Poetry
Le Drapeau de Carillon
Not translated into English
Octave Crémazie · 1858
Synopsis
An old soldier carried the white flag at Carillon in 1758, when a few thousand Frenchmen repelled a British army four times larger. The colony falls two years later. The old man keeps the banner as a relic and crosses the sea to ask the King of France for help. At Versailles, he does not get as far as the throne; the courtiers laugh at his stories.
Context
The text appeared on 1 January 1858, the year of the battle's centenary, as a booklet offered to the subscribers of the Journal de Québec, according to the Infocentre littéraire. Charles Wugk Sabatier set four of its thirty-two stanzas to music the same year, and the song became very popular; Antoine Dessane gave another version in 1861. Abbé Casgrain gathered the exile's verse in 1863-1864, then in a volume in 1882, three years after his death.
Who it is for
A poem of thirty-two stanzas in alexandrines, of an eloquence that the author himself judged outdated; two lines on the battle of 1758 and on the conquest are enough to make it clear.
Prizes and reception
It was this poem that made its author the national poet of French Canada, according to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
Sources for this page 10
The pages consulted to check this page.