The French revolutionaries of 1789 described all that they were sweeping away—the monarchy, the church, and the aristocracy—as “the old system,” the anden regime. Fhstorians have borrowed the phrase to describe a whole way of life that disappeared in most of Europe with the rise of democracy, capitalism, and the industrial revolution. In the eighteenth century. New France had emerged from its stormy pioneering youth to become a mature society of the anden regime. Like many European societies of its time, it was formed of a small and favoured elite and a vast mass of poor farmers. This social structure reinforced the political system in which an absolute government ruled without thought of representative institutions. Governors, intendants, and bishops all claimed a paternal authority over the colonists. They took for granted their right and duty, not only to rule in the King’s name, hut also to give or withhold favour as they thought fit and to impose their concepts of how their subjects ought to live. Perhaps it was inevitable that they found the people opinionated, for popular resistance to government was not unknown. When shortages drove up food prices in Montreal, women went into the streets, demanding royal action. Soldiers mutinied at Louisbourg in 1744, and rural habitants ofiien resisted obligatory labour for the Crown or their seigneur. Nevertheless, popular protest rarely if ever called into question the structures of society or government. Agents of royal authority, from the Governor down to the militia captains in each parish, carried the King’s will to his people, not vice versa. People might grumble at the results when the Governor drafted farmers for military construction labour, when the Intendant fixed the price of wheat, or when the clergy claimed its tithes, but there was little questioning of their authority to do so.
Catholicism was the basis of civil society. The colony closely restricted the rights of its few Protestants, and the teachings of the church hierarchy were strict and austere: even dancing was frowned upon. Of course, what the priests decreed, they could not always enforce. The governing authorities soon freed themselves from clerical dominance, and free-spirited aristocrats could disregard clerical dictates: in 1749 a group of them dared ask a Montreal cure to reschedule the Ash Wednesday morning service so they could more conveniently drop in on their way home from the Intendant’s all-night
Mardi Gras ball. Even rural priests bemoaned the laxity, superstition—and resistance to tithes—of the habitants. Still, even when the church’s temporal authority was weakest, there was a broad measure of popular faith and religious observance. The church participated in events of every kind: births and deaths and marriages, obviously, but also the celebration of military victories and public holidays, and the running of hospitals, schools, public charities, and craftsmen’s associations. Both the parish mass and the gathering afterwards of the men of the parish were vital events in every community.
In a colony rapidly growing and building, there were always opportunities to change one’s situation. Despite its inland location and scant immigration after the 1680s, the colony enjoyed a fair measure of outside contact and geographical mobility. Quebec maintained trade links with France and later with the Atlantic coast colonies. Louisbourg at one end of New France and Montreal at the other had regular, if barely legal, ties to coastal New England and the New York frontier, and a few people, as well as news and goods, passed back and forth. Within the colony, road and river traffic increased throughout the eighteenth century. The need to open new lands kept even farm families on the move, and a large minority of colonists married outside their local communities. The fur trade, of course, could always take young men into the west, where a few of them would merge into Native and Metis society or bring wives to the small settlements growing on the Great Lakes and the Upper Mississippi.
Nevertheless, any society where most people lived hy subsistence farming was slow to change. Rural New France was massively illiterate, and even in the towns literacy was a skill acquired by the few for whom it was essential. Education was for religious indoctrination, or it was a path to refinement for the elite and practical training for the professions and trades. Commerce and trade existed and in places even flourished, but it was a commerce that fit comfortably into a non-commercial society, not a revolutionary capitalism spreading out to erode the traditional economy. Despite the New World’s many opportunities for change, the eighteenth century saw the colony along the St. Lawrence maturing into a deeply stable and traditional society.
To be born on a farm meant an overwhelming likelihood of living one’s life in (to our minds) intolerable plainness, ignorance, and toil. Within that fixed and demanding world it remained possible—by work, good fortune, or a shrewd marriage—for masons, voyageurs, habitants, or their children to improve their situations substantially. Still, society could be very hard on anyone who lost his or her niche. Most colonists remained close to the circumstances in which they were born, and found food, shelter, a livelihood, and a stake in their community.
World History
