Power and Subsistence: The Political Economy of Grain in New France 9780773555983

Citation preview

P ow e r a n d s ubsi s tence

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M c G ill - Que e n’s F r e nc h A t l a n t i c W o rl d s S e ri e s

Series editors: Nicholas Dew and Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec The French Atlantic world has emerged as a rich and dynamic field of ­historical research. This series will showcase a new generation of scholarship exploring the worlds of the French Atlantic – including West Africa, the greater Caribbean region, and the continental Americas – from the ­sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. Books in the series will explore how the societies of the French Atlantic were shaped and connected by trans-oceanic networks of colonialism, how local and indigenous cultures and environments shaped colonial projects, and how the diverse peoples of the French Atlantic understood and experienced their worlds. Especially welcome are histories from the perspectives of the enslaved and dispossessed. Comparative studies are encouraged and the series will accept manuscript submissions in English and in French. Original works of scholarship are preferred, though translations of ­landmark books in the field will be considered. Le monde atlantique français est devenu un domaine de recherche riche et dynamique au sein de la discipline historique. La présente collection a pour vocation d’accueillir une nouvelle génération d’ouvrages explorant les espaces de l’Atlantique français – y compris l’Afrique de l’Ouest, la grande région des Caraïbes et les Amériques continentales – du début du XVIe siècle jusqu’au milieu du XIXe siècle. Les œuvres qui y sont publiées explorent de quelles manières les sociétés de l’Atlantique français sont façonnées et reliées par les réseaux transocéaniques issus du colonialisme, de quelle manière les cultures locales et leurs environnements influencent les projets coloniaux, et comment les divers peuples de l’Atlantique français comprennent et expérimentent leurs mondes. Les ouvrages donnant la parole aux esclaves ou aux acteurs traditionnellement dominés sont particulièrement bienvenus, tout comme les recherches comparées. La ­collection est ouverte aux manuscrits rédigés en anglais ou en français, de préférence des monographies originales, ainsi qu’aux traductions de livres ayant marqué le domaine. 1 Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire State, Church, and Society, 1604–1830 Gauvin Alexander Bailey 2 Flesh Reborn The Saint Lawrence Valley Mission Settlements through the Seventeenth Century Jean-François Lozier 3 Power and Subsistence The Political Economy of Grain in New France Louise Dechêne

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POWER AND SUBSISTENCE The Political Economy of Grain in New France

Louise Dechêne Translated by Peter Feldstein

McGill-­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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Published originally under the title Le Partage des subsistances au Canada sous le Régime français, © 1994 by Éditions du Boréal ©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2018 ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978-0-7735-5490-0 (cloth) 978-0-7735-5491-7 (paper) 978-0-7735-5598-3 (eP DF ) 978-0-7735-5599-0 (eP UB)

Legal deposit fourth quarter 2018 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013–2018: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Dechêne, Louise, 1928–2000 [Partage des subsistances au Canada sous le Régime français. English] Power and subsistence: the political economy of grain in New France /  Louise Dechêne; translated by Peter Feldstein. (McGill-Queen’s French Atlantic worlds series; 3) Translation of: Le partage des subsistances au Canada sous le Régime français. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isb n 978-0-7735-5490-0 (hardcover). – is bn 978-0-7735-5491-7 (softcover). – isb n 978-0-7735-5598-3 (ep df ). – is bn 978-0-7735-5599-0 (ep u b ) 1. Food supply – Canada – History.  2. Grain trade – Canada – History.  3. Grain – Transportation – Canada – History.  4. Emergency mass feeding – History.  5. Food conservation – Canada – History.  6. Famines – Canada – History.  I. Feldstein, Peter, 1962–, translator  II. Title.  III. Title: Partage des subsistances au Canada sous le Régime français.  English. HD9014.C32D4213 2018

338.1'97109032

C 2018-903920-5 C 2018-903921-3

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5 / 13 Sabon.

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Contents

Tables vii Foreword to the English Edition  ix Acknowledgments xxiii Introduction 3   1 Grain Demand: An Overview  7   2 Local Grain Redistribution  14  3 Regulations  27   4 Grain Transportation to the City  41   5 The Grain Trade  51   6 Shortages and Controls, 1690–1744  75   7 The King’s Granaries  97   8 Grain during Wartime  112   9 Public Unrest and Official Discourse  128 Conclusion 150 A ppen d i c e s A Note on Units of Measure  155 B Transportation Costs for Wheat and Flour within the Colony  157

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vi Contents

C Annual Wheat Price Fluctuations in the Vicinity of Montreal, 1675–1759 160 D Procurement of Grain, Peas, Flour, Biscuit, and Bread by the King’s Stores, 1732–47  162 E Years between 1702 and 1760 in which Canada Imported Flour and Approximate Volume of these Imports  164 F Supply of Flour and Peas to the Île Royale and Martinique Garrisons by the Intendancy of Quebec, 1729–51  165 Notes 167 Bibliography 239 Index 253

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Tables

1.1 Categories of Canadian wheat demand, 1725–44: common year 8 1.2 Volume of Canadian exports of flour, biscuit, and peas to Île Royale and the West Indies, 1721–41  12 4.1 Tonnage of ships from Montreal and Trois-Rivières unloading at Quebec, 9 May to 22 November 1763  47 7.1 Suppliers of wheat, flour, and legumes to the king’s stores by place of residence and size of contract, 1726–47  105

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Foreword to the English Edition

What basic foodstuffs sustain communities? Through whose hands does such food pass, and who ultimately consumes it? In what quantities and qualities? On what terms, and subject to what kinds of interventions and disruptions? To this day, grain of one kind or another remains at the heart of social life – indeed, of life itself. And for millennia, domesticated grain crops have been at the heart of politics too. Their history is closely tied to the history of states and public administration. The long history of state formation is in part the story of how crucial crops were mobilized.1 Visible, divisible, and easily transportable and storable, grains such as wheat, rice, millet, and maize were generally good to tax and tithe, and good for feeding armies. Coveted by what one scholar has tellingly called “the quartermaster state,” they were, naturally enough, objects of contention. Those who prepared the soil, sowed, weeded, harvested, and threshed were seldom free to dispose of the fruits of their labour as they wished. Those who moved grain to distant places were, in turn, often objects of suspicion. Others enjoyed privileged claims to grain by virtue of their status. All required grain to survive; all fretted over the risks attending its production and distribution. Mediocre harvests – due to bad weather, or some other catastrophe – could unleash insurrection, mortality crises, or flight. Thus, trying to prevent such disasters became an enduring aspiration of those in power.2 So did monitoring grain and people. During the early modern period that concerns us here, grain hardly seemed to travel through the kind of frictionless, universal, self-­ clearing transparent “market” dear to the less subtle versions of neoclassical economic theory. Yet, ironically enough, discussions about

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grain were central to the Enlightenment-era origins of the market concept. In 1750s France especially, some came to see the sphere of exchange as an autonomous human realm, existing prior to the state, and even prior to society itself. The typical interventions of public authorities – in such forms as price-setting or blocking exports – would in turn be cast as tyrannical, counterproductive transgressions of the primordial “natural laws” of property and liberty. In the minds of France’s physiocrats, who self-described with the neologism “economists,” “laissez faire” and “laissez passer” were watchwords that could guarantee the greatest good for all. Acting on such theories, government authorities liberalized France’s grain trade in the 1760s. The results would prove disastrous. Nonetheless, an enduring legacy of the period’s fraught debates over the circulation of grains has been a tendency to see “states” and “markets” in reified, ideologically charged terms, and as dichotomous entities.3 Louise Dechêne, a consummate social historian of early Canada, widely read in the rich literature on the French grain trade and the politics of bread, was thoroughly immunized against commonplace reifications on the topic of states and markets. Moreover, she knew a thing or two about the significance of grain in the northern, prephysiocratic colonial setting that constituted her domain of expertise. She had a strong hunch that “following the grain” – from the fields where it was grown, through the sites where it was ground into flour, to the consumers who finally ate it as bread or biscuit – would reveal much about the nature of colonial state power and social relations. She followed that hunch in the work translated here, Le Partage des subsistances au Canada sous le Régime français, which she conceived as the first instalment of a larger study of the relations between state and society.4 A quarter century after it first appeared in print, Power and Subsistence remains essential reading and a model study. Like everything Louise Dechêne published, the work has a classic quality: it starts with potent questions, conducts deep and probing research, and is fuelled by a passionate distaste for just-so stories about the origins of the present. As a historian, Dechêne never set out merely to “fill gaps” in the literature.5 Instead, she persisted in trying to change the ways in which North America’s past was discussed. When she began her doctoral work in the 1960s, elite men cast as founders and makers of future nations were still a central focus. She was impatient with such work, and with the uncritical significance it lent to the words

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Foreword to the English Edition xi

and acts of a paternalistic, powerful few. Surely other lives mattered and made history too? Dechêne’s training in France between 1968 and 1973 with mentors from the French Annales school was critical in this respect. It attuned her to the structures of everyday life – to patterns of birth, marriage, and death, of work and trade; to inequalities in status and wealth; to the differences between town and countryside; to particularities of landscape, climate, and belief. Indeed, social life in all its early modern, hierarchical complexity would become the topical thread running through her entire body of scholarship. During the decades following her doctorate, Dechêne certainly drew inspiration from the field’s linguistic and cultural turns. This broader intellectual context made her, among other things, an astute reader of official discourse. But she would never lose sight of questions of power, of unequal exchange – of the material bases of life.6 She retained many of the Annales’ bold aspirations toward an “histoire totalisante.” And like some of the finest novelists, she explored large questions in a setting that was intimately familiar to her, namely the St Lawrence Valley in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Far from being parochial, this focus was linked to her characteristic approach: exhaustive, cumulative immersion in the broadest possible range of primary sources. She had no patience with shortcuts. In turn, her rigour was alloyed with a fierce intelligence and a rich historical imagination. Mountains of index cards evolved eventually into prose that was characteristically lapidary, like her moral vision itself. Louise Dechêne never lured her reader into a romantic, entertaining early modern past. She led us with brisk, incisive authority into a hierarchical world of settlers, seigneurs, and merchants, of rulers and ruled. She wanted us to see, with eyes wide open. Power and Subsistence built upon Dechêne’s earlier landmark work, Habitants et marchands de Montréal au xvii e siècle, published in 1974 (followed by an English version in 1992).7 Montreal Island served as a magisterial case study for early French colonization, bringing into focus for the first time the emergence, over roughly two generations, of a coherent social and economic landscape. “One cannot express in a few lines the power, the youthfulness, the rightness and the discretion of these 500 pages,” wrote French Annales historian Pierre Goubert at the time, in a review published in Le Monde.8 To this day, no work on early modern Montreal has quite superseded it; nor, for that matter, has it been followed by an equivalent treatment of the eighteenth

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century. It remains the starting point for virtually any discussion of life in the fur-trade centre of France’s Canadian colony. Dechêne gained intimate familiarity with thousands as she saw fragments of their lives inscribed in notarial contracts or estate inventories, in censuses, in court cases, or in the records kept by the Sulpician religious order that owned the island and provided its parish priests. It almost seems that, before our very eyes, a small town took shape, surrounded by a countryside of peasant households. Family size, marriage, and inheritance practices; land use and ownership; seasonal and life-cycle patterns of agricultural work; merchant networks, assortments, and accounting practices; circuits of money and credit; the evolving geography, regulation, and structure of the fur trade and its work force… All of this, and much more, was explored in Habitants et marchands, beginning – as few books did at the time –­ with a discussion of local indigenous populations and a prescient invitation to investigate cross-cultural encounters in greater depth.9 Habitants et marchands opened up new questions for its author. In her conclusion, Dechêne wondered: How and with what effects did authorities intervene in the sphere of exchange? What might this reveal about the nature of colonial social relations?10 Having set aside the actions and intentions of colonial state agents in her monumental monograph, it was perhaps time to return more explicitly to them.11 Armed with a clinical, encyclopedic understanding of the community those authorities governed, Dechêne no longer had to take them at their own, self-satisfied word. In time, a larger set of concerns would take hold of her. How did endemic wars of empire shape the nature of governance? As she sketched out the lines that such an enquiry might take, it too began to take on vast proportions. It became clear to her that two books would be required. She would begin her larger study of the state with an examination of how basic foodstuffs were regulated. Provisioning cities and the politics of bread were, after all, central preoccupations of authorities in early modern France. What was the story in the kingdom’s northern, sparsely populated colony on the shores of the St Lawrence? Power and Subsistence explored such matters in detail. Dechêne would follow up with a broader study of the colonial state’s exactions, notably in the form of unpaid militia service, which fell disproportionately on the peasantry. This work would be published posthumously in 2008 as Le Peuple, l’État et la guerre au Canada sous le régime français.12 At the heart of both books lay deeply sympathetic portraits of the habitant farmers who formed

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Foreword to the English Edition xiii

the majority of the settler population, and of whom so much was unreasonably expected. How could they simultaneously feed everyone and form the backbone of the colony’s defence? Beneath Dechêne’s taut prose simmers anger at the condescension they received, first, from social superiors wielding economic or political power over them and, later, from historians ignorant of rural experience. “Meuvret, c’est ma bible,” Louise Dechêne once said as she worked on the present book. She was referring to the posthumous work of a kindred spirit, French historian Jean Meuvret, whose Le Problème des subsistances à l’époque de Louis xiv remains for many a challenging monument of method and mastery.13 In particular, she took to heart his injunction to expand the study of “problems of subsistence” beyond years of crisis. “The exclusive study of crises, cut off from the rest, amounts to deus ex machina history.”14 So Steven Kaplan, another major historian of French grains, would gloss his mentor’s words when they finally made it into print. Accordingly, Dechêne began her own book with a bold exercise in counting. What did the agrarian sector amount to in a typical, uneventful year? And where did the grain go? She chose to investigate orders of magnitude for the period 1729–44, when imperial violence was at a relatively low ebb. Outside indigenous enclaves like Kahnawake, maize was no longer the main crop planted in the St Lawrence valley.15 Instead, some 6,000 habitant households grew wheat, along with peripheral crops of oats, barley, and rye. Nearly two-thirds of the harvest remained in the countryside for consumption, for seed grain, and for a host of other transactions. Modest surpluses fed the colony’s three towns, its soldiers, fur traders, and fishing crews. In good years, there was enough to export to the island colony of Île Royale and even to the French plantation colonies in the West Indies. But with so few producers, the situation was precarious. A poor harvest, or a massive influx of new mouths to feed, such as occurred later during the Seven Years’ War, was profoundly disruptive. When both occurred at the same time, the effects could be devastating. During the late 1750s, writes Dechêne in her final chapters, the “spectre of famine” stalked the land. And this, she ventures further, was perhaps the most terrifying aspect of war. It is perhaps worth remembering that the St Lawrence Valley had long marked the northern limits of agriculture. As the region’s archeology suggests, Iroquoian farmers grew maize this far north until the late sixteenth century. We now know that the years 1580 to 1620 or so were particularly harsh; they stand out in the long cooling period

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known as the Little Ice Age, roughly spanning the years 1300 to 1850. The particularly aggressive frosts felt at the turn of the seventeenth century may well have destroyed Iroquoian harvests and increased tensions between affected and nearby indigenous communities. At any rate, these climatological conditions are now an integral part of the explanation for why Iroquoians no longer inhabited the shores and islands of the river by the early seventeenth century, just as French fur traders were attempting a year-round settlement at Quebec.16 And thus ironically enough, icy weather may have created a window for French interlopers to try their hand at growing crops that were more familiar to them. In time, settlers would adjust to a growing season that lasted no more than 130 to 150 days. Generations of peasant proprietors would eventually transform the river valley into a wheat landscape. And though by the peacetime years chosen by Dechêne to gauge the size and distribution of harvests, temperatures were warmer than during the previous century, the eighteenth-century climate was still harsher than it is today.17 As historians of climate and the environment will note, Dechêne is everywhere sensitive to the particular risks and constraints attending farming at its northern edges, and to the fears generated by such vulnerability.18 She does not content herself with generalities about short growing seasons. Instead, she meticulously documents the effects of climate and weather on patterns of work and transport, and on the timing of deliveries and contracts. This was a painstaking exercise, possible only for one deeply attuned to silences in the record, and adept at finding indirect evidence of customary practices. Many modest sales would have been sealed verbally and agreed to by people familiar with one another, leaving few written traces for the historian. Contracts passed before a notary are among the best-preserved documents from early modern Canada, and Dechêne did uncover dozens of these. But many more contracts would have been signed privately and have not survived. Under such circumstances, Dechêne made creative use of civil court cases involving agreements gone sour. These conflicts helped shed crucial, if indirect light, on the course of events considered “normal.” In Canada’s cold climate, Dechêne observes, a modest trickle of grain would only begin to appear in the towns by December. The breakneck pace of work imposed by the possibility of an early frost and the lateness of spring precluded earlier deliveries. Indeed, to get a head start for springtime sowing, farmers ploughed and prepared

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Foreword to the English Edition xv

their fields in the fall, right after the harvest. They threshed only at the onset of winter. Moreover, by November, the few roads that existed, such as those on Montreal Island, were often washed out by rain. Only when cold and frost dried up such tracks could farmers begin to bring modest surpluses to town by horse and cart. Meanwhile, buyers of more sizable stocks began to enter into agreements, and in some cases sign contracts, around February. No specialized grain traders emerged in this modest agrarian economy. Rather, larger purchases came from the likes of bakers in the towns or state officials such as the intendant at Quebec or his proxies in the other two colonial towns. These men would have been stocking the king’s storehouses, mainly to feed the naval troops stationed in the colony, or to feed the crews of royal vessels on their return trips to French ports. Contracts signed in February might be delivered much later, when the costs of moving grain were lowest. Water transport was cheapest, and the St Lawrence River was the main avenue for moving grain. But it froze until April or so, despite its current. Thus, substantial deliveries waited until spring and summer. Such delays were not without advantages: the cold winter could improve the quality of a humid harvest. In addition to tracking the habitual seasonal trajectory of grain at its northern reaches, this book offers a precise chronology of compromised harvests and a sense of the crises they occasioned. Bad harvests were not more frequent than elsewhere, but they were particularly disruptive given the small number of producers, the short window for river transport, and the compressed northern agricultural calendar. It didn’t help that crop sizes were perhaps less “legible” to public authorities than in more temperate settings. A full sense of the harvest, and whether it was necessary to worry, or intervene, might not be known until threshing work began in winter. (Dechêne observes that colonial intendants were in a position to take advantage of this uncertainty, signing their contracts for the provisioning of troops as early as October. If a bad harvest caused prices to rise later, the early contracts allowed for savings.) By the time it became clear that a harvest was dire, the St Lawrence River was no longer navigable. Thus, in the case of a major emergency, relief by way of supplies from outside the colony could never be immediate. And local supplies would be a long time coming. After an autumn catastrophe, the next good local harvest would at best be available for urban consumption a year and a half later. Modest town dwellers living

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on fixed salaries were especially affected by the resulting sharp rises in the price of bread. In the countryside, habitants could avert malnutrition by fishing and hunting. Dechêne’s study predates the explosion of recent work on the crucial importance of credit and debt in the pre-industrial economies of Western Europe.19 But it lines up presciently with the insights of this literature. In France itself, as late as the eve of the French Revolution, the value of cash transactions represented perhaps only one-fifth of the total.20 Credit provided the rest, mostly in the form of book debt and various types of private paper. Even merchants, the supposed avant-garde of capitalist bourgeois values, might not demand cash payment for ages. Their account books testified to the trust and personal relations underlying the transactions inscribed therein.21 In Canada’s pre-industrial economy, suggests Dechêne, only a fraction of grain transactions could properly be described as commercial sales, or indeed “sales” of any kind. And even the notarized tip of the iceberg shows that, for the most part, commercial sales occurred on credit. As for the overwhelming bulk of grain transactions, they occurred in the countryside itself, and were embedded in networks of proximity and kin. Wealthier peasant households might lend wheat to less fortunate family members or neighbours, for consumption or seed grain, in times of shortage or illness, or at vulnerable stages of life; they might pay wages in grain for farm labour beyond what a nuclear household could provide. Rural merchants might sell imported goods on credit, accepting wheat as repayment. Though transactions were typically recorded in the unit of account (livres, sols, and deniers), wheat was perhaps the most significant medium of exchange and payment, especially in the countryside. Throughout, Power and Subsistence makes signal contributions to the history of monetary practices. The book also contains invaluable discussions of just how difficult – perhaps impossible – it is to construct meaningful, homogeneous price series for colonial wheat. As in Meuvret’s work, Power and Subsistence’s endnotes are worth the price of admission. They open up a lifetime of research projects for the careful, interested reader. In Dechêne’s hands, “the state” is no more treated as a mythical abstraction than is “the market.” And her study of the regulation of the grain trade hardly amounts to a scholastic enumeration of legislative texts. Based on a deep familiarity with metropolitan French precedents and local practices, she draws out colonial peculiarities. As in France, the provisioning of towns was viewed as the natural

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Foreword to the English Edition xvii

domain of public administration, both by regulators and by urban consumers. The same collective fears of famine, hoarding, and “mono­ polies” prevailed, with the same wish of keeping intermediaries between producers and consumers to a minimum. In Canada, such fears focused on the figure of the rural merchant, mistakenly believed to violate some rule or other. As in France, rules established “the market” as a physical place in the towns, to promote the transparent exchange between buyers and sellers. While they became important urban sites, the formal colonial marketplaces never became the main locations where grain was exchanged and, thus, never fulfilled their role as guarantors of transparency. And little of the ancillary monitoring so crucial to French regulation – registration of merchants, passports for the internal movement of grain, default interdiction of exports – emerged in early Canada. Neither did rules explicitly forbid, as they did in France, the participation of bakers or public officials in the buying and selling of grain (or flour) – and participate they did. Dechêne even finds Canada’s intendant Michel Bégon formally outlawing exports while marketing his own private shiploads to the Caribbean.22 Dispersed, and subject to fewer controls under normal circumstances, the colonial grain trade was in some sense “freer” than that which occurred in many metropolitan locations, such as the vicinity of Paris. But without routine mechanisms for tracking the movement of grain and its prices, colonial crises were handled in more cumbersome, often arbitrary fashion. New France’s intendant arrogated much of the regulatory power to himself, squeezing out other institutional bodies that might have been of assistance. By the late 1740s, colonial rule and its effects resembled nothing so much as the early agrarian “quartermaster state” sketched out by James Scott, with its coercive power to mobilize grain and people, and its propensity to create human disaster, not to mention its tendency to collapse. In Canada, times never returned to “normal” after the War of the Austrian Succession (1744–48). Dechêne’s subsequent book would refer to the final years of French rule as the long “Sixteen Years War.”23 Military provisioning became the paramount concern. As fort building extended deep into the Ohio Valley and then as war broke out unofficially in 1754, the free circulation of grain vanished as ideal and as practical possibility. Always fragile, food security in the colony was thoroughly compromised by the arrivals of thousands of new mouths to feed – soldiers from France, Acadian refugees, and indigenous allies far from their habitual sources of subsistence.

