Fonds PR206 - Fonds Francis A. Abbott dit Franck Abbott

2 documents textuels.

Ce fonds a été donné en 2 versements le 24 mai 2005 et 18 mars 2013 par M. Abbott. Le fonds est conservé au centre d’archives régional de la Société du patrimoine des Beaucerons.

Ce fonds contient une affiche intitulée The Two Worlds of Saint-Joseph-de-Beauce : A Quebec Parish 1850-1900. Elle présente en dix points, en anglais, les deux mondes de Saint-Joseph-de-Beauce, selon la thèse de doctorat de M. Frank Abbott, en préparation au Kwantlen University College, à Surrey, en Colombie-Britannique.
“* For the past five years I have been conducting my PhD research on the social history of traditional Quebec popular culture by examining the interaction between the secular world of the local farmers of St-Joseph and the spiritual world of their parish priests. First settled in 1737, the parish is a typically traditional French Canadian farming community located approximately 70 km south of Quebec City in the green rolling hills of the Chaudiere River Valley of Beauce County.

• My involvment in the area grew out of earlier MA research on the Quebec Winter Carnival of 1894 where it seemed that the Church and the business community exercised a high degree of control over an old celebration of the community and transformed it into a tourist spectacle for wealthy outsiders, though the traditional forms persisted in the countyside.
• When I began researching this topic I therefore wanted to trace the same question of who controls and defines culture further back to its roots. Therefore it appeared logical to investigate what seemed to be a "typical" rural parish and the degree to which the Church in Quebec appeared to exercise such a dominant role in the lives of its people. And, did the people themselves exercise agency?
• Much has been written about the domination of the Church in Quebec, especially for the century 1850-1950. Indeed, the characteristic architectural features of the cities, town and villages of the province have been the many churches, rectories, convents, schools and hospitals - the physical manifestation of the spiritual and cultural submission of the Quebecois to Catholicism.
• So complete has this clerical triumph seemed that modern historical debates have focused more on how it came about than wheter it happened to the degree claimed. For example, in Trois-Rivieres, Rene Hardy has argued that the local business community and the Church shared a common concern for social control. The former desired a docile and productive workforce, and the latter a submissive and religious community of faithful Catholics, and apparently each gradually got what it wished.
• Operating with another frame of reference, Louis Rousseau argues that, rather than a gradual process culminating in clerical domination of most aspects of Quebecois life somewhere near the end of the nineteenth century the cultural transformation happened more rapidly, beginning in the 1840s. That period of religious revivals for him marks a clear dividing line between the earlier general religious indifference of much of the population and the "implantation of a new mass culture" based specifically on Catholic religious values.
• Though both Hardy and Rousseau differ on where and when they place their emphasis, they are in substantial agreement that, by the end of the nineteenth century Quebec was a "religious society".
• My own research confirms some of these finding while questioning others. For example, St-Joseph does have a number of signifiant religious structures apart from its imposing and magnificently decorated parish church. But in this apparently triumphal period for the Church that the parish priests here were complaining about the persistence of drinking, bootlegging, swearing, dancing, laxity about religious observance, and unruly behaviour among the young in their annual reports to the Bishop. Judicial records confirm much of this.
• Furthermore, the dossiers of ordinary people's recorded oral testimony in the "Archives de Folklore" at Laval University, indicate that the division between the worlds of the people and the priests was neither clear cut nor was there always contestation. Though the people clearly belonged to the secular world, the boundaries between it and the spiritual one were rather porous in places. The priest could therefore be simultaneously a meddlesome outsider when he was castigating local mores and a vitally necessary linchpin to the moral and psychic wellbeing of the community when he was mediating between it and the unseen but no less real forces of the spiritual realm.
• In conclusion, it certainly surprises me that new ground in Quebec history may be being broken by someone here in British Columbia. But if a study available in English will allow people here to overcome the barriers of time and distance that separate the people living in "the two solitudes" here in Canada to get a sympathetic understanding of a important component of our country, the effort will not have been wasted.
  Frank Abbott, Department of History »