It takes a special type of dedication to volunteer as a missionary in an unfamiliar land, facing unknown perils, cut off from one’s own culture and support system.

Roman Catholic missionaries in New France varied in their approach to their work. Some were single-minded zealots, others were more temperate. They all worked incredibly hard in a difficult frontier setting. They traveled long distances to tend their flocks. They built churches and chapels all over the wilderness. Some were linguists, and used this skill to create religious texts in symbolic format for Amerindians, whose tradition was oral.

Church and State were inextricably linked from the earliest days of European settlement in Acadia. The first French explorers and settlers brought Roman Catholicism to the New World. Britain had its own state religion. Several British colonies outlawed Catholicism in favor of the Anglican faith. Religious leaders of both faiths became instruments of civil policy, and civil policy favored the religion of the state.

In France, where kings averred, “I am the State” they might have added, “I am the Church.” French monarchs took to themselves some of the pope’s authority. The king nominated bishops. Church officials were dependent on the crown for their positions. They could be arrested, and their convents and monasteries destroyed, if they challenged the king. As one author put it, “The French could not conceive of a church which was independent of state authority.” (Cornelius J. Jaenen, The Role of the Church in New France; Canadian Historical Association, Historical Booklet No. 40; Ottawa 1985)

This concept migrated to New France. French missionaries were supported by the Church and the State, and they were expected to support France’s political and military objectives. During the British regime in Nova Scotia, some priests accompanied or supported French military expeditions. They passed intelligence to the French administration in Québec and to the Court in Paris. A few retaliated harshly against any of their flock who aided the British, and threatened eternal damnation to those who vacillated.

In their work, missionaries continued the State-Church relationship that existed in France. This section examines that relationship, as it played out in Acadia.

We begin with one of the most controversial priests of this era, Abbé Jean-Louis Le Loutre, who did everything he could to secure Acadia for the Roman Catholic Church and the French Crown.

Abbé Jean-Louis Le Loutre, Militant Missionary

Abbé Jean-Louis Le Loutre was a force of nature whose character and motives are still being assessed 250 years after his death. During much of his 17-year career in Acadia, his name burned on the pages of secular and religious correspondence that flew around New France and across the Atlantic in two languages. The descriptions that flew alongside the name varied, depending on the writer.

Colonel Edward Cornwallis, a British governor of Nova Scotia, called him “…a good for nothing Scoundrel as ever lived” and put a price on his head.

The Bishop of Québec declared him “…irreproachable in every respect, both in the functions of his sacred ministry and in the part he took in the temporal affairs of the colony.”

Sieur Louis de Courville, a notary and contemporary of Le Loutre’s, claimed that “…no one was more able to bring division and desolation into a country.”

Modern author and human rights activist Daniel N. Paul, a Mi’kmaq elder, writes, “Instead of the monster depicted by English colonial authorities…Le Loutre was a humanitarian.”

Le Loutre, of course, offered his own opinion of himself, written in the third person: “…he always passed for an honest man, he did nothing unworthy of his position as missionary, nor committed any action contrary to the laws of Great Britain.”

To understand a priest who evoked such contradictory opinions, it’s helpful to understand the context in which he began his life’s work. It isn’t my purpose to trace his entire career here. This section highlights key aspects of that career, in hopes of shedding light on his character.

Jean-Louis Le Loutre was born in 1709 at Morlaix, France, to a family of paper makers. The motto of Morlaix might have presaged his later missionary work: S’ils te mordent, mordes les (If they bite you, bite them, referring to the English).

We know little of his early life except that he had a brother, and that they lost both parents at an unknown date. In 1730 Jean-Louis studied for the priesthood at the Seminary of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, or Spiritans. In 1737, he transferred to the Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris (Paris Society of Foreign Missions), an organization that prepared priests for missionary work. The Société assigned him to New France.

The newly ordained priest first set foot in the New World at the age of 29 as missionary to the indigenous Mi’kmaq, an Algonquian people whose ancestral territory included Nova Scotia. He was also to serve the Francophone settlers known as Acadians.