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And there was simply less grain to go around. Habitants were increasingly pressed into longer and longer militia duty, leaving fewer hands to plough, sow, and harvest. Poor harvests, such as the succession occurring between 1757 and 1760, compounded the catastrophic effects of war. Rates of mortality spiked since malnutrition created fertile ground for epidemics. And there was nothing efficient or effective about the actions of state officials, who had become the main buyers of increasingly scarce grain. Those on the state’s payroll deepened their personal involvement as buyers and sellers, while enacting harsh measures of surveillance and prohibition. Invasive requisitioning (sometimes at gunpoint) fell disproportionately and unfairly on the peasantry, whose needs beyond immediate consumption and seed grain were viewed as suspicious and illegitimate. In contrast, the stocks of grain owned by seigneurs or members of the clergy were spared until the eleventh hour. Parish priests may have distributed grain in times of distress, but they also helped out with surveillance. As collectors of tithes, they could be expected to know which habitant farmers might be hiding grain at requisition time. Dechêne shows us that, even in peaceful years, profound asymmetries of power characterized exchange within this unequal early modern society. They would be brutally compounded by a global imperial war. In the end, I am tempted to return, with slight tweaks, to the words with which Pierre Goubert greeted Louise Dechêne’s first work. Indeed, one cannot express in a few lines the power, the rightness, and the discretion of these few hundred pages. Dechêne did not overtly signal her deep reading in works of political economy and empire. And she left to others the task of studying the many processes through which indigenous peoples came to be dispossessed in the Americas. But by patiently following grain, at a time when others had all but abandoned what may have seemed like a very “un-youthful” enquiry, this humane historian beckoned us back, and beckons us still, to essential questions: the politics of food and the instrumentalization of those with little social power. The questions themselves are in some sense timeless, and of global significance. Dechêne’s early modern study of a northern colony issues a modest but masterful proposal: our enquiries are no less potent when deeply rooted in particular times and places. Catherine Desbarats McGill University

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Foreword to the English Edition xix

n otes   1 Steven L. Kaplan, “Les subsistances et l’Ancien Régime: L’œuvre de Jean Meuvret,” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 36, no. 2 (1981): 295.   2 For a provocative recent intervention on the connections between early states on the one hand and attempts to control populations and harvests on the other, see James C. Scott, Against the Grain: The Deep History of Early States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). In particular, Scott discusses the superior suitability of grains for taxation, compared to other important crops such as legumes or tubers. He includes the property of “simultaneous ripening” as an important part of what makes grain harvests convenient for tax collectors ­(129–34). For Scott’s idea of the “quartermaster state,” see Against the Grain, 142.   3 On states and markets as reified, Manichean polarities, see Keith Hart’s classic essay on money: “Heads or Tails: Two Sides of the Coin,” Man 21 (1986): 637–57. On the Enlightenment era “economic turn,” “reasoning” on the topic of grains, and the important place of “liberty” and “property” in physiocratic thought, see Steven L. Kaplan, Raisonner sur les blés. Essais sur les Lumières économiques (Paris: Fayard, 2017), especially the introduction.  4 Le Partage des subsistances au Canada sous le Régime français (Montréal: Les Éditions du Boréal, 1994).   5 She might well have said, as Steven L. Kaplan wrote recently of his own, related work, “Mon projet n’a jamais été de combler une lacune, mais de problématiser le pain: la leçon des Annales.” Kaplan, Raisonner sur les blés, 10.   6 On the tendency to lose sight of power, see Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).  7 Habitants et marchands de Montréal au xvii e siècle (Paris: Plon, 1974); Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Montreal (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992, trans. Liana Vardi). For an elegant treatment of the work’s originality and impact, see Thomas Wien, “Introduction: Habitants, marchands, historiens,” in Sylvie Dépatie, Catherine Desbarats et al., Habitants et marchands, Twenty Years Later: Reading the History of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 3–31. Dechêne’s first book won both the Governor General’s Literary Award (French Language, Non-fiction) and the Canadian Historical Association’s

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Foreword to the English Edition

François-Xavier Garneau Medal. The latter is awarded to the best work of history, all fields included, published in Canada in the p ­ revious five years.   8 My translation. Goubert is quoted in Thomas Wien, “Introduction,” 4.   9 See her first chapter, especially Table 1, outlining the presence of indige­ nous populations in early colonial censuses. 10 Dechêne, Habitants and Merchants, 280. 11 Thomas Wien has explored, once again with elegant precision, Dechêne’s intellectual trajectory from Habitants et marchands to her larger project on the nature of colonial authority. Wien had access to some of her private manuscripts and thought processes. Wien, “Introduction,” in Louise Dechêne, Le Peuple, l’État et la guerre au Canada sous le régime français (Montreal: Les Éditions du Boréal, 2008). I draw on his many insights here. 12 Dechêne, Le Peuple, l’État et la guerre. 13 “Meuvret, c’est ma bible.” Personal communication, early 1990s. Jean Meuvret, Le problème des subsistances à l’époque de Louis xiv . La production des céréales dans la France du xvii e siècle, 2 vols. (Paris-La Haye: Mouton/ehes s , Centre de recherches historiques, Coll. Civilisations et sociétés, 1977). Meuvret’s work remained unfinished, and he was under-appreciated during his lifetime. For a helpful assessment of his difficult but rewarding work, see George Grantham, “Jean Meuvret and the Subsistence Problem in Early Modern France,” Journal of Economic History 49 (1989): 184–200. 14 My translation. Kaplan, “Les subsistances et l’Ancien Régime,” 297. 15 On maize growing at Kahnawake, see Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 98. David Preston, The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667–1783 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 34–6. 16 The most recent climate research and the current state of thinking about the so-called disappearance of the St Lawrence Valley Iroquoians can be found in Sam White, A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America (Cambridge, ma : Harvard University Press, 2017). 17 On long-term temperature evidence, see Colin Coates and Dagomar Degroot, “‘Les bois engendrent les frimas et les gelées’: Comprendre le ­climat en Nouvelle-France,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 68 (2015): 197–219. On peasant transformation of the landscape, see Colin M. Coates, The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000).

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Foreword to the English Edition xxi

The turn of the eighteenth century was also marked by harsh weather in North America. Gregory M.W. Kennedy has explored its impact on peasant farmers in Acadia. See his Something of a Peasant Paradise? Comparing Rural Societies in Acadie and the Loudunais, 1604–1755 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014). 18 Dechêne built on earlier work such as Thomas Wien’s “‘Les travaux pressants.’ Calendrier agricole, assolement et productivité au Canada au x v iii siècle,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 43 (1990): 535–58. 19 Landmark works include Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998); Laurence Fontaine, L’Économie morale: Pauvreté, crédit et confiance (Paris: Gallimard, coll. nrf essais, 2008); Fontaine, Le marché: Histoires et usages d’une conquête sociale (Paris: Gallimard, coll. n rf essais, 2014); Clare Haru Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Durham, nc : Duke University Press, 2013). 20 Françoise Bayard and Philippe Guignet, L’économie française aux xvi e, xvii e, et xviii e siècles (Gap, France: Ophrys, 1991), 217. 21 Pierre Gervais, “Crédit et filières marchandes au x v iiie siècle,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales 67 (4) (2012): 1011–48. 22 Bégon arrived as intendant of New France in 1712 and departed in 1726. Yves F. Zoltvany, “Bégon De La Picardière, Michel,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, www.biographi.ca/en/bio/begon_de_la_picardiere_michel_3E.html (accessed 20 April 2018) 23 Dechêne, Le Peuple, l’État et la guerre. See especially chapter 8, “Une guerre de seize ans (1744–1760),” 287–308.

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Acknowledgments

This study is part of a larger research project on the nature of power in Canada before 1760 and is soon to be followed by a second work. The whole project has been carried out with the financial support of the Killam Foundation, to which I express my gratitude. I also wish to thank McGill University for its contribution to the project, as well as the colleagues and friends whose encouragement spurred me on. Special thanks go to Thomas Wien, Louis Michel, and Sylvie Dépatie for agreeing to read and comment on the manuscript.

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P ow e r a n d s ubsi s tence

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Introduction

Subsistence crops – the basic food items necessary to a people’s survival – were a central concern of the French Ancien Régime state. They were the object of unending clashes between merchants small and large, who had to be watched, urban consumers, who had to be placated, and the various levels of authority that shared these responsibilities. Much the most important of these crops was wheat, which made up the bulk of the diet; hence, the need for tight control over the transactions by which it changed hands. In this effort, administrators wielded a set of regulations that had changed relatively little since the Middle Ages even as markets expanded, technical progress was accomplished, and new trade practices arose in the cities. The study of these legal provisions as well as the frequency of government intervention, the fears that provoked it, and the reactions it elicited can tell us much about the nature of power and, in particular, the power dynamics in play between governmental authorities and the various groups comprising society. It is this that explains historians’ undying interest in the French “grain police.” How did this institution survive the overseas migration? At first glance, the Canadian legislation looks like a simplified version of the metropolitan model, but when one takes the trouble to analyze the regulation of the grain trade and the nature of government interventions in times of scarcity, it becomes evident that colonial policy in this area diverged considerably from the policy applied elsewhere in the realm. This divergence has to do with several factors, starting with the peculiar geographical, demographic, and social context of the colony – but not ending there. What this study shows is that the hypercentralization and  increasing harshness of the colonial government’s measures

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4

P owe r a n d su b s is tence

corresponded to a logic of authoritarian power that was, as Tocqueville put it, “free to indulge its natural predilections.”1 From this perspective, the study fills a void. While previous historians of New France have addressed the subsistence question, they have generally stopped at paraphrasing the intendants’ ordinances and the reports these men sent to Versailles to justify their interventions. Readers are treated to descriptions of poor harvests and hardships, along with measures taken to alleviate them and to punish speculators and smugglers. Is it any wonder that such historical accounts, derived as they are from the official texts, should offer such a positive image of the administration? All the regulations are presented as necessary, judicious, and effective. Another distortion, and not the least, is that the question of subsistence is only considered at the moment when the intendants began taking an interest in it: when grain became scarce. Readers are given the impression that penury was the colonists’ lot and that without the meticulous surveillance and enlightened policy of the king’s officers, the whole colony would have died of starvation.2 It is not my intent to present a diametrically opposed interpretation, robotically substituting blame for praise. The point is that the colonial government did what it believed it had to do under the circumstances, and it is those circumstances that must be elucidated. To quote Jean Meuvret: “There can be no true knowledge of an economic policy without a satisfactory grasp of the realities that this policy had to confront.”3 Therefore, I have enlarged the scope of this study to consider the provenance of wheat placed on the market, as well as its movement from country to city and between cities. The three chapters devoted, respectively, to the local grain trade, to transportation, and to merchants owe much to the work of other historians and, in particular, to recent research on rural Quebec. These chapters make no claim to exhaust the subjects in question; what they represent instead is a more modest attempt to create a nexus between one group of precise, but perhaps overly hermetic, works of rural history and another group of synthetic works focusing on external trade, which pay little attention to the ruralists’ discoveries. After the outline of the grain trade presented in these chapters, this book turns to the other major task confronting the authorities, indeed their highest priority during both peacetime and wartime: military procurement. This question has remained unexplored to date, and it was important for my purposes to establish the relationship between military requirements and the control measures deployed by the colonial administration. Throughout, the

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Introduction 5

study remains sensitive to contentious situations that arose between consumers, producers, merchants, and administrators over how grain was to be shared and allocated, and the final chapter discusses how these situations were perceived and experienced. The backbone of the documentation that I have used in this study consists of legislative acts. My observations on the content and longterm patterns of colonial legislation rely on a serial analysis of all relevant judicial decisions (arrêts), ordinances, and commissions contained in the archives. I attach great importance to accurate knowledge of institutions and their workings, hence to this first level of interpretation. The second level, where this information is put into perspective, has benefited from anchor points in two related areas of knowledge. One consists of comparisons with Ancien Régime France, which are feasible thanks to the abundance and quality of old and recent work in which the problem of grain is examined from every angle. There is, of course, the work of Jean Meuvret and Steven Kaplan and, among older sources, that of Joseph Letaconnoux, Georges Lefebvre, Pierre de Saint-Jacob, and Jean Meyer, along with that of all the other authors mentioned throughout this study.4 The unique features of the grain police in the colony can only be discerned, and its failings identified, through comparison with its counterpart in the mother country. For the purposes of this comparison, I have focused on how this institution operated in France during the same time period, namely, the first half of the eighteenth century. It was a period when the essential components of grain policy were relatively uniform from one city or province to another;5 when transportation networks were improving, too slowly no doubt, but sufficiently to mitigate regional dearth; when the increasingly numerous agents of royal power had learned to count, and had even started to make predictions; and when the idea of deregulation was making small strides. The second anchor point for this work of institutional history consists of my many years of work on the social history of New France, that of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rural world in particular. While the book focuses on events taking place downstream of the farms, my prior knowledge of the rural context gives me an effective vantage point from which to interrogate the sources, so as not to conflate the official discourse with the reality it was describing. Occupying a middle ground between the social and the political, between structures and the events that disrupt them, this study of an administration seeks to elucidate the thought patterns of a government and the people it governed – to understand the specific cultural whole that was theirs.

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St L

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Sagu en a

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Parishes along the St Lawrence River

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1 Grain Demand: An Overview

Data sets only have meaning to the extent that they are interpreted in relation to one another. There is some statistical data that historians of New France can use to pinpoint agricultural production and export volumes, and there are also qualitative sources providing isolated information on civilian and military demand and on flour imports during food shortages. But taken in isolation, this data is insufficient to estimate the volume of commercial and extracommercial movement of grain or to gauge the impact of the corresponding administrative measures. How fully, say, did the 6,730 hundredweight (cwt) of flour purchased in France in 1744 meet the colony’s needs? What shares of the grain market did domestic and foreign demand account for in normal years? As an initial answer to these questions, table 1.1 represents an attempt to quantify the various uses of wheat in the colony. It is a rough-andready exercise, no doubt, and the result certainly makes no claim to precision. But it does establish an order of magnitude, rendering disparate data sets comparable by expressing them in the same units of measure­ment. This is the only way to obtain an overarching perspective on the grain trade in the early decades of the eighteenth century and to understand how it was transformed after 1744. The wheat in question was the soft wheat that occupied nearly three-fourths of the cultivated area in any given year, forming the basis of trade and diet in the colony. Corn was a marginal crop, barley and rye even less important. Oats, mostly used as animal feed, vied for second place in the cropping system alongside several varieties of legumes generically referred to as “peas.” The volume of the pea harvest fluctuated between 10 and 20 per cent of that of the wheat

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8

P owe r a n d su b s is tence

Table 1.1 Categories of Canadian wheat demand, 1725–44: common year Minots (60 pounds) Rural demand

%

235,314

48

Seed reserve

81,812

17

Quebec and Montreal demand

58,745

12

Fur trading and fishing provisions

21,000

4

Procurement by king’s stores

14,000

3

Exports and ship provisions

80,000

16

490,871

100

to ta l

harvest, and its contribution to rural subsistence was sizable. There was also a market for these peas and beans in the colony and abroad, as may be ascertained from export statistics and various references found in food procurement contracts. This complementary production does not appear in table 1.1 because its allocation is unknown, but one may assume that its presence in each demand category diminished dependence on wheat to some extent. The twenty-year period used in this model is punctuated by eight aggregate censuses showing an uneven but upward-trending production curve for the whole colony. This data provides some useful evidence, but its degree of precision cannot be determined until it has been carefully examined, parish by parish.1 The average production figure presented here, resulting from the sum of the demand categories given in the table, accords with the census figures. It is valid for the fifteen years in which the harvest was sufficient to meet these sources of demand. The volume of grain saved for seed is based on a yield of six to one – a conservative estimate, probably lower than the actual average in a normal year. I have calculated effective demand by assuming average rations of 1.5 pounds of bread per day for adults and 9.6 ounces for children under fifteen, and then multiplying by demographic data from the 1739 census. Assuming that wheat was converted into its weight in bread and that a minot of wheat weighed 60 pounds, these rations correspond to 9.125 and 3.65 minots of wheat per year, respectively.2 A decision by the Conseil souverain dated 22 November 1700, targeting merchants who hoarded grain, limited wheat purchases by residents of Quebec City (then unambiguously called Quebec,

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Grain Demand

9

for the word did not yet have a provincial referent) to domestic needs estimated at 12 minots per head, and this figure reappears several times in the official correspondence.3 The colonial authorities had no way of assessing actual consumption, so they based their estimate on the daily ration of militiamen stationed at the military posts: 2 pounds of bread and 6 ounces of lard. This was called a “habitant’s ration” in the storekeepers’ accounts to distinguish it from a “soldier’s ration,” since soldiers were only allotted 1.5 pounds of bread when not on the march.4 It goes without saying that the proportion of bread diminished where the diet was more varied, which was generally the case in the countryside. Peasants ate a great deal of dairy and vegetables in the summer, in the form of salads and curdled milk dishes. Cabbages, onions, root vegetables, and especially dried peas and beans added variety to winter menus. Fish was important, perhaps as much as meat. The latter was used to make soups in which the habitants dunked their bread.5 Aside from the gruel-enriched bran fed to livestock and pigs, none of the wheat harvest went to animal feed. All things considered, an average ration of 1.5 pounds of bread per individual, women and seniors included, is a reasonable estimate.6 City demand is calculated on the same basis as for the country, but it is perhaps understated to some extent. The uncertainty has to do with the dietary gaps between different social strata. How can an average be calculated for a divided population in which some sat at well-garnished tables while others essentially filled their bellies with bread? This is less of a problem for large cities where the population is dominated by masses of low wage earners, but in Quebec and Montreal, wage-earning households accounted for only a small proportion of the total.7 In any case, these were really only small towns; in 1739, Quebec’s population numbered just shy of 5,000, Montreal’s only 3,750. Urban demand was even lower in that quite a number of city dwellers owned land, and this introduces a second divide: between those who had their own grain provisions and those who depended on the market. The first group was not restricted to nobles and bourgeois; in Montreal in particular, many artisans owned small acreages in the adjacent côtes (administrative divisions consisting of a small collection of farms) where they grew some of their food, and it comes as no surprise to find some urban transactions in which payment was made in wheat. Convents and hospitals, of course, consumed the wheat from their rents and farms.8

