Alexis de Tocqueville and Lower Canada

In 1831-1832, Alexis de Tocqueville spent time in America during which he wrote his De la démocratie en Amérique, a critique of the socio-political nature of American civilisation that is widely regarded as a classic work of political theory. While touring northern New York State with his companion Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville learned to his surprise that a French enclave survived on the banks of the St. Lawrence and at the end of August 1831 he and Beaumont visited. They spent twelve days in Lower Canada at the end of the summer of 1831 notably in Quebec and Montreal where Tocqueville had discussions with the Lower Canadian elite including the deputies John Neilson and Dominique Mondelet. [1] Although he did not write up his experiences, Tocqueville left valuable notes about Lower Canadian society scattered in his work and correspondence that show considerable insight and analytical clarity.

Tocqueville, deeply Catholic and French in his loyalties, was impressed by Lower Canada, both on the spot and later in reflection. It seemed to him like a museum. On the one hand, as aristocrat and landowner, he was charmed by the warmth, hospitality, and morality of the peasantry. On the other hand, the colony served him in his published work as the mirror image of American democracy. As he would later write in Democracy in America, ‘the habit of thinking and governing for oneself is indispensable in a new colony,’ but there seemed to be little of this in Lower Canada, where the mass of the French population was subordinated to curé, seigneur, and agricultural routine. The presence of local, electorally managed institutions in New England seemed to him to account for much of the striking difference in economic and commercial development between Lower Canada and the American states. Yet he would continue to reflect on the relations between ‘civilization’ (the growth of commerce and the division of labour) and morality in the rest of his travels.[2]

Believing that nothing remained of the French presence in America, Tocqueville was agreeably surprised to discover in Lower Canada a ‘race forte’, largely French, peaceful, agricultural, prosperous, hospitable, whose customs were well-established, not excessively religious and with a strong sense of their heritage. He recognised that the difference between the French Canadians and the British lay in their different values. If the ‘race canadienne’ appeared somewhat ignorant to him compared to the Americans, for Tocqueville they seemed ‘supérieure quant aux qualités du cœur’.[3] He appreciated that although French Canadians rejected the utilitarianism and mercantile spirit evident in Anglo-American values they were influenced by the egalitarianism of American democracy.

It is with emotion and astonishment that Tocqueville noticed the extent of the similarities between the French and the ‘Français du Canada’: merry, undertaking, sharp, talkative, scoffer, open, avid of glory, sociable, obliging, proud of their origins and more instinctive than reasoned. [4] Attached to their religion and their traditions, the Canadians were xenophobic and unwilling to move away their land to colonise other areas whatever their possibilities. Fearing a possible cultural fusion with the ‘English’, Tocqueville was delighted by the fact that religion represented ‘un obstacle aux mariages entre les deux races’. Those who feared the French Canadians most were the British and Canadian elites who were profoundly ‘English in manners and ideas’.[5] Tocqueville also feared the submission of the Canadian elite to the colonial authorities, the massive influx of immigrant and the general apathy of the Canadians.

Tocqueville considered that the Conquest was a tragic event for the Canadian people but was convinced that it had the ability ‘one day to establish a great French nation in America’.[6] It seemed easy for him to note that ‘les Français sont le peuple vaincu’ because, although they were in the majority, many of Lower Canadian elite were primarily ‘British’ in attitude. Even if French was almost universally spoken, Tocqueville recognised that

...the majority of the newspapers, the posters and signs of the French merchants were in English. Commercial enterprises are almost all in their hands. It is beyond doubt the leading class in Canada and I expect that this has long been the case.’[7]

Several other things demonstrate that Tocqueville noticed the latent animosity between the two people and had a premonition of the deep upheavals to come: ‘Tout annonce que le réveil de ce peuple approche’. [8] He also noticed the enthusiasm with which some within the Lower Canadian elite had become ‘enlightened’ and deeply opposed to the ‘Anglais’. However, he noted that the hatred of the Canadians ‘se dirige plus encore contre le gouvernement que contre la race anglaise en général’.[9]

