-century Canada. It pitted a small group of radicalized liberals, members of a group called the Institut Canadien, a club devoted to literary and intellectual pursuits, against the full power of the Ultramontane Church as incarnated in the charismatic, leonine Bishop of Montreal, Ignace Bourget. Joseph Guibord (Fig. 4), the titular protagonist of the Affair, was destined because of its many peculiarities to be better known in death than he ever had been in life. And yet, living, this ordinary, married Catholic: a self-educated, working-class man – a printer by trade – engaged Bishop Bourget in hand-to-hand intellectual combat, together with his peers, for many years, first as a founding member of the Institut Canadien, and then as a member of its increasingly radicalized executive counsel. Guibord’s hard-won literacy, satisfying intellectual life, and consequent civic engagement were due in no small part to the resources and the inspiration of the Institut, to which he was forever faithful.

Figure 4. Joseph Guibord, the man at the heart of the 6-year-long “Guibord Unpleasantness.”

Image courtesy of Library and Archives Canada.

Ironically, given the extremes to which it would later drive him, Bourget, the episcopal successor of Lartigue, excommunicator of the Patriotes, had initially smiled upon the Institut Canadien when it was founded in 1844. A driven, ambitious bishop, whose big dreams for his city and his Church limited his sleep to an austere five hours a night, Bourget had launched a number of vigorous initiatives designed to spark a devotional renaissance upon ascending to the episcopate in 1840. A fervent adept of Ultramontanism and a firm believer in the messianic destiny of the French-Canadian people as the providential embodiment of the True Church, Bourget’s goal as Montreal’s second bishop was to expand the Church’s reach both within and outside his natal province. Within, he aimed to ensure that every French-Canadian had easy access to Catholic education and Catholic-run health care. Under Bourget’s leadership, Catholic Quebec embarked on a remarkable building campaign. Catholic schools, churches, convents, and hospitals arose, proclaiming in stone the mighty message of the Church’s ascendent power and presence. But Bourget’s outsized aspirations also outstripped the terrestrial limits of his episcopate. He enticed many French religious orders, including the Oblates of Mary Immaculate,Footnote ¹⁴ the Jesuits, and the Holy Cross Fathers to come to Canada in the 1840s. This was partly to ensure a large enough corps of religious to serve the needs of French Canadians in la belle province. But Bourget also sought to forge a dauntless cohort of religious who could continue the work of the fallen Jesuit martyrs of the seventeenth century in converting the Indigenous peoples of the far West and distant North.

Initially, then, the Institut’s aim of furthering the intellectual and cultural development of Montreal’s francophone population,Footnote ¹⁵ through its lending library and programme of public debates and speakers,Footnote ¹⁶ seemed a laudable goal to Bourget, one congruent with his own desire to elevate his people, particularly given the ongoing absence of a francophone university. But the Institut’s immense success, during its first decade, and its opening of many satellite chapters throughout the province prompted Bourget’s renewed episcopal scrutiny. By 1858, Bourget’s nagging disquiet had turned to outright alarm. The Institut, he felt, was taking the same disastrous route as had the Patriotes decades earlier in embracing and disseminating radical, anticlerical, and revolutionary views. Immediately, the agitated bishop inaugurated a determined campaign to bring the Institut to heel or, failing this, to shut it down.Footnote ¹⁷

Though the increasingly small and radicalized kernel of surviving members, including Joseph Guibord, continued energetically to battle Bourget at every turn, the powerful and popular bishop’s manifest disapproval proved devastatingly effective. Membership in the Institut had dropped by two-thirds, and all the Institut’s sixty branch chapters, arrayed across the province, were shuttered. By 1869, only the original Montreal foundation endured.

That same year, Bourget further upped the ante: placing the Institut’s yearbook or “annuaire,” which contained an eloquent defense of religious toleration, on the Vatican’s Index of forbidden booksFootnote ¹⁸ and publishing a letter in the Ultramontane newspaper, Le Nouveau Monde, warning that reading the banned tome or associating with the disgraced Institut would result in immediate excommunication:

Cowed, a further 138 members of the Montreal Institut Canadien immediately quit, while the small remainder desperately appealed both rulings to the Vatican.

IV. Death Comes for Joseph Guibord

But as they waited, “God knocked.”Footnote ²⁰ In the early morning hours of November 18, 1869, the then 60-year-old vice-president of the Institut, Joseph Guibord, suddenly collapsed and died of an apparent aneurism.Footnote ²¹ His widow, Henrietta, and his friendsFootnote ²² – many of them fellow members – planned his funeral for three days later at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery, where they planned to inter Guibord in the modest single plot the prudent printer had pre-purchased to ensure the seemly burial of his own mortal remains, and those of his wife.

As scheduled, that Sunday,Footnote ²³ the remaining die-hard members of the Institut, some two hundred strong,Footnote ²⁴ walked behind the handsome funeral cortège of jet-black horses, their tossing heads topped with plumes of silky black feathers, as they drew the dark carriage bearing Guibord’s coffin down the quiet Montreal streets. But at the gates of Notre -Dame, the progress of the black-clad assembly was blocked by one Monsieur Desroches, a representative of the Fabrique, the corporation which ran the rambling hilltop city of the holy dead. Cooly, Desroches told the mourners that there was could be no possibility of Guibord’s internment in the plot of land he had purchased. His status as a vitandus, or excommunicate, forbade it.

Appalled, the assembled members of the Institut protested. Surely the excommunication could not be in effect whilst the appeal of Bourget’s ruling remained unheard in Rome? Desroches, however, was adamant. He had his orders. Should they wish to inter Guibord at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, he would take them to the section of the cemetery that could licitly receive Guibord’s remains: the strip of unconsecrated no-man’s-land derisively known as “les gémonies,” where the unrepentant Institut member could rest eternally alongside criminals, suicides, and the unbaptized: others deemed unfit for burial in consecrated ground.Footnote ²⁵

Their “tears and supplications”Footnote ²⁶ being to no avail, Guibord’s mourners withdrew in confusion. The cortège made an unscheduled stop at the nearby Protestant cemetery, Mount Royal, where arrangements were hastily made to deposit Guibord’s casket temporarily in their stone vault or “charnier”Footnote ²⁷ as his widow and friends contemplated their bleak options.

But before the funeral meats were even cold, his widow Henrietta and his Institut compatriots, radicalized by a decade of fighting with Bourget and the Ultramontane powers that be,Footnote ²⁸ had made an unprecedented decision: to take the Fabrique de Montréal (and thus, by implication, Bourget and the Catholic diocese of Montreal) to court. Their argument? That the church’s refusal to allow Guibord to be buried in his pre-paid plot, in the regular section of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges violated the deceased’s basic civil rights.Footnote ²⁹

V. Six Years of Controversy, Contention, and Division: “The Affair” Proper

Thus began the infamous “Guibord Affair” proper: a raging 6-year long legal battle full of dizzying twists and turns, narrow victories, and tense appeals. The original case was decided in favour of the deceased Guibord and his living plaintiffs on May 2, 1870. But their victory was short-lived, as the ruling was reversed on appeal only four months later.Footnote ³⁰ And there the matter would have rested, had not the Institut decided to send one of its members, the indomitable lawyer Joseph Doutre (Fig. 5), to London to appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, then Canada’s highest court.Footnote ³¹ On November 21, 1874, the matter came full circle, as this court of last resort upheld the original decision, finding for the plaintiffs and ordering the Catholic Church to bury Guibord in his family plot at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges (Section N, number 873) and pay the plaintiff’s not inconsiderable court costs.Footnote ³²

Figure 5. Joseph Doutre, a Montreal lawyer and member of the Institute, who served as its lead council for much of the Guibord Affair.

Photograph courtesy of the Bibliothèque et Archives Nationals du Québec.

