Despite its cities and industries, the development of Quebec – and particularly francophone Quebec – did lag behind that of Ontario and the adjoining American states. Far into the twentieth century, francophone Quebec preserved more of the characteristics of traditional, pre-industrial society than its anglophone neighbours: a high birth (and death) rate, limited opportunities for mass education, and a strong dependence on traditional industries and traditional leadership.
But the difference was only relative. Commerce, capitalism, industry, and city life made their inroads in Quebec slightly more slowly than in neighbouring regions, but by the early twentieth century a substantial bloc of Quebeckers had long since left behind traditional rural society. But what endured for them, almost as much as for their rural cousins, was the conviction that the devout, traditional farming community was the truest part of French Quebec. From the 1840s into the 1960s, Quebec’s leaders often believed their task was like Brother André’s: to celebrate and safeguard traditional values in the midst of a world that was too English and too secular.
Quebec’s political leaders had the harder task in this regard. If Brother André went to Parliament Hill, he went secure in his faith, seeking only to bring a blessing and take away a few alms. Secular political leaders had to bridge two worlds. French Canada’s minority position in the Anglo-Protestant modern world meant its representatives had to deal as skilfully with English Canada as with their own francophone community. In the 1860s, the statesman charged with that double responsibility was George-Étienne Cartier, Quebec’s pre-eminent representative in the making of confederation.
By 1864, George-Étienne Cartier had been the dominant politician of Canada East for a decade. A political rival conceded that “by his energy” and “his intimate acquaintance with the strong and the weak points of his fellow countrymen,” Cartier had made himself “chief of the French-Canadian nationality,” and the only person who could have imposed confederation upon it. Cartier did not disagree. Criticized by another rival for failing to consult widely, Cartier said cheerfully, “That is quite correct. I do not consult anybody in making up my mind.” His irritating self-sufficiency regularly provoked his foes. “The honourable member never sees a difficulty in anything,” said Christopher Dunkin in the legislature when Cartier dismissed a particular difficulty arising from the Quebec resolutions. “And I have been generally pretty correct in that,” responded Cartier.2
Cartier was fifty in 1864, a small, wiry man with a large head and a shock of white hair. On the surface, he seemed a genial, uncomplicated companion, fun-loving, and not much daunted by his less-than-perfect command of English. A furious worker, he preferred noisy parties over quiet solitude for relaxation, and he could be counted on to pound the piano and lead the singing in every quiet moment of the confederation process. As the leader of the conservative bleu caucus and long-time ally of John A. Macdonald, Cartier had built his political success on the principle that traditional French-Canadian society could survive and prosper by accepting the union of the Canadas. To his English-speaking colleagues, he was at once a hard-headed lawyer, perfectly comfortable in a mostly English business milieu, and a proud, sentimental defender of his French heritage.
Only his closest associates knew how intimately Cartier lived with the complexities of that dual allegiance. He proclaimed himself a proud son of the people, and he often represented rural Verchères in Parliament – but he had made a fortune as a big-city railway lawyer. Cartier exalted Catholicism and worked hard at cultivating alliances with the clerical hierarchy – but his private life was irreligious, and he spent much of his adult life in an adulterous relationship with his wife’s cousin. An apostle of traditional family life, he was both neglectful and controlling with his daughters, who grew up despising him.
Above all, Cartier was the defender of French Canada’s traditional ways, composing sentimental anthems in praise of his people, urging his voters to hold fast to the land and work it with love. But he was also a fervent admirer of the British Empire, a monarchist who wore English-tailored clothes, talked of retiring to London, and named one of his daughters “Reine-Victoria.” He once declared that a French Canadian was an Englishman who spoke French.3
Cartier’s family had lived with these complexities a long time. In the agricultural Richelieu valley, the Cartiers had been merchants and landholders rather than plain farmers. Cartier’s grandfather had been a member of Lower Canada’s assembly in 1809. George-Étienne, born in 1814, was christened “George,” rather than “Georges,” in honour of George III. His parents ran through much of the family wealth, but George-Étienne received a solid education and became a lawyer in 1835.
