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Fires
The building replaced seats of government lost to fire
A large fire destroyed the Château Saint-Louis in 1834. The Old Parliament Building was fully destroyed by fire on 1 February 1854, and the post office building that housed the legislature succumbed to a fire in 1883.
The design
Taché chose a French style over the British look of Ottawa
Eugène-Étienne Taché designed the building in the Second Empire style, built between 1877 and 1886. Budget limits toned the style down from what was popular in Paris, but it was still called a construction of the century.
Strikes
Workers struck over wages in 1878, and three more strikes followed
Wages went down from 60 cents to 50 cents in 1878 and the workers struck. The military suppressed the demonstrations in June 1878. In October 1884 a bombing damaged the construction site, and costs ran over.
The statues
The front wall holds 26 statues of people from Quebec's history
The statues were ordered in 1886 and delivered in 1894 from Louis-Philippe Hébert and eight other sculptors. Two are allegories, two represent the Abenaki, and the rest honour important people in the history of Quebec.
26statues on the front wall of the building
The motto
Taché carved Je me souviens below the coat of arms in 1883
The phrase is above the old entrance, below the 1868 version of Quebec's coat of arms. It is considered the first time the phrase was used as a motto. It became the official provincial motto in 1939.
Day 4, evening
It comes after Sainte-Famille church.
More stories from this trip idea
The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Parliament Building (Quebec), and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.