From its inception, the Guibord Affair was deeply divisive. As it dragged on, year after weary year, it only became more so.Footnote ³³ Both sides of the debate, predictably, tended to see their own position as the only reasonable one. To backers of the Institut, the Guibord Affair represented a particularly egregious case of overweening clerical arrogance and an outrageous expansion of Bourget’s petty persecution of a brave band of free thinkers: persecution which was now all the more deplorable for being directed against a dead man, helpless to defend himself against the heartless, unchristian treatment of his mortal remains.

Guibord’s allies and spokesmen often stressed the deceased’s modest means in life and his careful provision for himself and his wife in death: casting the Church’s refusal to bury him in the plot he had scrimped and saved to pay for as a mean-spirited, small-minded attack on one of the “little guys,” a model citizen who had lived (by civic, if not by episcopal standards)Footnote ³⁴ an upstanding, blameless, and admirable life.

The Daily Witness cast the contest in David-and-Goliath terms, with working-class printer Joseph Guibord as a latter-day David and Bourget as a hulking Goliath: “Who but blind Ultramontanes will say that the will of the imperious Bishop should triumph rather than that justice should be done to the poor printer?”Footnote ³⁵ For its part, The Canadian Illustrated News described the late Monsieur Guibord as “a man of irreproachable morals, of the steadiest habits, of rigid honesty, and altogether a model workman”Footnote ³⁶ who had labored his entire 36-year career for a single employer, Louis Perrault and Sons, a print-shop.Footnote ³⁷

A loyal husband and solid citizen, Guibord had displayed no scandalous vices and had no criminal record. Though he had assiduously paid his taxes to the government and his tithes to the church, he had nevertheless managed to leave his widow, Henrietta, unencumbered by debt. Moreover, despite his membership in the Institut Canadien, Joseph Guibord had been “born a Catholic, baptised and married in the Catholic church, and had always been a Catholic up to the hour of his death.”Footnote ³⁸

For those who agreed with his cause, then, Guibord’s life thus told the quietly inspiring, though not unusual story of a working-class kid who had used the Institut Canadien, of which he was a founding member, to address the educational deficits of his childhood, bettering himself. The Institut had awakened his intellectual curiosity and fueled his political activism: allowing him the dignity of participating in the great debates of his time as an informed, engaged citizen. Hadn’t this very outcome been what Bishop Bourget at one time had himself envisioned, in initially backing the Institut at its founding in 1844?

But conservative Catholics, who backed the Church, saw the case very differently. For them, the Guibord case represented an outrageous usurpation of the church’s special powers and prerogatives by a fundamentally intrusive, alien, and hostile State. No other parties, Ultramontanes asserted, had any business whatsoever involving themselves in “the Affair” – which was a strictly religious matterFootnote ³⁹ – particularly not a civil court. For by what right could any authority outside the Catholic Church presume to judge, or meddle in, its internal affairs? If left unchecked and unchallenged in this case, where would such interference of the secular state end? With the total erosion of the Church’s dignity, power, and rights, throughout the entire province of Quebec?

For loyal Ultramontanes, questioning of the Catholic Church’s powers and prerogatives was experienced emotionally as adding latter-day insult to the still throbbing injury of Conquest and their continuing subjugation to a foreign, hostile power bent on its linguistic and confessional assimilation. Because they saw the Catholic Church as the exemplar, the guarantor – indeed, as the very soul of French-Canadian collective identity – perceived disrespect for its prerogatives, even when they were made in the name of yet more universal causes, such as that of human dignity, were felt as unbearable slights on an entire people’s honor.Footnote ⁴⁰

Bourget and his allies in the Ultramontane press lost no time in using the Guibord Affair to draw the clearest possible rhetorical lines between themselves and their opponents, using a series of stark dyads: us and them, good and evil, sacred and secular, purity and danger, faithfulness and apostasy, heaven and hell, truth and falsehood, light and darkness.Footnote ⁴¹ Or, in the parlance of the time, “bleu et rouge,” as in the famous political slogan, “Le ciel est blue, l’enfer est rouge,”Footnote ⁴² where bleu represented piety and conservatism, and infernal red the Rouge party and the Institut Canadien, united in their faithless, anticlerical liberalism. For themselves and their “imagined community”Footnote ⁴³ (Fig. 6) of compliant French-Canadian Catholics: obedient and united under the aegis of their bishop, the Ultramontanes appropriated the flattering half of each dyad, simultaneously assigning their infernal opposites to their antagonists: the small, determined band fighting for liberalism, secularism, and the ghost of Guibord.

Figure 6. Jean-Paul Lemieux’s La Fête-Dieu à Québec. Although this painting was executed in 1944, it still gives a wonderful sense of the deeply Catholic “us” imagined by Ultramontaine Catholics in the 1870s, during the height of the Guibord Affair.

Image courtesy of the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec.

The Ultramontanes’ rhetorical strategy, particularly their decision to mobilize public opinion around the citadels of “us and them” – the beloved familiar and the foreign menace – demonstrates that they had quickly grasped that what was really at stake in the Affair. For the court case was fundamentally about not simply the burial of Guibord’s remains, but the Institut’s proposal of a different kind of “us:” one which might establish French Canadian identity on something other than confession: a vision that fundamentally challenged the central place that the Catholic Church had claimed for itself as the guarantor and the animating esprit of les habitants, using the complex, ingenious, and improbable scaffolding of clerico-nationalism.Footnote ⁴⁴

But for this to work, the Guibord plaintiffs – all of whom were French Canadian and Catholic – had to be presented as menacingly and unwholesomely “other.” This explains the ubiquitous insinuation – sometimes yelled, sometimes whispered – that Guibord and his living legal representatives were “traitors to their race,”Footnote ⁴⁵ by which they meant, in the parlance of the time, French-Canadians. Joseph Doutre, the Institut’s lawyer, was characterized as an apostate, an atheist – even a Protestant! – in an illogical and contradictory harangue that shows that these terms were chosen more for their ability to shock, alienate, and offend faithful French-Canadian Catholics than for any inherent accuracy.Footnote ⁴⁶

This “scarlet P” branded the dead as well as the living. The fact that Guibord’s coffin had been forced to take temporary shelter in a vault at the Protestant Mount Royal cemetery was milked for maximum innuendo in the Ultramontane press: disingenuously ignoring that the Bishop’s purported excommunication of Guibord had barred reception of his corpse from all potential Catholic entities, whether cemeteries or funeral homes, within the Diocese of Montreal.Footnote ⁴⁷

A similar “otherness” was intuited in the fact that the Guibord faction had taken the Church to civil court. Such a move suggested that they accepted the heresy that Church and State were and should be separate. Particularly after Doutre appealed the case to the Privy Council in London, the Ultramontane press capitalized upon their antagonists’ dependency upon the intervention of a foreign crown and country to aid their cause. Its ruling in their favor was seen as signaling not the righteousness of their plea, but the victorious plaintiffs’ craven identification with Quebec’s Anglophone Protestant oppressors.Footnote ⁴⁸ And the Guibordists certainly didn’t help their own cause by cheekily placing the Union Jack over Guibord’s casket.

VI. Guibord’s “Anti-Relics”

But perhaps the most devastating allegation of an essential and uncanny otherness ranged like an excluding wall against Guibord and his party were the consistently dehumanizing references to his mortal remains, the fate of which were at the heart of the case. Articles in Ultramontane dailies such as La Minerve and Le Nouveau Monde routinely referred to Joseph Guibord simply as “le mort” or “Doutre’s [ e.g. Guibord’s lawyer’s] mort.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Death became Guibord’s defining feature, effectively erasing his name, his beliefs, his very identity as a human being.

Guibord’s strong rhetorical association with death need not have been a bad thing, had his corpse been presented as being, like everyone’s, subject to the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. But instead, his unburied body was presented as something uniquely disgusting that intimated a great deal about his postmortem fate. Much was made of the apparently “sickening odor” which floated from the “gloomy recesses”Footnote ⁵⁰ of the Protestant vault where his collapsing coffin was finally retrieved, so well did this inevitable physical decay align with their insinuations of Guibord’s moral opprobrium (Fig. 7). Such an analysis, of course, conveniently ignored the fact that his body had been forced to molder above-ground for some 5 years, waiting for his friends and foes, caught up in their “grave” battle, finally to cede to one another ground enough to inter his bones of contention.