Like most politically active young French Canadians, Cartier was quickly drawn into Louis-Joseph Papineau’s Patriot movement. Quebec’s elected assembly, dominated by Papineau and his English and French supporters, had in the 1830s become stifled by conflict with the governor’s appointed councils. Representative government on the British model had become a sham. The Patriots increasingly favoured radical action and the recourse to arms if necessary.
For Cartier, as for many of his generation and class, the Rebellion of 1837 was a defining moment. When the Patriot leaders had been agitating for constitutional reform and the rights of elected politicians against the appointed councils of the Crown, scores of young men like him had been active in petition drives, protests, and rallies. But when the confrontation flared into violence late in 1837, peasant farmers provided the manpower for armed resistance to the British troops and the loyal militias who advanced on Patriot strongholds in the countryside. The peasants were less attracted by constitutional slogans than by the prospect of fundamental change.
The farmers who died behind the stone walls of Saint-Denis and inside the shattered church at Saint-Eustache when the British army wiped out the rebellion had seen themselves as oppressed by more than a theory of government. Burdened with poverty on overcrowded lands with exhausted soils, they were as likely to blame their miseries on seigneurs and their rents, priests and their tithes, and usurious merchants, as on Queen Victoria and her distant governor at Quebec. Once the farmers decided the goal of the uprising was to end taxes, tithes, and dues, the Patriot agitation threatened to become a peasant-driven revolution against the existing social order in French Canada. Peasant anger put muscle behind Patriot resistance, but it threatened and alarmed Patriot supporters from the landowning and mercantile class – Cartier’s own friends and allies.4
Cartier did not abandon the Patriot cause when fighting flared. He had been among the leaders at Saint-Denis, faced the British cannon, and went into hiding with a charge of treason on his head. For the rest of his life, he spoke proudly of having fought for the rights of his people. But after facing both the horrors of a defeated rebellion and the spectre of a peasant uprising, Cartier made a swift and permanent conversion to parliamentary process. In his bid for a pardon, he swore that he had resisted oppression but never forfeited his allegiance to the Crown. When he emerged in politics soon after, it was as a follower of Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, an ex-Patriot who had rejected violent means in favour of parliamentary tactics.
When he joined LaFontaine, Cartier was returning to a political tradition with deep roots in French Canada and in his own family. As soon as Britain had called an elected assembly in Lower Canada in 1792, French-Canadian leaders had begun to master – and to appreciate – the intricacies of English parliamentary processes. Cartier’s own grandfather had been one of them. Another, the lawyer and journalist Pierre Bédard, was among the first in British North America to work out the principles of colonial self-government and legislative control that are summed up as “responsible government.” Republican and radical theories drawn from France and the United States always competed with parliamentary models in French Canada, but after the disastrous rebellions, LaFontaine’s advocacy of parliamentary methods triumphed. Even in the face of a union between Canada East and Canada West intended by Br
itain to punish and assimilate French Canada, LaFontaine argued that French Canada would be able turn the union to its advantage.
French Canada could thrive within the British Empire, LaFontaine and his followers argued. They became apostles of British liberties, British parliamentary processes, and the British monarchy. Treated with respect, they argued, French Canadians would be the Crown’s most loyal subjects. In 1846, the doctor-politician Étienne Taché, who in 1864 would chair the Quebec conference, made the ringing declaration that, if Britain respected the rights of French Canada, “the last cannon which is shot on this continent in defence of Great Britain will be fired by the hand of a French Canadian.”5
The achievement of responsible government in 1848 put the elected assembly in control of political life in the united Canadas. The French-Canadian voters who elected a crucial bloc of members to that assembly suddenly had power. It was Cartier, first elected in 1848 and securely established as LaFontaine’s successor by 1854, who built an enduring political base upon that fact. He welded his bloc of parliamentary supporters, the bleus, into a cohesive party solidly behind his leadership. With their support he could achieve LaFontaine’s ambition: a partnership between French and English politicians in which French Canada’s interests would never be neglected.
