THE AGE OF LOUIS QUATORZE
Louis XIV, the greatest of the Bourbon monarchs, had now taken into
his own hands the reins of power. Nominally he had been king of France
since 1642, when he was only five years old, but it was not until 1658
that the control of affairs by the regency came to an end. Moreover,
Colbert was now chief minister of state, so that colonial matters were
assured of a searching and enlightened inquiry. Richelieu's interest
in the progress of New France had not endured for many years after the
founding of his great Company. It is true that during the next fifteen
years he remained chief minister, but the great effort to crush the
remaining strongholds of feudalism and to centralize all political
power in the monarchy left him no time for the care of a distant
colony. Colbert, on the other hand, had well-defined and far-reaching
plans for the development of French industrial interests at home and
of French commercial interests abroad.
As for the colony, it made meager progress under Company control: few
settlers were sent out; and they were not provided with proper means
of defense against Indian depredations. Under the circumstances it did
not take Colbert long to see how remiss the Company of One Hundred
Associates had been, nor to reach a decision that the colony should
be at once withdrawn from its control. He accordingly persuaded the
monarch to demand the surrender of the Company's charter and to
reprimand the Associates for the shameless way in which they had
neglected the trust committed to their care. "Instead of finding,"
declared the King in the edict of revocation, "that this country is
populated as it ought to be after so long an occupation thereof by our
subjects, we have learned with regret not only that the number of its
inhabitants is very limited, but that even these are daily exposed to
the danger of being wiped out by the Iroquois."
In truth, the company had little to show for its thirty years of
exploitation. The entire population of New France in 1663 numbered
less than twenty-five hundred people, a considerable proportion of
whom were traders, officials, and priests. The area of cleared land
was astonishingly small, and agriculture had made no progress worthy
of the name. There were no industries of any kind, and almost nothing
but furs went home in the ships to France. The colony depended upon
its mother country even for its annual food supply, and when the
ships from France failed to come the colonists were reduced to severe
privations. A dispirited and nearly defenseless land, without solid
foundations of agriculture or industry, with an accumulation of Indian
enmity and an empty treasury--this was the legacy which the Company
now turned over to the Crown in return for the viceroyal privileges
given to it in good faith more than three decades before.
When the King revoked the Company's charter, he decided upon Colbert's
advice to make New France a royal domain and to provide it with a
scheme of administration modeled broadly upon that of a province at
home. To this end a royal edict, perhaps the most important of all the
many decrees affecting French colonial interests in the seventeenth
century, was issued in April, 1663. While the provisions of this edict
bear the stamp of Colbert's handiwork, it is not unlikely that the
suggestions of Bishop Laval, as given to the minister during his visit
of the preceding year, were accorded some recognition. At any rate,
after reciting the circumstances under which the King had been
prompted to take New France into his own hands, the edict of 1663
proceeded to authorize the creation of a Sovereign Council as the
chief governing body of the colony. This, with a larger membership and
with greatly increased powers, was to replace the old council
which the Company had established to administer affairs some years
previously.
During the next hundred years this Sovereign Council became and
remained the paramount civil authority in French America. At the
outset it consisted of seven members, the governor and the bishop _ex
officio_, with five residents of the colony selected jointly by these
two. Beginning with the arrival of Talon as first intendant of the
colony in 1665, the occupant of this post was also given a seat in the
Council. Before long, however, it became apparent that the provision
relating to the appointment of non-official members was unworkable.
The governor and the bishop could not agree in their selections; each
wanted his own partisans appointed. The result was a deadlock in which
seats at the council-board remained vacant. In the end Louis Quatorze
solved this problem, as he solved many others, by taking the power
directly into his own hands. After 1674 all appointments to the
Council were made by the King himself. In that same year the number of
non-official members was raised to seven, and in 1703 it was further
increased to twelve.[1] At the height of its power, then, the
Sovereign Council of New France consisted of the governor, the
intendant, the bishop, and twelve lay councilors, together with an
attorney-general and a clerk. These two last-named officials sat with
the Council but were not regular members of it.
[Footnote 1: Its official title was in 1678 changed to Superior
Council.]
