21 - When Italians Raised Their Heads

Immigrants among early settlers in Quebec when they fought British in 1800s

The fact that in the mid-19th century Montreal was the Canadian city with the highest number of Italians was well known to the Kingdom of Sardinia, so that a Consulate General was opened there. After the Unification, in 1861, it became the Consulate General of the Kingdom of Italy.
Italians had come in large numbers to Nouvelle France, as artists, traders and soldiers for the French Crown, since the 17th century. However, military immigration had an impulse in the early 19th century, when the British Crown stationed two regiments, Watteville and Meuron, along the St. Lawrence, with the purpose of defending Lower Canada (today's Quebec) from the expansionist intentions of the recently born United States. Those two regiments were Swiss and formed with mercenaries. They included over 600 young Italians recruited in the territories occupied by Napoleon. They had chosen to fight as soldiers of fortune over enlisting with the French. They were Piedmontese, Lombards, Neapolitans and Sicilians; their names have been preserved through the payrolls still kept at the War Office in London.
Hostilities between Great Britain and United States ceased in 1815, and the following year those two regiments were dismissed. A hundred mercenaries of German origin went and fought in Manitoba; the Italians stayed in Quebec where they got some land and became colonists. Many of them Frenchified or Anglicized their names: e.g. Burchisi became Burchési, Verdi became Verdy, Paillazzo became Pallatio. "Is this enough for you to realize," Filippo Salvatore, poet and author, teacher of Italian Literature at Concordia University, asks me, "that we are not late arrivals here? Far from being des Italiens qui vivent parmi nous, we are full-blown Canadians, proud of our Italian origins."
Browsing through history books we stumbled upon the reproduction of an article from the Gazette. It includes a curious bit of news: "Montreal," the title reads, "got its name from an Italian map." The author of the article, David Johnston, says that when Jacques Cartier arrived on the place where Montreal would be built, he wrote in his journal: "We call this mountain Mont Royal." The year was 1535. Some 20 years later, in 1556, Italian cartographer Giovanni Battista Ramusio was asked to draw a map of the area; while following Cartier's journal, he called the place Monte Real. Incredibly, this Italian name was adopted in 1575 by historian François de Belleforest, who was used as a source by Samuel de Champlain when he made his famous 1612 map. He made only a slight change, turning Monte Real in Montreal.
The over 160,000 square feet of Centro Leonardo Da Vinci, in the heart of St. Leonard (the local Little Italy), summarize over two centuries of Italian presence in Montreal. The Centro opened recently, but it won't be just a meeting place for Italians. "It will also be the place where our community will open to the others," says Luigi Liberatore, who chaired the committee that raised the funds for this structure, to the tune of $15 million. He continues: "This can represent the passage from Trudeau's multiculturalism to real interculturalism, which is when the communities recognized as equals dialogue with one another."
The lilies of France have never been lowered here. They still exist, not just on the flag of Quebec but in everyday life as well.
"Quebec is Europe, with all this entails," remarks Luigi Liberatore. "The rest of Canada, even with all its differences, has an American culture. I don't mean to say that things are better here and worse there. What I mean is that Canada has two different realities. In Quebec, we Italians found our natural habitat because we interact with people sharing our Latin cultural traits, our virtues and even our defects. Moreover, the Quebecois, staunch defenders of their own difference, had to recognize our own."
What did we give them in exchange? Liberatore: "We made Francophones and Anglophones talk to each other; everybody acknowledges that, even the Quebec separatists, whose secessionist ideas we doggedly opposed."
The authority conquered in Quebec by the Italians was not born out of indulgence. At times, on the contrary, their presence had to be rather gritty, as in the case of the St. Leonard riot of 1968.
A law was passed compelling immigrants (except for those of Anglo-Saxon origins) to send their children to Francophone schools. The law provoked the reaction of Italians, who insisted on choosing which school their children were to attend, regardless of whether it was a French or an English one. "Most preferred the English schools," remarks Angelo Principe, historian, who taught at the University of Toronto for many years, "because it offered greater job opportunities, as nearly all of North America speaks English. For French-Canadians, of course, it was a different matter. They were afraid that French would eventually become extinct. Imposing the teaching of French to immigrants meant getting fresh blood. It also meant keeping their culture, their traditions, and in the end also their political dominance over Quebec alive. From the cultural standpoint, it was a matter of life and death for French-Canadians. In 1968 at St. Leonard the clash was therefore between two mutually exclusive principles."
That clash of principles turned into a veritable riot. Italians refused to obey the law and escorted their children to English schools, where they were confronted by the police. A huge contingent of police officers tried to disperse them and pursued them all the way to St. Leonard, where the Italians held fast and erected barricades. The riot lasted four days, until police forces managed to overcome the defenders and stormed the neighbourhood.
Except for this episode and a few more detestable but secondary displays of intolerance, Canada welcomed Italians with open arms. It was not necessary for them to elbow their way like they did in Australia. Until the late Thirties, Catholic Quebec welcomed Italians wholeheartedly, also thanks to the agreement between Italy and the Holy See.
At the time Mussolini was seen as a brilliant head of State, worthy of respect and even imitation: "Nous n'avons pour Mussolini et pour l'Italie que de bonnes pensées, une bonne opinion, de l'admiration," said Quebecois Senator Maurice Riel.
