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DAVID, ATHANASE (baptized Louis-Athanase; he started to omit the first name Louis during the 1910s), lawyer and politician; b. 24 June 1882 in the parish of Notre-Dame in Montreal, son of Laurent-Olivier David*, a lawyer, and Albina Chenet; m. there 3 Nov. 1908 Antonia Nantel*, and they had five children; d. 26 Jan. 1953 in Montreal and was buried four days later in Sainte-Agathe (Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts), Que.

Family

Athanase David was part of a large Liberal family in the province of Quebec. Born in Montreal in 1882 on 24 June, Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, he owed one of his baptismal names to his godfather, the poet Louis Fréchette*, and the other to the French general Athanase Charette de La Contrie, who was visiting Canada at the time. His father, Laurent-Olivier, a lawyer, journalist, historian, and senator, was a personal friend of Sir Wilfrid Laurier* [see Sir Wilfrid Laurier]. He wrote a biography of Laurier and published some 20 works, including a history of the Patriotes of 1837–38. A fervent nationalist who embraced Laurier’s pan-Canadian perspective, he had a profound influence on young Louis-Athanase’s thinking, which was shaped by the memory of the Patriotes, liberal ideas on education, and the nationalist ideology of the day advocating the seizure of economic power by French Canadians. Louis-Athanase’s mother, Albina Chenet, died in 1887 from tuberculosis. She was survived by her only son, aged five at the time, and her ten daughters. On 3 Nov. 1908 Louis-Athanase David married Antonia Nantel, daughter of the journalist and Conservative politician Guillaume-Alphonse*, who had represented the provincial riding of Terrebonne from 1882 to 1900.

Education and political career

David attended the Collège du Mont-Saint-Louis from 1891 to 1895, followed by the Collège Sainte-Marie, where he earned a bachelor of science degree in 1902. He studied law at the Université Laval in Montreal, which awarded him a bachelor’s degree in 1905, and that same year he was called to the bar of the province of Quebec. He spent some time practising law in Montreal with Édouard Montpetit and Arthur Vallée. Around 1906 he opened a legal practice with Henry J. Elliott; they would be joined by other lawyers and continue until the early 1930s. David’s election as president of the Young Bar Association of Montreal for the year 1913–14 marked the beginning of a long political career in Quebec.

David was elected Liberal mla for the riding of Terrebonne in 1916 and re-elected by acclamation in 1919. He resigned on 25 August upon being nominated provincial secretary, a ministerial post he would hold until 1936. He was returned unopposed in the by-election of 6 Sept. 1919 and was re-elected in 1923, 1927, and 1931, as well as in 1935, thanks to the vote of the riding’s returning officer, Anthony Lessard, which was necessary because a technical error on the ballots had caused them all to be rejected. After not putting his candidacy forward in 1936, David was re-elected in 1939 and expressed his disappointment at not being part of the cabinet of Adélard Godbout, the new premier of Quebec. Godbout, wishing to distance himself from the outgoing Liberal government of Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, instead offered him the role of president of the Legislative Assembly. David refused. The premier initially preferred Henri Groulx as provincial secretary, and Groulx held the post from 8 Nov. 1939 to 16 Oct. 1940, in addition to serving as minister of health. Godbout subsequently appointed Hector Perrier* as provincial secretary. As for David, he resigned on 14 Feb. 1940, after his appointment as senator of the Saurel division by Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King*. He remained in the post until his death.

During his years in provincial politics, David formed a genuine partnership with Jules-Édouard Prévost, the Liberal mp for the riding of Terrebonne from 1917 to 1930. The riding association, which in 1928 adopted the name Club libéral “David-Prévost” du comté de Terrebonne, Limité, was responsible for rewarding the party’s supporters, both provincially and federally.

Department of the Provincial Secretary

When he joined the cabinet of Liberal Premier Sir Lomer Gouin* as provincial secretary in 1919, David was only 37. He continued to occupy the post in Taschereau’s government the following year and without interruption until 1936. His lengthy period in a position of power within one department allowed him to make his mark in several areas. The role of the Department of the Provincial Secretary, which dated back to 1868 – and even beyond, under the union government [see Charles Edward Poulett Thomson*] – was to register letters patent and various official documents. Besides these chancellery functions, David was entrusted with the government’s residual powers.

