Crofters and Habitants. Settler Society, Economy, and Culture in a Quebec Township: 1848-1881.

In 1852, two groups of migrants, 35 Protestant families from Lewis in Scotland, out of 2,337 who came to Canada, and 58 Catholic families from older French Canadian parishes south of Quebec city, had recently settled in Winslow township, Megantic county. Both were poor and, indeed, had not been attracted to this area by its promises of wealth. The soil was unusually poor, the growing season short, and the means of communications bad. However, two distinct ethnic communities emerged and, thirty years later, 669 Scots and 1,107 French Canadians lived there.

These people are the subject of J. Little's book. What is new in the ways he studies them, however, is not his flat rejection of theories and models, such as the frontier thesis, the Hartz model or theories of "social-control." It does not come either from his devotion to cultural history, so fashionable during the last decade. Nor is his preference for empiricism and a "different dimension of human experience" unique--anymore than it is ideologically neutral. What is original in this author's cultural history is the way he resists the prevailing tendency today to systematically homogenize the past by an exaggerated insistence on similarities; instead Little allows for the possibility of more balanced comparisons of human experience between different groups.

Little says that the meeting of these two cultural groups in Winslow "was not simply a voluntary process in chain migration". In effect, both the Scots (coming from 19 different parishes on the Isle of Lewis which was said to be "a full century behind other parts of Scotland") and the French (from 13 parishes in and around the seigneury of Lauzon) had been obliged to leave their native communities once wheat and potato crops had started to fail. But he also points out, as a sign of healthy urbanization and greater market opportunities, that in this seigneury the families with less than 10 arpents had increased to 42% in 1852 from 31% in 1831. No doubt, he forgets that the Isle of Lewis had a rate of urbanization of 18% while in the Quebec district of whom Lauzon was a part, only 11% of the people lived in town. So, instead of looking also at impoverishment, proletarianization and emigration, he relates this process to some sort of agricultural revival caused by the emergence of a new dominant crop: oats, worth only 1/3 of wheat. To make his point, Little refers his reader to table 1.4, p. 37 on agricultural production in Lauzon. But the data in question carry a different message: (1) evidence of the collapse of wheat, the traditional dominant and most valuable crop, (2) the continuous expansion of potato production (the new dominant crop before 1827) until the 1846 blight (from 46% of the crop in 1831 to 49% in 1842), (3) the late dominance of oats: a post-1846 phenomenon. Put together, his data show not only a minimal increase in the total production of feed crops (including peas, potatoes and turnips): from 220 minots per farm in 1831 to 281 twenty years later, but also a significant decline in the numbers of animals on the farms: from 25 in 1831 to 20 in 1852.

In fact, the people of Winslow township were caught up in the larger ongoing economic and social crisis of Quebec society, a crisis which was, indeed, the reason why Francophone immigrants had gone to Winslow in the first place. Looking at the census of 1852, at a time when the industrial base was still pretty weak in Dorchester county (including Lauzon), I have found that the unskilled workers formed 41% of the local active population. No doubt, these workers were mostly landless people, seasonal workers and perfect candidates either for emigration abroad, or for the settlement of Quebec's more arid and marginal lands. These marginalized people were also competing with immigrants for rural lands and jobs in the cities. There is ample evidence that this movement, widespread at this date, had started many decades before these French migrants went to Winslow.

Yet each of these two groups of migrants, so similar in some of their economic circumstances, created their own separate communities. The Scots were not only more hungry for land but, even if the discrepancy in size of landholdings so evident in 1852 shrank later on, they accumulated much larger properties than the Francophones and their local bourgeoisie was stronger. In 1881, the proportion of owners of land of more than 50 acres was 91% among the Scots and 58% among the French. Little tries to minimize these contrasts, insisting that there was equality in the number of improved acres: 45.1 against 44.2. However, one must remember that the size of the holdings also depended on the amount of pasture and woods, that parity in improved size of the land is not very useful in explaining the evident superiority of the Scots in agricultural output, crop yield, numbers of animals and value of farms. It is very clear, more than Little believes, that the Quebec French Canadian farming families, like those of eastern Ontario at the same time, were for this reason much more subsistence-oriented and dependent upon the forest industry than their immediate Anglophone neighbors.

