General Introduction
The Séminaire de Québec Archives
In 1663, New France was already an emerging society, a population settlement colony with its commercial activity organized around the fur trade. This new country sought its identity through conflicted relations with the native populations and the concerns of France about its way of life, its language, its religion and its education. It was also in that year that the Séminaire de Québec was founded, built in the very heart of the colony by Mgr. François de Laval.
Despite the upheavals of the French Régime, the establishment of a new administration in the aftermath of the Conquest of 1759, the Patriotes' Rebellion with Louis-Joseph Papineau, the political impasse that preceded and accompanied the Canadian Confederation of 1867, the two Great Wars, the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, up to our current upheavals generated by the weakening of national borders and the technological advances that are increasingly modifying our way of life, the Séminaire de Québec was, and still is, present and very much alive.
More than three centuries of history to discover - The Séminaire de Québec Archives is intended for everyone who is curious about history. This publication presents people, events and places and reveals to us the scope of the spiritual, cultural and educational influence and outreach of the institution. Many individuals have lived in these solid stone walls, have thought there, have educated students, and defended their rights and those of others. They were concerned and worried; they laughed there, and they cried; they took part in making our society evolve and in writing our history.
In keeping with the European tradition of the religious congregations, the Séminaire's priests, upon their arrival, began keeping archives to preserve the historical memory of their community. In this regard, it appears essential to briefly outline the history of this archive repository in order to more fully grasp its importance. In September 1688, Abbé Charles Glandelet produced the first general inventory of the Séminaire's papers, which were preserved at the Procuracy until 1882. It was only in 1938 that permission was granted to the students and professors of the Institut d'histoire of Laval University to gain access to the archives in order to prepare dissertations and theses. In 1983, these archives, by then accessible to all, became one of the components of the collections managed by the Musée du Séminaire de Québec, which became the Musée de l'Amérique française in 1993.
The inestimable richness of the Séminaire de Québec archives has long been recognized by researchers and historians. In order to make this recognition more official, an application was made in 1989 to the ministère des Affaires culturelles by Mr. Laurent Tailleur, a Séminaire priest and Director of the archive repository, to have the Séminaire de Québec archives formally registered. Following this request, the Québec Government officially recognized, on 16 August 1990, the importance of the document heritage of the Séminaire de Québec archives by designating the repository as a private registered archive centre. The Musée de la civilisation, by a memorandum of understanding agreed upon with the Séminaire de Québec in 1995, integrated the Musée de l'Amérique française into its own administration and its conservation and diffusion activities. The Musée de la civilisation thereby assumed full managerial responsibility for the various collections of the Séminaire de Québec, including its archives.
This is the context in which the Musée de la civilisation produced and finally published this document, intended to provide a general description of the archives of the Séminaire de Québec. Long requested and awaited, this publication required intense teamwork, taking up the challenge of intellectually organizing the information, using piece by piece descriptive index records as basic documents. The production of More Than Three Centuries of History to Discover - The Séminaire de Québec Archives required long months of work to organize the information, establish the context of its creation and rework a classification plan to more accurately reflect the functions and activities of the Séminaire, yet without modifying the physical storage arrangement of the documents. We had to adapt our working methodology, enrich the contents by further research and verifications, question, further specify, review and modify over again before we finally succeeded in writing the history of the Séminaire de Québec and making it live.
The priests of this educational institution perpetuated its tradition of excellence through their writings. Of course, priests were trained there, but the institution also trained the core membership of a French Canadian elite that was to occupy most of the positions in the country's political and economic structures. The information revealed by these archives largely exceeds the scope of the history of the Séminaire de Québec itself, for it also contributes to illustrate the broader historical and intellectual growth of the French culture in North America.
This prestigious institution built up an exceptional archival heritage over time. We are proud to present you with the result of this project entitled More Than Three Centuries of History to Discover - The Séminaire de Québec Archives, and we hope that this publication will contribute to make the multiple facets of the life of the Séminaire de Québec better known and enable more people to discover, in a sometimes unexpected fashion, many witnesses of the past who still live on in these archives.
Pierre Bail
Director of the Collections and Historics Archives
