SHORTLY BEFORE confederation, twenty-year-old Alfred Bessette left Quebec’s rural d’Iberville County and the relatives who had raised him and went seeking work in the United States. In the 1860s, emigration was carrying a flood of young people like him from the crowded farms of rural Quebec to the factory towns of New England. Unlike most of them, young Bessette did not stay in the States. Small and sickly, he proved as ill-suited to the American factories as to the farms where he had grown up. Shortly after confederation, the young man returned home, to bleak prospects.
Soon, however, Alfred Bessette found a vocation. He had always been given to prayer, penance, and meditation, and his local curé encouraged him to approach the Congrégation de Sainte-Croix, a clerical order that had recently opened a college nearby. For an illiterate son of the rural peasantry, the priesthood was beyond reach, but the Congrégation included lay brothers who devoted themselves to manual labour in imitation of St. Joseph the carpenter, and Bessette joined these. At the order’s college in Montreal, Alfred Bessette gave up his name and became Brother André. In time, he was assigned to be the college doorman – in effect, to be a household servant to the teaching order and its students. It seemed an appropriately humble vocation for one of the weakest and most vulnerable children of rural French Canada. Yet, during his decades of service as doorman and servant, Brother André would become one of the pre-eminent men of early-twentieth-century Quebec.1
Brother André began to visit the poor and sick of the neighbourhood around the college. He also began to work cures. During his charitable visits, Brother André would offer to rub sores or disabled limbs with oil that he collected from the lamps at the statue of St. Joseph in the college chapel. Many professed themselves cured, often instantly. Admiration for the humble brother’s healing skills and his holiness began to spread. Devout Montrealers seeking relief from illness or injury made their way to the doorman’s cell. Brother André attributed all his feats to his patron saint and insisted he was only St. Joseph’s “little dog.”
To have a miracle-working cult arising in Montreal initially dismayed sophisticated Catholics and some of the Catholic hierarchy. But Brother André’s simple piety disarmed his critics, and his popularity among working-class Montrealers became immense. He won tolerance and support, and then he won permission to build a shrine to his saint on the slopes of Mont-Royal near his college. St. Joseph’s shrine became a place of pilgrimage, a minor North American Lourdes, with Brother André as its guardian and guiding spirit. Pilgrims left alms, and in 1915 the small shrine was removed to make way for a vast church, the Oratoire Saint-Joseph.
For the rest of his life, Brother André devoted himself to caring for the pilgrims and completing his shrine. As devotees flocked to the Oratoire, and stories of cures multiplied, Brother André humbly but ceaselessly solicited the millions of dollars his shrine required. He would talk to anyone, pray with anyone, take an offering from anyone. By the 1920s, frail and elderly, he travelled widely every year to raise funds, but he was particularly cherished by the poor Montrealers to whom he preached quiet Christian acceptance of life’s hardships, even as he sought to heal their pain. Montreal shops displayed collection boxes for Brother André, in much the way they might now support cancer research or environmental protection. Brother André became a talismanic figure for French Canada, but particularly for francophone Montreal. The simple, devout, barely literate son of the rural peasantry had become to Montreal what the parish curé was supposed to be for rural farm families of Quebec: a familiar friend and counsellor, the benefactor of a village society secure in the embrace of traditional ways.
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.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 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.”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 have 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
Confederation had critics in Quebec. The bleus were the largest but not the only political party in Quebec. Ranged against them were the rouges, proud heirs of Papineau’s Patriot cause. (In the parliamentary debate on confederation, Cartier’s dismissive reference to Papineau would provoke them to a furious defence of the man “every true French Canadian holds in veneration.”11) In the 1860s, the rouges offered French Canada a political vision almost the reverse of Cartier’s. They were liberals and sometimes radicals, heirs of the French and American revolutions. Where bleus defended traditional society and an alliance with English Canada, rouges proposed both a secular society and a French one, a Quebec independent of both clerical and British influence.
