Conservatives and conditional loyalty: The Rebellion Losses Crisis of 1849 in Montreal (Les conservateurs et la loyauté conditionnelle: la crise de la Loi d’indemnisation pour le Bas-Canada de 1849 à Montréal)

Abstract

In 1849, the conservatives of Montreal engaged in a series of ostensibly disloyal actions: the burning of the Parliament, attacks on the Governor General, and the publication of the Annexation Manifesto. Yet even as they did so they refused to abandon the language of loyalty. Canadian conservatives instead chose to follow the political philosophy of John Locke, endorsing his ‘right of revolution’. In so doing, they demonstrated an ideology eerily similar to that of the American Patriots three quarters of a century earlier. They held a conditional conception of loyalty as a social contract between monarch and subject. The British Crown was seen to have broken this contract through its sanctioning of the Rebellion Losses Bill and its implicit support of ‘French Domination’. The connection between mother country and colony was now conceived as open to negotiation.