The Quebec Act: Forgotten Cause of the American Revolution

“For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies.”

This text from the American Declaration of Independence refers to the Quebec Act of 1774. This Act of the British Parliament was one of the major causes of the American Revolution. New Englanders in particular feared that this law threatened the very survival of their political and religious institutions.

Religious ideology was at the heart of this imagined threat to American liberty. The religious controversy surrounding the Quebec Act opens a gateway to a forgotten story line in the narrative of the American Republic.

The former French colony of Canada, renamed the Province of Quebec, came under English rule following the Treaty of Paris of 1763. The intention of the 1774 law was to create a political and legal basis for a British province that was, at that date, almost entirely French-speaking and Roman Catholic.

The provisions of the Quebec Act and its subsequent mandates...

• Restored the pre-1763 borders of the province, which included the Great Lakes region and the Ohio Valley
• Reinstated French civil law, while it established English criminal law in the Province
• Reestablished both the tithe for the Roman Catholic clergy and the traditional privileges of the land-holding seigneurs as a consequence of the restoration of the French civil code

With the exception of the imposition of English criminal law, these provisions reinstated Canada’s status quo ante. The Declaration of Independence, however, frames the Act’s provisions not as a revival of Quebec’s former customs but as an assortment of innovations both outrageous and dangerous:

“For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province…”

This refers to the restoration of French civil law. The “free system of English laws”  had been in effect in the "neighbouring Province," and only partially at that, for a mere ten years or so prior to the Quebec Act. This "free system" was insufficiently established to speak reasonably of its abolition.

“establishing therein an Arbitrary government…”

The Quebec Act provided for an appointed council, rather than an elective assembly, to aid the governor’s oversight of the Province. A not dissimilar council had existed under the French Regime. This is the arbitrary government referenced in this clause. Rather than establishing arbitrary rule, the intent of the Act was to normalize the political and legal structure of the Province along lines familiar to its elite.

In fact, the period of British rule prior to the Quebec Act, which involved the refusal of its governors to implement the constitution in full, and the exclusion of most of the inhabitants from any role in civil affairs, might be liable to a charge of “arbitrary government.”

Province of Quebec 1774
Source: l'Annuaire du Québec, 1972

“and enlarging its Boundaries…”

Control of the Ohio Valley had been a casus belli in the so-called French and Indian War. Reestablishing the Province’s former borders allowed the Montréal merchants, via the Great Lakes, Ottawa, and St. Lawrence waterways, to compete with the Albany/Hudson/New York trade. The American colonists saw the territory that had been restored to Quebec as a natural field for their own western ambitions and resented its return to the Canadiens.

“…so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies.”

Following a politicized construal of the Act's provisions, this language reveals the Americans' gravest concern. They feared that King George was sharpening his sword on Canada in preparation for the reduction of the American colonies to “absolute rule.” The colonists viewed what was in reality a pragmatic policy with regard to Quebec as a mere prelude to a tyrant’s gambit.

The phrase about Quebec becoming a “fit instrument” for the King’s supposed despotic designs touches on the Americans' darkest fears. What most exercised New England in the Quebec Act is that their Protestant king had not only tolerated but also established the Roman Catholic faith in “a neighbouring province.”  The next step, they feared, was that King George would unleash a French “papist” horde as his “instrument” for imposing a romanizing religion and government upon them.

In his book The Quebec Act: A Primary Cause of the American Revolution, Charles H. Metzger, S.J. argues that anti-Catholic bigotry with its fears of the French “papist” horde was by no means a minor subplot to the tea tax, the Stamp Act, and other American grievances. 

Writes Metzger, “[the] writings [of the American colonists] prove that to many of them the ‘Church of Rome’ was little less than the incarnation of evil; its adherents were thought capable of any crime; its creed was believed to be perversive and destructive of the very foundations of the social order.”*

In my next post I will explore in greater depth this picture of a French “papist” horde sweeping down from the North to extinguish Anglo-Saxon Protestant liberty. This meme was not only a major cause of the American Revolution. It also illumines the unique, virulent opposition faced by the French-Canadian workers who descended upon New England  in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

These latter-day Canadiens came not with weapons of war but with tools of labor. What I term the French “papist” horde meme, however, exerted so powerful an influence on the New England mind that these immigrant workers evoked anew the fears of 1774. I will show that the French "papist" horde image persisted for more than a century after the Quebec Act.

