Date Published:

Biographies of Prominent Quebec and Canadian

Historical Figures

Adélard Dugré

(1881-1970)

Damien-Claude Bélanger,

Department of History,

McGill University

Clergyman and novelist, was born at Pointe-du-Lac, Quebec. He was educated at the ultramontane Séminaire de Trois-Rivières. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1901 and taught at the Collège de Saint-Boniface in Manitoba from 1906 to 1915. Dugré was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1915. That same year he went to England to study theology at a Jesuit college. He returned to Canada in 1919 and taught theology at Montreal's Scolasticat de l'Immaculée Conception until 1932. Dugré became the school's chancellor in 1927. From 1932 to 1936 he was the Superior of the Jesuit province of Lower Canada. In 1936 he became the Society of Jesus' assistant general superior for the British Empire and Belgium. Ten years later, he was appointed head of Montreal's Maison Bellarmin. He retired in 1950. In 1925 Father Dugré wrote La campagne canadienne, a best-selling work of fiction that explored the differences between French Canadian and American society through the tale of a Franco-American family torn between its rural French Canadian roots and its urban Midwestern American home. The novel vigorously denounced the chaotic materialism of American civilization, which the author contrasted with the stable, ordered and spiritual quality of French Canadian society. These ideas were common to the ruralists of French Canada. Re-edited numerous times, including once in comic book form, La campagne canadienne was serialized by several Quebec newspapers.