Administrative infrastructure and social enquiry: finding the facts about agriculture in Quebec, 1853-4.

In the thirty years since Philip Abrams stressed the importance of mundane administrative questions in the development of the 'social science', there has been a remarkable resurgence of interest in this area and in the history of statistics more generally.(1) A central preoccupation in the literature has been with the practices described by Hacking as 'the taming of chance.'(2) Chance, the devil's work to a world in which the divine hand guided everything, has been reconstituted as probability, the essence of order in a world where indeterminacy reigns.

One of the preconditions for the dominance of probabilism has been the production of 'facts,' observable regularities recorded routinely in a dispassionate manner. As the registrars of vital events, the measurers of military recruits, the enumerators of populations, and so on, state agencies have played a leading role in making such observations. Moreover, in politics and administration, especially from the second quarter of the nineteenth century in Europe and America, appeals to the facts came increasingly to be seen as the way to resolve contentious political and social questions. While the facts as arbiters of conflict could speak with many different voices, the belief that truth was contained somewhere in the 'real facts of the matter' came to be common in this period.(3)

Obviously, the facts are themselves products of definite practices of knowledge-production, practices by means of which the raw materials of truth are appropriated in particular ways by certain kinds of observers with interests of their own. In the formative period of social science, fact-production was largely continuous with earlier cultural practices, even as it contributed to the emergence of new ways of fashioning truth. The elevation of some people's observations to the status of facts, moreover, has typically involved the normalization or 'black boxing' of the interpretive dimensions of practices of observation.(4)

'Black boxing', a term derived from contemporary social studies of science, refers to the ways in which the modalities of investigative practices acquire the status of taken-for-granted elements in the production of knowledge. A central concern in the literature of social studies of science has been with the dependence of science upon such 'infrastructural work' as the construction of measurement systems, conventions of reporting and other means of stabilizing enquiry. Some writers point out that the 'truth effect' of enquiries bound by such conventions derives in part from organized inattention to unsuccessful attempts.(5)

This article is particularly concerned with such dimensions of nascent social scientific practice, especially in the domain of state administrative knowledge-production. It begins with a discussion of the problem of knowing civil society as an administrative domain. To know civil society from the viewpoint of nineteenth century state agencies involved defining the social, the peculiar object of the social science. I first outline some general attempts to define and know the social domain in the British North American colonies called the Canadas (the southern parts of the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec in the period 1841-1867) and then explore the knowledge-production process in more detail through an examination of one of the first texts produced by a Canadian social scientific agency: Jacques-Pierre Rheaume's fact-finding report on agricultural conditions in the district of Quebec in 1853-4.(6)

The report can be seen as an 'unsuccessful trial' for, although Rheaume's text contains a handsome narrative, and although Rheaume himself was a controversial figure, by the time the report was delivered to the Canadian Minister of Agriculture who had commissioned it, it was considered of no particular interest to anyone: at least the parliamentary printing committee recommended that it not be reproduced and no visible changes in government policy towards agriculture resulted from it. Still, that a government ministry commissioned an investigator to find the facts about certain aspects of rural social organization illustrates the emerging belief that the facts of the matter, collected dispassionately, could speak authoritatively. From this point of view, that Rheaume's facts did not lead to any transformation of state policy is as important, in principle, as if they had transformed it completely. How Rheaume went about finding the facts will illustrate part of the process of administrative knowledge-production.

Rheaume's report is one of those minor, marginal documents to which attention is encouraged by Michel Foucault's genealogical method.(7) From this point of view, the linkages between the past and the present are not to be seen as the linear or evolutionary unfolding of processes whose content is determined in advance. Rather, such linkages are characterized by the intersection of forces that may have quite different and unconnected histories of their own. Events and practices that seem to be quite marginal, trivial or isolated at one historical moment may acquire a dramatically heightened importance at another. Social practices that emerge in one specific context under particular conditions may migrate to quite different contexts and be enlisted in the pursuit of quite other purposes, as Foucault's own analysis of the confessional suggests.(8) The study of Rheaume's practice of the social science illuminates the translation and elevation of the personal knowledge of members of certain social classes into 'the facts.'

Knowing the Social

How does the domain of the social come to be defined as a knowable entity accessible to policy? Given that no state agency can administer intensively a population about which it knows nothing, how does a developing political administration gain access to regions of civil society that are not themselves subject to extensive administrative organization?(9) As adjuncts to administrative enterprises, social science and statistics have sought to generate useful intelligence about social relations and conditions so that these might be governed. Yet, the investigation of social conditions and relations presupposes that the relevant portions of the subject population can be identified, situated, located and induced or compelled to allow themselves and their conditions to be investigated.

The conduct of social scientific investigation thus implies the effective incorporation of the subject population in a framework of administrative structures and relations. Such incorporation need not take place at all: attempts to know civil society may not succeed. Where it does take place, the incorporation of social subjects in administrative relations may be as fleeting as an interview with the census enumerator at the door of one's house or as enduring as a lengthy incarceration in a public institution. Without some degree of administrative incorporation of the object of investigation, however, state knowledge of civil society does not take the form of statistics or social science; it is likely to remain the personal knowledge of public officials or local notables. Only people and things that can be subjected to a process of standardizing classification and codification may adopt a form that goes beyond personal experience.

As an administrative enterprise, then, social science yields knowledge not of people and social relations in a pristine condition; it yields knowledge that is mediated through the kinds of administrative incorporation to which the objects of knowledge are subjected. Historians and historical sociologists interested in the development of social science and statistics, as well as anyone concerned to use the fruits of social enquiry as a source of information, must attend to the ways in which these forms of knowledge are shaped by the interaction of three phenomena: the characteristics and interests of those conducting the enquiry; their means of access to the object of knowledge; and, in the case of human informants, the ways in which the enquiry is taken up by the objects of knowledge. These concerns will guide my analysis of Jacques-Pierre Rheaume's investigation.