Under Taschereau’s government, the province of Quebec underwent extensive development, and the Department of the Provincial Secretary became a type of incubator of future departments. David was therefore responsible for various services involving culture, education, health, and social assistance (welfare), as well as the Bureau des Statistiques de Québec, the registrar’s office, and the Gazette officielle de Québec.

Higher education and specialist training

David was influenced by the ideas of Étienne Parent* and Robert-Errol Bouchette*, who had insisted on the need for French Canadians to overcome their industrial underdevelopment, and equally by the ideas of his friend Édouard Montpetit, a professor of political economy at the Université de Montréal and the École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Montréal, who advocated the development of higher education so that students could acquire skills that the province of Quebec needed. David pursued these objectives in the areas of education, culture, and social issues. In the Legislative Assembly on 13 Feb. 1919, he explained: “It is therefore important that we push our young people, whose well-prepared minds are capable of developing skills, towards specialization by exposing them to training that we cannot find here for want of teachers, and that they will seek out in the major centres of contemporary thought.” At a time when higher education remained underdeveloped in the province of Quebec, David turned his attention to France as a model for ways members of the Quebec elite could upgrade their skills in various fields.

One of David’s first initiatives to promote the training of specialists occurred in 1922, when he increased the number of $1,200 graduate-student scholarships from 5 to 15 annually. The program, established by Premier Gouin two years earlier, initially for studies in Paris only, allowed these graduates to go to Europe to further their education. Between 1920 and 1936 the Department of the Provincial Secretary thus provided a sum of $673,454 to recipients in areas as varied as the arts, letters, law, social sciences, medicine, and the pure sciences. The cultural and scientific impact of the scholarship recipients who studied in Europe would, upon their return to Quebec, prove considerable.

In 1922 David also tabled a bill to encourage the production of literary and scientific works by means of a contest. In his address to the Legislative Assembly on 26 January, he recalled that in a country still in its youth, readers were few and far between. It was also important to create conditions favourable to the development of literary talent. How many works, David pointed out, would not have seen the light of day without the help of the government, which had, for many years, been supporting the authors of Quebec by buying their books to ensure distribution? The Liberal member for Drummond, Hector Laferté, proposed that the contest be named the Prix David, following the example of France’s Prix Goncourt. This form of public recognition was the first step in creating the group of awards known as the Prix du Québec, which were established in 1977. The Prix Athanase-David, as it would be known, became one of the Prix du Québec and is still awarded by the Quebec government every year in the 21st century to highlight an individual’s contribution to the literature of Quebec.

Teaching fine arts and the Musée de la Province

The creation of the School of Fine Arts of Quebec and the School of Fine Arts of Montreal in 1922 was undoubtedly a major achievement of David’s cultural policy. Fine arts education did exist previously, thanks to private schools and evening classes offered by the Council of Arts and Manufactures of the Province of Quebec at the Monument National in Montreal. However, artists wishing to perfect their art had to do so in France or elsewhere in Europe.

To ensure the quality of both schools of fine arts, David turned to French expertise. Emmanuel Fougerat, the founding director of the École Régionale des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, in France, was put in charge of the School of Fine Arts of Montreal, while the sculptor Jean Bailleul held the same position in Quebec. French instructors also rounded out the teaching staff from the province of Quebec. At the inauguration of the School of Fine Arts of Quebec on 23 Nov. 1922, David and the architect Jean-Omer Marchand*, the newly appointed president of the Conseil Supérieur des Beaux-Arts, gave an address outlining the direction the institution would take. In his speech, published the following day in La Presse, Marchand stated that “the government of Quebec understood perfectly well that unless action is taken immediately, Canadian art will sink into irreversible decay.” For both David and Marchand, the mission of schools of fine arts was therefore to revive French-inspired art as a basic element of French Canadian cultural identity. The high enrolment in both schools of art in the following decades is evidence of their success in educating several generations of visual artists in Quebec.

David achieved another success in 1922 when the Act respecting provincial museums was approved. In his opinion, training visual artists through appropriate instruction called for the supplementary establishment of a museum to exhibit creators’ works and build a collection of Canadian art. The museum was founded in 1926, when the architect Wilfrid Lacroix was selected and an intensive campaign was launched under the leadership of David’s right-hand man, deputy secretary Charles-Joseph Simard, to acquire works of art. Its construction on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City was delayed by the Great Depression. The project took from 1928 to 1931 to complete and cost $1.2 million. The Musée de la Province finally opened to the public in 1933. At the time, it consisted of three sections: fine arts, natural history, and the provincial archives.