Anglo-French partnership proved good for Cartier personally. No longer confined to the legal work of the small French-Canadian middle class, Cartier grew wealthy as the lawyer to the Grand Trunk Railway and other businesses of English Montreal. For political success, his bleus had to show that, whereas Patriot resistance had brought only blood and defeat to Quebec, they could deliver benefits. Cartier delivered. French Canada began to receive the benefits of modernization, without opening the door to outside influences that might threaten the control of the church and of middle-class political leaders like himself.
In the 1850s, Cartier and the bleus helped end the regime of seigneurial landlords – not by seizing the land, as the peasants of 1837 might have wished, but by assisting them to pay the seigneurs generously for it. In place of the ancient legal system inherited from New France, they drafted a revised code, much better adapted to the needs of the Montreal business community, French and English. They used the revenues of the state to help the Catholic bishops spread education out to the countryside. For the first time, substantial numbers of young French Canadians began to learn to read and write. (Alfred Bessette, born in 1845, did not, but it was a newly opened rural college that put him in touch with the religious order he joined.) Even traditional farm life began to change, as an expanding market and agricultural reform campaigns helped wean farm families from traditional crops towards more commercially viable dairying and market gardening.
Cartier took care that such changes did not threaten the entrenched powers of French-Canadian society. In turning Quebec away from a dead-end confrontation between peasants and landlords, the bleus encouraged commerce, education, and an expanding middle class. But it was all done under conservative auspices, in ways that did not threaten the church hierarchy or the Montreal bourgeoisie (whether French or English). Quebec could still aspire to be rural, agricultural, and Catholic. Cartier, a city man, rhapsodized about the sacred bond between his people and their land as frequently as he blessed the British Empire.
From 1854 to 1864, Cartier and the bleus made the union of the Canadas work for Canada East. The bleus’ effective control of the largest bloc of French Canada’s legislative seats made them the controlling bloc in Parliament. Cartier became the linchpin of the Anglo–French partnership, without whose support no policy and no party was likely to succeed. That position enabled him both to deliver the benefits of union to Quebec – and to protect the traditions of his people from alien influences. Throughout the decade that George Brown campaigned for rep-by-pop and against “French domination,” Cartier and the bleus insisted that the union was inviolable. It could not be changed, they said. Merely to question it was to insult and threaten French Canada, and for years the bleus had demonized Brown as a dangerous bigot.
So when Cartier led the bleus into a coalition with Brown based on confederation and rep-by-pop, he was making an enormous political conversion, and taking an enormous risk. He was abandoning the positions on which he had built his career. After twenty years of insisting that the union was essential to the survival of his people, he was suddenly agreeing to consign it to the dustheap – in partnership with the man he had always denounced as an enemy to French Canada. The survival of his people, not merely of Cartier’s political career, was the measure by which confederation would be judged in Quebec. For Quebec’s political master, confederation was a gamble with nightmarishly high stakes.
Nevertheless, Cartier had compelling reasons to come over to confederation. He liked some key elements of the idea. He was, after all, a growth-oriented bourgeois railway lawyer, a proud partner in the expanding British Empire. Partnership with English Canada had brought him both personal wealth and political success, and he believed it had been good for his people as well as for his business clients. Cartier was no more immune to state-building, continent-spanning ambition than Tupper or Brown. “Shall we be content to maintain a mere provincial existence, when, by combining together, we could become a great nation,” he told the Parliament of the united Canada in 1865, and no one doubted he was sincere.6
Cartier could also calculate that the union of the Canadas, attractive as it had been for almost a quarter-century, might not long endure. Canada West, with 300,000 more people than Canada East, was expanding the population gap more every day. Its unwillingness to tolerate the sectional equality that gave Cartier’s bleus such influence could only grow stronger. The bleus had to calculate that rep-by-pop campaigners might come to control Upper Canada so totally that only a handful of allies in Lower Canada would enable them to turn the tables and make Cartier’s bleus a perpetual minority. Failing that, the Upper Canadians might convince the ultimate arbiter, the British government, simply to repeal the increasingly unbalanced union. Cartier feared that, once out of the union, Quebec would be ripe for annexation to the United States and rapid assimilation. Cartier’s phobia about American republicanism and the tyranny of the majority was one of the wellsprings of his fervent devotion to the British monarchy. In the United States, he argued, Quebec would be consigned to the fate of Louisiana, where the French language and the Catholic faith were already considered as good as lost. When they considered the dark possibilities of seeing the union abolished, the bleus’ resistance to changing it began to waver.
