Legacies of Fear: Law and Politics in Quebec in the Era of the French Revolution

Martin L. Nicolai an adjunct assistant professor of history at Queen’s
University.

This legal history of Lower Canada during the years 1793 to 1811
provides an important reinterpretation of the period. Breaking with
Donald Creighton and Fernand Ouellet, who see serious nationalistic
ethnic tensions emerging only in the years after 1800, and with
Jean-Pierre Wallot, who traces conflict almost back to the conquest,
Greenwood convincingly argues that the biethnic class divisions
characteristic of the early British regime turned into political
polarization along ethnic lines in 1792–93. Greenwood demonstrates
that English-Canadian fears aroused by the radicalization of the French
Revolution and the alleged danger of insurrection and French invasion
created what he calls a “garrison mentality.” This paranoia, which
magically trans formed parti canadien politicians into conspiring
Jacobins or Bonapartists and rioting peasants into rampaging
sans-culottes, had little basis in reality, for French Canadians of all
classes became almost uniformly hostile toward post-1789 France.

In contrast to Creighton, who believes that English-speaking merchants
and administrators only wanted French Canadians to adopt the English
commercial legal system, Greenwood persuasively argues that after 1801
the English considered complete assimilation of French Canadians
imperative for security reasons. His idea that the parti canadien became
overtly nationalistic, anti-commercial, and pro-clerical as a direct
result of this pressure is plausible, although the Revolution’s
undermining of liberal attitudes among the bourgeoisie was also a
factor.

Greenwood is probably the first historian to point out that the
colonial government’s legal reaction to sedition or treasonable
behavior went far beyond the measures used in contemporary Britain. The
authorities suspended habeas corpus and other civil rights virtually
without qualification, and judges reverted to a “Baconian” role as
an arm of the executive, with no attempt to provide the nonpartisan
justice prevalent in Britain pre–1791 British Quebec.

Greenwood’s use of unorthodox sources to place cases such as the
treason trial of David McLane in a larger public and political context
provides an excellent example of the new legal history. No one has gone
further in explaining the crucial legal and political precedents of this
formative period in the creation of a bi-national Canadian state.