Federalism in itself was not necessarily anathema to the rouges. In other circumstances, they might have been natural federalists. In 1858, when Antoine-Aimé Dorion had been George Brown’s unfortunate fellow victim of the double shuffle, they had been struggling to shape a common policy that would give each section of the Canadas greater autonomy to run its own affairs. Dorion still led the rouges. Far from being an embittered old rebel, he was liberal more than radical. Four years younger than Cartier, he too was a middle-class Montreal lawyer with commercial interests, and he was perfectly fluent in English. Unlike previous rouge leaders, he was a practising Catholic. Under his influence, the rouges were mellowing, in a society where clerical influence was on the rise. If Cartier could talk with Brown, why should not Dorion?
But rouges and reformers had drifted apart. Cartier, whose credentials as a defender of tradition were secure, could consider the leap to accepting rep-by-pop. The rouges no longer could. In the conservative Quebec of the 1860s, it was radical enough for rouges to question clerical authority by defending freethinking intellectuals and secular education. For them also to waver from the defence of sectional equality seemed suicidal. When Brown and Cartier began talking about federalism in the spring of 1864, Brown hoped to bring rouge leaders into the coalition. Instead, the rouges took up the traditional bleu repudiation of rep-by-pop, proposing that the sectional equality of Canada East and Canada West should be entrenched forever. The rouges stayed out of the coalition of 1864 and declared themselves opposed to its federal policy.
Cartier, the only provincial leader willing to bear the risk of making confederation alone rather than have to share credit for it, seems to have been glad to find the rouges so hostile to the coalition. It was said that, when Brown and Cartier met to form their new partnership, Cartier only embraced Brown after making sure no rouge leaders were following the western reformer into the room. Instead, the rouges would attack the bleus for making a unprincipled surrender to George Brown. They accused Cartier of endangering French Canada simply to preserve his hold on power. Bleus retorted that the rouges had turned away from federalism “not by patriotism or national spirit, but simply by party spirit.”12
The isolation of the rouges left them out of the constitutional process. Quebec became the only province where the main opposition party did not have delegates at the confederation conferences. Had Dorion and one or two of his rouge colleagues joined the negotiations at Quebec, they could have strengthened the reform-minded, provincial-rights caucus there. Their readiness to challenge Cartier would have forced clarification of issues he was willing to blur, and their participation should have improved both the resolutions and the debates about them which followed. If dissatisfied, the rouges could still have repudiated the outcome of the conference, as several members of the Maritime delegations soon did. Instead, Quebec was the only province where one party presumed to negotiate for a divided population. The rouges, having had no part in making the new constitution, were certain to oppose it.
In February 1865, the legislators of the united Canadas gathered again in the building where the confederation terms had been negotiated in October. The vital order of business was a resolution requesting the Imperial government to enact a new constitution for British North America based on the Quebec resolutions. The rouges launched their attack on it with their usual parliamentary skill. Governor General Monck, in his Throne Speech, had looked forward to the rise of “a new nationality” under confederation. Dorion swiftly moved that, as French Canadians and loyal subjects of the Queen, they wanted no new nationality. Confederation’s supporters found themselves obliged to vote down this apparently unimpeachable statement of loyalty, as if confederation’s aim was to assimilate the French and break up the Empire.