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10

P owe r a n d su b s is tence

This limited market was expanded by distant enterprises owned by some of the bourgeois. Since the colony’s inception, Montreal bourgeois had been sending flotillas of canoes into the interior. In the eighteenth century, the number of men required to carry goods upriver and return with furs increased steadily. Outfitters supplied provisions for the journey itself and for the trading posts they operated. These shipments were recorded in their account books, most of which are no longer extant. The one kept by Alexis Monière from 1739 to 1753 shows that the engagés, or indentured employees of the fur traders, were mainly fed on lard and wheat cakes, and the heavy predominance of wheat in the diet at the posts is confirmed by hundreds of invoices submitted to the naval treasurer by various suppliers during the last decade of the French administration.9 In the seventeenth century, people departing for faraway destinations carried sacks of roasted corn or hominy ground into meal. What this information shows is that the voyageurs’ dietary regime evolved as journeys into the interior became more frequent.10 In fact, Canada grew little corn – according to the censuses, only 7,000–12,000 minots in the 1720s and even less in the 1730s. Small quantities were harvested in the vicinity of certain posts where the climate was suitable, and the Indigenous people might sell some on occasion, but it was only a supplemental grain. The chances of one day being able to quantify the volume of this supply operation are nil. Even if historians managed to agree on the number of merchants and engagés moving about the Great Lakes region each year – and their estimates still differ markedly – how could such widely dispersed demand be evaluated, given the distances, the length of time spent in each place, the various uses of provisions at the posts, and the considerable losses that must certainly have occurred?11 But some way must be found to account for this demand, and in the absence of accurate figures, a volume of 14,000 minots, or enough to feed a thousand men, seems a reasonable conjecture. Equally lacking is data that might serve to quantify the effective demand of the sedentary fisheries and the fur trade operated by Quebec merchants along the shores of Tadoussac and Labrador. Yet these were much more concentrated enterprises than those operating in the pays d’en haut (the contemporaneous term for much of presentday Ontario), and a good study of these operations will one day make it possible to estimate the provisions required for the boat crews and the employees on land. In the meantime, I will venture an estimate of 7,000 minots for these vessels, including those bound for the Gaspé

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Grain Demand

11

shore. Conflated in practice with urban demand as such, these supplies bring the latter figure up to around 80,000 minots.12 As for wheat procurement for military rations, it amounted to 14,000 minots in an average year from the turn of the century until the late 1730s.13 These provisions, processed into flour, bread, and biscuit at the king’s expense in the Quebec, Trois-Rivières, and Montreal stores, fed the soldiers in their winter quarters and supplied the remote garrison posts in season. This was more than enough to meet the needs of the 750 or so soldiers stationed in the colony during this period, especially given the common practice of billeting soldiers in private homes, where they were often fed by their hosts. But there was plenty of waste, such as grain that spoiled in transit, and the storekeepers did not scrimp on the quality of a product much superior to the bread eaten by soldiers in France – for the flour could never be too white for the officers who shared these provisions while stationed at the posts.14 When the harvest sufficed, the colony shipped flour and biscuit to Louisbourg and the other fishing ports in the gulf and vicinity, and also exported flour directly to the West Indies. This trade, begun during the War of the Spanish Succession with shipments of provisions to Plaisance (now Placentia) and the Caribbean, reached its height in the 1720s. From 1727 to 1736, an average of twenty-four ships a year shuttled between Quebec and Île Royale (the French colony composed of today’s Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island), and a dozen more carried foodstuffs directly to Martinique and Saint-Domingue.15 The only extant data that can serve to quantify these exports is the discontinuous official series reproduced in table 1.2. It covers only nine years, albeit corresponding to the peak period of this trade. Whether these figures cover supplies of provisions for the ships’ crews is unknown.16 Yet this is a sizable category of demand, one that Quebec merchants and bakers vied to capture, and one of great concern to the authorities when shortages made it necessary to curtail exports. The manufacture of ship’s biscuit (hardtack) for the crews precedes the period when exports were occurring and continues on a larger scale after 1745, when the war interrupted intercolonial trade but augmented transatlantic traffic. In peacetime, it was necessary to supply the king’s vessel and a dozen other ships bound for La Rochelle, Bordeaux, or other French ports, ships bound for Louisbourg and the West Indies, and fishing barques needing repairs and provisions before

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P owe r a n d su b s is tence

Table 1.2 Volume of Canadian exports of flour, biscuit, and peas to Île Royale and the West Indies, 1721–41 Year

Flour Quarters

Biscuit Cwt

Cwt

Total In m i not s of w h e at

Peas Q ua rt e rs

I n m i not s

1721

2,026

4,052

2,522

16,435

836

2,090

1727

7,472

14,944

11,138

65,205

4,126

10,315

1728

6,613

13,226

11,802

62,570

3,876

9,690

1732

6,433

12,866

8,858

54,310

4,452

11,130

1733

2,194

4,388

2,847

18,088

966

2,415

1734

10,010

20,020

10,883

77,258

1735

8,753

17,506

10,073

68,948

3,170

7,925

1736

7,054

14,108

11,574

64,205

4,040

10,100

1737

204

408

2,373

6,953

1,133

2,832

1739

9,524

19,048

10,618

74,165

1,827

4,567

9,333

7,500

42,082

726

1,815

17,495

304

760

1740a 1741b

3,499

6,998

a

For Île Royale only b For the West Indies only Conversion: 2 cwt per quarter; 2.5 minots of wheat per cwt of flour or biscuit; 2.5 minots of peas per quarter (See Appendix A) Sources: ac, g 1, v. 466; f2b, 11; the data are reproduced in Lunn, Economic Development, with the exception of the figures for 1734, which were found by Thomas Wien in the Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), naf, 2552: 139–40.

setting off on the return voyage.17 My scrutiny of the exporters’ decla­ rations leads me to believe that the official statistics only take account of exports proper. They include shipments on the king’s account to the Louisbourg and Saint-Pierre (Martinique) garrisons, which represent only a small proportion of the total during this period.18 To the Windward Islands, Canada shipped only patent flour, following the Bordeaux practice according to which the finest grinds were reserved for the Americas. This flour kept better in the heat and under maritime conditions.19 Exports of subsistence items to Île Royale were much more voluminous and diversified, consisting of green or white peas, patent flour, greater quantities of whole flour, and especially biscuit. Approximately 40 per cent of wheat was exported in the form of biscuit, as indicated by table 1.2; considering only Île

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Grain Demand

13

Royale and environs, the proportion often reached 50 per cent or more, for the West Indies purchased little or none depending on the year.20 Hardtack was the primary staple of the fishing posts and the ship’s crews sailing for France or the West Indies from Louisbourg, a much busier port than Quebec. Small quantities of dried beans and peas were sold on the various colonial markets, and even at times in France.21 According to the proportions presented in table 1.1, the foreign market absorbed nearly half the wheat surplus coming out of the rural parts of the colony; but the key point is that the surplus was not very big. Despite all the question marks in this data, the table highlights the considerable share of the harvest taken up by rural demand – nearly two-thirds. This is the primary characteristic of this agricultural system and the source of its vulnerability. Seed saving and rural household consumption were inelastic variables if not constants, so the slightest dip in production had a catastrophic effect on trade. Using my figures, for example, a 20 per cent decrease in the harvest, down to 460,000 minots, would have translated into a halving of the surplus available for market. A 25 per cent decrease, in itself not a tragedy, would have left not even enough wheat to feed Montreal and Quebec.22 These wholemeal bread-eating peasants were also guilty of being too few in number, whence the sluggishness of production on the whole. The number of farms, increasing as a function of population, had barely reached 6,000 in 1740. At such a small scale, yield fluctuations were more perceptible and the grain market felt their effects all the more.

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2 Local Grain Redistribution

As long as the Canadian peasantry was perceived as homogeneous, there was no way for local grain movement to attract historians’ attention. The assumption that each farm family possessed approximately the same acreage and means of production implied that trade in subsistence crops among them could only have been sporadic, mainly used as a means of settling transactions when money was short.1 Recent work has demolished this image of the undifferentiated rural masses and, by the same token, revealed the scale of local grain circulation. The grain independence threshold, even if set at a very low level, remained out of reach for at least a fifth if not a quarter of peasants, for lack of the resources needed to fully exploit their land, to plough and to plant it.2 This proportion, observed in well-­established parishes throughout the eighteenth century, was even higher on the agricultural frontier. Contrary to previous belief, studies of seventeenth-­ century Montreal colonists have shown that differences in production levels did not even out as the forest receded.3 Quite the contrary, they became more pronounced, with some farmers subsisting by selling their labour power and a minority of better-off individuals harvesting far more than their families could consume, putting them in a position to profit from shortages. Between these two poles, a majority of midsized producers oscillated between small surpluses in good years and periodic deficits in bad ones. The dynamics of the local market were driven by these differences among producers.4 The word “market” is used here in its broadest sense to comprise exchanges of goods and services more closely resembling barter than sales. Trade networks did not stop at the boundaries of the parish or the seigneury but extended to older neighbouring parishes

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Local Grain Redistribution 15

and nascent farm communities, forming small regional clusters whose outlines shifted, expanded, or contracted according to the status of the settlement and the available routes of travel. It can be surmised that migratory movements were bound up with trade. While food self-sufficiency was far from the common denominator of individual peasant families, it was a reality at the scale of these rural agglomerations, which – regardless of the size of the harvest – had none but their own resources on which to rely. Wheat moved from country to town, not in the other direction. Nor is there any example, before 1760, of one region sending food to another in order to help out a group of parishes in distress.5 Year in and year out, a varying but always sizable proportion of grain surpluses was redistributed locally. This grain came from the priests’, seigneurs’, and merchants’ granaries as well as directly from the farmers’ barns.

F a r m e r- to - fa r mer Trade Trade among farmers can be divided into two categories as a function of the type of social relations in play: payments in wheat and advances of wheat. The rural economy comprised an in-kind payment system in which grain played a crucial role. When one priest wrote that “wheat is the currency of Saint-Sulpice,” he might have been referring to any one of the seigneuries.6 This phenomenon should not necessarily be entirely set down to a money shortage in the colony. Card money abounded during some periods, as did payment orders interconvertible with cards, yet people continued to demand 6.5 minots of wheat for nine days’ wages, or to charge 16 minots for a cart; they continued to trade wheel hoops, winnowing baskets, and lumber for heifers, hay, peas, or labour. This form of exchange, with deferred payment made in instalments, reveals itself to be a normal, convenient procedure; it did not, however, exclude the pricing of goods and services at market rates.7 The peasant who asked a judge to order his neighbour to “give him back” a cow, three barn posts, a day of planting with two horses, or “four minots of peas that I lent him, what with the planting season well underway,” knew the market value of what he demanded.8 Services are the common object of such agreements: children hired out by the month, cartage of wood, and, especially, harvest and threshing days, for which grain remained the most common method of payment. The best farmers, most of whom cultivated rather large acreages, generally needed extra hands at the

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busiest times of year. But labour demand was not solely driven by this minority, for familial circumstances likewise forced mediocre farmers to resort to hiring labourers, as witness some instances of “unpaid wages” carried as a liability after death.9 A portion of the harvest was claimed by these seasonal labourers, mostly recruited from among the poorest members of the peasantry. Quite clearly, something other than reciprocal relationships looms behind such payments in wheat, but advances of wheat are much bolder clues to the existence of economic inequalities and – in contrast to payments – almost inexorably led to indebtedness. Peasants often referred to “lending” instead of selling: “the defendant is hereby ordered to return four minots of wheat lent to him when in pressing need thereof”; or, “the quantity of twenty minots of wheat of sound and fair merchantable quality, similar to that lent to him.”10 At first sight, the word “loan” appears to denote an interest-free advance, a mere form of mutual aid, but this is not always the case. In the foregoing examples, as in others, the lender had been speculating on future price increases: the twenty minots were worth 60 livres at the time of the claim instead of 40 livres, the probable value at the time of the sale. When Joseph Bissonnette demanded delivery of four minots, the price of wheat had just risen to 4 livres, whence the debtor’s protestations that he had bought the wheat, not borrowed it, at a price of only 2 livres per minot. Conversely, if François Leriche was at pains to specify in his deposition that he had lent two minots “at a time when wheat was worth four livres,” it is because he intended to collect the initial value of this advance.11 It appears, then, that the word “loan” refers not to the method of repayment so much as to the use of the product: for subsistence and seed, or for sale. But why were farmers willing to dole out some of their surplus to their needy fellow parishioners, with all the risks this entailed? To answer this question, one would have to begin by determining how the volume of grain advances varied with fluctuations in the harvest; one would have to ascertain the specific conditions of the market, the prices offered by merchants vis-à-vis those that would eventually be paid by local borrowers, and the value of the services that the latter could offer in return (or of the creditor’s claims on their property). It need hardly be stressed that these transactions were based on mere verbal agreements and were not written down anywhere. It was one party’s word versus the other’s. Contemporary accounts are of little use. The parish priest (curé) of Deschambault, embroiled

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in a conflict with his parishioners over pew rents, wrote: “They want to pay… just 3 livres 10 sols in cash, and I know for a fact that if one of them should find an opportunity to sell a minot of wheat to a poor habitant of the côte, he will charge him 10 or 12 livres a minot.”12 Contrariwise, the priest of Saint-Nicolas noted that his parishioners “zealously assisted one another with life’s necessities.”13 All things considered, it would be a mistake to attempt to set everything down to economic motives. In large part, the answer is buried within the complex network of social relations and the pressures exerted by the community on its members.14 An alternative to putting precise figures on the volume of grain circulating within the seigneuries might be to try to detect the traces of these transactions in debts inventoried after death. This is not necessarily straightforward: first, because these were owner-occupants, a status that went hand in hand with considerable land debt intermingled with debts to merchants, who often financed land purchases and estate settlements;15 and second, because the inventories found in parish monographs do not lend themselves well to serial analysis by level of wealth, so that it would be difficult to ascertain the proportions of wheat loans corresponding to different wealth categories. When the problems associated with identifying the creditor or the origin of the debt are factored in, it becomes easy to understand why such transactions between peasants, swamped as they are by the much larger mass of rural debt, have not attracted historians’ attention.16 Sylvie Dépatie’s study of Île Jésus is an exception: she managed to circumvent some of these difficulties and demonstrate the relative importance of the local agricultural produce market by examining liabilities and – even more importantly – debts receivable by peasants from their peers. Nearly half of these correspond to advances of grain and fodder.17 A grain and flour inventory ordered by the Conseil supérieur in May 1729 provides additional clues. A commissary visited the parishes of the governments of Trois-Rivières and Montreal to ascertain whether provisions were sufficient to last until the next harvest and whether the export ban should be maintained. Only 104 habitants in total, across the twenty-eight parishes visited, showed up to report what they had harvested, planted, and sold. And since requisitions were always to be feared, it was in each one’s interest to state that his granary was empty and that those who hadn’t come forward were doing no better. While data collected in this way is of no value,

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there may be some truth to the accompanying explanatory remarks concerning sales, which the respondents proffered of their own accord. Of thirty-six sales for which the recipient of the grain is reported, thirteen were made to merchants and all the others “to various habitants of the côte,” who together accounted for 57 per cent of the wheat sold.18 This example illustrates what typically happened when the crop was mediocre.19

S to r ag e a n d R e d i s tri buti on But there were more substantial reserves available, beyond what the peasants had, to stimulate trade and cover parish deficits. These consisted of seigneurial dues paid in wheat, the mill toll, and in-kind payments that built up with local merchants. The mechanisms governing these levies, and their impact on the cash flow of the habitants and beneficiaries, have been studied in several monographs on rural life.20 The cursory discussion that follows addresses the question from another angle: that of the formation of grain reserves and the place they occupied in local transactions, as well as in the grain trade at the scale of the colony.

T it h e s a n d V e s t ry Revenues The tithe – a uniform one twenty-sixth of the grain and pea harvest – is easier to pinpoint than the other levies. In general, it belonged to the parish priest outright. Peasants delivered the threshed and winnowed grain to their priest’s granary at Easter, when the merchants also began taking delivery of their purchases. This novel mode of delivery had been adopted at the inception of the colony when output was too meagre to interest a receiver. The Church in Canada made numerous subsequent efforts to increase the tithe and return to collection of grain in the field, but to no avail.21 It was certainly a far cry from the quantities collected by tithe owners in metropolitan France, but at the scale of this little colony, these unshared tithes, ranging in established parishes from 200 to 500 minots or more of wheat, and smaller quantities of other crops, were relatively substantial. At this point it is necessary to dispense with the conventional wisdom to the effect that the majority of eighteenth-century parishes still lacked resident priests and that generalized fraud jeopardized the missionaries’ subsistence.22 A list of parishes and their officiants drawn

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up by the intendant in 1731 shows that only about one-third of rural parishes (32 of 88) were served intermittently.23 Thirty years later, the proportion of these “French missions” had fallen to about 15 per cent, or 16 to 18 out of 107 parishes, nearly all of them situated in the outlying, sparsely populated regions of the government of Quebec.24 If population density is also factored in, it becomes clear that a large majority of country dwellers lived in organized parishes from the turn of the century onward, with resident priests who knew full well how to go about bringing in the tithes. Even habitants served by missionaries had to pay tithes, so that a priest who ministered to more than one parish was compensated with extra revenue.25 In short, rather than putting much stock in the lamentations of the bishops and the Séminaire de Québec, we must look to the priests’ wills. Jean-Baptiste La Coudraye prefaced his last wishes thus: “Albeit the property remaining to me is more clerical than patrimonial…,”26 and this was the case for most of the colony’s parish priests, who left small, attractive fortunes derived to a very great extent from tithes. The method used to collect the grain worked in the priests’ favour, as did the season when it was delivered, for it meant they could save on handling and even storage charges.27 Moreover, since a presbytery had fewer mouths to feed than an average family, the bulk of the tithe grain was available for sale. The quantities were big enough that priests could bargain directly with the colony’s large grain buyers, who could pay in cash. Thus, for example, a barque owned by the merchant Nicolas Philibert of Quebec could be seen docking at SaintSulpice to load 500 minots of soft wheat and 150 of peas for Messire Barret for a total of 1,275 livres, with three-fifths of this sum being handed over on the spot.28 With smaller quantities, it might be necessary to deal with a commission agent in order to sell the grain at the best price in the nearest town.29 The eighteenth-century Canadian parish clergy were not, like the clergy of Lower Brittany, “the natural extension of the peasant elite,” but rather that of the urban elite, and their familiarity with the world of commerce facilitated these transactions.30 Nevertheless, the market was not the exclusive destination for tithe grain, especially when the crop was meagre. For example, while the below-average harvest of 1728 does not seem to have greatly affected Messire Barret’s curial revenues, he sold only 261 minots of wheat to “various persons of Montreal” and kept 172 for his own subsistence and for sales and alms in the parish. He was one of thirteen parish priests who agreed to testify with the habitants

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at the grain inventory ordered by the Conseil supérieur in June 1729. According to these priests’ statements, no more than 40 per cent of their tithe wheat had been sold outside the parishes; in five cases, the whole tithe had been redistributed among the parishioners. 31 The demarcation between advances of seed grain and alms is not always clear. If phrases such as “to help the parish poor” are interpreted as allusions to charity, then these were generous priests. Perhaps so, but some were also lenders of grain, as attested by some of these statements and by lawsuits that they (or their successors) filed to recover small advances from peasants. The vestries, too, built up grain reserves: from the casuel fees paid for masses and other ceremonies, from pew rents and alms collection, particularly the Enfant-Jésus drive held every January, and from collections taken up for exceptional expense items such as bells and altarpieces. Based on her examination of the account books of twenty government of Quebec parishes, Marie-Aimée Cliche estimated the average annual alms paid to the church at 1 or 2 livres per family, these donations representing one-third to one-half of vestry revenues.32 Converted into wheat, the most widespread form of contribution, this could easily amount to a hundred minots for a parish of fifty fami­ lies. With no other source of revenue and a pressing need for ready cash, churchwardens had an interest in selling most of this, but there are also instances of them paying it out as wages or in exchange for services, reducing the fraction earmarked for sale.33