The Canadas

In the early 1850s, the administrative capacity of the Canadian state, by which I mean its ability to contain the population within the kinds of administrative grids and effective social taxonomies upon which social scientific practice depends, was little developed.(10) There were few well-established state administrative boundaries that framed social activities and relations. School municipalities, one of the earliest effective means of administrative localization, were reasonably well-established in Canada West, but their existence in mainly francophone Canada East was still quite tenuous. Township and county municipalities with substantial powers were organized only in 1841 in Canada West, while in Canada East local opposition effectively prevented the replacement of parish structures with state administrative bodies until the middle 1850s.

Other elements of the administrative infrastructure upon which social scientific investigation now depends were also lacking in the colony: there were no population registers under the control of state administrative agencies; no vital statistics were produced in Canada West; houses in villages and towns were not numbered, nor often were streets named; topographical maps were unheard of and survey maps were rare; although the government commanded a corps of post masters, no uniform postal grid existed; the telegraph and railway nets were in their infancy; there was no telephone system; in Canada East there was no systematic registration of property. Members of the population were not subject to the other kinds of public (social insurance numbers, health registration cards, drivers' licenses, etc.) or private (transaction records, credit card purchases, credit histories, etc.) administrative registration that now facilitate their localization in social scientific investigations.

Kinship, neighbourliness, mutual economic dependence, community school and community church, parish institutions, and exchange networks gave social relations their form: an unquantified and unquantifiable form. Government was roughly modelled on the English pattern of the dominance of landed gentry at the local level, but civil society remained largely opaque to central government. Canadian colonial governors in the late 1830s and early 1840s complained frequently that the absence of an effective local administrative presence made it impossible to base policy on a knowledge of social conditions, especially in largely francophone Lower Canada/Canada East. Mundane administrative work and social enquiry were centrally important in the translation of this form of social relations into one susceptible to policy initiatives.

Early Experiments at Social Knowledge

In the period surrounding the Rebellion of 1837, finding out what was going on in the Canadas, what had gone wrong, and what to do about it became pressing matters for the English imperial authorities. Major investigatory commissions were despatched; an extensive official documentary system was constructed and several systematic attempts were made to discover the causes of political insurrection and to eliminate them. Some of these commissions engaged in sustained and well organized attempts to acquire a comprehensive view of the facts, employing and developing techniques of the social science in the process.

Particularly ambitious was the enquiry into educational conditions in Lower Canada of 1838-9, conducted by the Bullet Education Commission. Replicating one of the newest methods of the London and Manchester Statistical Societies, the Commission's secretary, Christopher Dunkin, distributed a package of enormous and very detailed questionnaires to priests, postmasters, ministers of religion, militia officers, justices of the peace and notaries in each colonial township and parish. These people were invited to provide extensive information about all dimensions of educational matters in their areas. The work requested of them ranged from taking a census of the literary abilities of the population, according to sex and age, to producing an exhaustive historical account of each local school district for a ten year period.

Dunkin's mandate was to produce a comprehensive view of the educational statistics of the colony as a guide for policy. He attempted to use the limited existing Lower Canadian administrative grid to direct his enquiries, but with very uneven success. The investigation depended upon the willingness of local observers to translate what they knew about educational matters onto standard report forms, but Dunkin could not effectively secure their cooperation. He could not force even those local administrative officers who were competent to conduct the enquiry to answer him, and there was not an effective network of cooperative amateurs on which he could draw, as in Britain. He did not have the resources to send his own investigators into the field.(11) The Education Commission's experience demonstrated that even a well-thought out attempt at getting the facts demanded administrative infrastructure: specifically, reliable means of commanding the participation of strategically placed observers.

Under representative government after 1840, Canadian state agencies set out to organize knowledge of the social domain more actively than in the previous decades. Systematic attempts were made to incorporate localities into administrative networks by legislation and other policy initiatives. One way for governments to generate intelligence about localities was to impose an administrative grid on them by legislation and to use agents - either their own employees or local allies - first to define the boundaries of the grid 'on the ground' and then to report on conditions within its cells. The granting of government subsidies was commonly tied to requirements for standardized reporting practices.

The administration of public education frequently led the way. Beginning in 1841, school acts laid the groundwork for a set of knowledge-production practices that was quickly stabilized in Canada West. Centrally-appointed inspectors, usually members of the gentry, performed the necessary initial work of situating and identifying local schools, school boundaries and educational conditions before passing this work on to men of lesser standing. They translated local knowledges about educational matters into useful administrative categories. Other local officers were required to identify certain kinds of individuals and social relations and to generate standardized observations on provided report forms. Educational conditions and relations were classified and translated into statistical returns, 'facts' which in turn became political resources.

The educational experiment worked well from an administrative point of view in Canada West. In Canada East such was not the case: the administrative grid in question was seen clearly to be a political imposition in many areas in the 1840s and was opposed systematically by those subjected to it. Here the central authority could gain only very limited knowledge of local conditions by means of educational administration.(12)

Census-making was a second major means by which central authorities attempted to know the domain to be governed. While there were attempts at census-making in the decade of the 1830s, with the implementation of representative government after 1840 census-making acquired a heightened importance. Policy and administrative decisions were increasingly tied to a knowledge of population. From the beginning of the latter decade, the drawing of electoral boundaries, the distribution of schools, the location of court houses, registry offices, and the allocation of various forms of state funding all came to be tied to the distribution of population. The nature and causes of population growth and population movement were hotly contested issues of sectional politics.

Again, the fate of census-making as an administrative knowledge-producing enterprise was quite different in Canada West and Canada East. In the former, the establishment of local administrative bodies, in the form of representative district councils, and an effective system of property registration, made it possible for the central government to use local property assessors to conduct household enumerations beginning in 1842. The administrative structure of the district council enabled the central authority to conduct an expanded census of population in 1848 with some degree of efficiency.

