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On the 1st and 2nd of January 1838, Canadian patriots gathered in Middlebury, Vermont.[1] They had been forced into exile south of the border by volunteers and British soldiers who exerted a violent repression during the preceding autumn. Most had been at the forefront of a socio-political crisis in Lower Canada that led to armed confrontations in the Richelieu Valley, south-east of the island of Montréal.[2] Some of them were now planning to reinvade the colony. Among them were sympathizers of Robert Nelson — even though he seems not to have attended the meeting himself — a radical and polemicist who would eventually become an important figure behind the failed 1838 invasion.[3] Louis-Joseph Papineau (1786–1871) was also involved, but he was much more skeptical about the prospect of a successful new armed conflict than Nelson and those who expressed his viewpoint during the Middlebury meeting.[4] The former leader of the Parti canadien (1815–1826), then of the Parti patriote (1826–1837), Papineau was the inconspicuous head figure of the exiles. Personal accounts written following the meeting and the 1838 failed invasion would indicate that a breakup had occurred between Papineau and Nelson in Middlebury, and, more generally, between Papineau and the radicals eager to take up arms once again.[5] Papineau was above all else unwilling to support another ill-prepared armed campaign against the British army.[6]

Nelson and others, however, were otherwise displeased by Papineau’s position on “seigneurialism.”[7] Papineau, in fact, since 1817 had been seigneur of La Petite-Nation , a large seigneury situated some 100 miles west of Montréal, and his opinion about seigneurialism as well as his personal involvement with the seigneurial regime were also at the heart of the dissension.

“Le Diable,” as Nelson was known, had been working on a Declaration of Independence of Lower Canada that would have included the abolition of seigneurialism even before the Middlebury meeting took place.[8] Since the early 1830s, he and other radicals from the Richelieu region had in fact been harbouring an antiseigneurial feeling that was not shared by Papineau and other leaders of the Parti patriote. The Parti, in fact, officially reasserted its support for the seigneurial tenure in the 92 Resolutions of 1834. When a potential Declaration was discussed in Middlebury four years later, so was, in some measure, the seigneurial question, and still no consensus was reached on the matter. According to Thomas Bouthillier, who was in Middlebury, Papineau expressed reservations about the idea of confiscating seigneurial properties.[9] Partly because of differences of opinion on the seigneurial question, it seems, no Declaration was adopted in Middlebury.

The matter, however, was left open for later agreement, possibly because Papineau had said in Middlebury, according to Bouthillier, that “he would be guided by the opinion of the majority [and] would willingly give away his seigneury for the good of his country.”[10] But by the end of January 1838, a few weeks after the meeting took place, no draft of the Declaration had yet been agreed on. Nelson and some of “his friends,” as Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan put it, were still waiting for Papineau’s thoughts on the draft before finishing it.[11] Eventually, probably before the end of the spring of 1838, Papineau provided his opinion: he was against the radical abolition of seigneurial rights as intended in the Declaration.[12]

Usually depicted by Canadian historians as an avant-garde document, the 1838 Declaration aimed for the establishment of free republican government in Lower Canada, for equal rights of Indigenous People, for the separation between Church and State, for freedom of press, and for trial by jury, among other things.[13] While not all these measures prompted commentary from Papineau, suggesting his general approval, he would explicitly reject section 5 that provided for the abolition of seigneurial tenure “as if it never existed in this country,” as well as section 6 that planned to free from all seigneurial obligations anyone willing to take up arms or otherwise “provide assistance to the Canadian People in their struggle for emancipation.”[14] Papineau would note, disapprovingly: “I could not conscientiously subscribe to the underlined part of this Declaration. It is no more legal and just to steal from a seigneur than any other man.”[15] In addition to his reluctance to support an armed invasion, he could not accept any abolition project that provided no compensation for loss of seigneurial property. The controversy generated during the Middlebury meeting resurfaced and caused a split.

This split was irreversible. The final Declaration that was to be read twice during the 1838 campaign showed that Nelson did not address Papineau’s objections.[16] Papineau had pursued his diplomatic representations to American political authorities to find support for the patriots’ cause.[17] With perceivable resentment, Nelson made Papineau’s “seigneurial” reluctance the main reason why the patriot leader had decided not to support an armed invasion.[18] In a letter intercepted by American military authorities and published in several newspapers in 1838 and 1839, Nelson wrote: “Papineau abandoned us for reasons of selfishness and family, concerning seigneuries, and for his inveterate love of bad old French laws.”[19]

This event in Papineau’s political and intellectual trajectory has been interpreted by his contemporaries as well as by later historians as proof of his ambivalence — if not his duplicity — towards social progress, even of his maladaptation to his own time.[20] How could a champion of modern, democratic ideas defend an institution rooted in feudalism? Was it not obvious that seigneurialism was anachronistic in the middle of a century that would witness the rise of economic and political liberalism? Had Robert Nelson not revealed Papineau’s “true” nature: an egoistic aristocrat entangled in Old Regime traditions, who, even for the sake of “progress,” would not sacrifice his own security embedded in a feudal institution?[21] Papineau’s democratic and seigneurial “affinities” have been seen as, at worst, hypocritical, or, at best, simply incompatible with each another; one inclination pointed forward while the other pointed backward, as if an insurmountable, somewhat debilitating, and paradoxical progressive/conservative dichotomy inhabited him.

