In southwestern Nova Scotia, the municipality of Clare includes more than 25 small villages spread over about fifty kilometers along Saint Mary’s Bay, between the towns of Digby and Yarmouth. Of Acadian and French-speaking origin, the vast majority of Clare’s residents are still able to conduct a conversation in both official languages[1]. It is also the only municipality in the province to offer its services in both French and English. Similarly, the municipality is home to Université Sainte-Anne, the only French-language university in the province. It is therefore natural that it was chosen as one of the 14 welcoming French-speaking communities in Canada (outside Quebec), where newcomers can live and thrive in French.
Since the founding of the Township of Clare in 1768, the Acadian community would never have achieved such a result without a homogeneous initial French-speaking population and good representation in the provincial legislature. It also owes much to its first resident priest, the French priest Jean-Mandé Sigogne, an authoritarian and uncompromising, but also generous and devoted missionary who arrived in the region in July 1799. A true pioneer of French-language education, Father Sigogne is considered the precursor of the private college that preceded Université Sainte-Anne, founded in 1890 at Pointe-de-l’Eglise (Clare). Today, Université Sainte-Anne is a university with strong roots in the five main Acadian and Francophone regions of the province. Here is a brief history of this proud Francophone university and its community roots…
A pioneer of French education
Let’s go back to the beginning of the 19th century, in southwest Nova Scotia. Father Sigogne had just founded the two parishes of Sainte-Marie, in Saint Mary’s Bay, and Sainte-Anne, further south, in the current municipality of Argyle. Dividing his time between the two parishes, he established his main residence in Saint Mary’s Bay, where Acadian families were most numerous. Settled along the coast, according to land concessions, these families already lived in a long string of small, homogeneous villages with a French-speaking majority. For a long time, by taking advantage of the abundant and high-quality local forest resources, these Acadians benefited from an economy less centered on the sea than in Argyle.
However, economics is not everything. Very quickly, Father Sigogne bitterly noted the harsh local reality. The Acadians remained poor and illiterate, very little inclined to have their children educated at school. One can understand why. Who would have helped them in their daily work, at home, in the forest, at sea or in the fields? However, how could one hope that their children could one day, without education, have an impact on the society around them, which was predominantly English-speaking? Convinced that illiteracy must be fought tirelessly, Father Sigogne created, shortly after his arrival, a small school at Pointe-de-l’Eglise, where he taught a few children catechism, reading and writing. Until his death in 1844, he spared no effort to ensure that young Acadians were educated in French.
The provincial public school system was only slowly established, starting in 1811. French-speaking teachers were few in number and it was only in 1841 that French-language schools were formally authorized[2]. As early as 1867, other public schools were created in the region, but boys[3] could not continue their studies in French beyond the ninth grade. It was to fill this gap that the Eudists Fathers founded the Collège Sainte-Anne in August 1890. The context of the “Acadian Awakening” lent itself perfectly to this. At the same time, the third national convention of Acadians was ending, at Pointe-de-l’Eglise, in a fervor conducive to the creation of a French-language college at Saint Mary’s Bay.
From classical college to secular university
At the beginning, Collège Sainte-Anne hesitated over the strategy to follow. Did they want a French or English, classical or commercial college? The Eudists sought to recruit Acadian students from Nova Scotia, which proved difficult, because Acadian families were poor. After two decades of trial and error, they finally adopted a classical program close to that of Quebec colleges, but with bilingual teaching. In 1952, the college had 188 students (boys), including 100 from Nova Scotia, 45 from Quebec and the others from New Brunswick and the United States. At the end of the 1960s, the major reform of the Quebec education system led to the disappearance of classical colleges (private and fee-paying). Collège Saint-Anne then lost the recruitment of Quebec students. Lacking human and financial resources, the Eudists ended up giving up the administration of the college.
In June 1971, Acadian Louis-Roland Comeau, Member of Parliament for Ottawa, was appointed the first president (future rector) of Collège Sainte-Anne, which had become a secular university. His conviction was that the university should display its particular identity, bilingual with a French character, serving the Acadian and Francophone community of the province. Under his rectorship, among the development work undertaken, the Acadian Centre (archives centre) was opened in 1972 and the Louis-R. Comeau library in 1977. The current French immersion as a second language program, where only French is permitted, also dates from 1972. Université Sainte-Anne then underwent other developments on its campus and, above all, a territorial expansion that gave it its current appearance…
In 1988, the Nova Scotia government reorganized the province’s college higher education (technical and vocational) and created the Collège de l’Acadie to add a French component to its college network. Made up of six training centres[4] in the Acadian regions, the Collège de l’Acadie adopted the distance learning formula. It welcomed its first students in 1992, then merged with Université Sainte-Anne in 2002. Since then, Université Sainte-Anne has also offered college programs at its five regional campuses, thus consolidating its roots in the main Acadian and Francophone regions of Nova Scotia.
In memory of Acadian history
Since its founding in 1890, Université Sainte-Anne has played a major role in the training of Acadian elites and the preservation of the French language, while welcoming international students. Today, at Pointe-de-l’Eglise, it houses valuable testimonies of the Acadian history of Saint Mary’s Bay.
On the university campus, across from the tourist information centre (Rendez-vous de la Baie), is the Monument de l’Odyssée acadienne, which commemorates the settlement of the first Acadian settlers. On the western edge of Petit Bois, which adjoins the campus, is the Monument Sigogne 200e, inaugurated in 1999 to honor the 200th anniversary of Father Sigogne’s arrival in the region.
A little further north, at Anse des Belliveau, the site of Pointe-à-Major marks the location of the first Acadian cemetery in Saint Mary’s Bay and its first mass. At Pointe-de-l’Eglise, you can still admire the Sainte-Marie Church, the largest wooden church in North America, whose future is, however, compromised.
Fortunately, the Congrès mondial acadien in August 2024, in southwest Nova Scotia, offers local authorities the opportunity to carry out a project to modernize the Acadian Shores Interpretive Excursion. This project will better promote Acadian heritage and local tourism experiences. Finally, a major annual cultural and heritage celebration since 1955, the Clare Acadian Festival is the oldest Acadian festival in the world. The region’s Acadian memory is still well preserved.
Header image: Entrance buildings of the Université Sainte-Anne, in Pointe-de-l’Eglise (Photo Jean-Marc Agator).
Author: Jean-Marc Agator,
Paris Region, France.
English translation: Jean-Pierre Bernier,
Greater Toronto Area (ON), Canada.
Main sources
Ross, Sally et J. Alphonse Deveau ; Les Acadiens de la Nouvelle-Ecosse, hier et aujourd’hui ; Les Editions d’Acadie, Moncton, 1995.
Université Sainte-Anne : site 125 années d’histoire(s) à raconter (in French).
[1] 68.5% of Clare’s 7,678 residents (Statistics Canada 2021).
[2] See on this site the generic article “A long fight for education in French”.
[3] Girls had to be content with a convent of the Sisters of Charity, in Pointe-de-l’Eglise or in Meteghan, where secondary studies were in English.
[4] Pointe-de-l’Eglise (coordination), Halifax, Tusket, Petit-de-Grat and Saint-Joseph-du-Moine in Nova Scotia, with a sixth centre in Prince Edward Island.