12 Facts About Lionel Groulx

Lionel Groulx was ordained to the priesthood on 28 June 1903.

Lionel Groulx believed that only through national education and the Quebec government could the economic and social inferiority of French Canadians be repaired.

Lionel Groulx called the Canadian Confederation of 1867 a failure and espoused the theory that French Canada's only hope for survival was to bolster a French State and a Roman Catholic Quebec as the means to emancipate the nation and a bulwark against English power.

Lionel Groulx believed the powers of the provincial government of Quebec could and should be used, within Confederation, to better the lot of the French Canadian nation, economically, socially, culturally and linguistically.

Lionel Groulx preferred the settled habitants to the more adventurous and, in his view, licentious coureurs des bois.

Lionel Groulx has been described as the first French Canadian historian to consider the period of French colonial rule superior to that of the British control that followed it, evaluating the conquest of New France as a disaster rather than the common 19th-century Canadian view of it as a 'blessing' that saved Quebec from the atheist terrors of the French Revolution.

Lionel Groulx developed a Quebec history curriculum that glorified French colonization in Canada, the difficulties imposed upon the Canadiens by the conquest of New France, and how these were countered by lengthy political struggles for democratic rights.

Lionel Groulx insisted, as had many before him, on the Quebec Act of 1774 as the official recognition of his nation's rights.

Lionel Groulx bore particular affection for the undertaking of Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine, that in 1849 successfully restored the rights of the French language along with the obtention of responsible government, thus thwarting the assimilation plans of Lord Durham's policy of a union between the colonies of Upper and Lower Canada.

Lionel Groulx received the Royal Society of Canada's J B Tyrrell Historical Medal in 1948.

Rudin underscores Lionel Groulx's founding role in scholarly History with the development of the Montreal History Department.

Lionel Groulx founded the Institut d'histoire d'Amerique francaise in 1946, an institute located in Montreal devoted to the historical study of Quebec and of the French presence in the Americas and the publication of La revue d'histoire de l'Amerique francaise, still today arguably the main publication for professional historians in Quebec.