[Crofters & habitants: settler society, economy & culture in a Quebec township, 1848-1881]

Journal of Canadian Studies, Spring 1997 by Little, JI, Coates, Colin M

It may not be obvious why historians of early Quebec are paying so much attention to rural society. Indeed, one of the books under review refers to "une remarquable banalite" of the area studied (Lavallee 274). Such candour may do little to attract the attention of historians interested in larger populations and apparently more vital issues.

Does the history of rural Quebec matter? At one time, intellectuals argued that the virtue of nations was located in the countryside. The nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet lauded the peasant: "Le paysan n'est pas seulement la partie la plus nombreuse de la nation, c'est la plus forte, la plus saine, et, en balancant bien le physique et le moral, au total la meilleure."(f.1) In part, such sentiments reflected anti-modernist concerns about declining "communitas." But French-Canadian nationalists, until the 1960s, often located the heart of their nation among rural communities as well. Much of the recent production on the rural history of Quebec, with its emphasis on peasant culture, revisits such views, often recreating the social divisions that defined possibilities in rural communities in Quebec and discussing the rich and tenacious rural culture that developed in the colony. The history of seventeeth-century Montreal spans the religious and commercial interests fundamental to the colony of New France. Founded in 1642 as the Counter-Reformation utopian experiment Ville-Marie, Montreal soon revealed the extent to which Old World patterns were replicated in the New World. Louise Dechene's now classic account Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Montreal set the historiographical trend in which many studies of colonial society locate themselves. Published in French in 1974 but only recently translated, this volume re-evaluates the nature of colonial society by reconstructing in minute detail the workings of commerce and agriculture in the second most important town of the colony. Dechene's book is filled with insights into the society and economy of New France, and relatively little of her work has been shaken by the historical production of the last 20 years. The European population remained small throughout the period, and indeed throughout the history of New France as a whole, given limited immigration. For Dechene, the merchants and the peasants were the most important classes in the colony. The two groups functioned in relative isolation. While merchants in the fur trade dominated economic exchanges and ignored local development, farmers were content with subsistence. It was this lack of integration between the two sectors of the economy that determined the colony's features and long-term viability: "No sooner was it settled than the countryside began to exhibit the familiar, unchanging features of Quebec rural society -- and this despite the closeness of the warehouses -- encapsulated in its uniform farms and lifestyle, stable land ownership, strong family ties, and entrenched routines"(283). La Prairie en Nouvelle-France, 16471760, an examination of a seigneury located on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, provides an interesting counterpart to Dechene's study of Montreal. An agrarian seigneury, La Prairie did not witness the same socio-economic cleavages as the commercial town. Delving meticulously into notarial documents, Louis Lavallee sketches the lines of solidarity within the community: La Prairie constituted indeed "une unite de vie et de lieu"(263). Lavallee emphasises (but does not always demonstrate) social consensus within the local population, "la belle unite habituellement maintenue au sein de la communaute"(168). Without denying economic differences within the peasantry, there was a rough parity amongst them: "une majorite de paysans moyens, plus ou moins mediocres, dont l'independance economique semble cependant assuree"(262). Having a religious order as seigneur, La Prairie, like Montreal, was managed carefully but was managed carefully but not with legal and financial vigilance until the 1730s. Rather, the principal dynamic of local issues was the reproduction of the society from generation to generation. This occurred within a restricted space, as some 72 per cent of all marriages involved partners both from the seigneury. As Lavallee writes, "la reproduction est passablement hermetique"(159). Still, Montreal-based merchants increasingly came to dominate economic matters in the seigneury, through commercial debts. Thus, Lavallee captures the divide between town and country, as presented in Dechene's earlier work. Only a short distance from Montreal, La Prairie residents developed a strong rural community. The potential difficulties of the relationship between town and country can be seen in an episode from 1714: in one of the rare occasions of serious shortages of food, a group of women attacked two habitants delivering flour to a Quebec City merchant, and stole over 500 pounds of the article from them. In analysing such incidents, Louise Dechene's Le partage des subsistances au Canada sous le regime francais represents an insightful and detailed study of the wheat trade in the colony. Usually, the farms of the colony were able to produce food enough for the subsistence of both country and town, as well as for the fur trade, shipping and export to other French colonies. This commerce was not highly organised; it relied on the surpluses produced by the habitant farmers. The colonial state attempted to regulate this trade, but until the wartime situation of the 1740s and 1750s, commerce remained