The Rise and Fall of a French Royalist Settlement in Upper Canada After the 1789 Revolution

View of Yonge Street in Richmond Hill, Ont. In the late 1700s, a French Royalist enclave known as Puisaye Town was established in present-day Richmond Hill, but it didn’t last long. JossK/Shutterstock

Commentary

A great mistake people make about the French Revolution is that it had something to do with liberty. Seen in the proper perspective, its high-flown rhetoric presaged the era of genocide and mass warfare that culminated in the Bolshevik coup of 1917, Hitler’s subsequent rise to power, and Mao Zedong’s takeover of China in 1949, encompassing the century’s most terrible persecutions and wars.

The tyrants of 1789–’94, after imprisoning and murdering thousands of innocents on the basis of their class, religion, dissent, and regional character, drove thousands of refugees to flee to neighbouring countries. The majority found safety and succour in England, at a time when a superb parliamentary aristocracy was nearing its peak. And of the émigrés who fled, some even made it to Canada, where they tried to establish a Royalist colony.

The French exiles were Royalists, Catholics loyal to their church, and counterrevolutionaries. They had many sympathetic supporters in England, including the great conservative Whig MPs Edmund Burke and William Wilberforce (who was later better known as an anti-slavery hero of the Christian-inspired abolition movement).

A handful of the refugees went to North America in the 1790s, including about 50 Catholic priests who took up leading positions in Quebec with the permission of the governor, Lord Dorchester, and were given assignments all over the British province by Bishop Jean-François Hubert. Since Quebec had only about 140 priests at the time, these 50 highly educated men gave a significant conservative cultural boost. One priest, on returning to France, shipped 200 paintings from Paris, sparking a revival of Quebec painting.

In another curious episode, about 40 French Royalists, led by aristocratic army officers, signed up to establish a settlement in Upper Canada in 1798. The expedition consisted of army officers and ordinary soldiers, a few aristocratic ladies, a few artisans, and quite a number of domestic servants (men and women). They were supposed to be the first of thousands. Their chief leader was Joseph-Geneviève, Comte de Puisaye. The former commander of the Royalist armies in Brittany, Puisaye received a hero’s welcome in 1794 when he arrived in England from France.

The Prime Minister, William Pitt (the Younger), was impressed. Henry Dundas, the Home Secretary, was more cautious, viewing Puisaye as a possibly dangerous adventurer. Still, Pitt backed the nobleman’s plan to invade France with several thousand French troops, and the War Minister, William Windham, channelled funds to them. But the attempted invasions were a disaster and many supporters were killed; the survivors limped back to England.

Where could they go? Windham, who was one of Edmund Burke’s protégés, became a sponsor of the effort to establish a Royalist colony in Canada. Upper Canada (the future Ontario) had recently been separated from the parent colony, Quebec, under the Canada Act of 1791, to create a Loyalist bastion with an English majority. As the idea developed, it was thought that a well-armed colony of veteran French Royalist types would enhance the security of the northern flank of the new colony’s capital, York (later Toronto). Councillor Richard Cartwright believed they would be “a valuable Accession [meaning asset] to the higher & anti-democratical Society of this Province.” The plan was approved in July 1798.

Portrait of Joseph-Geneviève, Comte de Puisaye, in 1789. Public Domain

On Nov. 22, the Executive Council of Upper Canada selected the townships of Uxbridge, Gwillimbury, part of Whitchurch, and another near Whitby, for refugees “whose character and behaviour appear to entitle them to the King’s beneficence because they endeavoured to maintain the cause of the late King of France against his ferocious oppressors just as American Loyalists had supported their sovereign against the swindling transactions of the American Revolution with its bitter fruits.”

The eccentric pioneers sailed from England in 1798 and were thus given the same kind of land grants as the Loyalists who fled the American persecutions in 1783 (also with the assistance of Lord Dorchester). They travelled upriver via Quebec City to Kingston, their destination being about 25 to 30 kilometres north of York (present-day Toronto), close to present-day Richmond Hill.

There, the little French Royalist colony was named Windham in honour of the War Minister, but was often called Puisaye Town.

The following year, they were given rations and agricultural implements to develop their farms along Yonge Street in the townships of Markham and Vaughan. Puisaye himself was promised 5,000 acres but may have actually received as little as 850 acres. Other nobles in the expedition got comparable grants: the Count of Chalus got 650 acres, for example, and the Count of Allègre, 450.

So far so good. They had food supplies, tools, and seeds with which to get started. But Legislative Council member Robert Hamilton, a Scotsman, judge, former Montreal trader, and a pillar of the original Tory leadership of Upper Canada (whose son George founded the city of Hamilton), predicted that an isolated French settlement would fail: “Mixed with older settlers,” he warned, the colonists might master the skills required “by patient perseverance.” But he also said that “a separate establishment of French Emigrants in the woods of the country can never succeed.”

He was correct.

The land was none too fertile. These officers of noble birth were accustomed to supervising work and were used to having more labourers on hand. For the latter, the work was so arduous that many downed tools and ran away. Progress was even slower for those who remained, and observers said the restless colonists never really settled down.

“I fear the Count de Puisaye is beginning to grow sick of his Colonial Project,” Peter Russell, the Administrator of Upper Canada, wrote to the ex-Governor, John Graves Simcoe. “He now thinks the distance too great for navigation, the roads impracticable, and the consequent difficulties of transport insuperable, and in short that his people are unequal to the hardships of reducing such heavy timbered forests into cultivation. He therefore wishes for some situation on the Lake where the nobles, aged, and women may engage in less laborious occupations.”

Was there somewhere else they could go? It was a big frontier. Native populations were small and concentrated on their own land grants. The unfortunate Windham colonists eventually split, only 25 (by some accounts, only 16) wanting to remain in their ragged township, which they too abandoned in 1806. One sturdy settler, Quetton St. George, became a successful merchant, but returned to France after Napoleon’s defeat and restoration of the monarchy.

Today, Richmond Hill is a far cry from being a French Royalist enclave. Its ethnic makeup is 29 percent Chinese, 10 percent Iranian, and 8 percent Italian, with far more Russian and Korean speakers than French.

Some quasi-aristocratic characteristics remain. A piece of the more rural northern part of the colony, which stretched along Yonge Street up to Stouffville Road, is now occupied by the Summit Golf & Country Club. There aren’t many farms; it’s mostly housing now.

For Puisaye, there was no going back to France. Casting around, he and the balance of the colonists were drawn to the Niagara Peninsula. He built a house 25 kilometres north of London and wrote six volumes of memoirs, mostly to explain away his noble failures. One of C.W. Jefferys’ famous drawings illustrates Puisaye, his house, and a sketch map of the Windham colony.

Count Puisaye lived for a time, with his chickens and cows on his estate near Niagara-on-the-Lake, until 1802. The house on the Niagara Parkway is commemorated by a plaque a few kilometres south of town, and by a 1915 stone marker near Line 2, at which time part of the house still stood.

Having returned to England, Puisaye died in 1827 a British subject. Oddly enough, with such a sophisticated French background, commercial wine-making in the region did not begin until the 1870s.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.