Figure 7. Joseph Guibord’s coffin being retrieved from the mausoleum at the Protestant Mount Royal cemetery. Guibord’s Ultramontaine opponents made much of the corpse’s condition, insinuating that his altogether natural post-mortem physical corruption signaled his spiritual and moral shortcomings.

Image courtesy of the Canadian Illustrated News.

The larger spiritual context of the late nineteenth century only reinforced the Ultramontane’s gothic association between physical and moral putrescence. For this period was a veritable golden age of saintly incorruption: part of the larger phenomenon of romantic Marianism that dominated Catholicism for a century. Bookended by the proclamation of two Marian dogmas, that of the Immaculate Conception in 1854 and that of the Assumption in 1950, this period featured an upsurge in the frequency, popularity, and complexity of Marian apparitions. Across Europe, Mary’s seers – often women and children, the poor, and the illiterate – brought the Virgin, however briefly, to earth to numinize the very rocks, soil, and water her flowery feet deigned to touch.Footnote ⁵¹

Through a kind of holy alchemy, these visionaries themselves – most famously Saint Bernadette of Lourdes – came to incarnate many of the Virgin’s own prerogatives, including the alleged incorruption of their bodies after death (Fig. 8). Even the same verse of Thessalonians that would later buttress the Doctrine of the Assumption was employed to explain the miraculous post-mortem preservation of her chosen messengers: “Thou shalt not suffer thy holy one to see corruption.” At least as they were unflatteringly depicted by the Ultramontane press, poor Guibord’s festering remains could not have presented a starker contrast to the luminous, if eerie beauty of these sleeping saints.Footnote ⁵²

Figure 8. The implication that Guibord’s moral state echoed his body’s corruption was only underlined by the late nineteenth century fascination with the phenomena of incorruption. Above: the unearthly beauty of St. Bernadette of Lourdes in her glass coffin at Nevers. St. Bernadette is still, arguably, the most famous incorrupt.

Image courtesy of The Catholic Herald.

VII. Riot at a Funeral

This incendiary characterization of Guibord’s body as a kind of evil “anti-relic” helps to explain the hysteria and riotous violence that greeted the second of the three attempts necessary to bury him. On September 2, 1875 – une journée dramatique Footnote ⁵³ – Guibord’s mourners effectively re-enacted their ritual actions of almost 6 years earlier. Out came the solemn black carriage. Out came the black-bedecked horses and their dark, cross-topped carriage.Footnote ⁵⁴ Out came the black armbands.

But out, too, came hostile crowds, “very violent in both language and gesture.”Footnote ⁵⁵ An estimated 1000 people,Footnote ⁵⁶ encouraged by the Ultramontane press to associate Guibord’s remains with danger, sin, and moral contagion, were determined to prevent this decaying interloper from contaminating the sanctified resting place of their own sleeping dead. They quickly shut and braced the cemetery’s iron gates: manning them to deny the cortège entry (Fig. 9). Loudly, they shouted their battle cries: “God damn Guibord,”Footnote ⁵⁷ “Take the cursed Guibord away, he shall never be allowed to enter,”Footnote ⁵⁸ “Jésus Christ, ils n’entrent pas; Mon Dieu, ils n’entrent pas; Vierge, ils n’entrent pas.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Alcohol circulated freely, and a few pistols were seen amongst the brandished pick handles.Footnote ⁶⁰

Figure 9. This image gives a vivid sense of the tension and the press of the crowd around the shut gates of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges during Guibord’s second, abortive funeral on September 2, 1875.

Image courtesy of the Canadian Illustrated News.

When the funeral procession appeared, it was met with a chorus of boos and a shower of rocks:Footnote ⁶¹ injuring several mourners and prompting others to remove their black mourning bands, the better to blend in with the angry crowd.Footnote ⁶² The black-trapped horses, unnerved by the shouting and sudden movements, began to buck, threatening to bolt. Despite their vain appeals to the “angry mob” massed at the gate, the Guibordists were unable to prevail. Fearing that the panicking horses could not withstand much more provocation, they retreated at speed, Guibord’s coffin in tow, to the relative safety of Mount Royal cemetery. Their second attempt to inter their friend, like the first almost 6 years earlier, had ended in similarly ignominious failure. Guibord’s hapless bones were still above ground.Footnote ⁶³

VIII. Why this Strong Reaction?

What are we to make, as latter-day observers, of this riotous behavior on the part of a crowd that had gathered expressly to prevent a funeral from taking place? Why did Guibord’s presence so unnerve the crowd that they were prepared to lock the gates against him, and attempt to intimidate, by their words and actions, the black-clad mourners who had come to bury him? Is it possible, at this far remove, to recreate some of their thoughts and feelings, and discern something of their motivations?

We might start by noting that the boundaries of belonging, strongly enforced by the clerical top, were generally accepted, even embraced, by those at the laic bottom. Hence the ferocious overreaction to dissenters, whether living and dead, who inconveniently insisted upon on their individual right to think and to choose for themselves: themselves to weigh the great issues of the day, rather than falling into automatic lockstep with the self-described people of God. For ecclesial authorities, freethinkers represented a public defiance of their paternal powers and an affront to the top-down model of submission to authority that Ultramontanism promoted. For ordinary parishioners, such individuals’ audacious insistence on their own individualism and freedom seemed to shirk the collective burden that all must together bear for the greater good. Thus, rather than prompting admiration and emulation, in many cases principled dissent prompted only resentment from their fellow rank-and-file laic pew-fillers. Why did they believe themselves above the common lot: “to pay, pray, and obey?” How dare they be ungrateful for the paternal direction provided them by the better-educated clergy? Wasn’t such hubris a sign of infection, either by the reckless, Godless radicalism of the French Revolution, or the heretical individualism of anglophone Protestant culture?

Certainly, fear of assimilation and eradication as a distinct people loomed large in the hearts and minds of French-Canadians in the nineteenth century. And, in the 1870s, confessional identity, rather than more diffuse, linguistic identity, seemed the best bulwark against the encroaching waves of anglicization for a variety of practical, political, and ideological reasons.

For one, the performance of Ultramontane Catholicism and the definition of one’s collective identity in confessional terms meant that one could claim membership in an ancient, international collective, with its own venerable traditions that both transcended and dwarfed the Johnny-come-lately, Canadian confederation. Ostentatiously bending one’s knee to the Church and its many layers of hierarchy offered a perfect way of implicitly defying the assimilationist ambitions of the federal state. Performing obedience to one set of authority figures – religious superiors – was the perfect way to telegraph defiance of another: political overlords. Elaborate submission to the Church and its dictates, as loyal “children of the Church” became a favored way, then, for nineteenth-century Quebecers to perform their distinctiveness and their determination to endure as a people. Strength in numbers and representation by ecclesiastical spokesmen gave the collective their best chance of enduring as a “distinct society” or, as it was often parsed in the parlance of the time, as the French-Canadian “race.”

But this tactic could only work if everyone observed it. The unyielding façade of an otherworldly, triumphant Catholicism was only impressive and intimidating (for those both within and outside the church), if it was not beset by factionalism or riven by questioning. Only unbroken and perfect unity would telegraph the undeterred sense of higher purpose and the holy virtue of a chosen, if suffering people.

But the “carrot” of contributing, by their beliefs and behavior, to a new definition of belated victory, French-Canadian survivance, was always accompanied by the “stick” of threatened isolation. Even for those lay Catholics predisposed to interpret it as an offensive example of Church overreach, the Guibord affair presented an unnerving, real-time illustration of the Church’s incredible power to shape an individual’s reputation and treatment, both in life and in death. Excommunication, and its heavy burden of exclusion from the beloved community: exclusion that had social, spiritual, and economic implications, was communicable. Those who associated with excommunicates, or expressed sympathy for their plight, themselves risked the same fate. Could some of the crowd’s behavior come from the desire performatively to distinguish themselves from these sinners: underlining their own righteousness?

