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Casual visitors from the older countries of the world have been heard to say in parts of Quebec, as their train whirled through tiny villages nestling around the lofty spire of a church or passed through long stretches of country with small farmhouses and attenuated farms, that it was all rather uninteresting but as much as could be expected in a region so devoid of history and tradition! Yet, if the truth had been known to them—even though they came from a soil where statesmen, heroes, martyrs, sages, had left their imprint through two thousand years of history—much that was romantic, attractive, inspiring, might have been seen or felt. As a matter of fact, the existence of savage life, of wild animals, of wilderness conditions, of vast and lonely spaces of great forests and greater waterways, created in early Quebec elements of romance and interest which for centuries Continental Europe could not entirely grasp and which without individual experience must to the people of England’s “sceptered isle” have always seemed more or less incomprehensible. To the historic record of such regions, these conditions add forces of rugged strength and picturesque memory, of barbarous brutality and sacrificial fire, of military achievement and religious heroism, which many volumes and much description will not fully picture unless the reader has also the gift of imagination.

The first important element in the making of the French Canadian, who now holds the portals of a great Dominion, was his relation to and bitter life-grapple with the North American Indian. It is difficult in these prosaic days to portray some of the scenes, the basic events of early Canadian history, in this respect. Indeed, if the Indians were dealt with alone, the record would go to the very root of things human. Back of the white man’s fixed memories in this connection, beyond the pages of Fenimore Cooper on the one side and Parkman on the other, long before the days of blazing settlements and martyred priests or tortured pioneers, lie shrouded centuries in which the wilds of Quebec, in common with all the vast forests and stretches of the continent, saw the solitary form of the Indian, stalking game, hunting food or fighting his foe. Whether he drove a preceding and more civilized race out of this great region, or had himself lost ground in a savage struggle for subsistence, there is no adequate record to show. That another and greater civilization was to first conquer and then ruin the Indian, we do know.

When Cartier in 1535 and Champlain in 1608 first came into contact with different tribes of Indians, they unfortunately assumed a hostile attitude—the former in carrying away Donnacona on a voyage from which he never returned, the latter in espousing the cause of the Hurons against the Iroquois. They could not see into the future, they could not well estimate the nature of these savage forces of the wilderness, they could not comprehend a native character which all history has failed to satisfactorily decipher. Through the experience of French settlers and English pioneers alike, the Indian has since come down to us imbedded in the literature of a hostile and conquering race as the very embodiment of cruelty and savagery. Yet that mysterious figure was in many respects a noble one to which nature had given a vast and varied environment. Cold and hard in character, passionate and revengeful in temper, ignorant and superstitious in belief, keen and quick in thought, the Indian was never, in the days prior to his period of decadence under external influence, guilty of the effeminate and meaner vices which have destroyed peoples such as the Roman and the Moor.

Love of liberty in its wilder forms and contempt for all arbitrary rule or personal control he carried to an extreme greater than can be anywhere paralleled. Sleepless suspicion of others was a natural part of his surroundings of war and treachery. That he was ignorant of his opportunities and subservient to the passions of pride and cruelty were perhaps misfortunes more than they were faults. Compared with the greater knowledge, the gentler faith, the more cultured surroundings, the kindlier home-life of the white man, his chances were very slight and his sins not so lurid as their flaming background might imply. The curious federal system of the Iroquois, and the characters of Pontiac, Tecumseh and Thayendenagea indicate his individual capabilities under favorable circumstances. The Indian was, in brief, the product of nature, the outcome of wilderness conditions; the result of long and continuous struggle with the forces of extreme heat and cold and of contact with the wild, free vagaries of a wandering forest life.

