SIGOGNE, JEAN-MANDÉ, Roman Catholic priest and jp; b. 6 April 1763 in Beaulieu-lès-Loches, France, the eldest child of Mandé Sigogne and Marguerite Robert; d. 9 Nov. 1844 in Ste Marie (Church Point), N.S.

From his father, a cloth manufacturer, Jean-Mandé Sigogne inherited an uncommonly forceful character which, coupled with a moral rigorism, was the most striking characteristic of his pastoral career in Nova Scotia. The Sigognes encouraged learning for their children. Jean-Mandé, in particular, showed promise and eventually decided upon a vocation in the priesthood. At the Petit Séminaire de Tours he received the traditional classical education of pre-revolutionary France, mastering Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. He went on to firmly anti-Jansenist theological studies at the Grand Séminaire, and in 1787 he was ordained a priest for the diocese of Tours.

From this education Sigogne at age 24 emerged a resolute gallican, and a man of refinement, sensibility, and substantial culture. During his years of formal study he had gathered an impressive personal library which included, along with ecclesiastical works, a good representation of reference books and dictionaries, secular history, Greek and Latin classics, and a number of French authors. A detailed inventory of 1792, the year in which the revolutionaries seized his belongings as state property, lists nearly 200 titles, and “a pile of book[s] in bad condition, heaped up in a large box, many volumes of no value, bound and unbound.” Nor were the young abbé’s cultural propensities limited to books: a smaller case contained “a number of unusual shell[s] and other items.”

Sigogne was said to be small of stature “and in flesh, thin. His appearance was modest even to timidity.” He was of frail health, “not strong in body.” In Nova Scotia he complained variously of asthma, urinary disorders, and a “faint buzzing in the head.” In 1808, in the aftermath of a severe illness, his hair rapidly turned grey.

Sigogne’s only ecclesiastical appointment in France was as curate in Manthelan, a remote village some 12 miles west of Beaulieu-lès-Loches. He exercised this charge from 1787 to 1791. As early as April 1791 he rejected the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, but for a time his legal status remained ambiguous. He continued to function, perhaps semi-clandestinely, alongside the conforming cure for another seven months, during which he is described in municipal documents as “formerly curate.” To his problems with the revolutionaries was added the hostility of his father, by now mayor of Beaulieu-lès-Loches, who turned him away from the family home because of his conservative politics.

Harassment of the refractory clergy turned to open persecution in late 1791. From November Sigogne carried on his ministry in secret. When la patrie en danger was declared in July 1792 the situation for the non-conforming clergy became untenable. In some accounts Sigogne is said to have barely escaped death. Whether on his own or aided by his father’s influence, he contrived to leave France, as did the majority of the French clergy.

Sigogne made his way to England, where his presence is noted as early as 27 Aug. 1792. A month later he collected his first assistance from a recently formed committee of relief for the émigré clergy. Thereafter he may have found gainful employment as a wood-turner for several weeks. However, from January 1793 to June 1796 he collected his two guineas monthly from the committee; he had no other income. He may then have been engaged as a tutor in a noble house, or an Anglican private school, or both. In his latter years in England he lodged in Rotherhithe (London). There he gave French, Latin, Greek, and geography lessons, and sold devotional and stationery materials. During the time he spent in England, Sigogne achieved a thorough mastery of English.

In these years the lack of French-language priests in the Maritime colonies of British North America was an acute problem, and the émigré clergy in England therefore became a focus of interest. Since 1790 the Acadians of St Mary’s Bay in the Clare district of Nova Scotia had become increasingly concerned about the inability of church authorities to meet their religious needs. The last French-language priests to minister to this area even on an occasional basis were Joseph-Mathurin Bourg* and Jean-Antoine Ledru*. After the latter’s departure in 1788, the Acadians had to rely on English-speaking priests: William Phelan and Thomas Power paid occasional visits to St Mary’s Bay, and Thomas Grace*, named Father James, was stationed there from 1790 to 1791. Petitions for a resident French-language priest from among the émigré clergy were earnestly seconded by James Jones*, the superior of missions in the Maritime colonies, and by Lieutenant Governor Sir John Wentworth*. Bishop Pierre Denaut* of Quebec and his coadjutor designate, Joseph-Octave Plessis*, had also pleaded the Acadians’ cause in England. It was many years before they obtained satisfaction, however. Finally, in January 1799 an émigré priest in Boston forwarded 20 guineas in passage money to London, and that April the leader of the French clergy in England advised Denaut, “I have just procured from the government a passport for a kindly and worthy clergyman named M. Sigogne, who has departed to go and work under your orders.”