Were Papineau’s republicanism and seigneurialism truly incompatible? Papineau’s ideas on the seigneurial regime were consistent with his larger intellectual and political horizons. To grasp Papineau’s thought on the seigneurial regime, one has to go beyond the 1838 Middlebury event to consider how his ideas formed over a longer period of time. A long-term approach reveals that his understanding of seigneurialism was constant and stable, both privately and in public. It also sheds light on deeply held values and ideas, which, in turn, help us put into context Papineau’s opinions and choices during an event as unique as the 1838 Middlebury meeting. From the standpoint of the history of ideas, Papineau’s seigneurialism appears consistent when understood in the context of his admiration for Jeffersonian republicanism and his wider republican vision. For him, this was an ideology based on political liberty, civic virtue, equality, and the common good. It was institutionally incarnated in the democratic republic, a political system establishing the “people” as the origin of legitimate power.[22]

Historians have shown that Canadian patriots were broadly influenced by the struggle for independence that occurred during the American Revolution (1775–1783) and demonstrated the mutual entanglement of both Canadian and American politico-economic issues of the beginning of the nineteenth century.[23] New research has also shown how Canadian republicans wanted annexation to the United States in 1837, but were disappointed by the U.S. response to the Rebellion and switched “from annexationism to advocacy for a separate [“Twin Stars” pan-Canadian] republic”.[24] With respect to Papineau, Yvan Lamonde, among others, has asserted his fervent republicanism and admiration for the United States from the 1830s until his death in 1871.[25] Recent studies, however, continue to view Papineau’s ideas on seigneurialism as “paradoxical,” and no study — a few perceptive commentaries aside — has proposed an extensive examination of the Jeffersonian tendencies found in his republicanism.[26] Papineau’s republicanism and admiration for Jefferson offers us a key to reconsider his ideas on seigneurialism and to move away from the inaccurate dichotomy.

Papineau, the Seigneurial Regime, and Lower Canadian Politics

As the seigneurial regime was being abolished in the middle of the 1850s, Louis-Joseph Papineau reminisced in a letter to his son about the reason his own father had acquired (1801–1803), then sold to him (2 May 1817), the seigneury of La Petite-Nation.[27] Joseph Papineau (1752–1841) wanted to save “the débris of our Canadian nationality from the suffocation of the English government,” by offering them a seigneurial “asylum” at the risk of his personal “fortune.”[28] While we can doubt that national solidarity had been the only motive behind the transactions, one may certainly understand why Joseph Papineau and his son Louis-Joseph, both fiercely engaged in colonial politics, felt Canadians were being stifled by British colonial policies in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

Following the implementation of parliamentary institutions in 1791, French Canadians had gradually learned the limits of the democratic Legislative Assembly. In the British colonial context, the authorities appointed by the Governor — the Crown’s representative in the colony — had more control than the ruling party. In fact, the nominated Legislative Council had rejected over 230 of the Assembly’s legislative projects in the 15 years leading up to summer of 1837.[29] Papineau saw the Assembly — the sole elected branch of Parliament — as the only legitimate entity to protect the interests of the Canadian population.[30] As leader of the majority party since 1815, he had sought reforms that would have increased the powers of the democratically elected Assembly, and limited what he saw as the arbitrariness of the system.[31] Issues such as the control of subsidies, the composition of the civil list, the combination of functions, the independence of judges, and the composition of both Executive and Legislative Councils had been some of the tremendously litigious political questions in Lower Canada.[32]

The fate of seigneurial land ownership had been another profoundly contentious matter. Implemented in New France by the French Crown during the seventeenth century as a way to develop and populate the territory, the seigneurial regime was a customary mode of land ownership, and implied a relationship based on inequality inherited from French feudalism.[33] Consequently, individuals living under seigneurialism could only have an imperfect proprietorship over land, determined by two factors: synallagmatic contracts comprising reciprocal but unequal rights and obligations, and their status as dominant (seigneur) or subordinate (censitaire).[34] Following the Constitutional Act of 1791, the seigneurial space of the St. Lawrence Valley was officially confined to its conceded parcels because no new seigneuries could be granted by the British Crown.[35]

The status of the seigneuries proved to be precarious. Colonial authorities and British merchants had already expressed, in the 1780s, their desire to get rid of what they saw as a significant obstacle to commercial enterprise and British colonization in Lower Canada.[36] Canadian seigneurs, for their part, had been at the forefront of the defence of seigneurialism since the Conquest of 1760, facing a new colonial administration that was fairly ambivalent on the matter.[37] Nevertheless, the introduction of an elective Assembly in 1791 moved the seigneurial regime defence’s nucleus from the seigneurs to the elected representatives.[38] Opinions on seigneurialism were not divided into two rigid “national” camps: there was a spectrum of positions ranging from radical abolitionism to complete seigneurial “fidelity.” Some Canadian seigneurs wanted to commute their land into English tenure (free and common socage) after the conquest, whereas some British individuals did acquire seigneuries in large numbers.[39] Regardless, British colonists judged seigneurialism rather unfavourably, while members of the Canadian Assembly adopted a sympathetic, but not entirely uncritical, party line on the matter that would seem relatively consistent with the opinion of most Canadians.[40]