It was 1738. Peace, for once, reigned in Europe. Great Britain had ruled Nova Scotia for nearly as long as Le Loutre had been alive. But the British presence wasn’t strong. England had failed to attract colonists to the region, and its military force was limited to a base at Annapolis Royal, at the southern end of the province.

The French, by contrast, had a formidable citadel at Louisbourg on Île Royale (Cape Breton Island), as well as anchorage there for the French Navy, the possibility of military support from Québec, and a roving militia that could harass the British at will. They also had priests bent on converting the indigenous population to Catholicism.

Le Loutre landed at Louisbourg, and spent several months with Abbé Pierre Maillard, learning the complexities of the Mi’kmaq language. Maillard had developed a symbolic form of Míkmawísimk, which at that time was a spoken language, learned by listening. It was difficult for Europeans to learn, even those like Le Loutre who were proficient in several languages. After months of work, Maillard reported that his student could say the liturgy well enough but everyday speech “betrays him.”

In September 1738 Le Loutre left for St. Anne Mission at Shubenacadie in central Nova Scotia. He seems to have spent his early years working diligently with the Mi’kmaq and the Acadian settlers in the immense territory assigned to him—over 300 linear miles from Tatamagouche in the north to Cape Sable in the south. He built churches near present-day Tatamagouche and Truro, as well as chapels for his more remote parishioners, and he traveled continually between them and Mi’kmaq encampments. The relationships he formed with the Mi’kmaq during this time later served him well.

Acadians would come to have a different opinion. Very likely, they welcomed him with deference when he first arrived. A young, energetic missionary in their midst reassured them the Church hadn’t forgotten them in the wilderness. As he became more militant, however, they would not be spared his wrath.

Relations with the British initially were polite. A single incident marred his early days, when he failed to report to the British governor on arrival. The meeting was mandatory, since priests were allowed in the province only with the governor’s consent.

It’s unknown whether Le Loutre’s failure to appear was an oversight, or whether he meant to “bite” British authority. Whatever his intention, the matter was resolved amicably. Le Loutre met the governor and promised to keep his congregants peaceful and loyal to Britain.

Several writers have discussed Le Loutre’s “transformation” from missionary to military leader. However, he didn’t so much transform from one role to the other, as embody both roles. Just as Church and State united under one head in France, so did religious and political activities converge in Le Loutre’s career.

Yet not every priest became militaristic, so why did Le Loutre? I believe there were two reasons: a change in French policy after the outbreak of war; and Le Loutre’s own character.

In 1744, when France and Britain declared another of their frequent wars, French authorities gave missionaries in Acadia two different assignments. Those who served the Acadian inhabitants were to counsel them to remain neutral in the dispute, to give the British no excuse to remove their priests.

Priests who ministered to the Amerindians, on the other hand, were to encourage their converts to fight the British. The Mi’kmaq needed little encouragement. They had never pledged allegiance to Britain and didn’t consider themselves subjects of any foreign power. They were already motivated to be hostile to Britain, given a history of antagonism and treaties broken by various British governors.

From this period onward, Le Loutre devoted himself to the Mi’kmaq, and to the fight. Why didn’t he settle down in a parish and preach peace to the Acadians? It was never his assignment to be a traditional parish priest. For six years, his base had been among the Mi’kmaq at Shubenacadie. He served the Acadians as best he could, but only until he could arrange for an assistant to take over that duty.

Besides, he didn’t seem to have the temperament for parish work. De Courville, who knew him personally, wrote, “…l’esprit de domination qui faisoit son principal caractère ne lui laissoit échapper aucune occasion de se faire valoir.” “…the spirit of domination which was his principal characteristic let him miss no opportunity of asserting himself.”

Admittedly, de Courville dipped his quill in acid instead of ink, but this statement has the ring of truth, given some of Le Loutre’s later actions. It isn’t likely the Acadians would have been willing to accept him as a parish priest anyway. How does one confide doubts to a priest who threatens thunderbolts at the least sign of disagreement?

So with a character suited to battle, and the encouragement of Church and State, Le Loutre engaged in war. His initial forays weren’t successful. After leading a failed attempt to capture Annapolis Royal, he went to Québec and returned with 4,000 pounds of gunpowder and lead shot. But then Louisbourg fell to the British, and a French fleet sent to retake the fortress town came to disaster.