Whatever their motives, the excited crowd, having chased off the funeral cortège (with some following it all the way to the imposing gates of the rival Mont Royal), then cemented their victory by promptly filling in the hapless printer’s yawning grave, closing the earth itself against his unwanted presence.Footnote ⁶⁴ But their rage, though abated, was not yet fully assuaged. Sometime between Guibord’s second and third funerals, a person or persons unknown belatedly attacked the only mourner who had been unable to flee: Guibord’s widow, Henrietta Brown.

IX. Henrietta Brown: The Woman in the Middle

Henrietta Guibord, despite being the unmoved “first mover” of the Guibord Affair – for, had she not agreed to fight the Church for the right to bury her husband in the family plot, the Affair would never have happened – remains an essentially mysterious figure. Unlike her husband, her lawyer, and her bishop, Brown does not enjoy her own entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Her face did not become familiar, as theirs did, from newspaper illustrations. Moreover, the unlucky Brown, as she was consistently known in court proceedings (as the French civil law system retains a woman’s maiden name as her legal name) did not live to see her party’s hard-won victory. She had passed away some 4 years earlier, on March 24, 1873,Footnote ⁶⁵ having survived only the first two of what would become the Affaire’s 6-year span. Though she did live to see her husband’s first victory, she also witnessed its reversal on appeal, and expired years before his final vindication. And then, in perhaps the crowning irony of her hidden life,Footnote ⁶⁶ Henrietta’s body was placed in the very grave into which she had fought so hard to inter her husband’s remains (Fig. 10). The couple’s relative penury meant that the humble printer had only been able to afford to buy a single plot – lot N873Footnote ⁶⁷ – to serve as the resting place for both himself and his wife. Their plan for a vertical burial – with one coffin stacked on top of the other – rather than the more conventional (but also more expensive) side-by-side internment, by no means unusual for the time, nevertheless provides a poignant reminder of their modest means.Footnote ⁶⁸

Figure 10. Henrietta Brown’s humble wooden grave-marker, in the form of a cross was smashed and shredded by vandals or curiosity seekers. Though herself a faithful lifelong Catholic, Brown was seen as guilty by association with her infamous husband.

Image courtesy of the Archives of the City of Montreal.

Sadly, it seems all too likely that the unremitting stress, uncertainty, and notoriety of the Guibord Affair hastened Madame Guibord’s demise. She was, after all, a woman whom fate had put in the middle.Footnote ⁶⁹ Married to a self-made intellectual firebrand, she was herself a faithful Catholic. The circumstances of her husband’s death trapped her between what she likely saw as her duty to him and his memory and the dictates of her faith. A contemporary chronicler put it poignantly:

Now, however, Henrietta Brown should finally have been safe, and at peace. And not just because she had been rightfully interred in Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery. Mme. Guibord should have been safe from the mob because, by all of the measures used to determine “us” and “them,” she was on the Catholic side. Unlike her husband, Brown was not a vitandus, but a faithful and obedient Catholic of good standing. She was not even a member of the infamous Institut, for despite its fulsome and idealistic calls for the intellectual development of the French Canadian “race,” it did not accept female members. Moreover, though long married to the self-educated Joseph, Henrietta herself remained illiterate. Unable to read, Brown could not even sign her own name. In the many legal documents that she had to sign as a plaintiff, Henrietta could only mark an “X” to signal her understanding and assent.Footnote ⁷¹

Despite this, her 41-year-long-marriage had given her an unlikely bedfellow in her liberal husband. Her decision to put her spouse – even in death – over the rulings of her Church, and her audacious decision to take said Church to court, had turned her, in the eyes of some, into “one of them.” Accordingly, then, the plain wooden cross that symbolized her soul and marked her final resting place was upended and “found lying in the snow, torn apart” in an act of desecration.Footnote ⁷² The humble marker, moreover, “bore marks of the knives of relic-hunters, and was well whittled up.”Footnote ⁷³

X. Guibord’s Final Funeral

Sadly, this was only the first of several odd post-mortem ordeals that Brown’s unique place in the Affair – as a faithful Catholic married to unrepentant vitandus – would force her to endure as her husband received his third – and final – funeral. This time, in view of the riotous events that had transpired several months earlier, on September 2, and amidst rumours of planned bombings and body snatching,Footnote ⁷⁴ Guibord’s funeral cortège was escorted by “une petite armée:”Footnote ⁷⁵ “horse, foot, and artillery,” in an “imposing demonstration”Footnote ⁷⁶ comprised of firefighters,Footnote ⁷⁷ 950 militiamen and soldiers and “almost the entire Montreal police force.”Footnote ⁷⁸ For the first time, the twin dark horses and their solemn load were able to enter the imposing gateway of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery) as this time, prudently, its heavy iron gates had been removed from their hinges as a precaution against their being once again shut and braced against the cortège by an unruly foule. Footnote ⁷⁹ And then, for the second time in three months, the family plot was opened, so that Joseph Guibord’s coffin could finally be “superimposed…over that of his wife.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Even with Guibord finally on the brink of his grave, security concerns remained paramount. For, in the charged atmosphere surrounding the controversial internment, what would stop determined grave-robbers, convinced that Notre-Dame-des-Neiges had been profaned by Guibord’s presence, from simply removing his offending corpse, under the cover of a conspiring darkness? And perhaps that of his wifely accomplice, as well? For had her grave-marker not already been targeted: either by those who resented her role in the affair or due to the too-avid curiosity of souvenir-hunters?

To thwart such nefarious plans, the Institut had commissioned a heavy stone sarcophagus to protect Guibord’s now-battered coffin, which they had provocatively painted rouge Footnote ⁸¹ (Fig. 11). But Montreal’s mayor nervously objected to its use on the grounds that the technical requirements of including such a heavy, unwieldy object would unduly complicate and further delay Guibord’s interment, an unwelcome risk given the eggshell-thin peace.Footnote ⁸² So instead it was decided that both caskets, that of the “heretic husband” and his “orthodox wife”Footnote ⁸³ would be thoroughly encased in cement, reinforced with bits of scrap metal, to deter their would-be profaners. Accordingly, prior to the arrival of Guibord’s funeral cortège, the family grave was re-opened: “the coffin of the late Mad. Guibord was reached without difficulty, and an opening made on each side and at the ends, in order to admit of a thick layer of the Portland cement being introduced (Fig. 12).”Footnote ⁸⁴ When Guibord’s coffin had finally been laid to rest in its hard-won patch of earth, it received the same treatment.Footnote ⁸⁵

Figure 12. Joseph Guibord’s third and final funeral on November 16, 1875. Note the imposing black carriage and strong military presence. Though there was no religious ceremony at his internment, one of the young printers that Guibord had mentored made the sign of the cross over his casket.

Image courtesy of the Canadian Illustrated News.

Figure 11. A heavy stone sarcophagus was commissioned by the Institut Canadien to deter would-be grave robbers, but it was never used, becoming, in the aftermath of the affair something of a tourist attraction.

Image: Canadian Illustrated News, courtesy of the National Archives of Canada.

The ritual that accompanied the internment, though “bare bones,” was strangely appropriate. Though the local curé, Père Rousselot, was present, he was there only in his “civic capacity.” As the bishop’s man through and through, Rousselot, in the memorable words of his mentor, though

Be that as it may, a more apt benediction, perhaps, was given by young Monsieur Camyre:

For their part, Guibord’s mourners, most noted for their anticlerical skepticism, were turned by the funeral’s unprecedented circumstances into relic-hunters: “Members of the Institut picked up little pieces of the scrap iron as mementoes of the unnatural way in which they had been compelled to carry out the interment.”Footnote ⁸⁸ And then, clutching their sopping hats in the icy rain, and stamping their feet against the cold, the mourners dispersed.

