Chapter VII: A French Canadian Village (2)

Municipal interests represent of course only a part of the village's political thought. In provincial politics, federal politics, there is often in Quebec an interest keener even than in other parts of Canada. It would be too much to say that the habitant has a wide outlook on public questions; but the village notary and the village doctor are likely to have political ambitions and rivalry becomes acute; often indeed the curse of the village is the professional politician. At times in Quebec politics have been closely associated with religion and always the bishops are persons to be reckoned with. Their attitude has ever been that, if the policy of one or the other party seems to be inimical to the Church, they have the right to direct Catholic electors to vote against such a party. From the point of view of British supremacy in French Canada it would be a mistake to say that the bishops in a political rôle have always been mischievous. After the conquest they soon became the most staunch supporters of the authority of George III and through the Church the British conqueror was able to reach the people. When the American Revolution began, the bishops were strenuous for British connection and from the pulpits came solemn warnings against the Americans. Again in Britain's war on Revolutionary France the Canadian bishops were with her, heart and soul. They ordered _Te Deums_ when Nelson destroyed the French fleet at the battle of the Nile, and over Trafalgar there were great rejoicings. After Waterloo we find in French Canada perhaps the most curious of all the thanksgivings; at Malbaie, as elsewhere, a _Te Deum_ was sung and the people were told in glowing terms of the victory of the "immortal Wellington" which had covered "our army" with glory and ended a cruel war. Later, in the days of Papineau, the Church opposed rebellion; she has since opposed annexation to the United States. She has also helped to preserve order. If a crime was to be detected, the curé read from the pulpit a demand that any one, who could give information to further this end, should do so. Solemn excommunication was pronounced against offenders; to make the warning impressive the priest would drop to the ground a lighted candle and put it out with his foot; so would God extinguish the offenders thus denounced, and those who abetted their crimes.

Since the Church has aided the state, not unnaturally she expected some special favours in return. She got them in the days of the early British governors of Canada. Sir Guy Carleton, afterwards Lord Dorchester, secured for the Church the legal power to levy the tithe on Catholics and practically all the other privileges she had enjoyed under the old régime. The bishops tended to become more and more active in politics and this reached a climax in 1896. With great heat the bishops threw themselves into the attack on the Liberal party, because it would not support the Church's demands for her own separate schools in Manitoba, supported by taxes levied on Roman Catholics by the state. Some of the bishops went too far in denunciation; an appeal against their action was carried by Catholics to the Pope and the offenders were rebuked. The incident showed that in politics the habitant knows his own mind, for he gave an overwhelming support to the party on which the bishops were warring. Since then many a habitant draws a sharp distinction between the spiritual and the political claims of the bishops. Their full spiritual authority he does not doubt; in politics he thinks his own opinion as good as theirs.

If in spiritual matters the Church led it was intended that in temporal affairs too the habitants should always have guidance. An old world flavour seems to pervade the relations between seigneur and vassal in a French Canadian parish. The seigneur was himself the vassal of the crown, bound to do humble homage at the capital when he received his grant. We have a detailed account of the ceremony as performed, perhaps for the first time under British rule. On December 23rd, 1760, in the morning one Jacques Noël, a seigneur, accompanied by royal notaries, proceeded to the government house in Quebec. He knocked at the principal entrance and, when a servant appeared, Noël asked if His Excellency James Murray, the Governor, was at home. The servant replied that His Excellency was within and that he would give him notice. On being admitted to the presence of the Governor, Noël with head uncovered, and, to symbolize his humble obedience, wearing neither sword nor spur, fell on his knees before him and declared that he performed faith and homage for the seigniory to which, on his father's death, he had become the heir. He then took an oath on the gospels to be faithful to the king and to be no party to anything against his interests; to hold his own vassals to the same obedience; and to perform all other duties required by the terms of his holding.

