Je me souviens

Étienne-Paschal Taché is credited with having popularized the phrase. In 1883, his son Eugène-Étienne Taché, Assistant Commissioner for Crown lands in Quebec and architect of the provincial Parliament building, had the motto carved in stone below the coat of arms of Quebec which appears above the Parliament Building's main entrance door. The motto then came into official use, even though the coat of arms was not adopted until 1939. == Meaning ==

ceremony in Quebec City badge at the Citadelle of Quebec includes regimental motto Taché appears not to have left an explanation of the motto's intended meaning but he wrote a letter to the deputy minister of public works, , that showed what he intended to accomplish with the statues on the building's façade and described what they were intended to remind people of. All around the Parliament building, there are 24 statues of historical figures. They originally included founders (Jacques Cartier, Samuel de Champlain, and de Maisonneuve); clerics (de Laval, de Brébeuf, Marquette, and Olier); military figures (de Frontenac, Wolfe, de Montcalm, and de Levis); First Nations Peoples; French governors (D'Argenson, de Tracy, de Callières, de Montmagny, d'Ailleboust, de Vaudreuil); and, in the words of Taché, "some English governors the most sympathetic to our nationality" In 1919, seven years after Taché's death, the historian Pierre-Georges Roy underlined the symbolic character of the three-word motto: "which says so eloquently in three words, the past as well as the present and the future of the only French province of the confederation." This sentence would be cited or paraphrased several times afterwards. or possibly Victor Hugo's poem "". Writer André Duval thought the answer was simpler and closer at hand: In the hall of the Parliament building in which the motto is carved above the door, are the arms of the Marquess of Lorne whose motto was ("do not forget"). Consequently, Duval believed "the motto of Quebec to be at the same time the translation of the Marquess of Lorne's motto and the answer of a French-Canadian subject of Her Majesty to the said motto." Research published in English before 1978 led to the same conclusions regarding the motto's origin, the number of words it has and its interpretation. == Replacement of ==

s have featured the phrase "" In 1978, replaced the tourism-oriented motto ("the beautiful province") on Quebec's vehicle registration plate. According to the historian Gaston Deschênes, this event marks the start of a new period of attempts to reinterpret the meaning of the motto in the mainstream media of Canada. On February 4, 1978, Robert Goyette signed an article entitled "Car owners argue over motto" in The Montreal Star. This article attracted the attention of a reader, Hélène Pâquet, a granddaughter of Taché who replied on February 15 in an open letter entitled . It reads in part: The passage refers to the and the Tudor rose, as the floral emblems of France and England respectively. The idea that the motto had a lesser known second part spread widely. This new piece of information had a long life in the media before it was investigated by Deschênes in 1992. When Deschênes contacted Hélène Pâquet in 1992, she was unable to specify the origin of text she quoted in her letter. Her statements were not conformable to those of her father, Lieutenant-Colonel Étienne-Théodore Pâquet Jr., who on March 3, 1939, wrote in a letter to John Samuel Bourque, Tâché's son-in-law, and Minister of Public Works, that "the one who synthesized in three words the history and traditions of our race deserves to be recognized" == Other uses ==

appears on the badge of the Royal 22e Régiment, a francophone regiment of the Canadian Forces. The first version of the badge was designed in 1914. ==See also==