The Francophones had also to support larger families. Not only did women and men marry younger than the Scots (8.3 years for men in 1882) but, given the shorter intervals between births, the fertility rate of French women was higher (45% in 1871 and 58% ten years later). The Scots practiced some form of birth control, perhaps related to breast-feeding, and this had a significant impact on the size of their families. Knowing this, how can the author say that there was "no evidence of major distinctions between the two cultural communities"? These structural differences appear even more marked when mortality is considered. Of course, says Little, the general mortality was much higher among the French than the Scots but there was a big gap between the first (a rate of 167 per 1,000 births) and the second group in infantile mortality. Little contends that "there are no figures available for Quebec during this period". This is wrong, and the census of 1861 is a good example in this regard: the general and infantile mortalities were dramatically higher in Quebec than in Ontario: 56.7% and 125.6% respectively. Inside rural Quebec, the same disparities existed between areas with large French majorities and areas where the Anglophones were either a majority or a substantial minority. All of this confirms the observations made in Winslow and reminds us of the enormous importance of the complex phenomenon of infantile mortality in Francophone Quebec.

The French community, farmers and unskilled workers, were to survive in Winslow as an agricultural group also involved in seasonal or full-time work in the lumber industry and some other activities. From 1861 to 1881, their number increased by only 30% and even then they could not absorb more than half of their natural growth. Younger and more vulnerable members of the community had to emigrate. There was nothing that the leaders of the community could do about it, not even the ultramontane priest who had come to play such a dominant role in this Catholic community. Little insists a lot on the occasional and superficial instances of resistance to ecclesiastical authority, but he is forced to admit that "the evidence of mass conformity is overwhelming". Because he does not like the idea of social control, he naturally emphasizes "the deeply-entrenched popular culture." But, there is plenty of evidence in the historiography that the clergy had been able, since the days of New France, to combat with great success any autonomous expression of popular religion, even by taking over many of its practices.

The Scots, although stronger economically, reacted somewhat differently. Their population had grown by only 2.5% in the decade after 1861, and then had declined by 9% during the next ten years. For them, it was the prelude to the extinction of their community in this area and the acceleration of an exodus to different parts of the country. Even if they did not have much choice either to stay or to leave, they had more flexibility than the French, due at least to the fact that they had a higher degree of education. Even if the Francophones became relatively more educated in this township, particularly the women after 1850, the French males were far behind their Scots counterparts. As Little says about the latter, this attraction to literacy was related at first to their religion and to the need to read the Bible, and it was reinforced by the process of schooling, the product of the urbanization already visible in Megantic county (Winslow included) in the 1880s.

Why the choice of Winslow as an object of study? Of course, there were French and Scottish people there and Little looks in great detail at their profile, compares them in Winslow and elsewhere and even discusses fine points of historiography. But it remains very difficult to see from the book the context of what happened in Winslow. These Scots left the Isle of Lewis and Winslow for economic reasons. But, culturally, there is more to this. In Lower Canada, the townships north and south of the seigneuries were considered as a territory where the Anglophone immigrants could have expected to settle on the land and perpetuate their culture. But, in the end, this happened only in some townships located south of Montreal and in the Ottawa valley. In the 1830s, this pattern was already threatened by the over-population of the seigneuries, which forced the French Canadian settlers, who combined agriculture and seasonal work in the forest with other activities, to move east, north and, particularly westward through the Eastern Townships where they had a majority before 1890, and then toward eastern Ontario, western Quebec and northern Ontario. From 1850 to 1911, while the population of the older rural parishes grew by only 32%, the number of people in the new areas of colonization was multiplied by 5. In 1911, 200,000 Francophones lived in Ontario: 100,000 in eastern Ontario and 50,000 in the north. It was also the time of urbanization and industrialization in Quebec and New England, and the French went into the cities mainly as workers. During the sixty years after 1850, the number of urbanized Francophones multiplied by seven while their population in the New England towns reached half a million. How could the Protestant Scots of Winslow and the Anglophones in other isolated localities not have felt that their culture was threatened by this Francophone wave? This is a time when rural Anglophones concentrated increasingly in Montreal or left the province in significant numbers. Little has been written elsewhere about this movement; if he had reminded us of it in this book, he might have helped us to understand better the significance of the Winslow experience.

Fernand Ouellet York University, Toronto