Strangers in the House. Candace Savage

ethnicity, religion—and new rifts open up. Even among the patriotes, there were disagreements over tactics, as some adherents sharpened their arguments to continue the war of words, while others organized militias and began sharpening their scythes and pitchforks for battle. But perhaps the most painful break of all occurred between the patriotes and their church. In the decades since the Conquest, Roman Catholicism had become almost synonymous with French Canada, woven into every birth and death, every hope and fear. But now this guardian of the people had chosen to ally itself with the enemy, by standing on the side of constituted authority. In the parish of Saint-Polycarpe, in the southwestern corner of the colony, parishioners were so enraged when their priest instructed them to sing a Te Deum to honor Britain’s newly crowned queen that they sealed him in a barrel, delivered him to the quay, and put him on a ship bound for the United States.

      Clara Parent’s ancestors lived in that parish; her great-grandmother Josette was married in that church. Wherever their loyalties fell, whatever their political stance, it hurts one’s heart just to think of it.

      AS FOR THE Blondin side of the family, the guerre des Patriotes found them in the parish of Sainte-Rose-de-Lima, just north of Montréal, in the epicenter of the trouble. Napoléon’s grandfather Augustin turned sixteen that year, 1837, and it is easy to imagine him as a fresh, unshaven face in the crowd, a thousand strong, that shouldered into the local inn that autumn. Perhaps he climbed onto a bench at the back of the smoky hall to catch a glimpse of the orators, including the cousin of the famous leader of the Parti Patriote, Louis-Joseph Papineau. “The church has fomented the trouble,” someone shouted, and the gathering roared its approval. The laws governing land tenure were “partiale, secrète et vicieuse.” Agreed. France had contributed to the rise of civilization, sciences, literature, and the arts, and had never taken second place to the British. “Forward,” everyone shouted. When the crowd dispersed that night, it was clear that trouble was coming.⁸

      A few miles from Sainte-Rose, on the other side of the Rivière du Chêne, sat the village of Saint-Eustache. In normal times, people moved freely back and forth between the two settlements; as an infant, Augustin had been taken to this neighboring village for baptism. But in these terrible new days, Saint-Eustache had become known as a hotbed of patriote agitation, and the British army, stung by a humiliating defeat in its first engagement with the rebels, was on the march north. The villagers tried to deflect the attack by destroying a strategic bridge, but the army sent out a party of artillery to test the river ice. Then came the ordinary weekday morning when two thousand redcoats marched on Saint-Eustache, their field guns and rocket launcher rumbling behind them, their bayonets glinting in the sun.