Marguerite Bourgeoys

French-born educator and saint

• Born: April 17, 1620
• Birthplace: Troyes, France
• Died: January 12, 1700
• Place of death: Montreal, New France (now in Canada)

Arriving in Montreal from France eleven years after the city’s founding, Bourgeoys developed a community of uncloistered women, called the Congrégation de Nôtre-Dame of Montreal, dedicated to the education of indigenous peoples and French settlers. Her work critically supported the colony in its early years by providing both basic instruction and vocational training. She was beatified in 1950 and canonized in 1982.

Early Life

Marguerite Bourgeoys (mahr-gehr-reet buhr-zhwah), the seventh child born to Abraham Bourgeoys and Guillemette Garnier, grew up in a rented house in the center of Troyes. Her parents were members of the merchant class, and her father held a position in the city’s mint. Marguerite was especially close to her father, who carried with him, according to Marguerite, a trinket she had made for him as a child. She spent her childhood years with other girls, pretending she was part of a community in a faraway land.

Bourgeoys received her education probably from the women of the Congrégation de Nôtre-Dame, established in Troyes in 1628. With the Congrégation, she would have learned reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion. Other than where she was likely educated, little else is known of Bourgeoys’s early life. She did provide some descriptions later in life, however. A girl who was popular and had a cheerful disposition, she showed no exceptional piety until her conversion experience on Rosary Sunday, 1640. As part of a procession of women in honor of the Virgin, she passed by the portal of Nôtre-Dame-des-Nonnains. Looking up at a statue of Mary, she was struck by its beauty. Although Bourgeoys did not have a “typical” mystical experience, the moment was transformative. The Marian imagery with which Marguerite was to identify was not the passive, submissive ideal but an activism that included teaching and mission.

Bourgeoys joined the Congrégation, a loosely knit group of women who met regularly under the guidance of Louise de Chomedey, sister of the Sieur de Maisonneuve, the first governor of Montreal. Most of the women lived at their respective homes, but they took part in devotional activities and educated girls. Their compassionate ideas about teaching were advanced for the time, as they emphasized involvement of the girl’s entire family. The girls would adopt positive roles in their families, society, and religious life.

Bourgeoys’s work with Father Antoine de Gendret, the Congrégation’s spiritual director, turned her toward the religious life. She aspired to the Carmelite Order but was rejected. Instead, she took a private vow of chastity in 1643, followed by a vow of poverty. The beginning of a project for a new kind of female ministry seems to have resulted from the interactions between Marguerite, Gendret, and the Congrégation.

Life’s Work

Doors of opportunity were opened for Marguerite Bourgeoys following the arrival in Troyes of Paul de Chomedey, sieur de Maisonneuve, whose sisters Marguerite knew well. Maisonneuve, looking for a female educator, approached Marguerite about the position, an offer she discussed with Gendret and others.

In 1653, two years after the death of her father, she joined Maisonneuve on a trip to Brittany. Once again, the Virgin appeared to her, urging Bourgeoys to “go, for I will not forsake you.” After an abortive embarkation from Saint-Nazaire, she and Maisonneuve, along with 108 future colonists (including a few women), finally set sail in July. During the month before the ship left port, rumors had circulated that Bourgeoys was Maisonneuve’s mistress. Although he later considered marrying her, a deep friendship evolved instead.

After an arduous journey, the ship arrived in Quebec on September 22. Maisonneuve went directly to Montreal, but Bourgeoys remained behind to care for those sickened by the voyage. Although offered a place in the Ursuline convent, she instead chose to live among the settlers.

During her forty-six years in Canada, Bourgeoys devoted herself to active service. The worst of the Iroquois attacks on the colony had ended by the time she arrived in mid-November. For her first five years, she lived in the governor’s residence in the center of the fort. Only fourteen women and fifteen children lived in Montreal, but 1653 marked a turning point for the settlement. The following year, three of her female shipboard companions married settlers, and soon there were births, the first French-Canadians.

As early as 1655, Bourgeoys decided to build a chapel dedicated to the Virgin. Three years later, she opened her school in a one-room stable. The building of the school, the center of the Congrégation de Nôtre-Dame of Montreal, was completed on April 30, 1658, the feast day of Saint Catherine of Siena, a woman who had actively influenced the course of political and religious events in the fourteenth century. Early teaching at the new school consisted mainly of reading and catechism.

In October, Bourgeoys returned to France with philanthropist and lay nurse Jeanne Mance, who required medical attention. Bourgeoys used the time to recruit more women for the colony in Canada. Her goal was to create not a cloistered community of women so typical of Catholic Reformation Europe but instead an active group of uncloistered women who would teach both girls and boys. Once in Troyes, she stayed not with her family but with the congregation there, enlisting four women for her new community. Along with Mance, Bourgeoys and her recruits left France on the Feast of Our Lady of the Visitation in 1659, a date she felt marked the true beginning of the Congrégation de Nôtre-Dame of Montreal. The ship arrived in Quebec on the eve of the Feast of the Nativity, and they continued on to Montreal three weeks later.