in the hands of the rural merchants, the seigneurs and priests and the habitants themselves. None the less, at least in prosperous periods such as the 1720s and 1730s, a stable trade developed: "les campagnes respirent, les paysans apprennent a vendre et les marchands profitent. Ensemble, ils creent un espace commercial ou la monnaie est a peu pres absente mais qui fonctionne quand meme avec souplesse"(96). Gone is the emphasis on the separation between merchants and habitants, a point that Dechene concedes in a new preface to her older work (Habitants and Merchants, xiv). The few open conflicts that occurred under the French regime involved consumers' protests in the urban areas. The absence of communal institutions in the countryside restricted the ability of peasants to organise themselves. Country dwellers may have shared many common traits, but they did not have the strong political weight afforded by organised unity. There are few foreshadowings in either Dechene's recent book or Lavallee's, both ending with the fall of the colony, of the intense political upheavals that would develop out of rural communities in the early-nineteenth century. Given the numerical preponderance of the rural population and the importance of agriculture in pre-industrial society, it is not surprising that political struggles after the British Conquest directly addressed the issue of seigneurial tenure. Politicians and lawyers disputed the benefits of seigneurial tenure over free and common socage, but this debate remained largely on an elite level.(f.2) While new lands in the Eastern Townships were granted in freehold, the British authorities maintained seigneurial tenure where it already existed. The contemporary arguments over the relative moral values of the two systems should not obscure the fact that seigneurial tenure could be profitable and did not necessarily hinder industrial developments. Despite their presumed antipathy to the system, many British landlords were able to make good use of their "feudal" privileges. For instance, the Scottish military officer Gabriel Christie had purchased five seigneuries south of La Prairie by 1766. As Francoise Noel demonstrates in The Christie Seigneuries, Christie and his successors governed these in a profit-oriented fashion, particularly by marketing timber. This point, illustrated through a detailed examination of seigneurial land-granting and surveying policy, may seem basic, but it is an important corrective to the view that seigneurial tenure was merely feudal and antiquated, while free and common socage was capitalist and progressive: "The relevance of seigneurial tenure in the century after the Conquest ... stemmed not so much from its differences from freehold tenure as from its similarities: it could be used by large proprietors to monopolize scarce resources"(136). None the less, the seigneury was a form of personal tenure. Paternalistic attitudes would allow the lord or the agent to favour particular tenants and thus contribute to the rise of a local elite. Such attitudes would also lead Gabriel's son, William Plenderleath Christie, to enlist Protestant missionaries in a vain attempt to convert his Catholic tenants. Furthermore, in the aftermath of the Rebellions of 1837-1838, in which a number of tenants from his seigneuries participated, Christie would attempt to dispossess the rebels. In seigneuries such as Montreal and La Prairie, religious orders were the lords, which implied a certain respectful distance from the tenantry; in the Christie seigneuries, the personalities of the lord and his agents contributed greatly to the strains between seigneur and habitant. Louise Dechene not unfairly refers to "une histoire rurale precise mais un peu trop cloisonnee" (Le partage, 10-11). Books like Noel's and Lavallee's, replete with extensive comments on methodology and evidence, are written primarily for a specialised audience. Such detailed studies of specific regions are essential counterparts to more wide-ranging analyses. With Lavallee's and Noel's detailed discussions of the tenor of social relations, it becomes possible to test particular theories. By contrast, two recent books provide broader interpretations of the genesis of the Rebellions of 1837-1838, the single most important political mobilisation of the French-Canadian countryside. Gerard Bernier and Daniel Salee's stimulating theoretical study The Shaping of Quebec Politics and Society reveals sociopolitical cleavages arising from the class divisions in the colony. They reject interpretations that emphasise the influence of capitalistic relations and ethnic divisions. From the time of the Conquest, Quebec was in a process of transition to capitalism, but the end result was not inevitable. Rather, they recognise that Lower Canada constituted "a typically agrarian society,"(37) and they analyse the political arguments over social relations in the countryside. The attempts of some seigneurs to squeeze their tenants more and more harshly after 1815, as Noel's evidence on the Christie seigneuries indeed suggests, contributed to heightened tensions. Ultimately, the rebellions developed out of the complexities of this transitional economic phase. The Patriotes, including both French-Canadians and anglophones, produced a critical discourse in favour of capitalistic development. The Patriotes represented petty bourgeois interests, however, and consequently the attempted revolution could not succeed: "an attempted bourgeois revolution was waged without the presence of a true bourgeoisie in its midst"(100). In their analysis of the political turmoil, Bernier and Salee base much of their argument on statements printed in the Patriote press and made before legislative committees. The