S e ig n e u r ia l Dues Seigneurial dues were a means of amassing larger quantities of grain, but any attempt to generalize here must be abandoned given the considerable differences in land area, the advantages to be derived from the location of the fief, and the manner in which the grain was turned to account. Three important variables must be considered: population, allocation of receipts, and mill capacity. In the late 1720s, twenty-two seigneuries had more than 100 lots (censives) while forty others had between 26 and 99.34 Thirty years later, these same properties had all exceeded 75 censives. Montreal Island topped the list of highly profitable seigneuries with some 1,300 censives, followed by Île Jésus, Île d’Orléans, Beaupré, Lauzon, Charlesbourg, Beauport, Rivière-du-Sud, l’Assomption/Repentigny, Lachenaie, Berthier, Varennes, Verchères, La Prairie, and perhaps two or three others,

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where the number of censitaires (the occupants of the censives, who paid seigneurial dues) ranged from 150 to 400.35 In a seigneury with 100 censives, wheat revenues amounted to 550 minots at a minimum, or 250 for the fraction of rents payable in kind and 300 for the mill toll, calculated as one-fourteenth of the grain milled for the peasants. I am using a rental rate frequently found in the colony of 1 sol per arpent (about the equivalent of an acre) plus a half-minot of wheat for every twenty arpents, with an average area of one hundred arpents.36 But it is not known how these charges were paid in practice. In the seigneury of Montreal, habitants willingly paid in wheat the portion of their seigneurial rent (cens et rentes) that was stipulated in cash, with the wheat being valued at the market price on the due date.37 In these rural areas where not much money was in circulation, this practice was probably quite widespread where the seigneur accepted it. In some instances, it doubled the volume of wheat received.38 Finally, it should be noted that while seigneurial dues accounts were closed in the fall (often on Michaelmas or Martinmas), the wheat was normally delivered at the end of winter, as in the case of the tithe. It is even harder to assess the proportion of dues paid in wheat that made its way to the city. Although not a common practice, the leasing of seigneurial rights was not exceptional, and the millers retained a portion of the product varying in inverse proportion to the quality of the mill. Some of the imponderable circumstantial factors that would have hindered the accumulation of large stocks were the presence of sub-fiefs and the concomitant fragmentation of rents; the payment of in-kind wages for various kinds of work; the extension of wheat loans by seigneurs or their tenant farmers; the purchases they made in grain with local merchants; and the division of revenues among the heirs to the first seigneur.39 The more fragmented the receipts, the less likely they were to reach the market, for each receiver, right-holder, or creditor had to provide for his own subsistence and fulfill various obligations at home. In contrast to so many historians of New France, I do not wish to minimize the considerable economic advantages of the seigneury: seigneurs enhanced their legally granted monopoly on flour manufacturing by claiming any site on which they wished to build a mill, sometimes without paying compensation; they took increasing control over forest resources, and, in the eighteenth century, they enjoyed a general increase in property values and ­revenues induced by population growth and rising wheat prices.

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Moreover, wheat paid as dues and then resold within the seigneury brought in as much revenue as wheat brought to market. The point is merely that to rank among the colony’s large wheat suppliers, it was not enough to possess a populous fief.40 Most seigneurs and co-seigneurs owned at least one, generally sharecropped farm whose grain harvest was additional to the volume of dues paid, but these farms were not well enough developed to support an upper class of rentiers. It is to the mills that one must look, and a brief digression is in order here to review their geographical distribution and operation.

T h e M il l Toll All the mills in the colony enjoyed a right known as banalité, which meant that censitaires were required to have their wheat milled at the seigneur’s mill, and this monopoly was reinforced by the jurisprudence established by the intendants over the years. However, these rules only applied to grain harvested in or brought into the seigneury for consumption there.41 Bakers or grain merchants domiciled in Montreal, Île d’Orléans, or any other seigneuries were free to have their flour milled wherever they pleased if it was intended for the Quebec market or for export. This principle was applied in a highly liberal fashion, such that commercial wheat readily eluded the seigneurial monopoly, in marked contrast to the constraints imposed on “habitant wheat.”42 For example, while most custumals, including the Custom of Paris, gave the miller twenty-four hours to deliver the flour, failing which the censitaire could reclaim the wheat and take it elsewhere, Canadian habitants had to wait forty-eight hours before exercising this privilege.43 Since the mill toll in the colony was a uniform one-fourteenth of the grain ground, seigneurs had only two ways to turn a profit: either attract customers by offering better service, or fall back on feudal privileges and scrimp on upkeep. Short-term pragmatism related to distance from markets, small fief size, and the slow pace of settlement led nearly all seigneurs to choose the second route, with the result that the majority of the 120 mills enumerated in 1739 were desperately primitive or rundown. Many were still unreliably wind-powered while others were built on waterways that went dry in the summer and froze in the winter; some had failing mechanisms or worn grindstones, or were operated by incompetent or disloyal millers.44 Often, the seigneur downloaded the cost of major

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repairs onto the miller in exchange for a low annual fee or by handing over a large proportion of the flour. Neither the seigneur nor the miller prospered and these facilities became increasingly dilapidated. 45 Censitaires complained constantly about the service, as is evident from the many cases brought before the intendants or the courts for cracked or mashed kernels and ruined or burned flour. Awards were not generally very harsh and did little to remedy the situation. Judges ordered mills to keep calibrated weights and measures but remained, for the most part, uninterested in the poor quality of the flour that the peasants had to consume. The fact is that because of the mediocrity and inconsistency of these mills, merchants did not use them. Parish wheat surpluses travelled in grain form to Montreal and Quebec, where they were ground at one of ten or so professional gristmills. These too were banal, but the reserves built up by their owners came in large part from wheat collected throughout the colony and brought in by merchants, bakers, and clerks of the king’s stores. The figures in table 1.1 illustrate the difference in wheat receipts between the two types of mills. By my calculations, the toll retained on wheat consumed by the rural population amounted to 16,808 minots divided among over a hundred seigneurs; the toll retained on wheat bound for the cities and for export by a dozen professional mill owners amounted to 12,767 minots.46 A specific example corroborates this calculation. On the death of Étienne Charest on 11 May 1734, the executor recorded a credit of 2,023 livres and 15 sols consisting of the value of the mill toll and flour found in the mills on his seigneury of Lauzon, primarily the Saint-Nicolas commercial mill. This corresponds to a total levy of around 1,500 minots, on the same order as my average for this category.47 Milling was a business, and while the location of the seigneury was an essential factor, a timely investment had to be made if one was to secure a share of the market – something a good number of suburban seigneurs had lacked the foresight to do. Charles Le Moyne, Baron de Longueuil already had a windmill in his seigneury to accommodate his censitaires when, in the early eighteenth century, he built a water mill on little Île Sainte-Hélène, almost directly facing Montreal in the St Lawrence River. This was a brilliant stroke. Driven all year long by a powerful current, this mill quickly became and long remained one of the region’s largest – indeed, perhaps the largest of all.48 Similarly, the large mill built by Louis Lepage de SainteClaire in the early 1720s on his still-unpopulated Terrebonne fief sat

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along the shipping route to Quebec and attracted people sending grain there. By the winter and spring of 1729 it was receiving over 20,000 minots of grain and the traffic kept on increasing, spurred on by agricultural development on the north shore and by the growth of trade and military demand.49 To vie with this competition, the Montreal seigneurs relied on their two best mills, at Sault-au-Récollet and especially Lachine, the latter having the advantage of being accessible by cart from the city when navigation was impeded. Even though much of the merchants’ grain continued to elude them, they could count on the grain that the bakers and the thousand or so censitaires existing in 1731 were obligated to bring them.50 The Séminaire de Québec had been the first seigneur to put its faith in the wheat trade when, in 1693, it built the excellent mill at PetitPré in the Côte de Beaupré; as far as I can tell, this facility subsequently attracted the bulk of the wheat bound for export. Merchants also used its mill at Sault-à-la-Puce, along with the smaller-volume mill on Île Jésus.51 According to the 1729 inventory of wheat and flour in granaries owned by Quebec dealers, five mills shared these customers: in descending order of size, the ones at Petit-Pré and Sault-à-la-Puce, the Jesuit-owned mill on the Beauport River, and the ones owned by Étienne Charest and Guillaume Gaillard, located in their respective seigneuries of Lauzon and Île d’Orléans.52 All of these mills are large stone buildings measuring 50 to 75 feet long by about 50 feet wide. They contained two or three water wheels (four at Terrebonne) driven by rushing, usually dammed watercourses. If care was taken to keep the canals ice-free, they could operate nearly year-round. Second-storey granaries served to hold not only the mill toll but also the merchants’ grain and the unsifted flour, an essential service in a colony where good storehouses were few. The best stones were made of several sections joined together with iron hoops, and the runner stone had to be dressed (sharpened) regularly. Some of these stones were imported from France.53 As per the custom there, wheat was milled more or less in the condition in which it was received;54 that is, with the impurities left in by the winnowers in the barn, which caused relatively few problems if the product was consumed rapidly, as it generally was. But this poorly cleaned grain and the flour derived from it did not store well: it was incompatible with long sea voyages and unsuitable for export. As the person responsible for France’s largest shipping company and for supplying the West Indies, the naval minister was acutely

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aware of the problem of keeping quality. As an integral part of his policy, which involved subsidizing research and encouraging his contractors to use the latest techniques,55 a number of cylindrical sieves were sent to Canada in 1732 and 1734.56 Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau provides a detailed description of this metal implement built on the model of the bolters, describing how the grains were polished as they were projected toward the bottom by the movement of the inclined cylinder. Twenty years after its introduction into the colony, it was still thought of as an “admirable” invention that ought to be in wider use, and in 1769 it was awarded a government prize.57 The ten commercial mills just mentioned became even more productive after being fitted with these sieves, consecrating the sieves’ status as standard commercial equipment.58 It must be assumed that they were put to good use, for the once-frequent complaints by overseas flour buyers cease to be reported. Between these mills and the small banal mill neglected by its owner, there was room for a few initiatives. In 1713, Jean-Baptiste Neveu built a water mill on his fief of Dautré and it came to serve a whole region in which the few mills were quite mediocre.59 But it was mainly in the 1740s that better mills began to appear in the backcountry, such as the one on the Bayonne River at Berthier, or the ones at Chambly and Montarville, which preceded settlement and were perhaps dedicated to supplying the military posts. In this regard, JacquesHugues Péan de Livaudière’s mill on his Saint-Michel fief southeast of Quebec was among the most prosperous businesses whose coffers were swelled by war and patronage.60 In short, a small minority of seigneurs controlled large grain stocks that built up primarily in their mills. Their millers, if unsalaried, kept only a third or a quarter of the mill toll. In the final two decades of the regime, the revenues of the best seigneuries attracted increasing numbers of merchants, who paid good money to rent either all the rights and farms or just the mill. In this way, the mills on Île SainteHélène, on Île Jésus, and at Petit-Pré earned their owners 1,600, 2,400, and 4,000 livres per annum, respectively, and the wheat went into the middlemen’s hands.61

R u r a l M e rchants Most merchants, however, were even more reliant on the grain they picked up directly from peasants’ barns, for after the initial stage of

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colonization, tithes and seigneurial dues did not come close to exhausting parish surpluses.62 I shall return to the various forms of trade that took place in rural areas. For the moment it suffices to emphasize the role of the rural merchant in local grain movement. On the one hand, the wheat collected by the merchant, either in payment for goods or through direct transactions with farmers, did not all go to the city. On the other, the sum of the grain quantities listed among the merchant’s assets does not necessarily correspond to the volume that he actually amassed, for he was also a lender of wheat in the parish. Louis Michel notes this in his study of the accounts of Gaspard Massue, and it is attested by notarial minutes of debts incurred for wheat or “wheat and goods received.”63 The grain lent to habitants might come out of the merchant’s sheds, but it might also be delivered to the borrower by another customer whose account would be credited for the same amount. This method of offsetting debts was perhaps much more common than it appears. Neither the merchant’s after-death inventory nor his general ledgers, where the exact nature of the transactions is not generally reported, provide any evidence of the phenomenon, although I was able to observe it in the blotter or journal of an early-eighteenth-century Montreal fur trader, where much space is devoted to grain debited or credited to his customers that did not enter his granary.64 This was certainly not the case for rural merchants, who needed wheat as a currency to buy goods, but they would have been hard put, I believe, to avoid contributing to a parish’s grain balance as long as their business was well entrenched within its borders. For this was not a captive clientele.65 To retain their customers, merchants had to participate in the local trading system and do their part to make it run smoothly. It has been important, it seems to me, to provide a brief description of the system of interdependence on which rural grain self-sufficiency relied before turning to the grain trade itself, and to the study of the regulations governing it. It was a system in which each player stood to gain, but it did not exclude domination of the poor by those better off, the peasantry as a whole by the privileged and the merchants. A further conclusion from this chapter is that colonial trade was based to a greater extent on farmers’ surpluses than on the reserves of ­seigneurs and parish priests – a fact that clearly contributed much to its fragility.66

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3 Regulations

On the advice we have received to the effect that certain habitants of this land are going to the côtes and visiting each habitation to purchase and intercept wheat for resale at a considerable profit, which does notable injury to the other habitants, who, having little, are forced to buy second-hand what they should obtain first-hand, we hereby prohibit the said habitants from purchasing more than their fair share of provisions for purposes of resale.1 This ordinance, issued by the first intendant of the colony in 1671, is interesting in two respects. It perfectly sums up the principle on which traditional grain legislation was based: that grain should ideally go directly from producer to consumer, since the involvement of middlemen will inevitably drive up prices. At the same time, the ordinance tells us that the provisioning of Quebec in the early 1670s departed hardly at all from this ideal situation. The hundred or so heads of households enumerated in the 1666 census could count on purchases from neighbours’ barns and the harvest from their own lands to feed their families and run their businesses. Accelerated immigration, and the emancipation of engagés and soldiers, created a new category of urban consumer who lacked these resources, leading to the emergence of the middlemen whose existence alarmed the intendant. When the initial shock subsided, the authorities – like authorities everywhere – learned to cope with the fact of a grain trade and the purchase of grain for resale. All the same, provisioning the cities was perceived not as an economic activity pure and simple but as a public service entrusted to private interests and subject to ongoing government tutelage; the same

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was true of the enterprise of provisioning the other French colonies in which Canada participated during the eighteenth century. This tutelage took two forms. First, there were some general regulations that set up more or less specific boundaries between licit and illicit commercial practices. Second, when a shortage loomed or befell the colony, ad hoc measures were abruptly taken to interrupt the normal operation of the domestic and export markets. Chapter 6 of this study presents an analysis of this second group of regulations. But first we must dwell on the regular system of control, the rules to which trade in wheat, flour, and bread was ordinarily subjected as well as the manner in which these rules were observed.2

T h e M a r k e t S quare It can hardly be imagined that peasants living near Quebec would have waited for regulations to be published before coming into town to exhibit their wares on the riverbank or somewhere in Lower Town, where a market was officially created in 1673 by Governor General Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac. The site chosen by the habitants apparently displeased the authorities, for the 1676 ordinance stipulated that “a more suitable site shall be designated in the Upper or Lower Town of Quebec for the establishment of a market at the earliest possible time.”3 Frontenac’s regulation was limited to urban policing but did devote four articles to the conditions under which the market was to be held, including two that were not retained when the intendant and the Conseil souverain embarked, three years later, on a revision of all the colony’s police regulations. The regulation provided for the construction of a covered building for wheat and other grains and legumes, and the appointment of a grain measurer who, for the purpose of setting the price of bread, would report sales data to the police magistrate on each market day. These two clauses were enforced by a corps de ville composed of three elected aldermen or syndics (one acting as police magistrate) who were authorized to collect and spend municipal funds under the supervision of the royal representative. But these syndic positions had been created at the beginnings of the colony, and it ran counter to the views of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister of finance under Louis xiv, to keep them on, let alone give them more power. The ordinary tasks falling to them – keeping tabs on the cabarets, the market, the butcher shop, and the bakery; keeping the streets clean; preventing fires; housing soldiers

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– would be transferred to the king’s court of first instance along with the power to prosecute offenders. Funds for improvements, which were supposed to have been derived from fines and from rents collected on market stalls, were undoubtedly not substantial enough at first to allow for the construction of a covered market. The Conseil revived the project several times but it was shelved for good after 1698.4 The same was true of the establishment of a grain measurer’s position and the practice of drawing up weekly official grain price lists (mercuriales). These initiatives were set aside for the nonce, what with the insignificant volume of market square transactions and the resulting price uncertainty. In the meantime, the opinions of various experts were solicited for the purposes of setting bread and meat prices and settling disputes over the value of rents, or of debts stated in kind and paid in cash or vice versa. The legislators of 1676 intended for current prices to be recorded once the colony was somewhat better established, but this part of the regulation was never completed. Until the end of the French regime, Canadians had to fall back on a slow, costly, not always reliable procedure for having their receivables assessed.5 The other market-related articles of Frontenac’s ordinance were incorporated more or less verbatim into the general police regulations published 11 May 1676 by the Conseil souverain.6 The market opened at dawn on Tuesdays and Fridays. Goods brought there for sale had to remain on exhibit until eleven, after which peasants and other vendors were permitted to go door to door selling whatever was left. To prevent goods from being monopolized before the bourgeois had had a chance to procure what they needed, tavern-keepers, hoteliers, resellers, and hucksters (regrattiers) were forbidden to shop at the market before eight o’clock in the summer and nine o’clock in the winter. At those hours and again at eleven, the church clock chimed as a reminder to all concerned.7 Bourgeois and artisans were free to obtain their provisions in the countryside, but all, and especially tavernkeepers and hucksters, were forbidden from going to the head of the canoes or sleighs to intercept goods bound for market.8 The Montreal market, established in August 1676 by an ordinance of Intendant Jacques Duchesneau de la Doussinière et d’Ambault, was governed by the same rules. With a population half that of Quebec and a pronounced rural character, the parish could still make do without such an institution. The seigneur justified his request for a market by explaining that considerable numbers of non-resident French merchants (forains) arrived in the summer to trade with the

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Indigenous people, who would otherwise be forced to procure highpriced goods from locals, whence the need to accommodate these visitors.9 Situated on St Paul Street, not far from the riverbank, the market square would quickly, as in Quebec, become the heart of the city and the place of residence of its most prominent merchants.10 The regulation of urban markets allowed the colonial authorities to control the distribution of the agricultural produce, fish, and game brought there for sale, but no concomitant measures were put in place to encourage peasants or merchants to supply the city. Yet this had always been the main purpose of the grain police in France. To force farmers to deliver their grain to market, a decommercialized zone was drawn around each city, with the radius varying according to its size – generally two leagues, or nearly 10 kilometres, for small provincial cities. As Nicolas de La Mare explained it, the distance had to be great enough to deter people from taking their goods and going home when they found the prices too low. As for city merchants, they were issued passports prohibiting them from shopping within this zone; instead they had to go out to where wheat would not ordinarily be routed into the city and bring what they bought back to the market. By the end of the day’s bargaining, prices would have tended to align with those that the captive vendors of the non-­commercial zone were forced to accept. This left only a small profit margin for wheat resellers and other middlemen, who incurred additional shipping and handling expenses. The system was intended to provide for rapid and continuous movement of grain at fair prices.11 There can be no comparing the Canadian situation with this regulatory straitjacket, which was far from being strictly applied throughout the realm in any case. The French grain police were a local affair, enforcing the rules quite strictly in Paris and other large cities, and much more laxly elsewhere. “One of the most important [rules] – the obligation to sell only in the markets – was for all intents and purposes never obeyed,” wrote Joseph Letaconnoux about Brittany.12 He distinguished two forms of commerce: procurement for city subsistence from farmers and wheat resellers, who cheated extensively but remained subject to the regulations; and the export trade, supplied by the large landowners, who sold wheat in bulk to dealers and shippers, the latter in turn selling it overseas without going through the market. The presence of these latter interests in the parlements and other provincial bodies facilitated these practices. The Breton case was exceptional in several respects, but examples of accommodation

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and tolerance could be found throughout the realm.13 Nevertheless, these did not invalidate the central principle of the grain regulations: the primacy of the market in ensuring that supplies remained visible, transactions transparent, and consumers’ expectations met. In the early days of the colony, such regulations would surely have been superfluous. Farmers with surpluses to sell were all farming in the vicinity of the two main towns and almost no wheat travelled from one to the other. The Conseil still sought to prevent Quebec bakers from abusing the system by forbidding them, in 1677, from buying wheat within the city limits or a radius of six leagues (30 kilometres), which amounted to decommercializing Île d’Orléans, the Côte de Beaupré, and the whole countryside as far as Neuville to the west and Beaumont on the south shore.14 Such an unrealistic measure (given the limited extent of the cultivated area) was bound to be disobeyed, and it was officially repealed twelve years later.15 From then on, bakers procured their supplies wherever they chose and the Conseil resigned itself to making life hard for tavern-keepers and hucksters, forbidding them from buying subsistence crops within a radius of four leagues (20 kilometres) in 1694 and extending the banned area to the whole countryside in 1706.16 But these were common folk who did not play an important role in the grain trade. The real movers and shakers were not troubled by the regulations. For example, nothing prevented magistrates and other career administrative officers (officiers de plume) from engaging in this enterprise, whereas concerns about conflicts of interest kept them explicitly barred from it in France.17 Merchants were not required to register with the authorities. They were free to buy wheat and flour wherever they pleased, even at the gates of the town. They could bargain secretly in the barns, buy a crop at a price set in advance, bring grain to their own granaries without exhibiting it at the market, supply bakers, and form all manner of partnerships with no obligation to report them. These practices all ran counter to the centuries-old principles governing the supply of cities of the realm, yet they were perfectly legal in the colony. The administration upheld this liberty in the face of opposition from urban consumers, who saw it as a threat to their survival, and lobbying by Quebec dealers, who – on the strength of public opinion favourable to them – wanted to eliminate rural competitors while preserving their own freedom of action. The Conseil supérieur, which represented the combined interests of all concerned, tried twice to regulate these practices, but in vain.