The Iroquois, with whom Champlain first came face to face in the inauguration of a drama which had a continent for its stage and a century for its enactment, were at once the best and the worst of all the Indian nations. Their pride was intense and overmastering, their lust of conquest was individually as strong as that of Alexander or Napoleon, their savage passions and cruelties were vented in an indescribable degree upon their enemies. Yet in courage, constancy and concentrated energy it would be difficult to find their equal as a people; and where they inflicted pain they were equally ready to endure it. As Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas and afterwards the Tuscaroras, they stretched in what was practically a loose federation of nations across the wide lake region and into what was destined to become the State of New York and the Provinces of Ontario and Quebec. In their day of greatest power the Iroquois warriors never numbered more than four thousand men, though they became a thought of terror to all the tribes from the rolling waters of the St. Lawrence to the sunny slopes of Carolina and from the far West to the Atlantic shores. To the French colonists they became and were called a scourge of Satan—a source of untold suffering and sorrow.

Capes Eternity and Trinity, Saguenay

The effect of this Indian environment upon the character of the French Canadian was not altogether what might have been expected. It did not make the people permanently warlike in character, though it intensified the military atmosphere of pioneer Quebec, quickened the missionary spirit of the Church, enhanced the difficulties of local administration and of wars with the English and prevented, perhaps, a greater influx of the French peasantry into the colony. In the earlier stages of settlement there were practically no habitants or peasants in the country; there were soldiers or adventurous spirits of a wandering type. The fur-traders wanted workers and hunters and did not care for settlements of a permanent character; the early Governors required men who could fight and farm and naturally did not desire the added responsibility of guarding homes and families at a distance from the forts. Between 1608 and 1645 little more than a hundred actual settlers, or heads of families, arrived in the colony. When they did come in any large number the scattered settlements were always in some peril or in a situation where fear was natural, and it was not until the British Cession had disposed of the matter of external war for a time and had quieted the Iroquois, with whom the English had always been more or less friendly, that peace came to the habitant.

More important than this factor of Indian war in its final impress upon the French Canadian were the work and influence and personal qualities of the Jesuits. From the first these black-robed missionaries of a great Church dominated much of the life of the colony. They controlled the essential lightness of the French nature and life in the interest of more solemn themes; modified the extremes to which an irresponsible court life in an isolated community might have naturally led; encouraged the building of monasteries and convents and churches; promoted a study of the lives and characters of the Indians which no military or French administration would have taken seriously in hand; plunged themselves into the thick of a missionary effort which for heroism, self-sacrifice, and martyrdom has been unexcelled in the history of the world; shared in privations and dangers and journeys which enabled them to discover or explore the shores of Lake Erie, the upper reaches of the Mississippi, the stormy waters of the far-off Hudson’s Bay of a century later, that great wonder of nature, the Falls of Niagara.

Had Richelieu not been checkmated by British ships in his effort to make the Company of the Hundred Associates a dominant power in the colony, New France would have been placed almost entirely under the control of this Order of Jesus. Its missionaries, in fact, gathered at Quebec from all over the continent to welcome a large number of additional priests whom the victory of Admiral Kirke in 1629 prevented from reaching their destination. So far as Canada was concerned these missionary priests were the pioneers of religion, the pathfinders of territorial power. Over all the vast countries from the confines of Hudson’s Bay to the heart of the Mississippi Valley they carried with alternate failure and success the banner of the Cross. To them no self-sacrifice was too great, no suffering too painful, no hardship too severe, if but one savage child were baptized into the faith, or the passions of a solitary Indian modified by the influence of persuasion and the power of Christian hope. Many a gloomy forest of the middle of the seventeenth century echoed with the prayers of wandering priests and often blazed with the martyr-fires of their execution by the merciless Iroquois or vacillating Huron. Often, too, those lonely aisles of nature’s primeval church witnessed scenes of torture such as the pen must fail to adequately describe and even imagination to fully understand. Daniel, Brébeuf, Lallemant, Garnier, Garreux, Buteaux, Chabanel, thus wrote their names across the pages of early Canadian history in letters illumined by the light of a great sacrifice.

In the two French Canadian cities of the future stately buildings of stone grew up emblematic of the ambitious policy of this and other religious Orders; while early in the history of New France, women of sacrificial soul, such as Madame de la Peltrie, Marie de l’Incarnation, Mlle. Mance and Marguerite Bourgeoys, helped in founding institutions of religion, charity and education. Thus it was that the policy of Richelieu—the establishment of a powerful French and Catholic state upon the American continent—was commenced; as to how far it succeeded in a development along lines which the famous French statesman could never have imagined, the present situation is the best comment. Of the influence of this Order and the Roman Catholic Church as a whole upon the succeeding life of French Canada, there can be no question. The record of the Jesuits and the progress of the Church were interchangeable terms in the early history of Quebec, and though changes afterwards came and the ruling force and material wealth of the Order of Jesus were eliminated, its impress remained upon the mind of the people and made for the strength and unity of their faith.

