THE RISE OF PAPINEAU
In the year 1812 a young man took his seat in the House of Assembly for
Lower Canada who was destined to play a conspicuous part in the history
of the province during the next quarter of a century. His name was
Louis Joseph Papineau. He was at that time only twenty-six years of
age, but already his tall, well-built form, his fine features and
commanding presence, marked him out as a born leader of men. He
possessed an eloquence which, commonplace as it now appears on the
printed page, apparently exerted a profound influence upon his
contemporaries. 'Never within the memory of teacher or student,' wrote
his college friend Aubert de Gaspe, 'had a voice so eloquent filled the
halls of the seminary of Quebec.' In the Assembly his rise to
prominence was meteoric; only three years after his entrance he was
elected speaker on the resignation of the veteran {22} J. A. Panet, who
had held the office at different times since 1792. Papineau retained
the speakership, with but one brief period of intermission, until the
outbreak of rebellion twenty-two years later; and it was from the
speaker's chair that he guided throughout this period the counsels of
the _Patriote_ party.
[Illustration: Louis Joseph Papineau. After a lithograph by Maurin,
Paris.]
When Papineau entered public life the political situation in Lower
Canada was beginning to be complicated. The French-Canadian members of
the Assembly, having taken great pains to acquaint themselves with the
law and custom of the British constitution, had awakened to the fact
that they were not enjoying the position or the power which the members
of the House of Commons in England were enjoying. In the first place,
the measures which they passed were being continually thrown out by the
upper chamber, the Legislative Council, and they were powerless to
prevent it; and in the second place, they had no control of the
government, for the governor and his Executive Council were appointed
by and responsible to the Colonial Office alone. The members of the
two councils were in the main of English birth, and they constituted a
local oligarchy--known as the 'Bureaucrats' or the 'Chateau
Clique'--which {23} held the reins of government. They were as a rule
able to snap their fingers at the majority in the Assembly.
In England the remedy for a similar state of affairs had been found to
lie in the control of the purse exercised by the House of Commons. In
order to bring the Executive to its will, it was only necessary for
that House to threaten the withholding of supplies. In Lower Canada,
however, such a remedy was at first impossible, for the simple reason
that the House of Assembly did not vote all the supplies necessary for
carrying on the government. In other words, the expenditure far
exceeded the revenue; and the deficiency had to be met out of the
Imperial exchequer. Under these circumstances it was impossible for
the Lower Canada Assembly to attempt to exercise the full power of the
purse. In 1810, it is true, the Assembly had passed a resolution
avowing its ability and willingness to vote 'the necessary sums for
defraying the Civil Expenses of the Government of the Province.' But
Sir James Craig had declined on a technicality to forward the
resolution to the Houses of Parliament at Westminster, realizing fully
that if the offer were accepted, the Assembly would be able to exert
complete {24} power over the Executive. 'The new Trojan horse' was not
to gain admission to the walls through him.
Later, however, in 1818, during the administration of Sir John Coape
Sherbrooke, the offer of the Assembly was accepted by the Imperial
government. Sherbrooke was an apostle of conciliation. It was he who
gave the Catholic bishop of Quebec a seat in the Executive Council; and
he also recommended that the speaker of the House of Assembly should be
included in the Council--a recommendation which was a preliminary move
in the direction of responsible government. Through Sherbrooke's
instrumentality the British government now decided to allow the
Lower-Canadian legislature to vote the entire revenue of the province,
apart from the casual and territorial dues of the Crown and certain
duties levied by Act of the Imperial parliament. Sherbrooke's
intention was that the legislature should vote out of this revenue a
permanent civil list to be continued during the lifetime of the
sovereign. Unfortunately, however, the Assembly did not fall in with
this view. It insisted, instead, on treating the civil list as an
annual affair, and voting the salaries of the officials, from the
governor {25} downwards, for only one year. Since this would have made
every government officer completely dependent upon the pleasure of the
House of Assembly, the Legislative Council promptly threw out the
budget. Thus commenced a struggle which was destined to last for many
years. The Assembly refused to see that its action was really an
encroachment upon the sphere of the Executive; and the Executive
refused to place itself at the mercy of the Assembly. The result was
deadlock. During session after session the supplies were not voted.
The Executive, with its control of the royal revenue, was able by one
means or another to carry on the government; but the relations between
the 'Bureaucrats' and the _Patriotes_ became rapidly more bitter.
Papineau's attitude toward the government during this period was in
harmony with that of his compatriots. It was indeed one of his
characteristics, as the historian Christie has pointed out, that he
seemed always 'to move with the masses rather than to lead them.' In
1812 he fought side by side with the British. As late as 1820 he
publicly expressed his great admiration for the constitution of 1791
and the blessings of British rule. But in the struggles over the
budget he took up ground {26} strongly opposed to the government; and,
when the question became acute, he threw restraint to the winds, and
played the part of a dangerous agitator.
What seems to have first roused Papineau to anger was a proposal to
unite Upper and Lower Canada in 1822. Financial difficulties had
arisen between the two provinces; and advantage was taken of this fact
to introduce a Union Bill into the House of Commons at Westminster,
couched in terms very unfavourable to the French Canadians. There is
little doubt that the real objects of the bill was the extinction of
the Lower-Canadian Assembly and the subordination of the French to the
English element in the colony. At any rate, the French Canadians saw
in the bill a menace to their national existence. Two agents were
promptly appointed to go over to London to oppose it. One of them was
Papineau; the other was John Neilson, the capable Scottish editor of
the Quebec _Gazette_. The two men made a very favourable impression;
they enlisted on their side the leaders of the Whig party in the
Commons; and they succeeded in having the bill well and duly shelved.
