Once a month, The duty challenges history enthusiasts to decipher a current theme based on a comparison with a historical event or character.
How do we imagine today the fate of the colonial emancipation project of the 1830s in Lower Canada? Did the project of the patriots and Papineau fail in December 1837? Was its survival still significant in 1838 when Robert Nelson wrote a declaration of independence? Did the new battle of the Canadian Institute of Montreal in 1848 over the principle of nationalities bear fruit at a time when Papineau, returning from exile (1845) and re-elected deputy (1848), was marginalized by La Fontaine and the reformists?
Antoine-Aimé Dorion (1818-1891) is from the Canadian Institute of Montreal but keeps the most radical at bay. He is from the generation of the manifesto of the National and Democratic Club (1849), whose most difficult task is to reconcile nationality and democracy.
Dorion and the signatories believe in the “legitimacy of the democratic revolutions of the day”, which give way to the liberalism of free trade, and believe that “the colonial obstacle being broken, the Canadian star will almost undoubtedly come to take its providential place in the colossal republic of the new world. He who was not on the team The future (1857-1851) founded with his brothers The country (1852-1871), defender of the democratic cause.
We must ask ourselves what emancipation Papineau was still carrying in 1854 when he left politics. The public hardly knew its content, but Papineau wrote and detailed its orientation to his eldest son, Amédée: he is just as much, if not more republican, than in agreement with the principle of the right of peoples to self-determination. He is an American Republican by refusing to be part of a monarchical colony of the British type.
Dorion probably does not know this position of Papineau; how could he continue it, if not develop it? He took over from Papineau in the middle of the Union of 1840 at a time when the French language was no longer in use in the Legislative Assembly; where Lower Canada suffered half of Upper Canada’s debt with a smaller debt of its own; where, with a larger population, Lower Canada finds itself with the same number of deputies as Upper Canada.
Then, on the occasion of the first official census of Canada in 1851, Dorion discovered with all Canadians that henceforth, Canada West or Upper Canada had 952,004 inhabitants, Canada East or Lower Canada, 890,261. C This is the first time that the population of Upper Canada has exceeded that of Lower Canada.
Hands tied
The historical situation is changing: demography now makes it possible to format democracy differently and finally guarantee an English-speaking majority in the Legislative Assembly. Even before any confederation project had been concocted, Upper Canada could dominate Lower Canada. You have to imagine what the situation would be like if Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island added their populations to that of Upper Canada. A turn of the screw had already been enough; two rounds were reassuring.
The Civil War in the United States raised fears of some attempted annexation of Canada; at the same time, their railway from east to west, from north to south can only suggest a model for creating a real economy, a real Canadian territory, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Businessmen and politicians quickly take note of the situation.
A project to federate the Maritime provinces was an opportunity for the conservative leaders of United Canada, John A. Macdonald and the powerful George-Étienne Cartier, to invite themselves to Charlottetown (September 1864), a conference that Dorion boycotted. He will do the same at the Quebec Conference (October 1864).
Between 1854 and 1864, Dorion hardly moved, except to repeat that any constitutional change would have to be approved by the people. He had no choice but to wait and see how Cartier and the Conservatives were going to resolve the crucial problem of the representation of deputies according to population in this new system of government. It is this situation which immobilizes him. His friend Charles Daoust found the metaphor to describe Dorion’s challenge: you don’t get into the boat if you don’t know the currents.
This is done with the 72 resolutions of the Quebec Conference; of the 194 seats in the Commons, 82 will go to Upper Canada; 65 in Quebec; 19 to Nova Scotia; 15 in New Brunswick; 8 in Newfoundland, 5 in Prince Edward Island. The famous “constitutional guarantee”, awaited since 1858 by Dorion and the Reds of Lower Canada who, as Republicans and Democrats, had to accept the rep by pop, was finally formulated. Quebec would still be entitled to 65 deputies, the other provinces to a number of deputies evolving according to the population of Canada.
Sixty-five deputies out of 194: no parliamentary action for independence of Lower Canada was thinkable, even less than in 1840, when United Canada was composed of an equal number of deputies. Besides, how could a parliamentary struggle for independence have been possible in 1835 or 1837, even with a strong majority of French-speaking deputies in the House? What is parliamentary colonial independence? Why would an empire let a strategic colony go?
Dorion had decided to be absent from the conferences in Charlottetown, Quebec and London. The dice were cast. Dorion had persisted in his republican and democratic convictions by demanding approval by the Parliament of United Canada of this confederation project that no one had requested or proposed in the previous elections.
This is one way of seeing how, after 1840 and after 1854, Dorion arrived at the head of the Liberal Party with his hands tied. He didn’t just have Cartier to stand in his way. The polemical environment created and maintained by the Canadian Institute complicates his task as party leader. Not only is Dessaulles editor-in-chief of Country at the same time as defender of the Institute against Mgr Bourget, but in 1864 the Institute experienced an intellectual crisis around the meaning to be given to the principle of nationalities.
Since 1852, there have been members to clarify that nationality must not erase “man first” and the “citizen of the globe” and to see in immigration a tendency towards the “fusion of nationalities” . To Arthur Buies, who, in conferences at the Institute, distinguishes fusion and “confusion of nationalities”, Gonzalve Doutre reminds that “the fundamental principle of any nationality is interest, of course, which binds all men of ‘the same country’. “Of course”, what does that mean? It is a formalist position which, from Laurier to Trudeau, will find adherents.
Confusion of nationalities
Reconciliation between nationality and democracy is not self-evident. Dorion must have heard or read Papineau himself in his testamentary conference at the Canadian Institute in December 1867. Four years after his death, the great political leader whom Dorion succeeded in 1854 thought that nationality “cannot be confined within its current limits; that it has an irresistible force of expansion; that it will be more and more in the future composed of immigrants coming from all the countries of the world, no longer only from Europe, but soon from Asia, the overflow of which is five times more numerous has more outlets than America; composed, I say, of all races of men, who, with their thousand religious beliefs, a great jumble of errors and truths, are all pushed by Providence to this common meeting to melt into unity and brotherhood of the entire human family.
This is the utopian reading of the Democratic Republican. Did Buies see a “confusion of nationalities”?
Dorion, whose human quality was recognized without believing that he had “replaced” Papineau, would serve the cause of justice when he ascended the bench of chief judge of the Court of Appeal of Quebec in 1876.
The one who would succeed Dorion, Wilfrid Laurier, also had an itinerary typical of these years of changed hoods. Member of the Canadian Institute, where he played the role of conciliator and from which he resigned to marry Catholic, he had initially been a radical liberal, anticlerical and fiercely opposed to confederation in the newspaper The Clearer of Arthabaska.
Laurier meandered through the paths of liberal politics and the authorities of his hierarchy, making his first mark with his 1877 speech on political liberalism and Catholic liberalism. For this imperialist soon to be “sired” and forgetful of his party’s tradition of colonial emancipation, liberalism was no longer the youthful sin of the local liberals of 1848, but a reformist liberalism in the English style, with all the nuances of shades available.
In The EventHector Fabre, the man who has marked this march towards reformism since 1858, Laurier’s great friend, writes that the latter’s speech “opened a path and showed the road to follow […]. We know where we are going from now on.” The idea of the independence of French Canada and Quebec had faded. Only Henri Bourassa will become independent, Canadian independent facing Laurier marching blithely in the imperialist parade.
The idea of Quebec independence will revive from its ashes in the 20th centurye century. To the right. Then towards various lefts.
To suggest a text or to make comments and suggestions, write to Dave Noël at [email protected].