Philéas-Frédéric Bourgeois

1909-1960

Philéas-Frédéric Bourgeois (Roman Catholic priest, professor and author) was born on 17 November 1855 in the parish of Pré-d’en-Haut, New Brunswick. Bourgeois finished his elementary schooling in his native parish, and in 1865 he enrolled in the College of St Joseph at Memramcook. In 1873 he entered the noviciate of the Congregation of Holy Cross in Saint-Laurent, near Montreal. He taught for two years at the Collège Notre-Dame in Côte-des-Neiges (Montreal. In 1875 he returned to St Joseph’s, where until 1880 he taught Belles-Lettres and Rhetoric. Bourgeois was ordained to the priesthood in Moncton, N.B., in 1879. The following year, he was chosen to represent the Acadians at the Convention Nationale des Canadiens Français in Quebec City. Bourgeois completed his MA at the Université Laval the following year. In 1880 he had moved to the Collège de Saint-Césaire in the province of Quebec. In the spring of 1881, he resumed teaching at St Joseph’s. In 1882 he had to leave the Congregation of Holy Cross to help his parents. He served first as curate in Manchester, NH, and then became curé of Main-à-Dieu and Louisbourg in Cape Breton in 1883, and from 1886 to 1889 had pastoral charge of Havre Boucher on the Nova Scotian mainland. Then, after teaching for a few months at St Joseph’s, he decided to take a year off, during which he was involved in publishing L’Évangéline illustrée, a special edition of the Acadian newspaper L’Évangéline. In 1891, while travelling for six months in the United States and Europe, he sent his travel diary, written under the pseudonym Viator, to Le Moniteur acadien and L’Évangéline. On his return to Canada, Bourgeois withdrew to the residence of the Trappist monastery in Tracadie, N.S. In the summer of 1891, he joined the Eudists and began teaching at the Collège Sainte-Anne, founded the previous year at Church Point, NS. In December 1893, however, he returned to the College of St Joseph, where he again taught Belles-Lettres and Rhetoric, as an auxiliary priest. From the autumn of 1896 until the spring of 1898, in addition to teaching, he served as an editor at L’Évangéline. At the end of 1898, after five years at St Joseph’s, Bourgeois went to the Trappist monastery in Oka, Que. He stayed there until 1900, when he was readmitted to the Congregation of Holy Cross and became a professor at the Collège Notre-Dame. In 1902 he went back to the College of St Joseph, where he spent most of his time, except for a stay at the Asile Saint-Benoît-Joseph Labre in Longue-Pointe (Montreal) in 1907–1908. He returned to St Joseph’s in 1908 but left in 1911 for reasons of health and went to Montreal, where he helped organize the Annales de Saint-Joseph. A few months later, in February 1912, he suffered a severe attack of jaundice. Feeling the end was near, he returned to Memramcook, where he died on 3 April 1913. Bourgeois was the author of some 150 newspaper and magazine articles and a dozen books and pamphlets, mostly dealing with Acadian history.

Predominant New Brunswick Residences:

Saint John

Archival Material

• Fonds Philéas-F.-Bourgeois
  ⌄
  Location

  Centre d'études acadiennes Anselme-Chiasson

  Website/Catalogue Record

  View Archival Record

  Retrieval Number

  13, G13

  Date Range of Material

  1877-1964

  Extent

  22 cm of textual material

  Scope and Content Note

  Philéas-F.-Bourgeois collection consists of manuscripts that were used in the preparation of texts on the history of Canada and on the biography of Abbé F.-X. France.