The Crown required very little of the seigneur and so, in truth, did the seigneur of his tenants. Their annual payment of _cens et rentes_ rarely amounted to more than a very few dollars. When it fell due in the autumn they were given abundant notice. Still in the Canadian parishes, when the Sunday morning mass is over, the crier stands on a raised platform near the church door, the people gather round, and the announcement is made of tithes and taxes due, of articles lost or found, of anything indeed of general interest to the community. It was in this way that as St. Martin's day, November 11th, approached the people were reminded of the falling due of the _cens et rentes_. The meaning of the two terms is somewhat obscure. The _cens_ was a trifling payment by the _censitaire_ in recognition of the seigneur's position and rights as landowner; while the _rentes_ represented a real rental based in some degree on the supposed value of the land. But the rate was usually conventional and very small. In early Canada the river was the highway and upon it therefore every settler desired to have a frontage. There was, also, greater safety from Indian attacks in having the houses close together at the front of the farms. So these became long narrow strips, with the houses built so close together that the country side often seems like a continuous village. The habitant paid usually in _cens et rentes_ twenty sols (about twenty cents) for each arpent (192 feet) of frontage; instead of cash usually he might pay in kind--a live capon or a small measure (demi-minot) of grain for each arpent. He paid also about one cent of rent for each superficial acre. Thus for a farm of 100 acres, with two arpents of frontage, a habitant might pay $1.00 in cash and two capons. If each of 400 such tenants paid for their frontage in capons, 800 of these fowls would he brought to the seigneur's barn-yard each autumn!

Though payment was due on November 11th, the habitants usually waited for the first winter days when the sleighing had become good. In many of the sleighs, hastening with the merry sound of bells over the wintry roads to the manor house, there would be one or two captive capons or a bag or two of grain. M. de Gaspé has described how on such an occasion the seigneur, or some member of his family for him, would be found by the tenant "seated majestically in a large arm chair, near a table covered with green baize cloth." Here he received the payments, or in many cases only excuses for non-payment. The scene outside was often animated, for the fowls brought in payment of the rent, with legs tied but throats free, would not bear their captivity in silence. Rent day was a festal occasion, but the great day in the year at the manor house was New Year's Day. Then the people came to offer their respects to the seigneur and Nairne speaks of the prodigious consumption of whiskey and cakes at such a time. The seigneur was usually god-father to the first-born of the children of his tenants. It is a pretty custom among French Canadians for the children to go on New Year's Day, which is a great festival, to the chamber of their parents in the early morning and kneel before the bed for their benediction. To the seigneur as to a parent came on this day his god-children and we have it from M. de Gaspé, an eye witness, that on one occasion he saw no less than one hundred of these come to call upon the seigneur at the manor house! In the old days the people came also on the first day of May to plant the May-pole before his door and to dance round it.

Some of the seigneurs were as poor as their own _censitaires_ and, like them, toiled with their hands. But usually there was a social gulf between the cottage and the manor house. Even the Church marked this. The seigneur had the right to a special pew; he was censed first; he received the wafer first at the communion; he took precedence in processions, and was specially recommended from the pulpit to the prayers of the congregation. Caldwell, who was seigneur of Lauzon opposite Quebec, used to drive through his great seigniory in state, half reclining on the cushions of his carriage and with a numerous following. If on a long drive he stopped at a farm house, even for the light refreshment of a drink of milk, he never paid the habitant with anything less than a gold coin. I once asked a habitant, who remembered the old days, whether the seigneur really was such a very great man in the village. He replied, with something like awe in his voice, "_Monsieur, il était le roi, l'empereur, du village_."

The ministrations of the manor house were often patriarchical and beneficent; the seigneur's wife was like the squire's wife in an English village. In time this relation aroused resentment. Some villager's son with a taste for business or letters made his way in the world, got into touch with more advanced thought, and when he came back to the village was not so willing as formerly to touch his hat to the seigneur and accept an inferior social status as a matter of course. M. de Gaspé tells how he often accompanied Madame Taché, in her own right co-seigneuress of Kamouraska, opposite Malbaie, in her visits to the people on the seigniory. She took alms to the poor, and wine, cordials, delicacies to the sick and convalescent. "She reigned as sovereign in the seigniory," he says, "by the very tender ties of love and of gratitude." When she left the village church after mass on Sunday the habitants, most of whom drove to church in their own vehicles, would wait respectfully for her to start and then follow her in a long procession, none of them venturing to pass her on the road. At the point where she turned from the high-way up the avenue leading to the manor house, each habitant, as he passed, would raise his hat, although only her back was in view disappearing in the direction of the house.

But early in the 19th century this spirit was changing:

One day I was myself witness, says M. de Gaspé, of a violation of
this universal deference. It was St. Louis's day, the festival of
the parish of Kamouraska. As usual Madame Taché, at the close of
mass, was leading the long escort of her _censitaires_, when a
young man, excited by the frequent libations of which in the
country many are accustomed to partake during the parish fêtes,--a
young man, I say, breaking from the procession passed the carriage
of the seigneuress as fast as his horse would go. Madame Taché
stopped her carriage and turning round towards those who followed
her cried in a loud voice:

"What insolent person is this who has passed before me?"

