_Nature Of The Government.--The Governor.--The Council, Courts and
Judges.--The Intendant.--His Grievances.--Strong Government.--Sedition
and Blasphemy.--Royal Bounty.--Defects and Abuses._
|The government of Canada was formed in its chief features after the
government of a French province. Throughout France the past and the
present stood side by side. The kingdom had a double administration; or
rather, the shadow of the old administration and the substance of the
new. The government of provinces had long been held by the high nobles,
often kindred to the Crown; and hence, in former times, great perils had
arisen, amounting during the civil wars to the danger of dismemberment.
The high nobles were still governors of provinces; but here, as
elsewhere, they had ceased to be dangerous. Titles, honors, and
ceremonial they had in abundance; but they were deprived of real power.
Close beside them was the royal intendant, an obscure figure, lost
amid the vainglories of the feudal sunset, but in the name of the king
holding the reins of government; a check and a spy on his gorgeous
colleague. He was the king’s agent: of modest birth, springing from
the legal class; owing his present to the king, and dependent on him for
his future; learned in the law and trained to administration. It was
by such instruments that the powerful centralization of the monarchy
enforced itself throughout the kingdom, and, penetrating beneath the
crust of old prescriptions, supplanted without seeming to supplant them.
The courtier noble looked down in the pride of rank on the busy man in
black at his side; but this man in black, with the troop of officials
at his beck, controlled finance, the royal courts, public works, and all
the administrative business of the province.
The governor-general and the intendant of Canada answered to those of a
French province. The governor, excepting in the earliest period of
the colony, was a military noble; in most cases bearing a title and
sometimes of high rank. The intendant, as in France, was usually drawn
from the _gens de robe_, or legal class. * The mutual relations of the
two officers were modified by the circumstances about them. The
governor was superior in rank to the intendant; he commanded the troops,
conducted relations with foreign colonies and Indian tribes, and took
precedence on all occasions of ceremony. Unlike a provincial
* The governor was styled in his commission, Gouverneur et
Lieutenant-Général en Canada, Acadie, Isle de Terreneuve, et
autres pays de la France Septentrionale; and the intendant,
Intendant de la Justice, Police, et Finances in Canada,
Acadie, Terreneuve, et autres pays de la France
Septentrionale
governor in France, he had great and substantial power, The king and
the minister, his sole masters, were a thousand leagues distant, and he
controlled the whole military force. If he abused his position, there
was no remedy but in appeal to the court, which alone could hold him
in check. There were local governors at Montreal and Three Rivers; but
their power was carefully curbed, and they were forbidden to fine or
imprison any person without authority from Quebec. *
The intendant was virtually a spy on the governor-general, of whose
proceedings and of every thing else that took place he was required to
make report. Every year he wrote to the minister of state, one, two,
three, or four letters, often forty or fifty pages long, filled with
the secrets of the colony, political and personal, great and small, set
forth with a minuteness often interesting, often instructive, and often
excessively tedious. ** The governor, too, wrote letters of pitiless
length; and each of the colleagues was jealous of the letters of the
other. In truth, their relations to each other were so critical, and
perfect harmony so rare, that they might almost be described as natural
enemies. The court, it is certain, did not desire their perfect accord;
nor, on the other hand, did it wish them to quarrel: it aimed to keep
them on such terms
* The Sulpitian seigniors of Montreal claimed the right of
appointing their own local governor. This was denied by the
court, and the excellent Sulpitian governor, Maisonneuve,
was removed by De Tracy, to die in patient obscurity at
Paris. Some concessions were afterwards made in favor of the
Sulpitian claims.
** I have carefully read about two thousand pages of these
letters.
that, without deranging the machinery of administration, each should be
a check on the other. *
The governor, the intendant, and the supreme council or court, were
absolute masters of Canada under the pleasure of the king. Legislative,
judicial, and executive power, all centred in them. We have seen already
the very unpromising beginnings of the supreme council. It had consisted
at first of the governor, the bishop, and five councillors chosen by
them. The intendant was soon added to form the ruling triumvirate; but
the appointment of the councillors, the occasion of so many quarrels,
was afterwards exercised by the king himself. ** Even the name of the
council underwent a change in the interest of his autocracy, and he
commanded that it should no longer be called the _Supreme_, but only
the _Superior_ Council. The same change had just been imposed on all the
high tribunals of France. *** Under the shadow of the _fleur-de-lis_,
the king alone was to be supreme.