On numerous occasions the provincial secretary expressed his notions about art, which he linked to the search for beauty – a pursuit inherent in academicism, an aesthetic outlook he shared with Charles Maillard*, Fougerat’s successor as director of the School of Fine Arts of Montreal. For David, as he wrote on 28 May 1935 in his preparatory notes for a speech, art represented “a way of elevating the people by elevating their feelings and creating their taste.” He added that “what is beautiful about art is that it is personal” – that is, linked to the artist’s own language.

On 12 Dec. 1934 art historian Gérard Morisset*, when considering the work accomplished by David in terms of cultural policy in the previous 15 years, wrote in L’Événement: “With all his initiatives, Mr. David has inspired artistic vocations, caused honourable talents to flourish, facilitated the task of our art historians, and, in a word, has created a favourable atmosphere for the emergence of great works. The public therefore owes much gratitude to the honorable Provincial Secretary.” It must be stressed that David’s cultural policy was reflected in the substantial increase in aid from the government of the province of Quebec in this area. When he began as provincial secretary in 1919, the budget devoted to culture amounted to scarcely $21,300. This amount doubled the following year and eventually reached $307,000 in 1930–31. The Great Depression, however, led to a large reduction in subsequent spending, which stabilized at around $173,000 in 1935–36.

Heritage and provincial archives

David’s cultural policy combined the present and future but also took into account the past. Although the provincial secretary thought it essential to train economic and cultural elites to meet the present and future needs of French Canadian society, he did not forget to remind people that the legacy of the past imparted meaning to his overall vision. In his many speeches in the assembly and before various audiences, he insisted on recalling past sacrifices related to political struggles and to the slow emergence of French Canadian writers and historians. The creation of the Service des Archives de la Province de Québec and the nomination of Pierre-Georges Roy as archivist of the government of the province of Quebec both occurred in 1920. These decisions emerged from David’s concern with preserving historical documents to make them available to researchers. Preserving tangible heritage was consistent with the founding in 1922 of the Historic Monuments Commission of Quebec, which consisted of five members under the chairmanship of Adélard Turgeon*, who was also president of the Legislative Council at the time.

Musical life: Antonia David’s contribution

David and his wife, Antonia, remained very active in the development of musical life. They were among the founders in 1934 of the Société des Concerts Symphoniques de Montréal, the forerunner of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal. In addition, in 1936 Antonia David, a trained musician, established summer music seasons (known as Montreal Festivals as of 1939) with conductor Wilfrid Pelletier* and was the director until 1952. Athanase was not successful, however, in creating the desired provincial conservatory of music along the lines of the French model of the two schools of fine arts. The music scene at the time was too divided by divergent interests, in both Montreal and Quebec City. It was not until 1942, following the tabling of Bill 63 by Provincial Secretary Hector Perrier, that the Institute of Music and Dramatic Art of the Province of Quebec came into being.

The Jewish school question

Although David devoted great effort to the promotion of higher education and professional training, his involvement in elementary and secondary education, which was controlled by the Catholic clergy at the time, was more discreet. He generally confined himself to tabling in the assembly the annual report prepared by Cyrille-Fraser Delâge, Quebec’s superintendent of public instruction, which came under David’s jurisdiction. He did not question the existing school policies and structures dominated by the Catholic clergy.

At the beginning of the 1930s, however, David was drawn into the controversy surrounding the plan to establish Jewish schools in an organization that would be distinct from the Catholic and Protestant committees, within the Council of Public Instruction. As the minister responsible for the Department of Public Instruction, he acted as mediator between the Protestant commissioners, the Catholic bishops, and the Jewish community in order to find a political and administrative solution to this explosive situation, given the religious and ideological context. During the speech from the throne on 2 Dec. 1930, the speaker, Télesphore-Damien Bouchard*, announced that an agreement had been reached with the Protestant committee to allow it to continue admitting Jewish pupils to its schools. David, who had arranged the approval of a law on 4 April to create the Jewish School Commission of Montreal, hastened to have that law repealed. According to historian Robert Rumilly*, who relied on a letter written by the provincial secretary on 9 April 1930, David “will recall the case of the Jewish schools as the worst headache of his ministerial career.”