But the couple, reunited in their single grave, were not yet alone. All through that first night, four soldiers kept a lonely watch above them to prevent any attempt to despoil their final resting place before the cement had hardened to an adamantine strength.Footnote ⁸⁹

XI. De-consecration by Fiat

And yet, though her grave-marker had been slashed to splinters and her casket opened and filled with cement, the post-mortem ordeal of Henrietta Brown was still not over. To these physical insults would now be added a spiritual injury: the official de-consecration of the grave she now shared with her husband. Bishop Bourget, in a final show of defiance, finally did what he had long threatened, announcing: “the place in which has been laid the body of this rebellious child of the church is actually separated from the consecrated cemetery, as to be henceforth only a common or profane place.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The lifelong Catholicity of Henrietta Brown, who shared her husband’s grave, does not seem to have been uppermost in the thoughts of her bishop. Bourget does not seem to have considered her plight or made any provision for Brown’s remains, now figuratively as well as literally overshadowed by the contested bones of her husband.Footnote ⁹¹

XII. Who “Won” the Guibord Affair?

Despite his ritual “last word,” there is a strong case to be made that Bishop Bourget emerged from the protracted Guibord Affair as the loser in the moral as well as in the legal sense: that he was roundly thrashed by Guibord’s vengeful ghost.Footnote ⁹² Indeed, even at the time, Bourget’s prestige took a serious hit, particularly in the international press. The bishop’s de-consecration-by-fiat of the Guibords’ hard-won final resting place received particularly widespread excoriation as an act unbefitting a prince of the Church. The New York Post wrote that his behavior “would be rather melancholy, were it not absolutely laughable,” and opined that Bourget had acted out of “petty spite.”Footnote ⁹³ The Globe went even further, stating that this was “more like the proceeding of a weak bigot than of a large-minded, charitably disposed, Christian prelate.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Both at the time and ever since, commentators have speculated that Bourget’s abrupt retirement only two months after the ignominious conclusion of “the Guibord Unpleasantness” was a direct result of this self-inflicted wound.Footnote ⁹⁵

However, in the shorter term – and from the necessarily foreshortened perspective of people at the time – Bourget’s blustering proved to be a great success. For although the interminable Affair left him badly wounded, it had wholly finished off the Institut Canadien, rendering its victory over the Church wholly pyric.Footnote ⁹⁶ In fighting its long battle to bury their friend, the members of the ever-shrinking Institut had completely depleted their funds. Bourget’s energetic and unrelenting intimidation had dramatically culled their numbers, and the popular opprobrium in which the organization was held discouraged new membership.Footnote ⁹⁷ Though waspishly expressed, the analysis of Ultramontane newspaper, La Minerve, was fundamentally correct: “The Rouge party and the Institute have dug their own grave in digging that of Guibord.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Bourget had succeeded in making his vision of French Canadian collective identity – his bleu “us” – so normative that “when French Canadian women quarrel, and wish to enrich their ordinary billingsgate, in the most extreme possible manner – one reviles the other as a Guibord.”Footnote ⁹⁹ The behavior of the crowds on September 2 and November 16, 1875 show that Bourget had been wildly successful in framing the Guibord Affair as a Godless, senseless attack upon the powers and prerogatives of the Roman Catholic Church, which remained, to most French Canadians, their own symbolic soul, and their tireless defender against all enemies. His people had proven their loyalty to their bishop by passionately affirming his right paternally to control them in this life, and even in the next. And their bishop had reciprocated by surreally addressing them as his “very dear brethren,” and dismissing the bloody, drunken riot of September 2 as “a mere popular protest in favor of the reverence due the dead who have slept in the Lord and subject to the Sacred Laws of His Church.” Surreally, Bourget was effectively congratulating, rather than reprimanding, the very rioters he himself had instigated: saluting their “zeal,” and commending their relative “docility”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ given the extent of their “just indignation.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

XIII. 1885: The Sword Is Unsheathed Again

But there was another, more pragmatic reason why, despite the Institut’s successful challenge to its ultimate enforceability, excommunication continued to be widely used across Ultramontane Canada: when used against the right kind of rebel, it actually worked! Invoked against one of the most famous – or infamous – figures of the tumultuous 1880s, excommunication forced this high-profile target’s contrite and public volte-face within a matter of months. Returning to the Catholic fold, he ostentatiously submitted his neck to the Catholic yoke. “Renouncing…all the special interpretations that I have made of my mission which my confessor and director does not approve,” the erstwhile rebel expressed his wish to “re-enter the bosom of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church,”Footnote ¹⁰² and to live and to die with, in, and for it. And so he did: succumbing to death only three and a half months after his penitent readmission and as a veritable martyr in the eyes of many of his Canadian coreligionists.

Who was this man? This famous rebel, whom excommunication contrived to tame?

It was none other than Louis Riel (Fig. 13).

Figure 13. Louis Riel in 1875, reading a letter and looking pensive.

Image courtesy of Library and Archives Canada.

XIV. Louis Riel: A Revolutionary Life

In contrast with Joseph Guibord, who is largely forgotten today, Louis Riel is likely at least a vaguely familiar figure for many readers. A lawyer, poet, and eloquent orator, particularly in his native French, Riel was a thoughtful, shy, and deeply devout Roman Catholic. An unlikely revolutionary in many ways, he nevertheless spearheaded two armed uprisings in a last-ditch effort to protect Métis territory from federal encroachment: the Red River Rebellion of 1869–1870, and the North-West Rebellion of 1885. Sensitive yet charismatic, bold yet fragile, Riel was a passionate advocate for the land-rights of his people, the Métis: heirs to both European and Indigenous ancestry who had long made the Western Plains their home. Conscious of his privilege in receiving a top-flight education at the Sulpician’s Grand Séminaire in Montreal, Riel drank deeply of the era’s Ultramontane piety. Mentored during his childhood and adolescence by none other than Bishop Bourget, the instigator of the Guibord Affair, Riel, because of his evident intelligence and piety, was groomed to be the first Métis priest:Footnote ¹⁰³ a path he evaded to consecrate his considerable eloquence and imagination to furthering the Métis cause.

Seeing his people railroaded, both literally and figuratively, by the aggressive westward expansion of the Canadian federal state under its first Prime Minister, John A. MacDonald, Riel snowed Ottawa with a blizzard of objections, petitions, letters, and other licit means of protest Métis dispossession. But when these objections went unacknowledged, this unlikely rebel led his people in an open revolt against the state, not just once, but twice. Though Riel did eventually get his day in court, it was not in a tribunal investigating Métis land claims, but his trial for high treason: a hanging offense.

Riel was a polarizing figure in Canada, both during the 41 short years of his “revolutionary life,”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ and in the lead-up to and aftermath of his dramatic death. Perceptions of Riel, however, depended largely on the native tongue and confessional identity of the perceiver. In both the pre- and post-Confederation era, Quebecers jostled fiercely with their Anglophone Protestant competition to make the opening West proudly French and devoutly Catholic. In a messianic Catholic iteration of the American doctrine of Manifest Destiny, French Canadians supported immigration drives, rallied behind missionary orders who consecrated themselves to the missionization of the Canadian hinterlands – such as the Oblates of Mary Immaculate – and championed the cause of the French Catholics already resident in the West: les Métis. Though lionized by francophone Catholics as a symbol of their hopes for an Ultramontane West, Riel was generally perceived as a pest at best or a dangerous lunatic at worst by anglophone Protestants. The 140 years since his death have elevated and unified perceptions of Riel, who is now recognized as a Canadian “founding father” because of his role in the establishment of Manitoba’s first provisional government and because of his early and passionate advocacy for Métis and Indigenous rights.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