In 1675, the number of councillors was increased to seven, and in 1703
it was again increased to twelve; but the character of the council or
court
* The governor and intendant made frequent appeals to the
court to settle questions arising between them. Several of
these appeals are preserved. The king wrote replies on the
margin of the paper, but they were usually too curt and
general to satisfy either party.
** Déclaration du Roi du 16me Juin, 1703. Appointments were
made by the king many years earlier. As they were always
made on the recommendation of the governor and intendant,
the practical effect of the change was merely to exclude the
bishop from a share in them. The West India Company made the
nominations during the ten years of its ascendancy.
*** Cheruel, Administration Monarchique en France, II. 100.
remained the same. It issued decrees for the civil, commercial, and
financial government of the colony, and gave judgment in civil and
criminal causes according to the royal ordinances and the _Coutume de
Paris_. It exercised also the function of registration borrowed from the
parliament of Paris. That body, it will be remembered, had no analogy
whatever with the English parliament. Its ordinary functions were not
legislative, but judicial; and it was composed of judges hereditary
under certain conditions. Nevertheless, it had long acted as a check on
the royal power through its right of registration. No royal edict had
the force of law till entered upon its books, and this custom had so
deep a root in the monarchical constitution of France, that even Louis
XIV., in the flush of his power, did not attempt to abolish it. He
did better; he ordered his decrees to be registered, and the humbled
parliament submissively obeyed. In like manner all edicts, ordinances,
or declarations relating to Canada were entered on the registers of
the superior council at Quebec. The order of registration was commonly
affixed to the edict or other mandate, and nobody dreamed of disobeying
it. *
The council or court had its attorney-general, who heard complaints and
brought them before the tribunal if he thought necessary; its secretary,
who kept its registers, and its _huissiers_ or attendant officers. It
sat once a week; and, though
* Many general edicts relating to the whole kingdom are
also registered on the books of the council, but the
practice in this respect was by no means uniform.
it was the highest court of appeal, it exercised at first original
jurisdiction in very trivial cases. * It was empowered to establish
subordinate courts or judges throughout the colony. Besides these there
was a judge appointed by the king for each of the three districts into
which Canada was divided, those of Quebec, Three Rivers, and
Montreal. To each of the three royal judges were joined a clerk and
an attorney-general under the supervision and control of the
attorney-general of the superior court, to which tribunal appeal
lay from all the subordinate jurisdictions. The jurisdiction of the
seigniors within their own limits has already been mentioned. They
were entitled by the terms of their grants to the exercise of “high,
middle, and low justice;” but most of them were practically restricted
to the last of the three, that is, to petty disputes between the
_habitans_, involving not more than sixty sous, or offences for which
the fine did not exceed ten sous. ** Thus limited, their judgments were
often useful in saving time, trouble, and money to the disputants. The
corporate seigniors of Montreal long continued to hold a feudal court in
form, with attorney-general, clerk, and _huissier_; but very few other
seigniors were in a condition to imitate them. Added to all these
tribunals was the bishop’s court at Quebec to try causes held to be
within the province of the church.
* See the Registres du Conseil Supérieur, preserved at
Quebec. Between 1663 and 1673 are a multitude of judgments
on matters great and small; from murder, rape, and
infanticide, down to petty nuisances, misbehavior of
servants, and disputes about the price of a sow.
** Doutre et Lareau, Histoire du Droit Canadien, 135.
The office of judge in Canada was no sinecure. The people were of a
litigious disposition, partly from their Norman blood, partly perhaps
from the idleness of the long and tedious winter, which gave full
leisure for gossip and quarrel, and partly from the very imperfect
manner in which titles had been drawn and the boundaries of grants
marked out, whence ensued disputes without end between neighbor and
neighbor.
