By Nancy Miller Chenier
The plaque at 159 Murray Street, the former Guigues School, does not name any individuals involved in the battle over Regulation 17. If it did, Diane Desloges (1892-1945) and her sister Beatrice Desloges (1895-1957) would definitely be there in capital letters. Called the “Guardians of Guigues”, these two Lowertown women are well known to Francophones but less recognized by others.
Ontario Regulation 17, passed in 1912, placed severe restrictions on the teaching of French in our Lowertown schools, forbidding the language beyond the first two years. Beatrice and Diane Desloges, who were teachers at Guigues School at the time, defied the ban and were dismissed from their school.
With the assistance of Lowertown neighbours, they set up classes in the vacant Charbonneau store at Dalhousie and Guigues and in the Notre Dame du Sacre Coeur Chapel, which was then on Murray Street. When smuggled back into the school with the help of women armed with hatpins, they continued to teach under the protection of angry women and men.
What motivated these young women to do battle and become symbols of Franco-Ontarian resistance? Was it family stories of the grandfather who had fought as a patriote in the Rebellion of 1837-38? Had they been following the debate about votes for women in Ontario? Was it a sense of loyalty to the families that they had known since childhood?
Diane and Beatrice grew up on the streets of Lowertown – Cathcart, St Andrew, Bolton, Cumberland – while their father, Alexandre, worked at the S.J. Major Company. The children they taught were from these streets; the mothers and grandmothers who defended them were from their Notre Dame parish; the fathers worked with their father and brothers.
In many ways, they were ordinary women doing extraordinary things during a brief period of their lives. We know little of their lives afterwards. Diane married Georges Tanguay a few years later in 1917 and moved to Montreal. Beatrice married Ovila Lanthier in 1923 and lived in the community until her death.