While some might have agreed with reformist ideas on the matter, members of the Assembly stood against abolition and would not have preferred freehold ownership — free of seigneurial obligations — to seigneurial tenure before the 1837–1838 Rebellion.[41] In the 1820s, with high immigration and gradually saturating seigneuries, members of the Assembly even adopted the official position that seigneurial tenure remained the best way to ensure fast and easy colonization of Lower Canada.[42] This position dismayed British colonists — merchants, politicians, lawyers — who, between 1791 and 1822, formulated numerous commutation and abolition projects.[43] Some were thus prompted to turn to Westminster to obtain desired legislation, which led to the adoption of the Canada Trade Act (1822) and Canada Tenures Act (1825) allowing commutation to freehold.[44] As a result, seigneurialism was repeatedly being compromised, in Papineau’s words, by both “determined” and “persevering” colonists and political authorities before 1830.[45]

Papineau had a lot to say regarding all these “seigneurial” matters. First, he considered Westminster’s legislation on seigneurial tenure to be morally illegitimate as it was, to him, completely disconnected from the needs and interests of the habitants.[46] According to Papineau, only the local Assembly should create laws on seigneurialism since Canadian representatives knew better about the population’s habits, customs, and preferences. Papineau was irritated by antiseigneurial legislation carried out by a few individuals against what he considered the interests of “half a million.”[47] He feared forcing Canadians to adopt British freehold would compel them into “exile” in their own country.[48] Secondly, he read the antiseigneurial bills as direct attacks on both property rights and against the synallagmatic contracts between seigneurs and censitaires: if no compensation were to be provided, the result would be a shameful “spoliation.”[49] Finally, Papineau considered the equivalence of Canadian seigneurialism and European feudalism, as some detractors of the seigneurial regime claimed, a falsehood. No such thing, he believed, ever existed or could ever occur in Canada. To him, in fact, seigneurialism was not oppressive but only a “modified,” “softened” feudalism that the Canadian people rarely complained about.[50] Even though the 1822 and 1825 bills allowed landowners to commute to freehold on a voluntary basis, almost no one followed through.[51] Papineau held this fact as evidence that these laws were unsuitable for the interests of the colony and thus, somehow, a product of political corruption.[52] The 92 Resolutions of 1834 — the patriots’ Cahier de doléances sent to London to which Papineau significantly contributed — contained similar opinions and requests regarding seigneurialism.[53]

The debate on seigneurialism certainly contributed to Papineau’s antipathy towards colonial political institutions, especially the Legislative Council; it also unquestionably influenced his shift towards republicanism in the 1830s. Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, he and his fellow members of the Assembly constantly aimed to legislate on seigneurial matters. They could rely on petitions sent by habitants and seigneurs to the Assembly showing that seigneurialism, despite its flaws, was not completely rejected by Canadians.[54] Quite the opposite. The appointed Legislative Council imposed its veto multiple times to stop these legislative attempts.[55] Taking his inspiration from republicanism and some of the political institutions of the New England states, Papineau and others requested the implementation of an elected Legislative Council.[56]

The demand for an elected Legislative Council was politically and intellectually revolutionary in the context of British parliamentarism.[57] Clearly, it was an illustration of the fact that Papineau had turned his eyes on American republican institutions based on popular sovereignty for solutions to Lower Canada’s political impasse. The seigneurial issue had been one of the political controversies that had highlighted to Papineau the incapacity of the elected body of the colony — the Assembly — to legislate according to the will of the people. If the colonial system would not give the people its due legislative importance, then perhaps republican institutions were the only alternative. As he defiantly declared in the Assembly in November 1835, “[o]ne could still find [among Canadians] a [Thomas] Jefferson’s pen and a [George] Washington’s head to oppose an entire branch of the Legislature from remaining the subject of the Crown’s nomination.”[58] Only a few years before the outbreak of the 1837/38 Rebellion, “We the People,” the famous phrase penned by Thomas Jefferson, acquired an important meaning for Papineau, as did Jefferson as a figure.

