Dry Patriotism: The Chiniquy Crusade

Abstract

Between 1848 and 1851, thousands of French-speaking Catholics in the Province of Canada came forward in their parish churches to take the temperance pledge. As word of this conversion reached non-Catholics across North America, the reaction was one of pure astonishment. For several decades, evangelical Protestants had laboured long and hard to eradicate drunkenness; and now a Catholic priest was securing more converts in a single day than these earlier workers had won with years of steady effort. Contemporaries shook their heads and laid it down to the eloquent charm of Father Charles Chiniquy. Chiniquy in all likelihood helped to forge the new and lasting image of the church as guardian of the national destiny. His work embodied the new Catholicism championed by Bishop Bourget and Etienne Parent. This idea has stood the test of time; the full-length biography of Chiniquy published by Canadian historian Marcel Trudel in 1955 attributed the priest’s vast influence to “honeyed flattery” and other excesses of his oratory. In the 1840s Chiniquy’s promises of survivance won support for virtues more commonly associated with the Anglo-American, Protestant side of Canada’s heritage. Hoping to save itself, little Rome-on-the-St Lawrence crooked its knee to Samuel Smiles.