A French Catholic State in North America? Rescuing Tardivel

“La Vérité,” the organ of the Ultramontane Party, says that confederation is merely a half-way house for the French Canadians; their goal is “the complete autonomy of the French Canadian nationality, and the foundation of a French Canadian and Catholic state, having for its mission to continue in America the glorious work of our ancestors." 

Thus wrote W. Blackburn Harte in a November 1890 issue of a U.S. news magazine called The Forum. Harte's quotation in this passage is a not inaccurate translation from a piece that had appeared in La Vérité, a Québec newspaper, the previous year.1 

La Vérité was frequently cited in both the U.S. and Canada as a source for the notion that the 19th c. French-Canadian Catholics were engaged, in Harte’s phrase, in “open sedition.” Supposedly, they were plotting to separate Québec from its rightful sovereign in Great Britain, perhaps taking part or all of New England with them. 

An Immigrant Becomes an Advocate

Jules-Paul Tardivel, the founder and editor of La Vérité, was an immigrant to Québec. He was not Québécois de souche. Born in Covington, Kentucky in 1851, Tardivel’s father was French (of France), while his mother was English (of England). His parents were immigrants in the United States. The future Jules-Paul grew up calling himself Julius Tardeville. 

Right across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, Covington emerged as an industrial center in the 19th century. Like its neighbor in Ohio, Covington attracted immigrants from Europe, Catholics in particular.

After his mother died, Julius and his sister lived first with an aunt and then with an uncle, a Catholic priest in Mount Vernon, Ohio. Influenced by priests from Québec who had come to the Midwest to counter the anti-Catholic agitation of Charles Chiniquy, Tardivel’s uncle sent him to Canada to receive a classical education. He matriculated at the Collège de Saint-Hyacinthe, an ultramontane stronghold. Tardivel did not speak a word of French before he was 18 years old and entered Québec to pursue his studies at the famed seminary. 

Upon completing his education, he made a brief, disappointing reappearance in the U.S. and then returned to Québec. He became a French-Canadian by adoption. Like the religious convert who is a more fervent believer than the lifelong adherent, Tardivel became more Canadien-français than the Canadiens-français. He was an outspoken advocate for a conservative, ultra-Catholic strain of Québec nationalism. 

When Tardivel founded the newspaper La Vérité in 1881, after an apprenticeship as a journalist and a literary critic, he intended to remain independent of party politics. Like Saint-Jean Baptiste himself, Tardivel would be a voice crying in the wilderness in the service of a vision of the Canadiens-français as a Catholic nation. This new nation would, proclaimed Tardivel, continue the work of 17th-18th c. France in catholicizing and “civilizing” the continent. 

Jules-Paul Tardivel (1851-1910)

In his long career as the gadfly of Québec, Tardivel took issue with nearly everyone of importance in the province, including members of his own ultramontane set. He stood fiercely alone, inhabiting his own ideological space. 

Yet writers like Harte and the editors of the Toronto Mail made this odd-man-out represent the views of the Québec elite at large. They took a fringe figure – with quite an unusual background by Québec lights – and made him represent the mainstream of French-Canadian opinion. 

Much if not all of La Vérité is available online. The first thing a modern reader notices is that the utterances and writings of the Pope were front-page news. If the paper had a dominant theme it was opposition to Freemasonry. I intuit that a closer scrutiny would reveal the influence of U.S. anti-masonic literature on Tardivel.

There’s much in Tardivel that is bizarre, often objectionable from many of our modern viewpoints. He had a colonialist turn of mind, seeing himself as the possessor of an allegedly superior civilization with expansionist proclivities. Although he hearkens back to the days of Nouvelle-France, his talk of “civilizing” has more the flavor of 19th c. European French imperialism.

I have no intention of defending Tardivel in toto. But the implication that his views on Québec's future amounted to “open sedition” was false. Elements of the English-language press misrepresented Tardivel's stance, tearing his statements out of context. 

Tardivel’s Vision

Harte’s quotation from La Vérité in his 1890 piece in The Forum appeared in Tardivel's October 12, 1889 issue under the headline “Un pas en avant” (“A step forward”). The subject at hand was Wilfrid Laurier's address to a Liberal group in Toronto. Tardivel shares with Laurier the view that the “current Confederation is not the last word on our national destiny.” But Tardivel differed with Laurier in having a specific post-Confederation future in mind for his people. 