After arriving at Halifax on 12 June, Sigogne spent a fortnight with Jones, his immediate superior. Then, having sworn allegiance to the crown, he sailed in a fishing vessel to the first of his two widely separated parishes, Ste Anne du Ruisseau in the Argyle district at the southwestern tip of the province. Three weeks later he proceeded some 50 miles north through the wilderness to his second parish, Ste Marie in the district of Clare. This mission was to be his headquarters for the rest of his life.

At least four times a year for the next two decades, and periodically after 1824, Sigogne was to undertake the onerous journey between Ste Marie and Ste Anne, travelling on horseback over unmade roads. From Ste Marie he would go to Ste Anne once in summer and once in winter, remaining each time two to three months in the lower parish. In response to sick calls he made many unscheduled journeys as well. The trip took three days, with overnight stops at Salmon River and Yarmouth. After the creation eventually of mission churches at West Pubnico in Argyle and Meteghan in Clare, Sigogne had to divide his activity four ways until 1819. That year a long-awaited second priest arrived to take charge of the Argyle mission. He was André Doucet*, who shortly founded a new mission at Bas-de-Tousquet (Wedgeport). After Doucet was forced by failing health to leave in 1824, Sigogne resumed his twice-yearly treks to Argyle until the arrival of a new priest in 1829. With the departure of the latter in 1833, the old abbé, now a septuagenarian, ministered to the lower missions until 1836, when a permanent pastor was finally found for Argyle. Apart from his constituted missions, Sigogne ministered as best he could to the isolated Catholics along the upper half of St Mary’s Bay, from Sissiboo (Weymouth) to Digby, and to the Micmacs who arrived periodically at his residence in Ste Marie.

When Sigogne had first set foot among the Acadians of southwest Nova Scotia, he failed to find the idyllic, God-fearing communities which have often been portrayed in both history and folklore. Abject poverty, official neglect, and lack of stable pastoral care for a generation and a half after the expulsion of 1755 had caused indiscipline, ignorance, superstition, and moral laxity to flourish. Sigogne’s impression of his new flock was anything but flattering. They were “a benighted people,” he reported, “[steeped] in crass ignorance . . . , infected with ideas of equality [and] liberty, or rather licence and libertinism . . . and the most foolish [of them] is often the most stubbornly determined to set his wishes as the standard.” Even occult practices, not unknown in Acadia, continued to thrive. As late as 1810, while Sigogne was absent from Argyle, a young maiden, “possessed by an evil spirit, sick with an unknown illness,” was treated to a bizarre mixture of traditional prayer and a “recipe of old Acadia” involving 100 pins and 100 needles, a new knife, the heart of a black chicken, and the afflicted girl’s urine, all boiled together in a newly made earthen pot.

Sigogne’s rather bilious reaction to the Acadians, under the circumstances, is not surprising. He was particularly sensitive to their primitive republicanism, which reminded him of the moral chaos that had forced his exile from his own country. His revulsion echoed that expressed by royal officials, both French and English, as early as the second half of the 17th century. More recently, James Jones had warned that the missionary “will have to deal with people hard to lead; in regard to ecclesiastical regulations they are true Americans.”