Opposition to the district council initiative in Canada East, by contrast, resulted in a very uneven development of local administrative agencies. Such opposition ensured that no enumeration was attempted there until 1844, and then many people refused to answer census queries. A census scheduled for 1847 was abandoned in the absence of an effective local administrative organization and further attempts at enumeration in 1848 and 1850 at worst counted none of, and at best less than half, the population. State knowledge of the social on the scale demanded by a census was clearly impossible in the absence of effective local administrative organization. Only in 1852, and then only by directly enlisting and paying its own agents at the local level, did the census agency manage to execute a credible enumeration of population in Canada East. Census history illustrates well the dependence of social enquiry on administrative infrastructure.

Censuses of population were the largest-scale early social scientific investigations in Canada and their history as such is both complex and informative, but they were sporadic enterprises, of limited utility in addressing some important administrative questions by virtue of their scope, comprehensiveness and expense.

Some Canadian social enquiries attempted to estimate or anticipate the success or progress of policies that did not involve the creation of new state institutions. Such policies and projects often aimed at regulating or changing people's behaviour or social conditions, but involved neither strong elements of compulsion nor the disciplining of people in formal institutions. Projects such as those for 'the diffusion of useful knowledge', for the encouragement of technical innovation, for the attraction of settlers to particular regions, for temperance, and for agricultural improvement are cases in point. In these instances, political activists and state servants frequently sought to learn the facts about conditions in localities with a view to promoting their vision of what 'needed to be done'; could not usually draw upon an established administrative grid; but were not usually interested in imposing a new one.

The investigations attached to these kinds of projects, of which Jacques-Pierre Rheaume's enquiry is one, present their own peculiar features. Particularly pertinent for my purposes is that administrative networks typically gave little access to or purchase on the matters in question. Government officials and bureaucrats in the locality were not placed to know the facts (which is not to say they would not be invited to or willing to report them). How then to get the facts? How were the facts shaped by the manner of getting them?

Agricultural conditions in the Quebec district

In June 1853, the Quebec city lawyer, Jacques-Pierre Rheaume, was commissioned by the Canadian Minister of Agriculture to conduct a detailed enquiry into agricultural conditions in the district of Quebec, particularly in the francophone rural parishes. The proposed enquiry was politically volatile.

The Hincks-Morin government in power, a coalition of moderate Reformers from both sections of the colony, in an uneasy alliance with the agrarian radical Clear Grit faction, seemed on the verge, finally, of settling the nagging question of seigneurial tenure in Canada East. Legislation extinguishing this modified form of feudal land tenure passed the Assembly, only to be refused by the Legislative Council on the grounds of its attack on property rights.

The refusal of the legislation gave new life to the parliamentary representatives of the seigneurs. Because many of them had been concerned to argue that the seigneurial system was the best way to promote the colonization of new land and the development of agriculture on which the colony's economy was primarily dependent, the refusal of the legislation also gave new life to long-standing debates over the means to agricultural improvement. These debates, in turn, were rendered more heated because the recently published results of the 1852 census demonstrated that the population of predominantly anglophone Canada West had outstripped that of largely francophone Canada East. The census results confirmed the fears of many francophone politicians and professionals of widespread rural outmigration leading ultimately to francophone cultural extinction.

Agriculture in Canada East was seen by many observers to be in a crisis provoked by the failure of the enfeudated francophone peasantry to adopt improved agricultural practices. Yet, the means to improvement were themselves the subject of conflict. The peasantry was largely illiterate and the attempt to impose a system of tax-supported elementary schools upon it had had a very limited degree of success. Anti-clerical liberals in turn attributed illiteracy to the hegemony of the Catholic church and to the continued survival of the seigneurial system itself.

Conservative francophone Catholics were often willing to join with anglophones and Protestants to dismantle the seigneurial system, but only if the seigneurs were compensated for the loss of their property rights. Many of them perceived illiteracy to be a problem, but supported clerical involvement in schooling.(13)

Activists on both sides of this debate looked to local agricultural societies and especially to demonstration projects in the shape of model farms as the means to educate an illiterate peasantry. Yet politicians and self-appointed 'friends of agriculture' struggled over the location, management and finance of model farms. Should they not be attached to the colleges run by the clergy? Anathema to religious voluntaryists! Should not the wealthiest proprietors in the countryside demonstrate improved methods to the peasants? Surely peasants should not aspire to be gentleman farmers! This was a debate about the distribution of power and wealth in connection with cultural and religious dominance.

In Parliament by 1850, rural economic misery, illiteracy and the lack of agricultural improvement on the part of the francophone peasantry was commonly tied to the seigneurial system. But representations of the system and of its historic contributions to the development of the canadiens as a people were contested. On one side were views like those expressed by the MPP J.E. Turcotte. In opposing any compensation for the seigneurs in March 1853, Turcotte argued that while their censitaires (tenants) might not quite be slaves, it certainly didn't encourage 'Jean-Baptiste' to be forward looking when he had to come in through the kitchen door to satisfy his lord's demands for some petty form of tribute.(14) Other members, closer to the seigneurs, argued that 'Jean-Baptiste's' character flaws were due to the fact that he'd had it too easy in earlier periods and so hadn't learned to work diligently and economize. When it had worked well, they claimed, the seigneurial system had guaranteed access to land, subsistence and moral community for the peasantry.(15) J.-P. Rheaume was despatched to find the facts about agricultural conditions especially in those areas where the seigneurial system reigned.

Clear Grits and Annexationists

Rheaume's enquiry was commissioned by the leading Clear Grit member of the government, Malcolm Cameron, Minister of Agriculture and President of the Committees of the Executive Council. The Clear Grits had split from the Reform party in 1849, after the concession of colonial parliamentary autonomy by Britain failed to produce substantial democratic reforms. Their political platform contained planks drawn from the English Chartist movement and they were frequently denounced by their parliamentary opponents as communist or socialist in their tendencies.

Many Clear Grits were also associated with the movement for the annexation of the Canadian colonies to the United States which arose out of the economic depression occasioned by imperial free trade policy. Many annexationists saw union with the United States as the key to Canadian prosperity, although the movement also had francophobic elements. Jacques-Pierre Rheaume was a signatory to the 1849 Quebec city Annexation Manifesto and may have been among those purged from office as part of the government's attack on the movement.(16)

For his part, Malcolm Cameron left the moderate Reform government in December 1849, after it suspended his decentralizing School Act, and returned to office as a member of the left-liberal coalition government formed in 1852. The creation of a Bureau of Agriculture was widely viewed as the price paid for his support.