Jeffersonian Inclinations of Papineau’s Republicanism

Papineau was well acquainted with the ideas of Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), third American president (1801–1809), Virginian slave owner, and drafter of the United States Declaration of Independence (1776). The Virginian’s writings were easily available to politicians in Lower Canada: the Assembly’s library, which Papineau had contributed to setting up, possessed several books on American society and its young revolutionary history.[59] These books crystallized in many minds an idealized image of agrarian republican virtue in the United States.[60] Specifically, the Assembly acquired Jefferson’s Writings, Papers and Correspondence in 1831, his complete Works in 1836 and a copy of his famous Notes on the State of Virginia in 1835.[61] Papineau himself owned a 1784/85 version of the Notes, an edition of Mélanges politiques et philosophiques extraits des Mémoires et de la correspondance de Thomas Jefferson (1833), and a biography of Jefferson entitled Thomas Jefferson, sa vie et études sur la Démocratie (1862).[62] His eldest son’s father-in-law, James Randall Westcott, whose own father fought in the American Revolution, often sent the patriot books on the history of the United States and the Revolution, as well as US newspapers.[63] Papineau could also read the numerous American press articles reprinted by Canadian periodicals, and, as a man at the very centre of Lower Canadian politics for 30 years, he most probably did.[64]

Louis-Joseph Papineau clearly idealized Thomas Jefferson. In his private correspondence and public speeches he praised the Virginian revolutionary on various occasions, “the most beloved” of his “masters in politics.”[65] Jefferson was evidently part of Papineau’s pantheon of great thinkers.[66] He often spoke of the American politician as the “genius” or the “immortal Jefferson,” and once described him as the “prince of the Cenacle” who drafted the “perfect” American Declaration of Independence, a “political gospel,” which, he thought, “revealed the political rights common to men of all races and all colours.”[67] Inspired by Jefferson’s democratic eloquence, Papineau frequently referred to Jefferson’s Declaration in the popular assemblies held prior to the outbreaks of armed confrontations in November 1837, and made him the incarnation of an ideal that ought to have inspired the Canadian people towards republicanism.[68] Writing to George Bancroft (1800–1891), the American nationalist historian, Papineau explicitly identified himself with the republicanism of the “school” of Jefferson.[69] While residing in Paris as an exile in 1841, Papineau wrote to his son Amédée that Jefferson’s “doctrines” had “become the American universal symbol.”[70] To him, Jefferson’s republican vision was no less than bound to be universally adopted by mankind.[71] Papineau must have been deeply flattered when some of his contemporaries referred to him as “The Jefferson of Canada,” or even the “Jefferson of his age.”[72] The Papineau family memory still holds that he had on his night shelf, the day he died of pneumonia in his seigneury, a biography of Jefferson.[73] Papineau had been influenced by Jeffersonian ideas since at least the beginning of the 1830s, and passed away, forty years later, as a sincere admirer.

Several inclinations of Papineau’s republicanism can be linked to Jefferson’s political ideas. One can discern in Papineau’s correspondence and public speeches several themes associated with civic humanism. While civic humanism can be broadly defined as “the application of learned culture to political life,” many have depicted it as the vita activa — the selfless implication in political life, public offices, and social affairs — in opposition to the vita contemplativa.[74] Civic humanism generally entails a high valorization of political liberty and, in many cases, a strong preference for republican institutions over monarchies.[75]

Thomas Jefferson has frequently been presented as an influential modern thinker characterized, notably, by civic humanist ideas (or Country ideology). Accordingly, Lance Banning and John G. A. Pocock (among others) have emphasized that Jefferson’s thought was coloured by the importance he attributed to civic participation, virtue, political liberty, and by a durable suspicion towards (British) monarchical institutions.[76] They have also argued that the idealization of agrarian life was an important aspect of Jeffersonian republicanism. This context enhanced both the development and the preservation of individuals’ independence and morality, which were necessary to civic virtue.[77] Louis-Georges Harvey and Michel Ducharme have revealed similar civic humanist aspects in the political ideas of Papineau and other Canadian patriots, emphasizing the proximity of Papineau’s republicanism to a political and intellectual tradition within which Jefferson occupies an important place.[78]

Papineau correlated corruption with moral degradation, vice, selfishness, luxury, despotism, and colonial servility. He associated virtue with the exercise of political rights, personal independence, freedom, disinterestedness, patriotism, moderation, and talents. He explained to Marcella Dowling, a close friend during his exile years in Paris, the necessity of free elections in order to bring virtuous and talented men in politics, and the necessity for such elections to be held frequently in order to avoid abuse of power and corruption.[79] In a similar vein, he stipulated to his sons, whom he was striving to educate according to his notion of virtuous and useful citizens, “love virtue first, homeland, [then] family.”[80] To Papineau, “the selfless love of our country” was the purest “of social virtues.”[81]

Papineau generally considered Canadians to be a virtuous people dominated by corrupted colonial elites. He wrote incisively to Lord Dalhousie in 1827 that many of his colleagues in the Assembly were superior to the viceroy “in terms of virtues, talents [and] enlightenment.”[82] A few years later, he declared similarly that in “moral education the people of the country compares favourably to any other.”[83] The Rebellions prompted him to speak out further on the Canadians’ virtuous character. In 1838, during his exile south of the border, he worried about the fate determined for the “virtuous peasants of Lower Canada” by the colonial administration carrying out a severe repression.[84] Some months later, now an exile in Paris, Papineau wrote similarly of the “morality and of the suavity of the Canadian people […] this virtuous people [reduced] to political helots, in favour of the handful of adventurers without lights and without virtues.”[85] Papineau, indeed, praised his “beautiful and virtuous country” inhabited by a “virtuous people” made of “compatriots worthy of a better lot and so apt by virtues to govern themselves well.”[86] In fact, as a resident of a British colony, Papineau certainly agreed with Jefferson for whom republicanism was not to be found in the US Constitution, but in the mind of his “fellow” American citizens.[87]

