by Tom Flanagan
University of Calgary
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In his book Louis Riel (1963), the historian George Stanley reported that the young Louis Riel had signed in 1866 a marriage contract with Marie-Julie Guernon (1847–?)[1] but that her parents’ opposition frustrated the couple’s plans and Louis left Montreal in disappointment.
Louis spent a little over a year in Montreal, between the time he left school and the day he decided to return
to the west. This decision was, apparently, the result of the disappointment he suffered in a love affair. Some time during his years in Montreal, the young Riel met and fell in love with a young woman, Marie Julie Guernon, the daughter of Joseph Guernon and Louise Euphémie Bourque, who were neighbours of the Lees.[2] The lovers did not inform Marie’s parents of what happened, but they secretly concluded a marriage contract on June 12, 1866, before the notary, A. C. Décary of Montreal. When the bans were subsequently published in the Church of the Holy Infant Jesus, Mile End, St. Louis, Marie’s parents raised such objections to their daughter marrying a métis that the match was broken off; and Louis Riel, angry and disappointed, shook the dust of Montreal from his feet.[3]
Stanley states that the information was furnished to him “by M. Emile Falardeau of Montreal, who learned of the circumstances from the nephew of Riel’s fiancée, and who drew my attention to the existence of the marriage contract noted above.”[4] Falardeau was a well-known genealogist and historian of Quebec.
George Stanley’s papers in the University of Calgary archives contain extensive notes and drafts for the book Louis Riel, apparently dating from the mid- to late 1950s.[5] The material includes detailed descriptions of Riel’s time as a student and afterward in Montreal. There is, however, no reference to the love affair with Marie-Julie, which suggests that Stanley learned about it later after most of his research was done. From our days working together on the Riel Project, I can remember a conversation with Stanley in which the latter explained how he had learned about Marie-Julie. According to Stanley, Falardeau had told him (more or less): “I know something you don’t know. Louis Riel signed a marriage contract.”
It would be useful to know which member of the Guernon family was Falardeau’s informant, but we could not find that information in Falardeau’s papers held at the Société de généalogie de Longueuil.[6] In any case, it seems that nothing was said at this time about a pregnancy; Stanley would surely have included it in his highly detailed biography if he had known about it.
Later in the 1960s, Gilles Martel found a notebook of Riel’s youthful poetry in the Provincial Archives of Manitoba. Martel, Campbell, and I edited and published this notebook under the title Louis Riel: Poésies de jeunesse (1977).[7] It contains several love poems by and to Riel that shed new light on the romance, but it did not change the basic outlines of Stanley’s account. Now, however, we must consider the possibility that Louis and Marie-Julie had a love child who was raised by other members of the large Guernon family.
Glen Campbell and I first became aware of this possibility in fall 2018, when we submitted to Manitoba History a draft of this article. An anonymous reviewer of the draft commented as follows:
A Guernon family descendant, Olivier Guernon, claimed in 2005 (document on file at SHSB [Société Historique de Saint-Boniface]) that Julie had a child in 1866 that was given her surname. Family oral tradition offered some support for his claim. Was the engagement and marriage contract between Louis and Julie precipitated because of a suspected pregnancy or the result of an “indiscretion”? It was not uncommon, even in the rigid Catholic French Canadian tradition of the time, for engaged couples to be intimate…or produce what was called a 7 or 8 month baby… The Guernon family claim may be difficult to prove conclusively without DNA evidence as parish records were often evasive or subsequently “altered” but it is an interesting story.
The SHSB sent us a scanned copy of the file containing Olivier Guernon’s email of 11 November 2005:
Notre famille a comme une interrogation sur la descendance possible de Louis Riel. Je m’explique. Nous avons de bonnes raisons de croire que Louis Riel aurait eu un fils de son union avec Marie-Julie Guernon. Nous avons un acte de naissance qui correspondrait avec l’époque où Louis Riel serait venu a Montréal. A sa naissance cet aieul portait le nom de famille de la mère, ce qui, est pour l’époque une pratique très peu commune si vous voyez ce que je veux dire. Est-ce possible? Comment le valider??? Je veux juste savoir. De plus mon frère se souvient qu’il a fait une recherche sur la généalogie lorsqu’il était plus jeune lors d’un projet scolaire. Il a donc entrepris d’interroger notre grand-père [Roméo, fils de Ernest] Guernon qui lui aurait répondu qu’on ne devait pas deterrer le passé parce que l’on risquait de retrouver un pendu dans un garde-robe??? A qui dois-je poser la question?
