Montreal history: CF Montreal deserves a red card

The new CF Montreal logo which will be used from the 2023 season.

In 1642, Montreal was founded by a consortium of Aboriginals, French, English, Scots and Irish. Does this ring false to your ears? It’s because it is! However, this is what CF Montreal said in a publication. The club wanted to explain its new brand image, which uses the symbols of each of these peoples.

“It is important for us to celebrate the date of the founding of Montreal and to recognize the peoples present at its founding in 1642: Aboriginals, French, English, Scottish and the Irish”, stated the CF in a press release, which has since been deleted. A factual and historical error that does not fail to make people talk.

Screenshot from the CF Montreal website.

It’s indeed a funny statement, when it’t took 118 years after the arrival of the French, and the reign of three monarchs, for the English to take control of Montreal, September 8, 1760.

Following this invasion, Scots began to immigrate to Canada around 1780. It was not until around 1815 that Irish immigration increased in Montreal. These three peoples, who nevertheless marked the history of the metropolis, were therefore far from being present when Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve and Jeanne Mance set foot in Montreal and founded Ville-Marie there on May 17, 1642.

For Aboriginal people, if they were present during – and long before – the founding of Montreal, they hardly took part in it. On the contrary, the establishment of Ville-Marie will rekindle the tensions between neo-French settlers and the Haudenosaunee.

This false assertion supported and justified the five symbols used in the brand image, which reproduce the symbols found on the flag of Montreal. These five symbols – native white pine, French lily, Scottish thistle, English rose, Irish shamrock – are described as being those of the founding peoples on the City of Montreal website, which may be misleading.

A little further research would have allowed CF Montreal to avoid ridicule and realize that by “founders”, the City actually means people who have greatly contributed to the development of the metropolis, but who were not necessarily present on May 17, 1642.

An error that is more laughable than angry. The MP for Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, where the CF stadium is located, Alexandre Leduc, did not hesitate to laugh at the club for this unfortunate misunderstanding of Montreal history. “It seems that historians and anthropologists had it all wrong and that Ville-Marie was founded in 1642 by an international consortium,” quipped the MP in a tweet.