DAUVERSIÈRE, JÉRÔME LE ROYER DE LA - Founder of the Hospitaller Daughters of St Joseph and promoter of the founding of Montréal, b. at La Flèche (Anjou, France), of a family belonging to the minor nobility, 18 March 1597; d. there 6 Nov. 1659. A tax collector at La Flèche, he married in 1618 Jeanne Baugé, by whom he had five children. This modest collector of taxes, commonly called “the holy man of La Flèche,” faithful executor of a precise mission entrusted to him by Divine Providence, matured between 1630 and 1640, with the advice of Fr Stefano, Recollect, of the Jesuits François Chauveau and Charles Lalemant, and of the Sulpician Jean-Jacques Olier, the plan for the twofold daring foundation mentioned above, soon translated into reality. He began by founding at La Flèche, on 23 Dec. 1639, with the assistance of Mlle Marie de la Ferre, the Hospitaller Congregation of the Daughters of St Joseph, with simple vows and without enclosure, canonically erected by the Bishop of Angers on 19 Oct. 1643. Later, in order to contribute effectively to the evangelization of the natives, he promoted the founding of the city of Ville-Marie, now Montréal, on the island of the same name, of which he had been, since 1640, co-owner with Baron Pierre Chevrier de Fancamp.
The city came into existence on 17 May 1642, when forty colonists, led by the valiant Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, and by the intrepid Mlle Jeanne Mance, founder and first director of the Hôtel-Dieu of the incipient city, landed on the island. D., though remaining in France, provided for all the needs of the colonists, from their voyage to their tools, with his own resources, loans, and generous offerings inspired by a pure missionary ideal, from the members of the “Compagnie de Montréal,” created for this purpose and of which he was procurator. These two foundations brought him endless moral and financial worries; yet at his death the Congregation extended to La Flèche-Dieu (at La Flèche, Moulins, Laval, Baugé, Ville-Marie), and the town of Ville-Marie already numbered several hundred inhabitants. He died in terrible torment of mind and body, leaving a precarious inheritance immediately sequestered by the tax authorities and by the numerous creditors who had advanced, as procurator of the “Compagnie de Montréal,” large sums of money.
Follower of E. Drumont, initiator in France of anti-Semitism, and later of E. Vaugeois, advocate of monarchical nationalism.