“I will not say,” writes the satirical La Hontan, "that Justice is
more chaste and disinterested here than in France; but, at least, if
she is sold, she is sold cheaper. We do not pass through the clutches
of advocates, the talons of attorneys, and the claws of clerks. These
vermin do not infest Canada yet. Everybody pleads his own cause.
Our Themis is prompt, and she does not bristle with fees, costs, and
charges. The judges have only four hundred francs a year, a great
temptation to look for law in the bottom of the suitor’s purse. Four
hundred francs! Not enough to buy a cap and gown, so these gentry never
wear them.” *
Thus far La Hontan. Now let us hear the king; himself. “The greatest
disorder which has hitherto existed in Canada,” writes Louis XIV. to
the intendant Meules, “has come from the small degree of liberty which
the officers of justice have had in the discharge of their duties, by
reason of the violence to which they have been subjected, and the part
they have been obliged to take in the
* La Hontan, I. 21 (ed. 1705). In some editions, the above
is expressed in different language.
continual quarrels between the governor and the intendant; insomuch that
justice having been administered by cabal and animosity, the inhabitants
have hitherto been far from the tranquillity and repose which cannot
be found in a place where everybody is compelled to take side with one
party or another.” *
Nevertheless, on ordinary local questions between the habitants, justice
seems to have been administered on the whole fairly; and judges of all
grades often interposed in their personal capacity to bring parties to
an agreement without a trial. From head to foot, the government kept its
attitude of paternity.
Beyond and above all the regular tribunals, beyond and above the council
itself, was the independent jurisdiction lodged in the person of the
king’s man, the intendant. His commission empowered him, if he saw
fit, to call any cause whatever before himself for judgment; and
he judged exclusively the cases which concerned the king, and those
involving the relations of seignior and vassal. ** He appointed
subordinate judges, from whom there was appeal to him; but from his
decisions, as well as from those of the superior council, there was no
appeal but to the king in his council of state.
On any Monday morning one would have found the superior council in
session in the antechamber
* Instruction du Roy pour le Sieur de Meules, 1682.
** See the commissions of various intendants, in Edits et
Ordonnances
of the governor’s apartment, at the Chateau St. Louis. The members sat
at a round table. At the head was the governor, with the bishop on his
right, and the intendant on his left. The councillors sat in the order
of their appointment, and the attorney-general also had his place at the
board. As La Hontan says, they were not in judicial robes, but in their
ordinary dress, and all but the bishop wore swords.1 The want of the
cap and gown greatly disturbed the intendant Meules, and he begs the
minister to consider how important it is that the councillors, in order
to inspire respect, should appear in public in long black robes, which
on occasions of ceremony they should exchange for robes of red. He
thinks that the principal persons of the colony would thus be induced
to train up their children to so enviable a dignity; “and,” he
concludes, “as none of the councillors can afford to buy red robes,
I hope that the king will vouchsafe to send out nine such. As for the
black robes, they can furnish those themselves.” ** The king did not
respond, and the nine robes never arrived.
The official dignity of the council was sometimes exposed to trials
against which even red gowns might have proved an insufficient
protection. The same intendant urges that the tribunal ought to be
provided immediately with a house of its own.
"It is not decent,” he says, “that it should sit in the governor’s
antechamber any longer. His guards and valets make such a noise, that we
* Compare La Poterie, I. 260, and La Tour, Vie de Laval,
Liv. VII.
** Meules au Ministre, 28 Sept. 1685.
cannot hear each other speak. I have continually to tell them to keep
quiet, which causes them to make a thousand jokes at the councillors as
they pass in and out.” * As the governor and the council were often on
ill terms, the official head of the colony could not always be trusted
to keep his attendants on their good behavior. The minister listened to
the complaint of Meules, and adopted his suggestion that the government
should buy the old brewery of Talon, a large structure of mingled timber
and masonry on the banks of the St. Charles. It was at an easy distance
from the chateau; passing the Hôtel Dieu and descending the rock, one
reached it by a walk of a few minutes. It was accordingly repaired,
partly rebuilt, and fitted up to serve the double purpose of a lodging
for the intendant and a court-house. Henceforth the transformed brewery
was known as the Palace of the Intendant, or the Palace of Justice;
and here the council and inferior courts long continued to hold their
sessions.
