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Marguerite Bourgeoys and Montreal

Adapted from the introduction to Patricia Simpson's Marguerite Bourgeoys and Montreal, 1640-1665 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997)

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1. Educator of Montreal

Marguerite Bourgeoys, a native of Troyes, the ancient capital of the province of Champagne, in 1653 came to a tiny and be­lea­guered Ville-Marie, still undergoing its birth pangs. The city that we now know as Montreal came into existence through the de­sire of a group of devout men and women in seventeenth-cen­tu­ry France to share with the native people of the New World what they regarded as their most precious possession: their Chris­tian faith. They hoped to achieve this goal through the es­tab­lishment of a settlement on the island of Montreal in the col­o­ny of New France. The foundation was intended to embody the Chris­tian ideal described in the Acts of the Apostles in such a way as to attract the Amerindians just as the communities of ear­ly Christians had drawn their first converts in the Med­i­ter­ra­ne­an world of the first century. To attain this end, the Société de Notre-Dame de Montréal was formed in France in 1640, and Ville-Marie founded on the island of Montreal in May two years later.

Marguerite Bourgeoys's arrival eleven years after the initial foun­da­tion was to fulfill part of the original design for the colony, which included a plan to provide for the education of its chil­dren. She came with the recruitment known as the “hundred men” (« La grande recrue »), who were to prevent that first foundation from a­ban­don­ment or extinction, the alternatives facing Ville-Marie by 1653. On the voyage between France and Canada, during which she had cared for the sick and consoled the dying, the prospective set­tlers with whom she journeyed had already begun to address her as “Sister.” From this beginning until her death in 1700, she was totally dedicated to the welfare of the people of Montreal.

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