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The first time, during the session held on 22 November 1700, the attorney general issued a harsh indictment of individuals who sent goods into the parishes as a means of monopolizing the harvest, thus allegedly causing the shortage from which the colony was suffering. It was necessary to prevent “all merchants, and other persons of any capacity or condition whatsoever, from having stores in the côtes and the seigneuries, to the detriment of the cities.” But the Conseil (chaired by the intendant as it usually was) ignored the recommendation, ordering a few temporary measures to alleviate the situation.18 The police regulation published five years later, something of an update to the regulation of 1676, dispelled all doubts as to the government’s intentions, for it did not even mention the rural stores.19 The second attempt came in November 1728. Taking advantage of a vacancy in the intendant’s position and rumours of a poor crop, the Conseil finally succeeded in passing the much-desired regulation, which “most expressly forbids and prohibits all merchants, habitants, and others, of any capacity or consideration whatsoever, from selling or retailing any dry goods, whether directly or indirectly, and whether acting for themselves or by representatives… in all the côtes of the colony, or from keeping such dry goods there, on pain of confiscation thereof, and more severe penalties if there be occasion for them.” The owners of these stores were given forty-eight hours to bring their stocks into the nearest city, with offenders to be punished by “being forever barred from commerce.”20 The Conseil, excluded from policing since 1715, could not have chosen a worse cause through which to reassert its authority. It was hard to see the measure as anything other than a self-interested manœuvre or to imagine how such a brutal measure could be put into effect without the use of force. The governor, who understood nothing of these matters and had initially yielded to persuasion, heeded the criticism and decided to suspend publication of the regulation until the new intendant’s arrival. Nothing further ever came of it.21 But regardless of the outcome of these legislative episodes, the public remained convinced that the rural stores were illicit; that they ope­ rated in violation of some regulation that must have existed in a distant, ill-defined past. This mistaken idea was shared by nearly all city dwellers, from labourers to military officers. The governor of Montreal himself portrayed the operation of a rural store as no less a disturbance of public order than that of selling aqua vitae to Indigenous people or making loud noise after dark. He wrote:

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Most of the merchants have had stores in the côtes these last ­several years, where they intercept all the habitants’ money and goods, so that nothing comes into the city, and the bourgeois, merchants, and others living in the city have to purchase everything at higher prices, as if through middlemen, and cannot sell anything to those same habitants, so that people will ultimately have to abandon the cities in order to survive. The Court once ordered that all commerce be conducted within the three cities, and this was done for as long as the police were obeyed in this land, but strict enforcement has lapsed of late.22 There was, in short, a collective image of colonial legislation as it ought, ideally, to exist, and this was evoked to condemn ordinary commercial practices as abusive and fraudulent. Bereft of the regulatory straitjacket that channelled grain movement elsewhere, Canadian city dwellers felt vulnerable and, by a mechanism that is hard to explain, projected their fears onto the spectre of the rural merchant. But as we shall see, this vision of powerful, autonomous rural merchants capable of monopolizing basic grains and interrupting supplies to the cities in order to drive up prices was utterly divorced from reality.23 It was a pure figment of the urban imagination. It remains that the bulk of the wheat consumed in the cities did not pass through the market square and that this was not the principal locus of price formation. Nevertheless, the markets were convenient places to move small surpluses, and bags of wheat regularly appeared alongside vegetables, poultry, and other staples brought into the city by peasants from the surrounding countryside.24 But since nothing obliged them to bring wheat, these meagre supplies dried up at the slightest rumour of a price rise.25

s h ip p in g Exports of flour and biscuit from the colony were under the authority of the governor and the intendant, who could suspend them at any time, and the geography of the St Lawrence facilitated the necessary surveillance. The provost court of Quebec supervised maritime activities and heard cases arising from them until the establishment of an admiralty court that began sitting in 1719. At that point, the officers in charge implemented a registration system, and even though statistics on ship movements, export volume and type, and so on have not been

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systematically preserved, what there is shows that the rules were obeyed.26 This court issued licences to captains headed downriver and into the gulf for purposes of fishing and trade but was not competent in matters of river navigation as such,27 in which authority rested with the ordinary colonial police. At first sight, control over domestic movement of goods seems to have been provided by the regulation of 1676, which required captains to submit declarations of merchandise or food items carried from place to place within the colony; however, this clause was never put into effect, no more than the 1715 ordinance intended to resuscitate it.28 During periods of scarcity, the intendants halted ships or required them to obtain permits, but these were only temporary measures. In 1728, Intendant Claude-Thomas Dupuy noted that persons “engaging in cabotage on the river are not bound by any passport” and were not producing bills of lading. The ordinance that he issued to fill this gap did not survive his departure three months later and the matter was not taken up by his successor.29 It was only in 1749 that the intendancy established a permitting system and began strictly enforcing it.30 This tardy diligence, though, had nothing to do with exerting control over commerce, for it appeared at a time when the free movement of grain had been permanently eliminated and replaced by military procurement carried out by the king’s agents.

B a k e r ie s The status of bakers, summarily defined by the regulations of 1673 and 1676, likewise departed from the principles governing the profession in France. Colonial bakers were not only allowed to purchase supplies wherever they wanted but could also sell flour or process it into hardtack for export. In France, the division of labour between merchants and bakers was fundamental: the first supplied the raw materials, the second turned them into bread to meet the cities’ needs, and nothing was to divert them from this, their sole reason for being.31 When they omitted this rule, the colonial authorities introduced an enduring conflict of interest into the system, which they tried to counteract with exhortations and sporadic fines. As was the case for other aspects of policing, the local situation in 1676 did not necessitate elaborate regulations. The majority of habitants baked at home, while any who did not could buy bread at the tavern.32 The ordinance simply stipulated that only established bakers were permitted to sell

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bread, and that they were to keep their shops stocked with white and wheatmeal bread for sale to the public at official prices. Subsequent orders fixed the number of bakers, and required candidates for the profession to make an application to the local court clerk and post a surety bond before they could be admitted.33 The legislation was silent, however, as to the wheat provisions that a baker was required to have on hand at all times in order to guarantee regular production – another important measure in France.34 For some time, the provisioning of ships’ crews with flour and biscuit, along with occasional exports of these items, remained too insignificant to provoke disputes. The bakers of Quebec were in the best position to supply these markets without compromising bread distribution. But everything changed at the turn of the century: the cities grew, a sequence of poor harvests was recorded, and a small export market was established. Merchants began moving into this market and bakers forged a common front to defend what they regarded as their privilege. In 1706, they won the first round: while everyone, bakers included, was permitted to “make flour for trade domestically and abroad,” only bakers could make biscuit.35 Pressure from the merchants caused the bakers to lose their biscuit monopoly the following year when this decision was partially reversed.36 At no time, whether during these debates or subsequently, did the Conseil or the intendants envision the possibility of limiting bakers’ activities to breadmaking. The temptation to ignore local customers, to devote their time and flour supplies to meeting maritime requirements, was ever present. Those who were prosecuted for failing to bake enough bread to keep their shops stocked proffered a variety of excuses, such as poverty or the high cost and scarcity of wheat, which was no doubt accurate in most such cases. The real commercial bakers were less likely to be troubled by the authorities. In France, the regulation of bread quality, price, and distribution was another essential feature of the grain police. It normally fell under the jurisdiction of the police court established in each city. The general purpose of the authorities’ interventions was to ensure that bread prices reflected the fluctuations in wheat prices induced by supply and demand. To establish this relationship on an ongoing basis, a breadmaking test was performed, this being an estimate based on the cost of wheat, the yield of bread from a given quantity of it, the material cost of baking, and payment for the baker’s labour. A table was then drawn up, showing the range of possible wheat prices and,

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for each, the proportionate value of a pound of bread. On this table, posted in all bakeries, the police magistrate indicated the current price based on weekly information collected by the grain measurer.37 Procedures in the colony were far from equally clear. The task of the police magistrate was complicated by several factors that interfered with the quick and systematic indexation of the price of bread to that of wheat. It was a jurisdictional problem in the first place and a technical problem after that, but in the final analysis the two were connected. Until 1715, supreme authority over policing rested with the Conseil, presided over by the intendant, who oversaw the proceedings. The role of the lieutenant-general of the provost court was limited to enforcing the regulations, which in principle amounted to adjusting bread prices according to a permanent rate or scale of equivalences established by the higher authority.38 Yet the prices established by the breadmaking tests of 1686 and 1715 were not enforced.39 The pricesetting mechanism was disrupted several times, as shown by the twenty-four regulations affecting bread prices that were published by the Conseil between 1677 and 1715, as well as the subsequent regulations published by the lower courts. The relationship between wheat and bread prices varied continually. In the absence of complete data, there is no way to juxtapose the two curves from the beginning to the end of the regime, but it can be said that bread cost proportionately more in the eighteenth century.40 The Conseil’s interventions prior to the turn of the century ensued from the regulation of 1676, which provided for two police assemblies each year, held at the provost court of Quebec, where the principal habitants would be invited to discuss various matters and, in particular, to reach agreement on the price of wheat with a view to determining the price of bread. The king’s attorney first had to obtain the approval of the Conseil, which delegated one or two of its members to preside over the deliberations. These were purely consultative and conducted in such a way as to obviate debate. On 30 April 1710, before councillor Mathieu-François Martin de Lino, president of the assembly, the officers of the provost court of Quebec, and “the most notable bourgeois and artisans of this city,” the bakers were invited to present their petition. After stating the grounds on which they considered a bread price increase to be justified, they were asked to withdraw and the floor was given to the bourgeois, who accused the bakers of selfinterest and recommended a smaller increase. The nub of the dispute was disagreement over the price of wheat. On this note the assembly

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was adjourned and it fell to the Conseil and the intendant to make a decision in light of these opinions.41 The procedure was unwieldy and quite ineffective. Public assemblies were held once a year at best. In his petition of 1698, the lieutenant-general of the provost court rightly noted that “no police assemblies have been held in the last several years”42 (the most recent dated back to January 1694). As long as two months could elapse between an application by the bakers for a bread price increase and the publication of a new price. Nor did things necessarily move much faster when it came to lowering prices at the request of the king’s attorney. At times, the Conseil changed the price without holding an assembly; at other times, it authorized the lieutenant-general to set the price from month to month on the basis of the most recent regulation. But on the whole, the latitude afforded him was quite limited during this period.43 Since the first intendant’s arrival in the colony, the powers of the Conseil had progressively been sapped. It could no longer act alone in matters of general or even municipal policing. The final clash, in July 1714 – over the bread and wheat trade, as it happened – sealed its defeat.44 After 1715, the enforcement of regulations by the royal officers of first instance fell under the exclusive jurisdiction of the intendant and the financial commissary (commissaire ordonnateur) in Montreal. Only four subsequent ordinances issued by the lieutenant-general of the provost court to modify bread prices have been found, and it is possible that the consultative assemblies were eliminated.45 The provost court, now operating in the shadow of the intendancy, must have followed the latter’s instructions, estimating the price of wheat and changing the price of bread at its behest. It sufficed to convene the bakers, hear their grievances, and serve them with the intendant’s decision. This hypothesis is based on the manner in which the procedures evolved in Montreal. Due to its remoteness from the capital, this jurisdiction’s lieutenantgeneral initially had a freer hand. The Conseil supérieur’s regulations were registered in Montreal, meaning that they went into force on the day they were published, but the magistrate intervened regularly to modify the rate as local circumstances dictated, further to assemblies of bakers and “the most notable and venerable bourgeois of the city.” With the intendancy gradually increasing its control over local policing, lieutenant-general Jacques-Joseph Guiton de Monrepos – less conciliatory than his predecessor Pierre Raimbault – felt compelled to express his displeasure. Writing to the minister around 1745, he argued that

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the duties of his office gave him the power to take cognizance of all police-related matters, and hence to change the price of bread, without having to give an accounting to the financial commissary. The intendant stood fast but was forced to justify his position to the minister: “It appeared in order that no police regulation be enacted in Montreal, particularly concerning the price of bread and meat [without the commissary’s approval]. Such a regulation could affect the cost of supplying the troops, as well as the price of the provisions to be made in the king’s stores.”46 Thus it can be stated that considerations extraneous to wheat price fluctuations weighed heavily in decisions concerning the price of bread. It follows that the colonial government had no interest in delegating this responsibility to police officers, nor in publishing and enforcing a system of equivalences to which it would be captive thereafter. It should not be imagined that successive intendants in Canada pursued a uniform grain policy, informed by a single rationale, from 1676 until the end of the regime. While the stakes were clear to Intendant Gilles Hocquart at the onset of the War of the Austrian Succession, they were much less clear to his predecessors and were never even considered by the Conseil while it was involved in drafting regulations. There was much trial and error, much clumsiness behind all these practices, but at some point the priority of military procurement imposed itself as an obstacle to change. And there was certainly much room for improvement, starting with the curious and rather irrational method used to modify the price of bread. The authorities had a choice between two methods: the more widespread one described above, in which the price of bread was adjusted, and the one in which the price was left unchanged but the weight of a loaf of bread was increased or decreased. This second method – based on the notion that consumers would object less to bringing home a lighter loaf than to paying more – was perceived as archaic even though it persisted in large cities such as Rennes and Cologne.47 The colonial administration chose a combination of the two methods. In the seventeenth century, it opted primarily for the first; in 1709 it changed to the second but without totally abandoning the practice of adjusting prices. These variations appear to have had different impacts on the two main types of bread: white, made of patent flour, and wheatmeal, from a mixture of patent and clear flour in more or less equal proportions.48 But in the absence of confirmed, continuous price series for a given city, I had to give up any hope of interpreting

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the fluctuations. There was, in the early years of the colony, a third type of rustic bread made with whole flour containing all the bran, to which all allusions vanish after 1701. Note also that the authorities occasionally suspended white bread production in times of dearth so as to slow the drain on flour supplies.49 In the seventeenth century, bakers offered small 6- to 12-ounce white loaves, larger ones weighing 3 to 6 pounds, and wheatmeal loaves weighing 4, 8, or even 12 pounds. Subsequently, this range of products narrowed. In Quebec, the weight of wheatmeal bread, whose price seems to have been fixed at 10 sols since 1710, ranged from 5.5 pounds after poor harvests to 8 pounds in good years. The price of white bread oscillated between 3 and 4 livres, never reaching a stable level. In Montreal, by contrast, it was the price of the two types of bread, not the weight, that tended to vary.50 These haphazard practices were surely of little import. The public and the bakers got used to them, and the latter suffered more from the torpid pace at which the price of their product was indexed to that of their inputs. When added to the other anomalies discussed above, however, these practices give pause to reflect on the spirit that guided the policing of the grain trade in the colony. Let us consider that same spirit as it manifested itself in the mother country. There, the regulations centred around the primacy of the market square, a public place and a social space where supply and demand were concentrated, transactions took place in plain sight, and profit was subordinated to public order. The regulations, taken together, added up to a system whose purpose was to uphold this principle. In Canada, the market square did not fulfill this central function, and what filled the gap was a disparate set of practices instituted upstream and downstream of it. These related, respectively, to the liberties that characterized internal trade and to the relative information void surrounding grain transactions, hence the limited control that the administration could exert over them. The situation inevitably led to arbitrary measures being used to estimate wheat prices and accomplish other ends.51 However, the French grain police should not be regarded as an outdated institution that the colony could blissfully do without, opting instead for a liberal conception of the market. An anachronistic reading of the situation will not do. The grain policy in the mother country had been tailored to meet the needs of a sluggish economy,

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unpredictable harvests, and regional isolation. It was a target of frequent criticism by the physiocrats in the late eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the failure of various reforms attempted in France reflected not only the country’s attachment to tradition but also its genuine structural impediments to evolution. Supply problems in Canada were even more acute because of the colony’s remoteness, the narrowness of its agricultural base, and its total wintertime isolation. In view of this situation, its abandonment of age-old principles is at first sight inexplicable; but all becomes clear when a close look is taken at what happened on either side of the Atlantic with the onset of a shortage. In the French system, prohibitions and controls were loosely enforced when resources were abundant and flowed freely; their essential function was to manage trade when wheat became scarce. They consisted of a whole arsenal of methods designed to stimulate grain movement from country to city at the first signs of a dip in supply. The state preferred to act indirectly: it conceived of its role not as one of feeding the people but of ensuring that they were fed. In Canada, things were entirely different. As soon as an alarm sounded, the government stepped in, the merchants’ operations were interrupted, and the king’s agents took charge. Wheat price setting and requisitions – both very rare in France – were common practices in the colony, where the grain police became indistinguishable from the military procurement enterprise at the slightest indication that the latter could be compromised.52 Under these circumstances, traditional forms of regulation became superfluous. Colonial priorities were different, and the intendants saw no need to revise and complete the old regulations to keep pace with the changes that occurred after 1676. The hypercentralization of policing power ruled out any rethinking of authoritarian practices in times of scarcity, and did not augur well for sound long-term management. The intendant was in charge of everything but lacked the resources to manage the system effectively. He had no bureaucracy on which to rely for the purposes of gathering data, issuing permits, and ensuring the continuity of all services. The courts did their best within the narrow sphere in which their powers had been confined, but were too short-staffed to take on additional responsibilities. The laxness in evidence had much to do with these factors as well. The grain trade remained an activity subject to government interference at any time.

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4 Grain Transportation to the City

The grain marketing system was closely tied, in a play of reciprocal influences, to the conditions of grain transportation. Technical and climatic constraints on transportation influenced the types of transactions that took place in any particular season, while the nature of the transactions partly determined the types and methods of carriage. Given this situation, it might seem factitious to separate the two analyses; but we have to start somewhere. Another pitfall is that there is no previous study of the local transportation system on which to base this chapter, and the little information I was able to glean affords a superficial, not to say partial, view of it since most of this data relates to wheat in the government of Montreal. Nevertheless, something resembling a commercial geography can be derived from the following observations.

