ONE LANGUAGE, TWO SISTERS & SEVERAL HATPINS
How this city’s fight for French education was won
It was a calm, cold January morning in 1916 when a horde of angry local mothers — armed with hatpins and sewing scissors for weapons — descended on Murray Street’s École Guigues and smuggled two young francophone teachers back into their former classrooms.
Months before, the province had thrown schoolteachers Béatrice and Diane Desloges out of the Lowertown boys’ school because they had refused to stop teaching in French.
But in what would become one of the most important moments for Ottawa’s French community since Confederation, the Desloges sisters, supported by a small army of francophone parents, showed that Franco- Ontarians would not stand for losing their minority language and education rights.
“These women were resisters,” says Soukaïna Boutiyeb, executive director of the Réseau du patrimoine franco-ontarien, a provincial francophone heritage organization. “They were convinced of the French fact, determined to keep their language, to fight for the French language for future generations.”
Regulation 17, introduced at Queen’s Park in 1912, was meant to stamp out French education in the province by restricting instruction in the language to one hour a day and only in primary schools. But from the moment the tight-knit Desloges sisters started teaching at Guigues in September 1915, they rejected the rule.
At just 23 and 20 years old, and in an era when women still couldn’t vote, Béatrice and Diane showed what might have been a genetic inclination toward rebellion: Their grandfather, Michel Desloges, was a Patriote who fought in the Battle de Saint-Eustache against the British in 1837.
Resisting Regulation 17 in Ottawa wouldn’t be an easy fight, however. As the biggest and most prestigious French school in the province, Guigues was under intense scrutiny from provincial authorities.
During the Desloges sisters’ first month at the school, the Petite Commission — a new school board imposed by the province to replace the francophone-led Commission des écoles séparées d’Ottawa — threatened to refuse the sisters’ pay and revoke their teaching diplomas if they didn’t start instructing in English. When the Desloges sisters still wouldn’t listen, the school board kicked them out on Oct. 4, 1915.
The sisters’ resolve wasn’t so easily shaken. The next morning, they began teaching clandestine classes — without pay — in a Murray Street chapel, then in two abandoned shops at the corner of Dalhousie and Guigues streets. Supported by parents, Béatrice and Diane’s students followed, and for months the teachers hired to replace the Desloges and teach in English showed up to empty classrooms at Guigues.
“They kept on teaching, but the conditions, these weren’t spaces that were meant for teaching,” Boutiyeb says. “There wasn’t much light, there wasn’t heat. Imagine a tiny chapel, teaching to kids in there.”
By Christmas 1915, with students shivering in their makeshift classrooms, parents were fed up. On the morning of Jan. 4, 1916, a group of 70 mothers, according to the Ottawa Journal, occupied Guigues and welcomed back the Desloges sisters to the school. For the rest of the day, the mothers, hatpins at the ready, stood guard in the building ’s vestibule while 50 fathers formed a second garrison outside.
Three days later, about 30 Ottawa police officers were ordered to bar the Desloges sisters from re-entering Guigues. But when they showed up, about 1,000 francophone parents had already converged on the school’s front steps.
Things didn’t go well. “One officer had his eye blacked and another his thumb chewed,” read the Jan. 7 Journal, adding that the government lawyer who also showed up at the school was pelted with ice and “generally jostled.” Meanwhile, the Desloges sisters — the “Gardiennes de Guigues” as they became known — were quietly spirited into their classrooms through a side window.
Sensing defeat, the police eventually left. Students filed into their classrooms and classes began as normal. A few dozen mothers, hatpins and scissors in hand, stood sentinel day and night at Guigues for several weeks afterward. Protests and marches to the mayor’s office and Parliament were also launched to support the Desloges.
“It was a battle that never should have happened,” says Irène Morin, whose grandmother, Alice Laporte, was one of the parents who stood guard over Guigues in 1916. Several of Morin’s uncles attended the school at the time.
“Certainly, it was important, and we’re proud of it. But it was something they should never have had to do, fight for our education rights.”
Still, a major victory had been won. Guigues’ fate was back in francophone hands.
After the “Battle of the Hatpins,” the Ontario government turned a blind eye to Guigues even though Regulation 17 remained in force, says Michel Prévost, the University of Ottawa’s chief archivist.
Faced with the ongoing Great War in Europe and the prospect of angering already anti-conscription Quebec by igniting French-English tensions in the nation’s capital, the government never attempted another large-scale crackdown on francophone teachers in Ottawa.
Other areas weren’t so lucky. The government officially enforced Regulation 17 at many Ontario schools until 1927, and the policy wasn’t formally abolished until 1944.
Only in February 2016, shortly after the 100-year anniversary of the parents’ defence of Guigues, did the Ontario government formally apologize to the province’s francophone community for the education policies of the 1910s and ’20s.
Although the Desloges sisters became the symbols of resistance to Regulation 17, they weren’t the only Franco-Ontarians to stand up against the rule, Prévost says. Many others, including Pembroke schoolteacher Jeanne Lajoie, were instrumental in the fight against Ontario’s French-language education policies. Women in particular, Prévost says, played an inspiring role in the resistance, especially during an era when they were marginalized in society.
“Often in resistance movements, it’s rare that it is women who are recognized. But today when we talk about the resistance against Regulation 17, immediately those women come to mind,” he says. “At the beginning of the 20th century, when women didn’t always occupy the space they deserved in history, I find that very interesting that we had a movement dominated by women.”
As it wasn’t exactly a time of equality, both Desloges sisters stopped teaching in the early 1920s after they got married (wedded women weren’t allowed to teach).
Diane moved to Montreal with her husband, Georges Tanguay, where she had five children. Béatrice stayed in Ottawa, where she had three children with Oliva Lanthier and remained heavily involved in the city’s francophone community.
Over a century on, says Boutiyeb, the Desloges’ memory lives on both in Ottawa and in Ontario’s greater francophone community. Béatrice had a French Catholic high school named after her in Orléans.
“When we talk about Regulation 17 and when we talk about the resistance that Franco-Ontarians mounted against it, the Desloges sisters’ resistance was one of the events that we rally around and that we all remember,” says Boutiyeb.
For Prévost, their story is part of a constant struggle for recognition faced by Ottawa’s francophones — from early fights for government services in French, to the battle to save the Montfort Hospital in the ’90s, to current attempts to make the city officially bilingual.
“We owe them a great debt — and in the long term, too, because for decades afterwards we used their example to develop a feeling of pride and belonging in Ontario,” he says. “If there hadn’t been any resistance and they’d applied Regulation 17 to the letter, it would have pretty quickly assimilated Franco- Ontarians.”