1867 (21 page)

Except, of course, Montreal was not a rural village. It was a big city, growing and industrializing since before confederation and reaching a million in population before Brother André’s death in 1937. Hundreds of thousands of francophone Montrealers lived in walk-up apartments, worked in factories, and worried about the rent and crime and unemployment. They lived lives not very dissimilar from those of urban workers elsewhere in North America. One of the miracles of Brother André, simple pastor to a great metropolis, was to help his people retain something of their comforting traditional way of life in the modern, anonymous, secular world of the city.

In Brother André’s lifetime, religion and agriculture were said over and over to define the essence of French Canada, to be the shields that guarded French civilization on an English continent. From the 1850s to the 1960s, many of Quebec’s leaders believed its security lay in being at heart rural and agricultural. Only as a nation of devout Catholic farm families was Quebec safe from the urban, secular, materialist values of English Canada and the Americans. They sometimes said (in a metaphor now mercifully extinct) that English Canada might be the husband, authoritative and worldly, but French Canada would be the wife, perhaps deferential but the nurturer of culture and faith. To be true to itself, Quebec would remain a Catholic society and a traditional one.

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.
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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.
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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 Britain 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.”
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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.