Papineau adopted a dichotomous representation that characterized the minds of many American politicians in his time, opposing the beliefs of Thomas Jefferson (Republicans) to those of Alexander Hamilton (Federalists).[88] This antagonism originated in party struggles of the 1790s that, according to Jefferson, “were contests of principle between the advocate of republican and those of kingly government.”[89] For historian Drew McCoy, “[b]y the election of 1800, Jefferson and his supporters saw themselves engaged in a crusade to halt an unnecessary, deviously enforced ‘Anglicization’ of American government and society” by Federalists.[90] Papineau tended, using such a dichotomy, to separate what he considered as true republicanism from its corrupted, “Anglicized” opposite. Hamiltonian principles, according to Papineau, often prevailed over Jeffersonian doctrines and had had a bad “monarchist” and Anglophile influence on the American republic since the Revolution, leading to more elitist, industrial, and centralized governmental politics.[91] In the 1840s, Papineau tried to evaluate John Tyler’s Whigs faithfulness to the party’s abhorred Hamiltonian heritage, and rejoiced to see Tyler, a Virginian aristocrat, being arguably more sympathetic to Jeffersonian principles. [92]

The Jefferson/Hamilton antagonism is often described in the historiography of republicanism as an agrarian/industrial, countryside/town, moderation/luxury, virtue/corruption dichotomy. In his private correspondence, Papineau would often use such dichotomies and express his preference for the Jeffersonian side. He periodically tried to convince members of his family to come and settle in the seigneury. For this purpose, he often extolled the virtues of country life and denigrated the vices of the city. In a similar manner, he denounced what he saw as Hamiltonian economic policies favouring futile luxury products over “objects of common usage and of general utility,” thus appealing to Jeffersonian morality and frugality in opposition to vice, greed, and luxury.[93] In 1858, Papineau wrote to his daughter-in-law that Montréal “is not worth Montebello, because the city is not worth the countryside, because the noise, the dust, and the customary visits will always be unbearable inconveniences to my tastes of independence.”[94] In a sentimental attempt to draw James Randall Westcott to his “quiet” and “solitary” seigneury in 1859, Papineau recalled his adherence to Jeffersonian values, which he contrasted to Hamiltonian principles. If Montebello predisposed “the mind to moral thoughts, the soul to love and kindness, and the body to health and vigour,” he wrote to Westcott, cities, such as Boston and New York — “the permanent seat of wickedness and all moral evils” — had “unsound” physical and moral atmospheres, which should discourage any “Jeffersonian as [he was]” from preferring these nests of “wicked” Hamiltonians to a “balmy” seigneurial forest.[95]

The issue of slavery in the United States is another example of Papineau’s Jeffersonian leanings.[96] Even though Jefferson did not live long enough to witness the heyday of radical abolitionism in the decades preceding the Civil War (1861–1865), the resemblances in their ideas are often striking. Adopting an antislavery perspective similar to Jefferson’s, Papineau believed emancipation should be done “gradually”; be preceded by benevolent and measured methods, educational and moralizing practices; and then followed by mass deportation.[97] He tended to favour deportation as he believed, following Jefferson, that White Americans were incapable of accepting the idea that Black people could live as they did and be beneficiaries of the same rights and privileges.[98] He feared, much like Jefferson and many others did, outbreaks of racial violence.[99] Moreover, Papineau considered Northern recriminations against the conditions of slaves as revealing a great hypocrisy, since he believed the northern Black people who had been freed were not better off than slaves in the South.[100] They were, he lamented, unduly ostracized and deprived of political rights, rights that they could only hope for, in contrast to their southern brethren.[101] For Papineau, the whole abolitionist movement — including in Canada — was a “Northern hypocrisy” led by British interests.[102] “England,” he wrote, was “paying abolitionists to spout out nonsense against an evil that was of its own creation, instead of their freeing by their money, not by their incendiary words, and gradually and voluntarily, some of the Black population.”[103] Papineau thought that the movement’s “fanaticism” led to the eruption of the Civil War, a “fatal fratricidal war.”[104] Furthermore, resorting once again to a Jeffersonian–Hamiltonian antagonism, Papineau thought that corruption had been preferred to Jefferson’s democratic principles, and believed that the heirs of the Federalists as well as other “courtesans of the English alliance” caused the country to lose its peaceful composure.[105] Jefferson had always been, it seems, adamant about the necessity to solve the problem of slavery through democratic policies. He put his trust in the American republican institutions, which, through a democratic majority-decision, would eventually rid the nation of slavery in a peaceful manner. Such a decision, for Papineau, would be brought by some progress in the moral spirit of the American people, a progress made possible by republicanism.[106] Writing in July 1861, Papineau feared that an eventual prolongation of the violence to which the American people resorted would compromise the idea that the American political institutions, based on human reason, democratic deliberations, and majority decisions, could guide rationally societies to “peaceful arrangement[s].”[107] For a short period of time, Papineau’s faith in the American institutions was thus seriously shaken;[108] yet his profound attachment to Jefferson’s “philanthropic conceptions” was never affected.[109]

As a politician struggling with British colonialism, Papineau was inspired by the fight of Jefferson’s generation against British colonialism and viewed the famous “Founding Father” to be the perfect incarnation of a certain republican ideal. As a passionate Jeffersonian republican, Papineau kept a watchful eye on what was happening south of the border. As a seigneur who valued rural life, built a large manor on his Montebello domain, tried to administer his affairs with care, and sought to act moderately with his censitaires, Papineau also certainly identified with the Monticello’s landlord and slaveholder.[110] It seems clear that Papineau saw in Jefferson a true inspiration and a true model.