place of the peasantry in the rebellions is consequently largely overlooked, with the conflict being located in literate discourse and apparently inexorable social forces. This model cannot and does not seek to explain why so many habitant farmers took up arms against the British colonial rulers in 1837. By contrast, Allan Greer's The Patriots and the People provides a closer evaluation of the form and significance of the rebellions. In this full examination of the background to the rural unrest, Greer proposes as a necessary condition a rich, peasant sociability, one rooted in shared rituals of the maypole, the charivari and parish life. Greer sets his discussion within a much broader historiography of peasant revolts, emphasising the close ties within rural communities. Greer also evaluates the discourse of the Patriote leaders, paying more attention to its ambiguities than do Bernier and Salee. Ultimately, the rebellions owed much to rural unrest, the Patriote leaders themselves being dragged along in the conflict: "the habitants were setting the agrarian agenda of the Rebellion"(283). Greer accounts for the more radical turn of discourse in 1838, in favour of the abolition of seigneurial tenure, by discussing divisions among the rebels themselves: "the incipient class conflict within the Patriot movement was becoming manifest as peasants began to challenge the bourgeois norms of their leaders where property was concerned"(319). The presence of large numbers of English-speaking farmers in the Montreal region contributed to the tensions, but this was not the cause of the outburst. The rebellions were a conflict between francophones and anglophones only in as much as the British usually refused to join the rebels and incurred hostility as a result. Greer's study is an important re-interpretation of the rebellions and of the politics of rural Quebec. He provides a valuable discussion of the increasingly tense relationship between seigneur and habitant, and recovers the complexity of the Patriote movement. Ultimately, the strong peasant culture of the 1830s seems similar to the pre-Conquest unity Lavallee proposes for La Prairie. In the particular circumstances of the 1830s, the shared traditions and perspectives provided the form for "a remarkably effective challenge to British imperial rule in Canada"(363). Greer's book clearly establishes both the durability and the political importance of rural culture. An important contributing factor to the political fervour of the period was the large wave of Irish and Scottish immigrants arriving in Lower Canada after 1815. In the post-rebellion period, when so many state institutions were modified, this immigration continued and expanded. One of these groups was composed of Gaelic-speaking crofters from the Isle of Lewis. These Scots arrived in the 1850s in the Eastern Townships at the same time as French-Canadian habitants moving south from Lauzon seigneury near Quebec City, a convergence that provides an interesting comparison between French-Canadian and Scottish farming communities. J.I. Little examines the two communities in Crofters and Habitants, arguing that ethnic differences have often been exaggerated in the historiography. Looking for available land, these migrants came to Winslow in the Eastern Townships. No seigneur dominated or restricted their lives in this area of freehold tenure; the migrants' lack of prosperity had much to do with the marginality of the land. The Scots and the French-Canadians attempted to escape rapidly changing economic circumstances, trying to maintain their agrarian independence: "The very persistence of a population engaged in subsistence-oriented agriculture represents a partially successful resistance to the forces of proletarianization"(256). Little emphasises the cultural tenacity of both the Scots and the French-Canadians. Even in this isolated, unproductive area, they attempted to reproduce their cultural values, and largely succeeded. Moreover, despite their perceived differences -- there was little interaction between the two ethnic groups -- they shared some traits: "mutual attachment to kin, community, and tradition"(13). Little argues that the study of these two groups helps to evaluate the impact of the "New World" on agrarian societies. Like the early settlers of Ville-Marie, inspired by religious fervour and facing economic hardship, the Scots would spread across the continent. Unlike the French-Canadians, the Scots would ultimately lose their language. One of the defining characteristics of many of these recent accounts is the emphasis on a more or less unified peasant culture seen in generally positive terms. This culture provided unity -- at times political, at others social, within rural communities. The importance of rural history surely lies in the explanation of the social tensions so well crystallised in the rebellion period, one of the most striking events in Canadian history. Even when such tensions did not rise to the surface, politicians and government officials had to contend with the weight of rural opinion. Rural perspectives remained influential well past the period covered in this review.(f.3) The rural nature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Canada is, then, even in its most remarkably banal aspects, essential to a fuller understanding of Canadian social and political development. NOTES f.1. Jules Michelet, Le Peuple (Paris: Flammarion, 1974) 89. f.2. See Evelyn Kolish, Nationalismes et conflits de droits: Le debat du droit prive au Quebec, 1760-1840 (Ville LaSalle: Editions Hurtubise HMH, 1994). f.3. See for instance, J.R. Miller, Equal Rights: The Jesuits' Estates Act Controversy (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1979).