Tocqueville left America shortly after his Lower Canadian visit, but continued his enquiries into its government, culture and politics as he thought through what he had seen in America. He was in England in 1833 and again in 1835; in the latter year he also toured Ireland, still making notes and preparing the second volume of Democracy.[10] His appreciation of the simple morality and material comfort of the French Canadian peasantry contrasted sharply with his reactions to the moral degradation, loose sexual morality and widespread illegitimacy caused by the operation of the English Poor Laws and by the astonishing contrasts of wealth and misery in industrial Manchester. Tocqueville was also struck by the popular enthusiasm for schooling among the Irish Catholic peasant population, despite its miserable poverty, something that contrasted sharply with the indifference of the French-Canadian peasantry. He visited schools and in County Tuam had a long conversation with a priest who supported the English government’s new educational system, even though it excluded sectarian religious instruction from the schoolroom. This system, which liberals in England had promoted, but whose adoption there was blocked by sectarian struggles, was suggested both by the Gosford Commission and by the Durham Mission for Canada and it formed the basis of much of the Canadian school legislation in the 1840s. Wasn’t the priest worried about Protestant conversion, Tocqueville wondered? Education first, the priest argued, Ireland desperately needed education and, anyway, he got the children as soon as they came outside class.

The Whigs and Radicals whom Tocqueville visited and corresponded with in England were not limited to J.S. Mill and J.A. Roebuck, although Lower Canadian Patriote politicians might have profited from Tocqueville’s comments on the latter. As Lower Canadian politics dissolved into attrition over the Civil List and the question of an elective Legislative Council, the Patriote Parti’s analysis of the stance of the British government was said to be that of the Assembly’s agent, Roebuck.[11] While Tocqueville commented on Roebuck’s commitment to reform, and his respect for property and religion, he also noted his marginal social status and the fact that his political position depended on ‘continually keeping the people’s passions in motion.’ Those passions failed in the 1837 elections when he lost his seat in Bath and well before that he had only limited success in arousing much interest in Lower Canadian grievances in the Commons.

Tocqueville corresponded at length with the political economist Nassau Senior and Mill served as an intermediary between Tocqueville and Edward ‘Bear’ Ellice (although it seems they did not manage to meet when Ellice was in Paris).[12] Ellice was the seigneur of Beauharnois, south-west of Montreal, and for much of the 1820s and 1830s a leading voice in governing circles on Canadian questions. He was an intimate of Lord Durham and it was likely that Ellice’s urging convinced Durham to undertake his mission to Canada in the wake of the 1837 Rebellion. In Canada in 1836, Ellice was in frequent contact with Pierre-Dominique Debartzch, seigneur for St. Charles and through him with others disaffected with the radical politics of the Papineau faction. Ellice reported his meetings with Debartzch to Melbourne’s cabinet, discussing how best to manage Lower Canadian politics and urging the creation of a form of ministerial government with ‘a discreet division of the loaves and fishes’ to include the appointment of Louis-Joseph Papineau to the office of President of the Executive Council or as Attorney-General.

In a letter dated 3 January 1838, Tocqueville commented on the rebellions that occurred in Lower Canada the previous year. [13] With limited information about events, he limited his comments to general conclusions but seems to have understood the reasons behind the rebellions

À l’époque de mon passage, les Canadiens étaient pleins de préjugés contre les Anglais qui habitaient au milieu d’eux, mais ils semblaient singulièrement attachés au gouvernement anglais qu’ils regardaient comme un arbitre désintéressé placé entre eux et cette population anglaise qu`ils redoutaient.

However, Tocqueville appeared unaware of how the situation could have degenerated but that it was ‘peine à croire que l’administration coloniale n’a pas quelques reproches à se faire’.

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[1] Vallée, Jacques, Tocqueville au Bas-Canada, (Editions du Jour), 1973, pp. 86-88, 93-99.

[2] De Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, (Knopf), 1994, p. 430n.