Writes Tardivel,

But we know and we loudly proclaim what we want, the future that we dream of, that we foresee for the French-Canadian race if it remains faithful to its providential mission. Why not say frankly what every patriot wishes from the bottom of his heart? For us, ‘the step forward,’ that we would only wish to take at the hour marked by God, is a more complete autonomy for the French-Canadian nationality, towards which it must lead[:] to the foundation of a French-Canadian and Catholic state having for its mission to continue in America the glorious work of the country of our ancestors.2

However, the “realization of the project” of “a French-Canadian and Catholic state,” continues Tardivel,

…does not suppose the least infringement of the rights of other races which have established themselves on the soil that our fathers conquered for civilization. We desire that the change [in Québec's political status] should be done naturally, peacefully, without shock, without upheaval, by mutual consent; but at last we want French Canada to be a country absolutely autonomous, living its own life, having its distinct place among the nations of the earth. There’s space enough on this continent for us, having our place in the sun, without inconveniencing the other peoples in the process of its formation. We threaten no one; we ask only for our national existence.

Tardivel’s vision is clear. He wishes only that the French-Canadian people will continue to exist, and he imagines that a day will come when a peaceful political change will result in an independent Québec. On that day, “marked by God,” a new French-Canadian nation will emerge that will in no way infringe upon the rights of minorities living in Québec. 

“We threaten no one; we ask only for our national existence.” But the mere wish for the continued existence of the Canadien-francais, in some post-colonial future, was threatening to Harte and his ilk, despite Tardivel's reassurances. 

New England and the Providential Mission

Did Tardivel’s support for the “providential mission” of the French-Canadians in catholicizing the U.S. mean that he advocated the overthrow of New England by a revived New France?

As early as 1881, Tardivel addressed the question of emigration to New England.3  Far from supporting the New England Canadiens as an advance-guard of Catholic missionary activity in North America, Tardivel sought a means to discourage emigration. He believed that the solution to the population drain was to return to the land, to the rural identity which he assumes is essential to French-Canadian nationhood.  

Tardivel believes that his people must learn to love agriculture once again. They must see in it their best chance for well-being and independence, thought Tardivel. Only the “colonization” of the hinterlands of Québec will discourage the outflow toward New England mills and factories. 

Tardivel's views on this particular subject were, for once, not contrarian. In advocating agriculturalism and the "colonization" of Quebec, Tardivel embraced the conventional wisdom of French-Canadian Catholicism in his day (see the famous work of Fr. Antoine Labelle).

In an 1885 piece, Tardivel explained what he called “our program” regarding emigration.4  This definitive statement shows how Tardivel’s talk of a “providential mission” implied neither an aggressive expansion southward, nor a deliberate subversion of U.S. political institutions. Writes Tardivel, 

We do not deny the providential mission of the French-Canadians who emigrate to the United States. If they preserve the Faith…they will certainly contribute, in a large measure, to the conversion of the United States…but beside that beautiful role there is a very real danger, it is the loss, for a great number, of the inestimable gift of that same Faith. 

Tardivel’s recommendation for avoiding this “danger” was to “colonize the province of Québec; we are the true masters here, but it’s necessary to become still more so. Here is our program for the moment.” Tardivel’s “program” did not include the conquest of New England. He sought rather the concentration of French-Canadian forces within Québec, and the consolidation of the province as a Canadien homeland. 

Tardivel calls again for a renewal of agriculture that will serve to fill the crown lands, create new parishes, and put an end to mass emigration. He would direct those who must leave Québec toward Manitoba or the Canadian Northwest, reinforcing the “French element” in these regions.

When the notion of a French-Canadian takeover of New England arose, Tardivel rejected it. In an 1881 issue of La Vérité, Tardivel discusses the insightful observations of a Frenchman (of France) named Jannet, who commented on the French-Canadians of Québec and New England.5  Jannet noted that some “Canadien enthusiasts” spoke of “Frenchifying” (franciser) New England. For Jannet, such talk was delusional. The vast majority of the emigrants were working class. These poor workers were unable to impose their mores “on a powerful American civilization,” Jannet reasoned. Tardivel found this argument “persuasive.” 

Commenting on Jannet's observations, Tardivel acknowledges that a small number of French-Canadians in the U.S. had acquired political office. But the Kentucky-born journalist thought that the French-Canadians of New England did not understand the U.S. political system. He concurred with Jannet that they did not have the capacity to subvert U.S. institutions even if they wished to do so.
 

Hopes and Dreams Are Not Sedition

Tardivel hoped for nothing more than the continued existence of the French-Canadian people. He also speculated that if they should survive, one day they would establish an independent francophone Catholic state in North America. 