In the debate on the resolutions themselves, Dorion, his followers, and anglophone allies Luther Holton and Lucius Huntington launched withering attacks on the agreement. How could confederation protect British North America against the United States when it simply created a longer border to defend? Why promote a customs union between colonies which had no trade ties? What good were bold promises that union would bring intercolonial railways if confederation was, as Dorion put it, only “another haul at the public purse for the Grand Trunk,” which would bankrupt all the colonies together?13
What about this crazy idea of letting the government appoint members of an unelected upper house? Rouges condemned it as reactionary and autocratic, a tory plot to reimpose the rule of unelected councils sure to be hostile to French Canada. The federal union was at once too centralized and too dependent on the will of the Maritime provinces, they said. Dorion urged the union to solve its own problems rather than “going on its knees and begging the little island of Prince Edward to come into this union.” Henri Joly, rouge member for Lotbinière, concluded a string of criticisms by proposing the rainbow as confederation’s symbol. “By its slender and elongated form, the rainbow would afford a perfect representation of the geographical configuration of the confederation. By its lack of consistence – an image without substance – the rainbow would represent aptly the solidity of our confederation.” 14
Mostly, however, the secular, freethinking rouges took up the natural grounds of the conservative bleus: confederation as a threat to the institutions, religion, language, and way of life of French Canada. The rouges stressed the danger of ethnic conflict, tried to show the Catholic Church was opposed to the union, and denounced confederation’s originators as the implacable English enemy, the heirs of Lord Durham. “The union having failed to produce assimilation,” said a rouge newspaper, “they have turned to a more powerful, more terrible instrument: federation.” 15
In his fiery contribution to the legislative debate, Joseph Perrault, rouge member for Richelieu, made much of this theme. Perrault was no nostalgic Patriot. Just twenty-seven, he was an agronomist, trained at English universities, who urged modernization for Quebec’s farms. But facing the confederation plan, he made embattled tradition the theme of a long speech, packed with historical references. He argued that it had been the ambition of the English since long before the conquest “to destroy the influence and the liberties of the French race” in Canada. Confederation was the work of George Brown, the “imported fanatic,” “the man most hostile to Lower Canadian interests.” It would be “a fatal blow to our influence as French Canadians” and “decreed our national downfall.” French Canadians would find it would be “disastrous to their institutions, their language, and their laws” and “threaten their existence as a race.” Perrault acknowledged he was in favour of “the creation of a great political organization spread over an immense territory” – but not “at the price of our absorption.” 16
Other rouges made similar declarations. It was the terms of confederation, not federal union itself, that inspired their wrath. “The confederation I advocated,” said Antoine-Aimé Dorion, “was a real confederation, giving the largest powers to the local governments and merely a delegated authority to the general government – in that respect differing in toto from the one now proposed.” He declared that the Quebec conference had proposed a legislative union in disguise, with “local governments whose powers will be almost nothing, which will only burden the people with useless expenses.” 17
This was the crucial point. The rouges and their allies pointed to the unequal division of powers, to the federal authority to disallow, to federal appointment of the lieutenant-governors and judges. They highlighted every clause that emphasized central power and every statement delegates had made extolling strong national authority. They seized on all the elements designed to create a strong central government – and found them too strong. The English-Canadian majority had gained rep-by-pop, they charged, while French Canada would receive a provincial government whose powers were only illusory.
Why had French Canada’s representatives at Quebec allowed this to happen? It was treason, said several of the rouges, and Cartier was the traitor. He had undertaken a cynical betrayal of French Canada. Maurice Laframboise, rouge member for Bagot, accused Cartier of assisting the disappearance of the French-Canadian race for the promise of a baronetcy. Henri Joly compared him to a banker who had been entrusted with the fortune of the French Canadians – their nationality – and sacrificed it without a scruple, for private gain.
If political opinion in Quebec endorsed the rouge charge that the bleus had failed to safeguard its interests in so fundamental a matter, Cartier and his party would be finished. On November 8, 1864, a bleu journalist wrote ominously to one of Cartier’s cabinet colleagues, “I won’t hide from you that there is a certain malaise among our warmest, most devoted friends. It will need much prudence and zeal – both at the same time – to keep them all beneath our banner. Don’t trust too much in Cartier. He is surrounded by flatterers who don’t express the feelings of most people.” 18
The recipient of that letter was Hector Langevin, bleu politician, solicitor-general of Canada East, and a delegate at Charlottetown and Quebec. Like Cartier, with whom he had articled, Langevin was the lawyer son of a mercantile family, though his home and power base was Quebec City, not Montreal. At thirty-eight, he stood second to Cartier among Quebec’s confederation-makers. One of Langevin’s brothers was an aide to a bishop, another about to become a bishop himself.