People associated with the SHSB discussed Olivier Guernon’s message among themselves but apparently did not respond to him, and the matter was not taken further at that time.
We were able to locate Olivier Guernon in Boucherville, Quebec, and contacted him by email. We subsequently had several phone calls, Skype sessions, and emails with him and other relatives, especially Pierre Comte and his daughter Anne-Marie Comte. Pierre, who is 90 years old, is not himself a Guernon but was married to Thérèse Guernon, a daughter of Roméo (1902–1986) and granddaughter of Ernest Guernon (1868?–1937).
We learned from Pierre Comte that he had first heard the story of Riel’s love child from his daughter Anne-Marie Comte, who lives in Vancouver. According to Anne-Marie, she learned of this narrative in 1992 from a member of the Guernon family known as Tante Gilberte (1913–2011), who was then 79 years old and living in Nanaimo, BC. Tante Gilberte was the only surviving child of Ernest Guernon, who was reported to be Louis Riel’s son by Marie-Julie Guernon.
Anne-Marie says that, when she went to visit Tante Gilberte in Nanaimo in 1992, the latter showed her George Stanley’s biography of Louis Riel with passages underlined. Tante Gilberte then told Anne-Marie that her father Ernest Guernon was actually the illegitimate child of Louis Riel and Marie-Julie Guernon, after which she said she would never speak of it again. She was apparently embarrassed by the illegitimacy, which Anne-Marie explains with reference to how religious the family was. Unfortunately, Anne-Marie does not now have that copy of Stanley’s book and does not know where it may be.
Anne-Marie says further that she told this story to her father Pierre in 1994 when he came out to Vancouver to visit, and it appeared to be news to him at the time. Later, however, Pierre began to talk about stories that he said came from another aunt, Germaine Guernon (1899–1978), also a daughter of Ernest and an older sister of Tante Gilberte. This second source may explain why there are some differing elements in what Anne-Marie and Pierre are telling us now.
Anne-Marie says baby Ernest was adopted by Marie-Julie’s parents, Joseph Guernon (1808–1868) and Louise-Euphémie Bourque (1813–1892), who found the baby “abandoned in a basket.” This seems like a reference to the Biblical story of Moses (Exodus 2: 1–9) and might somehow be linked to Riel’s later messianic claim of being “Louis ‘David’ Riel, the Prophet of the New Word.” But Anne-Marie also says that her father has a different version of the story (and this would have come from Germaine), in which Ernest was adopted by Marie-Julie’s brother Edouard (1835–1902) and his wife Amanda Lefebvre (1840–1883). The two versions could perhaps be reconciled if the parents adopted Ernest first and then passed him on to Edouard after Joseph died on 4 August 1868.
There appear to be no contemporary family letters, diaries, papers, or photographs that might confirm or disprove the story. The only documentary evidence is an entry in the registry of the parish church of Saint-Enfant-Jésus de Mile End for 25 December 1868, recording the baptism of Léon-Noël-Ernest Guernon, son of Edouard Guernon and Amanda Lefebvre.[8] The sponsors were Aurélie Guernon, Edouard’s older sister, and Léon Chartrand, not otherwise identified. The entry does not appear to have been altered or to be out of order in the larger register. There is no birth certificate for Ernest in the modern sense of a secular government record because the province of Quebec relied at that time upon parish records of baptisms, marriages, and funerals.[9]
The date poses a problem because we know that Louis left Montreal on 19 June 1866.56 If he fathered a child by Marie-Julie, it would have been born in late 1866 or early 1867. However, people were more casual about dates in the mid-19th century than we are today, and it is also possible that a sympathetic priest might have performed a baptism ceremony at the later date and entered it in the register as part of a story designed to make Ernest look like a legitimate child of Edouard. Yet, if that is the case, it would mean that parents and godparents were making a false declaration with the complicity of the priest, for the entry states that the baby was “born this morning” (né ce matin), i.e., 25 December 1868.