But Riel continues to fascinate and to haunt us at least as much because of what we don’t know about his dramatic life and troubling death. His celebrated biography encompasses many unresolved issues, from the thorny question of his possible mental illness to the many questions raised concerning the fairness – and even the legality – of his trial, sentencing, and execution.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Riel’s dramatic, short-lived excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church, to which he was otherwise so devoted, represents another little-known but illuminating episode from the final year in the life of this enigmatic Canadian icon. For, on April 30, 1885, Riel was officially cut off from the sacraments of the Church.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

XV. Why Was Louis Riel Excommunicated?

In short, because his actions left the Church no other choice. By the time that wary Western clergy finally took this step, Riel had already made a number of incendiary first moves, both politically and theologically. Barely a month before, he had launched a formal rebellion against the federal government of Canada – his second – establishing his own provisional provincial government of Saskatchewan. He then had himself declared a prophet by this newly formed body, the Exovedate – meaning, significantly, “those who have left the fold,”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ and formally changed the weekly day of worship from the traditional Catholic Sunday back to the Jewish Sabbath. Finally, in a move designed both to signal his view that the corruption of the Old World must yield to the freshness and vitality of the New, Riel unilaterally elevated a “Pope of the New World.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Who did Riel have in mind for this newly minted post of his own creation? None other than the long-retired bishop, Ignace Bourget!Footnote ¹¹⁰ Riel had long regarded Bourget as an important supporter of his unorthodox spiritual questing because of an 1875 letter in which the bishop had stated, vaguely if affirmatively: “God, who has always led you and assisted you until the present hour, will not abandon you in the dark hours of your life, for He has given you a mission which you must fulfill in all respects.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Though meant to honor him, Riel’s announced appointment doubtless horrified the Ultramontane prelate.

And yet, despite all this, Riel had not yet been excommunicated! Indeed, things had gone so far by the end of April 1885, that those priests who belatedly wielded the sword of excommunication against the man they bitterly called “the tyrant”Footnote ¹¹² did so as his prisoners of war. So tense had relations between the Métis rebels and the Catholic Church become that the Exovedate feared that, should these Catholic religious be released, they would immediately divulge important strategic information about the Métis’ numbers, position, and materiel to their far more numerous federal enemy.Footnote ¹¹³

So perhaps a better question is “Why was Riel not excommunicated earlier?”

He had, in fact, narrowly escaped excommunication on many earlier occasions. On December 3, 1884, three months before the uprising began, angry Saskatchewan clerics did consider taking this fateful step. Again on March 15, 1885, the virtual eve of the revolt, a frustrated Père Jean-Vital Fourmond, pushed to his limits in a run-in with Riel, again publicly threatened him. Two weeks later an equally irate priest, Père Moulin, called him a “heretic” and an “apostate.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

Why did Louis Riel clash so frequently, in 1885, with the Catholic clergy he normally revered? Because he was frustrated that the priests who lived and worked among the Métis, out West, were not using their literacy and prestige to gain sympathy for their cause in the citadels of Eastern power. Not unjustly, Riel unfavorably compared their arm’s-length indifference to his own not inconsiderable sacrifices for God’s new chosen people: the biblical meek who sought to inherit their earth before it could be cruelly prised from them by MacDonald’s unscrupulous Federalists. Riel’s impassioned public questioning of cleric’s commitment to the Métis cause does not seem to have been simply for show, or for strategic advantage in winning the battle for his people’s loyalty. Rather, it was genuine cri du coeur: a real expression of disillusionment with the clergy’s failure to recognize Métis oppression and to rise up, in righteous wrath, in support of them.

Riel’s popularity meant that use of excommunication, the pastoral “nuclear option” was always postponed. Local clergy were all too aware that, should they excommunicate Riel – or even too sharply reprimand him – they risked alienating his many followers, Métis, white, and Indigenous alike, and possibly jeopardizing their ongoing fidelity to the Church.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Not wanting to make an already challenging situation worse, and perhaps hoping to retain what little sway they had over their embittered and rebellious flock, they had long bitten their tongues and endured Riel’s increasingly bitter tirades.

XVI. Riel’s Religion: Ultramontaine Prophesy

The belated nature of Riel’s excommunication leads to perhaps the most apropos question of all, in speaking of this part of Riel’s religious life: “Can you truly eject someone from an institution that they have already left?” The many audacious innovations that Riel had pioneered prior to his excommunication, and the fact that the basic components of his theo-political program changed little after it had occurred suggest that Riel had effectively already left Catholicism long before he was formally cast out of it.

What were the key pillars of Louis Riel’s emergent theo-political worldview during the last year of his life? Though they were many, and fascinating, this article will consider only two: prophesy and ecumenicalism. Throughout much of his adulthood, Riel was convinced that God had chosen him to fulfill a divine mission. Following a series of profound mystical experiences in December 1875Footnote ¹¹⁶ (a mere month after Joseph Guibord received his final funeral), Riel took the name “David” to signal that he, like his new namesake, was a latter-day prophet-king divinely ordained to uphold Métis claims to their promised lands in the Canadian West.

Riel’s application of Old Testament themes and ideas to nineteenth-century North America was both wildly original and strikingly familiar. Much like Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, Riel sought both to resurrect the Old Testament role of the prophet and to reframe Christian salvation history to give North America a far more dominant and vital role (hence his would-be elevation of an appalled Bourget to his New World papacy).Footnote ¹¹⁷ But whereas Smith had accomplished this latter goal by effectively appending a crucial American chapter to the life of Christ, teaching that Jesus had come to convert Indigenous peoples after his resurrection but prior to his ascension, Riel’s (North) American exceptionalism struck distinctively Catholic notes (which, strikingly, persisted – or even intensified – following his excommunication). While it is true that on March 18, 1885, the first day of the Métis revolt, Riel pronounced the enigmatic words, “Rome has fallen,” this was not a renunciation of the papacy so much as its putative rebirth as a North American institution.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Indeed, throughout this most crucial and consequential period of his life, Riel’s religious imagination was a striking mixture of audacity and conservativism. In the words of his most recent biographer, M. Max Hamon, Riel “steered between the Scylla of liberal revolution and the Charybdis of Catholic counter-revolution.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Even in revolt, Riel’s formation by Ultramontane Catholicism is still very evident, both in his religious psychology and in the different roles he created for himself and his followers. Riel’s rebellion, then, didn’t so much question Catholic patterns of authority and obedience it appropriated them for himself. An obedient “child of the church” until his excommunication, Riel now demanded unswerving submission as an authoritarian prophet-messiah.Footnote ¹²⁰ This is in no way contradictory or hypocritical in an Ultramontane Catholic context, where these roles were, effectively, two sides of the same coin. As we have already seen, in a kind of spiritual “trickle-down economics,” Ultramontanes stressed the flow of inspiration and grace from God downward to his anointed leaders, pope, cardinals, archbishops, bishops and priests (to which Riel added inspired prophets) and from them to the faithful. Much like his spiritual mentor Ignace Bourget, then, Riel believed that everyone on this scale – with the sole exception of God – thus had both the duty of obedience to his superiors, and the right to unswerving obedience from his inferiors. Though many of the spiritual crises of Louis Riel’s tumultuous life stemmed from questions of where precisely he fit on this scale, his inherent conservativism meant that, even in rebellion, the scale itself went unquestioned.

Louis Riel’s spiritual authoritarianism is most obvious when we explore his relationship with Gabriel Dumont (Fig. 14), the Métis “Adjutant General” and “head of the Army.”Footnote ¹²¹ As a seasoned hunter, horseman, and warrior, Dumont was purportedly in charge of all matters related to Métis military strategy.Footnote ¹²² But in practice, Riel frequently usurped Dumont’s prerogatives, particularly his ability to decide when to launch attacks, and when to hold the line. Riel justified his behavior on basis that, as the group’s holy prophet, a role that he could not evade, foreclose, or delegate, he was duty-bound prayerfully to discern God’s will, even when this required crucially important hours, or even days. Moreover, throughout the conflict, Riel was preoccupied with keeping casualties on both sides to a bare minimum, and himself never shouldered a rifle, nor fired a shot in combat, choosing to bear a crucifix, rather than a firearm.Footnote ¹²³ Mounted, and thus “very exposed,” Riel bore this cross aloft, before the eyes of his rag-tag army. His voice, raised in loud prayer and supplication of the saints, was clearly audible over the volleys of sporadic gunfire.Footnote ¹²⁴ Riel’s scruples about bloodshed, his prevarications and delays, and his frequent imposition of religious exercises, even for on on-duty soldiers, often cost Métis insurrectionists the valuable strategic advantages of speed and surprise.Footnote ¹²⁵

Figure 14. Riel’s right-hand man, Gabriel Dumont, was purportedly in charge of military strategy. In practice, however, Riel’s prophetic role often superseded Dumont’s tactical decisions.

