Last week, in conversation with the MYM Sydney team, we were discussing one of the reported inspirations of Marcellin Champagnat, Jean-Baptiste Montagne. This narrative has been etched into our repertoire of Marist traditions in recent decades, proclaimed from lecterns of school assemblies or studied in religion classes across our Marist education institutions. History, though, is never simple, and seldom complete. One of the tenets of a historiographical framework is the understanding that past events, people and narratives are construction (or reconstructions) based on evidence, examination and interpretation. History is not a cold study of objective truth, but the highly charged activity with great power and influence over present and future events. I digress. Essentially, we are shaped by the stories given to us, but we should always be aware of the malleable and incomplete nature of history. Even in our own Marist patrimony.
So, in 2017, Brothers Michael Green and André Lanfrey, two of the current historians of our Marist Institute, undertook a critical analysis of the Montagne experience. The story that we thought we knew isn’t the complete picture. As a result, Jean-Baptiste Montagne has become the boy that died twice. Here are some teasers of the article by Br Michael:
Marists of today often believe that they know well enough the basics of the Montagne story. What they may not realise is that it is an event that was constructed a long time after the death of this youth, using a seminal story that was told from the beginning and connecting it with other data which came to light in the last century and which have been connected to it. It may surprise many Marists to learn that there is, in fact, no proven link between the original story and death of Jean-Baptiste Montagne, or even any evidence that Marcellin visited the Montagne home on the night in question. The young Montagne boy did indeed exist – we have his birth, death and burial records – but whether he is the “dying child” of the story appears to be highly questionable. Indeed, there is no record of any attempt to identify the child as J-B Montagne until the 1930s, and no active promotion of the name until after 1966 when Marist scholar, Brother Gabriel Michel, linked the death and burial records of this boy with the old story that had been with us from the time of Marcellin. The link is theoretically possible, but there are difficulties with sustaining an argument for it.
Br Michael Green elaborates on the evidential basis for his doubt of the dying boy being Jean-Baptiste Montagne:
There are problems with the location, the year, the age of the child, the improbability of the Montagne family’s disconnection from the faith and their local parish, and also the low likelihood that a priest to anoint the dying boy would have been sought from La Valla rather than from nearby Tarentaise. First, all of the early accounts (among them the Life by Brother Jean-Baptiste Furet; the Memoir of Brother Sylvestre; and the Notes of Father Bourdin which recorded the actual words of Father Champagnat) speak of the event taking place with a child in foothills of Mt Pilat whereas, of course, Les Palais is up on the plateau. None of them names the child. The Bourdin notes are additionally interesting because of the sequence in which he orders the events. This entry in his notes seems straightforward enough: “What made the work urgent: a child sick in the foothills of Pilat, needed the sacraments... Goes to a neighbour for a moment, returns, child dead, reflection: “How many children far from the means of salvation... if instructed, know how to repent, know...” But Bourdin – quoting what he has heard directly from Father Champagnat own lips – lists this encounter after Marcellin’s recruiting Jean-Marie and two other brothers, his buying the house, the beginning of the brothers’ work with young people, and La Valla’s pre-existing “drunken schoolmaster” leaving town.
This all takes us well into 1818, eighteen months after the death of J-B Montagne. Perhaps Bourdin does not mean to imply a chronology in his notes but the order is curious, nonetheless, especially when considered against other inconsistencies among the accounts. Brother Laurent, the next oldest account after that of Bourdin, is clear that the event occurred in 1818.
A third reason to question whether young Montagne is the dying child is prompted by the age given in the different documents. While Brother François, in his notebooks, describes the young person’s age at seventeen, all other accounts – including the official version of the Life by Brother Jean-Baptiste – have the child at eleven or twelve. We know J-B Montagne was sixteen when he died. Even though chronological age might have been regarded to be of less importance at the time than level of maturity, it is another inconsistency. Taken together, and from French writers known for an often-pedantic accuracy, it is not easy to explain away, let alone to reconcile, these apparently varying accounts….
Another thing to which Laurent draws our attention is that the situation of the “dying child” was not a one-off, and that Marcellin was growing in his appreciation of the extent of this problem for at least two years after taking up residence in La Valla. The civil registers indicate that seven relatively young people over the age of seven died in Marcellin’s first year at La Valla, coming from six different hamlets.
Finally, there is the problem of why Father Champagnat would have been the priest called to attend J-B Montagne, when there were two priests at Tarentaise, just a twenty-minute walk away. To get a message to La Valla would have been a two-hour trek down to that town, with no guarantee that he would have been there, then a steep two-hour climb back….
So, on the balance of probabilities, it seems problematic to claim that Jean-Baptiste Montagne was in fact the dying boy. It is much more likely to have been another child of the parish. That does not mean, however, that we should forget the Montagne story. In fact, it is most instructive to look at why this story and this boy have captured Marist imagination, since Brother Gabriel Michel started recounting the name and place to Marist pilgrims in the late 1960s. But let us approach it as nuanced mythology rather than dubious history. Like all good foundation myths, it tells us more about why than what.
Poor Montagne. Br Michael proceeds to highlight additional historical evidence to support his hypothesis. However, as Br Michael highlights, the importance of the story isn’t in the literal details, but the meaning that we garner from the substance of the legend.
The story of Marcellin’s encounter with the dying child is, like all good founding myths, a tale that one generation should to continue to pass onto the next, as a way of maintaining integrity and identity, and of defining deeper purposes. But such myths also risk being read simplistically. One key for Marists in their unlocking of the Montagne story is for them to see it in the context of its origins. As we contemplate the Montagne myth, it is not Jean-Baptiste, in the final analysis, on whom we should be focussed. Perhaps this is one reason why the early Marist chroniclers did not give a name to the “dying child”. That child represented all young people whose circumstances meant they had a diminished capacity for appreciating who they were as a son or daughter of God and what the Gospel of Jesus Christ could mean in their lives. The focus is, rather, on those who respond to this need and what is needed for them to be the kind of Marist evangeliser that Marcellin imagined. It is a story ultimately about the reader.
In the same edition of Marist Notebooks, there is another article by Br André Lanfrey, which takes the hypothesis even further. I have attached this edition, number 35, with both articles. Enjoy the (unsettling) reading!