Langevin had decided early he was too ambitious to be a priest; he seems to have aspired all his life to be a “grand fonctionnaire.” Even at thirty-eight, he was a stout, formal figure with a fussy little goatee. In later years, he grew fatter as he grew more powerful, and he joked contentedly that “a minister should be a man of gravity, if he wants to weigh in the balance.” Langevin’s personal life was much more conventional than Cartier’s. He was always lonely when politics separated him from his wife and children. Never very sociable, he stood a little apart from the dinners and balls of the confederation process. Personal style, ambition, and the traditional Quebec–Montreal rivalry all kept him slightly removed from his leader. By the London conference of 1867, he would come to think Cartier spent too much time fighting for confederation in the salons of the great and powerful, leaving Langevin alone at the conference table to struggle with all the vital details of the legislation. (The other bleu delegate at the Quebec conference, a remarkably self-effacing politician named Jean-Charles Chapais, from Kamouraska, said barely a word in the conference or the legislative debate. He was dropped from the London delegation.)19
Still, Langevin understood that “my political future depends entirely on the success of the measure.” He had to stand with Cartier. On February 21, 1865, well after the senior ministers had made their speeches, Langevin rose in the Parliament of the united Canadas to defend both his leader and confederation. In a long and powerful speech, Langevin appealed to ambition, saluting confederation because “we have become sufficiently great” for it. He quoted reams of financial statistics. He argued tangled issues of national defence and arcane matters of church-state relations. He even defended the appointive Senate.20
But the issues Hector Langevin kept coming back to were the national interests of Quebec. French Canadians were “a separate people,” he declared. They could never accept a position of inferiority, and he denied they would have to. “The central or federal parliament will have the control of all measures of a general character … but all matters of local interest, all that relates to the affairs and rights of the different sections of the confederacy will be reserved for the control of the local parliaments.” This talk of a new nationality that had alarmed the rouges meant the creation of a great country and a powerful nation, he said, but not at all the dismantling of “our different customs, manners, and laws.”21
Unlike Cartier, Langevin was willing to confront the most explosive issue of confederation in Quebec: the threat to local autonomy pointed to by its critics. Lieutenant-governors would be appointed by the federal government, he agreed, but that would give them no more authority for “arbitrary acts” against the local government than the existing constitution gave to the governors appointed from Britain. The power to disallow local legislation had indeed been shifted from “a second or third class clerk” in the Colonial Office to a responsible government in Ottawa. But under responsible government, Imperial London had rarely used that power, and Langevin denied that a cabinet in Ottawa would have broader grounds for using disallowance against the provinces. In any case, should Ottawa try, members from every province would oppose it, “lest they should one day experience the same treatment.”
Oliver Mowat, gone to the chancery bench, was not in the Canadian legislature to argue the case he would make as premier of Ontario, that responsible government made provincial sovereignty inevitable. (Christopher Dunkin, who became so incisive a critic of the Quebec resolutions, had told Mowat when he left for the bench that his participation had been the best guarantee something good would come of the conference.) Langevin, however, was rooting his case in the same set of ideas Mowat would defend as premier of Ontario. In the late twentieth century, praise for responsible government would sound like the merest cliché of platform oratory. But to the politicians of the 1860s, conscious heirs of the achievement of that principle, it mattered vitally. Responsible government was the sovereignty of the 1860s.
Antoine-Aimé Dorion had charged that the Quebec delegates had plotted to produce “the most illiberal constitution ever heard of in any country,” because confederation would obliterate responsible government. “There will be no such thing as responsible government attached to the local legislatures.” The appointive Senate, the powers confided to Ottawa, federal disallowance, lieutenant-governors dominating the provinces – all these proved confederation was a tory plot against the people, Dorion said. Confederation was not only an misallocation of powers between local and central governments. It was an attempt to restore arbitrary power against the influence of the people.22
Langevin confronted the rouge leader directly. “Now we enjoy responsible government,” he cried. “This great constitutional guarantee we take with us into the confederation.” Étienne Taché, titular head of the Canadian coalition and a living link to the campaign for responsible government, had declared earlier in the debate that the war of races in Canada had been extinguished “on the day the British government granted Canada responsible government.” Langevin argued on the same grounds that a self-governing people could not be oppressed. Within confederation, Quebec was and would remain distinct. Since responsible government had been preserved in the confederation settlement, he insisted, “our position then is excellent, and all those who frankly give expression to their opinions must admit that the representatives of Lower Canada at the Quebec conference have carefully guarded her interests.” 23