The Bureau soon became the main state social scientific agency. It was initially intended to further the 'agricultural interest' by collecting and disseminating information, coordinating the activities of local agricultural societies, promoting improved agricultural practices through educational means, encouraging the immigration of farm labourers, and pursuing agricultural settlement schemes. To enable it to carry out these activities, the Bureau of Agriculture Act accorded the Minister of Agriculture or any person deputed by him the astonishing and unprecedented power of imposing a fine on anyone who might refuse to answer any queries "relating to the Agricultural interests, or the Statistics of this Province."(17) Its powers were seen by the parliamentary opposition as dangerous to liberty, a danger perhaps inflated by the perception that these powers were in socialist hands. Jacques-Pierre Rheaume's investigation was one of three enquiries launched by the new agency.

The enactment that created the Bureau of Agriculture also gave Cameron effective authority over the only other existing government office that commanded the legal power to demand information from people, the Board of Registration and Statistics. The Board, responsible, among other things, for the execution of the decennial census and for providing an annual report on statistical matters to Parliament, had been firmly in Tory hands since its organization in 1847. Malcolm Cameron and his Clear Grit successor as minister would soon replace the Board's high Tory secretary, Walter Crofton, with the moderate Reformer William Hutton. Under Hutton's direction, the Bureau of Agriculture and the Board of Registration and Statistics were formally joined in 1855 and the new agency's mandate came to include a great many areas of social inquiry.

In short, Rheaume's commission to 'get the facts' about agriculture in the Quebec district for a controversial new agency was pioneering and politically charged in most of its dimensions. As it turned out, however, those alarmed about this radical lawyer poking his nose into rural conditions for his socialist master need not have been so. Rheaume's approach to getting the facts ensured that the facts he got would not be menacing to anyone except the peasantry.

A Table of Questions

Rheaume's official letter of instructions included a detailed set of questions in tabular form that he was to pose to informants in the rural parts of the district of Quebec. He was particularly to determine if there was a rural surplus population willing to migrate to new areas of settlement; to report on the existing state of agriculture; and to make recommendations for its improvement.

Rheaume was not simply to retail gossip; the Minister of Agriculture wanted to know each respondent's name, age, and length of residence in the district, as well as the amount of land held by the respondent, by the respondent's grandfather and father. He also wanted to know if the respondent's land was inherited. This group of questions was meant to make it possible to estimate the effects of the prevailing institution of partible inheritance on patterns of landholding. One of the ongoing issues in the debate over agricultural improvement, and governance in the Canadas more generally, was precisely the extent to which economic 'backwardness' in Canada East was due to French legal institutions. Rheaume's enquiry was meant to address this matter.

His instructions next told Rheaume to discover how many heads of household had emigrated to the United States, why they had gone, if they would have preferred to stay and what the government could do to encourage them to stay. He was to pose the question, "don't you think it would be a good idea to set up in the Townships?" (i.e., the lands to the south-west of Quebec city recently opened for colonization).(18)

There followed a series of detailed enquiries about the extent to which improved agricultural practice had penetrated the district: What kind of plough did people use? Did the respondent have a threshing machine, a straw cutter, a horse-drawn rake? What other kind of new machinery was in use? What variety of wheat did people plant and what was causing poor harvests? Did the respondent use fertilizer, raise livestock for market, and employ a crop rotation?

Rheaume was explicitly instructed to report people's responses without any comment of his own. The Minister of Agriculture wanted the facts and he particularly wanted Rheaume to collect them from what were called 'practical agriculturalists,' common code words for farmers whose means were moderate, in contrast to the capitalist farmers whose views were commonly expressed in Parliament. The Minister probably expected that Rheaume would question francophone peasant farmers directly. But gentlemen travelled in buggies and buggies travelled on roads where small peasant holdings did not have frontage.

Networks, Informants, Projects

Rheaume bought a horse and buggy and set out on his mission on July 1 1853, touring first through the parishes around Quebec city.(19) The main arteries of transport led him to the main entry points to local social networks accessible to a francophone gentleman: the parish presbyteries. Here he questioned and recorded the opinions of the cures with respect to agricultural conditions before seeking from them the names of what he called 'reputable individuals and practical agriculturalists.' The cures usually directed him to potential informants and such informants in turn might direct him to others.

Although he may exceptionally have interpellated some men living in the vicinity of the parish churches, apart from the cures, Rheaume did not report questioning anyone to whom he was not referred directly, nor did he stray from the main roads. In consequence, his coverage of potential farmer-informants was extremely selective. In the large arc around Quebec city(20) encompassed in the work of his first report, for instance, Rheaume reported questioning only 25 men out of a farming population of several thousand. While his informants estimated the average holding in the district to be 20 arpents of land or less, with one exception Rheaume interviewed only farmers with more land than this. The vast majority of his informants can be described as economically comfortable ('a l'aise') and well-to-do ('tres a l'aise') men in middle age. Rheaume made a brief record of the remarks of one woman, likely in the absence of his preferred informant, her husband, and one aboriginal man was questioned about colonization lands to the north. As we shall see, Rheaume's own class-cultural background, his means of transport and his means of access to the social domain ensured that 'the facts' he was commissioned to find would not be 'the facts' he was able to find.

One can easily trace Rheaume's itinerary along the main wagon roads of the district; his social route is equally visible from the outset. For instance, in Charlesbourg, Rheaume sought out and interviewed the cure, M. Payment, and was directed by him to a number of other informants in the immediate vicinity of the church. He questioned the village notary, who had a substantial farm, and three other men, before setting out to find P. Dorion, the militia captain and justice of the peace recommended to him by the cure as the leading farmer in the parish. M. Dorion sent him on to a M. Devillers at St. Foye who in turn referred Rheaume to several other men, of whom he was able to find only the retired militia captain Hamel at Cap Rouge.

