Becoming Fool of Love: Montreal walking tour!

Today, I felt like a traveller again...

I joined a small group of couchsurfers, for a casual -and free- historical tour of the city.
I had found the event posted on couchsurfing.com: ''L'histoire de Montréal par ses immigrants''.
''Perfect!'' I thought. ''This is exactly what I'm hoping to delve into here!''

I wondered how many people would be brave enough to show up for a stroll in the winter cold. I didn't know what to expect. I thought it was a nice day out though. So I just went, hoping I'd be warm enough, and that my foot would hold off okay.
(I have been diagnosed with a plantar fasciitis. Darn it. Other story...)

We met our guide Philippe in front of the Grande Bibliothèque de l'UQAM, and we follow him inside for a look at the map and an introduction to the cultural history of the metropolis. There was a guy from Lyon, another Peruvian born but raised here, in Laval. There was a girl from Malaga, in Andalucia! Another joined us at the beginning of our walk; she is from Guadeloupe (and is white).

I've been to Montréal countless times before. I came here as a child, on summer vacations with my family. And in the past several years I've spent lots of short stays with my friends who have now settled here. But I really don't know much about the history of this place. I'm disturbed because I hear so much English spoken on the streets. It's irrational; I know it's been a dual occupancy since the beginning.
So I was curious and impatient to learn about that whole cultural process...

Copper apparently changes color with time.
This roof used to be shiny and... well... copper-colored!
(It's just like an oxidized penny!)

I learned that the Natives never had settlements on the island (yes, Montreal is an island), but instead came sporadically, to trade furs and other goods.
I was brought back - in my imagination - to the time where the first French explorers came and created trading posts along the river - rather than ''colonies'' per se. They were here for commerce, strictly. Along the St-Laurent - in Québec, Trois-Rivière, and Tadoussac - they were but a small 300 surviving, and trading with the Natives.
They also wanted to convert them to Christianity, of course. (At that time, France is experiencing a strong boost of Catholic fervor, in reaction to the Protestant Revolution.)

1641. Eight dreamers set out to build their great project: the ''Société de Notre-Dame de Montréal pour la Conversion des Sauvages de la Nouvelle-France''. They have a clear goal: they want to build a walled city, a colony, where they will educate the settlers and the Natives into the glory of their fervent Catholicism.
Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve is one of these enthusiastic christians. Today he is considered the founder of Montréal. But according to our guide Philippe, we should give the most credit to Jeanne Mance (a nurse), since she was the one who persisted the longest, and stayed long after all the initial utopists had died or returned to France.
Ville-Marie, as it was originally called, was far off into the wilderness back then. There were Natives roaming around. There were the rapids of St.Louis (Lachine), which couldn't be navigated but had to be portaged instead. There were the seasons.
On the island, the population stagnated at 42 people during all of the first decade. Some left, others died from malnutrition and harsh conditions, a few were killed by local Iroquois fighters.

It's a harsh place to try and settle.

By the late 1650s, there's about a hundred people living in Ville-Marie. Maisonneuve has returned to the mother land, Jeanne Mance is still here. The Roi-Soleil, Louis XIV, takes over the French monarchy and decides to centralize his North American assets. This is the end of the religious utopian project for the Société Notre-Dame. Ville-Marie is but another piece in the colonial, commercial, battle.

There will be more than forty wars between the Nouvelle-France and the New-England over the following hundred years. From the start, the Canadiens (I learned that the word originally referred to French settlers, before it turned into French Canadiens and British Canadians. Only in the 1960s did the identity of Québécois really take shape in the collective psyche.) are outnumbered by a ratio of 20:1. There are English settlers everywhere. And in 1760 it's the infamous battle on the Plains of Abraham, and the rest is history. Nouvelle-France is no more. Canada becomes a British belonging.
But the first waves of English speaking Montrealers are mostly Irish and Scottish. They come to take over the fur trade, since there is now a law prohibiting French Canadians to do business.

Our poet: Émile Nelligan,
son of an Irish man and a French Canadian woman.

During the first forty years of the nineteenth century, there are 70% anglos in Montreal.
The Industrial Revolution is shaking things up here too. The city (which, by the way, is still only a fraction of the island) becomes a port of confluence for trade and shipping.
French peasants go to the United States looking for work. They go to Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts. Some will come to Montreal in the 1850s, and the city will expand a bit, east of the Main street: Saint-Laurent.

I learned then, that this is the street that divides the island between East and West. It's something anyone living here finds out quickly. I'm glad I didn't have to get terribly lost before learning that fact.

Our guide actually took us for a walk up Rue St-Laurent. He explained that it shows pretty well the different strata of immigrations that constitute the metropolis.

La ''Main'' is history.

Irish, Scottish... then Germans and Jews (''Germans'' also including Eastern Europeans who then lived under German occupation), as well as Italians, and Greeks... and then Chinese people immigrated. And Vietnamese people also came, and Haitians (two waves; the first were intellectuals fleeing the dictatorship of Duvalier Père, the second generation, under Duvalier Fils), and Moroccans and Lebanese people, then more Maghrebians, and some West Africans too. And Chileans (leaving their homeland under Pinochet), and Argentinians, etc. Portuguese immigrants apparently came from the Azores island (when?), and I know for sure there is also a big Brazilian population here.

You get the idea. Montreal was always a metropolis! I think this is both fantastic and disturbing. And I'm very inspired to seek out more information on the subject, to read historical books and novels, and to talk to everybody about where their ancestors come from...

And to go back to all these old restaurants we walked by, and try it all..