Langevin gave his long speech to a noisy House. He was frequently interrupted and frequently flung out charges of his own. But his most impassioned moment came in response to Henri Joly’s image of Cartier as a corrupt banker who had squandered the treasures entrusted to him. Langevin gave a long survey of Cartier’s achievements and turned Joly’s image inside out. “The country,” he said of Cartier – and by “country,” he meant French Canada – “confided to him all its interests, all its rights, all its institutions, its nationality, its religion … and he restored them guaranteed, protected, and surrounded by every safeguard in the confederation of the British North American provinces.” Langevin concluded with one final insistence that confederation “will afford the best possible guarantee for our institutions, our language, and all that we hold dearest,” and sat down amidst cheers.24
Despite speeches of great length, detail, and sometimes even power, the Canadian Parliament’s debate on the Quebec resolutions was weakened by a hint of inconsequence. The members had been told at the start that they could not change the resolutions, no matter how long they debated. “These resolutions were in the nature of a treaty,” John A. Macdonald said several times as he launched the debate. They were the result of long negotiation and many compromises among several provinces. If each legislature began to revise the terms of the treaty, “we could not expect to get it passed this century.” 25
Macdonald’s cheerful refusal to countenance any change to the agreement made at Quebec troubled even some of his supporters. It infuriated his opponents. They denounced it as more evidence of the anti-parliamentary arrogance of the confederation planners. But Macdonald could refuse to be troubled with the inconvenience of amendments only because he and his partners were sensing that the House was behind them. No nineteenth-century ministry could count on passive, complaisant support from its backbenchers the way twentieth-century party leaders could. Had enough of the Canadian backbenchers seen trouble for themselves in the confederation resolutions, Macdonald would not have been so highhanded. Both Charles Tupper and Leonard Tilley had returned from the Quebec conference to discover they could not get the Quebec resolutions through their legislatures, despite the large majorities their parties enjoyed. They each backed down. In Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, the legislatures made sure the Quebec terms were not even brought up for debate, while Tupper and Tilley eventually sought approval for resolutions that held out hope of “better terms.” Macdonald and Cartier would have done the same if their seats in government depended on it. They persevered only because they calculated they had the votes to do so.
Indeed, the Canadian caucuses did not waver. Among the Upper Canadians, Sandfield Macdonald of Cornwall, ex-premier of the union and its staunchest defender, voted against the Quebec resolutions. So did Malcolm Crooks Cameron, a prominent Toronto lawyer and a deep-died tory, Joseph Rymal, a homespun Clear Grit farmer from Hamilton, and a few others. From early in the debate, however, it was clear they and a handful of others would not shake the Upper Canadian consensus in favour of confederation. George Brown had forged it through years of effort, and Macdonald’s adhesion made it unbreakable.
In Lower Canada, caucus solidarity was equally firm. Had the rouges’ charges – that confederation put the survival of French Canada at risk – stuck, Cartier and Langevin could not have prevented wholesale defections of bleu backbenchers to Dorion’s side. Instead, confederation gained supporters as the debate went on. Louis Archambault of L’Assomption came to the session intending to oppose confederation, he said. During the debate, he changed his mind. He would support confederation on the Quebec terms. Edouard Rémillard of Bellechasse, formerly a supporter of Dorion’s, told the House that, when it came to protecting the rights and institutions of French Canada, he had more confidence in Cartier than in his former leaders.
When an opposition member challenged him to put confederation to the people, George Brown predicted that, if the House failed to support confederation, the government would sweep every seat in Upper Canada in a snap election. In Lower Canada, Cartier and Langevin faced more doubters and more opposition. But, as the debate continued, they too seem to have grown more confident. Dr. Beaubien of Montmagny expressed a belief that was growing rather than wavering among the bleu backbenchers when he declared that he had found opinion leaders “in every parish” were coming to support confederation.
Beaubien was exaggerating. Particularly in rouge strongholds around Montreal and on the south shore, protest meetings and petitions denounced confederation. But initial suspicion of the Quebec plan had failed to develop into general hostility. The church hierarchy got over its shock at what one influential cleric called “the union of this fanatic [George Brown] with our statesmen.”26 Vigorously lobbied by Cartier and Langevin, and by Langevin’s clerical brothers, the bishops dismissed the rouges’ cry of alarm and came to support confederation very strongly. Even Henri Joly had to concede that Cartier had lulled the all-pervasive feeling of uneasiness the confederation plan had first provoked in Quebec into “a sleep of profound security.” The success of the bleus’ public-relations offensive reassured their supporters, and few of their elected members defected.
