Lord Dufferin's Medieval Dream: How a 19th-Century Governor Wanted Québec to Look Like Carcassonne

Every old city has a founding myth. Québec's fortifications have a Victorian one — and it comes with a lord who fell in love with a French dream and clashed with an engineer's staircase logic.

The romantic obsessed with the Middle Ages

When Lord Dufferin (Frederick Temple Blackwood) arrived as Governor General in 1872, he wasn't just fond of old stones — he was a man of his era, and the 1870s were mad for medieval revival. Across Europe, the French fortified city of Carcassonne was being dramatically restored by architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc into the fairy-tale silhouette tourists still visit today. Dufferin never needed to set foot there; the image of Carcassonne was already everywhere in the romantic imagination of his generation, and he wanted Québec to carry that same medieval spell. Working with his architect, William H. Lynn, he pushed for gates dressed in neo-Gothic turrets and ornament — Québec's own answer to a European dream castle.

The real objection, on record

Dufferin arrived to find demolition already underway. The city's own engineer, Charles Baillairgé, and the municipal council saw the walls as an obstacle to a modern, growing city — two gates were already gone. Dufferin objected in the strongest terms available to a Victorian gentleman: he called the men behind the demolitions — Baillairgé included — "goths and vandals." Strong words for the city's own engineer and its elected officials, from a governor who hadn't even brought in an architect of his own yet. He got the work stopped just in time.

The complaint no one wrote down (but every guide imagines)

Here's the thing about Dufferin: he wasn't a purist. He wanted the walls kept, but he also understood they had to work for a modern city. As guides like to picture him growling to his engineers:

"By all means, we must protect, conserve, and maintain the fortifications. But please — get rid of these steel gate doors! Horse carriages can't negotiate the chicanes those doors were built for. They were designed to stop musket fire from slipping through when the gates stood open — not to jackknife every carriage in the city!"

No document has him saying exactly this, but it captures the real tension: preserve the past, but don't let it choke the present. That's precisely why the new gates went up wider, gentler on traffic, and dressed in the medieval-revival style that was all the rage — heritage and practicality, reconciled in stone.

This is where I like to turn to my own tourists — in my Québécois or Canadian accent, depending on the tour — and give them Dufferin's imagined mic-drop:

"Are you familiar with Wall Street, in New York? Where are their walls? All that's left is the name — Wall Street. I'm telling you: keep the Québec walls. One day, THEY will come..."

(If that last line sounds familiar, it's a wink to Field of Dreams — tourists usually catch it.)

And then I look at the group and say it plainly: and here you are... Dufferin was indeed a visionary.

Dufferin's stubborn romanticism, backed up by decades of restoration work and advocacy that followed him, is a real part of why Québec was recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site on December 3, 1985 — the first urban site north of Mexico to earn that distinction. The fortifications weren't the only reason (UNESCO also cited Québec's living historic core and its role as the cradle of French presence in North America), but they're the part visitors can still touch. Not bad, for a man mostly remembered for calling the city's own engineer a vandal.

Want to hear this one told live — accents included? Book a walking tour of Old Québec.