Technical and professional education

As the years went by, the Liberal governments of Gouin and Taschereau established technical and professional educational institutions to respond to society’s new economic, technological, and cultural needs. In 1926 David, who was directly responsible for this sector in his capacity as provincial secretary, had a bill approved to coordinate the administration of the École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Montréal, the technical schools of Montreal, Quebec City, and Hull, and the fine arts schools in Montreal and Quebec City within a single organization – the Corporation of Technical or Professional Schools. The Catholic clergy, who controlled francophone teaching at the elementary, secondary, and university levels, took a dim view of these initiatives. Was this not opening the door to state education and non-confessional schools? On numerous occasions during debates in the assembly, David, in response to insinuations from his Conservative opponents, strongly denied wanting to aspire to the title of minister of public instruction.

Bureau of Public Charities

Assistance for the poor, both in rural and urban areas, had traditionally been the responsibility of religious communities, municipalities, and private initiatives. In 1921 Premier Taschereau tasked David with defending an important bill to establish the Quebec Bureau of Public Charities, the aim of which was to secure funding for the hospitalization of the indigent sick. In the assembly on 16 March, while praising the devotion of Christian-inspired private charities, David asserted that it was the government’s duty to intervene “when society is incapable of fulfilling its mission.” Without wishing to “extinguish the flame of charity,” he dared to add that, in the words of the American novelist and polemicist Upton Sinclair, “charity today is technical and ‘it has become a science.’” Although the statement sparked outrage in the conservative Catholic press, the bill was generally well received. It stipulated that financing of welfare services would be divided equally among the provincial government, the municipality in which the needy person resided, and the public welfare institution.

David subsequently made two amendments to the bill. In 1925 he wanted to reassure the clergy by reaffirming the authority of bishops over the religious communities working in health and welfare institutions in their diocese. In 1929 he had another amendment added so that the annual payment of $1 million from the net revenues of the Quebec Liquor Commission henceforth contributed to the funding of welfare services. This considerable sum was an indication of the growing needs of public welfare in an increasingly urbanized society.

New challenges for public health

The accelerating pace of industrialization and urbanization since the beginning of the 20th century presented significant challenges for public health in Quebec, especially in Montreal. Unsanitary conditions and poverty in working-class areas, poor nutrition, alcoholism, and the absence of rules of hygiene in the population were all factors that led to outbreaks of infections and contagious diseases such as tuberculosis.

Because public health was the responsibility of the provincial secretary until the creation of the Department of Health in 1936, David became the spokesman for Taschereau’s government to defend new bills in this domain. The passing of a law in 1922 created the Provincial Bureau of Health and the Board of Health of the Province of Quebec. This organization replaced the Superior Board of Health of the Province of Quebec, whose mandate was limited to public outreach. The new board’s job was to examine public health issues and make recommendations to the Provincial Bureau of Health. The bureau was responsible for applying the law and dealt mainly with compiling statistics, conducting epidemiological studies, opening boards of health, and making recommendations about sanitation and public health. On 20 March, David explained in the assembly: “The Board has educated the public, but the time has come to make reforms. The government feels that since the people are now prepared enough to monitor their own hygiene, the provincial authorities can take control of public health and develop the system in keeping with new ways of living, especially in the large cities and towns.”

To manage the service and chair the board, David chose the physician Alphonse Lessard*, who had been head of the Quebec Bureau of Public Charities since 1921. As deputy minister of health before the role officially existed, Lessard worked closely with David until 1936. Among their achievements was the introduction of a system for compiling statistics on civil status and the causes of mortality (1924), the Act respecting tuberculosis and infantile mortality in the province (1924), the establishment of numerous sanatoriums, and the creation of a network of forward-thinking county health units (1928).

The David and Perron camps

Before the discovery of antibiotics to treat tuberculosis during the 1940s, building sanatoriums was the only possible solution to isolate infected people and thus limit the spread of the disease, given the high risk of contagion [see Arthur Rousseau*]. Civil society was concerned with protecting children in disadvantaged neighbourhoods from the risks of infection by temporarily separating them from their home environment. In 1925 Montreal’s Institut Bruchési, which had been founded in 1911 to combat tuberculosis [see Joseph-Edmond Dubé*], began organizing summer camps for children aged 6 to 12 to provide them with a healthy environment, proper nutrition, and a variety of leisure activities. David supplied the help of his department to support the initiative and in the assembly he recalled, with some emotion, that his own mother had died of tuberculosis after raising 11 children.