On March 10, 1865, the legislators of the united Canadas sat long into the night. After more than a month of debate (it would fill 1,032 pages in the transcript published soon afterwards), the Quebec resolutions came to a vote not long before dawn. Peter Waite found a sardonic report of the proceedings in the anti-confederate Stratford Beacon.
The House was in an unmistakeably seedy condition, having, as it was positively declared, eaten the saloon keeper clean out, drunk him entirely dry, and got all the fitful naps of sleep that the benches along the passage could be made to yield.… Men with the strongest constitutions for parliamentary twaddle were sick of the debate, and the great bulk of the members were scattered about the building, with an up-all-night, get-tight-in-the-morning air, impatient for the sound of the division bell. It rang at last, at quarter past four, and the jaded representatives of the people swarmed in to the discharge of the most important duty of all their lives.27
The members may have been jaded, tired, and hung-over, but by the time backbencher Thomas Ferguson of Simcoe County uttered the last words of the debate, they knew what they wanted to do. “I take upon myself,” said Ferguson, “though with great reluctance, the responsibility of voting for this measure.” It was hardly a clarion call but, reluctant or exultant, most of the others had made the same choice. They voted ninety-one to thirty-three in favour of a confederation on the terms agreed at Quebec. Despite the united opposition of the rouge members, confederation had received majority support from among francophone members.
After the vote, the alliance of the church and the bleus grew even stronger. Bishop Bourget, the powerful, ambitious bishop of Montreal, who had often clashed with Cartier on other issues, remained cool to the bleus’ coalition with George Brown and to confederation itself. As it moved toward ratification, however, clerical support for confederation would become nearly unanimous. Once the British Parliament passed the British North America Act early in 1867, the Quebec bishops issued a declaration that confederation, now the law of the land, must be accepted, respected, and made to work. Submission to lawful authority was orthodox church teaching, of course, but many clerics used the declaration as a fresh weapon in their old war with the rouges, even threatening to deny the sacraments to anyone who would vote for an anti-confederation candidate. The rouges’ attempt to position themselves as defenders of traditional, Catholic French Canada against the confederation threat had completely failed, and the clerical offensive helped ensure that the rouges were badly beaten in the general election of 1867.*
In fact, rouge opposition to confederation had begun to flag after the legislature approved the Quebec resolutions. There began to be hints that rouge hostility was less intense than rouge rhetoric. Even before confederation was completed, Le Pays, the leading rouge newspaper, began to argue that liberals should be seeking “to give more elasticity to the federal structure and to push back the centralizing elements … so as to make a veritable confederation.”28 By then, George Brown was busily wooing old rouge allies, seeking to build a liberal coalition that could challenge Macdonald and Cartier in the new confederation.
The reform of confederation, not its abolition, became the future course of most of the rouge opposition. Antoine-Aimé Dorion, Luther Holton, and other leading anti-confederates gradually conceded that confederation was not a plot against responsible government and became provincial-rights federationists. After confederation, in effect, they defended what had been Langevin’s reading of the Quebec resolutions against John A. Macdonald’s centralizing inclinations. In alliance with advocates of provincial autonomy like Ontario’s Oliver Mowat and reconciled anti-confederates of Atlantic Canada, they helped bring the Liberal Party to power in Ottawa in 1873.
Maurice Laframboise and young Joseph Perrault lost their seats in 1867, and Perrault left politics. But Henri Joly soon became a supporter of confederation who served as both premier of Quebec and lieutenant-governor of British Columbia. Antoine-Aimé Dorion became a founder of the Liberal Party and an Ottawa cabinet minister under Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie. The man who had argued that federal appointment of judges would be a threat to French Canada’s legal system ended his days as Sir Antoine-Aimé Dorion, Chief Justice of Quebec.
