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Everyone to Parliament!

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The Present-Day Place D'Youville

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Place Royale

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Place d’Armes

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Notre-Dame Street

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Champ-de-Mars

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The Seigneurs of Montréal

Contemporary photograph of a stone building with a metal roof: the Old Seminary. In front stands a stone wall with a gateway made up of a closed black gate and a triangular red pediment bearing a coat of arms (lions). In the foreground, pedestrians walk along a sidewalk.

Normand Rajotte, Pointe-à-Callière, 2022.019.019.

The Sulpicians did not simply educate boys, train priests and serve Notre-Dame parish. They were also… the seigneurs of Montréal! Their archives are a treasure trove for anyone interested in the city’s history.

In 1854, an act of the Parliament of Canada gradually abolished the seigneurial system of the Ancien Régime, in principle putting an end to the rents that censitaires had to pay their seigneur.

Since 1840, the Sulpicians had already set change in motion by allowing censitaires to commute their property to freehold tenure, and by subdividing some of their lands, such as the Saint-Gabriel farm near the Lachine Canal. No longer simply seigneurs, they were becoming almost… real estate developers!