[3] Ibid, Vallée, Jacques, Tocqueville au Bas-Canada, p. 100.

[4] Ibid, Vallée, Jacques, Tocqueville au Bas-Canada, p. 109.

[5] Ibid, Vallée, Jacques, Tocqueville au Bas-Canada, pp. 101-102.

[6] Ibid, Vallée, Jacques, Tocqueville au Bas-Canada, p. 114.

[7] Ibid, Vallée, Jacques, Tocqueville au Bas-Canada, p. 88.

[8] Ibid, Vallée, Jacques, Tocqueville au Bas-Canada, p. 101.

[9] Ibid, Vallée, Jacques, Tocqueville au Bas-Canada, p. 104.

[10] De Tocqueville, Alexis, Memoir on Pauperism, Paris, 1835, (Institute of Economic Affairs), 1998 and Mayer, J.P., (ed.), Journeys to England and Ireland, (Arno), 1987 provide Tocqueville’s reflections. Zemach, Ada, ‘Alexis de Tocqueville on England’, Review of Politics, Vol. 13, (3), (1951), pp. 329-343 and Welch, Cheryl B., (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville, (Cambridge University Press), 2006 provide analysis.

[11] Knowles, E. C., The English Philosophical Radicals and Lower Canada, 1820-1830, London, 1929, provides the context. Thomas, William, The Philosophic Radicals: Nine Studies in Theory and Practice, 1817-1841, (Oxford University Press), 1979, is the best examination of this amorphous and highly ambiguous political ‘party’. See also Turner, Michael J., Independent Radicalism in Early Victorian Britain, (Praeger), 2004, pp. 207-215, and in his ‘Radical agitation and the Canada question in British politics, 1837-41’, Historical Research, Vol. 79, (2006), pp. 90-114.

[12] Colthart, James, ‘Edward Ellice’, DCB, Vol. 10, 1861-1800, 1976, pp. 233-239 is a useful study.

[13] Ibid, Vallée, Jacques, Tocqueville au Bas-Canada, p. 168-170.

The meaning of poverty

Between 1830 and 1914, there were two period when state intervention in British social policy significantly increased. The first of these was in the 1830s and 1840s and the second in the Edwardian years at the beginning of the twentieth century. Fundamental in the first burst of reforming activity was the New Poor Law of 1834, which centred round the workhouse system. It gave conditional welfare for a minority, with public assistance at the price of social stigma and loss of voting rights.

Some Edwardian reforms still retained conditions on take-up, as in the first old-age pensions in 1908, where tests of means and character eligibility were reminiscent of the Poor Law. Three years later, in 1911, there was a radical departure in the national scheme for insurance against ill-health and unemployment that conferred benefits as a result of contributions. It was still a selective scheme, limited to a section of the male population and entirely left out dependent women and children.

The nineteenth century had inherited the attitude that such a state of affairs was both right and proper. Many contemporary writers regarded poverty as a necessary element in society, since only by feeling its pinch could the labouring poor be inspired to work. Thus it was not poverty by pauperism or destitution that was regarded as a social problem. [1] Many early Victorians adopted the attitude that combined fatalism, ‘For ye have the poor always with you’[2] and moralism, destitution was the result of individual weakness of character. Fraser’s Magazine in 1849 commented that

So far from rags and filth being the indications of poverty, they are in the large majority of cases, signs of gin drinking, carelessness and recklessness.[3]

Such cases if congregated together in sufficient numbers seemed to constitute a social menace.[4] It was thinking of this sort that provided the impetus to poor law reform in 1834. Relief continued to be offered but only in the workhouse where the paupers would be regulated and made less comfortable than those who chose to stay outside and fend for themselves, the principle of ‘less-eligibility’. Those who were genuinely in dire need would accept the workhouse rather than starve. Those who were not would prefer to remain independent and thus avoid the morally wasting disease of pauperism. The Poor Law of 1834 provided an important administrative model for future generations with central policy-making and supervision and local administration but the workings of this model were often profoundly disappointing to the advocates of ‘less-eligibility’ as a final solution to the problem of pauperism. But the issue was not pauperism, the issue on which contemporaries focused, but the debilitating effects of poverty itself.