The British commanders at Louisbourg tried to lure Le Loutre into captivity, knowing his influence with the Mi’kmaq and other tribes. He didn’t fall into the trap. Instead, he fled to France.

Attempting to return, he was captured and imprisoned twice, and was released to France, where he was forced to wait out the rest of the war.

When he finally returned to Acadia in 1749, the declared war was over. Louisbourg was back in French hands. But peace wasn’t in store for “the land of discord always.” Nova Scotia, which remained British, had a new governor.

Colonel Edward Cornwallis landed at Chebuctou (present-day Halifax) a few days before Le Loutre’s return. With him were an expanded military force and 2,500 Protestant settlers. The influx of Protestants was an existential threat to the Mi’kmaq and to the government in Québec.

To the Mi’kmaq, they were also a profound affront. The land Cornwallis expropriated for his town was theirs by treaty, an important hunting ground and a site for religious gatherings. The governor set an ominous tone for his administration when he took it, especially since his settlers nearly outnumbered the Mi’kmaq in the province.

With Cornwallis so near, Le Loutre moved his base to the Chignecto isthmus that separates Nova Scotia from New Brunswick. There, the Missaguash River formed a porous boundary between French and British territory. Naturally, Le Loutre settled on the French side.

On the Nova Scotia side were several Acadian habitations that collectively were often called Beaubassin, the name of the largest of them. Le Loutre began to pressure Acadians in that area to move to the French side. Time and again, Acadians reported to the British their fear of this priest and his Mi’kmaq allies, recounting numerous threats that they knew weren’t idle.

Consider the case of René LeBlanc, a respected Grand Pré notary in his 60s. In 1749, he outraged the priest by advising his neighbors to cooperate with the British. At Le Loutre’s order, a group of Mi’kmaq kidnapped him and his son Simon, and “plundered” their home. Simon was sent to Québec and held there. René was imprisoned in New Brunswick at the home base of the Broussards, noted privateers and foes of the English. (More on them in another post.) He was held there for two years and was apparently severely mistreated, despite his age. When he returned home, his broken body was testament to Le Loutre’s intractability.

In 1750, learning that the British were sending troops to build a fort on the isthmus, Le Loutre stepped up the pressure at Beaubassin. Some Acadian families migrated to the French side, on the promise that they would be given land and help resettling, a promise that would not be kept.

When others proved obdurate, Le Loutre reportedly “could not control his passion.” He bullied them from the pulpit, saying the Mi’kmaq would kidnap the wives and children of anyone who defied him. He threatened to withhold the sacraments and to forbid other priests to serve them.

When these measures didn’t work, his Mi’kmaq allies burned the village of Beaubassin to the ground, along with some of the surrounding habitations. Then they drove any reluctant inhabitants across to French territory at gunpoint, often giving them no chance to bring their belongings.

Some accounts say Le Loutre participated in the deed, setting fire to their church with his own hands. Others name a different priest. Le Loutre himself doesn’t mention this devastation in his autobiography, referring only to an “evacuation” of the inhabitants.

Regardless, many of these refugees were reduced to homelessness, from which they never recovered. For these and other acts, Le Loutre earned the sobriquet The Black Abbé among Acadians.

Militarily the “evacuation” was a success, though a temporary one. Finding the village in flames, and the French in control of the isthmus, the British under Major Charles Lawrence withdrew, breaking dikes to flood cropland as they went. They returned with a stronger force, however, and built a fort that Lawrence named for himself at Beaubassin.

In answer to Fort Lawrence, the French erected Fort Beauséjour on the north side of the Missaguash, and for a few years a stalemate ensued on the isthmus. On a rise of ground in the marsh between the forts, there was a tavern, where soldiers clinked tankards with the enemy, and spycraft was rife.

The stalemate at Chignecto didn’t mean the land of discord was at peace. Father Le Loutre’s War was still on. Wave after wave of attacks rained down on Halifax and nearby settlements. Soldiers or settlers who ventured into the forest for firewood were killed, scalped, and sometimes beheaded. Buildings were destroyed, precious stores were seized or set ablaze.

