This paper will highlight how the churches built by Victor Bourgeau (1821-1892) in the diocese of Montreal were influenced by aesthetics as advocated by A.W.N. Pugin and the periodical The Ecclesiologist. 
Even though a hundred or so churches are attributed to architect-builder Bourgeau, he never actually drew plans. Rather, he erected his first buildings (among which the Saint-Pierre-Apôtre Church in Montréal, in 1850) after John Ostell’s plans. It is Ostell who initiated Bourgeau to Baroque and Gothic vocabularies. Subsequently, young architects in his entourage continued to supply him with church drawings, sometimes neo-Baroque, sometimes neo-Gothic. Amongthem was Adolphe Lévesque (1829-1913), who had translated into French and published, in Montréal, Pugin’s The Present State of Architecture in England, as of 1856. 
Pugin’s influence is especially noticeable on bell-towers and church interiors built on the  outskirts of the territory of the diocese of Montréal, because, in the city itself, in Bishop Bourget’s words, there already was “too much Gothic.”