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The State of Tutelage in Lower Canada, 1835–1851

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Bruce Curtis
Bruce Curtis*
Affiliation:
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
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Extract

Most of the postmortem examinations of the Canadian Rebellion of 1837–38 identified one of its leading causes as faulty political education, but competing interpretations of “education” existed. The British Whigs and Radicals charged with reorganizing Canadian government after the Rebellion argued that the colonial population needed to be placed under far more extensive relations of tutelage than those implied by attendance at school as an antidote to revolution. Their analysis connected reform of governmental institutions, inspection and investigation of local conditions, and common schooling with a host of other attempts to reconfigure social solidarities in the colony and to reconstruct the colonial state. An alliance of imperial officials, anglophone capitalists and reformers, and, often grudgingly and ambivalently, sections of the francophone petite bourgeoisie attempted to translate this analysis into practice in the decade of the 1840s.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , Spring 1997 , pp. 25 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Allan Greer's, prize-winning The Patriots and the People: The Rebellion of 1837 in Rural Lower Canada (Toronto, 1993) provides the best available account.Google Scholar

2 Charland, Jean-Pierre, “Le Réseau d'Enseignement Public Bas-Canadien, 1841–1867: Une Institution de l'État Libéral,” Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française 40 (spring 1987): 505–35, covers part of the period treated here and draws connections between educational reform and reform of local government. However, his main concern is to argue that “liberalism” rather than “clericalism” and “conservatism” was the active force in school reform. In my view, he treats “liberalism” as an all-encompassing ideology; I am concerned with projects for and practices of rule and government.Google Scholar

3 See Lajeunesse, Marcel, “L'Évêque Bourget et l'Instruction Publique au Bas-Canada, 1840–1846,” Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française 23 (June 1969): 35–52.Google Scholar

4 For a detailed investigation of anchoring rule in popular psychology, see Curtis, Bruce, Building the Educational State: Canada West, 1836–1871 (East Sussex, Eng., 1988).Google Scholar

5 For a more detailed analysis, see Curtis, Bruce, True Government by Choice Men? Inspection, Education, and State Formation in Canada West (Toronto, 1992), ch. 1.Google Scholar

6 For instance, see Abrams, Philip, The Origins of British Sociology, 1834–1914: An Essay with Selected Papers (Chicago, 1968); Donzelot, Jacques, L'invention du sociale: Essai sûr le déclin des passions politiques (Paris, 1984); Hacking, Ian, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, Eng., 1991).Google Scholar

7 My analysis is shaped in part by Michel Foucault's view of the “governmentalization of the state.” See “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality: With Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, ed. Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin, and Miller, Peter (Chicago, 1991), 87–104.Google Scholar

8 For the vestry, see Chabot, Richard, Le curé de campagne et la contestation locale au Québec, de 1791 au troubles de 1837–8 (Montréal, 1975).Google Scholar

9 Greer, , Patriots, ch. 4 and passim; Fecteau, Jean-Marie, Un nouvel ordre des choses: La pauvreté, le crime, et l'Etat au Québec, de la fin du XVIIIe siècle à 1840 (Montréal, 1989), 214; for the Blue Book, see Curtis, Bruce, “The Canada ‘Blue Books’ and the Administrative Capacity of the Canadian State, 1822–67,” Canadian Historical Review 74 (Dec. 1993): 535–65.Google Scholar

10 Kennedy, W. P. M., ed., Documents of the Canadian Constitution, 1759–1915 (Toronto, 1918), 399.Google Scholar

11 Similar reports were made about the use of nationalist newspapers by schoolmasters; see Clark, S. D., Movements of Political Protest in Canada, 1640–1840 (Toronto, 1959), 270–74 (quotation, 270).Google Scholar

12 Fecteau, , Nouvel ordre des choses, 214. Translation of quotation: “the irremediable decline of relations of domination based on custom and on the paternalistic authority of the élites.” Google Scholar

13 Allan Greer has examined the transformation of the charivari into a directly oppositional force in this period. See “From Folklore to Revolution: Charivaris and the Lower Canadian Rebellion of 1837,” Social History 15 (Jan. 1990): 25–43; idem, Patriots, 69–86; and Hardy, René, “Le charivari dans la sociabilité rurale québécoise au XIXe siècle,” in De la sociabilité: Spécificité et mutations , ed. Levasseur, Roger (Montréal, 1990), 59–72.Google Scholar

14 The standard narrative account, before Greer's, Patriots, was Ouellet, Fernand, Lower Canada, 1791–1840: Social Change and Nationalism (Toronto, 1980), 275–327.Google Scholar

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16 Durham, to Glenelg, , 9 Aug. 1838, in Kennedy, , Documents, 455.Google Scholar

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18 Quoted in Kennedy, , Documents, 457.Google Scholar

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20 A similar analysis of the class structure was common in francophone liberal circles as well, although here the problem was diagnosed as the anglophone monopoly over capital. See, for instance, Chauveau's, Pierre-Joseph-Olivier early novel Charles Guérin: Roman de Moeurs Canadiennes (Montreal, 1978). Lucas, , Lord Durham's Report, 3: 139.Google Scholar