From 1659 until Maisonneuve’s forced retirement and departure for France in 1665, Bourgeoys experienced some of the happiest days of her life. While Montreal’s independence was under constant attack from the bishop and governor of Quebec, François Laval, the colony continued to grow, as Mance led her congregation of hospital nuns at the Hôtel Dieu, which she had founded, and Bourgeoys began in earnest to educate colonists. A census in 1663 showed about seventy children of elementary school age. In the early years, boys and girls learned reading and writing, prepared for first communion, and trained for trades and “honorable work.” Bourgeoys and her companions supported themselves by taking in laundry and sewing jobs. Shoveling snow was also a regular part of their work.

In 1662, Bourgeoys obtained two new properties, one for crops and animals and the other as a temporary shelter for the filles du roi, the “king’s girls” who were sent as partners for settlers. In 1665, with Maisonneuve’s final departure for France, came the end of what is considered Montreal’s “heroic era.” However, Bourgeoys and her companions continued their educational and vocational training. Maisonneuve’s departure had the effect of altering the vision of the congregation in Troyes; no longer would they envision a Canadian mission. As a result, Bourgeoys would place her school squarely on a secular footing. She had been encouraged to pursue an uncloistered path earlier by Gendret, and was supported later in her endeavors by the Sulpician fathers, who had taken over the work of the Society of Gentlemen and Ladies of Nôtre-Dame, the early settlers, in 1663. The Society recognized the practicality of a self-supporting school.

Bourgeoys made provisions for the continued stability of the school by elevating to power those women who were skilled in fund-raising and recruitment. The years that followed increasingly included work in the burgeoning French settlements around Montreal and with the indigenous peoples. King Louis XIV granted official recognition of the Congrégation in 1671, followed by the bishop of Quebec’s recognition five years later.

Even with approval, however, interference from Quebec continued. In 1694, Jean-Baptiste de Saint-Vallier, the second bishop of Quebec, tried to force a merger between the Ursulines and the Congrégation, which would have required Bourgeoys’s community to follow the Rule of Saint Augustine. Bourgeoys, however, took the fight directly to the Sulpicians in Paris, who supported her cause. In 1698, Saint-Vallier gave in, and the constitutions of the community received approval in 1698. Although the women of the community were known as “nuns” and “sisters,” they had effectively broken out of the pattern of cloistering that had been established in Europe by the Catholic Reformation.

When Marguerite Bourgeoys died in January, 1700, forty sisters remained to carry on her educational and apostolic work in and around Montreal. She was beatified in 1950 and canonized by Pope John Paul II on October 31, 1982, becoming Canada’s first woman saint.

Significance

Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys’s dynamic and assertive personality kept her from following the pattern of behavior expected of devout women in France. Aided in her efforts by Father Gendret in France and Paul de Maisonneuve and Jeanne Mance in Montreal, Bourgeoys created a school uniquely suited to a frontier territory constantly under assault from Iroquois attacks, a harsh climate, fires, and floods.

She used to her advantage the hostility between the ecclesiastical authorities in Quebec and the Jesuits and Sulpicians in Montreal to teach vocational skills, reading and writing, and catechism. The Congrégation she founded focused particularly on the plight of poor girls, teaching them the skills needed to make a living. Fighting for the right to teach and minister as secular sisters, Bourgeoys broke free of the constraints expected of women during her forty-six years in New France. More than twenty-five hundred Sisters of the Congrégation continue her work into the twenty-first century, around the world.

Bibliography

Choquette, Leslie.“’Ces Amazones du Grand Dieu.’” French Historical Studies 17, no. 3 (2000): 627-655. A study of how women altered the frontier society of New France to break free of Old World constraints.

Côté, Louise F. The Writings of Marguerite Bourgeois: Autobiography and Spiritual Testament. Montreal: Congrégation de Nôtre-Dame, 1976. An excellent collection of primary sources.

Delâge, Denys. Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in the American Northeast, 1600-1664. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1993. A native perspective on the history of French and Dutch colonization in northeastern North America.

Eccles, W. J. The French in North America, 1500-1783. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998. A general history of New France.

Moogk, Peter N. Le Nouvelle France: The Making of French Canada, a Cultural History. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000. Moogk traces the roots of the current conflict between English- and French-speaking Canadians to the political and social developments that occurred in New France in the seventeenth century.

Simpson, Patricia. Marguerite Bourgeoys and Montreal, 1640-1665. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. A superb biography of Bourgeoys up to 1665. Includes extensive notes and a bibliography.