Join us for a Distinguished Professorial Lecture with Augustana history professor, Mélanie Méthot.


Lessons on Subjectivity: The Sad Story of Bigamist Julie Russell

On a cold Monday in January of 1855, Jean-Baptiste Bolduc, one of the priests stationed at Faubourg Saint-Roch Church in Paris, united Édouard Robitaille and Julie Morin in matrimony. The records show that nearly 23 years later, Reverend Sexton of the same church blessed the union of 64-year-old widower William Russell to 46-year-old Julie Morin, widow of Édouard Robitaille. A year after the marriage celebration, William wrote a new testament in which he made his “beloved wife Julie Morin” sole legatee. Six weeks later, Julie Russell asked that her husband William, who had become insane and violent, be interned in the Beauport Asylum. In a dramatic turn of events, Édouard Robitaille, who had been missing since 1865, knocked at Julie’s door on a nice August day in 1879. A bigamy lawsuit ensued.

Tried and acquitted in April 1880, Julie Russell was not at the end of her misery. William had come out of the asylum in December 1879 but was living under the care of his niece. When he died of consumption in early September 1880, the niece lost no time and immediately contested the validity of her uncle's last will and testament, in which he left nearly all of his assets to Julie. She cited that her uncle did not have the required faculties to dictate a will and that Julie Morin was not his wife. The case was first tried in the Superior Court of Quebec in January 1881, appealed in the Court of Queen's Bench and tried again at the newly established Supreme Court of Canada.

This lecture will take you on Julie’s legal journey. Along the way, we’ll learn how subjectivity plays a crucial role in our own understanding of events.