The French government's motives in the Affaire du Canada, 1761–1763

Abstract

IN 176I the government of Louis XV decided to arrest about fifty French officials from Canada, including the intendant, Frangois Bigot, and to put them on trial on various charges of conspiring to defraud the Crown and the public. Anyone working through the history of Canada in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, when the British won the colony away from the French, must reach an understanding of this scandal. It is as much a major event in the history of the French re'gime in Canada as the Dreyfus case in the history of the Third Republic. These two cases, though different in many respects and separated by I40 years of history, may be usefully compared in another particular: the base motives of the French authorities in sentencing Alfred Dreyfus were not revealed until after a political struggle had led to his re-trial, but Bigot and the other officials from Canada never had a second trial and so the Bourbon government's motives for trying them have never been brought out into the open. The case has been left, so to speak, where the government and the public left it in 1763, just as though the Dreyfus case had remained closed after the original trial of December I 894. This is not to presume that the officials from Canada were as innocent as Dreyfus, and I am not prepared to argue that they were. The circumstances and political uses of the trial are worth investigating for the light they throw on the history of the period. The story of the affair has been told, and well told, in standard histories using what seem to be better sources than there are for many other historical events: that is, the reports, judgments, factums and other such material printed during the trial. These are the detailed and voluminous records of an inquisitorial system of justice, leisurely and thorough, based on investigations of more than two years, much more if we count the information gathered before the arrests were made, records richer and fuller than the historian of the eighteenth century is used to. They are also, be it said, the records of an authoritarian government unhampered by an independent judiciary or a jury, unchallenged by any organized legal defence, by habeas corpus or by any other rights of the accused they had very few able to interrogate the prisoners in private as often as necessary, accustomed to receiving the testimony of secret or even anonymous 'witnesses', more moderate and sensible than certain other authoritarian regimes but nevertheless free to build up and publish an official version of the alleged crimes without fear of questioning in an elected legislature or anywhere else. Knowing this, the best his-