Recognizing that such pronouncements have led to misunderstandings, Tardivel emphasized that he imagined a peaceful political transition to an independent Québec, but only by the hand of le bon Dieu, and such that the rights of other peoples were respected. Mere hopes and dreams for independence, at some indefinite point in the future, hardly constitute the “open sedition” of which Harte wrote. 

Although Tardivel recognized that the French-Canadians in the U.S. had some role to play in catholicizing the States, he preferred that they “colonize” the hinterlands of Québec. This was his “program” in 1885 and he never rescinded it. He remained a lifelong opponent of emigration to New England.

Harte and other anglophones who mined La Vérité tended to distort Tardivel’s views in order to agitate their readers and to stigmatize French-Canadians as disloyal citizens and political subversives. 

Political discourse in this period dwelt much more on the U.S. annexing Canada than on Québec annexing bits of the U.S. I’m turning my attention next to this annexation question, that loomed large from about 1890 until the First World War.

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More about the "providential mission" of the French-Canadians in my book
A Distinct Alien Race
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Notes

1. "'Un Pas en Avant,'" La Vérité, October 12, 1889, 12:90.

2. All translations from La Vérité are my own.

3. "Les Canadiens emigres," La Vérité, August 4, 1881, 2:2.

4. "Emigration et Colonisation," La Vérité, January 24, 1885, 27:2.

5. "Le Canada en France," La Vérité, August 11, 1881, 3:2.

An “Impending Race War” in Canada? Victorian Englishman “Explains” Québec to the U.S.

In a previous post I mentioned The Forum, an eminent U.S. magazine of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This monthly periodical, covering current events and culture, had a point/counterpoint approach. A writer would take a stand and defend a position, to be contradicted by some other author in a later issue. The second writer would often cite the earlier piece and its author by name. Notables of the period such as Theodore Roosevelt, Booker T. Washington, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton authored articles in The Forum.

In the two decades before 1900, the emigration from Québec to the U.S., especially to New England, was national news. There was ongoing coverage in The New York Times, and pieces in The Nation and Harper’s for starters. The pages of The Forum saw a number of articles that covered the Canadien influx, either as a story in its own right or as part of a national issue such as labor, immigration, or the U.S. annexation of Canada. Annexation was a hot topic in this era that I plan to explore at length another day.

Among these offerings in The Forum was one titled “French Canada and the Dominion” by W. Blackburn Harte, appearing in the November 1890 issue.1  Harte mentions the French-Canadians of New England as a subtopic in an article attempting to explain Québec to a U.S. audience. His piece countered an article by journalist and former Montréal mayor Honoré Beaugrand that had appeared in the July 1889 edition.2  Beaugrand sought to rebut the negative portrayal in the U.S. press of the French-Canadians and their compatriots in New England. He claimed to be telling his U.S. audience the truth about political attitudes in Québec. Harte thinks he knows better and his article purports to set the record straight.

An Englishman Becomes An Expert on Canada

Harte was born in London, England in 1868. He was still a teenager when he set out for Canada around 1887. After mercifully brief and luckless stints in the Québec countryside and in New York City, Harte became a writer for Montréal papers, notably for The Gazette, while living in anglophone circles in the city. After a brief return to New York, Harte relocated to Boston in 1890 where he settled and established himself as an American writer specializing in Canadian subjects.3

Let's break this down: A Victorian Englishman living in Boston, with a couple of years of experience as a journalist in Québec, dwelling in an anglophone milieu, while writing for the notoriously anti “French” Gazette, became the interpreter of the French-Canadian soul for U.S. readers of The Forum. In doing so, he casts aside with condescension the views previously expressed in that publication by the well-traveled, experienced journalist Beaugrand, Canadien born and bred. 

Anti-clerical, republican and a Freemason, the bilingual Beaugrand was an idiosyncratic spokesman for his people perhaps. But he had lived among them, and plied his trade as a journalist throughout the United States as well as in Québec. He had far more experience living and working in both Canada and the U.S. than did Harte. 

Then as today, U.S. press reports about Québec often derive from, and closely mirror, anglophone Canadian perspectives – views Harte imbibed from The Gazette. Typically, the U.S. press doesn't trust the Québécois to account for themselves.

Predicts "Impending Race War"

Harte begins his piece in The Forum by highlighting U.S. ignorance about its northeastern neighbors:

American people, we may safely affirm, know little or nothing of the French Canadians and of the part they play in the national concerns…of Canada….An occasional reference to the unprogressive character of the French Canadian people has been made in American magazines, usually when the question of annexation has been under discussion; but the writers, if Canadians, have usually been reticent for political reasons, and if foreign observers, have been unaware of the real state of affairs.