Many of the men Rheaume first interviewed expressed support for colonization projects as a means of preventing the emigration of young people to the towns or to the United States. However, they preferred the settlement of the Lac St. Jean region to the north of Quebec to plans for the colonization of the more distant Townships to the south-west. Hearing this and having interviewed Captain Hamel at Cap Rouge, Rheaume headed north to La Jeune Lorette and St. Ambroise des Indiens, in search of the cure and, through him, of what he called 'les sauvages' who had cut the line of a possible Lac St. Jean colonization road. He questioned Pierre Gros Louis, one of the men involved, who spoke of excellent land for settlement in the area around Chicoutimi. While Rheaume may have thought it fitting that what he called a 'wild man' (un sauvage) should pronounce on the quality of wild land (les terres sauvages), the aboriginal population was not known for its improved agricultural methods.

Having satisfied himself as to the quality of the colonization land to the north, Rheaume picked up the network of respectable proprietors in the parish, again using the curd, a M. Boucher, as his point of entry. M. Boucher directed him to Richard Freeman, the largest local proprietor, to Jos. Savard, farmer and school commissioner, and to the village notary, M. Lefrancois. He then travelled south to L'Ancienne Lorette, consulting cure Laberge who sent him on to 5 other informants. He had now been at work for four days, and Rheaume completed his tour of inspection in the Quebec district proper with a brief run down the Beauport road to the east, stopping to question M. Poulin in the parish of La Canardiere, at the manor house to meet with the retired seigneur, Colonel Gugy (certainly not a 'practical agriculturalist') and at two other farms near the church of St. Michel de Beauport. A similar pattern was repeated in the other parishes he visited. No peasant farmers were questioned.

Land, Inheritance, Methods and Comfort

Mature, well-to-do, long-established men of property, known to the curd and living close to wagon roads served as Rheaume's informants. His itinerary traced a geo-social network of relations of class, culture, and acquaintance. It also limited his capacity to generate the information the Minister of Agriculture sought.

In the nature of the case, Rheaume's comfortable informants could not speak directly to the question of partible inheritance. While quite a few of them had inherited their land, the fact that they were well-off demonstrated that it had not been divided into parcels too small to be profitable. Indeed, many informants claimed to have had their farms intact from their fathers or grandfathers.

In several parishes, Chateau Richer, Ste. Anne and Ange Gardien, for instance, informants claimed that there was no extensive subdivision of land. Most of the farmers were said to be very comfortable, despite the fact that the terrain prevented the extensive use of agricultural machinery. The young men found work in Mr. Paterson's lumber camp and households without large fields engaged in domestic cloth production. The notaire M. Ranvoyse, who inhabited what Rheaume called 'a superb rural chateau' and who "met daily with the agricultural population of Montmorency county and knows its needs well" insisted that there had been no emigration since he had come to the county in 1818. The lumber yards at Pointe aux Trembles in the county of Portneuf "brought abundance to hundreds of families."

While prospering themselves, not suffering from the institution of partible inheritance and not themselves in need of any instruction in improved methods, Rheaume's informants were quick to point out that the situation was different for 'Jean-Baptiste.' The cure of Charlesbourg, Rheaume's first informant, claimed that the sub-division of land drove young people to emigrate or to seek employment either in lumbering or in an urban trade. This view was repeated by others in the parish. Most land parcels were too small to allow for the use of agricultural machinery or for the raising of animals. M. Morin, the cure of Portneuf, claimed to know a great many people who emigrated to the United States because of extensive sub-division and related high land prices, and similar views were expressed by informants in Charlesbourg. Rheaume seems not to have questioned anyone who lived on such small plots of land or who was about to emigrate.

Many parliamentarians and publicists were holding up the large capitalist farmer employing English methods as the model to be emulated by all as the key to improved agriculture. Rheaume's ethnic and class background made it impossible for him to pronounce unambiguously on this matter. He was torn between admiration for the enterprising spirit of the English capitalist and sympathetic nostalgia for the traditional methods of the French Canadian farmer, precisely one of the rifts that appeared in parliamentary debate.

On the one hand, he wrote glowing accounts of the methods and success of large capitalist farmers, despite the fact that these were not the people the Minister of Agriculture wanted to know about. In St. Ambroise, for instance, he toured the farm of Richard Freeman, who had purchased 100 arpents in very bad condition only three or four years previously but who "through his practical knowledge of agriculture and his energy made them into one of the best farms" in the parish. Freeman's harvest the previous year included 5000 minots of turnips, 500 minots of potatoes, 660 of oats and 200 minots of wheat, in addition to 4000 bales of hay and a large quantity of cabbages and other vegetables. Freeman was feeding 150 sheep and had spared no expense, digging ditches to drain his land, rotating his crops, fertilizing extensively and using all the latest agricultural machinery, including a straw cutter.

Again, in L'Ancienne Lorette, Rheaume toured the 180 acre farm of Mr. Dinning, an establishment he thought should be called a 'model farm,' and reported that it had been transformed quickly through Dunning's efforts from scrub brush and gravel to productive splendour. Despite his substantial expenditure, Dinning claimed that his income was continually rising. Rheaume was impressed with the farm buildings, especially the large stable which measured 150 feet by 30 and accommodated 100 horned cattle, and by the farmer's breeding practices. Dinning's prize bull weighed 1600 lbs., he had Durham and Ayshire cattle in addition to a 500 lb. prize sow, for which he had refused what Rheaume considered to be the choice sum of [pounds]15, and whose piglets he sold at [pounds]5 the pair. Crowning it all was a handsome farmyard, full of excellent fowls.

