Le Progrès was a weekly French newspaper published in Windsor starting in 1881 by the brothers Aurèle and Gaspard Pacaud. Until very recently, most issues of Le Progrès were thought to be lost; as writer Paul-François Sylvestre once stated in Les Journaux de l’Ontario Français, “In this day, copies of Le Progrès are, alas, disconcertingly rare.” We cannot even be sure when exactly Le Progrès stopped publishing; various dates have been proposed, including 1912, 1919 and 1928. But a recent discovery has opened an amazing window on this lost piece of Windsor Francophone history. Thanks to the efforts of historian Jack Cecillon, archivist Linda Chakmak and librarian Daniel Noël, a lost cache of more than 800 newspapers has recently been brought to light. The collection includes mainly issues of Le Progrès, from 1881 to 1902 , , but also several issues of some of its main competitors Le Courrier d’Essex / Le Courrier de l’Ouest (1884-1885) , and Le Courrier (1908-1909) , . This discovery is of inestimable value to historians, genealogists, folklorists and anyone else interested in researching this often overlooked period of French-Canadian life in South-Western Ontario.

The source of this collection remains a mystery. The newspapers, bound in a series of uncatalogued and unidentified covers, had apparently been warehoused for several decades in the basement of the Windsor Public Library. The Library has no record of the newspapers’ provenance. Some issues appear to have been marked by an editor , ; we therefore speculate that the collection came from someone closely associated with Le Progrès itself.

Le Progrès, while serving the political and commercial aspirations of the Pacaud brothers, also managed for over thirty years to be the number one publication for the Windsor area French-Canadian community. The paper was able to maintain this position by serving two functions: one, as mirror of the community, and secondly, as its window on the world. In the following web pages, we will illustrate this double mandate by focussing on three aspects of Le Progrès:

Windsor 1881-1909   The French-Canadian Community  Le Progrès and the Pacaud Brothers