After dismissing Beaugrand’s article, Harte predicts nothing less than an “impending race war” between French- and English-speakers in Canada. Harte declares that “a collision between the two peoples is imminent and inevitable.”

Historically, the English and the English-Canadians had been conciliatory to a fault toward the conquered French-Canadians, believes Harte. "The English," in Harte's world, were never the aggressors and have allowed "the French" to dominate Canada. French-Canadian institutions, writes Harte,

…are obstacles in the way of all progress in Canada to-day, and…they are, in fact, weapons in the hands of the enemies of the federal system of government. The French Canadian masses, ground under the heel of political Romanism as they are, are emphatically not fit for manhood suffrage. It is necessary to remark here that the racial struggle and the religious struggle are really identical, as the French Canadian leaders have espoused the crusade of the Ultramontane Party, and now preach open sedition in Quebec.

"French Canada and the Dominion"
by W. Blackburn Harte
November 1890

Harte does not say that he would take away votes from “the French Canadian masses” but he finds them unfit to have them. He saw these "masses" as “ignorant," "superstitious” and utterly in the thrall of “political Romanism.” They voted the way their priests commanded them, claimed Harte, holding the rest of Canada hostage to the Church. 

The Church, alleges Harte, “skillfully” directs “French Canadian emigration,” “gerrymandering the electoral districts,” to turn “the public schools of Ontario and Manitoba into French Roman Catholic schools.” He believes that French-language schools in those provinces are illegal incursions into "English" territory.

Harte claims that the French-Canadian masses are illiterate, and that even their own poets and litterateurs are unknown to them. One wonders why they would struggle for French-language schools in Canada or New England if they had so little interest in education, so little care for reading and literate culture.

An Alleged French-Canadian Plot

Eventually, Harte reaches for a trope familiar to readers of that era’s U.S. news: the specter of a French-Canadian Catholic plot to subvert New England. Harte introduces the topic in his polemics against Honoré Mercier’s Parti National, a short-lived coalition that developed in the wake of the furor over Louis Riel's execution in 1885. Mercier’s first priority was a greater degree of provincial autonomy for Québec vis-à-vis the federal government in Ottawa. Harte's article is a response to Mercier's rise, but the young journalist sees an ominous agenda behind the new political movement:

The avowed object of Le Parti National is the establishment of a French papal state on the banks of the lower St. Lawrence, and, if possible, the wresting of the Dominion of Canada entirely out of the hands of the conquering Saxons. The press, the clergy, and the leaders of the French Canadian phalanx in the Dominion House of Commons are very honest about their program. Some go even further than this; they include the New England States in their dream of conquest, hoping to gain them by sheer force of numbers and by insidious undermining of American institutions.

Harte attributes to a French-Canadian speaker at “a recent national celebration” the claim that “in less than fifty years the French Canadians would be able to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the St. Jean Baptiste Society in Boston, which would then be French Canadian, and in the heart of a French Canadian nation. New England would then have become New France, and puritan Boston would be only a memory.”

However, in another sharp contradiction, Harte claims elsewhere in his piece that the “clerical party” of Québec “does its best to stem the tide of emigration into the New England States.” Which is it? Does the French-Canadian clerical leadership wish to make Boston an outpost of New France, or do they oppose emigration to New England? Harte saves the truth by a thread by stating that only “some” of the French-Canadian leaders dream of the conquest of New England. The truth is that the preponderance of Québec's leadership sought to prevent rather than to encourage emigration. 

The charge that "some" French-Canadian leaders conspired in an “insidious undermining of American institutions” was intended to sound alarm bells and to ratchet up the fear of the French-Canadian immigrant in Harte’s U.S. audience. His rhetoric is intended to depict a collection of poor workers, looking for a regular payday, as a menace to the Union.

La Vérité 

Continues Harte, warming to his theme:

The French Canadian papers of all political shades are very frank about the aims of the new revolutionary party. “La Vérité,” the organ of the Ultramontane Party, says that confederation is merely a half-way house for the French Canadians; their goal is “the complete autonomy of the French Canadian nationality, and the foundation of a French Canadian and Catholic state, having for its mission to continue in America the glorious work of our ancestors.”

La Vérité was an ultra-Catholic paper edited by the notorious Jules-Paul Tardivel, who was outspoken in this era's debates over Québec’s future. Harte seems to appreciate that there was a distinction between more liberal, secular nationalists and what he calls "the Ultramontane Party," but his genre of article isn't always clear about the different factions in Québec. Tardivel and Beaugrand, to name two, represented sharply opposing views, and Mercier was frequently opposed to both. 