D e l iv e ry S eas ons Unless forced by the insufficiency of the preceding harvest, the colony left newly harvested wheat unthreshed for several months. The peasants started threshing and eating their grain in December, and the tenant farmers or métayers (known as laboureurs in Canada) made their first deliveries around Christmas. All through the winter, farmers on the outskirts of the cities supplied small quantities to the public markets and their private customers. Only from May to July could large orders be shipped on the river to Montreal, and the window was sometimes even shorter for Quebec. The flour was improved by these practices, since wheat put up at the end of the summer was too wet for milling, especially in the Quebec region, and cold winter

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storage improved its milling quality. It was not these considerations, however, but the constraints of transportation and farming that determined the calendar of commercial activities. Fall labours gave the peasants no respite. When river navigation ended in November, most had barely finished their ploughing.1 There followed a period in which the countryside was practically cut off from the market by impassable, rain-drenched roads.2 There was no point in hurrying to thresh the wheat, which could not go to market until the winter roads were fully covered with snow and the ice on the rivers solid enough to bear the weight of sleighs, and this rarely happened before mid-December. With spring thaw, the countryside was cut off again. It was not until late April, sometimes mid-May, that boats could be dispatched to pick up the first large shipments along the St Lawrence. Dues payments were bound by these same constraints, as discussed above in regard to tithes, which the peasants brought in at Easter time, or “around the middle of Lent, when they had finished threshing their wheat and still had time to carry it over the ice,” according to the procurator of the Séminaire de Montréal. The same was true of rent, at least in the Montreal and Saint-Sulpice seigneuries, which was generally delivered at the end of winter rather than around Martinmas (11 November) when it was due.3 These late deliveries greatly decreased the storage charges that the merchants would otherwise have incurred. Unlike the situation in France, where the wheat was harvested and immediately sent to the receivers’ or buyers’ granaries, here it sat in the peasants’ barns, taking a straight-line course from there to the commercial mills. Wheat sheds were a rare sight in the cities. There were a few for military or religious community provisions, but an inventory conducted in the summer of 1729 found that Quebec dealers still possessed few warehouses. Some of their export-bound flour and biscuit was stored in their home granaries and the rest was dispersed among nearby mills and bakeries in exchange for a monthly storage charge.4 The problems associated with flour storage, whether in sacks or barrels, were even more acute in the case of grain, which had to be spread out and stirred on a regular basis, requiring space and labour.5 Rural granaries seem to have been just as scarce. Certain rural merchants and a few seigneurs had sheds where sacks of wheat could be assembled just before the boats came to pick them up, but it is not my belief that these shelters were designed to warehouse a large quantity of bulk wheat for several months.6 Neither did small windmills offer

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much storage space. It was the barns, with their spacious lofts, that provided the best aeration and some protection from the elements.7 Peasants offered free storage to those who had contracted to purchase their surpluses, but charged for the service when the buyer failed to pick up the load on time, especially since the piles had to be turned more often in the summer to prevent spoilage.8

T r a n s p o rtat ion Costs In Canada, the St Lawrence dominated the transportation scene: it was the cheapest mode and, nearly everywhere, the most direct one. Thus, the condition of the roads had little impact on the grain trade. Only on Montreal Island, and between it and Île Jésus, did land travel afford certain advantages, but the city remained very much focused on the St Lawrence, as evidenced by the locations of its gates: a dozen facing the riverbank and only six on the other three sides of the fortifications.9 The water route was even more dominant for connections between Quebec and its hinterland.10 There was a road, interrupted by a dozen short ferry crossings, that ran between the two cities along the north shore of the river, but it was mainly used by voyageurs and never, to my knowledge, for long-distance cartage.11 The types of vehicles plying such roads were correspondingly primitive. Professional carters seem to have used the same vehicles as peasants: two-wheeled horse-drawn carts with a capacity of a little over fifteen sacks (30 minots or about 18 cwt) of wheat.12 A series of February deliveries from the mill on Île Jésus, made to the order of a Montreal merchant, shows that the average load carried by a sleigh was about the same: fifteen to twenty sacks of 2 minots each, or a maximum of 24 cwt.13 For carriage of small quantities over short distances, winter was the best season. Sleighs, which often cut across fields, beat carts for their speed and the peasants’ skiffs for protection of the goods.14 Habitants in the Côte de Beaupré and on Île d’Orléans, who supplied the Quebec market, waited for ice bridges to form before taking their goods to the city, as did those on the south shore facing Montreal, no doubt.15 At any other season, the grain had to be carted along the shore, transshipped, and then reloaded on the opposite shore, whereas sleighs could go door to door without transshipment. But these advantages only held good for farmers who could make the round trip to and from the city in a single day. Outside a 15-to-20-kilometre radius, sleighs and especially

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carts were not profitable for anyone, whether peasants making their own deliveries or people employing them to do the same, who had to house and feed the workers. And this is not to mention the problems arising when large quantities had to be shipped over a period of several weeks, thus requiring several teams. In the above example, seventeen peasants had to be mobilized to transport 3,062 minots of flour over 17 kilometres; at five to nine trips per person, the whole operation took three weeks.16 Appendix B presents limited data on land and water transportation costs, consisting for the most part of the prices paid by the naval treasurer to supply the king’s stores in Montreal and Quebec. These prices are in line with those found in the contracts of the time; given the importance of military transportation in the colony, it can even be surmised that the latter tended to track the former. Rarely do the detailed records of revenues and expenses (bordereaux de revenus et dépenses) mention the exact date of cartage, thus limiting the utility of this source as regards land transportation, but it was clearly much more expensive as a function of distance. The price was 4 sols per minot of grain carted 15 kilometres in a day, whereas it could be shipped by boat to Quebec, a one-week journey, for the same price. The loading and unloading fees paid by the shipper or his client do not figure into the price paid to the boatman.17 The shipping cost from Montreal to Quebec was standard and extended to the neighbouring côtes. Initially set at 5 sols per minot, it dropped to 4 sols in the 1740s, undoubtedly due to the increase in interurban traffic observed during the last two decades of the regime. Grain movement was closely tied to the larger river transportation system and, outside of strictly local deliveries, remained beholden to the volume of outbound shipments.18 Many boats carried merchandise, wine, aqua vitae, salt, and munitions for the pays d’en haut trade and the military garrisons; wheat and flour had to compete with other goods for return cargo space and could be supplanted as necessary. The price of shipping determined by traffic intensity between the two cities presumably represented a ceiling for other routes along this same corridor, on which there was even less certainty of carrying full loads on the outbound and return trips. The season of travel, the number of stops to pick up grain, and the presence or absence of outbound freight are some of the variables explaining the cost spread over short and medium distances. The prospect of turning a profit on these secondary routes was scant.19

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T y p e s o f Ves sels On his trip downriver from Montreal to Trois-Rivières, the Swedish voyageur Pehr Kalm noted that people plying the river all used the same type of vessel: a slim, hollowed-out tree trunk of varying dimensions.20 Anne-Joseph-Hippolyte de Maurès, comte de Malartic, assistant major of the Régiment de Béarn, was more specific: “These canoes are troughs of sorts, fashioned from a single tree. They are very light and easy to turn. All the habitants use them to bring their goods to market and cross the river. They can put as many as 8 hundredweight in one boat and they propel them with small oars, which is called swimming [nager], or by poling in shallow places or when navigating against the current along the bank.”21 These descriptions are useful given the ambiguity of the word canot, which in the colony referred to both dugouts such as these and the Natives’ bark canoes. The colonists also used the latter on trips into the interior and, less often, for rapid travel on the St Lawrence.22 The boats used by peasants in the Quebec region were perhaps more varied, but there, too, dugouts were commonly used to cross the river at all seasons, and particularly to thread one’s way through the ice floes.23 While a considerable proportion of the goods sold at market or door to door travelled in these homemade vessels, grain transportation per se demanded larger craft. Here, too, the nomenclature is far from precise. I was able to identify the tonnage of only thirty ships regularly carrying wheat down to Quebec from the government of Montreal between 1720 and 1754, consisting of eight schooners, thirteen bateaux, three barques, and six charrois in approximately decreasing order of size. Apart from the schooners, these terms might simply refer to the form of the masts and rigging and not to a specific type of construction.24 On the west coast of France, the term bateau denoted a small, undecked vessel, in contradistinction to the slightly larger and always decked barque.25 In Canada, the two terms may have been interchangeable; the bateaux plying the waters of the St Lawrence, the largest of my categories, were 4 to 8 feet deep and apparently always decked. This detail is obviously of great importance for the packing and loading of wheat. Was it bagged or did it travel in bulk – dumped in a pile on boards to prevent contact with the hull? The available information on this subject is contradictory. In one instance, the buyer, a Quebec commercial baker, specified that he would provide the bags needed for packing and shipping 3,000 minots

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of wheat from Varennes.26 I do not believe that this was a routine practice: first, because bags were expensive and could not be entrusted to navigators without risk, and second, because they held more humidity than a pile exposed to the air. This is why the hardtack sent by Quebec to downriver posts, and perhaps also that which was exported to Île Royale, was not packed but loaded in bulk.27 At the end of the eighteenth century, a Richelieu grain merchant told his men to “send the clean wheat first; then, have it shovelled into the two ends of the ship; then send the spotted wheat and have it placed in the centre of the boards.”28 This passage clearly describes how an attempt could be made to separate shipped grain by quality or provenance. It should finally be noted that ships on the St Lawrence were filled with all sorts of cargo, except for a few small bateaux and charrois described as having “a capacity of 700 minots or less,” which would indicate a specific use.29 Table 4.1 gives a more accurate picture of the numbers and tonnage of ships than the one that can be derived from the incomplete, sporadic data of the previous period.30 The number of vessels may have increased from the outbreak of war in 1744 to the end of the French regime in 1763 but the boats retained the same characteristics, with the barques, bateaux, and charrois now all combined under the heading of “sloop.” Three-fourths of the registered ships made only one or two trips between Montreal and Quebec during the season and it can be deduced that they spent the rest of the time travelling within one or the other of these two districts. Grain and peas were the main items of cargo coming into Quebec, followed by furs and other produce such as tobacco, apples, and cider. The largest shipments were on the order of 2,000 minots; most ranged from 100 to 1,000 minots.31 The risks of dampness and spoilage were ever-present, for navigation on the St Lawrence was rough, hampered by currents, shallows, and violent gusts of wind. On the upper reaches of the river and its arms north of Montreal Island, the Rivière-des-Prairies and the Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, the presence of rapids made it necessary for carriers to line their boats when the wind died down.32 Downstream, the widening known as Lake St Pierre often held unpleasant surprises for navigators attempting one final trip in late fall, and further downstream the voyage began to resemble travel on the high seas, with rough water sometimes even interrupting crossings between Quebec and Île d’Orléans. Two boats travelled together in some cases, so that one could aid the other in an emergency.33 The crew of a forty-ton

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Table 4.1 Tonnage of ships from Montreal and Trois-Rivières unloading at Quebec, 9 May to 22 November 1763 Ship type

Tonnage 10–29

Schooners Sloops

30–49

50–69

70–115

4

7

6

9

26

15

8

6

4

33

1

1

2

19

15

13

14

61

Brigantines Total

Total

Source: lac , rg4–a3, 1, n.p., Record of ships and cargos arriving at Quebec

ship consisted of three or four members: the skipper, one or two sailors to assist him with steering, and one man for miscellaneous tasks. It also happened that these boats took on passengers. Joseph-AndréMathurin Jacrau left a description of his voyage from Quebec to Île Jésus on a barque headed to pick up the Séminaire’s wheat in July 1751. With stops every night and departures the next morning before dawn, the trip took nine days.34 The reverse trip was perhaps quicker; still, counting the time needed to load and unload, it took a month to make a round trip between Quebec and the government of Montreal. This translates into a maximum of six trips per season, a number rarely attained because stops had to be made along the way to fill the vessel with other cargo.35 It need hardly be added that passengers travelled much faster than freight, either in bark canoes or on flat boats propelled by a dozen oarsmen, the sail in that case merely providing auxiliary propulsion. Under these conditions, four or six days sufficed to travel the same distance.36

M e rc h a n t s a n d Boatmen Wheat from the Montreal region enjoyed a good reputation. Its abundance and quality – being harvested earlier than in Quebec, it was generally drier – gave the region its fame as the granary of the colony. Some contracts specified that flour and biscuit had to be made from “Montreal wheat and none other.”37 Speed was of the essence if this preferred product was to arrive at Quebec early enough in the spring to be processed into flour and loaded onto the first ships bound for

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Louisbourg and the islands. Demand for transportation tended to outstrip capacity at the start of the season, whereas ships travelling in summer were often forced to return to Quebec in ballast. 38 Merchants who wanted their wheat picked up at the start of the shipping season were well advised to own their own vessels. They saved even more time by parking their ships far upriver for the winter, in some cases even demanding that the navigator, who ordinarily resided in Quebec, “travel with his crew on the ice next spring so as to be the first to load.”39 Certain merchants in Montreal and vicinity arranged for biscuit and flour bound for the Quebec market and for export to be made before departure, alleviating the burden on Quebec mills and expediting the operations. Finally, to avoid transshipment and reach Louisbourg more rapidly, some ships went there straight from Montreal: the Manon, for instance, an eighty-ton ship chartered in 1726 by J.B. Tétreau; the Saint-Joseph; the Saint-François, and the Dauphin, a brigantine with a forty-five- to sixty-ton draft that also sailed to Île Royale from Montreal in 1731, 1734, and 1735.40 Other direct voyages may also have been undertaken by Montreal merchants with their own ships, but these would have left no traces in the archives. Thirty of the forty-one individuals identified as the owners of ships involved in river transportation lived in Quebec and vicinity, and seventeen of them were navigators by profession. The others were wheat and flour merchants, as were five of the eleven Montreal owners.41 In short, cabotage was a trade for some, while others bought boats not out of an expectation of profit, but rather to ensure that their own goods would travel safely and expeditiously. At the close of one shipping season, the Saint-Joachim had earned 480 livres. Expenses for repairs, wages, and ship provisions amounted to 252 livres, leaving only 228 livres in profit, which was divided evenly between owner-operators François Perrault, a Quebec merchant, and Joseph Lemarié, the navigator. The basis of Perrault’s interest in the enterprise was their agreement that the vessel would, on its first voyage, pick up his wheat “at the Berthier channel, Rivière-duLoup, Bécancourt, and further downriver.”42 This form of partnership between merchants and navigators, including co-ownership of the vessel, was quite common.43 Where the merchant was sole owner, the costs and benefits of a voyage were shared on the basis of twothirds for him and one-third for the boatman.44 Navigators rarely retained sole rights to their vessel for long but it is hard to be more specific, for nothing was more volatile than this form of ownership. Take, for example, Charles Réaume, an Île Jésus merchant and the

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successive owner of four ships, two of them built on-site. In 1737, he purchased the Saint-Pierre from Pierre Ranger, a Rivière-des-Prairies merchant; in 1740, he commissioned the fifty-ton Marie-Catherine, sharing the costs equally with a navigator’s widow, and sold it to Ranger two years later to buy the smaller Marie-Marguerite; in 1750, he started work on another schooner.45 But things were less febrile than they appear. These transactions involved a relatively small group of merchants and ship captains. The captains were faithful to the profession, which was handed down from father to son, and the merchants sought to control this aspect of their business, despite the meagre profits that could be expected from it. Cargo was not insured and the carrier’s responsibility did not include “the risks and perils of the river,” otherwise known as shipwrecks. On the other hand, they were responsible for grain spoilage during the trip.46 The captain had to give a faithful accounting of his journeys to the owner or partner and, if possible, “keep a log of charges and bills of lading.”47 Charter contracts for river transportation were oral or private. The bill of lading, done in at least three copies (for the shipper, the receiver, and the captain) and describing the load and the corresponding freight charge, provided proof of title to the goods, and such documents were very rarely notarized.48 This chapter has devoted little or no space to grain transportation within the two governments. It might lead one to conclude that wheat from the western part of the colony inexorably travelled east and that the capital depended on this region for its subsistence. This was not at all the case. Quebec was surrounded by fertile, well-established parishes that amply met the needs of its residents in good years. Furthermore, while wheat from the government of Montreal was unquestionably drawn downriver, the portion going into the city for processing into flour and biscuit to supply the fur trade and foreign markets should not be minimized. But intraregional movements seem to have left no traces. Only exceptionally were charter contracts signed before a notary, and where this occurred, it was almost always a matter of long-distance transportation.49 Nevertheless, based on a smattering of more or less reliable clues, certain hypotheses can be ventured. First, as regards the place of Montreal wheat in the Quebec market, and at the risk of oversimplification, two types of demand can be distinguished: demand by urban consumers and the fishing enterprises of Labrador, the Gaspé Peninsula, and the lower St Lawrence, which relied on production from the government of Quebec, and demand

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by exporters and the administration, which largely relied on Montreal wheat. A careful study of trade in the capital would be necessary in order to validate this distinction. The contrast between the transportation systems of the western and eastern portions of the colony is clearer. The Montreal fleet was very small. Only a few merchants in the city and the adjacent côtes owned ships, and specialized to greater or lesser degrees in the grain trade. Outside the zone from which a round trip could be made by canoe or cart in a single day, the region’s farmers and aggregators waited for boats chartered by Montreal or Quebec merchants to come get their wheat. Concentration of carriers and freight was the rule here, contrasting sharply with the more scattered network linking Quebec to its hinterlands. Few were the parishes of Quebec that did not have at least a few small ships and professional navigators. There were eighty-five of the latter in 1744, counting heads of households alone; most owned their own vessels.50 And they were not the only ones. All sorts of businesspeople, including small-scale bakers, had boats on the river to handle their affairs, and they turned them to profit by carrying cargo for third parties. The “account of journeys by shallop” kept in 1702 by Charles Trépagny, a Quebec tavern-keeper and baker, offers a good example of these activities. The shallop made fifty-nine trips during the season, some for his own cargo and some for customers. There were three June trips to Neuville and elsewhere to pick up wheat and peas, while the boat mainly carried timber in the summer and livestock in the fall.51 As noted earlier, grain transportation in the western part of the colony was largely tied to the regular and much more voluminous traffic in other types of goods bound for Montreal. The upper reaches of the St Lawrence were plied by ships in search of return freight, creating an undeniable advantage for grain sellers. Shipping costs were always borne by the buyers. This linkage faded in importance as one neared Quebec, disappearing altogether on the other side of it. Ships chartered by Quebec merchants to pick up wheat from Batiscan, Neuville, or Rivière-du-Sud were very likely to make the outbound voyage in ballast, and one may surmise that farmers in these regions often had to arrange to have their wheat shipped to the capital and bear the costs.52 As a result, cargoes were smaller, trips were more dispersed, and data about them is harder to gather. The study of the grain trade presented in the following chapters confirms these contrasts.

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5 The Grain Trade

A thorough analysis of the grain trade and its mechanisms would require a systematic survey of all commercial documents in the notarial and judicial archives of the colony, so as to identify the groups involved in this sector and each one’s position in the hierarchy of trade. In anticipation of this large-scale research project, it is useful to lay down some preliminary considerations, based in part on dissertations and published work and in part on the results of my own small survey of the archives. I went through the repertoires of twenty-seven notaries practising in Quebec, Montreal, and neighbouring parishes in search of grain sales or procurement contracts, taking note of certain other documents encountered in the course of the search, such as partnership agreements and obligations (debts recorded before a notary) relating to bakers and merchants particularly active in this trade. This survey, supplemented with a few ventures into Montreal’s judicial archives, served to track down around fifty grain-related transactions.1 Why so few? First, because procurement contracts were rarely notarized. When dealing among themselves, merchants ordinarily used private notes. They also used such notes, or even simple verbal agreements, when transacting with farmers or rentiers. Such contracts could give rise to obligations, especially in the event of default, but this source does not lend itself to straightforward analysis. Of the thousands of such obligations written down in the minute books of Montreal and Quebec notaries, only a small fraction explicitly mention wheat sales. An instance of default might also wind up before a judge, but the court proceedings are seldom sufficient to identify the exact nature of the transaction giving rise to the suit. For these reasons, wheat

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supply contracts remain the best source for learning about the workings of the trade. Yet these contracts are rare, not only with respect to other types of notarial instruments but also in comparison with contracts covering other items, such as meat, beef cows, stones, fence posts, or firewood, which were all of lesser importance in the market. In all cases, resort to a notary was infrequent – but why is this even truer for wheat? To explain the apparent under-representation of wheat contracts in French minute books, Jean Meuvret invoked the need to keep certain types of illicit transactions out of sight of the authorities.2 The conjecture may hold true for France, where trade was strictly regulated, but in Canada, where merchants normally enjoyed great freedom, another explanation must be found. If it is assumed that the number of notarized contracts is, although very small, proportionate to the volume of sales in each product category, then it must be concluded that wheat sales were rarer than sales of lard or wood. On this logic, the rarity of grain contracts in the minute books simply reflects the rarity of sales proper, in which buyers and sellers exchange money for goods, as opposed to transactions between debtors and creditors disguised as sellers and buyers.3 This conclusion would confirm what the analysis of village accounting has already shown: a preponderance of transactions in which wheat figures as a method of payment and not as a commodity. This observation applies not only to transactions between peasants and merchants but also to transactions between smaller merchants and the larger ones who gave them advances. Perhaps there were other rural products that might have served to pay off debts, but none as easily as wheat. In this colony, it was the payment method of choice.

