Lionel Groulx
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Lionel-Adolphe Groulx (January 13, 1878 - May 23, 1967), called Abbé Groulx (Canon Groulx), was a Roman Catholic priest, historian and nationalist.
Groulx was born at Chenaux, Quebec, Canada, and died in Vaudreuil, Quebec. After his seminary training and studies in Europe he taught at Valleyfield College, then the Université de Montréal. In 1927 he founded and edited a monthly journal called Action Française that later changed its name to L'action canadienne-française. In the inter-war period, Groulx was an avowed admirer of Benito Mussolini and suggested in an 1934 article that Quebec could use a leader like Il Duce.
Lionel Groulx called the Canadian Confederation of 1867 a disaster and espoused the theory that Quebec's only hope for survival was to foster a Roman Catholic Quebec as a bulwark against English power. He also developed a Quebec history curriculum that ignored the fact that France chose to keep Guadaloupe and hand over Quebec to Great Britain in the 1763 Treaty of Paris. Groulx was very successful promoting his brand of ultramontanism. Through his writings and teaching at the university, and his association with the intellectual elite of French Quebec he had a profound influence on many people including Michel Chartrand and Camille Laurin. While studying in Europe between 1906 and 1909, Groulx wrote letters to his family in which he asserted that everything possible should be done to keep the Jews out of Quebec because he knew what the Jews and the Freemasons were capable of doing.
In her 1993 book, The Traitor and the Jew: Anti-Semitism and the Delirium of Extremist Right-Wing Nationalism in French Canada from 1929-1939 (Antisémitisme et nationalisme d'extrême-droite dans la province de Québec 1929-1939), French-Canadian author and historian Esther Delisle documented the lifelong anti-Semitism on the part of Lionel Groulx, detailing his writings filled with denunciations of the Jews, blaming them for numerous social ills. Her attributions of pseudonymous articles to Groulx have been seriously questioned, however, as has her assertion that Groulx was an active fascist subversive.
Delisle's book also recounted the support given the Vichy regime in France during World War II by the Quebec nationalist elite. Kevin Henley, professor of history at Collège de Maisonneuve in Montreal wrote that Groulx helped smuggle Milice official Jacques de Bernonville into Quebec. De Bernonville, the right hand man to Klaus Barbie, had been convicted of war crimes in France and sentenced to death.
Lionel Groulx's major writings are Histoire du Canada français (1951), and Notre maître le passé.
Groulx founded the Institut d'histoire d'Amérique française in 1946, a small institute located in Montreal that is devoted to the historical study of the French presence in North America and the publication of La revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française. A station on the Montreal Metro was named for him. In November of 1996, the League for Human Rights of B'nai Brith Canada officially requested that the Executive Committee of the Montreal Urban Community (M.U.C.) recommend a name change to the Lionel Groulx metro station in Montreal.
External links
- Bibliography on Lionel Groulx, largely works in French (http://www2.marianopolis.edu/quebechistory/biblio/BibliographieGroulx.htm)fr:Lionel Groulx