Tardivel's La Vérité was often cited as a source for the view that the French-Canadian Catholics conspired to revive New France. But Tardivel’s views, as expressed in La Vérité, were more measured and far less sinister than accounts like Harte’s suggested. In my next post I will discuss Tardivel's viewpoint, but, in short, what he asked for was little more than the continued existence of the French-Canadian people. But repeated affirmations of survival, even as a mere enclave in North America, were threatening to the “Saxon conquerers.” 

In another contradiction, those pleased to refer to "Saxon conquerers" also wished to portray themselves as victims of alleged French-Canadian aggression. And "Saxons" of the period never doubted, modern revisionists notwithstanding, that there had been a Conquest. Or that the French-Canadians should have been happy to stay good and conquered.   

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Have you read my book
A Distinct Alien Race?
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Notes

1. W. Blackburn Harte, "French Canada and the Dominion," The Forum 10 (November 1890): 323-334.

2. Honoré Beaugrand, "The Attitude of the French-Canadians," The Forum 7 (July 1889): 521-530.

3. James Doyle, The Fin de Siècle Spirit : Walter Blackburn Harte and the American/Canadian Literary Milieu of the 1890s (Toronto: ECW Press, 1995).
Doyle does not cite Harte's "French Canada and the Dominion" among the latter's "selected writings" while he does cite other articles by Harte in The Forum. I did not see any mention in Doyle's book of Harte's views on the French-Canadians, although it's hard to imagine that his anti-Catholic opinions did not find their way into his other writings.

Were 19th Century Canadiens Bad Farmers?

Reading the usual literature about Franco-Americans one gets the impression that our Canadien forbears were bad farmers. The agricultural woes of the Saint Lawrence Valley in the 19th century are a ubiquitous theme, and bad farming is often mentioned in that context. Many such discussions describe a stock set of deficiencies said to have bedeviled the region’s agriculture.

For example, in his seminal book The French-Canadian Heritage in New England Gerard J. Brault writes,

The nineteenth-century Quebec farmer, like his New England counterpart, tilled the soil, planted, and harvested according to age-old custom and stubbornly resisted any change. He did not use manure or any other kind of fertilizer, kept turning over the same old top soil with a shallow plow, sowed unclean and unimproved seed, allowed weeds to grow everywhere, and knew nothing about crop rotation.1

A generation before Brault, agricultural historian Robert Leslie Jones gave a more detailed account of the alleged shortcomings of 19th c. French-Canadian farmers. Jones set these farmers against the background of the standard theory that Lower Canada (Québec) faced an agricultural crisis in the first half of the century. During this period, writes Jones,

Nothing the habitants could do, seemingly, promised economic salvation. By mid-century their situation had become one of chronic distress. Clergy, businessmen, newspaper editors, and politicians continually discussed it. They agreed in their analyses of the more obvious defects of agriculture in the St. Lawrence Valley – lack of fertilizing, lack of proper rotation, lack of approved stock-raising methods, lack of improved implements, too much concentration on wheat – but they showed much difference of opinion when they tried to account for these defects.2

The 19th c. French-Canadian farmer became a problem for “clergy, businessmen, newspaper editors, and politicians” to solve. It was not enough for them to make suggestions for improving the efficiency of farms. Elites also felt compelled to “account for these defects” in French-Canadian agriculture. The seigneurial system of land tenure was among the alleged causes of what Jones calls the “bad farming of the French-Canadians” and the “backwardness of the seigneuries.” Others blamed overpopulation in the region, poor access to markets, and a lack of formal instruction in agriculture.

19th c. Habitants: Bad Farmers?

Another reason Jones cites as “commonly given” for the supposed “backwardness” of Québec farming was the “ingrained conservatism of the habitants.” He invokes this alleged trait to impute the futility of government sponsored efforts toward agricultural education. Behind this conservative posture, says Jones, lurked “the spirit of French-Canadian nationalism.” “Dedicated as they were to the preservation of their laws, their language, and their religion,” Jones writes, “they resisted any change, however small, in their mode of life. It was this aversion to innovation which rendered the distress in the seigneuries so acute, and made it so difficult to ameliorate.”3

Thus the biggest problem with the 19th c. French-Canadian farmers, according to Jones, is that they were French-Canadian. For Jones, had they stopped being French-Canadian, i.e., had they ceased to remain a people distinct as to “their laws, their language, and their religion,” then they would have been more open to “innovation” and their agricultural deficiencies would not have been “so difficult to ameliorate.” Jones suggests that “French-Canadian nationalism,” i.e. the desire of the French-speaking person of Québec to remain such, was a major cause of their alleged “bad farming.”