An old man went up to her, hat in hand, and said with tears in his
voice:

"Madame, it is my son who unfortunately is tipsy, but be sure that
I shall bring him to make his apologies and meanwhile I beg you to
accept mine for his boorishness."

I ought to add that the whole parish spoke with indignation of the
conduct of the young man. The delinquent had committed a double
offence. He had been rude to their benefactress, and besides,
violating a French Canadian custom, he had passed a carriage
without asking permission.[33]

This must have been before 1813 for in that year this good Madame Taché died: even so early was youth restive under the old traditions of deference and subordination. Already some even of the seigneurs were saying that the system retarded settlement. It would have suited the seigneurs to have their holdings converted into freehold, for then they could have held the unsettled land as their own property instead of being under obligation to grant it for a nominal rental to _censitaires_. But to make this conversion would have been too kind to the seigneurs; so the matter dragged on for a long time.

The grievances of the habitant against the seigneurs were numerous, some of them real, some fanciful. It seemed anomalous that, in a British colony in the nineteenth century, there should be men holding great tracts of land with rights over their tenants, as some authors have seriously claimed, extending from the power of trying them for petty offences to that of inflicting the death penalty. This last right was, in any case, only nominal and was never exercised by any seigneur in Canada; but even the claim that it existed shows how high were the authority and privilege of the seigneur. A right like the _corvée_ had a sinister meaning. One of the greatest hardships of the old régime, in France it meant that, on demand, the peasant must drop his own work to join in making highways, in carrying from one place to another the effects of a regiment, and other unwelcome tasks, all without pay. In Canada it was milder. The seigneur levied a _corvée_ of so many days' labour, which he employed on the useful task of improving the highway. Some seigneurs required that at the times they chose, the habitants should work for them a certain number of days, usually six, in each year. They could even make the habitants work without pay at building a manor house; a few of the massive stone mansions still fairly numerous in the Province of Quebec were constructed by such labour. Not unnaturally the habitant came to feel it odious and humiliating to be obliged thus to give his labour at another's order.

The seigneuries too were often broken up. In Canada there is no law of primogeniture and, at a seigneur's death, the land went to daughters as well as to sons. Few of the old seigniorial families remained on their original estates. In time those who held the property came to think that a rental of about a cent an acre was not enough. In the days of French rule they could not have increased it; but the old custom, they claimed, did not apply under British sovereignty. So these charges were often increased; in time instead of a penny the habitant had to pay three-pence, six-pence, and even eight-pence, an acre; the seigneurs, as a judge put it, showed an excellent knowledge of arithmetical progression. Thus the _cens et rentes_ began to bring in a real income. So did the _lods et ventes_, the tax of one-twelfth of the price of whatever land the habitant sold. In early days land was rarely sold. But when towns and villages had grown up on seigniorial estates, a good deal of buying and selling took place and there stood always the seigneur demanding in every transaction his share of the selling price. If the land was sold two or three times in a year, as might well happen, each time the seigneur got his share of one-twelfth. If the occupier had built on the land a house at his own cost, none the less did the seigneur, who had done nothing, get his large percentage on the selling value of these improvements. This was a real grievance. To avoid paying the seigneur's claim a price, lower than that really paid, was sometimes named in the deed, and this led to perjury. To protect themselves the seigneur used his _droit de retrait_ the right for forty days of himself taking the property at the price named. This involved vexation and delay and increased discontent. Moreover the seigneur's right to _lods et ventes_ stood in the way of a ready transfer of property between members of the same family.

There were other causes of discontent. The seigneur had the _droit de banalité_, the banal rights, under which in France the habitant must use the seigneur's wine-press, his oven and his mill. In Canada no wine was made, so the seigneur's winepress did not exist. Some attempts were made to force the habitant to bake his bread in the seigneur's oven but what would do in a compact French village, where fuel was scarce, became absurd in Canada; the picture is ludicrous of a habitant carrying a dozen miles, over rough roads, to the seigneur's oven, unbaked dough which might be hard frozen _en route_. Moreover new inventions made ovens common and cheap so that the habitant could afford to have his own. The seigneur's oven thus caused no grievance. Not so however the seigneur's mill. In the early days when the seigneur had the sole right to build a mill this became for him, in truth, a duty sometimes burdensome; for, whether it would pay or not, the government forced him to build a mill or else abandon the right. But in time the mill proved profitable and to it the peasant must bring his wheat. There might be a good mill near his house, while the seigneur's mill might be a dozen miles away and even then might give poor service; yet to the seigneur's mill he must go. If it was a wind-mill, nature, by denying wind, might cause a long delay before the flour should be ready. As time went on, some seigneurs claimed or reserved a monopoly in regard to all mills; grist mills, saw mills, carding mills, factories of every kind. Canada in time exported flour, but the seigneur's rights stood in the way of the free grinding of the wheat for this trade. The habitant might have on his land an excellent mill site with water power convenient, but he could not use it without the seigneur's consent. More than this the seigneur often reserved the right to take such a site to the extent of six arpents for his own use without any compensation to the habitant.

