Quebec National Day
| Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day | |
|---|---|
Saint-Jean-Baptiste parade, Montreal, June 24, 2006
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| Also called | Fête de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste, La Saint-Jean, Fête nationale, National Holiday |
| Observed by | Quebecers, French Canadians, French Americans/French Canadian Americans |
| Type | Historical, cultural, national, religious |
| Celebrations | Parades, bonfires, fireworks, feasting, drinking, musical concerts, flag waving, patriotic speeches, contests |
| Date | June 24 |
| Next time | 24 June 2018 |
| Frequency | annual |
Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day (French: Fête de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste, la Saint-Jean, Fête nationale du Québec) is a holiday celebrated on June 24 in the Canadian province of Quebec and by French Canadians across Canada and the United States. It was brought to Canada by French settlers celebrating the traditional feast day of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. It has been declared a national holiday in Quebec with publicly financed events organized province-wide by a "Comité organisateur de la fête nationale du Québec".
The feast day of Saint John the Baptist or Midsummer was a very popular event in the Ancien Régime of France, and it is still celebrated as a religious feast day in several countries, like Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Spain, Latvia and Lithuania.
The tradition landed in Canada with the first French colonists. The first mention of celebrations of Saint-Jean-Baptiste in North America dates back to 1606, when settlers en route to the future Acadia rested on the coast of Newfoundland, June 23. The second mention of celebrations, according to the Jesuit Relations, occurred on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River on the evening of June 23, 1636, with a bonfire and five cannon shots.
In Lower Canada, the celebration of the nativity of St. John the Baptist took a patriotic tone in 1834 on the initiative of one of the founders of the newspaper La Minerve, Ludger Duvernay, who would later become the first president of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society. In the spring of 1834, Duvernay and other patriotes attended the celebrations of the first St. Patrick's Day, the celebration of the Irish diaspora, in Montreal. This would have given him and others the idea of organizing something similar for all the Canadiens and their friends.
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