Television Comes to Touladi for the First Time

Television Comes to Touladi for the First Time marks the moment a distant, previously unseen world entered the village through the parlor of the Founder’s House. On November 21, 1954, Guillaume D’Anjou made the ancestral home the first in Touladi to receive a television set. The gathering around its flickering screen was both a public spectacle and the beginning of a profound change: new images and entertainments would draw villagers away from older forms of communal and religious life.

Preparing the First Reception

In the mid-1950s, the Founder’s House briefly became the village’s foremost home because it was to receive a new presence that the narrative compares to a deity. Guillaume wanted the D’Anjou family’s heritage house to be first, and arranged the installation himself. Beside the building, he had a tall mast erected to carry a large, many-branched antenna, pointed due north to catch signals coming over the hills from Rimouski.

The receiving set was a bulky, varnished cube. A pane of glass on one side served as its conspicuous face, like a large open eye. Guillaume placed it in a clear corner at the back of the salon, to the right of the portrait of Le Fondateur. The placement made the new apparatus part of the ancestral interior even as its signals promised to bring the outside world into it.

The Village Gathers Around the Screen

Loïc remembered the autumn Sunday of 1954 as a day of impatient waiting with his cousins for the television’s great eye to begin blinking. More than a hundred people came to the house. Some arrived hours early and crowded inside; those who could not get in gathered outside at the windows, all waiting for the broadcast expected late that afternoon.

The first images included the head of an Indigenous person. The narrative presents this image as a stark emblem of the first inhabitants’ long history of exclusion from recorded memory and representation. Then the screen began to animate with flashes of light and moving scenes from Montréal and elsewhere. Faces, voices, gestures, and fragments of lives appeared across distances of hundreds or thousands of kilometers, making the faraway seem suddenly present in a home in the rural Bas-Saint-Laurent.

That effect was not simply a matter of hearing distant voices. Radio had already brought voices into people’s homes, but television made those speakers visible. The assembled viewers could see faces tighten, sweat on skin, and lips tremble. For some, the sudden appearance of people from far away seemed disturbing, even frightening; the screen made remote life feel almost face-to-face.

Suspicion, Fascination, and Habit

The first reception also exposed the difference between watching the new device and feeling at ease with it. When Grébiche came to inspect the television a few days later, she regarded it with a mixture of suspicion and amusement, muttering that there was something of the devil in it. Annette, too, seemed wary of the object and kept a respectful distance. Yet she became one of the household’s most faithful viewers, waiting each day for the programs to begin. She never dared to turn the set on herself.

The set’s physical presence therefore carried several meanings at once: wonder at the images, unease at their uncanny immediacy, and a new daily attraction. The gathering on its first day made television a shared event, but the habit it introduced would increasingly organize time around the screen rather than around the people assembled in the room.

A New Center of Village Life

Television’s consequences spread beyond the Founder’s House. When popular serials aired, the streets and spaces around the homes emptied, more thoroughly even than during Sunday high mass. Evening visits to play cards or checkers, or simply to talk, gradually dwindled, apart from gatherings maintained by a few older holdouts. At first, neighbors still visited one another to watch together; later, as families acquired their own sets, even that shared arrangement became less necessary.

The change reached into the village’s religious rhythms. The priest’s sermons increasingly met distracted listeners, drawn instead to television’s apparently democratic lessons. The screen’s blinking eye came to rival the eye of God: what had been treated as an emblem of modern progress displaced older beliefs as outdated. The event thus begins the village’s entry into the global village, but it also registers a loss of collective life. Television connected Touladi to distant images while loosening the local gatherings through which its people had once spent their evenings and Sundays.