Between them, Halifax and Dartmouth were attacked a dozen times in six years. The worst carnage occurred in 1751 at Dartmouth, where the Broussards and their Amerindian allies killed and mutilated even women and babies.

The raids on British settlements prompted Governor Cornwallis to place a bounty of £50 on Le Loutre’s head, and later double it to £100. Considering that the average laborer in England earned about 12 pence per day, either sum must have been attractive to settlers struggling to start farms on a contested frontier. Nevertheless, Le Loutre remained at large.

It should be noted that the British also had an active militia in the region at the time. Rangers such as Captain John Gorham harassed both military and civilian targets, and actively sought the bounty for Mi’kmaq scalps. Gorham was at Annapolis Royal in 1744 when the French force attacked it. Later, at Chignecto, he would set aflame the habitations that the Mi’kmaq had not destroyed. Cornwallis formed two additional ranger companies during his term.

In 1752 Le Loutre left again for France, seeking funds for two ambitious projects. One was a vast dike inside French lines that would reclaim hundreds of acres of farmland. With this project, he hoped to help feed the families he had made indigent. The other was a church to be built close to Fort Beauséjour, on the same plan as the basilica in Québec, though on a smaller scale.

When he returned in 1753, he brought 50,000 livres for construction of the dike, along with crates of sacred vessels, devotional books, vestments and money to build the church. That year, he was also made Vicar General of Acadia, giving him ecclesiastic authority over his brother priests.

And that year, Nova Scotia had yet another governor, Charles Lawrence, Le Loutre’s nemesis at Chignecto, who was by then a lieutenant-colonel. Lawrence was a soldier’s soldier—as unyielding as Le Loutre—who would govern according to Cornwallis’s playbook. He was virulently anti-Catholic and expressed only contempt for the Acadians and Mi’kmaq. He brought hundreds more Protestant settlers to Nova Scotia’s eastern shore. And though he signed treaties with the Mi’kmaq, he continued to encroach on their lands, adding the settlements of Lunenberg and Lawrencetown to those already begun at Halifax, Bedford and Dartmouth.

Lawrence reinstituted the old policy of requiring forced labor details (corvées) of the Acadians, and also of requisitioning provisions from them. He prohibited them from selling grain anywhere except Halifax, and when they objected, he threatened them with “military execution.”

Worse was yet to come. In 1755, in the absence of declared war, the British launched a multi-pronged attack in the New World. Their most famous failure was the shocking defeat of General Edward Braddock in Pennsylvania. Two other ventures were at best impasses.

Their only success that year was at Chignecto, where 2,000 New England recruits landed and captured Fort Beauséjour. Le Loutre, who had brought Mi’kmaq allies to the fort, escaped when the French surrendered. He tried to flee to France but was captured and imprisoned at Elizabeth Castle, a forbidding stone edifice on the Isle of Jersey. There he remained until peace was declared in 1763. Father Le Loutre’s War was over.

During captivity, he wrote a self-serving autobiography, aimed at burnishing his reputation and obtaining a pension from the Church, while ingratiating himself with his English captors. In it, he made the point several times that his actions were “for the good of the Religion and the State.” To British authorities, he also proclaimed himself an honest man, and told the unmitigated lie that he had never broken British law.

So who was this priest who elicited both terror and reverence, who seemed capable of both brutality and pastoral care, but incapable of compromise or flexibility?

The Bishop of Québec must have been pleased that Le Loutre so ably furthered the Catholic religion and French policy in Acadia. But it was stretching credence to call him “irreproachable,” since the bishop himself had already reproached the priest for threatening to withhold sacraments from the faithful—though not for burning Beaubassin. Beaubassin will always be a stain on Le Loutre’s reputation, whether he was present or not, as will threats to set the Mi’kmaq against Acadians, his treatment of those like René LeBlanc who defied him, and his part in the murders of noncombatants.

It’s equally wrong to suppose that “no one was more able to bring division and desolation...” Although Le Loutre did much to earn that censure, there were too many other players stirring up trouble in Acadia to give him so much credit. British and French militias actively harassed each other and the civilian populations. British governors schemed for years to rid the province of its Catholic inhabitants. They subjected the Acadians to divers indignities and practiced a policy of extirpation on the Amerindians. They must assume their share of the blame for discord in Acadia.

