After Sir John A. Macdonald, Quebec institutions mull pulling Lionel Groulx’s name

Of the 20 or so Quebec municipalities that are recorded as having places named after Groulx, only two indicated that they intend to broach the subject of a possible renaming.

In 2020, Montreal activists yanked down and decapitated a statue of Canada’s first prime minister, in protest of Sir John A. Macdonald’s role as the architect of the residential school system.

Now, another larger-than-life historical figure is coming under scrutiny, as Quebec municipalities and institutions are mulling whether to pull the name of priest and historian Lionel Groulx from public places over views described as antisemitic and racist.

Earlier this year, a Quebec-based history organization that Groulx founded in 1946 decided to remove his name from its prestigious annual prize, following a consultation with its members in which about 60 per cent advocated for the change.

“Today, with the recognition of diversity and the necessary reversal of perspectives towards colonialism in Quebec, the name of Groulx can hardly act as a unifier,” read a line in the 24-page document released by the Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française.

Thomas Wien, the institute’s president, said in an interview that Groulx was someone who was “eminently complex, and eminently fascinating.”

Groulx was born in 1878 near Montreal. He was a historian who helped professionalize the field, an intellectual and a Quebec nationalist figure who inspired pride. Born of modest means, he went on to become a priest, writer and thinker who penned the slogan “maîtres chez nous” (“masters in our own house”) that later became a rallying cry of the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s.

However, he was also a conservative nationalist whose views were “tinted by racism and antisemitism,” including a belief that French-Canadian Catholics were a “chosen people” guided by divine providence, Wien said.

While the comparisons are inevitable, Wien maintains that Groulx and Macdonald have little in common. While Canada’s first prime minister was a direct architect in the forced removal of Indigenous Peoples from their land and other atrocities, he said, Groulx was a historian whose legacy is more complex.