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Laurier, then in his 46th year, became leader of the Liberal party in June, 1887. It was supposedly a tentative experimental choice; but the leadership thus begun ended only with his death in February, 1919, nearly thirty-two years later. Laurier was a French Canadian of the ninth generation. His first Canadian ancestor, Augustin Hebert, was one of the little band of soldier colonists who, under the leadership of Maisonneuve founded Montreal in 1641. Hebert's granddaughter married a soldier of the regiment Carignan-Salieres, François Cotineau dit Champlaurier. The Heberts were from Normandy, Cotineau from Savoy. From this merging of northern and southern French strains the Canadian family of Laurier resulted; this name was first assumed by the grandson of the soldier ancestor. The record of the first thirty years of Wilfrid Laurier's life was indistinguishable from that of scores of other French-Canadian professional men. Born in the country (St. Lin, Nov. 20, 1841) of parents in moderate circumstances; educated at one of the numerous little country colleges; a student at law in Montreal; a young and struggling lawyer, interested in politics and addicted upon occasion to political journalism.—French-Canadians by the hundreds have travelled that road. A fortunate combination of circumstances took him out of the struggle for a place at the Montreal bar and gave him a practice in the country combined with the editorship of a Liberal weekly, a position which made him at once a figure of some local prominence. Laurier's personal charm and obvious capacity for politics marked him at once for local leadership. At the age of 30 he was sent to the Quebec legislature as representative of the constituency of Drummond and Arthabaska; and three years later he went to Ottawa. The rapid retirement of the Rouge leaders, Dorion and Fournier to the bench and Letellier to the lieutenant-governorship of Quebec, opened the way for early promotion, and in 1877 he entered the cabinet of Alex. Mackenzie and assumed at the same time the leadership of the French Liberals. Defeated in Drummond-Arthabaska upon seeking re-election he was taken to its heart by Quebec East and continued to represent that constituency for an unbroken period of forty years. He went out of office with Mackenzie in 1878, and thereafter his career which had begun so promisingly dwindled almost to extinction until the events already noted called him back to the lists and opened for him the doors of opportunity.

When Wilfrid Laurier went to Montreal in 1861 he began the study of law in the office of Rodolphe Laflamme, a leading figure in the Rouge political group; and he joined L'Institut Canadien already far advanced in the struggle with the church which was later to result in open warfare. Those two acts revealed his political affiliations and fixed the environment in which he was to move during the plastic twenties. Ten years had passed since a group of ardent young men, infected with the principles and enthusiasm of 1848, of which Papineau returning from exile in Paris was the apostle, had stormed the constituencies of Lower Canada and had appeared in the parliament of Canada as a radical, free-thinking, ultra-Democratic party, bearing proudly the badge of “Rouge”; and the passage of time was beginning to temper their views with a tinge of sobriety. The church, however, had them all in her black books and Bishop Bourget, that incomparable zealot and bigot, was determined to destroy them politically and spiritually, to whip them into submission. The struggle raged chiefly in the sixties about L'Institut Canadien, frowned upon by the church because it had books in its library which were banned by the Index and because it afforded a free forum for discussion. When Confederation cut the legislative connection between Upper and Lower Canada the church felt itself free to proceed to extremes in the Catholic province of Quebec and embarked upon that campaign of political proscription which ultimately reached a point where even the Rome of Pius IX. felt it necessary to intervene.

In this great battle for political and intellectual freedom the young Laurier played his part manfully. He boldly joined L'Institut Canadien, though it lay under the shadow of Bishop Bourget's minatory pastoral; and became an active member and officer. He was one of a committee which tried unavailingly to effect an understanding with Bishop Bourget. When he left Montreal in 1866 he was first vice-president of the Institute. His native caution and prudence and his natural bent towards moderation and accommodation enabled him to play a great and growing, though non-spectacular, part in the struggle against the church's pretensions. As his authority grew in the party he discouraged the excesses in theory and speech which invited the Episcopal thunders; even in his earliest days his radicalism was of a decidedly Whiggish type and his political color was several shades milder than the fiery red of Papineau, Dorion and Laflamme. Under his guidance the Rouge party was to be transformed in outlook, mentality and convictions into something very different indeed; but this was still far in the future. But towards the church's pretensions to control the political convictions of its adherents he presented an unyielding front. On the eve of his assumption of the leadership of the French Liberals he discussed at Quebec, June 1877, the question of the political relations between church and state and the rights of the individual in one of his most notable addresses. In this he vindicated, with eloquence and courage, the right of the individual to be both Catholic and Liberal, and challenged the policy of clerical intimidation which had made the leaders of the church nothing but the tools and chore-boys of Hector Langevin, the Tory leader in the province. It may rightly be assumed that it was something more than a coincidence that not long after the delivery of this speech, Rome put a bit in the mouth of the champing Quebec ecclesiastics. This remained Laurier's most solid achievement up to the time when he was called to the leadership of the Dominion Liberal party.