Sir George-Étienne Cartier, co-prime minister of the Province of Canada and Sir John A. Macdonald’s senior partner in Confederation, was a classically educated member of French Canada’s noblesse d’épée (“nobility of the sword”), a lawyer, and a monarchist. And yet as a young man he took an active part in the Rebellion of 1837 against the Lower Canada authorities.
That seems like a paradox—but it’s not if one understands the history of French Canadians.
With a few notable exceptions, French Canada’s leaders—even the rebels—were loyal to the Crown. They served in the Militia and upheld the British Constitution.
Even Louis-Joseph Papineau, the best-known 1837 radical, had served as a captain during the War of 1812. He was a seigneur with a manor house, after all, and as late as the 1820s “Papineau refused to accept republicanism and democracy after the French or American manner,” wrote Quebec historian Fernand Ouellet. Papineau “remained an ardent monarchist” until he went down some republican rabbit holes.
Even the famous Ninety-Two Resolutions of the Lower Canada Assembly (1834), of which Papineau was the longtime Speaker, began with a clear profession of loyalty. French Canadians were “His Majesty’s loyal subjects” who had “shown the strongest attachment to the British Empire” and had “repeatedly defended it with courage in time of war.”
What most of the French-Canadian elite wanted was not a republic but a more faithful, more democratic copy of the Westminster parliamentary system in their old capital of Quebec City—which they got with Confederation in 1867, when the Province of Quebec was re-established.
“Mr. Papineau and his friends sought no more than to carry out the principles of the Constitution which had been given to the Country by England, and to which the honor of England was pledged”—namely, to protect the rights of French Canadians. That is what the rebel leader Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan, born in Ireland, told the English immigrant and journalist, Stewart Derbishire.
Remember, the pivotal event of all Canadian history was the Conquest of Canada in 1760. The British committed, in the Treaty of 1763 and the Constitution of 1774 (Quebec Act), to preserve French Canadians’ culture and religion rather than try to assimilate them.
As literacy expanded under the British, who in the 1790s encouraged the immigration of 50 highly educated refugee priests from France, the classical colleges they founded or improved were churning out 200 to 300 graduates a year by the 1830s. This was “a new order of men,” who breathed in the spirit of politics—and liked it.
George Cartier was one. Born in 1814 in the fourth generation of Cartiers who prospered as grain merchants around St. Antoine and St. Denis and served as Militia officers against the Americans in 1775 and 1812, he was baptized “George” after King George III, the king falsely demonized by American propaganda. (It is with good reason that a portrait of him traditionally hangs in the Canadian Senate foyer.)
Sir George-Etienne Cartier in 1871. Public Domain
Home from school in the summer of 1830, George watched his father, Lieutenant-Colonel Jacques Cartier III, take command of the 5th Battalion, Verchères Militia, which his grandfather, Lieutenant-Colonel Jacques Cartier II, had also commanded. George became a lawyer and in 1834, secretary of the St. Jean Baptiste Society, formed to uphold the rights inherited from the 1760s.
That was necessary because a kind of American invasion was occurring through legal immigration. Hundreds, and eventually thousands, of traders and speculators from the Thirteen Colonies, and to a lesser extent from Great Britain, settled in Quebec and began to form a local English-speaking elite. They were bitterly resentful of the “defeated” majority, but by the 1840s half of Montreal was English-speaking. Despite many of them having come from America, they claimed a higher loyalty to the Crown.
They came to dominate the Legislative Council (the senate of Quebec) and other appointed positions to the extent that they were called the “Chateau Clique.” And short-sightedly, they blocked members of the growing Canadien meritocracy from holding senior positions.
“Study constantly. … Read the political history of your country,” Sir Louis-Hyppolite LaFontaine told Cartier, his young protégé, according to Alastair Sweeny’s biography of Cartier. “The survival of our nation depends upon the youth of Canada.”
Somehow Canadians, both English and French, gave up studying their history.
As Cartier’s mentors, including LaFontaine and newspaper publisher Ludger Duvernay, grew frustrated with this “idiotic nouveau riche” and the “stupid nobility,” they became more radical. If the “Parti canadien” renamed itself the “Parti patriote” in 1826 it was because they were pushed hard.
“We were always conservatives,” wrote Joseph Cauchon, editor of the Journal de Quebec, in 1852, “because we wanted to preserve and protect what we’ve fought for against the invading and spoliating oligarchy for 50 years. … We have always called ourselves reformers” or “liberals,” he added, “but we were nevertheless conservatives” with respect to “our institutions.”
The Rebellion of 1837 was thus in some ways an aberration. Important to note is that some of the Patriote leaders were in fact Irish, like O’Callaghan, not only French Canadian. Thomas Storrow Brown, for example, was a Unitarian from New Brunswick and of American descent.
Indeed, journalist Stewart Derbishire concluded that in fact English provocateurs, so-called “Montreal Volunteers” had triggered the violence in order to force a reckoning with the hated “French.”
The Anglo-Montrealers continued to commit atrocities after the ceasefire, when they burned 297 buildings “including two churches, a convent, twelve granaries.” In the village of St-Benoit, “where no resistance at all was found,” they burned 87 houses and committed crimes that included “the shooting of men as they stood in the doorways of their wooden dwellings long after all opposition had ceased.”
Cartier was active in a rebel standoff at St. Denis, and it was mistakenly reported by Le Populaire newspaper that “he was found dead by his own father … frozen to death while fleeing arrest.” In fact, with a bounty on his head, Cartier hid with his brother Damien at a friend’s sugar bush, then fled to the United States.
He quickly relented, applying in 1838 to return peacefully to Lower Canada.
Cartier then rebuilt his reputation and eventually became a senior cabinet minister in Lower Canada, the Province of Canada (of which he was prime minister from 1858 to 1862, with Macdonald as deputy premier), and the Dominion of Canada.
“It is necessary to be anti-Yankee,” Cartier said, “in order to build up the Northern power.”
A healthy caution towards the United States was a hallmark of Cartier’s philosophy. Quebec conservative reformer Joseph Cauchon, like Cartier, backed Confederation over annexation to the United States (advocated by some in the 1840s) because in terms of population size, it was better for Quebecers to be “one in 10” rather than “one in 100.”
Many Quebec sovereigntists today consider men like Cartier as “vendus” (sellouts). But in reality, they were true to their history and traditions. They were realists and got the best deal possible for Quebec, backed by the Crown.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
C.P. Champion
Author
C.P. Champion, Ph.D., is the author of two books, was a fellow of the Centre for International and Defence Policy at Queen's University in 2021, and edits The Dorchester Review magazine, which he founded in 2011.