Some of these inferior courts appear to have needed a lodging quite as
much as the council. The watchful Meules informs the minister that the
royal judge for the district of Quebec was accustomed in winter, with
a view to saving fuel, to hear causes and pronounce judgment by his own
fireside, in the midst of his children, whose gambols disturbed the even
distribution of justice. **
The superior council was not a very harmonious
* Meules au Ministre, 12 Nov., 1681.
** Ibid.
body. As its three chiefs, the man of the sword, the man of the church,
and the man of the law, were often at variance, the councillors attached
themselves to one party or the other, and hot disputes sometimes ensued.
The intendant, though but third in rank, presided at the sessions, took
votes, pronounced judgment, signed papers, and called special meetings.
This matter of the presidency was for some time a source of contention
between him and the governor, till the question was set at rest by a
decree of the king.
The intendants in their reports to the minister do not paint the council
in flattering colors. One of them complains that the councillors, being
busy with their farms, neglect their official duties. Another says
that they are all more or less in trade. A third calls them uneducated
persons of slight account, allied to the chief families and chief
merchants in Canada, in whose interest they make laws; and he adds that,
as a year and a half or even two years usually elapse before the answer
to a complaint is received from France, they take advantage of this
long interval to the injury of the king’s service. * These and other
similar charges betray the continual friction between the several
branches of the government.
The councillors were rarely changed, and they usually held office for
life. In a few cases the king granted to the son of a councillor yet
living the right of succeeding his father when the charge
* Meules au Ministre 12 Nov, 1684.
should become vacant. * It was a post of honor and not of profit, at
least of direct profit. The salaries were very small, and coupled with a
prohibition to receive fees.
Judging solely by the terms of his commission, the intendant was the
ruling power in the colony. He controlled all expenditure of public
money, and not only presided at the council but was clothed in his own
person with independent legislative as well as judicial power. He was
authorized to issue ordinances having the force of law whenever he
thought necessary, and, in the words of his commission, “to order
every thing as he shall see just and proper.” ** He was directed to be
present at councils of war, though war was the special province of
his colleague, and to protect soldiers and all others from official
extortion and abuse; that is, to protect them from the governor. Yet
there were practical difficulties in the way of his apparent power. The
king, his master, was far away; but official jealousy was busy around
him, and his patience was sometimes put to the proof. Thus the royal
judge of Quebec had fallen into irregularities. “I can do nothing
with him,” writes the intendant; “he keeps on good terms with the
governor and council and sets me at naught.” The governor had, as he
thought, treated him amiss. “You have told me,” he writes to the
* A son of Amours was named in his father’s lifetime to
succeed him, as was also a son of the attorney-general
Auteuil. There are several other cases. A son of Tilly, to
whom the right of succeeding his father had been granted,
asks leave to sell it to the merchant La Chesnaye.
** Commissions of Bouteroue, Duchesneau, Meules, etc.
minister, “to bear every thing from him and report to you;” and he
proceeds to recount his grievances Again, "the attorney-general is bold
to insolence, and needs to be repressed. The king’s interposition is
necessary.” He modestly adds that the intendant is the only man in
Canada whom his Majesty can trust, and that he ought to have more
power. *
These were far from being his only troubles. The enormous powers
with which his commission clothed him were sometimes retrenched by
contradictory instructions from the king; ** for this government, not of
laws but of arbitrary will, is marked by frequent inconsistencies. When
he quarrelled with the governor, and the governor chanced to have strong
friends at court, his position became truly pitiable. He was berated as
an imperious master berates an offending servant. “Your last letter
is full of nothing but complaints.” “You have exceeded your
authority.” “Study to know yourself and to understand clearly the
difference there is between a governor and an intendant.” “Since
you fail to comprehend the difference between you and the officer
who represents the king’s person, you are in danger of being often
condemned, or rather of being recalled, for his Majesty cannot endure so
many petty complaints, founded on nothing but a certain _quasi_ equality
between the governor and you, which you assume, but which
* Meules au Ministre, 12 Nov., 1684.