The abbé faced without delay the most urgent requirements of his far-flung missions: the resumption of the sacramental and liturgical life – hundreds of baptisms and the blessing of marriages, teaching the catechism, and the appointment of councils of elders whose purpose it was to “take a few salutary and needed measures for our spiritual and temporal benefit, and to maintain peace, justice, and unity amongst us, heeding religion, conscience and honour.” The onerous material burden of erecting and financing adequate churches both at Ste Anne and at Ste Marie caused Sigogne the greatest and most sustained distress of his career. By 1800 natural population growth in the two districts had caused younger members to settle at increasing distances along the shore from the original centres where the churches stood. As settlement extended farther from Ste Anne and Ste Marie, religious obligations in the new villages became more and more difficult to fulfil. These geographic and demographic circumstances led to many years of dissension between priest and parishioners, and among the people of the different villages, on the issues of the location of new churches, the division of the original parishes, and the creation of new ones. Sigogne built new churches to replace inadequate ones at Ste Anne and Ste Marie (1809), and in ensuing years he constructed the first churches at Pubnico (1815) and Meteghan (1817). Following a disastrous fire in 1820, in which the villages of Ste Marie, Petit Ruisseau (Little Brook), and Grosses Coques were virtually wiped out, Sigogne built a new church and rectory at Ste Marie. Around 1831 he built the Micmac chapel at Bear River, and finally, in 1841, he erected his seventh church at Corberrie, the only one that remains to this day.

Marshalling the energies of his recalcitrant flock continued to be an ordeal long after the affairs of the churches had been resolved. To his death Sigogne found the Acadians “hard to satisfy and quarrelsome.” He suffered incessant rebuffs, suits, and petitions, all of which he faithfully reported to his bishop. Plessis, who succeeded Denaut in 1806, clearly found all of this turbulence rather exceptional. “When will you be over the difficulties and the lawsuits?” he enquired in exasperation in 1817. “At your time of life one ages sufficiently without all those vexations.”

The situation was not improved by Sigogne’s forceful domination of virtually all matters pertaining to the temporality as well as the spirituality of his parishes. It is not surprising that successive bishops were obliged to confront him with what they felt was excessive rigour on his part, and to urge him towards moderation. Thus in 1800 Denaut, to whom Sigogne seemed “a bit odd in his behaviour,” counselled leniency in the application of the church’s teaching on such matters as usury, fasting, and abstinence. Yet Sigogne, even though he railed against what he called “follies, high jinks at all hours, and debauchery,” imposed as harsh penances upon himself as he did upon others, and frequently requested that the bishop relax laws which he felt were too onerous for the faithful. For example, he sought consideration for those whose work obliged them to take their meals in Protestant households, and also requested the removal of eggs from the “flesh” category for purposes of abstinence.

The Acadians continued to resent the authoritarian ways of their pastor. They tested his patience with their quarrels about the proportion of support due from each village. Unfortunately for him, as long as such matters remained in dispute, no support was forthcoming. Thus he was frequently forced to beg from the pulpit for his subsistence. Despite his frail constitution, he was obliged to cut and transport his own firewood, and to maintain a vegetable garden in order to keep from starving. Privations such as these, and the hostility which caused them, took a severe emotional toll. Sigogne was frequently troubled by self-doubt, and regretted having offered himself for the New World at all. At times, in the throes of discouragement, he threatened to return to France, where the religious situation had become somewhat more stable. Alone in his backwater he was plagued by rejection and loneliness: he was driven to writing pathetic and petulant outbursts to his bishop, and to clerical friends who no longer troubled to answer his letters.

Sigogne’s intellectual interests, his correspondence, his sermons, his friendships, and many impressions recorded by his contemporaries confirm that he was a man of refinement. His long career among unlettered Acadians did not diminish this quality. Captain William Scarth Moorsom*, travelling in Nova Scotia in the late 1820s, noted that Sigogne, “though buried in his retreat from all the thoughts and habits of the polished world, yet retains the urbanity of the old French School.” He maintained his fluency in Hebrew and Greek by reading breviary passages in those languages. Joseph Howe* described him in the Novascotian, or Colonial Herald as deeply learned and of polished manners. Thomas Chandler Haliburton* found him “a man of strong natural understanding, well informed.”

On at least one occasion Sigogne’s intellectual preferences led to a strikingly unclerical outburst. The incident followed Plessis’s pastoral visit of 1815, in the course of which he noted Sigogne’s predilection for the gallican, or Parisian, breviary. After he returned to Quebec, the prelate wrote a firm reprimand and ordered Sigogne to use henceforth the repetitive and less lively but (in the diocese, of Quebec) normative Roman version. Sigogne was so incensed that he threatened to abandon his mission on this issue alone. “I am more attached to my breviary,” he wrote to Plessis, “than to the country, and . . . gold is worth more than old lead.” The bishop allowed the matter to drop. When peninsular Nova Scotia became a vicariate apostolic under Edmund Burke* in 1817, his jurisdiction ceased.

