The Seigneurs of Old Canada : A Chronicle of New World Feudalism

by William Bennett Munro

It was during one of her proud and prosperous eras that France began her task of creating an empire beyond the Atlantic. At no time, indeed, was she better equipped for the work. No power of Western Europe since the days of Roman glory had possessed such facilities for conquering and governing new lands. If ever there was a land able and ready to take up the white man's burden it was the France of the seventeenth century. The nation had become the first military power of Europe. Spain and Italy had ceased to be serious rivals. Even England, under the Stuart dynasty, tacitly admitted the military primacy of France. Nor was this superiority of the French confined to the science of war. It passed unquestioned in the arts of peace. Even Rome at the height of her power could not dominate every field of human activity. She could rule the people with authority and overcome the proud; but even her own poets rendered homage to Greece in the realms of art, sculpture, and eloquence. But France was the aesthetic as well as the military dictator of seventeenth- century Europe. Her authority was supreme, as Macaulay says, on all matters from orthodoxy in architecture to the proper cut of a courtier's clothes. Her monarchs were the first gentlemen of Europe. Her nobility set the social standards of the day. The rank and file of her people—and there were at least twenty million of them in the days of Louis Quatorze—were making a fertile land yield its full increase. The country was powerful, rich, prosperous, and, for the time being, outwardly contented.

So far as her form and spirit of government went, France by the middle of the seventeenth century was a despotism both in theory and in fact. Men were still living who could recall the day when France had a real parliament, the Estates-General as it was called. This body had at one time all the essentials of a representative assembly. It might have become, as the English House of Commons became, the grand inquest of the nation. But it did not do so. The waxing personal strength of the monarchy curbed its influence, its authority weakened, and throughout the great century of French colonial expansion from 1650 to 1750 the Estates-General was never convoked. The centralization of political power was complete. 'The State! I am the State.' These famous words imputed to Louis XIV expressed no vain boast of royal power. Speaking politically, France was a pyramid. At the apex was the Bourbon sovereign. In him all lines of authority converged. Subordinate to him in authority, and dominated by him when he willed it, were various appointive councils, among them the Council of State and the so-called Parliament of Paris, which was not a parliament at all, but a semi- judicial body entrusted with the function of registering the royal decrees. Below these in the hierarchy of officialdom came the intendants of the various provinces —forty or more of them. Loyal agents of the crown were these intendants. They saw to it that no royal mandate ever went unheeded in any part of the king's domain. These forty intendants were the men who really bridged the great administrative gulf which lay between the royal court and the people. They were the most conspicuous, the most important, and the most characteristic officials of the old regime. Without them the royal authority would have tumbled over by its own sheer top-heaviness. They were the eyes and ears of the monarchy; they provided the monarch with fourscore eager hands to work his sovereign will. The intendants, in turn, had their underlings, known as the sub-delegates, who held the peasantry in leash. Thus it was that the administration, like a pyramid, broadened towards its base, and the whole structure rested upon the third estate, or rank and file of the people. Such was the position, the power, and administrative framework of France when her kings and people turned their eyes westward across the seas. From the rugged old Norman and Breton seaports courageous mariners had been for a long time lengthening their voyages to new coasts. As early as 1534 Jacques Cartier of St Malo had made the first of his pilgrimages to the St Lawrence, and in 1542 his associate Roberval had attempted to plant a colony there. They had found the shores of the great river to be inhospitable; the winters were rigorous; no stores of mineral wealth had appeared; nor did the land seem to possess great agricultural possibilities. From Mexico the Spanish galleons were bearing home their rich cargoes of silver bullion. In Virginia the English navigators had found a land of fair skies and fertile soil. But the hills and valleys of the northland had shouted no such greeting to the voyageurs of Brittany. Cartier had failed to make his landfall at Utopia, and the balance-sheet of his achievements, when cast up in 1544, had offered a princely dividend of disappointment.

For a half-century following the abortive efforts of Cartier and Roberval, the French authorities had made no serious or successful attempt to plant a colony in the New World. That is not surprising, for there were troubles in plenty at home. Huguenots and Catholics were at each other's throats; the wars of the Fronde convulsed the land; and it was not till the very end of the sixteenth century that the country settled down to peace within its own borders. Some facetious chronicler has remarked that the three chief causes of early warfare were Christianity, herrings, and cloves. There is much golden truth in that nugget. For if one could take from human history all the strife that has been due either to bigotry or to commercial avarice, a fair portion of the bloodstreaks would be washed from its pages. For the time being, at any rate, France had so much fighting at home that she was unable, like her Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English neighbours, to gain strategic points for future fighting abroad. Those were days when, if a people would possess the gates of their enemies, it behoved them to begin early. France made a late start, and she was forced to take, in consequence, what other nations had shown no eagerness to seize.

It was Samuel Champlain, a seaman of Brouage, who first secured for France and for Frenchmen a sure foothold in North America, and thus became the herald of Bourbon imperialism. After a youth spent at sea, Champlain engaged for some years in the armed conflicts with the Huguenots; then he returned to his old marine life once more. He sailed to the Spanish main and elsewhere, thereby gaining skill as a navigator and ambition to be an explorer of new coasts. In 1603 came an opportunity to join an expedition to the St Lawrence, and from this time to the end of his days the Brouage mariner gave his whole interest and energies to the work of planting an outpost of empire in the New World. Champlain was scarcely thirty-six when he made his first voyage to Canada; he died at Quebec on Christmas Day, 1635. His service to the king and nation extended over three decades.