** Thus, Meules is flatly forbidden to compel litigants to
bring causes before him (Instruction pour le Sieur de
Meules, 1682), and this prohibition is nearly of the same
date with the commission in which the power to do so is
expressly given him.
does not exist.” “Meddle with nothing beyond your functions.”
“Take good care to tell me nothing but the truth.” “You ask too
many favors for your adherents.” “You must not spend more than you
have authority to spend, or it will be taken out of your pay.” In
short, there are several letters from the minister Colbert to his
colonial man-of-all-work, which, from beginning to end, are one
continued scold. *
The luckless intendant was liable to be held to account for the action
of natural laws. “If the population does not increase in proportion
to the pains I take,” writes the king to Duchesneau, “you are to lay
the blame on yourself for not having executed my principal order (_to
promote marriages_) and for having failed in the principal object for
which I sent you to Canada.” **
A great number of ordinances of intendants are preserved. They were
usually read to the people at the doors of churches after mass, or
sometimes by the curé from his pulpit. They relate to a great variety
of subjects,--regulation of inns and markets, poaching, preservation
of game, sale of brandy, rent of pews, stray hogs, mad dogs, tithes,
matrimonial quarrels, fast driving, wards and guardians, weights and
measures, nuisances, value of coinage, trespass on lands, building
churches, observance of Sunday, preservation of timber, seignior and
vassal, settlement of boundaries, and many
* The above examples are all taken from the letters of
Colbert to the intendant Duchesneau. It is an extreme case,
but other intendants are occasionally treated with scarcely
more ceremony.
** Le Roi à Duchesneau, 11 Juin, 1680.
other matters. If a curé with some of his parishioners reported that
his church or his house needed repair or rebuilding, the intendant
issued an ordinance requiring all the inhabitants of the parish,
“both those who have consented and those who have not consented,” to
contribute materials and labor, on pain of fine or other penalty. * The
militia captain of the _cote_ was to direct the work and see that each
parishioner did his due part, which was determined by the extent of
his farm; so, too, if the _grand voyer_, an officer charged with the
superintendence of highways, reported that a new road was wanted or that
an old one needed mending, an ordinance of the intendant set the whole
neighborhood at work upon it, directed, as in the other case, by the
captain of militia. If children were left fatherless, the intendant
ordered the curé of the parish to assemble their relations or friends
for the choice of a guardian. If a _censitaire_ did not clear his land
and live on it, the intendant took it from him and gave it back to the
seignior. **
Chimney-sweeping having been neglected at Quebec, the intendant commands
all householders promptly to do their duty in this respect, and at the
same time fixes the pay of the sweep at six sous a chimney. Another
order forbids quarrelling in church. Another assigns pews in due order
of precedence to the seignior, the captain of militia, and the wardens.
The intendant Raudot, who seems
* See, among many examples, the ordinance of 24th December,
1716. Edits et Ordonnances, II. 443.
** Compare the numerous ordinances printed in the second
and third volumes of Edits et Ordonnances.
to have been inspired even more than the others with the spirit of
paternal intervention, issued a mandate to the effect that, whereas
the people of Montreal raise too many horses, which prevents them
from raising cattle and sheep, “being therein ignorant of their true
interest.... Now, therefore, we command that each inhabitant of the
_côtes_ of this government shall hereafter own no more than two horses
or mares and one foal; the same to take effect after the sowing-season
of the ensuing year, 1710, giving them time to rid themselves of their
horses in excess of said number, after which they will be required to
kill any of such excess that may remain in their possession.” * Many
other ordinances, if not equally preposterous, are equally stringent;
such, for example, as that of the intendant Bigot, in which, with a view
of promoting agriculture, and protecting the morals of the farmers by
saving them from the temptations of cities, he proclaims to them: “We
prohibit and forbid you to remove to this town (_Quebec_) under any
pretext whatever, without our permission in writing, on pain of
being expelled and sent back to your farms, your furniture and goods
confiscated, and a fine of fifty livres laid on you for the benefit of
the hospitals. And, furthermore, we forbid all inhabitants of the city
to let houses or rooms to persons coming from the country, on pain of
a fine of a hundred livres, also applicable to the hospitals.” **
At about the same time a royal edict, designed to prevent the undue
subdivision of farms, forbade the country
* Edits et Ordonnances, II. 273.