There are some subsidiary elements in the story, which probably come from Germaine, but it is hard to know because family members have been passing information back and forth for 25 years. Pierre tells stories about a baby being found in the rushes on the edge of the river and also about a change of identity. This might be influenced by Riel’s poem “Le Juif de Marseille,” which was published in 1977 as part of Poésies de jeunesse.[11] In Riel’s notebook, it is placed just before “”Chanson: A mes amis,” in which Riel says good-bye to his Montreal friends, and “[Izard et Isaure],” which seems to be a farewell to Marie-Julie. The enigmatic poem entitled “Le Juif de Marseille” describes a boy deprived of his real identity at birth and raised as a Jew, who then is saved by conversion to Christianity. We have never been able to find the inspiration or any real-world relevance of this poem. One might speculate that some contemporary member of the Guernon family read it after publication in 1977 and contributed something based on it to the evolving family tradition about Riel’s love child, but there is no solid evidence to go on.
An even more tantalizing possibility, though probably not provable, is that Marie-Julie herself had read the poem in Riel’s notebook and later talked about it to other family members. We know that she was aware of Riel’s notebook and may have written a couple of love poems (perhaps composed and dictated by Riel) in it. She could well have read “Le Juif de Marseille” or at least have listened while Louis read it to her. If so, Louis may have given her a context for understanding the poem that we no longer have. Maybe this could have been a source of some of the family stories that Pierre Comte says he got from Germaine; but again, this is speculation in the absence of any real evidence.
Overall, the theory about a love child has elements of plausibility. If it is true, it sheds important light on Riel’s biography. His abrupt departure from Montreal in 1866 has always been a bit of a mystery but makes more sense as part of a row with the Guernon family over their daughter’s untimely pregnancy. Indeed, the sudden signing of a marriage contract on June 12, 1866, might well have been a response to discovering that Marie-Julie was pregnant. In addition, Riel more than once in his later life referred to his “falls” as a young man.[12] Previous interpretations of these falls as Riel leaving the College of Montreal and giving up his vocation to the priesthood are probably still valid, but an illicit affair with Marie-Julie would add mortal sin to what otherwise might be considered career choices and make the term “falls” more appropriate.[13]
Plausibility, however, is not the same as evidence, and the theory cannot be definitively proved with the available evidence. The best evidence would be comparative DNA testing between descendants of Ernest Guernon, of whom there are many, and living relatives of Louis Riel. Guernon family members are highly interested in doing this and willing to pay expenses, but relatives of Riel will have to come forward. I hope publishing this appendix may stir some public interest in the project.
1. We have not found Marie-Julie’s date of death. It does not appear in the Arbre généalogique de Guernon, https://www.ancestry.ca/family-tree/person/tree/28264430/person/12024433942/facts.
2. George F. G. Stanley et al., The Collected Writings of Louis Riel/Les écrits complets de Louis Riel, 5 vols., Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1985. Afterwards cited as CW., Riel’s aunt Lucie was married to John Lee. CW4, p. 333.
3. George F. G. Stanley, Louis Riel. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1963, p. 33.
4. Ibid., p. 381, n. 46.
6. http://www.sglongueuil.org.
7. Gilles Martel, Glen Campbell, and Thomas Flanagan, eds., Louis Riel: Poésies de jeunesse, St. Boniface: Les Editions du Blé, 1977.
8. Quebec, Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1621–1967, in Arbre généalogique de Guernon, https://www.ancestry.ca/familytree/person/tree/28264430/person/12024433942/facts.
9. https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/genealogy/places/Pages/quebec.aspx.
10. CW3, p. 259.
11. CW3, p. 143.
12. E.g., CW3, p. 141.
13. There are additional stories about Ernest and Roméo travelling out to St. Boniface. The stories are vague, however, and are not accompanied by any dates that could be verified, so we have not tried to research them further.
We thank S. Goldsborough for assistance in preparing the online version of this article.
Page revised: 3 June 2021