One of Dorion’s anti-confederate protégés was Wilfrid Laurier, a young rouge lawyer who launched his long public career in the fight against the Quebec resolutions. Laurier wrote in March 1867 that in confederation the union that had been intended to destroy French Canada had at last achieved its aim. But Laurier too came to accept that confederation did not threaten the survival of French Canada and its institutions. In 1894, when he was poised to become prime minister of Canada, his adviser Joseph-Israël Tarte foresaw a glorious union for “Quebec and the Mowat party,” a union that would respect “all races and all the agreements which were the basis of confederation.”29
Laurier’s 1896 victory would remove Hector Langevin permanently from power. After 1867, Langevin and Cartier had both preferred federal over provincial politics. Despite his annoyance that Macdonald received a knighthood and became sole prime minister, Cartier at first played a role in Ottawa similar to that he had known in the union. He acquired the territorial interests of the Hudson’s Bay Company for Canada, negotiated British Columbia’s entry into confederation, and helped launch the national railway. But Cartier’s power in Montreal was already wobbling. New alignments arose to challenge his political networks, and he lost his seat in 1872. Then, brought down by kidney disease, he went off to his beloved London, with both his wife and his mistress in tow, and he died there in 1873. The Pacific Scandal was breaking in Ottawa, exposing the huge donations that railroad barons had made to Conservative leaders in exchange for the Pacific railway contract. Cartier’s old patrons in the Grand Trunk Railway had been squeezed out of the contract, but when he died his executors still thought it prudent to burn all his papers.
Hector Langevin succeeded Cartier as leader of the Quebec wing of the Conservative Party. He spent twenty more years wielding the high authority to which he had always aspired. In 1866, taking a new cabinet post with important patronage possibilities, Langevin had said it was a position where he could be useful to his friends while rendering service to his country. When Macdonald gave him a growing share of responsibility for party patronage on a national scale, his career, perhaps inevitably, was tarnished by spectacular corruption scandals. He had to resign from cabinet in 1891, and Laurier’s accession to power left him no avenue by which to return. Even before then, however, the power of Langevin and the bleu machine in Quebec had been broken.
In the post-confederation years, Langevin had become an Ottawa man, forced by his place in cabinet to acquiesce in Macdonald’s attacks on provincial power. His inability to prevent the cabinet from letting Louis Riel’s death sentence be carried out in 1885 helped destroy the Conservative Party in Quebec. The rights-of-the-provinces argument he had made so powerfully in 1865 became the property of Liberals, many of them his old rouge adversaries. In the wake of the hanging of Riel, Honoré Mercier built a nationalist coalition based on the vigorous assertion of provincial rights, traditional values, and clerical power. Mercier denounced Langevin for attempting to sit in Ottawa and control Quebec at the same time, and, in 1887, he swept to power as premier of Quebec. He and Oliver Mowat soon organized the first meeting of provincial premiers. Chaired by Mowat but held at Quebec, it proposed that the British North America Act be amended – to increase provincial powers, naturally. It was Mercier who first gave political sanction to the rising theory that confederation was a compact made between sovereign provinces and changeable by them.
For a century after 1860, Quebec got roughly the split which Cartier seems to have foreseen and Langevin defended. From the 1860s to the 1960s, French Canadians could participate in building a national state and a national economy if they chose to co-operate with the dominating English majority. Within Quebec itself, French Canada’s traditional leaders continued to direct a society in which French language, religion, and traditional culture held sway. For all who believed it was the destiny of Quebec to be rural, agricultural, traditional, and Catholic – and in 1865 that was almost everyone in Quebec’s public life – confederation confirmed Cartier’s and Langevin’s predictions much more than those of their critics and opponents in Quebec.
No one foresees the emergence of a saint. But Cartier and Langevin, both hard-headed, secular political managers, had helped create the environment in which Brother André thrived. As they intended, confederation helped Montreal consolidate its status as the financial and industrial capital of Canada, confirmed by the new national railroad as the gateway to the west. Industry thrived in the growing city, and resource industries blossomed throughout the province, often under English auspices. At the same time, the distinctly French-Canadian leadership of provincial society was preserved.
When Quebec controls its own land, several bleu members had declared in the confederation debates, it would be able to put an end to the migration to the United States that was bleeding the population of rural Quebec. After 1867, the province did launch “colonization” projects, guiding Quebeckers to the frontiers of Quebec rather than toward assimilation in New England. It was a priest, Father Antoine Labelle, who became the “apostle of colonization”; eventually he became Quebec’s deputy minister of colonization.