** Ibid., II. 399.
people, except such as were authorized to live in villages, to build a
house or barn on any piece of land less than one and a half arpents wide
and thirty arpents long; * while a subsequent ordinance of the
intendant commands the immediate demolition of certain houses built in
contravention of the edict. **
The spirit of absolutism is everywhere apparent. “It is of very great
consequence,” writes the intendant Meules, “that the people should
not be left at liberty to speak their minds.” ***
Hence public meetings were jealously restricted. Even those held by
parishioners under the eye of the curé to estimate the cost of a new
church seem to have required a special license from the intendant.
During a number of years a meeting of the principal inhabitants of
Quebec was called in spring and autumn by the council to discuss the
price and quality of bread, the supply of firewood, and other similar
matters. The council commissioned two of its members to preside at these
meetings, and on hearing their report took what action it thought best.
Thus, after the meeting held in February, 1686, it issued a decree, in
which, after a long and formal preamble, it solemnly ordained, “that
besides white-bread and light brown-bread, all bakers shall hereafter
make dark brown-bread whenever the same shall be required.” **** Such
assemblies, so controlled, could scarcely, one would think, wound
* Edits et Ordonnances, I. 585.
** Ibid., II. 400.
*** “Il ne laisse pas d’être de très grande conséquence de
ne pas laisser la liberté au peuple de dire son sentiment.”
--Meules au Ministre, 1685.
**** Edits et Ordonnances, II. 112.
the tenderest susceptibilities of authority; yet there was evident
distrust of them, and after a few years this modest shred of
self-government is seen no more. The syndic, too, that functionary whom
the people of the towns were at first allowed to choose, under the eye
of the authorities, was conjured out of existence by a word from the
king. Seignior, _censitaire_, and citizen were prostrate alike in flat
subjection to the royal will. They were not free even to go home to
France. No inhabitant of Canada, man or woman, could do so without
leave; and several intendants express their belief that without this
precaution there would soon be a falling off in the population.
In 1671 the council issued a curious decree. One Paul Dupuy had been
heard to say that there is nothing like righting one’s self, and that
when the English cut off the head of Charles I. they did a good thing,
with other discourse to the like effect The council declared him guilty
of speaking ill of royalty in the person of the king of England, and
uttering words tending to sedition. He was condemned to be dragged from
prison by the public executioner, and led in his shirt, with a rope
about his neck, and a torch in his hand, to the gate of the Chateau St.
Louis, there to beg pardon of the king; thence to the pillory of the
Lower Town to be branded with a fleur-de-lis on the cheek, and set in
the stocks for half an hour; then to be led back to prison, and put in
irons “till the information against him shall be completed.” *
* Jugements et Délibérations du Conseil Supérieur.
If irreverence to royalty was thus rigorously chastised, irreverence
to God was threatened with still sharper penalties. Louis XIV., ever
haunted with the fear of the devil, sought protection against him by
his famous edict against swearing, duly registered on the books of the
council at Quebec. “It is our will and pleasure,” says this
pious mandate, “that all persons convicted of profane swearing or
blaspheming the name of God, the most Holy Virgin, his mother, or the
saints, be condemned for the first offence to a pecuniary fine according
to their possessions and the greatness and enormity of the oath and
blasphemy; and if those thus punished repeat the said oaths, then for
the second, third, and fourth time they shall be condemned to a double,
triple, and quadruple fine; and for the fifth time, they shall be set in
the pillory on Sunday or other festival days, there to remain from
eight in the morning till one in the afternoon, exposed to all sorts of
opprobrium and abuse, and be condemned besides to a heavy fine; and for
the sixth time, they shall be led to the pillory, and there have the
upper lip cut with a hot iron; and for the seventh time, they shall
be led to the pillory and have the lower lip cut; and if, by reason
of obstinacy and inveterate bad habit, they continue after all these
punishments to utter the said oaths and blasphemies, it is our will and
command that they have the tongue completely cut out, so that thereafter
they cannot utter them again.” * All those who should hear anybody
* Edit du Roy contre les Jureurs et Blasphémateurs, du 30me
Juillet, 1666 See Edits et Ordonnances, I. 62.