Accepting Upper Canada’s demand for rep-by-pop, Quebec would lose the precious half-share in the national Parliament that had become its bulwark against hostile or assimilationist policies. But in a federal union, Quebec might see the union preserved, and still shelter its vital interests. Back in 1859, when the Upper Canadian reformers had proposed a federal union, they had suggested all significant powers would go to the provinces. That concept had changed by 1864, but the confederation bargaining of 1864 still presumed that “local matters” would be consigned to the provinces. That was Brown’s peace offering to Cartier, and Cartier recognized it.
Brown’s cry of joy when the Quebec resolutions were complete – “French Canadianism entirely extinguished” – has often been taken as an assimilationist chant, but Brown always used “French Canadianism” as an ugly shorthand for French-Canadian interference in Canada West’s affairs, and securing an end to that necessarily meant hands off French Canada’s affairs. Even Edward Whelan, visiting from far-off Charlottetown, grasped in a couple of weeks at Quebec that “the French desire most ardently to be left to the undisturbed enjoyment of their ancient privileges – their French language, civil law, literature, and language. It is utterly impossible to anglicize them.”7
In the spring of 1864, when Brown was floating the idea of federation in the union Parliament, Cartier’s government partner, John A. Macdonald, had condemned federalism as a foolish, dangerous notion. “We should h
ave a legislative union, in fact, in principle, and in practice.” Brown leapt in. Was that the policy of the Macdonald–Cartier government? “That is not my policy,” said Cartier grimly. The House laughed to see a wedge put so neatly between the unshakeable partners, but Cartier’s answer was the decisive one. Quebec could not accept rep-by-pop and legislative union, since in a single legislature its representatives would always be in a minority. If rep-by-pop had to come, federation must come too.8
Cartier quickly calculated that the trade was worth making. In a federal state, the province would protect the powers then thought necessary to the survival and prospering of rural, Catholic, and agricultural French Canada – its legal code, the administration of property, and education, charities, and health. With those secure, language and culture would take care of themselves. At the same time, Quebec could preserve the economic benefits of a larger union. Cartier seems never to have doubted that French Canada’s needs would be protected in a federal state, both by the powers of its new provincial government and by the continuing clout of Quebec’s members in the national government. Taché, his nominal leader, declared that confederation was “tantamount to a separation of the provinces, and Lower Canada would thereby preserve its autonomy together with all the institutions it held so dear.” Had he been a maker of slogans, Cartier might have called the plan sovereignty-association.9
Cartier was not a maker of slogans or a parliamentary speech-maker. He set his terms for confederation in the back rooms of the bleu caucus and in the coalition cabinet before leaving for Charlottetown. He spoke little in the conferences, though he did weigh in heavily when any of his fundamental requirements seemed threatened. Even in the public speeches he made, after the conferences and in the parliamentary debate on the Quebec resolutions, he chose blandness over detail. Instead of minutely analysing confederation’s benefits, he preferred mostly to celebrate the agreement and to sneer at its critics. It was his job to know what was good for Quebec, he seemed to be saying, and he had decided on confederation. Do you think you can do everything? challenged an opposition member. Cartier replied disdainfully that he was sure he was capable of forming a government for the new nation. “Well,” said the critic, “it will take more than a bold assertion and capacity for a hearty laugh.” Cartier did not bother to reply.10
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