Image courtesy of Parks Canada.

The response of his underlings to Riel’s behavior reveals both their shared formation in Ultramontane Catholicism and their apparent acceptance of his startling claim: “Who speaks through my mouth when I speak to you? It is God.”Footnote ¹²⁶ For, though often frustrated by the delays imposed upon them by Riel,Footnote ¹²⁷ neither Dumont nor any other members of Riel’s Exovedate ever engaged the enemy without their spiritual leader’s explicit say-so. Reflected Dumont: “I yielded to Riel’s judgement although I was convinced that…mine was the better plan: but I had confidence in his faith and his prayers and that God would listen to him.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Riel’s deputies were thus as obsequiously obedient to him as the most cowed Montréalais was to Ignace Bourget.

XVII. A Precarious Ecumenicalism

A second – and somewhat surprising – feature of Riel’s breakaway religio-political movement was its ecumenicalism, though this emphasis sat somewhat uneasily with the tendency toward Ultramontane authoritarianism just explored. It was also one of the very few values that he held in common with his fellow vitandi, the liberal Patriotes and Gibordists. During the last year of his life, Riel often decried confessional tensions and mutual hatred and spoke in remarkably eloquent terms of a robust and passionate ecumenicalism that – in its spirit and even in its very wording – presaged the best of Martin Luther King Junior’s own soaring rhetoric 78 years later. Defending himself in his second language, English, at his trial, Riel asked a series of impassioned rhetorical questions:

Moreover, some of Riel’s theological and ritual innovations (both before and after his excommunication) were quite Protestant in esprit. Chief among these was Riel’s reimagining of the priesthood as a fraternal and laic, rather than paternal and priestly, institution. This innovation, admittedly, was thrust upon Riel by the fact that Catholic priests often signaled their displeasure with Métis radicalism by withholding the sacraments from them, even prior to their formal excommunication. Once the uprising began on March 18, 1885, access to the sacraments became an (eternal) life-or-death issue. The possibility of falling in battle necessitated, for the pious Métis, a full confession on its eve. Riel’s command that Métis warriors confess to members of the Exovedate, rather than to the discredited Catholic clergy, then, merely made a virtue of this necessity.Footnote ¹³⁰ But this change also reflected Riel’s evolving view that priestly authority, rather than being absolute, or automatic, was conditional on how well a given religious leader was “faithful to their mission.” If a would-be priest failed to support their parishioners in a just life-or-death struggle, Riel concluded, then “they have lost their position and their usefulness. Priests are not religion.”Footnote ¹³¹ Martin Luther himself could not have put it better.Footnote ¹³²

XVIII. Riel’s Defeat and Reconciliation with the Church

And yet, following the disastrous defeat of the Métis rebellion, his surrender in mid-May of the same year,Footnote ¹³³ and his conviction for treason, Riel formally renounced his heresies: petitioning for readmission to the Catholic Church on August 5, 1885.Footnote ¹³⁴ Why, having headed his own breakaway church for some six months – among the most tumultuous and dangerous of his life – did Riel seek reconciliation with Catholicism? And how sincere was he, in so doing?

There is considerable evidence to suggest that during his final months, Riel did continue to cherish, in the inner sanctum of his soul, a number of beliefs wholly incompatible with orthodox Catholicism despite his formal abjuration of his “heresies.” During the last months of his life, it seems likely that Riel was balancing external conformity and internal rebellion, much as he had done at other fraught periods in his life, such as when he languished in a Quebec insane asylum, ultimately winning release by becoming better at hiding his true thoughts and feelings.Footnote ¹³⁵

Firstly, there is the matter of his name. Even after his return to full communion with the Catholic Church, Riel continued to use his full prophetic name, “Louis ‘David’ Riel,” not simply on private letters, but even on the document abjuring his heresies, casting doubt on whether he ever truly repudiated his status as a divinely elected prophet. Despite his protests to the contrary, the Métis leader may not fully have accepted that belief in his own messianic role was truly inconsistent with submission to the church’s ultimate authority.Footnote ¹³⁶ Indeed, he may have believed that in times of crisis, institutional, clerical authority could be augmented by charismatic, prophetic authority.

Secondly, Riel penned a prayer, not for but to himself as a future saint, “St. Louis the Métis.” Written in the shadow of the scaffold, and referring to himself in the third person, it asks for “the strength to achieve the great work which you [e.g. Riel himself] have begun for the welfare of the Métis people…”Footnote ¹³⁷ Fascinatingly, these enigmatic words may not have referred to Riel’s otherworldly intervention from heaven, as a saint, but to his continued implication in the tangible world. Riel seems to have believed that, though he would be unjustly executed by the Canadian state, he would be resurrected on the third day after his death, like Christ himself: thus confounding those who had dared to question the God-given nature of his theo-political mission.Footnote ¹³⁸

Thirdly, there is the fact that Riel formally renounced his break with Rome not once, but twice. As we have seen, he abjured in early August of 1885, some four months before his hanging. But Riel also went through the process a second time, on the very morning of his execution on November 16, 1885.Footnote ¹³⁹ While some might interpret this as indicating only a laudable thoroughness – or neuroticism – on Riel’s part, it is also possible to posit that this was his only true abjuration. If the latter interpretation is correct, this would mean that during the previous months Riel had in fact continued to believe in his highly personal and idiosyncratic religion, even as he partook of the sacraments, comfort, and companionship availed him by his putative membership in the Catholic Church. Taken together, these small clues suggest the possibility that, during the last months of his life, Riel never ceased believing in his special spiritual role and mission, despite his many professions to the contrary.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Alternatively, it is possible that Riel’s desire for reconciliation with the Catholic Church was indeed sincere and genuine. After all, for Riel and his disheartened followers, everything had changed in a disorientatingly brief period. The promises had been broken. The awaited glory had faded. The Métis had been defeated, and Riel had surrendered. His supporters were in disarray. Some had been killed, others wounded. Many, including Riel’s right-hand man, Gabriel Dumont, had fled southwards to the United States,Footnote ¹⁴¹ and some, like Riel, awaited execution. Riel himself was in solitary confinement where, even securely locked in his cell, he was nevertheless forced to wear a heavy ball and chain attached to his ankle as an extra security measure. Tried and convicted, he had been sentenced to hang. The exhilarating wave of confidence, faith, and hope he had been riding for a long, euphoric year had abruptly crashed into the cliffs of reality. The final prayer in which Riel had led his soldiers, kneeling on the battle-field – “My God, have pity on us! My God, stop those people, crush them”Footnote ¹⁴² – had gone unanswered, much like Jesus’s own poignant query on the cross – “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Returning to the Church and its sacraments, then, would have offered Riel a powerful measure of solace. Waiting for execution on his one-man death row was hard enough. But to do so alone,Footnote ¹⁴³ without the familiar comfort of the Church rituals he so loved would have been well-nigh unbearable.