W h e at S ales In our documentation, genuine sellers, whether peasants or merchants, were among those who eluded the constraints of indebtedness, at least temporarily, and could choose where, when, how, and to whom to sell wheat. The extant examples of private contracts, as described in judicial proceedings or appended to notarial instruments, suggest that these are representative of many more numerous transactions conducted by the minority of individuals falling into this category.4 Between farmers and their customers, verbal agreements were the rule. In the instances that I found, the buyers were mainly bakers and

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city residents putting up provisions for their personal use.5 The quantities were relatively small, at most 200 minots but in most cases much less. The peasant undertook to supply a quantity of grain at a set price, payable in cards or payment orders upon delivery. If the peasant carried the wheat to the city, he added 2 or 3 sols per minot for his trouble. If all went well, the transaction left no traces; if either party’s word proved insufficient, then the ensuing legal proceedings frequently show up in the archives. For example, the existence of an obligation drawn up at delivery, or shortly afterward, suggests that the buyer had defaulted on his initial promise of cash payment. The interpretation is less straightforward for credit sales, in which an obligation was drawn up prior to delivery. Now, why sell to bakers and other impecunious city dwellers when there were established merchants in the farmers’ own parishes who offered better payment guarantees? Did rural merchants refuse wheat except as payment for goods? Or could such decisions have been inspired by personal considerations? There is no way to tell, but be that as it may, the city was clearly not an anonymous market for peasants with regular surpluses to sell. Jacques Labelle, a resident of Île Jésus, secured a court order for a certain baker to post a bond before delivering 60 minots to him, “having learned that the plaintiff [the baker] was unreliable and having made a promise to him only on the condition that Mr Mentet went surety for him.”6 Such cases show that parish borders were permeable to outside information. Not everyone was so careful: when the merchant Joseph Durocher went bankrupt, four farmers and the churchwardens of La Prairie found themselves at the bottom of a long list of creditors.7 In other cases, it was peasants who were sued for failing to deliver the grain as agreed, ordinarily after an unexpectedly meagre harvest. There were no extenuating circumstances in law, and even verbal contracts had to be honoured, but that did not stop sellers from putting forward a host of excuses and, most importantly, from swearing that never, ever, would they have been swayed by a more tempting offer after they had given their word.8 In times of scarcity, exceptional agreements might be reached to retain a harvest still standing in the field or just put in the barn, as in the case of two contracts where the seller received the full price in advance and undertook to deliver the wheat in the fall.9 On 29 March 1734, François-Augustin Bailly de Messein, a merchant in the town of Varennes, near Montreal, represented in Quebec by his agent Louis Lambert, sold 3,000 minots of wheat to Pierre Chalou,

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a commercial baker in that city, to be taken from the second barque trip of the season. The buyer was to pay 6,000 livres during the month of September, in silver or endorsed bills of exchange, plus expenses. There followed, on 2 May 1735, a mortgage-backed obligation payable on demand, whereby Chalou admitted having received the wheat the previous year and still owing the 6,000 livres, and a final quittance dated 9 August 1738, this document signed by the seller.10 If Bailly had been in Quebec for the initial sale, it is probable that it would have taken the form of a simple promissory note, but the details of the transaction are typical of wheat sales by merchants.11 These were made in the winter, generally between January and March, and involved sizable quantities, from 1,000 to 3,000 minots. The contract stipulated when the buyer would send for the grain, for it was he who organized and paid for shipping. The price was stipulated in the contract and could be paid in “legal tender of this country” (including cash, cards, and money orders drawn on the naval treasury), or in bills of exchange drawn on private individuals and guaranteed by the buyer’s endorsement. Sales were always on credit, at least in part, with the amount usually coming due at the end of the summer, during the period when the seller was replenishing his stock and settling his own accounts with suppliers. Likewise typical is the absence of an obligation associated with the initial agreement, a mark of respect and trust between parties of equal station. Such an obligation placed a floating mortgage on the buyer’s property and was only exercised in the event of default. In this example, Bailly had to wait another three years before collecting the debt, whereas payment was ordinarily made within a reasonable period of time, if not on the due date.12 There were variations on this general rule. For customers in Montreal, delivery immediately followed the signing of the contract; in two out of ten contracts of this kind, the seller asked for a 15 to 30 per cent advance; in two other cases, where the buyers were of modest means (one a baker and the other a carpenter), the contracts were secured by a mortgage. Long periods of low prices, with little or no seasonal fluctuation, had allayed sellers’ mistrust to the point that prices were customarily set as much as several months before delivery. When they signed the contract, the parties already knew how much money would change hands; they were not speculating on a possible price increase. After 1750, uncertainty set in and grain was sold at its market price on the date of delivery, or at the official price.13

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Such were the procedures commonly observed in the case of voluntary sales, or the portion of wheat transactions visible to historians. The much larger invisible portion was recorded in the account books of those merchants who accepted wheat in exchange for goods sold on credit, either to farmers or to other merchants. And it is also there that the handsome profits realized on the terms of trade between these goods and the wheat received as payment are hidden. Speculation on wheat held out no hope of profit in a normal year, so my sample understandably contains no contracts between a farmer and a merchant or between two merchants.14 Excluding differences related to transportation costs, the price of wheat was uniform across the colony. Merchants might be able to turn a profit on regional differences in available quantities and prices engendered by a mediocre season, but as we shall see, in such cases the intendant stepped in to bar any commercial transactions that might have ensued. The only profit to be made on wheat was by processing and/or exporting it. The profit potential was modest in the case of bakers making bread for the public; it was more attractive for firms milling wheat into flour and biscuit for resale abroad.15 Our sample confirms the limits of the domestic market: it was too narrow to accommodate true middlemen buying wheat in one place and selling it elsewhere at a profit. In other words, there were no merchants who specialized in wheat. There were, however, merchants who sold imported items wholesale or retail and took payment in wheat, thereby playing a relatively important role in the movement of the harvest. If we now take a closer look at the manner in which this occurred, and at the specific types of relations that the merchants entertained with the backcountry, a difference between the two main colonial centres becomes evident.

Q u e b e c a n d It s Regi on On 24 July 1729, the Conseil supérieur ordered the merchants of Quebec to declare the quantities of wheat, flour, and biscuit in their possession; nine days later, it proceeded to audit them by touring and taking inventory of the granaries.16 The procedure, conducted late in the season and quite haphazardly, does not serve to classify the merchants by the volume of their stocks, which vary from 5 to 2,000 cwt or the equivalent of 5,000 minots of wheat at most. But the source does serve to identify those urban businesses that were regularly exporting wheat or supplying it to ships and the gulf fisheries.

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This group is composed of seven individuals who were both merchants and administrative officers, one commercial baker, and twenty-one merchants per se17 – about thirty people in total, sitting at the end of the chain running from the farmer’s barn to the port of embarkation. From the sixty wholesalers appearing as such in the 1744 census of Quebec must be subtracted about half who were only shopkeepers, not forgetting to add those of the king’s officers who actively participated in maritime trade. The category may, in short, have included some forty individuals in the 1740s.18 It goes without saying that not all of them operated on the same scale. Some acted mainly as wholesalers, in partnership with or representing metropolitan interests. François Havy and Jean Lefebvre, the colony’s largest importers, co-managed the Canadian affairs of Rouenbased Dugard and Company from 1731 to 1747 and went into business for themselves after that. While not a core component of the company’s business, wheat was needed to supply the Labrador fisheries and Dugard’s ships when they departed for France; it was also converted into an occasional flour shipment bound for Louisbourg or the West Indies. It could be obtained from their customers, who included several large rural merchants in the government of Montreal and an important seigneur, the Séminaire de Québec.19 Joseph Fleury de la Gorgendière, Nicolas Philibert, and François Perrault are more typical of the average early-eighteenth-century Quebec merchant. Fleury, a correspondent for his brothers (one of whom was established in La Rochelle, the other in Saint-Pierre, Martinique), largely specialized in fishing gear. Part of what he received in payment for his advances of provisions and goods consisted of oil and cod that he shipped to the West Indies. To produce biscuit for his fisheries customers, Fleury apparently relied exclusively on his own lands, consisting of the Deschambault family seigneury, purchased from other heirs, and two other pieces of land held by commoners in the Quebec suburbs.20 Larger quantities of wheat were needed for the flour and biscuit shipments that Perrault and Philibert regularly sent to Île Royale. Some of this was purchased from good retail businesses in the city that had dealings with the region’s farmers. For the rest, the merchants had to stay one step ahead of their customers. Philibert and Perrault each owned a boat that prospected upriver from Quebec, purchasing tithe wheat when the opportunity arose and, most often, picking up wheat gathered in advance by a man of the parish (a tavern-keeper, seigneurial farmer, or other farmer), who

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doubled as a sales agent for their goods.21 Jean-Baptiste Côté of Lachenaie was one of these men. In 1736, having failed to deliver the quantity of grain necessary to honour a promissory note of approximately 1,500 livres dating from the previous year, he was sued by Philibert, who obtained a garnishment order and claimed a small piece of land, a ramshackle house, and sixteen receivables from other habitants.22 The details of such agreements with local agents varied, but there is no doubt that grain dealers took advantage of the proliferation of outlets along the St Lawrence and that these profits represented the difference between the cost price of goods, wine, rum, or tafia bought in France, Louisbourg, or Martinique and the price paid by their commission agents, customers, and partners. Those who could not meet the needs of their maritime customers by acquiring wheat at the source could make arrangements with Montreal merchants or with Quebec bakers who processed Montreal wheat into flour and biscuit. The transactions in such cases did not ordinarily consist of sales; rather, they were partnerships between those who supplied all or part of the shipment and those who owned the boat and had correspondents in foreign ports.23 In a few decades, the Quebec merchants and their metropolitan backers had established a well-organized network of complementary lines of business that worked to their advantage when conditions were favourable. But their view of the situation was entirely different – in fact, the Quebec merchants never ceased to complain. They were continually petitioning the authorities to denounce the marchands forains and rural merchants who were ruining their business and, by the same token, the whole colony.24 The forains were foreign ship captains or adventurers who came ashore at Quebec in season, peddled their wares, and left in the fall, or the following year at the latest. Colonial merchants accused them of depressing prices, flooding the countryside with manufactured goods, and carrying away the harvest when they left. “Cast your eyes, Lordships, on the flourishing state of this colony before the forains made off with its retail commerce, like hornets devouring the honey that the poor bees have gathered with so much care,” reads an imagistic petition of 1719,25 but many other similar quotations could have been cited. What first strikes the historian when considering the forains is the mystery and anonymity surrounding them. No identifiable trait or name emerges from these repeated complaints or from the comments of the administrators who relayed them to the minister. Never is it

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specified whether the people in question are captains, supercargoes, or mere adventurers. Whatever the case, the role that the petitioners ascribed to them does not tally with what is known of commerce in the colony. On the one hand, as Dale Miquelon rightly points out, these competitors cannot have been tremendously numerous and formidable, given that only ten French ships docked at Quebec every year and that a large part of their available tonnage was taken up with shipments of goods to colonial merchants.26 On the other, a consideration of the trade calendar and of local customs relating to consumption and credit makes the alleged raids by the forains on the harvest seem highly improbable. The countryside was not holding onto its surpluses in anticipation of the ships’ arrival. By the time these foreigners came ashore in the spring, the grain had long since been gathered by colonial merchants and made its way to the mills and bakeries. To get a toehold in this industry, a foreigner needed an on-site agent – and who could legitimately complain if the bees associated with the hornets of their own accord? One more contradiction: how could the authorities prohibit retail sales by this category of individuals in a city where the status of resident or bourgeois was undefined, where business was unregulated, and where anyone could operate a shop without a declaration or a permit? A petition submitted in 1735 marked the end of a long and fruitless campaign against this foreign competition – the minister made it known that he would hear no more of it. Yet the Quebec merchant community continued to demand the head of its other bête noire: the rural merchant. Despite repeated failures, such as the abortive regulation of 1729,27 it still dreamed of doing away with the middlemen said to be sitting between the merchants and their farmer customers, as witness this memorial of 1740: Nothing is more pernicious to the trade of the colony than the establishment of the stores that already exist and continue to sprout up every day in every parish along the river. A servant, a salt smuggler, an indentured man, after a one or two year’s stay in the country, finds a way to gather up a small fund, with which he makes the rounds of the parishes, going from house to house and making away with all the food which the habitant would take to the city at a fair price, in this way forcing the bourgeois to pay what this villain demands for the necessities of life. A few others of more considerable means acquire a house in the parish and provide the habitant with all his needs, and grab

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his whole crop; then his family, finding this merchant to offer credit that at first appears to be easy, but proves later to be fatal and ruinous, improvidently spends beyond its means, day after day. So comes it that the habitant, having been despoiled of all that his land can produce, can only free himself of debt by giving up his beef and milk cows, and then his land, examples of which we see every day in certain parishes, where the merchants have dispossessed five or six habitants of their land. The habitant no longer comes into the city to sell his wares or purchase his necessities, and the city merchant, who now has only the city dwellers from whom to earn a living, finds himself forced, in order to amass the money necessary to buy life’s necessities, to sell his wares at nearly the same price at which he bought them; whence the confusion and disturbances that we see every autumn, which every year reduce a few merchants to the hard necessity of seeking refuge in the countryside and deserting the city, where they can no longer eke out a living. With the merchants in the côtes collecting up everything the soil… and the habitants’ industry can produce, they are the only ones possessing the wherewithal to make the necessary supplies for the loading of the ships which put into this port. And the city merchant, who bears all the costs of this trade, and who contributes each day, to the best of his ability, to the good order and embellishment which strict policing strives to maintain, remains an idle spectator to the foreign trade quite often taking place on his very premises. Such desolation in the city’s commerce makes the merchandise on offer so pitiful and so contemptible that the habitant, finding what he needs for a pittance, is prodded by no sense of emulation to apply himself or be industrious, neglects his crops, brings a scant few groceries to the city, sells them with unutterable disdain at whatever price he demands, and so forces the bourgeois to accede to the yoke placed upon him. All that may be said about freedom of commerce is well and good, but is there no way for the authorities to rein in all this activity and establish good order in this nascent colony, without there being any necessary consequence for all the other lands under the dominion of our Prince?28 None of the arguments stated here adds much to earlier petitions: we see the same apocalyptic scenario of an impoverished, depopulated city; the same opposition between city-rooted merchants, with the

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city’s development at heart, and base-born newcomers pursuing their selfish designs. What is new is how the petitioners put the ruin of the peasantry at the centre of their complaints – their material ruin, certainly, but graver still, their moral ruin – and the ensuing collapse of the hierarchical order. Did the persons making these arguments seriously believe that such doomsaying would carry more weight than an exposition of their own suffering? In truth, it is not at all clear that the merchants’ representative was himself convinced of the value of their initiative. To learn more, one would have to discover what hid behind this ostensibly unified discourse, and gain access to the debates and compromises that took place within a heterogeneous assembly harbouring opposing interests. After all, the rural merchants did not emerge out of the ether carrying complete lines of sheets, linens, utensils, pins, and nails. These were not fly-by-night operators who purchased their wares in France but individuals who had lived in the colony for several years, if not their whole lives. While there is no denying that transactions took place between rural merchants and foreign ship captains, these can only have been of limited importance: the merchants would have been unable to provide properly packed flour and biscuit for the return voyage, while the captains offered neither credit nor a full assortment of dry goods, focusing instead on wine and aqua vitae.29 Jean Mauvide, who did good business on Île d’Orléans, was one of the few rural merchants who could fit out departing ships, but when the time came to renew his stocks, he called upon an importer in Quebec’s Lower Town such as Pierre Trottier Desauniers who, as the city merchants’ representative, signed the petition calling for Mauvide and his ilk to be put out of business.30 The contradiction is obvious. In order to eliminate the intermediaries and force the peasants to shop in their own stores, it would have sufficed for the petitioners to suspend advances of goods and strike the resellers off their customer lists. But they did not do that. They continued, apparently in the face of common sense, to rail against a competitor out of one side of their mouths while encouraging him out of the other. A merchant who decided to stop dealing with such customers would have increased his competitors’ business in equal measure, unless a regulation passed by the authorities were to rein them all in at once. Merchants at opposite ends of the commercial hierarchy must certainly have had different views of the situation.31 The exaggeratedly dire view was that of the most vulnerable merchants, and while the bigger players

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made a show of supporting their petitions, it was perhaps because they knew such representations to be futile in any case. Of the two types of rural businesses denounced in these petitions, the itinerant and the sedentary, the second, based on “easy credit,” is presented as the most ruinous. Had the proliferation of such rural stores become such a blatant fact by 1740? The phenomenon was manifest in the government of Montreal, yet the Montreal merchants who should have worried about it were not associated with these petitions, neither individually nor through their representative. 32 In contrast, the situation in Quebec, which appears to have been the main target of the petitions, hardly justified such cries of anguish. Any business, however modest, that endured for any length of time eventually left traces in the notarial or judicial archives, yet the directories of the fourteen Quebec notaries in my sample do not contain the series of obligations typically signalling a merchant’s presence in a parish, even though some of these notaries boasted a considerable rural clientele. Likewise, I found only eleven rural merchants among petitioners to the Conseil supérieur between 1754 and 1759, all of them in the government of Montreal, in addition to the many citybased merchants.33 The third survey, covering a collection of bailiff’s minutes from the provost court of Quebec, produces similar results. The source, covering more than five decades and a wide range of individuals clearly identified by domicile and profession, mentions only seven rural merchants concentrated in the Côte du Sud, and that only after 1742.34 Thanks to the work of Jacques Saint-Pierre and Thomas Wien on that same region, many of these are known to have been struggling microbusinesses that did not play an important role in the parish economy.35 In sum, these clues suggest that with rare exceptions, such as the well-established Jean Mauvide on Île d’Orléans, there was not a single large sedentary business in the côtes of the government of Quebec with the capacity to monopolize local grain.36 We now turn to the other category of intermediaries denounced by the Quebec merchants: the peddlers.