Governor Cornwallis’s opinion of the priest as a scoundrel is understandable, given their conflicting world views and some of Le Loutre’s actions. But it’s also outrageous, from someone who helped “pacify” the Scottish Highlands and paid hard cash for scalps of Mi’kmaq women and children.

Elder Paul has reasons to call the abbé a humanitarian, including his close relations with the Mi’kmaq, and his repeated attempts to intercede for them with the British. But the label ignores much about this priest. Le Loutre’s humanitarianism toward the Mi’kmaq, if that’s what it was, wasn’t disinterested. It won him the support of a fighting force and converts for his religion.

Every description of the man leaves out something of his character. My take on him might do the same, but here it is:

If French policy set Le Loutre on the path of militarism in 1744, his own temperament impelled him to stride it with purpose. No one who knew him was equivocal about him, and nobody ever called him humble. Even his friends thought he was a dominating presence. He is described in various letters and journals as haughty, commanding, unwilling to moderate his opinions or actions—all characteristics suitable to evangelical as well as military pursuits.

To such descriptions, I would add another: incorruptible. The line between zealotry and evil might be thin, but I believe Le Loutre stood on the side of zealotry. In an era and region where corruption was endemic on both sides, Le Loutre could not be bought. There is a thread of single-mindedness woven into everything he did in Acadia and later. Dedication to his religion wasn’t separate from loyalty to his sovereign—they were one and the same, and he was true to both. All the seemingly contradictory acts of care on one hand, and cruelty on the other, stemmed from his understanding of his role as agent of both Cross and Crown.

For the Crown, he could burn Beaubassin without remorse because doing so returned hundreds of inhabitants to French control. For the Cross, he could be unfazed by the misery he caused there, partly because his religion taught that temporal suffering was beneficial for salvation, but also because of his conviction that he was rescuing Catholics from Protestant domination.

Added to this dual agency was an indomitable will and an unswerving faith in his own perspective. He didn’t believe he was right, he knew. That certainty, backed by the force of two powerful institutions, made Le Loutre the perfect weapon to set loose in the war to save Acadia for God and country.

Nevertheless, his worst depredations cannot be excused on the grounds that “he was just following orders.” Neither adherence to a creed nor loyalty to a country should relieve an individual of personal responsibility. If there had been more separation between Church and State, one or the other might have acted as a brake on the missionary’s intrigues. Because they worked in concert, there was no check on him except, eventually, a greater military force. In the end, Le Loutre had to bear responsibility for his own actions. His autobiography indicates that he hadn’t quite succeeded by war’s end.

It was after the war that his clearest, and least heralded, success came. When he was released from prison, he returned to France, where he finally served the Acadians well. Those who were deported to England were sent to France after the war, many of them to Morlaix, Le Loutre’s home town. The government granted emergency aid, but Acadians were anxious to obtain land to support themselves until they could return to North America. They also wanted to stay together in their extended families.

As the administration debated various plans to deal with the refugees, Le Loutre interceded on the Acadians’ behalf. Over the next years, many of them received additional aid as a direct result of his intercession. He argued against plans to assimilate Acadians in France, knowing that many of them hoped to return to Canada. Meanwhile, he worked tirelessly to help them settle together at various places. He traveled continually throughout France, often at his own expense, even going to Corsica to find lands for them. Any funds from his patrimony that hadn’t gone to his missions were spent after the war to assist the Acadians.

The President of the Navy Board wrote to the Bishop of Orleans in 1765 to ask for a benefice of 3,000 livres for Le Loutre, saying,

“Since his return to France, he has not ceased to be useful; has always occupied himself with the care of the Acadians; neither his age nor his infirmities have discouraged him. He is poor and resourceless.”

It was both a tribute to, and a sad picture of, an old warrior.

Seven years later, while again in search of lands for his flock, Abbé Le Loutre died suddenly. He was buried at Nantes in Poitou. He willed all his worldly goods to benefit the Acadians.