Yet, if rational English capitalists could turn bad land into good with science and money, Rheaume also wrote glowingly of farmers who managed to prosper using the good old canadien methods. In the well-to-do parishes to the east of Quebec, Rheaume interviewed Monsieur Lemoine, "father of a large family which he raised in the most respectable manner and to whom he gave the best education without any assistance other than the produce of land cultivated in an orderly manner following a rational system." He wrote glowingly of "Monsieur Racine, one of our good Canadian farmers who farm their lands in the old way," who nonetheless adopted the English plough (popularly, the 'bastard plough') and the practice of extensive manuring, and who, in a good year, claimed he could sell [pounds]30 to [pounds]40 worth of plums and as many apples. At both St. Fereol and on the Isle d'Orleans (largely in seigneury) the old methods prevailed and people were comfortable.

Seigneurs and Censitaires

Several of Rheaume's informants did address the question of the effects of seigneurial tenure, arguing that it was causing outmigration from the district of Quebec. Edouard Lagueux, farmer and magistrate in Dorchester, claimed that moderating the conditions of the concession of land by the seigneurs was the key to preventing people from leaving. He claimed that many censitaires were forced to abandon land they had cleared because of high rents. The cure of Deschambault made a similar argument and M. Marcotte of Portneuf was especially voluble on this subject. Rheaume quoted at length his claim that outmigration resulted from

... the high price that concessionaires were forced to pay to the seigneurs, and especially the seigneurial rights that weigh particularly heavily upon the young colonist.... I know ... people who paid as much as sixteen so/s per arpent, and the consequence was that many of them, after having cleared part of their land, were forced to abandon it, finding themselves unable to carry such heavy charges.

For Marcotte, the solution to this situation was clear: "let the Legislature improve the condition of the censitaires, let it consider seriously the question of Seigneurial tenure"!

The seigneur Colonel Gugy did not comment on this matter, but, predictably, perhaps, the young seigneur Larue from Neuville argued that it was the government's responsibility to prevent young people from leaving the land for the United States or for the cities. Larue did not include the abolition of feudalism as a means to this end, suggesting instead that the government subsidize memberships in local agricultural societies.

The other structural cause of agricultural decline identified by those Rheaume interviewed was the absence of good colonisation roads. He heard repeated comment on this question. Edouard Robitaille, a notary and farmer whom Rheaume described as "ranking among our most respectable farmers in the county of Quebec," put it succinctly: "good roads, easy communications, that's all a settler asks." Despite J.-B. Bedard's extensive efforts to aid his three sons to establish themselves on new land in the Lac St. Jean region, they were forced to give up the effort "especially because of the lack of communications."

Agricultural Societies and Model Farms

Criticism of existing property relations and calls for political remedies were made by Rheaume's informants, but such were not majority views, despite the emphasis placed on colonization roads. Most of these well-to-do men predictably diagnosed agricultural backwardness as an educational problem. According to these successful, comfortable farmers, peasants were leaving the land because they did not know how to farm profitably. If they could be taught to do so, agricultural backwardness and outmigration would end. Informants argued in equal measure that it was a character flaw in peasants to be backward and resistant to change, and that peasants were this way because they had not been exposed to anything different.

"They don't want to listen or imitate the few men of progress we have here in the parish of St Jean Chrysostome," grumbled Pierre Giroux, wealthy merchant-farmer, undoubtedly including himself among such progressive men. "The peasants prefer their old wheeled plough and cling to the old-fashioned ways of farming their land." Edouard Lagueux described the peasants as indifferent to agriculture, stuck in the old routine and not having 'a taste' for new machinery, and he was echoed by Francois Xavier Giroux, who claimed people had lost their 'taste' for farming and wanted to go into trade. For Joseph Savard, in addition to their refusal to adopt improved machinery and animal breeding practices, the peasants wasted their time going to market with small quantities of produce. M. Paradis of Charlesbourg also criticized them for spending too much time in Quebec city and not enough time working their farms. Jean Tremblay portrayed a peasant population clinging to a fifty-year old agricultural routine and having no desire to improve its stock nor to manure its land. That there might be structural causes for small yields and frequent recourse to the market was not considered.

Instead, various forms of agricultural education were proposed to shake the peasants out of their routine and to give them the taste for agricultural improvement: lessons in agriculture in the schools, the circulation of educational periodicals written in simple language, public lectures on agricultural methods, the establishment of demonstration projects in the guise of model farms and, through the agricultural societies, the organization of competitive exhibitions and the importation of improved seed, stock and machinery.

For many informants, the key to changing peasant habits lay in offering free memberships in agricultural societies and in having the latter sponsor competitive exhibitions. Rheaume heard this opinion repeatedly and several people spoke in favour of awarding prizes for the best crops, the best cross-bred animals, for the use of new machinery, for the most improved and the most productive farm, and so on. Just as frequently, however, Rheaume was warned that competitive exhibitions had to be open only to practicing peasant farmers if they were to produce the desired result.

Jean-Baptiste Bedard warned against letting 'hobby farmers' ['cultivateurs par fantaisie'] or "people who invest large sums in their land every year" compete against farmers who lived off their land. Captain Hamel insisted the peasants would never be able to compete against those who owned land "as a matter of luxury and amusement" and M. Devillers of St. Foye also argued for the exclusion of capitalist farmers. As he put it, "the peasants have been discouraged for many years past from bringing their animals to the exhibitions given that the Bourgeois carry off all the prizes and the peasants don't have the resources to compete with them."

In point of fact, these well-to-do informants were identifying one of the dynamics of the political economy of French Canada that underlay Rheaume's own ambivalence towards the English capitalist farmer. This dynamic may well have had something to do with the declining 'taste' of the rural population for agricultural production. The superior productivity of European methods, stock, seed grain and machinery was closely connected to the superior wealth and power of the capitalist farmer, both of which tended to be translated into assertions of English cultural hegemony. Technical and class cultural superiority were closely associated. The prize exhibitions of the agricultural societies risked degenerating into ritual recognitions of cultural dominance. Indeed, in other parts of Canada East in the 1840s, the English directors of agricultural societies, not content merely with carrying off most of the exhibition prizes, refused to allow canadien farmers to compete against their English counterparts.(21)

Neither Rheaume himself nor any of his informants seem to have been troubled by the inconsistencies of their own position. For if one kept the bourgeoisie from competing in prize exhibitions, how was the peasantry to encounter improved methods and practices? Several observers suggested the circulation of agricultural periodicals and the delivering of popular lectures, but the peasantry was largely illiterate, lectures left the cultural issue unresolved, and in any case they did not seem to have the desired effect. In the parish of des Ecureuils, for instance, cure Lemoine reported he had been circulating periodicals and spreading a knowledge of improved methods among his parishioners, but only one of them had bothered to change his habits.

