L’éruption patriote: The Revolt against Dalhousie and the Petitioning Explosion in Nineteenth-Century French Canada

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 453-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Carpenter ◽  
Doris Brossard

As much as any other site in the nineteenth century, Francophone Lower Canada saw immense waves of popular petitioning, with petitions against British colonial administration attracting tens of thousands of signatures in the 1820s. The petition against Governor Dalhousie of 1827–28 attracted more than 87,000 names, making it one of the largest mass petitions of the Atlantic world on a per-capita scale for its time. We draw upon new archival evidence that shows the force of local organization in the petition mobilization, and combine this with statistical analyses of a new sample of 1,864 names from the anti-Dalhousie signatory list. We conclude that the Lower Canadian petitioning surge stemmed from emergent linguistic nationalism, expectations of parliamentary democracy, and the mobilization and alliance-building efforts of Patriote leaders in the French-Canadian republican movement. As elsewhere in the nineteenth-century Atlantic, the anti-Dalhousie effort shows social movements harnessing petitions to recruit, mobilize, and build cross-cultural alliances.

1988 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 795-806 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Wiseman

AbstractIn an assessment of Louis Hartz's fragment theory, H. D. Forbes contends that its basic weaknesses are most easily exposed in the case of French Canada. This article argues the opposite: Hartz's approach in this case is particularly illuminating rather than representing its Achilles’ heel. Hartzian analysis is consistent with the historiography of French Canada. The growth of liberalism in the nineteenth century that Forbes points to in the French-Canadian fragment pales when placed in a comparative perspective as Hartz's theory requires. It is the mix of feudal and liberal ideas in the twentieth century that helps to explain the rise of social democratic forces like the Parti québécois.


2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Burgess

Abstract This study calls into question the view that immigration from the British Isles in the first half of the nineteenth century dramatically altered the ethnic composition of the urban crafts of Lower Canada and resulted in the marginalisation of French-Canadian artisans. Unlike earlier studies, which relied essentially on the snapshots provided by the manuscript censuses of 1831 and 1842, this case study combines a variety of sources in order to reconstitute the entire population of Montreal's leather trades between 1815 and 1831. The evidence provided by this important group of crafts shows that, while the British presence increased, it was primarily confined to the most transient elements of the anisan population. A mong craftsmen who settled in Montréal for extended periods of time, French Canadians remained dominant. Although their relative importance declined, their absolute numbers grew. Vital craft traditions ensured that skills were transmitted from father to son and that apprenticeship thrived. While the local ecomony was the major source of new manpower throughout this period, there was a steady increase in the flow of young men into Montréal from the surrounding countryside.


1980 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 497-514 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Lewis ◽  
Marvin McInnis

This paper examines the widely held view that the French-Canadian farmers of Lower Canada in the early nineteenth century were notably backward and inefficient. Data from the Canadian census of 1851–1852 are used to estimate agricultural output and factor inputs for a large number of parishes and townships. The estimated differential between French and English districts in total factor productivity is shown to be small and probably not significant. The conclusion casts doubt on the importance of ethnic differentials in farm practice as a source of agricultural retardation in Lower Canada.


Author(s):  
Benjamin A. Schupmann

Chapter 1 analyzes Schmitt’s assessment of democratic movements in Weimar and the gravity of their effects on the state and constitution. It emphasizes that the focus of Schmitt’s criticism of Weimar was mass democracy rather than liberalism. Schmitt warned that the combination of mass democracy, the interpenetration of state and society, and the emergence of total movements opposed to liberal democracy, namely the Nazis and the Communists, were destabilizing the Weimar state and constitution. Weimar, Schmitt argued, had been designed according to nineteenth century principles of legitimacy and understandings of the people. Under the pressure of mass democracy, the state was buckling and cannibalizing itself and its constitution. Despite this, Schmitt argued, Weimar jurists’ theoretical commitments left them largely unable to recognize the scope of what was occurring. Schmitt’s criticism of Weimar democracy was intended to raise awareness of how parliamentary democracy could be turned against the state and constitution.


Author(s):  
Robert Louis Stevenson

The literary world was shocked when in 1889, at the height of his career, Robert Louis Stevenson announced his intention to settle permanently on the Pacific island of Samoa. His readers were equally shocked when he began to use the subject material offered by his new environment, not to promote a romance of empire, but to produce some of the most ironic and critical treatments of imperialism in nineteenth-century fiction. In these stories, as in his work generally, Stevenson shows himself to be a virtuoso of narrative styles: his Pacific fiction includes the domestic realism of ‘The Beach at Falesé, the folktale plots of ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of Voices’, and the modernist blending of naturalism and symbolism in The Ebb-Tide. But beyond their generic diversity the stories are linked by their concern with representing the multiracial society of which their author had become a member. In this collection - the first to bring together all his shorter Pacific fiction in one volume - Stevenson emerges as a witness both to the cross- cultural encounters of nineteenth-century imperialism and to the creation of the global culture which characterizes the post-colonial world.


1977 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 350-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip A. Kuhn

The transmission of systems of ideas across wide cultural gaps is hard enough to study on any scale of human organization. It is particularly hard when two large, complex cultures meet under traumatic circumstances, as did China and the West in the nineteenth century. The myriad variables in such a situation dictate special care in defining the specific terms and conditions under which ideas are transmitted. The present case suggests three points worth attention: first, the precise language of the textual material that impinges on the host culture; second, the underlying structure of the historical circumstances into which this material is introduced; third, the process whereby the foreign material becomes important to sectors of society outside the group that first appreciated and received it and thereby becomes a significant historical force.


2006 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Gregory S. Kealey

Abstract While the history of the RCMP security service is becoming better known, study of its nineteenth-century predecessors is just beginning. From experiments with a rural police force established in Lower Canada in the aftermath of the 1837 Rebellions, the United Provinces of Canada created two secret police forces in 1864 to protect the border from American invasion. With the end of the Civil War, these forces turned to protecting the Canadas from Fenian activities. The Dominion Police, established in 1868, provided a permanent home for the secret service. The NWMP followed in 1873. Unlike the English, whose Victorian liberalism was suspicious of political and secret police, Canadians appear to have been much more accepting of such organisations and did not challenge John A. Macdonald's creation or control of a secret police. Republicanism, whether in the guise of Quebec, Irish or American nationalism, was seen as antithetical to the new nation of Canada, and a secret police was deemed necessary to protect the nation against it.


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Thisaranie Herath

The inaccessibility of the Ottoman harems to European males helped perpetuate the image of the harem as purely sexual in nature and contributed to imperialistic discourse that positioned the East as inferior to the West. It was only with the emergence of female travellers and artists that Europe was afforded a brief glimpse into the source of their fantasies; however, whether these accounts catered to or challenged the normative imperialist discourse of the day remains controversial. Emerging scholarship also highlights the way in which harem women themselves were able to control the depiction of their private spaces to suit their own needs, serving to highlight how nineteenth century depictions of the harem were a series of cross-cultural exchanges and negotiations between male Orientalists, female European travellers, and shrewd Ottoman women. 


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