Le printemps de l'Amerique francaise: Americanite, anticolonialisme et republicanisme dans le discours politique quebecois, 1805-1837 (review)

Reviewed by: Le printemps de l'Amérique française: Américanité, anticolonialisme et républicanisme dans le discours politique québécois, 1805-1837 Bruce Curtis Le printemps de l'Amérique française: Américanité, anticolonialisme et républicanisme dans le discours politique québécois, 1805-1837. Louis-Georges Harvey. Montreal: Boréal, 2004. Pp. 296, 27,95$ In this tendentious book, Louis-Georges Harvey recovers some of the republican dimensions of the political discourse of the Lower Canadian French-speaking elite. Acknowledging the work of Yvan Lamonde and more especially of Gérard Bouchard, Harvey sees Lower Canada as a new world society whose political struggles are like those of the American Patriot movement and the creole nationalists of South America and the Caribbean. Reading a selection of contemporary French-language political pamphlets, some parliamentary papers, and parts of the French-language press, Harvey describes for Lower Canada the themes of agrarian virtue, the praise of simple equality, the critique of official corruption, and the rejection of commerce, which are identified as characteristically republican in J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner's neo-Romanist history of ideas. Harvey denounces without naming the many historians who have promoted a view of Lower Canada as a closed society with an economically retrograde and politically confused elite. In seeing colonial politics as anchored in battles over liberalism, they have bought into the 'myth of the defeat of 1837' propagated by Lord Durham, who understood only too well that a political mythology of ethnic struggle was necessary for his liberal vision of British America. By forgetting that the parti canadien and the parti patriote attacked mercantile capitalism from within a framework of republican civic humanism, historians promote a false belief in 'Laurentian exceptionalism' and advance the hegemony of liberal ideology. Warning historians against the anachronism of seeing liberalism at work before it existed, Harvey proposes (with no sense of irony) that in this first société distincte, the republican political elite had a clearly articulated, progressive projet de société. We should draw from these first républicains québécois lessons for our own opposition to neo-liberal domination. [End Page 319] Harvey's first chapter is meant to establish the openness of Lower Canada to information and ideas from abroad. The colony's French-speaking elite was educated in a classical humanist curriculum, and American books and newspapers as well as travellers' accounts of American society circulated in the colony, especially after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Living as they were under intense and continual colonial repression, Lower Canadians saw the parallels between their own condition and that of the American Patriots. Harvey argues that from the outset Lower Canadian discourse was dominated by a civic humanism analogous to that of Pocock's 'country' party. The book's second chapter covers the period from the founding of Le Canadien newspaper and the debate between it and the Quebec Mercury, which Harvey sees as the first public discussion of colonial political institutions, through to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when wartime political repression forced Lower Canadian politicians to denounce all things American and to pretend loyalty to the Crown. The flood of new information into the colony at war's end, the struggles surrounding the projected union of the Canadas, and the emergence of the parti canadien are shown in chapter 3 to have led to a rehabilitation of the American referent in political discourse, where elements of civic humanism became much more common. Chapters 4 and 5 take us from 1830 to the events of 1837–8. Harvey suggests that Louis-Joseph Papineau was overtly republican in his views already in 1831, and the Lower Canadian political elite increasingly saw itself as of the new world and read politics in republican terms. Members of the elite reformulated their conception of the nation as one that included all inhabitants of Lower Canada, and their progressive societal project aimed to promote civic participation. Harvey has their vision of the nation as civic rather than ethnic and argues that such had to be the case because the parti patriote had to attract the votes of English-speakers: the...

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