As to the Church herself, to which this consideration naturally brings us in thought and pen, it has been the most direct, explicit and obvious single influence in the making of French Canadian character and nationality. Details can be allowed to develop as this volume proceeds; the broad general principle and fact is that the French Canadian knows no other faith. From the time when De Caen and the Huguenots sought place and power in the infant colony to the latest days of Baptist missions from Ontario, Protestantism has, with a few exceptions, found no permanent footing in the life of the French people. Around them it has ebbed and flowed. Montreal has been and always will be a center of the opposing faith to which, in its varied forms, the English-speaking commercial and financial interests of the Province adhere; the Eastern Townships, once settled by English people and loyalists from the United States, are rapidly falling into line with the rest of the Catholic and French population of rural Quebec; the Church has been and remains first in the home and the school, first in the lives and customs of the habitant.

Politics may at times appear to create a divergence of feeling and one Party may not always be as tender in its treatment of the Church or as respectful to tradition and obedient to ecclesiastical opinion as the other. But these are more or less surface indications of external influences which have been and must be powerful; below them is a deep-seated, though not always clearly expressed, devotion to the faith which has been so woven into the hearts and history and lives of the people. From the Church have come the instruction and ideals which reach back to the earlier days of settlement; from it came the educational institutions such as Laval and the classical colleges, which have steadily maintained the highest standards of learning and culture; from it have risen the leaders of religious thought and ecclesiastical statecraft and political action from the days of Laval to those of Taschereau, from the times of Papineau to those of Cartier or Laurier. Amongst the people a church building was provided for every tiny settlement and budding village; the parish curé became and remains to this day in rural villages the most important local personage; each local school was kept under religious control and guided upon the basic principle that religion was, is and must be the vital element in the life of the child, with secular matters following in a necessarily secondary place.

What was the influence upon French Canadian character of the prolonged struggle between French and English for the mastery in North America? During a hundred years of intermittent conflict, ended by the battle on the Heights of Quebec, the flag of England and the flag of France had “waved in war’s alternate chance.” It was a part of the birth-pains of a continent in national characteristics, conditions and constitutions; and it was, therefore, all important in the making of history as a great whole. But it would be easy to over-estimate the effect upon French Canadian evolution in particular. The victory of Wolfe may have made the United States possible; it did remove from the New England colonies the menace of an ambitious neighbor and the possibility of a great French empire in America. It did not greatly affect or alter the position of the French settler except that he was no longer a unit in the aggressive and patriotic designs of a Champlain or a Frontenac, a Richelieu or a Colbert.

It is questionable, indeed, if a great victory won by Montcalm instead of by Wolfe, and the establishment of a new or stronger French state—backed by France with zeal and with a wiser local statecraft than that of Bigot—could have preserved the permanent independence of New France. The world trend of English-speaking population and the aversion of the French at home to emigration would have still remained as the great factors in Continental evolution and would, finally, have given the dominance in North America to the nation or race which has there produced in a century nearly 100,000,000 of people as compared with 3,000,000 of the French race. If, when United States independence came, the republic had found itself checked in its expansion by a French state of attenuated population to the north, or in the heart of the continent, supported only by a France enfeebled through the world-wide ambitions of Napoleon and hampered in expansion by the home-loving instincts of its people, the result could hardly have been doubtful and would have meant, finally, the swamping of French nationality in America.

As it was, the French Canadian conflicts of a century had been as often with the English colonists on the Atlantic as with England herself; the wars between the white races were frequently over-shadowed by the horrors of Indian struggle; the France of the soldiers’ loyalty and the habitants’ faith was, as they afterwards realized, a very neglectful France; the Peace of 1763 threw a British mantle of power over the whole continent and brought rest to the much harassed settler in French Canada. When that rest was disturbed by the American Revolution the French Canadian found himself in a situation where he possessed the same rights of language, laws and religion as he had during the French régime, with an added element of greater liberty and a period in which he had enjoyed assured peace.

