Nearly coinciding with the country’s 250th anniversary, this is Query the Past’s 250th blog post. Thank you for reading.

Léon Ducharme said to me, “Madam, you must only take the clothing you need for yourself and your children, give us the keys, and leave; we are here to take possession of this house, it belongs to us.” I answered, “Where should I go, on these roads, perilous as they are; an unaccompanied woman, with four children . . . ?”

The year was 1837 and state authority had disintegrated in Lower Canada.

Led by Ducharme, more than sixty armed men had entered the home and stores of Jean Baptiste Casavant in Saint-Césaire. The master being away, they proposed to expel his wife, Marie Victoire Boucher, and their children. Relenting at last, Ducharme and his accomplices confined Boucher and the children to a bedroom. They sacked the house and stores, which fed the improvised garrison. The occupation likely continued for more than a week, that is, until approaching troops brought a semblance of order to the parish.

Alongside “la Conquête” and the Quiet Revolution, the Rebellions of 1837 and 1838 occupy an enviable place in Quebec’s historical imagination. Their continued relevance is maintained by the Journée nationale des Patriotes (a statutory holiday), the Maison nationale des Patriotes in Saint-Denis, such films as Quand je serai parti… vous vivrez encore and 15 février 1839, frequent mention in the press, and works of popular history. Many Quebeckers can name the main battles of Lower Canada’s insurrections and the leading figures of the conflict. Historical awareness is buttressed by a nationalistic lens focused on diametrically opposed camps: “l’envahisseur anglais” and a protest movement representing the French-Canadian majority.

Scholarly research has brought nuance to this narrative and helped transcend a story that has long revolved around high politics, hero worship, and national identity. However, the breakdown of law and order, political escalation, and the exaction of popular justice by ordinary people like Léon Ducharme remains nebulous outside of the main theaters of the Rebellions. In Montreal’s hinterland, the focus on military engagements at Saint-Denis, Saint-Charles, and Saint-Eustache conceals a civil war that played out with various inflections in different communities.

Whatever their deeply-held beliefs, residents of many parishes were caught between two factions and had to bend to the prevailing winds—which could shift rapidly. In the process, they faced the risk of retaliation at the hands of their neighbors, both loyal and Patriote. The course of events in Saint-Césaire makes these threats amply clear.

The Casavant family was not alone in facing the whims and wrath of the mob. Magistrate and merchant William Chaffers was forced to flee; his house and stores were also occupied. Insurgents attacked civilian homes and compelled, under threat of greater violence, local office holders to surrender their commissions. No longer were there justices of the peace, sheriffs, bailiffs, or militia. Neither people nor property were safe.

*          *          *

Twenty years ago, Louis-Georges Harvey hired me as a summer research assistant to collect Rebellion-era pamphlets and index Montreal Gazette articles with political content. Over the course of three summers, I saw nearly every issue of the Gazette published from 1792 to 1838. The experience helped inform my thinking about the Rebellions. We couldn’t dismiss the Gazette as a pro-British, Tory rag without erasing half of the story of political struggle that exploded in violence in 1837.

That was then. I did not expect to return to the topic nearly two decades later, least of all through genealogy. But, as it happens, my Lacroix ancestors lived in Saint-Césaire before and after the Rebellions, and I wanted to know something of their experiences and allegiances.

I found them in Saint-Césaire when a stepson married in January 1837. Exactly three years later, they were in the overwhelmingly English-speaking and Protestant Township of Brome. A winter move being unlikely, they must have left Saint-Césaire in 1839 or 1838. Whether this was a purely economic move or the product of unwelcome political opinions is still an open question… but, had they been displaced Patriotes, Brome would have been a most unlikely refuge.

In trying to reassemble the genealogical puzzle, I came across a small mountain of affidavits, depositions, letters, and reports about the situation in Saint-Césaire—all documents that provide an on-the-ground view of conflict in the rural Yamaska parish.

Order was lost, reconstituted, and restored. Allegiances shifted quickly. There were meetings, kangaroo courts, disguises, pillaging, knocks in the night, and threats of assassination. As eruptions of violence often are, this was a messy situation. Reprisals for past wrongs occurred as Patriote sympathizers asserted their power in November 1837. As the political and military winds shifted, these insurgents’ targets—French and English—testified against their oppressors. Most of the ringleaders would benefit from Lord Durham’s amnesty. Toussaint Goddu, who had led a column of men to the Richelieu in the wake of Saint-Denis, was sent to Bermuda.

Goddu’s mission was an exception, and a late one: the concerns of the Saint-Césaire Patriotes were intensely local and they acted in their own community. This is not to say that they were unsophisticated or that they held no higher political aspirations. Rather, they confronted power and oppression as they knew them, that is, in the form of office holders, merchants, and notables who had made themselves disagreeable often socially and economically.

As I recently noted on social media, the Patriotes of 1837-1838 have become holy blissful martyrs in Quebec’s collective memory. In the popular imagination, they are as cartoonish as their political counterparts and rivals.

With renewed attention to mob rule and rural violence, my recently published article on the Rebellions may, in a very small way, restore some of their humanity to each side. The article is available online to Histoire sociale/Social History subscribers.

Further Reading

I have previously studied the Rebellion era in two peer-reviewed. A piece in the International History Review provides a new glimpse of the cross-border Patriot War of the late 1830s. In an article in the American Review of Canadian Studies, I place the Rebellions’ political refugees in the larger arc of early migrations from Lower Canada.

On this blog, see a brief overview of the Rebellions’ fall-out and a glimpse of the little-known Ogden Report.