The 1850 Report on Lower Canada’s Agriculture

One of the documents Jones relied upon was an 1850 report of a special committee on agriculture filed with the Legislative Assembly of Canada.4  This committee had the parliament's mandate to investigate the state of agriculture in Lower Canada, to make recommendations for its improvement, and to address the disposition of crown lands. The report includes many pages of expert testimony submitted in writing.

Report of the Special Committee on Agriculture
for the Legislative Assembly of Canada (1850)

The report identifies “three capital vices” in Lower Canadian agriculture: “One relates to manure, another to the rotation of crops, and the third to the raising of cattle.” Another defect is too much land sown with a single crop: wheat, the principle product for market. Poor drainage is also an often-cited problem.

But this report lacks hard data to compare Lower Canada’s agriculture with that of other regions of North America. The report assumes that Lower Canadian farming is in a bad state, and much worse off than the best European operations. However, what little data is cited shows that in 1831, when insects that had devastated other 19th c. harvests were not a factor, Lower Canada's wheat output per capita was marginally higher than Upper Canada’s (i.e. Ontario's) and much higher than that of the United States. Even if French-Canadian farmers could have markedly improved their yields by using better methods, in terms of production of the staple crop they held their own with other North Americans all things being equal.

U.S. Farmers – Equally As Bad?

If mid-19th century French-Canadian farmers were bad, then their U.S. counterparts were little better. U.S. farms were also beneath the bar set by European agriculture. And the very same defects that observers claimed impeded French-Canadian agriculture beset U.S. farmers as well.

Consider the 1864 report by Joseph C. G. Kennedy, produced under the auspices of the U.S. Secretary of the Interior based on data from the 1860 Federal Census.5  Although this document is mainly quantitative in character, as befits the author’s position as Superintendent of the census, it is the qualitative description of U.S. farming in Kennedy's introduction that is relevant to the present discussion.  

“It has been said that American agriculture is half a century behind that of Great Britain,” writes Kennedy. “Our land is not as thoroughly under-drained, manured, and cultivated as that of England, Scotland, or Belgium.” Kennedy cites an English journal’s prediction that the U.S. would become an importer rather than an exporter of grain due to the American's "scourging" system of agriculture that exhausted the land.

Replying to these criticisms, Kennedy unwittingly reveals the defects in U.S. farming. Conceding that poor farming methods had exhausted some lands, Kennedy writes,

That any of our so-called exhausted land can be speedily restored to its original fertility, we have abundant evidence. All that is necessary, is to cultivate the soil more thoroughly, under-drain where it is wet, sow less grain and more clover and grass, keep more stock, and make more and richer manure….

American agriculture is in a transition state. In the older-settled sections of the country there is much land that has been exhausted of its original fertility. Here the old system of farming, which was simply to raise all the grain that the land would produce, is no longer profitable. But yet some farmers, with that aversion to change for which they are everywhere proverbial, are slow to adopt an intelligent system of rotation and manuring, and cling to their old ways.6

Kennedy’s account shows that the alleged defects of at least "some" U.S. farmers were identical to those ascribed to their Lower Canadian counterparts. These defects, common to both countries, included poor fertilization, poor drainage, and inadequate rotation of crops; insufficient livestock; and sowing too much land with a single crop. The same “ingrained conservatism” Jones attributed to French-Canadian farmers Kennedy bestowed upon their U.S. colleagues. But where Jones made this conservatism a national trait of the French-Canadians, Kennedy attributes it to the occupation of the farmer. Clinging to old ways is, for him, an occupational hazard. He thought that farmers “everywhere” were averse to change.

Whereas the authors of the 1850 Canadian report, and latter-day scholars like Jones, fretted over the problem of the “ingrained" traits of the French-Canadian farmer, Kennedy pinned his hopes on a younger, can-do generation. “We must look to the intelligent young men of our country for any great improvement in its agriculture,” Kennedy writes. “Our young men are beginning to realize that agriculture is worthy [of] their highest ambition, and that in no other pursuit will intelligent labor meet with a surer reward.”