Their mission resulted not only in the defeat of the bill; it also
showed {27} them clearly that a deep-laid plot had menaced the rights
and liberties of the French-Canadian people; and their anger was roused
against what Neilson described as 'the handful of _intrigants_' who had
planned that _coup d'etat_.
On returning to Canada Papineau gave vent to his discontent in an
extraordinary attack upon Lord Dalhousie, who had become governor of
Canada in 1819. Dalhousie was an English nobleman of the best type.
His tastes were liberal. He was instrumental in founding the Literary
and Historical Society of Quebec; and he showed his desire for pleasant
relations between the two races in Canada by the erection of the joint
monument to Wolfe and Montcalm in the city of Quebec, in the governor's
garden. His administration, however, had been marred by one or two
financial irregularities. Owing to the refusal of the Assembly to vote
a permanent civil list, Dalhousie had been forced to expend public
moneys without authority from the legislature; and his
receiver-general, Caldwell, had been guilty of defalcations to the
amount of L100,000. Papineau attacked Dalhousie as if he had been
personally responsible for these defalcations. The speech, we are told
by the chronicler Bibaud, recalled in its violence the {28} philippics
of Demosthenes and the orations against Catiline of Cicero.
The upshot of this attack was that all relations between Dalhousie and
Papineau were broken off. Apart altogether from the political
controversy, Dalhousie felt that he could have no intercourse with a
man who had publicly insulted him. Consequently, when Papineau was
elected to the speakership of the Assembly in 1827, Dalhousie refused
to recognize him as speaker; and when the Assembly refused to
reconsider his election, Dalhousie promptly dissolved it.
It would be tedious to describe in detail the political events of these
years; and it is enough to say that by 1827 affairs in the province had
come to such an impasse, partly owing to the financial quarrel, and
partly owing to the personal war between Papineau and Dalhousie, that
it was decided by the _Patriotes_ to send another deputation to England
to ask for the redress of grievances and for the removal of Dalhousie.
The members of the deputation were John Neilson and two French
Canadians, Augustin Cuvillier and Denis B. Viger. Papineau was an
interested party and did not go. The deputation proved no less
successful than {29} that which had crossed the Atlantic in 1822. The
delegates succeeded in obtaining Lord Dalhousie's recall, and they were
enabled to place their case before a special committee of the House of
Commons. The committee made a report very favourable to the _Patriote_
cause; recommended that 'the French-Canadians should not in any way be
disturbed in the exercise and enjoyment of their religion, their laws,
or their privileges'; and expressed the opinion that 'the true
interests of the provinces would be best promoted by placing the
collection and expenditure of all public revenues under the control of
the House of Assembly.' The report was not actually adopted by the
House of Commons, but it lent a very welcome support to the contentions
of Papineau and his friends.
At last, in 1830, the British government made a serious and well-meant
attempt to settle, once and for all, the financial difficulty. Lord
Goderich, who was at that time at the Colonial Office, instructed Lord
Aylmer, who had become governor of Canada in 1830, to resign to the
Assembly the control of the entire revenue of the province, with the
single exception of the casual and territorial revenue of the Crown, if
the Assembly would grant {30} in exchange a civil list of L19,000,
voted for the lifetime of the king. This offer was a compromise which
should have proved acceptable to both sides. But Papineau and his
friends determined not to yield an inch of ground; and in the session
of 1831 they succeeded in defeating the motion for the adoption of Lord
Goderich's proposal. That this was a mistake even the historian
Garneau, who cannot be accused of hostility toward the _Patriotes_, has
admitted.
Throughout this period Papineau's course was often unreasonable. He
complained that the French Canadians had no voice in the executive
government, and that all the government offices were given to the
English; yet when he was offered a seat in the Executive Council in
1822 he declined it; and when Dominique Mondelet, one of the members of
the Assembly, accepted a seat in the Executive Council in 1832, he was
hounded from the Assembly by Papineau and his friends as a traitor. As
Sir George Cartier pointed out many years later, Mondelet's inclusion
in the Executive Council was really a step in the direction of
responsible government. It is difficult, also, to approve Papineau's
attitude toward such governors as Dalhousie and {31} Aylmer, both of
whom were disposed to be friendly. Papineau's attitude threw them into
the arms of the 'Chateau Clique.' The truth is that Papineau was too
unbending, too _intransigeant_, to make a good political leader. As
was seen clearly in his attitude toward the financial proposals of Lord
Goderich in 1830, he possessed none of that spirit of compromise which
lies at the heart of English constitutional development.
On the other hand, it must be remembered that Papineau and his friends
received much provocation. The attitude of the governing class toward
them was overbearing and sometimes insolent. They were regarded as
members of an inferior race. And they would have been hardly human if
they had not bitterly resented the conspiracy against their liberties
embodied in the abortive Union Bill of 1822. There were real abuses to
be remedied. Grave financial irregularities had been detected in the
executive government; sinecurists, living in England, drew pay for
services which they did not perform; gross favouritism existed in
appointments to office under the Crown; and so many office-holders held
seats in the Legislative Council that the Council was actually under
the thumb of {32} the executive government. Yet when the Assembly
strove to remedy these grievances, its efforts were repeatedly blocked
by the Legislative Council; and even when appeal was made to the
Colonial Office, removal of the abuses was slow in coming. Last, but
not least, the Assembly felt that it did not possess an adequate
control over the expenditure of the moneys for the voting of which it
was primarily responsible.
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