With the crew of his little vessel, the Don de Dieu, Champlain cast anchor on July 9, 1608, beneath the frowning natural ramparts of Cape Diamond, and became the founder of a city built upon a rock. The felling of trees and the hewing of wood began. Within a few weeks Champlain raised his rude fort, brought his provisions ashore, established relations with the Indians, and made ready with his twenty-eight followers to spend the winter in the new settlement. It was a painful experience. The winter was long and bitter; scurvy raided the Frenchmen's cramped quarters, and in the spring only eight followers were alive to greet the ship which came with new colonists and supplies. It took a soul of iron to continue the project of nation-planting after such a tragic beginning; but Champlain was not the man to recoil from the task. More settlers were landed; women and children were brought along; land was broken for cultivation; and in due course a little village grew up about the fort. This was Quebec, the centre and soul of French hopes beyond the Atlantic.

For the first twenty years of its existence the little colony had a stormy time. Some of the settlers were unruly, and gave Champlain, who was both maker and enforcer of the laws, a hard task to hold them in control. During these years the king took little interest in his new domains; settlers came slowly, and those who came seemed to be far more interested in trading with the Indians than in carving out permanent homes for themselves. Few there were among them who thought of anything but a quick competence from the profits of the fur trade, and a return to France at the earliest opportunity thereafter.

Now it was the royal idea, in so far as the busy monarch of France had any fixed purpose in the matter, that the colony should be placed upon a feudal basis—that lands should be granted and sub-granted on feudal terms. In other words, the king or his representative stood ready to give large tracts or fiefs in New France to all immigrants whose station in life warranted the belief that they would maintain the dignity of seigneurs. These, in turn, were to sub-grant the land to ordinary settlers, who came without financial resources, sent across usually at the expense of His Majesty. In this way the French authorities hoped to create a powerful military colony with a feudal hierarchy as its outstanding feature.

Feudalism is a much-abused term. To the minds of most laymen it has a rather hazy association with things despotic, oppressive, and mediaeval. The mere mention of the term conjures up those days of the Dark Ages when armour-clad knights found their chief recreation in running lances through one another; when the overworked, underfed labourers of the field cringed and cowered before every lordly whim. Most readers seem to get their notions of chivalry from Scott's Talisman, and their ideas on feudalism from the same author's immortal Ivanhoe. While scholars keep up a merry disputation as to the historical origin of the feudal system, the public imagination goes steadily on with its own curious picture of how that system lived and moved and had its being. A prolix tale of origins would be out of place in this chronicle; but even the mind of the man in the street ought to be set right as regards what feudalism was designed to do, and what in fact it did, for mankind, while civilization battled its way down the ages.

Feudalism was a system of social relations based upon land. It grew out of the chaos which came upon Europe in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire. The fall of Roman power flattened the whole political structure of Western Europe, and nothing arose to take its place. Every lord or princeling was left to depend for defence upon the strength of his own arm; so he gathered around him as many vassals as he could. He gave them land; they gave him what he most wanted,—a promise to serve and aid in time of war. The lord gave and promised to guard; the vassal took and promised to serve. Thus there was created a personal relation, a bond of mutual loyalty, wardship, and service, which bound liegeman to lord with hoops of steel. No one can read Carlyle's trenchant Past and Present without bearing away some vivid and altogether wholesome impressions concerning the essential humanity of this great mediaeval institution. It shares with the Christian Church the honour of having made life worth living in days when all else combined to make it intolerable. It brought at least a semblance of social, economic, and political order out of helpless and hopeless disorganization. It helped Europe slowly to recover from the greatest catastrophe in all her history.

But our little systems have their day, as the poet assures us. They have their day and cease to be. Feudalism had its day, from dawn to twilight a day of picturesque memory. But it did not cease to exist when its day of service was done. Long after the necessity for mutual service and protection had passed away; long after the growth of firm monarchies with powerful standing armies had established the reign of law, the feudal system kept its hold upon the social order in France and elsewhere. The obligation of military service, when no longer needed, was replaced by dues and payments. The modern cash nexus replaced the old personal bond between vassal and lord. The feudal system became the seigneurial system. The lord became the seigneur; the vassal became the censitaire or peasant cultivator whose chief function was to yield revenue for his seigneur's purse. These were great changes which sapped the spirit of the ancient institution. No longer bound to their dependants by any personal tie, the seigneurs usually turned affairs over to their bailiffs, men with hearts of adamant, who squeezed from the seigneuries every sou the hapless peasantry could yield. These publicans of the old regime have much to answer for. They and their work were not least among the causes which brought upon the crown and upon the privileged orders that terrible retribution of the Red Terror. Not with the mediaeval institution of feudalism, but with its emaciated descendant, the seigneurial system of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ought men to associate, if they must, their notions of grinding oppression and class hatred.