Curé Labelle, a Formidable Unifier
Date: 2016
Source: Société d’histoire de la Rivière-du-Nord
Guest: Dominique Beauregard
Transcription:
Curé Labelle could rally the most disparate people to work together around one idea.
And there were none more anticlerical than Arthur Buies and his friend William Scott, who was a Protestant.
His friend Jules-Édouard Prévost was a Liberal; Alphonse Nantel was a Conservative; Onésime Reclus was a famous geographer and, I’m pretty sure, a Protestant. His brother Élisée Reclus was an anarchist. He had friends who were free thinkers. So he was someone who could connect with divergent people, people from all walks of life. He was equally at ease in a palace and a settler’s house; that’s what made him so extraordinary.