In the matter of powers the Council was given by the edict of 1663
jurisdiction over all civil and criminal matters under the laws and
ordinances of the kingdom, its procedure in dealing with such matters
to be modeled on that of the Parliament of Paris. It was to receive
and to register the royal decrees, thus giving them validity in New
France, and it was also to be the supreme tribunal of the colony with
authority to establish local courts subordinate to itself. There was
no division of powers in the new frame of government. Legislative,
executive, and judicial powers were thrown together in true Bourbon
fashion. Apparently it was Colbert's plan to make of the governor
a distinguished figurehead, with large military powers but without
paramount influence in civil affairs. The bishop was to have no civil
jurisdiction, and the intendant was to be the director of details. The
Council, according to the edict of 1663, was to be the real pivot of
power in New France.
Through the long years of storm and stress which make up the greater
part of the history of the colony, the Sovereign Council rendered
diligent and faithful service. There were times when passions waxed
warm, when bitter words were exchanged, and when the urgent interests
of the colony were sacrificed to the settlement of personal
jealousies. Many dramatic scenes were enacted around the long table at
which the councilors sat at their weekly sessions, for every Monday
through the greater portion of the year the Council convened at seven
o'clock in the morning and usually sat until noon or later. But
these were only meteoric flashes. Historians have given them undue
prominence because such episodes make racy reading. By far the greater
portion of the council's meetings were devoted to the serious and
patient consideration of routine business. Matters of infinite variety
came to it for determination, including the regulation of industry and
trade, the currency, the fixing of prices, the interpretation of
the rules relating to land tenure, fire prevention, poor
relief, regulation of the liquor traffic, the encouragement of
agriculture--and these are only a few of the topics taken at random
from its calendar. In addition there were thousands of disputes
brought to it for settlement either directly or on appeal from the
lower courts. The minutes of its deliberations during the ninety-seven
years from September 18, 1663, to April 8, 1760, fill no fewer than
fifty-six ponderous manuscript volumes.
Though, in the edict establishing the Sovereign Council, no mention
was made of an intendant, the decision to send such an official to New
France came very shortly thereafter. In 1665 Jean Talon arrived
at Quebec bearing a royal commission which gave him wide powers,
infringing to some extent on the authority vested in the Sovereign
Council two years previously. The phraseology was similar to that used
in the commissions of the provincial intendants in France, and so
broad was the wording, indeed, that one might well ask what other
powers could be left for exercise by any one else. No wonder that the
eighteenth-century apostle of frenzied finance, John Law, should have
laconically described France as a land "ruled by a king and his thirty
intendants, upon whose will alone its welfare and its wants depend."
Along with his commission Talon brought to the colony a letter of
instructions from the minister which, gave more detailed directions as
to what things he was to have in view and what he was to avoid.
In France the office of intendant had long been in existence. Its
creation in the first instance has commonly been attributed to
Richelieu, but it really antedated the coming of the great cardinal.
The intendancy was not a spontaneous creation, but a very old and,
in its origin, a humble post which grew in importance with the
centralization of power in the King's hands, and which kept step in
its development with the gradual extinction of local self-government
in the royal domains. The provincial intendant in pre-revolutionary
France was master of administration, finance, and justice within his
own jurisdiction; he was bound by no rigid statutes; he owed obedience
to no local authorities; he was appointed by the King and was
responsible to his sovereign alone.
From first to last there were a dozen intendants of New France. Talon,
whose ambition and energy did much to set the colony in the saddle,
was the first. François Bigot, the arch-plunderer of his monarch's
funds, who did so much to bring the land to its downfall, was the
last. Between them came a line of sensible, earnest, hard-working
officials who served their King far better than they served
themselves, who gave the best years of their lives to the task of
making New France a bright jewel in the Bourbon crown. The colonial
intendant was the royal man-of-all-work. The King spoke and the
intendant forthwith transformed his words into action. As the King's
great interest in New France, coupled with his scant knowledge of
its conditions, moved him to speak often, and usually in broad
generalities, the intendant's activity was prodigious and his
discretion wide. Ordinances and decrees flew from his pen like sparks
from a blacksmith's forge. The duty devolved upon him as the overseas
apostle of Gallic paternalism to "order everything as seemed just and
proper," even when this brought his hand into the very homes of the
people, into their daily work or worship or amusements. Nothing that
needed setting aright was too inconsequential to have an ordinance
devoted to it. As general regulator of work and play, of manners and
morals, of things present and things to come, the intendant was the
busiest man in the colony.
In addition to the governor, the council, and the intendant, there
were many other officials on the civil list. Both the governor and the
intendant had their deputies at Montreal and at Three Rivers. There
were judges and bailiffs and seneschals and local officers by the
score, not to speak of those who held sinecures or received royal
pensions. There were garrisons to be maintained at all the frontier
posts and church officials to be supported by large sums. No marvel it
was that New France could never pay its own way. Every year there was
a deficit which, the King had to liquidate by payments from the royal
exchequer.