Poverty is a term that is notoriously difficult to define. In simple terms, the failure to provide the basic necessities of life, food, clothes and shelter results in a state of poverty.[5] British society in the nineteenth century was poor by modern standards. The net national income per head at 1900 prices has been estimated as £18 in 1855 and £42 in 1900. Even the higher paid artisan might find himself at a time of depression unable to get work even if willing and anxious to do so. Most members of the working-class experienced poverty at some time in their lives and, compared to the middle-classes, their experience of poverty was likely to be a far more frequent, if not permanent one.

It was not until near the end of the nineteenth century that poverty was first measured in any systematic fashion and most of the evidence of the extent and causes of poverty is from around 1900.[6] The number of paupers had long been known: they amounted to about 9% of the population in the 1830s and this fell to less than 3% by 1900. Far more suffered from poverty than ever applied for workhouse relief. In 1883, Andrew Mearns in his Bitter Cry of Outcast London claimed than as much as a quarter of the population of London received insufficient income to maintain physical health.[7] Impressionistic claims like this led Charles Booth to begin his scientific investigation of the London poor in 1886. He found that as much as 30% of the population of London and 38% of the working-class lived below the poverty line.[8]

Booth‘s conclusions were criticised by some who pointed to the unique position of London. However, B. Seebohm Rowntree[9] did a similar survey of his native York and in 1899 published conclusions that mirrored those of Booth. [10] He distinguished between ‘primary poverty’ and ‘secondary poverty‘.[11] Primary poverty was a condition where income was insufficient even if every penny was spent wisely. Secondary poverty occurred when those whose incomes were theoretically sufficient to maintain physical efficiency suffered poverty as a consequence of ‘insufficient spending’. 10% of York’s population and 15% of its working-classes were found to be in primary poverty. A further 18% of the whole population and 28% of the working-classes were living in secondary poverty. Rowntree also emphasised the changing incidence of poverty at different stages of working-class life, the ‘poverty cycle’ with its alternating periods of want and comparative plenty.[12]

Other surveys followed the work of Booth and Rowntree.[13] The most notable was the investigation in 1912-1913 of poverty in Stanley (County Durham), Northampton, Warrington and Reading by A.L. Bowley and A.R. Burnett-Hurst.[14] They found that the levels of poverty reflected different economic conditions and that among the working-class population primary poverty accounted for 6%, 9%, 15% and 29% in the respective towns. These conclusions questioned the assumption made by both Booth and Rowntree that similar levels of poverty might be found in most British towns. In fact, the diversity of labour market conditions was reflected in considerable variation in the levels and causes of poverty.

It is important to examine the reliance that can be placed on the results of early poverty surveys as few of their results can be accepted with complete confidence. Booth relied heavily on data from school attendance officers and families with children of school age, itself a cause of poverty were over-represented in what he supposed to be a cross section of the population. Rowntree‘s estimates of food requirements were later regarded as over-generous by nutritionists and he later conceded after a second survey in 1936 that his 1899 poverty lines were ‘too rough to give reliable results’.[15] Working-class respondents, confronted by middle-class investigators were notoriously liable to underestimate income. Most poor law and charity assistance was means tested and the poorer respondents, suspecting that investigators might have some influence in the disposal of relief, took steps not to jeopardise this. Income acquired illegally was likely to remain hidden. It is difficult to compare these levels with poverty at other times. Recent attempts by historians to assess approximate numbers that lived below Rowntree‘s poverty line in mid-nineteenth century Preston, York and Oldham all suggest poverty levels higher than those at the time of the 1899 survey. This is not surprising as between 1850 and 1900 money wages rose considerably and many more insured themselves against sickness and other contingencies.