swear were further required to report the fact to the nearest judge
within twenty-four hours, on pain of fine.
This is far from being the only instance in which the temporal power
lends aid to the spiritual. Among other cases, the following is worth
mentioning: Louis Gaboury, an inhabitant of the island of Orleans,
charged with eating meat in Lent without asking leave of the priest,
was condemned by the local judge to be tied three hours to a stake in
public, and then led to the door of the chapel, there on his knees,
with head bare and hands clasped, to ask pardon of God and the king. The
culprit appealed to the council, which revoked the sentence and imposed
only a fine. *
The due subordination of households had its share of attention. Servants
who deserted their masters were to be set in the pillory for the first
offence, and whipped and branded for the second; while any person
harboring them was to pay a fine of twenty francs. ** On the other hand,
nobody was allowed to employ a servant without a license. ***
In case of heinous charges, torture of the accused was permitted under
the French law; and it was sometimes practised in Canada. Condemned
murderers and felons were occasionally tortured before being strangled;
and the dead body, enclosed in a kind of iron cage, was left hanging for
months at the top of Cape Diamond, a terror to children and a warning to
evil-doers. Yet, on the whole,
* Doutre et Lareau, Histoire du Droit Canadien, 163.
** Réglement de Police, 1676.
*** Edits et Ordonnances, II. 53.
Canadian justice, tried by the standard of the time, was neither
vindictive nor cruel.
In reading the voluminous correspondence of governors and intendants,
the minister and the king, nothing is more apparent than the interest
with which, in the early part of his reign, Louis XIV. regarded his
colony. One of the faults of his rule is the excess of his benevolence;
for not only did he give money to support parish priests, build
churches, and aid the seminary, the Ursulines, the missions, and the
hospitals; but he established a fund destined, among other objects, to
relieve indigent persons, subsidized nearly every branch of trade and
industry, and in other instances _did for the colonists what they would
far better have learned to do for themselves_.
Meanwhile the officers of government were far from suffering from an
excess of royal beneficence. La Hontan says that the local governor of
Three Rivers would die of hunger if, besides his pay, he did not gain
something by trade with the Indians; and that Perrot, local governor
of Montreal, with one thousand crowns of salary, traded to such purpose
that in a few years he made fifty thousand crowns. This trade, it may
be observed, was in violation of the royal edicts. The pay of the
governor-general varied from time to time. When La Poterie wrote it was
twelve thousand francs a year, besides three thousand which he received
in his capacity of local governor of Quebec. * This would hardly
* In 1674, the governor-general received 20,718 francs, out
of which he was to pay 8,718 to his guard of twenty men and
officers. Ordonnance du Roy, 1675. Yet in 1677, in the Etat
de la Dépense que le Roy veut et ordonne estre faite, etc.,
the total pay of the governor-general is set down at 3,000
francs, and so also in 1681, 1682, and 1687. The local
governor of Montreal was to have 1,800 francs, and the
governor of Three Rivers 1,200. It is clear, however, that
this Etat de dépense is not complete, as there is no
provision for the intendant. The first councillor received
500 francs, and the rest 300 francs each, equal in Canadian
money to 400. An ordinance of 1676 gives the intendant
12,000 francs. It is tolerably clear that the provision of
3,000 francs for the governor-general was meant only to
apply to his capacity of local governor of Quebec.
