Andrée Lévesque’s new book, Les filles de Jeanne : Histoires de vies anonymes, 1658-1915, will be published on April 16 by Éditions du remue-ménage and will be available in bookstores.
The book retraces the journeys of anonymous peasant women :
This story has very little to do with the political world. It focuses instead on the story of ordinary peasant women, and it is the same line of women that we follow, over three centuries and ten generations. It all began with Jeanne Perrin, who left La Rochelle in 1658 to work as a servant in Cap-de-la-Madeleine. Then from one Madeleine to another, from one Agathe to another, Andrée Lévesque follows Jeanne’s descendants, up to Maria Mélançon Brisson, who died in Témiscamingue in 1915.
These anonymous people have fortunately left some traces in notarial contracts, censuses or judicial archives, which allowed the historian to portray them, to reconstruct their lives, by conjecturing a little, sometimes imagining, with a canvas of backgrounds the economic and political context of their time. These farmers, most often illiterate and mothers of large families, had more than a singular story. They shaped history.