Pascal Poirier was 29 years old when he delivered this speech. An important figure in the “Acadian renaissance,” he was a member of the initial cohort of students at the first classical college in Acadia. One of the first Acadian federal civil servants, Poirier also distinguished himself as a writer, an historian, and a patriot. After co-leading the Acadian delegation to the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste convention in Quebec City in 1880, he joined the executive committee of the first Acadian “National Convention,” held in Memramcook the following year.

With this convention, Acadian nation-builders hoped to cement ties between the small Acadian communities scattered throughout the Maritime provinces and beyond. Poirier would later write: “It was the first time since the great upheaval [the deportations of the 1750s] that the scattered sections of our race found themselves reunited [...] We were children of the same family who didn’t know each other, strangers to one another. We approached each other with curiosity, but mostly with emotion” (Quoted in Massicotte, “Pascal Poirier”).

These leaders hoped to bring Acadia into the assembly of nations then on the rise in the second half of the 19th century. Great nation-states were forming, such as Italy (1861) and Germany (1871), while others were choosing national holidays to celebrate – the United States (1870) and France (1880), for example. Canada’s Confederation, created in 1867 as an integral part of the British Empire, didn’t fit neatly into the nation-state mould, so many of its supporters preferred to present it as a “community of communities,” one in which several “nationalities” could cohabit and cooperate.

It was at the table of these Canadian “nationalities” that Poirier proposed Acadia take its place. He pointed out that the Scots, the Irish, the French Canadians, and the English all had their own patron saints, whose birthdays were celebrated as national holidays. As a rapporteur for the commission considering the choice of feast day, he initially imagined remaining neutral, but eventually made up his mind: Acadians should choose the Virgin Mary as their patron saint, so that her Assumption into heaven would become “the emblem of our national awakening.”