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22 Ibid. Bettina Bradbury has argued that one of the most important initiatives of the Lower Canadian Special Council was its registration ordinance which dramatically changed women's property rights; see “Married women's property rights and the Special Council” (paper presented at the colloquium New Perspectives on the State in Canadian History, Montreal, 21–23 Mar. 1996).Google Scholar

23 Lucas, , Lord Durham's Report, 1:112, 287.Google Scholar

24 Ibid., 3:283–84. Buller's account was notoriously silent on a large number of issues: coeducation; the role of women as teachers; the language of instruction (he likely favored English); the role of the clergy; superior schools, and so on. Transforming teachers into a corps d'état has been called “professionalization” in the literature; in practice it also involved the feminization of the occupation. See Danylewycz, Marta, Light, Beth, and Prentice, Alison, “The Evolution of the Sexual Division of Labour in Teaching: A Nineteenth-Century Ontario and Quebec Case Study,” Histoire sociale–Social History 16, no. 31 (May 1983): 81–109.Google Scholar

25 Lucas, , Lord Durham's Report, 3:283–84.Google Scholar

26 Brian Young examines the peculiarly important role played by the Special Council in the transition to industrial capitalist relations of production in Lower Canada. See Young, Brian, “Positive Law, Positive State: Class Realignment and the Transformation of Lower Canada, 1815–1866,” in Colonial Leviathan: State Formation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Canada, ed. Greer, Allan and Radforth, Ian (Toronto, 1992), 50–63. For the instructions, see Russell to Thomson, 7 Sept. 1839, Kennedy, , Documents, 514–16, 519. Thomson to a friend, 20 Nov., 8 Dec. 1839, ibid., 528 (quotation).Google Scholar

27 Ibid., 555; Thomson, to Russell, , 16 Sept. 1840, ibid., 553.Google Scholar

28 Sydenham to his brother, 28 Aug. 1841, ibid., 563.Google Scholar

29 Opposition to the Union of the Canadas was strong in the first years of the decade, based not only on taxation, but on the loss of the francophone majority in Parliament and the assumption by the new colony of Upper Canada's large debt.Google Scholar

30 Legislative Assembly of Canada, Statutes, 8 Vic. cap. 40. In parliamentary debate, it was argued that the Municipal Act foundered on resistance to the fact of property taxation. See Nish, Elizabeth, ed., Debates of the Legislative Assembly of United Canada, 1841–1867 (Montréal, 1970-), 20 Mar. 1845.Google Scholar

31 See Statutes, 8 Vic. cap. 41.Google Scholar

32 Ibid. My account of the school legislation draws on Nelson's excellent “The ‘Guerre des Eteignoirs’: School Reform and Popular Resistance in Lower Canada, 1841–1850,” (master's thesis, Simon Fraser University, 1985); and Dufour, Andrée, “La scolarisation au Bas-Canada, 1826–1859: Interaction Etat/communautés locales” (Ph.D. diss., Université du Québec à Montréal, 1993). Lajeunesse comments on the dependence of the government on clerical support in most parishes. “l'Évôque Bourget,” 50.Google Scholar

33 Nish, , Debates, 21 July 1847, my translation.Google Scholar

34 For the Act, see Statues, 10 and 11 Vic. cap. 7; for the quotations, see Nish Debates, 21 July 1847, my translation. Notice that Chauveau became Superintendent of Education in 1856 and first premier of the Province of Quebec in 1868.Google Scholar

35 See Legislative Assembly of Canada, Sessional Papers, Appendix YY 1847. Local government is meant to be the source of intelligence for the center about local conditions and events; here a reform of local government makes this key information production process impossible.Google Scholar

36 Statutes, 12 Vic. cap. 50.Google Scholar

37 Statutes, 13 and 14 Vic. cap. 34. As far as I know, no one served as an inspector of municipalities.Google Scholar

38 Some of the events are described in the offers of rewards for the apprehension of offenders published in the official Canada Gazette, 18 Mar., 8 Apr., 12 Aug., and 18 Nov. 1848; 13 Jan. 1849; 13 and 26 Jan., 9 Mar. and 23 Nov. 1850. Even in 1852, census enumerators described local opposition to taxation as leading to the closing of schools. National Archives of Canada, Census Returns, Canada East, 1852 record group 31, vol. 1299, J. N. B. Papineau, Ottawa County; enumerator, Kingsey, Drummond Co.; J. B. Commeault de St. David de Yamaska. The first two are far from St. Francis.Google Scholar

39 For the pre-revisionist view, see Audet, Louis-Philippe, “Education in Canada East and Quebec, 1840–1875,” in Canadian Education: A History, ed. Wilson, J. Donald, Stamp, Robert M., and Audet, Louis-Philippe (Toronto, 1970), 167–89. Here the “candle-snuffers” became “better informed, [and] changed their attitudes” (p. 175). This work is an English summary of Audet's massive, heavily proclerical Le système scolaire de la Province de Québec (Québec, 1950–55). Audet's view is certainly not shared by Charland, , “Réseau d'enseignment.” Google Scholar

40 Nelson, , “Guerre,” 175. Translation of quotation: “no boards, no schools, no courts of commissioners, no members of registry offices”! Google Scholar

41 At second reading, the bill was explicitly connected to the antischool agitations. Nish, , Debates, 17 July 1850. Support by the legislature for a secondary school under clerical control was a common patronage instrument.Google Scholar