tempt a Frenchman of rank to expatriate himself; and yet some, at least,
of the governors came out to the colony for the express purpose of
mending their fortunes; indeed, the higher nobility could scarcely, in
time of peace, have other motives for going there. The court and the
army were their element, and to be elsewhere was banishment. We shall
see hereafter by what means they sought compensation for their exile
in Canadian forests. Loud complaints sometimes found their way to
Versailles. A memorial addressed to the regent duke of Orleans,
immediately after the king’s death, declares that the ministers of
state, who have been the real managers of the colony, have made their
creatures and relations governors and intendants, and set them free from
all responsibility. High colonial officers, pursues the writer, come
home rich, while the colony languishes almost to perishing. * As for
lesser offices, they were multiplied to satisfy needy retainers, till
lean and starving Canada was covered with official leeches, sucking, in
famished desperation, at her bloodless veins.
The whole system of administration centred in
* Mémoire addressé au Régent 1716
the king, who, to borrow the formula of his edicts, “in the fulness of
our power and our certain knowledge,” was supposed to direct the whole
machine, from its highest functions to its pettiest intervention
in private affairs. That this theory, like all extreme theories of
government, was an illusion, is no fault of Louis XIV. Hard-working
monarch as he was, he spared no pains to guide his distant colony in the
paths of prosperity. The prolix letters of governors and intendants were
carefully studied; and many of the replies, signed by the royal hand,
enter into details of surprising minuteness. That the king himself
wrote these letters is incredible; but in the early part of his reign
he certainly directed and controlled them. At a later time, when more
absorbing interests engrossed him, he could no longer study in person
the long-winded despatches of his Canadian officers. They were usually
addressed to the minister of state, who caused abstracts to be made from
them, for the king’s use, and perhaps for his own. * The minister or
the minister’s secretary could suppress or color as he or those who
influenced him saw fit.
In the latter half of his too long reign, when cares, calamities, and
humiliations were thickening around the king, another influence was
added to make the theoretical supremacy of his royal will more than ever
a mockery. That prince of annalists, Saint-Simon, has painted Louis XIV.
ruling his realm from the bedchamber of Madame de
* Many of these abstracts are still preserved in the
Archives of the Marine and Colonies.
Maintenons seated with his minister at a small table beside the fire,
the king in an armchair, the minister on a stool with his bag of papers
on a second stool near him. In another armchair, at another table,
on the other side of the fire, sat the sedate favorite, busy to all
appearance with a book or a piece of tapestry, but listening to every
thing that passed. “She rarely spoke,” says Saint-Simon, “except
when the king asked her opinion, which he often did; and then she
answered with great deliberation and gravity. She never or very rarely
showed a partiality for any measure, still less for any person; but she
had an understanding with the minister, who never dared do otherwise
than she wished. Whenever any favor or appointment was in question,
the business was settled between them beforehand. She would send to the
minister that she wanted to speak to him, and he did not dare bring the
matter on the carpet till he had received her orders.” Saint-Simon
next recounts the subtle methods by which Maintenon and the minister,
her tool, beguiled the king to do their will, while never doubting that
he was doing his own. “He thought,” concludes the annalist, “that
it was he alone who disposed of all appointments; while in reality he
disposed of very few indeed, except on the rare occasions when he had
taken a fancy to somebody, or when somebody whom he wanted to favor had
spoken to him in behalf of somebody else.” *
* Mémoires du Duc de Saint-Simon, XIII. 38, 39 (Cheruel,
1857). Saint-Simon, notwithstanding the independence of his
character, held a high position at court; and his acute and
careful observation, joined to his familiar acquaintance
with ministers and other functionaries, both in and out of
office, gives a rare value to his matchless portraitures.
Add to all this the rarity of communication with the distant colony. The
ships from France arrived at Quebec in July, August, or September, and
returned in November. The machine of Canadian government, wound up once
a year, was expected to run unaided at least a twelvemonth. Indeed, it
was often left to itself for two years, such was sometimes the tardiness
of the overburdened government in answering the despatches of its
colonial agents. It is no matter of surprise that a writer well versed
in its affairs calls Canada the “country of abuses.” *
* Etat présent du Canada, 1768.