The Quebec Act of 1774 was, of course, a potent influence in this process of mental growth or newly evolved point of view. This act of the British Parliament had fixed the boundaries of the Province, made provision for its civil government, vested authority in a governor with a council of seventeen members, established the English criminal law while in civil rights and property preserving the old French laws, recognized the Roman Catholic religion with its preceding rights and immunities, preserved all the religious Orders in their rights and privileges with the exception of the Jesuits. Such a measure, followed by that of 1791, which separated Lower or French Canada from Upper or English Canada and gave each a constitution with a governor and executive council, a legislative council and assembly, was enough to impress any people with belief in the fairness of the British authorities. There were troubles and complications, of course, but this policy, helped by the open antagonism of New England to the Quebec Act with its maintenance of Catholicism in Quebec, proved an efficient counter-balance to natural memories of the long warfare between French and English. Added to this was a growing feeling that peace was preferable to war and that when peace brought with it the rights and liberties for which war had been so often invoked, it was wise to conserve the conditions under which this result had developed. Hence it was that aversion to war grew and deepened in the nature of the habitant.

This fact or process of thought explains, in some degree at least, his refusal to accept the influence of Lafayette, the wiles of D’Estaing, or the appeals of Washington, and to plunge into the American revolutionary war. Twenty years later the habitant was growing in his love for what was now his native soil, and in 1812, therefore, a part of the population was more than passive; it was active. But this activity was not because of any innate military spirit in the people; had it been so the fiery eloquence of Papineau in 1836-37 would have fired the heather indeed. This second American war simply increased the French Canadian love for his native country; the several invasions by United States troops brought the war into the homes and hamlets of the people; the struggle gave the French peasantry an enemy to discuss and denounce and deal with, other than their British traditional foe; and no matter how generous England might have been since 1763, this was in itself a most important matter. The Church took active steps and, just as in 1775 Bishop Briand of Quebec had issued a Mandement denouncing the “pernicious designs” of the Americans, so in 1812 Bishop Plessis urged his people to “fear God and honor the King,” to encourage loyalty and to stand by their allegiance.

The awakening of the people to a fuller and more just appreciation of the benefits which had accrued to them from British rule was the chief indirect influence of this war. It also checked a growth of republicanism which would have been natural in view of events in France and which afterwards found some active expression in the troubles of 1837; it prevented the influences of United States contiguity and of that geography which a distinguished writer in after days claimed as ordained by God to bring together the peoples of this continent, from having any effective result; it for a time brought together Canadians of French and English extraction in defence of their hearths and homes and laid a foundation, invisible yet powerful, for a realization of that splendid vision of Nicholson, Sewell, Pownall, William Smith and others—a permanent federal union of British America for the purposes of common interest, defence, trade and government.

The next great factor in French Canadian evolution was the problem of self-government. The whole confused medley of recrimination, protest, violent language, charge and counter-charge, deadlock between legislatures and governors, rebellious action and fiery controversy, which made up the history of 1800-1840, was the effervescence of an excitable people struggling for constitutional powers which they did not clearly understand; which no other dependent people in the world had as yet enjoyed and which were quite outside the ken of the most experienced statecraft; which the people of the United Kingdom themselves did not yet fully possess. Out of evil, however, came good; out of the conflict between those in power and those who wanted power, plus larger liberties, grew knowledge as to how to use liberty when it did come.

During the first part of the eighteenth century the French population, in the main, was a rural and agricultural one, essentially poor, obviously irresponsible in a political sense, absolutely dependent for protection upon British troops, money and connection. The commerce of the Province was in the hands of the English settlers, the money of the Province was, in the main, possessed by English financial interests, the most important city of the Province, Montreal, was rich and dominant by virtue of English capital and enterprise. A part of the public revenues still came from England, the greater portion of the remainder came from taxation of the English minority. The English were accustomed to governing and they naturally did so under the changing conditions of the local constitutional system; the French were inexperienced and, when placed by agitation and then by election in control of a tentative legislative system, they naturally concluded that their main mission in public life was to overcome the dominance of the English. Hence a contest of forty years’ duration.

