Crofters and habitants: settler society, economy, and culture in a Quebec township, 1848-1881

Abstract

It may not be obvious why historians of early Quebec are paying so much attention to rural society. Indeed, one of the books under review refers to une remarquable banalite of the area studied (Lavallee 274). Such candour may do little to attract the attention of historians interested in larger populations and apparently more vital issues. Does the history of rural Quebec matter? At one time, intellectuals argued that the virtue of nations was located in the countryside. The nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet lauded the peasant: Le paysan n'est pas seulement partie plus nombreuse de nation, c'est plus forte, plus saine, et, en balancant bien le physique et le moral, au total meilleure.(f.1) In part, such sentiments reflected anti-modernist concerns about declining communitas. But French-Canadian nationalists, until the 1960s, often located the heart of their nation among rural communities as well. Much of the recent production on the rural history of Quebec, with its emphasis on peasant culture, revisits such views, often recreating the social divisions that defined possibilities in rural communities in Quebec and discussing the rich and tenacious rural culture that developed in the colony. The history of seventeeth-century Montreal spans the religious and commercial interests fundamental to the colony of New France. Founded in 1642 as the Counter-Reformation utopian experiment Ville-Marie, Montreal soon revealed the extent to which Old World patterns were replicated in the New World. Louise Dechene's now classic account Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Montreal set the historiographical trend in which many studies of colonial society locate themselves. Published in French in 1974 but only recently translated, this volume re-evaluates the nature of colonial society by reconstructing in minute detail the workings of commerce and agriculture in the second most important town of the colony. Dechene's book is filled with insights into the society and economy of New France, and relatively little of her work has been shaken by the historical production of the last 20 years. The European population remained small throughout the period, and indeed throughout the history of New France as a whole, given limited immigration. For Dechene, the merchants and the peasants were the most important classes in the colony. The two groups functioned in relative isolation. While merchants in the fur trade dominated economic exchanges and ignored local development, farmers were content with subsistence. It was this lack of integration between the two sectors of the economy that determined the colony's features and long-term viability: No sooner was it settled than the countryside began to exhibit the familiar, unchanging features of Quebec rural society -- and this despite the closeness of the warehouses -- encapsulated in its uniform farms and lifestyle, stable land ownership, strong family ties, and entrenched routines(283). La Prairie en Nouvelle-France, 16471760, an examination of a seigneury located on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, provides an interesting counterpart to Dechene's study of Montreal. An agrarian seigneury, La Prairie did not witness the same socio-economic cleavages as the commercial town. Delving meticulously into notarial documents, Louis Lavallee sketches the lines of solidarity within the community: La Prairie constituted indeed une unite de vie et de lieu(263). Lavallee emphasises (but does not always demonstrate) social consensus within the local population, la belle unite habituellement maintenue au sein de communaute(168). Without denying economic differences within the peasantry, there was a rough parity amongst them: une majorite de paysans moyens, plus ou moins mediocres, dont l'independance economique semble cependant assuree(262). Having a religious order as seigneur, La Prairie, like Montreal, was managed carefully but was managed carefully but not with legal and financial vigilance until the 1730s. …