Observance et profanation du dimanche dans l’industrie ferroviaire du Québec au XIXe siècle

Abstract

Quebec historiography often places the rise of industrial desecration of Sundays and the ensuing political debates at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article sheds light on the origins of these phenomena in Quebec by tracing the religious resistance to chronic disregard for Sunday observance on the railways in the nineteenth century. The study, which focuses on the half-century following the emergence of the railroad in the territory (1836–1886), traces the evolution of the religious struggle against Sunday trains, which began in Montréal in the 1840s and continued in the following decades, while railroad companies, caught between sometimes irreconcilable moral and commercial imperatives, constantly deviated from strict observance. Despite temporal and confessional differences, this struggle was led both by the Protestant, Presbyterian, and Methodist elites, mainly, and by the Catholic Church, which succeeded in making the observance of Sunday rest a political and legislative issue.