This, of course, was the chief reason why excommunication was such a powerful weapon. Maintaining a principled rebellion against the Church even in the valley of the shadow of death effectively consigned vitandi to fight a two-front war – inner and outer, spiritual and physical – under excruciating conditions. The many poetic reflections recorded of Riel’s prison diary vividly confirm that counting down the remaining days of one’s life, before it would be wrested from him at the end of a waiting rope, was an ever-present torment for the sensitive rebel:

Riel, then, should be taken at his word. For, when asked why he sought reconciliation, he stated simply and humbly: “I wish to have the help of the sacraments of the Church, in which I have every confidence and of which I have great need.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵

However, it is likely that strategic considerations also played a role in the rebel’s return – or pretended return – to the Church. Riel knew that his own survival, and that of his beloved Métis cause, were dependent upon the crucial support of francophone Catholics throughout the Dominion: particularly those in its devotional heartland: Quebec. But to marshal their support Riel needed to make his standing as a devout Catholic clearly evident, and quickly. If he could continue to embody, in his person, the powerful dreams of many for a francophone Catholic West, Riel could still win the war for public opinion: a victory which could save his life.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ If francophone Catholics saw him as one of themselves, they would object to the many problematic features of his flawed trial and plead – as Riel’s own jury had done – for clemency.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ If they saw him as one of their own, then Riel’s vision for the West might live on, and Métis demands for justice finally receive a response.

Their crucial support was imperilled, however, should Riel remain outside the church. Rebelling against a federal state that many saw as unfairly dominated by Anglophone Protestants was a pardonable sin the eyes of many francophone Catholics. But, as the Guibord Affair taught us, revolt against the Ultramontane Church – perceived as both the quintessence of French-Canadian identity, and its powerful defender – was not as lightly tolerated.

Riel’s last months on earth, then, chained in a Regina jail, present something of an interpretive conundrum. If his first abjuration of his heresies on August 5 was sincere, this means that Riel spent the fall of 1885 as a chastened, obedient, and authentic Catholic. But it is also possible that Riel chose, for personal reasons, for political advantage, or for some admixture of the two, to live something of a spiritual “double life” during this period: continuing secretly to balance his own distinctive beliefs with participation in the Catholic sacraments.

But whichever of these scenarios is true, one thing is certain: ultimately, there is no doubt that Riel died reconciled with the holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, because of his second abjuration, completed on the very morning of his execution. Whether it was sooner or later, months or mere minutes before his execution, excommunication had, in Riel’s case, ultimately “worked” in forcing his renunciation of his idiosyncratic and unorthodox ideas. Through the use of this tool of last resort, the Church had succeeded in bringing this lost sheep back into the fold, in a marked contrast with the failure of this tactic in cowing either the Patriotes or the Guibordists. Footnote ¹⁴⁸

XIX. Why Did Excommunication “Work” on Riel, but Not on Liberal Vidandi?

That excommunication “worked” in chastening Riel, whether sooner or later, demonstrates two things: that Riel’s disappointment in what he saw as the failings of the Catholic Church differed fundamentally from those of liberal-thinking rebels, and that Riel, even in rebellion, continued to demonstrate a deeply Ultramontane understanding of the virtue of obedience.

The Patriotes, the Guibordists, and Riel and his supporters were all rebels of one type or another: against the nineteenth-century state, against the powerful Ultramontane Church, or against both. In the 1830s, through their short-lived and abortive rebellion, the Patriotes had rejected both the permanence of French defeat and the Church’s place as a mediator and enforcer of the state’s prerogatives by at once launching a direct rebellion against a sitting government through armed uprising and by braving the church’s worst weapon against them: excommunication. For the Patriotes, the church was the enemy because of its own cozy connivance with the state and its siding with said state against its own people. By persevering in their doomed rebellion without the blessing of the Church, the rebels had shown both the possibility and the limitations of an alternative articulation of French-Canadian identity in their period, even as they provided seeds of inspiration for the nationalism and the laicité that would belatedly flower more than a century later, as Quebec underwent the profound shifts in the relationship between Church and State during the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1870s, the Guibordists had challenged the Catholic Church yet more directly by stubbornly insisting on their freedom of thought and conscience and their intellectual independence in the face of Bishop Bourget’s attempts to shutter the Institut Canadien. In refusing their assigned role as “children of the church,” this most radical kernel of free-thinking resistors was expressing a latter-day solidarity with the spirit of the French Revolution and with its philosophe standard-bearers, whose works had been banned outright by Quebec’s clerics. For Guibord in life, and for Doutre, his postmortem lawyer and standard-bearer, the Catholic Church had revealed itself as the enemy by its marked hostility toward any expression of the intellectual maturity and integrity of its laymen as individuals, and in its inhuman need to impose its adamantine will on both the living and the dead.

Though Riel, too, was angry at the Catholic Church, his was a very different disappointment: the anguish of thwarted idealism. For him, the Church had erred not in what it did – or, more fundamentally, what it was – but rather in what it had failed to do. Raised to respect – indeed, to revere – the church’s priestly personnel, Riel reacted with increasing incredulity, then disbelieving pain, when the Church failed to defend the Métis people in their ultimate hour of need. From Riel’s perspective, this left him with no choice but to form his own activist church: one which would act decisively, intervening to prevent the injustice of widespread dispossession. From Riel’s perspective, it was not he, but rather the Church, that had been disobedient to its highest calling, effectively forcing him to forge his innovative, unique role as a latter-day prophet and Métis messiah.

But crucially, in his new spiritual role, Riel never repudiated obedience as a key religious value. On the contrary, as we have seen, he replicated the Church’s insistence on absolute submission from his followers in his own improvised role as a prophet. In this sense, at least, Riel remained a conservative Ultramontane Catholic before, after, and arguably during his excommunication. Though he, just like the Patriotes and Guibordists, questioned and ultimately defied clerical authority, receiving, like them, the ultimate reprimand of excommunication, for Riel obedience paradoxically remained “the bread with which I should nourish myself.” For him, selfless submission to licit religious authority was a spiritual discipline – “the sublime slavery of duty”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ – a duty all the more salutary because of its difficulty.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Like gluttony or licentiousness, Riel felt, rebellious disobedience distorted natural desires by taking them to sinful extremes.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Like other sins of excess, wilfulness must be fought with discipline, restraint, and deep humility, including the willingness to obey without question benevolent religious superiors such as confessors or spiritual directors.Footnote ¹⁵²

In contrast with the Guibordists, who saw French Canadians’ uncritical obedience of Catholic clerics as the single greatest impediment to their intellectual progress as a people, a form of intellectual abdication, if not suicide,Footnote ¹⁵³ Riel ultimately perceived the struggle to conform his will to clerical authority as an expression not of their strength, but of his own. For Riel, his belated obedience to the Church was not servile submission to clerical domination, but self-mastery in preparation for his coming self-sacrifice. Like that of Christ, praying in the garden of Gethsemane, on the eve of his own horrifying execution, it was an expression of the prayer, “Let not my will, but thy will, be done.” It is in this spirit that Riel’s words, written during his imprisonment, should be read:

XX. Death of a Latter-Day Prophet

Riel’s commitment to the value of obedience shines through most strongly in his submission to one of the last and most difficult commands of his life: a test he received after signing the second and final of his abjurations. The morning of Riel’s execution, his former enemy turned spiritual confidante and confessor, Père Alexis André,Footnote ¹⁵⁵ counselled Riel not to deliver the long speech he had prepared to deliver from the gibbet. André urged Riel to keep total silence as a final act of piety: as an act of obedience and humility to the Church and as an imitation of Jesus’s own near-silence on the cross.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Riel complied, despite what must have been a strong temptation to address his people – and history – one last time. Other than those of the Lord’s Prayer which, poignantly, he began but never finished - his syllables cut short by the hangman’s rope - Riel’s last words were private and whispered. In fact, they were words of comfort for the priest himself. Though André had angrily called Riel “a diabolical spiritFootnote ¹⁵⁷ during his short-lived rebellion, he now wept inconsolablyFootnote ¹⁵⁸ as he watched the former rebel docilely assisting the hangman in placing the noose around his own neck. Noticing the tears of his former detractor, Riel comforted him, urging: “Courage, bon courage, mon père.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Reflecting back upon this moment, André wrote: “Riel died a saint.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