Same Facts – Different Frame

Nineteenth-century North American farming, in the U.S. and Canada alike, appears to have been less scientific than the cream of European agriculture. To explain the differences between the two continents, Kennedy observes that there was an abundance of cheap land on the western side of the Atlantic, but a shortage of farm labor. In much of Europe, every cultivable scrap had been cultivated long ago, and a dense population meant plenty of available farm workers. Geography and demography explain why North American farming was different from the European brand. North American farmers of the 19th c. had not yet thought to learn the best methods available in Europe because it hadn’t been in their interest to do so.

Kennedy's report on U.S. Agriculture (1864)

While official reports from the period suggest that the same deficiencies dogged both U.S. and French-Canadian farmers, the frame put around the former was optimistic, while observers depicted the outlook for the latter as decidedly glum. 

In contrast to the discourse around the habitants, the defects in U.S. farming were not personalized; modern farming was seen as a set of practices, more or less interchangeable from one farm to another, that a younger generation could learn as the need arose. Kennedy’s report sees U.S. farmers as rational actors who will respond effectively as prompted by self-interest. 

On the other hand, observers cast French-Canadian farmers as inertial, influenced to move, if at all, only from the outside. For Kennedy, solutions to the problems of U.S. farming were technical, while, for generations, discussions of French-Canadian agriculture tended to become sociological, for instance Jones's talk about "nationalism" and allegedly "ingrained" traits. Elites pondered not only a change in French-Canadian farming practices, but in the French-Canadians themselves. 

Were 19th century French-Canadians bad farmers? Perhaps by world-class standards but not by North American ones. Especially in the eastern parts of North America, Canadian and U.S. methods of farming, and the limitations of those methods, were not much different from one another. A similar set of facts prevailed in many rural regions of North America, but the frame elites and subsequent observers placed around those facts, depending on whether they were looking at U.S. or at Québec farmers, was markedly different.

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Much more in my book:
A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans
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Notes

1. Gerard J. Brault, The French-Canadian Heritage in New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1986), 52.

2. Robert Leslie Jones, "French-Canadian Agriculture in the St. Lawrence Valley, 1815-1850," Agricultural History 16, no. 3 (1942): 145-46.

3. Jones, 148.

4. Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, Volume 9, Issue 2, 1850, Appendix T.T.

5. Joseph C. G. Kennedy, Agriculture of the United States in 1860, Compiled from the Original Returns of The Eighth Census, Under The Direction of the Secretary of the Interior (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1864).

6. Kennedy, x.

Podcast: Discussing the Book "A Distinct Alien Race"

I was interviewed by Sandra Goodwin for her popular Maple Stars & Stripes podcast about my book A Distinct Alien Race.

We discussed how the New England Franco-American story reflects on perennial themes of U.S. history including industrialization; emigration across land borders; the nature of U.S. citizenship; and the fear of the Other. Sandy asked me about my motivations for writing the book, about the history of the Canadien move into New England, and the background in Québec and in Canada.




Listen to the podcast above or view the page for this episode on the Maple Stars & Stripes site.

I was on an earlier episode of this show called the Geographic Evolution of a Franco-American Family. Sandra Goodwin has done a number of interviews that represent a growing body of knowledge about Canadien, Acadian and Franco-American history.

Buy A Distinct Alien Race here:
Amazon.com
Publisher's website

Yes, There Was A Conquest

It is a war with three names. For some it is the Seven Years War. In the USA it is the French and Indian War. For the Québécois it’s often known as the War of the Conquest. That this 18th century war entailed the conquest of Québec by the English forces, that left the Canadiens a conquered people, is a founding narrative for many of those we now know as the Québécois.

However, in recent years there has been some pushback, mainly from Anglophone Quebeckers, who claim that in fact there was no such Conquest. In a March 2016 article in the Montreal Gazette by Celine Cooper, calling for an overhaul of the history curriculum in Québec schools, Cooper epitomizes this revisionist view. She characterizes the events of 1763 as "the abandonment of New France by the French monarch and its surrender to the English." 

This sentence reframes a military conquest in passive terms. The agency is given to the French Crown rather than to the conquering English. It’s not the English who take the initiative to conquer the colony, but rather the French who "abandon" it, despite the fact that they had held it for the better part of a century and a half. It makes it seem as if France simply faded away without firing a shot. 

Some years ago, Brian McKenna’s film Battlefield Quebec: Wolfe and Montcalm was an extended treatment of the revisionist view. In a preview of the film in the Globe and Mail, McKenna announced a new discovery. He claimed that a few days before the climactic battle on the Plains of Abraham, General Wolfe “[wrote] out the terms of Quebec's capitulation in the event of a British victory, terms which centered on the protection of French institutions, notably the French language and the Catholic Church.”