* The Quebec Act: A Primary Cause of the American Revolution, Metzger, Charles H., New York: The United States Catholic Historical Society, 1936, p 11.
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La Survivance and Revolution: The Ideological History of a Remnant (Part 1)

Following the Conquest of Canada by the English, ratified by the Treaty of 1763, our ancestors developed an ideology referred to as la survivance – survival. It has been said that in the early years following the English Conquest, Les Canadiens, as we were known at the time, expected the French to return. They could not believe nor would they accept that the French king would abandon his vast North American Empire, which had included a sphere of influence over some of the finest real estate on the continent.

Our ancestors reasoned that, inevitably, there would be another war with their rivals, the English, and this future war must bring the triumphant return of the armies and governors of the Kings of France. And when they returned, they must find everything in the colony formerly known as Nouvelle-France just as it had been before. Like the early Christians who expected the imminent return of the Savior, la survivance entailed the fervent preservation of our ancestor’s traditional cultural institutions in expectation of the ultimate return of France triumphant.

This return might have occurred within two decades of the Treaty of 1763. During the American War of Independence of the 1770s and 1780s, France allied itself with the fledgling American Republic against its common enemy, the British Empire. Historians claim that there was some talk of France recovering Canada in the negotiations that followed the English defeat in the Revolutionary War. However, Gallic diplomacy saw a greater advantage in allowing Canada to remain a part of the British Empire as a permanent menace to the Americans. By allowing the British to retain Canada, reasoned the French Crown, the United States might be made dependent on French military and naval power, maintaining a favorable (for France) balance of power on the North American continent.

The Cession of 1763 was the first break separating our ancestors from the mother country. Unbeknownst to them, the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which brought to an end the War of the American Revolution, would represent a second break.

Another Revolution, in France in 1789, would constitute a third and final break between our ancestors and their European mère patrie. The French Revolution, a cultural as well as a political milestone, swept away the ancien régime, ensuring that no future French King would rule over Canada.

The Revolution of 1789 and its aftermath created permanent cultural, ideological and political differences between the two French-speaking peoples on either side of the Atlantic. Staunchly Catholic, the more conservative elements among the Canadien elite, viewed the anti-clericalism, modernism and republicanism of the French Revolution with alarm.

Whatever the ideology, the France of 1815, when the dust from the Napoleonic Wars began to settle, was not at all the France from which the ancestors of the Canadiens had departed. With the Revolution of 1789 and its aftermath, France crossed a Rubicon separating the mother country from its former colony. It is at this point that the French-speaking people of Canada took on the character of a remnant – a remnant of an older French culture, the France of the Sun King, the Catholic France of seigneurs and the fleur-de-lys.

At this stage, having lost its initial raison d’être, the strategy of la survivance in French North America took on a different task with a new intent – to preserve a pre-Revolutionary French ideal, against the secularizing tendencies of the modern world. This ideal possessed three main characteristics: a society which was French-speaking, Catholic and rural. To these three watchwords we might add a tendency – implicit in Catholicism – toward hierarchical institutions and viewpoints.

This culture, said this new version of la survivance, would stand as a bulwark on the continent against what one cleric at the time of the War of the 1750s had called “the detestable errors of Luther and Calvin.” The survival of this pre-Revolutionary French culture would provide an alternative vision of North America, one which was, claimed these ideologues, more spiritual, more ordered, less materialistic, and less addicted to change and mobility than was the Anglo-Saxon, Protestant majority on the continent. To some degree, this vision still exists in modern Canada, which wishes to portray itself as more humane, more pacific, less avaricious and less violent than its Southern neighbor.

Part 2