Papineau’s Seigneurialism

A Jeffersonian republican, Papineau viewed the “people” as ideally formed mostly of landowners whose independence and moral virtue would ensure the stability of the political system as well as an orientation towards the common good. Similar to Jefferson, for whom “small land owners [were] the most precious part of a State,” for Papineau, “honest” Canadian farmers were “the soul and strength of the country.” [111] Papineau’s writings show that he valued the moral and virtuous character of the Canadian people. Likewise, Jefferson had famously written that “[the] corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example.”[112] Because Papineau viewed the seigneurial regime as providing easy access to land ownership, and hence as favouring the establishment of such “honest farmers,” censitaires formed the human base of the stable and virtuous Canadian society he envisioned.

Although it was theoretically impossible for censitaires to be full possessors of their tracts of land, Papineau saw them as “censuels owners” and “independent owners.”[113] He applied the same logic for seigneurs, as they were not “fidei-commissioner[s], but indeed [the] absolute owners[s] of the seigneuries,” once more indicating that he saw seigneuries as full landed properties.[114] Compared to free and common socage — with the notable example of the Eastern Townships administered by the British American Land Company since the 1830s — he considered seigneuries to be more accessible.[115] Papineau favoured seigneurialism over freehold ownership, because it contributed to a much wider “distribution” of properties at almost no cost to “the less well-off class.”[116] He thought, moreover, that the seigneurial regime helped to make Canada a truly egalitarian society, as it contributed to making it a place where small properties are the norm.[117] Equality and accessibility of land were very important for him on a political level. First, seigneurialism allowed the extension of political rights to the “poorest cultivators.”[118] Second, the seigneurial regime was congruent with what Papineau perceived as the natural equality of the American continent and with the democratic ethos of the people that inhabited it. In an 1836 speech, Papineau declared: “the social constitution of the Canadas is essentially democratic, where everyone comes into the world, lives, and dies a democrat; because everyone is a proprietor; because everyone has only small properties.”[119]

In Papineau’s mind, the seigneurial regime was also remarkably beneficial for Canadians since seigneurs had the duty to be “gentle, active, and benevolent” towards censitaires.[120] By the same token, seigneurs were morally bound to live among “their” censitaires.[121] He often had to deplore cases of “greedy men” perpetrating “excessive extortions,” but would characterize these as the work of seigneurs who had not understood the regime’s original spirit.[122] In an 1834 speech, Papineau had pointed out that seigneuries were originally granted to seigneurs “only for the benefits of the [country’s] people, to whom they were obliged to grant land for a limited fee.”[123] This spirit was utilitarian in his view, based on reciprocity: the interests of both the seigneur and his censitaires were “shared” and “closely related.”[124] Accordingly, Papineau blamed successive colonial administrations for their incapacity to maintain the “ancient laws of the Country on that matter,” which led to the perversion of a tenure regime destined to be benevolent “and advantageous for the people that were pushed towards settlement.”[125] All considered, seigneurialism was more morally commendable than freehold — again, the Eastern Townships served as his counterexample — because “[seigneurial property rights] have been exercised, it is easy to demonstrate it,” he asserted, “with justice for all, with advantage and benevolence for the poor.”[126]

Papineau’s ideas on the seigneurial regime were constructed in part on a clear dissociation from French feudalism, which he viewed as an “oppressive and privileged political power.”[127] He echoed the views of Jefferson, who saw feudalism as based on unjust privileges rather than the equal rights of all men.[128] Jefferson had been deeply impressed by the abolition of feudalism in France and the adoption of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789).[129] Papineau once made a revealing analogy on the matter when he compared the abolition processes of France and Canada. He thought the French people were justified in abolishing a barbaric feudality during The French Revolution, while the Canadian abolition of seigneuries during the 1850s had been completely illegitimate.[130] For Papineau, Canadian seigneurialism had nothing of the oppressiveness of its European counterpart. For him, it was rather a “modified, softened feudality” based on reciprocal socioeconomic relations, not a system of effective domination.[131]

