THE RIGHTS OF THE DEFEATED
The British did not treat the French inhabitants of Canada as a
conquered people; not as other countries won by conquest have been
treated by their victorious invaders. The terms of the Capitulation of
Montreal in 1760 assured the Canadians of their property and civil
rights, and guaranteed to them 'the free exercise of their religion.'
The Quebec Act of 1774 granted them the whole of the French civil law,
to the almost complete exclusion of the English common law, and
virtually established in Canada the Church of the vanquished through
legal enforcement of the obligation resting upon Catholics to pay
tithes. And when it became necessary in 1791 to divide Canada into two
provinces, Upper Canada and Lower Canada, one predominantly English and
the other predominantly French, the two provinces were granted
precisely equal political rights. Out of this {8} arose an odd
situation. All French Canadians were Roman Catholics, and Roman
Catholics were at this time debarred from sitting in the House of
Commons at Westminster. Yet they were given the right of sitting as
members in the Canadian representative Assemblies created by the Act of
1791. The Catholics of Canada thus received privileges denied to their
co-religionists in Great Britain.
There can be no doubt that it was the conciliatory policy of the
British government which kept the clergy, the seigneurs, and the great
body of French Canadians loyal to the British crown during the war in
1775 and in 1812. It is certain, too, that these generous measures
strengthened the position of the French race in Canada, made Canadians
more jealous of their national identity, and led them to press for
still wider liberties. It is an axiom of human nature that the more
one gets, the more one wants. And so the concessions granted merely
whetted the Canadian appetite for more.
This disposition became immediately apparent with the calling of the
first parliament of Lower Canada in 1792. Before this there had been
no specific definition of the exact status of the French language in
{9} Canada, and the question arose as to its use in the Assembly as a
medium of debate. As the Quebec Act of 1774 had restored the French
laws, it was inferred that the use of the French language had been
authorized, since otherwise these laws would have no natural medium of
interpretation. That this was the inference to be drawn from the
constitution became evident, for the British government had made no
objection to the use of French in the law-courts. It should be borne
in mind that at this period the English in Canada were few in number,
and that all of them lived in the cities. The French members in the
Assembly, representing, as they did, nearly the whole population, did
not hesitate to press for the official recognition of their language on
a parity with English.
The question first came up in connection with the election of a
speaker. The French-Canadian members, being in a majority of
thirty-four to sixteen, proposed Jean Antoine Panet. This motion was
opposed by the English members, together with a few of the French
members, who nominated an Englishman. They pointed out that the
transactions between the speaker and the king's {10} representative in
the colony should be 'in the language of the empire to which we have
the happiness to belong.' 'I think it is but decent,' said Louis
Panet, brother of Jean Antoine, 'that the speaker on whom we fix our
choice, be one who can express himself in English when he addresses
himself to the representative of our sovereign.' Yet the majority of
the French members stuck to their motion and elected their speaker.
When he was sworn into office, he declared to the governor that 'he
could only express himself in the primitive language of his native
country.' Nevertheless, he understood English well enough to conduct
the business of the House. And it should not be forgotten that all the
sixteen English members, out of the fifty composing the Assembly, owed
their election to French-Canadian voters.
Almost immediately the question came up again in the debate on the use
of the French language in the publication of official documents. The
English members pointed out that English was the language of the
sovereign, and they contended that the exclusive official use of the
English language would more quickly assimilate the French
Canadians--would render them more loyal. To these {11} arguments the
French Canadians replied with ringing eloquence.
'Remember,' said Chartier de Lotbiniere, 'the year 1775. Those
Canadians, who spoke nothing but French, showed their attachment to
their sovereign in a manner not at all equivocal. They helped to
defend this province. This city, these walls, this chamber in which I
have the honour to speak, were saved partly through their zeal and
their courage. You saw them join with faithful subjects of His Majesty
and repulse attacks which people who spoke very good English made on
this city. It is not, you see, uniformity of language which makes
peoples more faithful or more united.'
'Is it not ridiculous,' exclaimed Pierre Bedard, whose name will appear
later in these pages, 'to wish to make a people's loyalty consist in
its tongue?'
The outcome of the debate, as might have been expected, was to place
the French language on a level with the English language in the records
and publications of the Assembly, and French became, to all intents and
purposes, the language of debate. The number of English-speaking
members steadily decreased. In the year 1800 Sir Robert Milnes {12}
wrote home that there were 'but one or two English members in the House
of Assembly who venture to speak in the language of the mother country,
from the certainty of not being understood by a great majority of the
House.'
It must not be imagined, however, that in these early debates there was
any of that rancour and animosity which later characterized the
proceedings of the Assembly of Lower Canada. 'The remains of the old
French politeness, and a laudable deference to their fellow subjects,
kept up decorum in the proceedings of the majority,' testified a
political annalist of that time. Even as late as 1807, it appears that
'party spirit had not yet extended its effects to destroy social
intercourse and good neighbourhood.' It was not until the regime of
Sir James Craig that racial bitterness really began.
{13}