The summer camp, originally of modest design and known as Camp David from 1926, was expanded after its establishment in the Laurentian region, first at Lac Écho in 1927 and then at Lac de l’Achigan the next year. Following a personal donation of $10,000 for the purchase of a parcel of land, made by Joseph-Léonide Perron*, the minister of agriculture and president of the board of directors of the Institut Bruchési, along with the Taschereau government’s $100,000 grant, encouraged by David for construction of four large dormitories, in 1930 Camp David welcomed only girls while Camp Perron opened its doors to boys.

Professional sports in Montreal

David, an enthusiast of sports and the outdoors, played a part in developing professional sports in Montreal. After the Montreal Canadiens hockey club was acquired by Léo Dandurand, Joseph Cattarinich, and Louis Létourneau [see George Washington Kendall*] in November 1921, David became its president and remained so until the club was sold on 17 Sept. 1935. He also oversaw the construction of the Delorimier Downs Stadium, undertaken by the Montreal Exposition Company in January 1928 to welcome the Montreal Royals, a former baseball team (1897–1917) that was revived with the International League’s purchase of the Jersey City franchise in New Jersey for $225,000.

Senator

As a member of the Senate from 1940 until his death in 1953, David no longer featured prominently on the provincial political scene, dominated at the time by Godbout’s Liberal government and, subsequently, by the Union Nationale of Maurice Le Noblet Duplessis. In the Senate he drew particular attention for the debate he sparked when introducing a motion on 4 May 1944 to promote the writing of a unique textbook of Canadian history. He emphasized that a work of this kind, written by established historians, would provide pupils in different provinces and both language groups with better knowledge of the facts worthy of pride throughout the country. The motion won the support of all senators except Sir Thomas Chapais*, who thought that Canadian history was too complex and diversified for a single textbook to satisfy both language groups. Thus begun, the debate would continue in the province of Quebec during the 1950s.

On 30 May 1945, following the Allied victory in Europe, David delivered an important speech on the Montreal radio station CHLP. The senator made a plea for Canadian unity and backed the campaign to re-elect Prime Minister King while also taking the opportunity to appeal for the adoption of a distinctive national anthem [see Calixa Lavallée*] and flag [see Lester Bowles Pearson*]. However, these wishes would not come true until nearly 35 and 20 years later respectively.

Descendants and assessment

Antonia Nantel and Athanase David had five children: Simone (1911–2012), founder of the Bacille Calmette-Guérin Clinic, known since 2000 as the Centre de Réadaptation Marie-Enfant, part of the CHU Sainte-Justine – Le Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Mère-Enfant; Nantel (1912–72); Madeleine (1915–84); Suzanne (1919–2005); and Paul (1919–99), cardiologist, founder of the Montreal Heart Institute, and senator. Paul and his wife, Nellie Maillard (daughter of Charles), had six children: Françoise, an mp (2012–17) and the co-spokesperson for Québec Solidaire (2006–17); Charles-Philippe, political analyst and founder of the Chaire Raoul-Dandurand en Études Stratégiques et Diplomatiques at the Université du Québec à Montréal; Hélène, psychologist and Liberal cabinet minister (2014–18); Pierre, a film producer; Thérèse, a culture, communications, and public relations specialist; and Anne-Marie, an instructor in social service work at the Cégep du Vieux Montréal.

David may be regarded as the first politician in power to have developed a comprehensive cultural vision for the future of French Canadian society. In that respect his cultural policies anticipated those advanced by Georges-Émile Lapalme*, the first minister of cultural affairs of the province of Quebec in 1961 [see Jean Lesage*]. From the 1930s onward, many observers pointed to David’s contribution to government-supported culture. The journalist Madeleine [see Anne-Marie Gleason*] stated in La Patrie of 8 Aug. 1933 that “Mr. David, with his progressive and well-implemented policy, has set things in motion.”

During his long political career, Athanase David received many expressions of esteem and gratitude for all his achievements in areas as varied as the arts, heritage, education, public health, and the promotion of professional sports. Author and journalist Leslie Roberts, in a profile for the 1 Dec. 1929 issue of Maclean’s magazine (Toronto), did not hesitate to title the article “David, the versatile.” David was named a commander of the Légion d’Honneur in 1935. The École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Montréal and the Université de Montréal awarded him honorary doctorates that same year. Although David was celebrated and lauded by his contemporaries of the interwar years, his memory was more or less forgotten later on, owing to historiographical silences. Fortunately, his designation in 2023 as a historic figure by Quebec’s Ministère de la Culture et des Communications restored his place in the collective memory of the province.

Fernand Harvey