In a similar vein, Papineau reckoned that Canadian seigneurs did not equate with French aristocrats from the Ancien Régime, because they had no “more political rights than the poorest of censitaires.”[132] No élite group comparable to European aristocrats existed in the New World in his mind; noble bloodlines were not responsible for privileged situations but rather individual talents and merits. Replying to men who had formally asked him to join the Canadian Senate in 1860, Papineau offered a true and lengthy lesson in republican faith and antimonarchism based on his idealistic egalitarian vision. After reminding his recipients of his past struggles with Legislative Councils, Papineau wrote: “[t]heoretically I like not an aristocracy. Practically I am persuaded that it is an absurdity to strive to implant in America.” He continued by stating that “[t]hose who have the happiness of being the nobles of nature, by strong minds, good education, suavity of temper and elegant manners are welcomed in all good company,” whereas old-fashioned aristocrats “are bores anywhere and everywhere.” He insisted that “[t]he Peerage of England is not the Nobility of the Continent. It has as stronghold in the hearts of a Majority of the People, as the secular ancestral oaks that surround their Princely Mansions have in the soil.”[133] Papineau was a distinguished seigneur. Yet, while he probably saw himself as a “noble of nature” or a “seigneur éclairé,” he certainly did not consider himself simply as an aristocrat, or a gentleman from Ancient Régime France.[134]

To better grasp Papineau’s seigneurialism, one can also examine his vision of a Canadian society without the seigneurial regime, a vision he expressed most clearly during the abolitionist moment of the 1850s and after the abolition. What did Papineau think of the abolition? How did he see the future now that seigneurialism had been abolished? What did he think of the disappearance of conditions he believed were necessary for the nurturing of civic virtue? Surely, Papineau foresaw that Lower Canada would be threatened by socio-political degeneration if seigneurialism was to be abolished. Such “new order of things,” he lamented, would notably lead to an increase in the “number of proletarians.”[135] In the mid-1850s, anxious about the threats facing seigneurial property, he predicted that poor people “will quickly descend […] from the class of small independent owners to that of impoverished proletarian journaliers.”[136] He considered that the low presence of proletarians in Canada before the 1854 abolition — as well as the ensuing “moralization” — was “partly due to the [seigneurial] system.”[137]

The 1850s abolitionist moment made Papineau express his broader vision on the value of private property in “civilized societies” as well as his angst over what such attacks on property meant.[138] Because seigneurial properties entailed rights fixed by duly signed synallagmatic contracts, Papineau understood the matter to be essentially legal, not political. Therefore, if politicians were to legislate on abolition, Papineau was adamant that they do so by planning fair compensations and by resorting to the judiciary. The absolute respect for property rights in civilized society was thus a “principle of morality and social law.”[139] Otherwise, he feared Canadian legislators would be heading towards a dangerous, “confused” path: that of mingling fundamental powers in democracies — the political and the judiciary — giving way to attacks on “inalienable” rights, then to “profound social disturbances,” “mobocracy,” “anarchy,” or “communism.”[140] In 1850, during the only speech in Parliament that he delivered on the matter throughout the abolitionist moment, Papineau declared it the duty of the “honest man” to “resist masses when they go astray” as much as to “oppose criminal proceedings of tyrants.”[141] Reminiscent of what he thought of American masses being manipulated by English interests regarding slavery, Canadians were periodically fooled, according to Papineau, by corrupted men and misleading ideas that pretended progress and demanded the immediate abolition of seigneurialism.[142] “[U]topias undermining fundamental principles regarding morality and property,” he told his son, are not “progressive.”[143] To him, legislators who assailed property rights in the 1850s lacked both Jefferson’s genius and George Washington’s virtue that were necessary “to exercise the fullness of their power without abusing it.”[144]

Papineau feared this new society without seigneuries would lack solidarity. Seigneurs had had the duty to act as true colonizers and benevolent landlords. Facing the abolitionist moment of the 1850s, he consequently worried about the future of Lower Canadian society and the fate of its inhabitants. If freehold tenure were to be universally implemented, what would become of the patriarchal role that the seigneurs played towards their censitaires? What would happen to establishments “benefiting [both the censitaires] and the seigneur”?[145] What obligations would legally and morally bind the new landholders to their tenants? All salutary reciprocity would seemingly disappear, while at the same time widespread proprietorship would wane. Papineau feared that censitaires would become an immoral, degenerate, and vulnerable group of “impoverished proletarians.”[146] With sharp sarcasm towards abolitionists’ reasoning, he wrote that after the implementation of freehold tenure, there would be no more of the “opprobrium of being a censitaire towards a seigneur. No, there will only exist the honour of being a frightened debtor vis-à-vis a greedy usurer.”[147]

Lastly, Papineau’s fear of a Canadian society without seigneurialism took on a surprising meaning in his more general vision of the republican destiny of the American continent. In 1860, six years after the “antiseigneurial Act” had passed, he expressed his profound disappointment about the abolition, and indicated that seigneurialism could still be very useful to Canadian society.[148] In fact, Papineau expressed how clearly he envisioned the seigneurial regime as a good way to prepare Canadians for integration into American society: by helping to preserve a “nationality destined to blend into another.”[149] Indeed, he saw the preservation of the Canadian nationalité as an important step prior to the general and inexorable amalgamation of New World societies into a bigger, continental “nationalité colombienne.”[150] If American republican society was to be its dominant element, the new “nationalité colombienne” would assimilate the best “qualities” of smaller nationalities emancipated from colonial domination.[151] Without the seigneurial system preserving the highly moral character of the Canadian people, Papineau feared that the “excess of young democrats” and the “selfish ambition” of men responsible for the abolition would lead to the “unnecessarily fast and dishonourable extinction” of the Canadian nationality.[152] While Papineau was fond of Jefferson’s republican principles and the politician’s confidence in the hegemonic destiny of representative institutions based on popular sovereignty, he also hoped that seigneurialism would help Canadians contribute positively to such a destiny, a destiny bound to be, he believed, universally expanded to mankind. Hence, to Papineau, seigneurialism was far from being anachronistic.

