How easily we overlook what was happening in Lower Canada in the early 1860s. While bloody conflict wrecked Mexico, the American giant was embroiled in a devastating civil war that would claim 700,000 lives and lead to “a new birth of freedom.” For a time, it seemed that the winds of war would sweep over […]
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Placemen, Knights, and Laborers: The Politics of Jeanne la Fileuse
Emigration was political. Most late nineteenth-century French-Canadian emigrants left Quebec for economic reasons. But there were political causes underlying the province’s economic woes; efforts to stanch this demographic hemorrhage and to repatriate the exiles inevitably reverberated into partisan politics. Early reports on emigration to the United States (issued in 1849 and 1857) suggested solutions; policies […]
Continue readingPlacemen, Knights, and Laborers: Honoré Beaugrand on Emigration
What’s in a name? For illustrious Quebeckers of the late nineteenth century, we might think that it was destiny. Honoré Mercier, Faucher de Saint-Maurice, and Prosper Bender, all born in the 1840s, each had a name to match his personality and preeminence. So it was with Honoré Beaugrand, who survives in Quebec’s historical memory chiefly […]
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