In many cases the seigneur might freely cut timber on the habitant's land to erect buildings for public use,--church, presbytery, mill, and even a manor house. The rights to base metals on the property he also retained. The eleventh fish caught in the rivers was his. He might change the course of streams or rivers for manufacturing purposes; he alone could establish a ferry; his will determined where roads should be opened. Some seigneurs were even able to force villages and towns to pay a bonus for the right to carry on the ordinary business of buying and selling. So it turned out that if the habitant's crop failed he had little chance to do anything else without the seigneur's consent; he is, says the report of a Commission of Enquiry in 1843, "kept in a perpetual state of feebleness and dependence. He can never escape from the tie that forever binds to the soil him and his progeny; a cultivator he is born, a mere cultivator he is doomed to die." No doubt this plaint is pitched in a rather high key. But in time the burden of grievances was generally felt and then the seigniorial system was doomed.

In the days of the last John Nairne political agitation became an old story at Malbaie. We get echoes of meetings held in the village to support the cause of the idol of habitant radicalism, Louis Joseph Papineau; in 1836 ninety-two resolutions drawn up by him and attacking the whole system of government in Canada appear to have met with clamorous approval from the assembled villagers. Papineau was himself a seigneur and did not assail the system. But after his unsuccessful rebellion in 1837-38 the attack on the seigneurs intensified. We know little of what happened at Malbaie but the end came suddenly. In 1854, after an election fought largely on this issue, the Parliament of Canada swept away the seigniorial system. The habitants then became tenants paying as rent the old _cens et rentes_. They could not be disturbed as long as this trifling rent was paid. Moreover at any time they might become simple freeholders by paying to the seigneur a sum of money representing their annual rent capitalized on a six per cent, basis. The term seigneur is still used but is now a mere honorary title. No longer does his position give him the authority of a magistrate; no longer must the habitants grind their corn at his mill; no longer can he claim _lods et ventes_ when land is sold. For the loss of these rights he was paid compensation out of the public treasury.[34]

With the abolition of the seigniorial system ends too the story of the Nairne family. In 1861, exactly one hundred years after Colonel Nairne first visited Malbaie, died his grandson and the last of his descendants, John McNicol Nairne, son of Colonel Nairne's eldest daughter Magdalen. This last Nairne left the property absolutely to his widow, tied only by the condition that it was to go to her male issue if she had such, even by a second marriage. In 1884, she too died childless, and bequeathed the property to an old friend, both of herself and of her husband, Mr. W.E. Duggan. Had Mr. Duggan not survived Mrs. Nairne the property was to go to St. Matthew's Church, Quebec. Mr. Duggan occupied it, until his death in 1898, when it passed by will to his half-brother, Mr. E.J. Duggan, the present seigneur.[35]

It is a sad story this of the extinction of a family. Both Thomas Nairne and his father were buried at first in the Protestant cemetery at Quebec. But not there permanently were they to lie, and many years ago they found a resting-place in a new tomb in Mount Hermon Cemetery. On a lovely autumn day in 1907 I made my way in Quebec to the spot where the Nairnes are interred. In the fresh cool air it was a pleasure to walk briskly the three miles of the St. Louis road to the cemetery. One crossed the battle field of the Plains of Abraham where, within a few months, a century and a half ago, Britain and France grappled in deadly strife. The elder Nairne saw that field with its harvest of dead on September 13th, 1759, and, in the following April, he saw its snow stained with the blood of brave men who fell in Murray's battle with Lévis. In May, 1776, he marched across it in victorious pursuit of the fleeing American army. At Mount Hermon I readily found the Nairne tomb. It lies on the slope of the hill towards the river. Through the noble trees gleamed the mighty tide of the St. Lawrence. A great pine tree stands near the block of granite that marks the Nairne graves and a gentle breeze through its countless needles caused that mysterious sighing which is perhaps nature's softest and saddest note. One's thoughts went back to the brave old Colonel who wrought so well and had such high hopes for his posterity to the soldier son, remembered here, who died in far distant India; and to the other soldier son who fell in Canada upon the field of battle. He was the last male heir of his line. The name and the family are now well-nigh forgotten. The inscriptions on the tomb, reared by a friend, connected with the Nairnes by ties of friendship only, not of blood, are themselves the memorial of the rise and extinction of a Canadian family.[36]

[Footnote 25: He must have been a Roman Catholic for he was buried in the churchyard at Murray Bay.]

