On 14 December 1837 about 2,000 British troops under Sir John Colborne attacked the Patriote rebels at Saint-Eustache, north-west of Montreal. A few hundred poorly armed men under Dr. Jean-Olivier Chénier held the church and nearby buildings until the troops set them on fire. Chénier and some 70 rebels were killed, and the rising collapsed.
The last Patriote camp
The Patriote rising in Lower Canada broke out in November 1837. By mid-December the strongest rebel camp left was at Saint-Eustache, in the county of Lac-des-Deux-Montagnes, where Amury Girod and the village doctor, Jean-Olivier Chénier, led the revolt. Their men came mostly from Saint-Eustache and the neighboring parishes of Sainte-Scholastique and Saint-Jérôme, and many of them had no proper weapons.1
Colborne marched from Montreal with about 2,000 men and artillery. His dispatch names two brigades, one under Colonel John Maitland with the 32nd Regiment, the other under Colonel George Augustus Wetherall with the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Regiment, besides volunteer cavalry and riflemen from Montreal. A company of loyalist volunteers from Saint-Eustache itself was led by Maximilien Globensky.2
The church in flames
About eleven in the morning of 14 December the troops crossed the frozen river below the village, and the alarm bell rang in Saint-Eustache. A party of rebels came out across the ice and was driven back by the guns. Girod and many of the men fled before the attack, but the rest held the church, the presbytery, the convent, the seigneurial manor and nearby houses.3
The guns opened fire on the church and the houses around it. Soldiers stormed the presbytery and the manor and set them on fire, and then the church was set alight too. Rebels who tried to escape from the burning church were shot down as they ran. Chénier was killed trying to get out.4
The cost
The fire spread through the night and the troops looted the village. The 1838 eyewitness journal counts at least 70 rebels killed; the Dictionary of Canadian Biography finds some 40 dead whose names are known and probably as many more unknown. The troops took more than a hundred prisoners. Their own losses were light: the official return lists one man killed and nine wounded, while the journal speaks of three killed.5
Rumors that soldiers had mutilated Chénier’s body were denied by the 1838 journal, and historians were still arguing over how the army treated it more than a century later. Colborne reported that order had been restored, and by the end of December the rising in Lower Canada had been put down; a second one, in November 1838, failed too.6