But McKenna’s argument contradicts itself. Who dictates terms of surrender but a conqueror? Assuming McKenna is correct that Wolfe’s overtures were beneficent, the fact that Wolfe anticipated giving his terms to a defeated city tends to prove the opposite of what McKenna's revisionist thesis contends.

And the revisionist view must also account for other, far less conciliatory words that Wolfe addressed to the Canadiens in 1759 as his flotilla made its way toward destiny: “If by vain obstinacy and a misguided courage [the Canadien civilians] want to take up arms, they must expect the most lethal consequences; their habitations will be pillaged, their churches exposed to an exasperated soldiery, their harvests completely destroyed, and this most formidable fleet will prevent them from having any relief.”¹ If these aren't the words of a conqueror then what are?

Québec City, 1759:
But don't call it a conquest!

Getting Real About History

Whatever name we give this mid-18^th c. conflict, it entailed warfare in N. America involving tens of thousands of combatants. Wolfe’s fleet in 1759 alone included 30,000 sailors and 9000 soldiers.² After years of warfare, the British forces sailed up the river that year with purpose. The colony’s political capital was taken and its commercial capital, Montréal, surrendered into the hands of the looming British military. Although fighting continued after that, the war was won for the British and lost for the French and the Canadiens when it was British rather than French ships that were seen coming over the horizon in the Spring.

In the negotiations following the hostilities, France opted to negotiate the return of the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, which Britain had taken from France, while she ceded her claim to Canada to the English. The decision to cede Canada was made as a result of strategic and/or economic calculations on both sides of the treaty negotiations. The British dealt from a position of strength since their military held the country. 

The notion that there was no Conquest does violence to history because it ignores the considerable pains the English had taken to seize the colony by force and it ignores the bargaining position that their military posture gave them. It also papers over the loss of life (about 10% of the Canadiens were killed) and property damage involved in that war. In fact it argues that the prolonged period of warfare was simply inconsequential since, revisionists pretend, the power was in the hands of the French who opted to “abandon” the colony.

Gaslighting the Québécois

In summary, there was warfare in N. America over a period of years; the capital of the colony of Canada was taken by force; there was an occupation; there was a military government; and there was what we now call “regime change.” And it was permanent. The British monarch is still officially the Queen of Canada. If that’s not a conquest then we’re equivocating on the meaning of the word. Invariably, Orwellian equivocations serve a political agenda.

The agenda here is clear. The revisionist view is intended to undermine Francophone Québec's sense of itself as a distinct society. It attempts to establish that the Québécois were always on an equal footing with their British-descent countrymen and it suggests that there was always a perfectly level playing field between the two groups. 

Another reason for the revisionism is that the Québécois do not fit prevailing N. American racial narratives. The Québécois are in the anomalous position in North America of being a white-identified people who had been subjugated by another white-identified people. In this, they resemble the Irish.

Even if the British conquest of Canada were the most benign conquest in the history of the world, to be conquered and occupied by a foreign power is humiliating and traumatic. In all such cases, the conquerors hold the cards and the conquered have no choice but to submit to their fate be it benevolent or the opposite. Today, the descendants of the conquered Canadiens face the further humiliation of having their historical memories, a memory of cultural survival and eventual prosperity in the face of defeat, denied by the revisionists.

And, no, the point is not to wallow in victimization regarding events that happened long ago. It's about telling the truth and understanding the basis on which Québec's sense of collective self rests. The narrative that today's Québécois are the descendants of survivors of the Conquest is justified by the historical facts. Revisionists must not succeed in manipulating history.

In psychology there is a term for such manipulations: gaslighting. This is a form of psychological abuse where one person causes another to doubt their perception of reality through manipulation, distortion and denial. It is time for the historical revisionists to stop gaslighting the Québécois. It is time they faced up to the past as it really was and not as their political counter-agenda wishes it to have been.

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Notes

¹ Lamonde, Yvan. Histoire Social des Idées au Québec 1760-1896. Montréal: Editions Fides, 2000. Print. Cf. p 18. [The translation from the French is my own.]

² Havard, Gilles and Cécile Vidal. Histoire de l'Amérique française. Paris, Flammarion, 2003. Print. Cf. p 442.

Picture credit

A. Bennoist, engraver, after Richard Short (fl. 1754-1766), A View of the Church of Notre Dame de la Victoire, built in Commemoration of the raising the Siege in 1695 and destroyed in 1759. Hand-colored copperplate engraving. London, 1761. Graphics Division, Prints B-7.