Date Published:
March 2005

L’Encyclopédie de l’histoire du Québec / The Quebec History Encyclopedia

Henri-Raymond Casgrain

Casgrain, Henri Raymond (1831-1904), priest and historian, was born at Rivière Ouelle, Lower Canada, on December 16, 1831, the son of the Hon. Charles Eusèbe Casgrain and Anne Elizabeth, daughter of the Hon. Jacques Baby. He was educated at the College of Ste. Anne and the Quebec Seminary, and was ordained a priest of the Roman Catholic Church in 1856. In 1874 he was compelled to give up active parochial duties; but long before this he had turned his energies toward literary and historical work. His first important publication was a volume of Légendes canadiennes (Quebec, 1861), and this was followed-by his Histoire de la Mère Marie de l'Incarnation (Quebec, 1864; new and revised ed., Montreal, 1886), Vie des Saints (Ottawa, 1867), Les pionniers canadiens (Quebec, 1876), Opuscules (Quebec, 1876), Histoire de I'Hôtel Dieu de Québec (Quebec, 1878), and Une paroisse canadienne au xviie siècle (Quebec, 1880). Together with a number of short biographies, most of these were collected in his (Oeuvres complètes (4 vols., Montreal , 1884). His Pélerinage au pays d' Evangéline (Quebec, 1888) was crowned by the French academy. But his chief work was his Montcalm et Lévis (2 vols., Quebec , 1891; Tours, 1898) and this was followed by Une seconde Acadie (Quebec, 1894), Les sulpiciens et les prêtres des missions étrangères en Acadie (Quebec, 1897), Les origines du Canada (Quebec, 1898), and Montcalm and Wolfe (Toronto, 1905). He published also two small volumes of verse A ma soeur Rosalie (privately printed, 1860) and Les miettes (Quebec, 1869); and he edited, with a memoir of his mother, his mother's Mémoires de famille (Rivière Ouelle, 1891). He died in Quebec, on February 12, 1904. In 1877 he was made a LL.D. of Laval University; and in 1889 he was elected president of the Royal Society of Canada, of which he was a charter member, and in the proceedings of which a number of papers by him appeared. See A. B. Routhier, Eloge historique de M. l' Abbé H. R. Casgrain (Trans. Roy. Soc. Can., 1904), and Abbé C. Roy, L' Abbé Casgrain (La Nouvelle-France, 1904). A bibliography, of his publications is in the Trans. Roy. Soc. Can., 1894.

Source  : W. Stewart WALLACE, ed., The Encyclopedia of Canada, Vol. II, Toronto, University Associates of Canada, 1948, 411p., pp. 10-11.