Model farms were frequently suggested as demonstration projects for the supposedly practically-minded peasants. Observers seem to have believed that, given the chance, the peasants would be eager and willing to tour farms like those of Richard Freeman and would learn the appropriate lessons from his example. Yet, if the peasantry did not have the 'taste' and, moreover, the resources to compete with the technically superior forms of agriculture, where was it to get the resources to acquire improved seed, feed, stock and machinery?

Consider the apparently inexpensive practice of crop rotation, which was so thoroughly accepted by most agricultural improvers as the panacea for poor yields that even the Governor-General subsidized the translation and distribution of a tract explaining it to the peasantry.(22) The practice demanded that peasant producers have sufficient land to leave a sixth or more of it idle every year, yet most were reportedly so poor as to have to take tiny amounts of produce to the Quebec city market. Fertilizing demanded that one have enough land to raise stock, yet many observers commented that peasant parcels were too small to enable them to do so.

Many of Rheaume's informants looked to the agricultural societies to serve as resource banks and distribution centres, even while they argued that peasants should not have to subscribe to join them. Yet even in this instance none of these well-to-do observers clearly took a radical agrarian position to argue that the societies could use their resources to provide the peasantry with the means of production they lacked. At best, it was suggested that the societies import improved breeding stock and give peasants access to it or that they import machinery and put it on display.

In sum, all of these suggestions would have been useful for Rheaume's own informants; they were in fact embodied in existing government agricultural practice; they were of no practical utility to the poor sections of the peasantry.

Creating Social Facts

Although he had been equipped with an interview schedule and instructed to question small producers, Rheaume neither used his table of questions systematically nor contacted any peasant farmers. It is improbable that this gentleman, trained in one of Quebec city's most prominent law firms, knew any peasant farmers personally. He apparently did not consider it appropriate to act as did his contemporary investigators of European proletarian populations who pushed their way into their subjects' dwellings and took note of what they saw.(23)

Rheaume stayed within the confines of networks of religion and respectability. For that reason he was unable to find the particular kinds of facts sought by the Minister of Agriculture or to produce a report that suggested any novel state policy. If he delivered a synthetic overview of agricultural conditions in the district of Quebec, it has not survived. His final report on his fieldwork was delivered to the Minister of Agriculture in June 1854, but was not considered of sufficient interest by the parliamentary printing committee to be reproduced as a parliamentary paper. It mouldered in the archives of the Bureau of Agriculture while Rheaume lingered on the departmental payroll until June 1855, doing nothing of which any record has survived, before being ejected by a new, conservative minister.(24) By then, the question of feudal tenure had been resolved by legislation and the Bureau of Agriculture was becoming the administrator of a network of locally-situated information agents: emigration officials, agricultural boards, colonization road agents, officers of fever hospitals, and so on.

The enquiry that Rheaume had done, at best, confirmed the opinions of liberal parliamentarians and state officials about the continuing utility of sponsoring local agricultural societies and of promoting colonization roads as means of dealing with rural out-migration. Yet the existing policy did not in fact prevent rural outmigration. Rheaume's failure to question peasant farmers, to report their views in their own words, or to detail their social condition is thus quite significant. Given the presence of an agrarian radical faction both inside Parliament and out, and given the debate over property relations involved in the attack on feudal tenure, a different set of facts about the condition of the peasantry could easily have fuelled the agrarian radical movement. In the absence of a radical agrarian solution to peasant poverty and misery, the void was filled by the rise to dominance of an ultramontaine Catholic project for the subordination of the peasantry to church and nation, a project whose consequences were felt well into the 1960s, if not beyond.

Still, Rheaume's investigation is not significant simply for its results. It was one of the first social scientific investigations conducted by the main statistical agency of the colonial state. The combination, in its design, if not in its execution, of an interview schedule, a tour of inspection, and the reporting of the opinions of small producers was quite novel in the 1850s. Interview schedules had been used only in the domain of census-making before this period. Tours of inspection became regular administrative practices only in the 1840s. Only after the political reforms that followed the Rebellion of 1837 was the political voice of the smaller producer institutionalized. 'Expert testimony', to employ an anachronism, had rarely been collected systematically on any subject before the 1840s and, where it had been, the 'experts' in question were typically members of Parliament, officials in state institutions or local notables.

Yet the absence of an effective administrative grid giving access to the class of small producers and the investigator's own understanding of the sources of reputable intelligence combined to ensure that the 'facts' in this case were a codification of the opinions of respectable men of property.

Enquiries like Rheaume's are situated at transition points between regimes of knowledge. In the Canadian case, with the rise of representative government and bureaucratic expertise, the 'local knowledge' of the notable gave way to the social science of the bureaucrat. The authority of the leading proprietor to speak for his domain was extended to men of more modest standing and was increasingly filtered through the analysis of the trained expert.

Yet this transition was not instantaneous. Local knowledges had to be translated into administrative categories and the authority of administrative knowledges was not taken as given. Rheaume's was an enquiry conducted by a respectable member of the dominant classes, and bureaucratic expertise remained dependent upon respectability for its authority. Given the absence of administrative grids, respectability was a condition of entry into local networks. Given the absence of training in established practices of investigation, respectability served as a common sense guarantee for sound opinion. But respectable procedures in Rheaume's case meant that the facts were the common sense of the respectable classes.