The administration of the colony, moreover, fell far short of even
reasonable efficiency. There were far too many officials for the
relatively small amount of work to be done, and their respective
fields of authority were inadequately defined. Too often the work of
these officials lacked even the semblance of harmony, nor did the
royal authorities always view this deficiency with regret. A fair
amount of working at cross-purposes, provided it did not bring affairs
to a complete standstill, was regarded as a necessary system of checks
and balances in a colony which lay three thousand miles away. It
prevented any chance of a general conspiracy against the home
authorities or any wholesale wrong-doing through collusion. It served
to make every official a ready tale-bearer in all matters concerning
the motives and acts of his colleagues, so that the King might with,
reasonable certainty count upon hearing all the sides to every story.
That, in fact, was wholly in consonance with Latin traditions of
government, and it was characteristically the French way of doing
things in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Louis XIV took a great personal interest in New France even to the
neglect at times of things which his courtiers deemed to be far
more important. The governor and the intendant plied him with their
requests, with their grievances, and too often with their prosy tales
of petty squabbling. With every ship they sent to Versailles their
_mémoires_, often of intolerable length; and the patient monarch read
them all. Marginal notes, made with his own hand, are still upon many
of them, and the student who plods his way through the musty bundles
of official correspondence in the _Archives Nationales_ will find in
these marginal comments enough to convince him that, whatever the
failings of Louis XIV may have been, indolence was not of them. Then
with the next ships the King sent back his budget of orders, counsel,
reprimand, and praise. If the colony failed to thrive, it was not
because the royal interest in it proved insincere or deficient.
The progress of New France, as reported in these dispatches from
Quebec, with their figures of slow growth in population, of poor
crops, and of failing trade, of Indian troubles and dangers from the
English, of privations at times and of deficits always, must often
have dampened the royal hopes. The requests for subsidies from
the royal purse were especially relentless. Every second dispatch
contained pleas for money or for things which were bound to cost money
if the King provided them: money to enable some one to clear his
lands, or to start an industry, or to take a trip of exploration to
the wilds; money to provide more priests, to build churches, or to
repair fortifications; money to pension officials--the call for money
was incessant year after year. In the face of these multifarious
demands upon his exchequer, Louis XIV was amazingly generous, but the
more he gave, the more the colony asked from him. Until the end of his
days, he never failed in response if the object seemed worthy of
his support. It was not until the Grand Monarch was gathered to his
fathers that the officials of New France began to ply their requests
in vain.
So much for the frame of government in the colony during the age of
Louis XIV. Now as to the happenings during the decade following 1663.
The new administration made a promising start under the headship of De
Mézy, a fellow townsman and friend of Bishop Laval, who arrived in the
autumn of 1663 to take up his duties as governor. In a few days he and
the bishop had amicably chosen the five residents of the colony who
were to serve as councilors, and the council began its sessions. But
troubles soon loomed into view, brought on in part by Laval's desire
to settle up some old scores now that he had the power as a member
of the Sovereign Council and was the dominating influence in its
deliberations. Under the bishop's inspiration the Council ordered the
seizure of some papers belonging to Péronne Dumesnil, a former agent
of the now defunct Company of One Hundred Associates. Dumesnil
retorted by filing a _dossier_ of charges against some of the
councilors; and the colonists at once ranged themselves into two
opposing factions--those who believed the charges and those who did
not. The bishop had become the stormy petrel of colonial politics, and
nature had in truth well fitted him for just such a rôle.
Soon, moreover, the relations between Mézy and Laval themselves became
less cordial. For a year the governor had proved ready to give way
graciously on every point; but there was a limit to his amenability,
and now his proud spirit began to chafe under the dictation of his
ecclesiastical colleague. At length he ventured to show a mind of his
own; and then the breach between him and Laval widened quickly.
Three of the councillors having joined the bishop against him, Mézy
undertook a _coup d'état_, dismissed these councilors from their
posts, and called a mass-meeting of the people to choose their
successors. On the governor's part this was a serious tactical error.
He could hardly expect that a monarch who was doing his best to crush
out the last vestige of representative government in France would
welcome its establishment and encouragement by one of his own
officials in the New World. But Mézy did not live to obey the recall
which speedily came from the King as the outcome of this indiscretion.
In the spring of 1665 he was taken ill and died at Quebec. "He went
to rest among the paupers," says Parkman, "and the priests, serenely
triumphant, sang requiems over his grave."
