Charles Mercier
The first complete edition of Peter Pernin’s legendary survivor’s account of the Great Peshtigo, Wisconsin Fire of 1871, fundamental evidence for the deadliest wildfire in American history: original French text, fresh and readable English translation, and introduction and commentary that locate the work in its social, political, and religious context. Since its first bilingual publication in Montreal in 1874, the memoir has been known to its many readers, among them even wildfire professionals and writers on forest ecology, only in partial reprintings of an inadequate translation. Pernin’s life story (1822-1909), that of a French missionary priest in America, emerges here for the first time from archival sources. His memoir emerges as a considerable work of North American francophone literature whose style reflects both the humane Classical studies and amateur science of a mid-19th century French Collège and the grim humor of Wisconsin lumberjack culture. Intended overall as a work of popular theology and theodicy, the work offers more than a gripping survival memoir. Pernin’s assimilation as an American went so far as a Catholic priest’s enthusiastically amplifying his Catholic understanding of natural disaster with Calvinist theology. It is therefore an important document of French missionary experience in a multi-religious America. In the French Belgian community of the Door peninsula east of Green Bay, Pernin had pastored Adèle Brice (1831-1896), the Marian visionary who had been inspired to establish there a religious community and school. Pernin risked his diocesan standing to argue that the 1871 wildfires had miraculously passed over Brice’s community to vindicate the truth of her visions. The memoir is the first published source for those events and therefore, together with other relevant materials published here in an appendix, a document essential to a critical history of the 1859 Robinsonville Mariophany, declared 'worthy of belief' by the bishop of Green Bay in December 2010, the first in the United States so declared. This edition of Pernin’s Doigt de Dieu is a must read for a critical understanding of Pernin’s evidence for the Great Peshtigo Fire as well as for those interested in French literature and culture in North America, American theological and religious history, nineteenth century American immigrant communities, missionary studies, Roman Catholic diocesan politics and ecclesiastica, and studies of visionaries and appearances of the Virgin Mary. 3