Department of Sociology and Anthropology Ottawa, Ontario, Canada KIS 5B6

ENDNOTES

1. P. Abrams, The Origins of British Sociology. 1834-1914 (Chicago, 1968); also, in a burgeoning literature, Eric Brian, "Statistique administrative et internationalisme statistique pendant la seconde moitie du XIX siecle," Histoire et Mesure 4 (1989):201-24; Alain Desrosieres, "Histoire de formes: statistiques et sciences sociales avant 1940," Revue francaise de sociologie XXVI (1985): 277-310; "Comment faire des choses qui tiennent: histoire sociale et statistique," Histoire et Mesure 4 (1989): 225-42; INSEE, Pour une Histoire de la Statistique (Paris, 1977); Theodore Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (Princeton, 1986); Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864 (Chicago, 1995); Nikolas Rose, "Governing by Numbers: Figuring out Democracy," Accounting, Organizations and Society 16 (1991): 673-92; Libby Schweber, "L'histoire de la statistique, laboratoire pour la theorie sociale," Revue francaise de sociologie XXXVII (1996): 107-128; Stuart Woolf, "Statistics and the Modern State," Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (1989): 588-604.

2. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 1993).

3. For a contemporary view, Council of the Royal Statistical Society, Annals of the Royal Statistical Society, 1834-1934 (London, 1934).

4. For the translation of observations into facts, Bruce Curtis, "Mapping the Social: Jacob Keefer's Educational Tour, 1845," Journal of Canadian Studies 28

(1993): 51-68; on 'black-boxing', B. Latour, "Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands," Knowledge and Society 6 (1986): 1-40.

5. For an overview of the field, S. Shapin, "Here and Everywhere: Sociology of Scientific Knowledge," Annual Review of Sociology 21 (1995): 289-321; for more on infrastructural work, B. Curtis, "From the Moral Thermometer to Money: Metrological Reform in PreConfederation Canada," Social Studies in Science 28 (1998).

6. Rheaume's manuscript reports are in N[ational] A[rchives] of C[anada] RG17, vol. 1953, part I-10, file 2.

7. M. Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-memory, Practice (Oxford, 1977): 139-64.

8. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume I (New York, 1978). The actor-network approach in social studies of science contributes a key notion that I hold to be missing from Foucault's genealogy: translation. For a demonstration of the power of combining genealogical and actor-network approaches, Steven Ward, "Filling the World with Self-Esteem: a Social History of Truth-Making," Canadian Journal of Sociology 21 (1996): 1-24.

9. Following Max Weber, 'intensity of administration' is "the tendency for the state to take under its own control as many tasks as possible for continuous operation and execution." W.G. Runciman ed., Max Weber: Selections in Translation (Cambridge, 1978): 348. See also Derek Smith, "The Emergence of 'Eskimo Status': An Examination of the Eskimo Disk List System and Its Social Consequences, 1925-1970," in N. Dyck and J. Waldram eds., Anthropology,Public Policy and Native Peoples in Canada (Montreal and Kingston, 1993): 41-74, for the related concept 'intensive surveillance'.

10. See especially Laurent Thevenot, "Rules and Instruments: Investment in Forms," Social Science Information, 23 (1984):1-45; and "L'economie du codage social," Critiques de l'Economie politique 23-24 (1983): 188-222.

11. For an example of the Manchester Statistical Society's work, see "Report of a Committee of the Manchester Statistical Society. . . ." British and Foreign Review VI (1836): 564-603. The Buller Commission material, in very poor condition, is in NAC RG4 B30 and RG4 A1; also B. Curtis, "Enquetes sur l'education au bas-Canada, 1835-1840" unpublished paper, Department of Sociology and Anthroplogy, Carleton University, 1997.

12. See B. Curtis, "The State of Tutelage in Lower Canada, 1835-1855," History of Education Quarterly 37 (1997): 25-43; J.I. Little, State and Society in Transition. The Politics of Institutional Reform in the Eastern Townships, 1838-1852 (Kingston and Montreal, 1997).

13. Coloured by his partisan politics, but still a valuable overview of these questions is L.-P. Turcotte, Le Canada Sous L'Union (Quebec, 1871-2): 180-320.

14. Debates of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, 22 March 1853. 'Jean-Baptiste' and 'Josephe' were the stereotypical counterparts of 'Sambo' in this literature.

15. See the line taken in Legislative Assembly of Canada, Sessional papers Appendix TT 1850, "Report of the Special Committee on the State of Agriculture in Lower Canada" (translation).

16. Rheaume remains a relatively unknown figure, although he studied law with one of Lower Canada s leading figures. His application for admission to the bar, with an account of his legal education, is in NAC RG4 A1 vol.610, 'S' series, 1 July 1840.

17. Province of Canada, Statutes, 16 Vic. cap.XI, "An Act to provide for the establishment of a Bureau of Agriculture, and to amend and consolidate the Laws relating to Agriculture." Even this clause was a retreat from the draft bill, which made the Minister president ex officio of all local agricultural societies with the power to dissolve those not responding to his queries. Only the 1847 Census Act had any similar provisions.

18. NAC RG17 AI 2, Wright to Rheaume, 25 June 1853, "Ne pensez vous pas qu'il est avantageux de s'etablir dans les Townships?"

19. All of the material that follows, unless otherwise indicated, is from Rheaume's report and the translations are mine.

20. La Jeune Lorette to the north, east to Cap Rouge, west to Beauport, all on roads passable in a buggy.

21. For example, Parliament of Canada, Sessional papers, Appendix J. 1851 "Report of the special committee on the annual report of the Lower Canada Agricultural Society and the Agricultural Society of the County of Beauharnois."

22. See the Traite sur la Tenue Generale d'une Terre dans le Bas-Canada, reproduced in J. Doughtey, ed. The Elgin-Grey Papers (Ottawa, 1954) II: 854ff.

23. For example, Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Moscow, 1968).

24. For information about Rheaume's pay and employment, NAC RG17 A I 2, Wright to Rheaume, 3 August 1853; MacNab to Campell, 23 September 1853[sic 4]; vol. 1, Rheaume to Wright, 17 October 1853; Rheaume to Minister of Agriculture, 31 October 1853 with Executive Council minute about his pay; Rheaume to Wright, 4 November 1853; A I 2, Hutton to Rheaume, 22 March 1855 (the termination letter).