But discord within its borders was not the colony's only trouble
during these years. The scourge of the Iroquois was again upon the
land. During the years 1663 and 1664 bands of Mohawks and Oneidas
raided the regions of the Richelieu and penetrated to the settlement
at Three Rivers. These _petites guerres_ were making things
intolerable for the colonists, and the King was urged to send out a
force of troops large enough to crush the bothersome savages once for
all. This plea met with a ready response, and in June, 1665, Prouville
de Tracy with two hundred officers and men of the Regiment de
Carignan-Salières disembarked at Quebec. The remaining companies of
the regiment, making a force almost a thousand strong, arrived a
little later. The people were now sure that deliverance was at hand,
and the whole colony was in a frenzy of joy.
Following the arrival of the troops came Courcelle, the new governor,
and Jean Talon, who was to take the post of intendant. These were gala
days in New France; the whole colony had caught the spirit of the new
imperialism. The banners and the trumpets, the scarlet cloaks and
the perukes, the glittering profusion of gold lace and feathers, the
clanking of swords and muskets, transformed Quebec in a season from a
wilderness village to a Versailles in miniature. But there was little
time for dress parades and affairs of ceremony. Tracy had come to give
the Iroquois their _coup de grâce_, and the work must be done quickly.
The King could not afford to have a thousand soldiers of the grand
army eating their heads off through the long months of a Canadian
winter.
The work of getting the expedition ready, therefore, was pushed
rapidly ahead. Snowshoes were provided for the regiment, provisions
and supplies were gathered, and in January, 1666, the expedition
started up the frozen Richelieu, traversed Lake Champlain, and moved
across to the headwaters of the Hudson. It was a spectacle new to
the northern wilderness of America, this glittering and picturesque
cavalcade of regulars flanked by troops of militiamen and bands of
fur-clothed Indians moving on its errand of destruction along the
frozen rivers. But the French regular troops were not habituated
to long marches on snowshoes in the dead of winter; and they made
progress so slowly that the Dutch settlers of the region had time to
warn the Mohawks of the approach of the expedition. This upset all
French plans, since the leaders had hoped to fall upon the Mohawk
villages and to destroy them before the tribesmen could either make
preparations for defense or withdraw southward. Foiled in this plan,
and afraid that an early thaw might make their route of return
impossible, the French gave up their project and started home again.
They had not managed to reach, much less to destroy, the villages of
their enemies.
But the undertaking was not an absolute failure. The Mohawks were
astute enough to see that only the inexperience of the French had
stood between them and destruction. Here was an enemy which had proved
able to come through the dead of winter right into the regions which
had hitherto been regarded as inaccessible from the north. The French
might be depended to come again and, by reason of greater experience,
to make a better job of their coming. The Iroquois reasoning was quite
correct, as the sequel soon disclosed. In September of the same year
the French had once again equipped their expedition, more effectively
this time. Traveling overland along nearly the same route, it reached
the country of the Mohawks without a mishap. The Indians saved
themselves by a rapid flight to the forests, but their palisaded
strongholds were demolished, their houses set afire, their _cachés_ of
corn dug out and destroyed. The Mohawks were left to face the oncoming
winter with nothing but the woods to shelter them. Having finished
their task of punishment, Tracy and his regiment made their way
leisurely back to Quebec.
The Mohawks were now quite ready to make terms, and in 1667 they
sent a delegation to Quebec to proffer peace. Two raids into their
territories in successive years had taught them that they could not
safely leave their homes to make war against the tribes of the west so
long as the French were their enemies. And the desire to dominate the
region of the lakes was a first principle of Iroquois policy at this
time. An armistice was accordingly concluded, which lasted without
serious interruption for more than a decade. One of the provisions
of the peace was that Jesuit missions should be established in the
Iroquois territory, this being the usual way in which the French
assured themselves of diplomatic intercourse with the tribes.
With its trade routes once more securely open, New France now began a
period of marked prosperity. Tracy and his staff went back to France,
but most of his soldiers remained and became settlers. Wives for these
soldiers were sent out under royal auspices, and liberal grants of
money were provided to get the new households established. Since
1664, the trade of the colony had been once more in the hands of
a commercial organization, the Company of the West Indies, whose
financial success was, for the time being, assured by the revival of
the fur traffic. Industries were beginning to spring into being, the
population was increasing rapidly, and the King was showing a lively
interest in all the colony's affairs. It was therefore a prosperous
and promising colony to which Governor Frontenac came in 1672.