Il Duce understood that the Concordat had given him an incredible PR boost among French-Canadians, and did not miss any opportunity to find credit as a Man of Providence. The diplomat he sent to Canada presented him as the conceiver of corporatism, a doctrine that claimed to be superior to free market as well as planned economy and boasted to be a political, economic, religious and social model. This did not leave Canadians indifferent, especially in Quebec.
The idyll had moments of true passion in Montreal. The 6,000 votes of Italians were decisive in 1934 for the election of Mayor Camillien Houde, who returned the favour by giving a parcel of land at Saint Denis and Jean Talon where the Casa d'Italia was erected. The previous year, the Fascist grandeur astonished the city with the 24 floatplanes of Italo Balbo's Trans-Atlantic flight. Montreal had displayed its admiration not only with a triumphal welcome to the airmen but even launching a "Balbo style." Models of the Italian planes were everywhere, and the "Cigarettes of the Aces" were sold in packets with the colours of the Italian flag. "This deed," Quebec Premier Taschereau wrote to Balbo, "brings our countries, connected by so many links, closer still."
Those links can be seen in the fresco in the church of Madonna of the Defence, still called "Mussolini's church" by some people. In the apse behind the main altar, painter Guido Nicheri (Anglicized as Nicher) portrayed Mussolini on horseback, surrounded by his quadrumvirs (De Bono, Balbo, De Vecchi, and Bianchi); there are also Guglielmo Marconi, the duke of Abruzzi, and a Canadian philanthropist, Senator Lawrence Wilson.
The fresco was unveiled in 1933, the year of Balbo's flight, and it is still there. Italian tourists who see it are prone to consider it a curiosity. On the other hand, it marked the best moment in a love story that began to break down in 1935, at the first signs of the rivalry between Italy and Great Britain that would eventually lead to the sanctions of the League of Nations. That is when a growing number of Canadians began to have second thoughts. Their doubts grew following the Italian aggression against Ethiopia and became huge when Mussolini signed the pact with Hitler and intervened with him in the Spanish Civil War. Those doubts became horrific certainty on June 10, 1940, when Italy declared war on Great Britain and Canada. For many Italians, often unaware witnesses of a tragic moment in history, that declaration marked the end of the welcome and the opening of the gates of internment camps.
About 600 Italians were taken from their homes and closed in the camps at Petawawa, Ontario, and Fredericton, New Brunswick, on the authority of the War Measures Act.
They were considered enemy aliens. Over half a century after that event, its shadow still looms between the Italian community and Canada. Not all of those interned were Fascists, and many were Canadian citizens; no official apology was ever issued (and unofficial apologies are not satisfactory), nor any indemnification came from Ottawa. The resentment voiced by the National Congress of Italian-Canadians stems from here. The Congress has been asking the Federal government to come out of the limbo of indecision and take a definite stance.
"We should also consider that the Canadians never matched the excesses of the British and Australians, who reserved tough concentration camps for their enemy aliens of Italian origin," remarks Angelo Principe.
Actually in Canada there was detention without rage, some of the inmates even talk of a "compulsory vacation"; however the fact is that 600 Italians were imprisoned. Were all of them really Fascists, or did they include many innocents?
Vince Luca, President of the National Congress of Italian-Canadians: "I do not wish to discuss whether the Italians interned at Petawawa and Fredericton were Fascists or not. In my opinion, only sentenced criminals should go behind bars. No trial had been conducted against those Italians. A few of them, or most of them if you prefer, had expressed political ideas that did not sit well with the Canadian government of the time. By interning them, that government made them pay for a political crime that was not punished by any law.
"Even though what was done to our fellow nationals could be justified by the particular emergency and tension of those years, why, after 50 years, can't anyone say 'sorry, we apologize for the disproportion between your actions and our reaction'? There's a law of physics, but it holds true even for societies, where every action corresponds to an equal and opposite reaction. This law went astray with Italians. These are the terms of the problem that we've been presenting to Ottawa for years."
What now? "Now," says Vince Luca, "after years of endless and fruitless discussions with the government we asked CIAO, the organization of Italian-Canadian lawyers, a legal opinion for a satisfactory solution of the problem. If no one else does it, let's do it ourselves."
What if Ottawa persisted in turning a deaf ear? Luca: "We shall decide on a different course."
Angelo Principe proposes a different analysis: "The fact that a few were unjustly interned may be possible; that others who should have been interned managed to avoid the camp thanks to high-ranking friends among the ruling Liberals has been proven. It has also been proven that, except for some 30 alleged criminals, the rest were open Fascists, and Canada had to defend itself from them. We can discuss it as much as we want, and different opinions can be held about the way the War Measures Act was applied, but nobody can deny that the Canadian government had the duty and the right, in wartime, to protect the country from potential enemies, i.e. the Fascists. Let's not forget that World War II had a very specific ideological, rather then national character."
Principe and Luca hold different positions, but both express the degree of awareness that Italian-Canadians have about Canada. Are the British and the French the only "founding peoples" of this country?
Angelo Principe smiles enigmatically. "This is what history says."

Publication Date: 2002-12-15
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=2144