[Footnote 26: We have seen (_ante_ p. 49) how at Malbaie Colonel Nairne expected that a Protestant missionary would soon make the community Protestant.]

[Footnote 27: Professor Barrett Wendell, France of To-day, New York, 1907.]

[Footnote 28: Roy, Histoire de la Seigneurie de Lauzon, IV: 169, 170.]

[Footnote 29: The Abbé H.R. Casgrain: _Une Paroisse Canadienne au XVII. Siècle_. _Oeuvres_, Vol. I, pp. 483 _sqq._]

[Footnote 30: Roy, La Seigneurie de Lauzon, IV: 247.]

[Footnote 31: M. Léon Gérin in "L'Habitant de Saint-Justin", p. 202.]

[Footnote 32: Roy, La Seigneurie de Lauzon IV: 245.]

[Footnote 33: De Gaspé, _Mémoires_, p. 533, 4.]

[Footnote 34: Mr. Nairne claimed as compensation for his _lods et ventes_ £4,560, 9s. 6d., (Halifax currency) and for the banal rights £3,400. He probably received considerably less. More than 400 dwellers in the seigniory still pay the annual _cens et rentes_.]

[Footnote 35: Malcolm Fraser's seigniory, Mount Murray, remained somewhat longer in the family of its original owner. On Fraser's death in 1815 his eldest son William, who had become a medical practitioner and a Roman Catholic, succeeded. He died without issue in 1830 and his brother, John Malcolm Fraser, then fell heir to the seigniory. When he died in 1860 the property passed by will to his two daughters, both married to British officers. The elder, Mrs. Reeve, succeeded to the manor house. The younger, Mrs. Higham, soon sold her share to the Cimon family who became prominent in the district and one of whose members sat in Parliament at Ottawa on the Conservative side. Mrs. Reeve died in 1879 leaving the use of the property to her husband, Colonel Reeve, for his life. When he died in 1888, his son Mr. John Fraser Reeve, Malcolm Fraser's great-grandson, became seigneur. In 1902 he sold the property to the present seigneur, Mr. George T. Bonner, of New York, a Canadian by birth. Though there are numerous living descendants of Malcolm Fraser, Murray Bay knows them no more.]

[Footnote 36: Sacred to the memory of Lieutenant Colonel John Nairne, First Seigneur of Murray Bay. This Gallant Officer during 38 years distinguished himself as an able and brave Soldier. For simplicity of manners as a man, for Intrepidity and humanity as a Soldier, and for the virtues of a Gentleman, his memory will long be respected and cherished. Born in Scotland, March 1, 1731. Died at Quebec, July 14, 1802.

Lieutenant Colonel Nairne first entered the Dutch Service where he belonged to that distinguished Corps, the Scotch Brigade. He afterwards entered the British Service where under Wolfe he was present at the taking of Louisbourg and Quebec. He also served under Murray and Carleton and distinguished himself in a most gallant manner when Quebec was attacked by the Americans in the years 1775 and 1776.

And of his eldest son, Lieutenant John Nairne of the 19th Regiment of Foot, who fell a victim to the climate of India when returning with the victorious troops from the capture of Seringapatam in the 21st year of his age; also of his youngest son, Captain Thomas Nairne, of the 49th Regiment of Foot who bravely fell at the head of his Company in the Battle at Chrysler's Farm in Upper Canada November 11, 1813, aged 26 years.

Also of John Leslie Nairne, great grandson of Colonel Nairne, born July 23, 1842, died March 18, 1845; and of John Nairne, Esq., Grandson of Colonel Nairne, born at Murray Bay, March 22nd, 1808, died at Quebec June 8, 1861; and of his Widow, Maria Katherine Leslie, died at Quebec, August 25, 1884, deeply regretted by her friends and by the poor of whom she was the constant benefactress.

This monument is erected in affectionate remembrance of much kindness by one who was privileged to enjoy their friendship during the best part of his life.]