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Canons against viruses …

by Jean-Noël Bilodeau

Everyone will tell you. This is not the first time that Quebec has experienced confinement. There are those who have lived it before us. And who will tell you it was the right thing to do. Like Pauline, my older sister, in a way the memory of the family. In 1945, she was living with our grandmother Démerise Roy, in Saint-Isidore, in Beauce, just next to the Chaudière river.

That year, the government had decreed a “confinement” because the Quebec soldiers, and among them courageous Beaucerons, returned from the war and could be carriers of malicious viruses.

The elders remembered the famous “Spanish flu” of 1918 caused by troop transports. For them, we should not relive this disaster, which had resulted in the deaths of 14,000 Quebeckers.

This time, the Beaucerons were confined before the arrival of the troops and Quebec avoided the worst.

My sister reminds me that our grandmother, who didn’t have a tongue in her pocket, didn’t hesitate to say that we had to be wary of the real carriers of the virus, the English … and that there was no nothing Spanish in all of this!

The elders, including Démerise’s father, François Roy, born in 1841, said that history always repeated itself. The first pandemic, which Canadians remembered, was that of cholera morbus, which in 1832 would have caused more than 10,000 deaths in Lower Canada (present-day Quebec) among a population of approximately 400,000 inhabitants.

According to the newspaper of the time, La Minerve 1, the virus would have come from India… But the doctors of Montreal and Quebec were unanimous in saying “that the contagion did not exist”.

They must have feared the reappearance of rumors accusing the English once again!

According to them, the large number of deaths is rather due to an atmospheric cause. “The disease was aggravated,” they said, “by particular causes arising from the extraordinary season which entirely retarded the vegetation, which had to be very prolific to produce the complete absorption of the harmful gases generated in the soil. They proposed to put pressure on the authorities to burn bituminous materials or to fire cannons. “This is very effective,” they said, “against the atmosphere which carries the mephitic vapors. “

And, in addition to these climatic changes, to which they attributed the main cause of the apprehended pandemic, said doctors also had their opinion on certain so-called “predominant” causes: excessive drinking and eating, abandonment to pernicious influences, dirt and old age… As for Monsignor Panet, about to retire, he was of the opinion that we should have prayed a little more!

Finally, the government authorities decided to set up a quarantine station in Grosse-Île in order to stem a possible contagion by immigrants, targeted as possible carriers of the famous virus. The chronicler of La Minerve however insists on qualifying as stupid “the rumors which want that the British authorities sent sick immigrants”.

For there were then many Patriots who were fed up with the British governors of the colony and accused them of being responsible for the epidemic. One of them, Edouard-Étienne Rodier, a member of the Lower Canada Assembly, said in a debate that “it was not enough to send greedy selfish people to get rich at the expense of Canadians and seek to enslave them. They needed more. They had to get rid of their beggars and throw them by the thousands on our shores. We needed them to send us miserable poor and, as a result, Plague and Death. »

There are those today who say that the coronavirus is “Chinese”. I am convinced that if Démerise were still alive, she would swear that it did not come from there… But it does not say that she would believe that it is necessary to fire some cannon shots…

1: The following quotes come from an edition of Boréal Express, published in 1972, under the direction of historians Gilles Boulet, Jacques Lacoursière and Denis Vaugeois. (1810-1841: British regime)

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