Phil Comeau is an experienced francophone filmmaker with a long list of documentaries and features to his name. But even he looks a bit stunned by what he’s finding out about his father as he researches l’Ordre de Jacques Cartier in the NFB film The Secret Order.
The secret society established in 1926 was truly underground, its members recruited mainly through the church and its aims and rituals kept secret for life among most members.
A sinister air surrounds the francophone society as Comeau recreates an initiation ceremony in a very effective dramatization. The young men, having assembled at some point, don eye-masks for a blindfolded journey to an underground chamber. They must put a hand on the shoulder of the man in front and are led then by a member of the order to submit to five “ordeals” that will determine if they have what it takes to belong to Jacques Cartier brotherhood. These tests involve holding a hand over a candle, walking a plank and having their heads held under water. In the film, one initiate decides the order is not for him. The ritual, led by a grand chief in a blue satin sash, was to show how solidarity was as important as secrecy in the operations of the order.
The Secret Order follows Comeau, a New Brunswick-born francophone, in his search through multiple archives to uncover the purpose of the secret society. The Jacques Cartier order was born of necessity: to assert the rights of French Canadians. Long before the 1963 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, it was only through the Ordre de Jacques Cartier that francophones could establish the right to use their own language in their own country.
English oppression was so bad that as one Acadian former member of the order recalls, he was reprimanded by his boss at the post office for speaking French to a French-speaking customer.
For Phil Comeau, investigation into the order that his father was a member of was freighted with personal revelations. In one of the archives, he finds his father’s membership card. In another cache of materials, the actual eye coverings used in the initiation ritual. And his searches lead him to living family members as well as former members of the order, most of whom have never spoken of the secret society for a public audience.
Secrecy was paramount so each chapter or cell of L’Ordre de Jacques Cartier—as many as 850 across the country comprising 72,000 members—kept to itself. The goal was representation in government, in banks and on school boards, but recruitment focused on the rural population, which was where most Canadian francophones lived in the early 20th century.
By 1965, after Quebeckers began to agitate for their rights, the order was disbanded. However, The Secret Order is a testament to the many men (only one woman was ever made a member of the order) who helped secure the French language and francophone culture in Canada on a permanent basis. Among the prominent names were onetime mayor of Montreal Jean Drapeau and the first francophone premier of New Brunswick, Louis Robichaud.
No longer secret, L’Ordre de Jacques Cartier made an important contribution to Canadian democracy.
The Secret Order https://www.nfb.ca/film/the-secret-order/.
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