It was not usually a disloyal controversy or one of estrangement from England as a sovereign power; it was a local and racial rivalry which was bound to find expression and which, in its final solution, reflected honor upon both sides—upon the dominating English classes for giving way without exercising the real military and financial powers which they possessed, and upon the great Catholic majority of French Canadians for having so well learned the difficult lesson of self-government and for afterwards using, so moderately and so wisely, the powers of executive and legislative authority which they obtained. The period of constitutional stress and struggle which followed 1800 included the rise and fall of Papineau with his fiery cross of rebellion and gospel of a liberty which reached the extreme of license; the rebellion itself, with its fitful folly and final collapse and its earnest, honest adherents who, in death, are heroes still and are enshrined in memorial and record as martyrs to the cause of human liberty; the union with Upper Canada in 1841 and twenty-five years of succeeding evolution which brought inevitable racial complications in its train.

It was a period which finally formed the French Canadian character and formulated the place of its people upon this continent. There was just enough of bloodshed and passion to produce a local patriotism without destroying wider national growth or checking individual progress; there was just enough of struggle and ill-feeling between races and religions to strengthen and deepen the French love for their possessions and ideals without creating a lasting bitterness in the race or against it; there was just enough of keen political conflict to impress upon the French Canadian mind the value and responsibility of self-government and the greatness of the boon so readily given by Great Britain when her people once became convinced that the trouble was not imperial but racial and local. To obtain similar gifts of freedom within and immunity from danger without—as French leaders of education and experience came to realize—other nations or states have had to go through centuries of war and struggle and turmoil and evolution. During this period was developed also a vague, almost intangible, yet very real, aspiration for a Quebec which should be all French in its local characteristics and racial dominance; today it seems not unlikely that, outside of Montreal, this ambition will be ultimately realized.

One other influence of an intangible yet very real character was that of the Seigneurs and Seigneurial system. By the middle of the nineteenth century the question and the situation had become a mere football of the politicians and the abolition of the system, when it was once brought into open antagonism to democracy, was inevitable. It did not altogether deserve that fate; its influence and the individual lives of the Seigneurs had very often been of real service to a people who required an element of culture and hereditary wealth to round out the result of their pioneer labors. The feudal customs may at times have been abused, the habitants may have had occasional cause for serious complaint, but on the other hand, the lives and homes of the rural population absolutely required the strong hand of a local leader and educated man for the purposes of defence and organization, and if in early days the hand of the over-lord was sometimes heavy, it was far heavier upon the enemy at the gates.

Without the Seigneurs the light-hearted, irresponsible peasantry would have fared ill at many stages in their early history; the literary light of French Canada would have been hampered or checked instead of scintillating with a brightness which has passed upon the pages of history; much of the charm of old-world manners and the culture of an olden time would have been absent from the life of Canada; the politics of the Province would have lost the presence and public services of many interesting figures and the life of the Province been devoid of such families as those of Taschereau and De Lotbinière, Baby and Casgrain, Boucher, Le Moyne, De Salaberry and many more. In 1854 the institution disappeared in the United Parliament of the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada and one of the most picturesque elements in the life of the French Canadians more or less went with it.

Such, in brief summary, were the major influences in the making of French Canada. Minor ones there were in plenty, such as the Hudson’s Bay Company with its picturesque element of hunters and trappers; the court life of olden Quebec with its sometimes gorgeous and sometimes somber and sometimes trivial conditions, its rivalries of Church and State, its high ambitions and low intrigues, its imitation of the graces and vices of distant Paris; the influence of poetry and song upon the character of a people dwelling at first in a rugged wilderness and afterwards in an isolated state; the preservation of old-time systems of farming and living in the midst of newer and more enterprising populations. All these and many other things had a place in the evolution of French Canadian character, but it was a lesser place and one which was not fundamental in its nature.