Occasional impatience notwithstanding, Plessis was a source of much consolation for Sigogne. He never failed to praise, and even to marvel at, all that the abbé was able to accomplish in his difficult mission. Even after 1817 he invited Sigogne to continue writing as in the past. As a parting gesture in 1815, the bishop had honoured Sigogne by placing his new church at Meteghan under the patronage of Saint-Mandé (Saint Mandal). After the great Clare fire of 1820 Plessis strove, none too successfully as it turned out, to ease the Acadians’ losses by gathering alms in Lower Canada on their behalf.

To this day the oral traditions of Argyle and Clare recall Sigogne’s unyielding moral rigour. A large number of surviving sermons amply confirm this reputation. He used the threat of excommunication with singular results among a simple people who could not easily do without the consolations of religion. In this manner, though with much difficulty, Sigogne was able (at least during the months he was among them) to bring entire villages to their duty: to provide funds, labour, and materials to build their churches, to support their pastor, and generally to abide by the moral prescriptions of the faith.

The severest incident concerned an illicit marriage which, for reasons of consanguinity, Sigogne had refused to sanction in 1826. The young couple defied the pastor in his absence and were married before a Protestant clergyman. Sigogne, when he returned, took the matter vigorously in hand. He denounced the union as void and ordered the couple, and nine of their accessories, to withdraw from the church until they repented publicly and accepted an equally public penance. Within a fortnight the couple returned repentant, and heard their penance: for six years they were to advance no farther than the church entrance, and to wear white kerchiefs, so as to be recognized by all as fomenters of scandal. The matter was summarily concluded with the pastor extolling both the virtue of penance and penitents who accept its modalities with generosity. It was a dramatic stroke, fully in keeping with the abbé’s reputation. Though it is unlikely that Sigogne held the parties to the full measure of the penance, there is no doubting its effectiveness in both the spiritual and the social lives of his parishioners.

Sigogne was more than a pastor of Acadian souls. His flock depended on him, as the only man among them both learned and fluent in English, to see to their temporal interests as well. With the aid of his friend judge Peleg Wiswall of Digby, Sigogne learned to draft deeds, wills, and other legal papers on behalf of his charges. He held these papers in a box in the rectory at Ste Marie. When his residence took fire during the 1820 conflagration and he tried to save these documents, he suffered severe burns that required more than a month of sustained medical care.

Some years after his arrival Sigogne’s usefulness became known outside his districts: in 1806 he was appointed a justice of the peace, succeeding Amable Doucet*; Sigogne retained this post until at least 1841. He was of substantial service to the civil authority, which had hitherto paid slight attention to the legal requirements of the Acadians. Given his prominence in the eyes of the provincial authorities, Sigogne was also well suited to lead delegations to the seat of government in Halifax. In 1807 he successfully petitioned for new land grants at Salmon River to accommodate the growing population; years later he would be chiefly responsible for the first expansion of Acadian settlement away from the coastal area, at Concession and Corberrie, where he founded his last parish. As late as the year before his death, Sigogne appeared before Lieutenant Governor Lord Falkland [Cary*] on a public matter.

Sigogne considered ignorance to be the Acadians’ most serious privation. His own considerable efforts to help them overcome this disadvantage failed; the parents were apathetic, the children indocile, and qualified teachers lacking. He persisted in berating his parishioners for their indifference to learning and their resultant inferiority in dealing with their English-speaking neighbours. Given that the Acadians lived for several decades after the dispersion on the very edge of starvation, it was not entirely fair of Sigogne to express himself so strongly and persistently on the matter of their ignorance.

He achieved a small measure of success by gathering under his roof at Ste Marie several promising young boys and dispensing to them what education he could. Frederick Armand Robicheau, the first Acadian member of the House of Assembly from St Mary’s Bay, and other mid-century community leaders were the products of this system. Less than half a century after Sigogne’s death the problem of Acadian education was addressed in a manner he undoubtedly would have approved: in 1890 a small classical college in the French tradition, the Collège Sainte-Anne, was founded at Ste Marie specifically as a memorial to Sigogne’s efforts to free his flock from the bondage of illiteracy.