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[1] A ‘pauper’ can simply be defined as an individual who was in receipt of benefits from the state. A labourer who was out of work was termed an able-bodied pauper, whereas the sick and elderly were called impotent paupers. Relief was given in a variety of ways. Outdoor relief was when the poor received help either in money or in kind. Indoor relief was when the poor entered a workhouse or house of correction to receive help. The Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 said that paupers should all receive indoor relief.

[2] St Matthew, 26: 8-11.

[3] ‘Work and Wages’, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, Vol. xl, (1849), p. 528.

[4] It is important to remember the ‘revolutionary psychosis’ that afflicted many within the ruling elite during the first half of the nineteenth century. Poverty was seen in this revolutionary light.

[5] On this subject the briefest introduction is Rose, M.E., The Relief of Poverty 1834-1914, (Macmillan), 2^nd ed., 1986.

[6] Englander, David and O’Day, Rosemary, (eds.), Retrieved Riches: Social Investigation in Britain, 1840-1914, (Scolar Press), 1995 examines the nature of social investigation.

[7] Ibid, Mearns, Andrew, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor, pp. 15-18.

[8] Booth, Charles, Life and Labour of the People in London, 17 Vols. (Macmillan), 1889-1903. Norman-Butler, Belinda, Victorian Aspirations: the Life and Labour of Charles and Mary Booth, (Allen and Unwin), 1972 and Simey, T.S. and M.B., Charles Booth: Social Scientist, (Liverpool University Press), 1960 are sound biographies and Fried, A. and Elman, R., (eds.), Charles Booth’s London: a Portrait of the Poor at the Turn of the Century. Drawn from His ‘Life and Labour of the People in London’, (Harmondsworth), 1969 a useful collection of sources. O’Day, Rosemary and Englander, David, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry: Life and Labour of the People in London Reconsidered, (Hambledon), 1993, Gillie, Alan, ‘Identifying the poor in the 1870s and 1880s’, Economic History Review, Vol. 61, (2008), pp. 302-325 and Spicker, P., ‘Charles Booth: the examination of poverty’, Social Policy and Administration, Vol. 24, (1990), pp. 21-38 examine Booth’s ideas. .

[9] On Rowntree see, Bradshaw, Jonathan and Sainsbury, Roy, (eds.), Getting the measure of poverty: the early legacy of Seebohm Rowntree, (Ashgate), 2000 and Briggs, Asa, Social Thought and Social Action: A study of the work of Seebohm Rowntree, 1871-1954, (Longman), 1961.

[10] Seebohm Rowntree, B., Poverty: a study of town life, (Macmillan), 1899, reprinted, (Policy Press), 2000, 2^nd ed., (Macmillan), 1901.

[11] Ibid, Seebohm Rowntree, B., Poverty: a study of town life, pp. 119-145.

[12] Ibid, Seebohm Rowntree, B., Poverty: a study of town life, pp. 86-118.

[13] Hennock, E.P., ‘Concepts of poverty in the British social surveys from Charles Booth to Arthur Bowley’, in Bulmer, Martin, Bales, Kevin and Sklar, Kathryn Kish, (eds.), The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880-1940, (Cambridge University Press), 1991 and Hennock, E.P., ‘The measurement of urban poverty: from the metropolis to the nation, 1880-1920’, Economic History Review, Vol. 40, (1987), pp. 208-227.

[14] Bowley, A.L. and Burnett-Hurst, A.R., Livelihood and Poverty: A Study in the Economic Conditions of Working-Class Households in Northampton, Warrington, Stanley and Reading, 1915; see also, Carré, Jacques, ‘A.L. Bowley et A.R. Burnett-Hurst étudient les familles ouvrières à Reading en 1915’, in Carré, Jacques, (ed.), Les visiteurs du pauvre: Anthologie d’enquêtes britanniques sur la pauvreté urbaine, 19e-20e siècle, (Karthala), 2000, pp. 158-173.

[15] Rowntree, Seebohm, Poverty and Progress: A Second Social Survey of York, (Longman, Green and Co.), 1941, p. 461.