The Life of the Towns

Trading centres had preceded farms in New France, and at the beginning of royal government in 1663, more than a third of the colonists lived in towns. This proportion fell slowly, but to the end of the French regime more than one in five of New France’s people were urban dwellers. Montreal and Quebec City grew more slowly than rural New France, but in the eighteenth century they—along with newly founded Louisbourg—became substantial towns.

In the last years of the French regime, the Marquis de Montcalm, no unrestrained admirer of the colony, said that in Quebec City one could live “d la mode de Paris!’

The Compagnies Franches de la Marine garrisoned the towns of New France with officers of the Canadian aristocracy and recruits from France, and built the fur-trade forts that carried French power as far west as the Canadian prairies. This watercolour drawing of a captain of the force is dated c. 1718.

There was, if anything, too much urban luxury and dissipation there for

Montcalm’s taste. The colonial capital, which grew from 2,500 people in about 1715 to 6,000 or more in the 1750s, was the most imposing city in the colony and the oldest—Champlain’s landmarks and even his gravesite had already been lost. “Like one of the hilltowns of Italy,” said an admirer, it crowned a cliff surrounded by water, and natural ramparts remained its main defences even after a line of bastions was laid across its landward side between 1746 and 1749. Atop the cliffs stood the great buildings of the colony. Military officers, haughty royal officials, priests, and nuns walked, rode, or were carried in coaches between the Governor General’s Chateau St-Louis and the Intendant’s palace, the cathedral, the seminary and convents, and the Hotel-Dieu hospital. In the lower town, where the ships anchored and the barges docked, merchants, clerks and sailors crowded around the quay and the warehouses of the merchant community, unloading and storing the cargoes imported to the colony, all of which were landed at Quebec. Substantial two - and three-storey stone buildings.