Another pastoral problem for Sigogne was the contempt in which persons of mixed Acadian and Micmac blood were held by the rest of the community. “It is the only area in which their rule of equality does not apply,” he reported wryly. His interventions did not sit well with the rest of the population, and he soon decided to leave the solution of this problem to the passage of time and to intermarriage. More successful were Sigogne’s pastoral endeavours on behalf of the Micmacs. They came from Bear River to Ste Marie each year on 26 July to celebrate their principal feast of St Anne. In order to minister to them adequately Sigogne set about learning their tongue, procuring Micmac manuscripts for the purpose at his own considerable expense in 1804. It was not long before he could boast of preaching in three languages on a Sunday. His chief concern for the Micmacs was the preservation of their faith [see Andrew James Meuse], and he developed a fond attachment to them as a people. In the year of his death he wrote of them as “this forlorn people, whom I called my children.” He regularly solicited assistance from the government on their behalf. Late in 1827 Sigogne and judge Wiswall were able to settle about 20 families on a small reserve at Bear River, where they pursued sedentary livelihoods. In 1828 Sigogne reported quarrels and discords among them, but the settlement endured. In 1831 a grant of £100 from the province allowed him to begin the chapel of St Francis Xavier.

It is one of the paradoxes of Sigogne’s career that he was held in high esteem outside the French districts and bore his heaviest crosses in the Acadian community. He obviously enjoyed the society of those he hoped to influence on behalf of his flock. He regularly exchanged books, presents of apples and wine, and compliments with Wiswall. He nourished a high esteem for Haliburton, which the latter reciprocated, and maintained cordial relations with Joseph Howe, James Boyle Uniacke*, Laurence O’Connor Doyle*, and others. Haliburton, in return for the abbé’s assistance in his election in 1826, championed such Sigogne-sponsored causes as education and roads and the abolition of the discriminatory oath imposed on Catholics by the Test Act of 1673. During the debate on the Catholic emancipation bill of 1826, which was introduced in the legislature by Richard John Uniacke*, Haliburton paid public tribute to Sigogne’s character and to the exemplary loyalty and general orderliness which he inspired in his Acadian charges.

Sigogne elicited less enthusiastic regard from Edmund Burke, his ecclesiastical superior in Nova Scotia. The erratic Burke maintained a running feud with Sigogne. He found him stubborn and “of a somewhat irritable, not to say difficult disposition.” This is precisely how many of the Acadians saw him, and Burke’s opinion owed much to the petitions of complaint brought to him by Sigogne’s enemies in Argyle and Clare. In 1815 Burke reported that although well bred, Sigogne was not very learned, an appraisal which contrasts strikingly with the other opinions we have of him.

In 1844 Sigogne entered the 82nd year of his life and the 46th of his Acadian ministry. He had not left Nova Scotia since his arrival in 1799; he had taken no leave, except for periodic journeys to the provincial capital at the head of some delegation or other. In his deeply spiritual way, he saw only supernatural reasons for the strength he mustered in the face of poor health and ill usage, and for the extraordinary exertions he managed in the pursuit of his apostolate. Towards the end of his life he wrote: “Divine providence to which I have sacrificed everything led me to find resources quite beyond my deserts and wholly sufficient.” It is this conviction that explains his fortitude in the face of repeated temptations over the years to abandon the Acadians and return to France.

By 1835 the abbé’s lifelong frailty had begun to turn into paralysis. A description of the state of the Halifax diocese written in 1844, the last year of his life, reports that he required the support of two men to cross the yard from his rectory to his church. On 7 November, apparently while saying mass, Sigogne suffered a final stroke which completed his paralysis. He was carried to the rectory where he received the last rites, and was able to enjoy the consolation of a fellow priest by his side. At his own request he was taken back to the church sanctuary, where he expired at mid morning on the 9th. He was buried at Ste Marie. Nearly a half-century later, in 1892, his remains were moved across the highway to the centre of the greensward fronting the college recently inaugurated as his memorial. The monument erected on that occasion still stands. Sigogne was the most important figure in the survival of the French and Catholic traditions among the Acadians of southwest Nova Scotia, and he continues to be revered as such today in the districts of his apostolate.

Bernard Pothier