Clerical leadership of a public campaign such as land development was typical of the new Province of Quebec. The province had no department of education for a century; the province assisted the church to defend its authority in that field. The schools, colleges, technical institutes, and universities of French Canada were nearly all religiously run. It was the same with hospitals and charities. As industry grew, the church took a leading role in workers’ organizations and labour unions. Clerics became increasingly influential in cultural and intellectual life. The expanding responsibilities of the church symbolized how Quebec was simultaneously a modernizing society and a traditional one, a society with both the wealth to build Brother André’s shrine and the inclination to do so.
The miracle worker of Mont-Royal died at the age of ninety-one in 1937, and his death was soon followed by the initiation of efforts to see him canonized a saint. His mighty shrine to St. Joseph, already looming over the northern slopes of the city to which he ministered, was completed in 1957, twenty years after his death.
Considered from the end of the twentieth century, Brother André, in career and personality so different from George-Étienne Cartier, seems like the patron saint of the Quebec that Cartier sought to defend. Each represented a Quebec that wanted agriculture and the church to be the soul of Quebec – and yet provided no obstacle to economic development dominated mostly by English Canadians. By the time Brother André’s shrine was finished, however, those very policies had assisted in making French Quebec urban and modern and industrial. By then, it took a Maurice Duplessis to rule Quebec as if it were still the traditional society it had been in 1860. In his youth a student at the college where Brother André kept the door, Duplessis was a brutal, amoral, and sometimes hard-drinking politician. He was, however, le chef, the master of traditional French Canada as surely as Cartier in his prime had been.
After Duplessis’s death in 1959 came the “Quiet Revolution,” the explosive emergence of secular, modern, fashionable, relentlessly democratic Quebec. The Quiet Revolution seemed sudden and total because it was the abandonment of an illusion as much as a real social change. The demographics of Quebec had never been completely different from the rest of North America, and by the 1960s most Quebeckers, like other Canadians, were already leading urban ways of life. Quebec had moved beyond traditional faith and traditional agriculture, even when those things still defined it for the outside world and for itself. In the Quiet Revolution, Quebec abruptly abandoned the traditional image to seek new ways of defining and expressing itself in the modern world. Quebeckers began to reject clerical domination with the same determination that had gotten George Brown labelled as an anti-French bigot a century earlier.
If being rural farm families and devout, traditional Catholics no longer defined the French civilization in North America, what did? For many in Quebec, the answer was nationalism and the state. The Quiet Revolution dramatically changed the relationship between Quebeckers and what Cartier and Langevin had called “our religion, our institutions, and our laws.” Abruptly, the bargain on which they had brought Quebec into confederation looked obsolete. A new division of powers began to seem urgently necessary.
A new constitutional deadlock, much longer than the one that preceded the breakthrough of 1864, began to dominate Canadian politics in the late twentieth century. In Quebec, the dominant figure in that deadlock was Robert Bourassa. Much like Cartier and Langevin, he went almost alone into the constitutional conferences, the leader of a single party attempting to define the constitutional needs that would ensure the survival of a people. His task was even more difficult than theirs. In the 1860s, French Canada was a cohesive society, generally respectful and deferential to its political and clerical leaders. Cartier and Langevin were able to strike a deal which a broad cross-section of French-Canadian society could accept. Even though the bleus and the rouges fell into partisan division on confederation, Cartier’s bleus were powerful enough and popular enough to escape the consequences.
Robert Bourassa, a single party leader trying to incarnate both sides of a society absolutely divided as to whether federalism or separation was the choice best suited to the survival and flourishing of Quebec, was never so fortunate. Often distrusted by both federalists and separatists, accused by English Canadians of demanding too much, and by French Quebeckers of yielding too much, he was never able to see a new constitution ratified. Perhaps there exists a new constitutional settlement that will define Quebec’s distinct requirements for the twenty-first century as successfully as confederation did in the 1860s. But it hardly seems likely that any single leader or single party will be able to find it, or see it accepted in the new Quebec.
* A recent book, Marcel Bellavance’s Le Québec et la confédération: un choix libre? (Québec: Septentrion, 1992), argues that clerical interference on the side of confederation supporters should have invalidated the elections, but, given that all sides agreed that defending the influence of the church was one of Quebec’s vital requirements in confederation, it seems unreasonable to expect that the church should not have used that influence. New election laws a decade after confederation, however, prohibited the kind of direct political intervention the bishops made in 1867.