“Emparons-nous du sol!”: Visions of Québec’s Fin-de-siècle Forests

Abstract: Wood was an essential fuel in nineteenth-century Québec, and Canada’s dense, old-growth forests were sites of great potentiality. As discouraging immigration to the United States became a priority for French-Canadian leaders who feared that population decline would result in a loss of influence and, ultimately, the loss of their unique culture, colonization of the North was presented as a viable alternative. Québec School poet William Chapman (1850–1917) and Antoine Labelle (1833–91), an influential priest known as the “apôtre de la colonisation,” were enthusiastic advocates for colonization, which aligned with their messianic vision of French-Canadian culture and literature. In this article, I analyze Chapman’s poems on trees, forests, and logging alongside selections from Labelle’s writings. I underscore the significance of the forest both as a fuel source and a metaphor for French-Canadian society rendered all the more arresting by the failure of the so-called French-Canadian “mission” in North America.