The Secret Is Out

There is something irresistibly captivating about secret societies — circles of the powerful who gather in clandestine fashion. They virtually constitute a cinematic genre: The 39 Steps, North by Northwest, The Da Vinci Code, Eyes Wide Shut, and a host of more forgettable others take advantage of the general fascination with the idea that there are groups bound by arcane oaths and passwords who exert control on an unwitting public.

One such secret society was the Ordre de Jacques-Cartier, often referred to as La Patente. Formed in 1926 in Ottawa, it was created so that an underground elite, with the support of the Catholic Church, could promote the interests of French Canada. Over the years, it would include an astonishing array of French Canadian politicians and activists: Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau; New Brunswick premier Louis Robichaud, along with five members of his cabinet; Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger; the Queen’s Printer Roger Duhamel; the Quebec ministers Pierre Laporte, Denis Lazure, Pierre Marois, and Jacques-Yvan Morin, as well as Premiers Jean-Jacques Bertrand, Jacques Parizeau, and Bernard Landry.

La Patente played a role similar to that of the Orange Order, a fiercely Irish Protestant organization in Ontario, campaigning secretly for nationalist goals and conservative values. I once asked Landry about his involvement, and he said that joining had been almost automatic. “It was more of a mutual aid organization,” he told me. Alluding to the “Achat chez nous” campaign that urged consumers to buy local to support French Canadian merchants, he also said that this was a narrow view that he abandoned when he endorsed free trade.

Hugues Théorêt has gone through the files of the organization that are held in Library and Archives Canada to trace its evolution from its creation to its peak during the Second World War, along with its decline and ultimate collapse. Some of the names he lists are surprising: Jacques Parizeau had a completely secular education, unusual at the time, and had little interest in the traditional values of the Catholic Church. Nonetheless, the secret, conspiratorial nature of the enterprise must have appealed to him; he later built his own network of informants. What is not surprising is that René Lévesque, the most secular of his contemporaries and the most suspicious of traditional nationalists, never joined.

In many ways, La Patente is a story of Quebec nationalism prior to the Quiet Revolution: conservative, clerical, and closed. Théorêt describes how French Canada, and La Patente in particular, found Benito Mussolini impressive for three reasons: the Italian dictator was a devout Catholic, fascism was a rampart against Communism, and Il Duce supported corporatism, an economic ideology viewed favourably in Quebec at the time.

The organization worked tirelessly in favour of local businesses, circulating lists of canned foods, such as corn, beans, and tomatoes, and tobacco brands that were produced by French Canadians. The recommendation to buy matches made by Allumière Canada was lifted when that firm was purchased by the Eddy Match Company, jointly owned at the time by the British Match Corporation and Diamond Match, in the United States. Antisemitism was also a part of the message; whether boycotting Jewish merchants or opposing Jewish immigration, La Patente was loud, ugly, and persistent. (While antisemitism was explicit in Quebec, it is often forgotten how present it was in the rest of Canada, with a riot in Toronto’s Christie Pits Park in 1933, university quotas for Jewish students, and elite clubs refusing to admit Jewish members. In 1963, André Laurendeau, then co-chair of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, had the grace to publicly apologize in a column in Le Magazine Maclean for his youthful antisemitic ranting thirty years earlier.)

La Patente was a force for reaction in Quebec, pushing for agricultural colonization and warning against the evils of radio, popular music, non-confessional organizations like the YMCA and the YWCA, and Canada’s participation in the war. It had its successes along the way. In 1927, following pressure from the Ordre, the federal government issued bilingual stamps to commemorate the diamond jubilee of Confederation. A year later, massive lobbying led to the appointment of a French Canadian bishop in Ottawa — a victory over the Irish Catholics. And in 1947, René Chaloult and André Laurendeau, both members of the Quebec legislature and of La Patente, succeeded in getting the province to adopt a flag. (In fact, it was the first provincial flag officially adopted in Canada.)

The advent of the 1960s and the Quiet Revolution proved to be fatal for La Patente. There had been attacks before: as early as 1939, the liberal journalist Jean-Charles Harvey mocked the organization in the weekly Le Jour. Five years later, T. D. Bouchard denounced it in the Senate, accusing it of “making war on foreign investment in business, expounding antisemitism, and undertaking secretly to control the patriotic societies, governments, and public administration. Almost all the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Societies, the Catholic unions, the school boards, the municipal councils, and the Young Chambers of Commerce have fallen under the direct influence of this secret order.” This denunciation had little effect, though; Quebec nationalists saw Bouchard as an outlier, and a speech in the Senate as unimportant. They were not wrong.

Almost two decades later, however, there was a more devastating attack. In 1963, a former member of the organization, Charles-Henri Dubé, revealed the secrets of La Patente in an article for Le Magazine Maclean, laying out its structure and the groups it had infiltrated — all of those that Bouchard had mentioned and more. An English version of the article appeared a month later. This was followed by another account, by Roger Cyr, also a former insider, published in the newspaper La Patrie. He named some of the well-known members, including Bertrand, Laporte, Robichaud, and Laurendeau, and later expanded his article into a book.

Finally, in March 1965, the organization dissolved, in part because the secret society was no longer secret but also because Quebec was not the same. The nationalist movement had split between separatists and federalists; the Church was losing its influence; the education system was being transformed. The era of rural traditionalism had ended. “French Canada, Quebec above all, had moved on,” Théorêt writes. “The evolution of laicity, of modern values like the consumer society, television, movies, fashion influenced by the American way of life, had strongly contaminated the minds of young French Canadians who wanted to break with these old moorings, which, in the eyes of many, had kept us tied to the wharf for too long and prevented us from discovering the real world. Modern Quebec had changed.”

In this way, La Patente is also the story of a society that no longer exists — a society struggling for survival. Yet echoes of some of the defensiveness and fear can still be heard from the present Quebec government.