The word “seigneurie” is a dream in Quebec. It evokes a mythical New France. However, historical demography, this ungrateful, teaches us that native Quebecers descend, sometimes through men, but especially through women, from an illiterate lord: Zacharie Cloutier (1590-1677). Charpentier, the father of a people signed with a small axe, teaching there in silence humility as much as solidarity.
Born in Beauport in 1976, historian Benoît Grenier, from the University of Sherbrooke, would see in this simple reminder a progressive impertinence. Didn’t he innocently reveal the conservatism of his paternal grandfather, writing in the foreword to his highly documented book, Seigniorial persistencesthat in Courville, near Quebec, “we said ‘blue like an Attic'”?
The outdatedness of the book is astonishing, but Grenier, well of knowledge, teaches us that on November 9, 1940, The duty announced that in Quebec a law passed by the Liberal government of Adélard Godbout will ensure that, on November 11, “the current owners of the seigneuries will receive their rents for the last time.” This, despite the 1854 law of United Canada, “which sealed the tombstone on outdated institutions”, commented the newspaper, seeing it as obvious.
In 1854, rare liberal seigneurs, such as Louis-Joseph Papineau, considered that, despite its antiquated character, the seigneurial system, once useful for the settlement of the colony, safeguarded an institution of French origin threatened by the invading British influence. But the majority of liberals disagreed.
These were often from the people, like the provincial deputy Télesphore-Damien Bouchard, future mayor of Saint-Hyacinthe, who, from 1912, Grenier points out, “the most fervent destroyer of constituted rents”. This was the term given to the rents which the majority of the farmers continued to pay to their lord “rather than taking advantage of the possibility”, after 1854, of “redeeming the capital”.
Thanks to the persistence of T.-D. Bouchard, the “tribute”, considered unjust, disappeared in 1940 “from our territory which is probably, according to the vehement liberal, one of the last to suffer it in the universe”. As if to console himself for Bouchard’s progressivism, Grenier reveals to us, no offense to Catherine Fournier, current mayoress of Longueuil, that the French seigneurial title of “baron de Longueuil” was recognized as transmissible to a Grant in 1880 by Queen Victoria in becoming a British title!
It has been worn since 2004 by a Grant, making it 12e Baron of Longueuil! Will this baron be at the “seigneurial” costume ball, like the ball that closes the richly illustrated book by Grenier? In memory of our national patriarch, Zacharie Cloutier, will he sport a small axe?