Conclusion: On the Significance of Papineau’s Ideas

Papineau’s political struggles of the 1820s, including the seigneurial question, nurtured his democratic sensibility and prompted him towards republicanism and Jefferson’s figure in the 1830s. This shift gave new meaning to Papineau’s political involvement, as well as to the positive ideas he already held about seigneurialism. The fundamental matter went as follows in Papineau’s post-1830, republican mind: in tune with the egalitarian nature of a society of the New World, such as Lower Canada, the primary, “all-republican” purpose of the seigneurial regime derived from its ability to act as a system of “free” land distribution. The regime allowed easy access to land ownership, which was the absolute precondition to the establishment of a vast number of independent and virtuous citizens on whom can rest a democratic and republican political system. In other words, following Jefferson’s example, Papineau saw in (seigneurial) land ownership the basis of a virtuous republican society.

Of course, one should keep in mind rhetorical issues when studying ideas in history, especially when it comes to men involved in politics. During his career in Lower Canadian politics, Papineau tried to convince others by employing rhetoric; he did so when he addressed the seigneurial question by associating seigneurialism with, for example, patriotism, equality, the Canadian nationality, and by demonizing the regime’s detractors.[153] That said, ideas are more than simple reflections of strategic, political, and ever so circumstantial objectives. One should not completely cast aside the sincerity of deeply held values embodied in many ideas nor underestimate the power they may have on the course of human societies. Examining Papineau’s ideas helps us to fully appreciate the diversity of Lower Canadians’ socio-political identities and the possibilities they imagined before and after the 1837/1838 Rebellion.

The study of Papineau’s ideas illustrates the importance of the américanité of Lower Canadian society.[154] He admired American history and institutions, and his faith in the prospect of their extension to the entire continent, including Canada, was almost unshakable — even after the establishment of the 1867 Confederation.[155] Papineau rejoiced at this prospect, as he believed individual independent American states to be in a much more commendable situation than any of the British colonies.[156] “Hereditary institutions,” he had written in 1841, “are contradictory to the customs and opinions of modern times.”[157] Thirty years later, he confidently displayed the same ideas in a letter destined to an American annexationist group: “Let us be firm and persevering in our convictions, they will prevail.”[158] Hence, Papineau was truly an “American”: he was keenly aware of his belonging to the American continent, and had a positive view of his society’s American destiny, even though history would ultimately prove him wrong.

Papineau’s ideas illustrate another different, but complementary, road not taken. Undoubtedly, his republican-seigneurial synthesis was an original example of local republicanism, deeply rooted in a French-Canadian institution. While undeniably influenced by them, Papineau did not passively internalize earlier politicians and philosophers’ ideas on republicanism, not even those of Thomas Jefferson. His admiration for Jefferson certainly coloured his own thoughts on several matters, including seigneurialism. But regarding seigneurialism itself, Papineau clearly adapted some of Jefferson’s thoughts to his own context and formulated an uncommon, maybe unique, “republican seigneurialism.” Papineau’s republican horizon was “seigneurial” in that the tenure regime played a significant role in his surprising vision of continental, republican integration.

This last observation is not trivial and must be emphasized: many historians have stressed that, for Papineau, “the seigneurial system and rural life were central to the cultural survival of French Canada.”[159] But the whole matter was more complicated. In Papineau’s mind, seigneurialism was important for some national traits to endure, but cultural survival was not the ultimate goal: continental republican integration was the inexorable ending he eagerly envisioned, and seigneurialism was the best way to achieve it. Therefore, Papineau’s seigneurialism was not simply conservative nor progressive; in a republican way, it was both. Far from having been unable to overcome his contradictions on the matter, Papineau saw nothing that needed to be reconciled.

Historians have demonstrated the importance of studying local republican movements and of highlighting their diversity in history beyond hegemonic cases such as that of the United States.[160] Following Clément Thibaud, it is a matter of accounting for both the unity of a process — the extension of republicanism in the Atlantic World during the Age of Revolutions — and the uniqueness of its local variations.[161] The Lower Canadian republican movement was, without any doubt, part of a larger, transnational history of republicanism, and so is Papineau’s personal history.[162] Yet he remains just as much a product of his immediate, seigneurial context. Papineau’s seigneurialism, when considered through his republicanism and Jeffersonian inclinations, sheds light on both the outside influences and the local roots of his ideas, the originality of his republican vision, the complexity of the Canadian republican movements, and the diversity of “Atlantic republicanism” during the Age of Revolutions.[163]