Ville-Marie under Mount Royal became Canada’s bilingual giant
Montreal is Quebec’s largest city, Canada’s second, and North America’s eighth-largest. Founded in 1642 as Ville-Marie, it counted about 1.76 million people in the 2021 census and 4.29 million in the metro. Toronto overtook it economically in the 1970s, yet Expo 67 and the 1976 Olympics keep its global-event résumé unique in Canada.
The settlers who named Ville-Marie came from La Flèche in the Loire Valley. In 16th-century French réal and royal were interchangeable, so Montréal may simply be a variant of Mont Royal; another theory credits the Venetian geographer Ramusio, who wrote Monte Real on his 1556 map, though Quebec's toponymy commission disputes it. François de Belleforest first applied Montréal to the whole region in 1575. The Mohawk name Tiohtià:ke shortens a longer word for where the group parted ways.
People lived on the island as early as 4,000 years ago and grew maize by about AD 1000. The St Lawrence Iroquoians, distinct from the Haudenosaunee, built Hochelaga at the foot of the mountain, and Jacques Cartier, visiting on 2 October 1535, estimated over a thousand inhabitants. When Champlain returned in 1603 they had vanished, probably through disease, war or migration; he opened a fur post at Place Royale in 1611.
Jérôme Le Royer de La Dauversière acquired the island in 1639 for a Catholic mission and hired Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, then 30, who founded the settlement on 17 May 1642 with a hospital run by Jeanne Mance. Iroquois raids began by 1643, and the population had sunk to about 50 before Maisonneuve brought 100 recruits in 1653; otherwise the colony would have been abandoned. By 1685 it had some 600 colonists, the 1689 attack on Lachine was New France's worst massacre, and Sulpician efforts led to the Mohawk communities of Kanesatake and Akwesasne. British forces took the city in 1760.
Today 58.5 percent of residents speak both French and English, and it is the largest mainly French-speaking city in the Americas. It hosts the International Civil Aviation Organization, the world's largest jazz and comedy festivals, and the Canadiens, winners of a record 24 Stanley Cups.
Source: Montreal