P e d d l ers A familiar figure in the colony’s rural areas and along the streets of its cities, the peddler practised his profession in various ways. The humblest was to go from one parish to the next hawking his lowquality wares, stopping along the way to sleep and, occasionally, to

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work. This was the most common type of peddler seen in the vicinity of cities. Others moved in with a habitant for a few months while rambling around the surrounding country; still others resided for long periods in the same parish. François Rodriguès, a sailor who had deserted his ship and roamed the Côte du Sud buying poultry, belongs to the first category;37 Simon Chamberland, who boarded for a time with a Kamouraska peasant, to the second;38 and Pierre Labaty, a “merchant peddler” in Contrecœur where he had lived for some time, to the third.39 The common denominator was that they all distributed their merchandise door to door and personally carried what they received in return to its destination. Rodriguès carried the poultry on his back and Labaty owned a team of horses, while Chamberland took butter and wheat to Quebec in his boat. Chamberland was in a bracket above François Duchesny, who called himself “a merchant in the côtes of the government of Trois-Rivières, residing in Maskinongé”: he had only a dugout canoe in which to carry his wares.40 If it were possible to draw up a list of these peddlers, one would find that the true itinerants among them were outnumbered by resellers and day labourers from the city, along with a sizable number of peasants taking advantage of down time in agriculture to work their way through the adjacent côtes.41 The volume and variety of the goods on offer varied according to the seller and his means of locomotion. Socks, head scarves, and sewing supplies were always available, alongside tin spoons, combs, pictures, rosaries, violin strings, and so on, as well as cloth if the peddler owned or rented a warehouse in the côtes.42 Merchants advanced goods to peddlers with fixed addresses who regularly worked the same territory. Peddlers might sell on credit to certain customers, but cash sales were the rule, or immediate payment at any rate, and this characteristic differentiated these travelling salesmen from established merchants. Depending on the season, the place, and the era, all sorts of goods might be brought back from these rambles: tobacco, tanned hides, chickens, turkeys, lard, butter, human hair and horsehair for wigmakers, and, in the 1750s, the payment orders by which the colony was inundated. The peddlers also brought small quantities of wheat and peas to market, although here a distinction must be made between the two cities. The scarcity of sedentary businesses in the Quebec countryside led to a proliferation of travelling salesmen in these regions and enabled them to play a certain role in grain movement. Moreover, the various types of peddlers just mentioned were augmented by

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another: those who combined trade with transportation. Pierre Paquet, a “navigator operating as a peddler around Île d’Orléans,” was certainly not an isolated case.43 In the government of Montreal, peddlers usually travelled on foot and belonged to the lower strata of the profession. They left more traces in the judicial archives than in the notarial register, for the peasant women who let them enter and present their wares were equally quick to denounce them to the authorities. The only mention of such individuals in connection with grain is of someone named Félix, a Frenchman wearing a brown coat, a vest, red breeches and cap, and rough-hewn shoes, who wended his way through the côtes of Berthier, Contrecœur, and Boucherville buying wheat.44 The source is insufficient to situate this type of soliciting within the broader picture of grain movement. I believe its role to have been insignificant, since by the 1730s, merchants had moved into every parish in the government of Montreal that yielded a surplus, while also extending their credit and commercial networks into recently cleared areas.

M o n t r e a l a n d I ts Regi on Most of Montreal’s merchants, and the largest among them, derived the bulk of their revenues from a clientele of fur traders and officers of the troops who had dealings with the remote Indigenous nations. An analysis of Alexis Monière’s accounts from 1715 to 1724 shows that his other customers constituted only one-third of his total sales and that settlements in grain accounted for a mere 8 per cent of the value of their payments.45 A cursory look at his account books for the 1730s and 1740s, along with those of Pierre Guy, another large outfitter, reveals the same pattern: numerous customers dispersed throughout the neighbouring parishes who paid with local produce but always remained a marginal element of these fur-based businesses.46 When combined with the harvest from the suburban lands owned by these merchants, their wheat receipts might suffice for the subsistence of their own household and for some flour shipments to the posts or hardtack for the crews, but not much more. Precision is impossible in the absence of a census or inventory offering a snapshot of the Montreal merchant community, but there were perhaps fifty merchants operating during an average year of the first half of the eighteenth century. For this whole period, I was able to identify only a dozen individuals “specializing” in grain.47 The word

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is in fact a mere approximation of the actual operations of such merchants, who, not content with the returns on their retail business, used various means to amass large stocks of wheat destined for foreign markets and, to a lesser extent, for the military garrisons. Pierre Trottier Desauniers the elder, who invested in grist milling in 1713, was one of the first merchant-outfitters to take an interest in these new outlets.48 Other outfitters of the following generation, notably Pierre de Lestage and Ignace Gamelin, perhaps larger than their predecessors and followers, also looked to the agricultural market. These men were importers who had agents located in the côtes to retail their goods and collect wheat in payment. In 1718, Lestage made a smart long-term investment when he bought the largely unpopulated Berthier seigneury.49 In partnership with other Montreal merchants such as Charles Nolan Lamarque and François Poulin de Francheville, Gamelin kept a schooner on the St Lawrence shuttling between Montreal, Quebec, and his rural stores. He also had oceangoing ships carrying flour to Louisbourg and the West Indies.50 Smaller fur traders such as François Demers (dit Montfort) and Charles Héry played an active part in the local wheat and flour trade; Héry was among the privileged suppliers of the king’s stores in the 1740s and afterward.51 There follows another group made up of retailers not tied to the fur trade, or at least not in any serious way. The dominant figure here is Jean-Baptiste Hervieux, the son of a Quebec ironmonger, who became a shipowner and was publicly rumoured to have left no less than 100,000 livres to each of his seven children.52 The children certainly married well – particularly his daughters Marie-Anne and Michèle, to the wealthy La Corne brothers, who were officers of the troops. Hervieux undoubtedly had several irons in the fire, but retailing and flour and biscuit exports had much to do with his success. His accounts with the Quebec commercial baker Pierre Chalou shed a bit of light on his activities. In 1735, he sent Chalou 6,943 minots of wheat and 366 minots of peas. A portion of these provisions was used for trade with Île Saint-Jean, an endeavour in which the two men had partnered, while the remainder was bought by Chalou acting alone and shipped to the West Indies. This arrangement had been in place for several years, as indicated by the first statement of accounts in November 1733, and Hervieux continued to supply Chalou until 1740 or later. 53 For Joseph Guyon Després, who supplied meat to the Montreal garrison, wheat accounted for a

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secondary although non-negligible portion of his business. The other Montreal retailers involved in the grain trade had perseverance and small business volumes in common. In 1724, Pierre Courault (dit La Côte) formed a partnership with Jean Vidal, a Quebec surgeon. They each invested 20,000 livres in merchandise, which La Côte “could sell forward or with immediate payment, in exchange for equipment for the fur trade; [and] make purchases of wheat, flour, biscuit, peas, or other small grains, for cash or barter.” His family connections enabled him to carve out a small niche in the fur trade for a short period, but trade in grain made a larger contribution to his modest success.54 In the 1730s, he often worked with Jean Latour gathering wheat for Quebec, when it was not sold to the naval controller on site or processed into flour or biscuit for direct shipping to Louisbourg.55 The notaries Jean-Baptiste Tétro and Nicolas-Auguste Guillet de Chaumont, who more or less successfully pursued the same goals (sales to Île Royale and the king),56 all but round out the group of Montreal merchants involved in grain marketing before 1745.57 Other retailers only came to the city for short stays, their presence being recorded from one or another nearby parish, where they might plan to settle if all went well. For individuals lacking the means to hire a commission agent in the côtes and buy a good boat, the chances of attracting a large rural clientele to their Montreal stores were slim – and with fifty or so fur traders looking after the urban market, no business could be expected from those quarters either. Better to set up shop in the countryside, in a location explored in advance to make sure that the competition was limited and the chances of making a decent living were reasonable. At least, this is my interpretation of a highly visible centrifugal movement taking place in the western part of the colony. The buzzing of outmigration began in the late 1720s. Merchants exploring these parishes had to make sure that an outlet could be found for the wheat they would obtain from the peasants, who would not pay in any other currency. In 1729, rural merchants are recorded from only three of the nineteen government of Montreal parishes visited in the context of the grain inventory.58 There are undoubtedly some omissions, but it may be deduced that the presence of professional merchants, as opposed to seigneurs, seigneurial farmers, notaries, and others who owned small stores, was still a recent phenomenon. The phenomenon gathered steam in the 1730s as new land was cleared, so that by 1740 all the riverside parishes downstream of Montreal had at least one established merchant. A partial list from

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1763 identifies forty-one merchants dispersed throughout twenty-five parishes, and while some of them owed their position to the war, the majority had gone into business much earlier.59 Consider, for example, what was taking place at the confluence of the St Lawrence with the Rivière-des-Prairies and the Rivière-desMille-Îles, an area where generally abundant agricultural production had favoured the early establishment of enduring rural businesses.60 François Poisset and Pierre Ranger arrived in Rivière-des-Prairies almost simultaneously, between 1725 and 1728. Poisset, the son of a Quebec merchant, had lived in Montreal for a few years before moving his business to the new location.61 Partnering with Quebec merchant Antoine Lemaître-Lamorille in 1732, he commissioned a hundred-ton ship to be built on the site of his establishment. He was, however, forced to sell his share in the ship and the flour shipment when the vessel was launched, and the next year his bills of exchange drawn on Quebec and Rouen were protested.62 Abandoning certain aspirations on the heels of these setbacks, Poisset set about consolidating his rural clientele. Twenty years later, François Poisset and Company was solid enough to attract an investment of 30,000 livres, and when its operations were wound down in 1757, his partners stated no grievances.63 His neighbour Ranger’s success was quicker and more unexpected. Born in Montreal in 1696 to a non-merchant family, by 1728 he was being denounced as the chief grain monopolist in the Montreal region.64 With a boat on the St Lawrence and a baker and some coopers in his employ, Ranger’s flour transactions took on the proportions of a genuine small business, driven by in-kind payments from his rural customers along with occasional seigneurial dues collected in the form of wheat. Thus, for example, coarse flour from the Terrebonne mill was ground, partially baked, and packed in Ranger’s stores for shipping overseas in 1735.65 As of 1740 he was described variously as a merchant of Rivière-des-Prairies or a merchant of Montreal, where he owned property in the nearby district of Saint-Joseph. He carried on his rural affairs, including advancing merchandise and lending grain and money, until his death in 1766.66 The  proximity of such a large competitor did not stop Charles Réaume, scion of a Montreal fur trading family, from setting up shop across the river on Île Jésus in the 1730s and doing good business there. Like Ranger, his occasional partner, Réaume milled flour, shipped goods on his own boat, and mixed seigneurial wheat with wheat from ordinary customers, in particular when he rented the

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seigneurial mill from 1749 to 1755.67 Pointe-aux-Trembles was to some extent the outer harbour of Montreal, and ease of travel from the main town could have made life difficult for local merchants. Yet the Bômer brothers of Coutances, Normandy, were perfectly willing to move into this burgeoning community far from the ocean and operate a rural store while simultaneously outfitting ships for the Gaspé fishery. Jean-Nicolas arrived first, around 1735. He turned the business over to Guillaume five years later and opened a store at a new location in the côte of Chambly.68 Guillaume, who figured among the best customers of the importers Havy and Lefebvre, kept one eye on fishing and on cod sales in the western part of the colony until the end of the French regime, the other on his property in Saint-Léonard and his peasant customers.69 These merchants were by far the largest in their respective parishes, but they were not alone. Sylvie Dépatie has identified a dozen individuals who owned stores on Île Jésus before 1760, and several others could be found operating at Rivière-des-Prairies and Pointe-auxTrembles.70 There was, it seems, more room than it appears for new entrants into the market. These older parishes served as bridgeheads for the colonization of Terrebonne, l’Assomption, Lachenaie, and locales further downriver along the north shore where land was just starting to be cleared. The rural merchants did not have a monopoly in these côtes, for Montreal and Quebec merchants also did business there, but they were in a strong position.71 Montreal Island and Île Jésus accounted for a large proportion of the people colonizing the north shore, and Ranger and the others were well placed to capitalize on pre-existing connections with these settlers and their families, enabling these merchants to extend their businesses to the areas undergoing settlement. Yields in these areas were poor because of the major investments needed for tools, money, and wheat (for seed and subsistence), so these merchants had a further advantage in that they could extend initial credit while waiting for this clientele, in turn, to produce surpluses. The appearance of these would encourage other merchants to set up shop in the new parishes, and so on. A similar constellation of large and small rural businesses extending their operations into newly cleared lands formed on the south shore in the 1720s. Several large merchants were active in the parent parishes of Longueuil, Boucherville, Varennes, and Verchères before the war – François-Augustin Bailly being perhaps the largest. 72 This type of business, whose existence is revealed by long series of

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obligations, rentcharges (rentes constituées), and other transactions, did not, to my knowledge, exist upstream of Montreal or in the Sorel area, where agriculture was still too poorly developed. That left a vacuum to be filled by city merchants, who knew of the wealth to be derived from tithes and emerging surpluses, and by travelling peddlers. Marin Jehanne and Jean Leroux (dit Provençal), who ranged between Île du Pas and the mouth of the Richelieu River in the early 1750s and who settled their disputes with fists and knives, were constantly being taken to court by their suppliers; they are not representative of the rural merchants of this government.73 Nor should the fast fortunes made during the war by a few Richelieu Valley inhabitants be confused with the progressive accumulation characteristic of the sounder enterprises.74 In this region, the bumper crops of wheat harvested after 1760 coincided with the inauguration of new markets and the arrival of foreign merchants, albeit with no necessary cause-and-effect relationship.75

B a k e rs Bakers were central to the grain trade, since even wheat bound for foreign markets was processed in the colony. The profession was regulated by the police magistrates, who received applications and limited the number of candidates admitted to the profession (although not as much as the successful applicants might have wished). The number of bakers in each of the two major cities grew from five at the turn of the century to ten or so by 1750.76 There were no bakers operating in the rural parishes before the war.77 Only bakers distributing bread to the public were covered by the quota system and the regulations. The manufacture of hardtack had been officially open to all since 1707, hence the presence of fifteen bakeries operating in Quebec in 1744. Some, such as that of the merchant Nicolas Philibert, were exclusively involved in exporting.78 A brief discussion of techniques is necessary in order to understand the division of labour. Before the cracked wheat (thirds) coming out of the mills could be used, it had to be converted into flour by bolting.79 In the colony, this operation took place at the city bakeries and a few merchants’ granaries, rarely at the mill itself. To my knowledge, only the two mills operated by the Séminaire de Québec in the Côte de Beaupré (at Petit-Pré and Sault-à-la-Puce), and perhaps the one operated by the Jesuits on the Beauport River, regularly delivered finished flour to the merchants; furthermore, in 1748, the farmer at

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Petit-Pré, the largest of the three mills, was a Quebec baker.80 None of the nineteen mills in the governments of Trois-Rivières and Montreal that were visited by the commissary of the Conseil supérieur in 1729 had bolters. The ten bolters sealed by the commissary belonged to merchants and a few seigneurs who had their flour ground elsewhere than in their own mills.81 This inventory did not cover the Montreal Island mills nor the one on Île Sainte-Hélène, but notarized contracts between merchants and bakers show that here too, bolting was always contracted to the bakers. The king’s stores and the religious communities also milled their own flour. These practices correspond to the ones commonly observed in France until the mid-eighteenth century. Apart from isolated cases such as the enterprises run by millers in the Bordeaux region and those of certain mills serving the Paris market, the miller’s transformation into a flour merchant was a later development. The “low grinding” technique (mouture à la grosse) used in Canada was the oldest and most widespread. It involved milling the grain a single time and, if possible, delaying bolting for a few weeks to let the piled product cool. Few were the mills that possessed such storage facilities, hence the custom of having the flour finished elsewhere. The technique yielded a good product as long as the mill was in suitable repair and the wheat was of sufficient quality and pre-cleaned; however, a fraction of the coarse meal remained stuck to the bran and was removed by the bolter during patent flour production. This wheat pollard (grues) was fed to livestock. The bakers and merchants fattened their herds, but to the detriment of flour yield.82 The “high grinding” technique (mouture économique), introduced into France and rapidly adopted after 1750, remedied this waste by putting the grain through the stones a second time to separate the bran from the endosperm and recover an additional fraction of good-quality white flour. The new process was associated with on-site sieving, first by hand and later by mill-driven bolters.83 These transformations fostered the emergence of a new category of millers, who bought wheat instead of milling on demand and were able to dictate the price of the flour they sold to bakers, relegating the latter to the status of mere artisans.84 It appears that the two professions had begun their reversal of status by the late eighteenth century, after the modernization of the few large merchant-operated mills.85 Prior to 1760, the technology still allowed independent bakers to carve out a niche in the flour market. A bolter is a cloth-lined cylinder 5 to 9 feet long mounted on a gentle incline in a housing or “husk” and fitted with a cranked shaft. Different

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fabric meshes are used depending on whether one wishes to obtain patent flour or merely strip out the bran. The bolter bought by Pierre Chalou in 1733 cost 61 livres, making it a rather expensive device.86 It may be supposed that certain bakers, as well as the merchants who sieved flour in the côtes, were using more rough-hewn bolters. But when the flour was to be stored in barrels for long periods before being eaten, bolting had to be performed with the greatest of care. The bakers’ primary duty was to keep their stores stocked with different grades of bread at all times, and they were the only ones authorized to do so. There was one baker for every seventy-five to one hundred households, a relatively high proportion, indicating that few city residents baked their own bread. The fact that the bakers were dispersed among the seven districts and suburbs of Quebec in 1744 reinforces this impression.87 On the other hand, there were many ovens in the city – one in every three leased dwellings, which would seem to contradict my observation.88 But it makes little difference, for the key distinction is between city dwellers who bought bread and those who put by provisions of wheat. The majority of Montreal and Quebec residents apparently fell into the second category, either purchasing the wheat or obtaining it from their censitaires or tenant farmers. Some of this group baked their bread at home while others, perhaps the majority, entrusted the job to a baker. These customers supplied enough wheat in advance to provide for their household’s needs during a given period, or promised to do so, and the baker, working to order in this instance, delivered the bread to the customer’s home.89 If this practice was common, as I believe it to have been, then that leaves hardly anyone but the poor – i.e., those lacking the means to put by their own wheat – as retail bakery customers.90 One thing is for sure: when wheat was scarce, bakers were contractually obligated to deliver bread to their private customers, and the public found the bakeries empty. This constraint, added to the authorities’ slowness to index the price of bread to the rising price of wheat, meant that fines were constantly being assessed during such periods. Bakers, for their part, often applied to the courts to obtain payment for bread deliveries. These petitions name small sums and target people from all walks of life, proving that credit was not reserved to home delivery customers but was also extended to ordinary bakery patrons.91 Nobody got rich from making and selling bread. In the absence of wheat price data series for the cities, there is no way to calculate profit margins, but it is known that in Canada,

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as in France, the official price calculation did not include a handsome amount for the labour involved in making bread; indeed, that margin was close to zero in years of high wheat prices.92 However, the bakers’ business was not limited to bread distribution. They supplied flour and especially biscuit to the remote posts and the other colonies, and it will be recalled that biscuit accounted for 40 per cent of grain export volumes. While merchants could dispense with the bakers’ flour preparation services if necessary, biscuit baking demanded a good oven and a skilled tradesman. By local custom, biscuits weighed half a pound and were made of farine entière, meaning flour consisting of all fractions of the milled product except the bran and pollard.93 Lengthy kiln-drying made it possible to store the biscuit for over a year under suitable conditions. Unsold flour would keep until the next shipping season if converted into biscuit. It was, of course, possible to produce poor-quality biscuit. At least twice, the intendant had spoiled flour processed into biscuit in the hope that the final product would be more edible and less sickening. There was no risk in doing so: at worst, the soldiers would reject these rations.94 Likewise, the king’s bakers could make biscuit from coarse flour or clears, consisting of the portion remaining after some of the patent flour was removed, and the troops in the field would have no choice but to eat it. But the bakers and merchants who supplied the ships and the bourgeois and fishermen on Île Royale did not engage in this practice. To stay in business, they had to satisfy their customers. Louisbourg was not a captive market or a poor, remote colony that would accept an inferior product, unsaleable elsewhere, without ever complaining.95 Procurement and charter contracts mention only patent flour and farine entière, and biscuit was always made from the latter. Baking contracts were always explicit as to the nature of the raw material and the desired quality of the finished product, which had to be good, true, and saleable, properly packed, and subject to inspection. Bakers undertook to “make and perfect” the flour, and to tamp it down in dry-tight wooden barrels tared to mark the net weight. It was preferable for the cooper to be present at the end of the operations to head the barrel, and a large bakery found it an asset to have a cooper on staff.96 All of these precautions seem inconsistent with complaints found in the official correspondence about Canadian flour exported to the West Indies. Rather than conclude that all shipments were defective – that the exporters, incapable of observing the elementary rules of

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commerce, were simply seeking to defraud their customers – these complaints and the corresponding practices must be put into perspective.97 The packing of flour and biscuit for long tropical journeys demanded savoir-faire that did not exist in the colony when it began to export these items in the early eighteenth century. The first bakers to arrive, and others who came from France later (for the renewal of the profession owed much to immigration), knew no more than how to make bread and how to carry bags of flour between their bakery and the small provincial markets. The 1720s were a decade of learning for both the bakers and the merchants, who had to keep an eye on the millers and coopers if they wanted to hold on to their customers in Louisbourg and elsewhere. Antoine Lemaître-Lamorille discovered at his expense that he could not trust a Longue-Pointe merchant to prepare a shipment of peas bound for Marseille. Following this incident, Intendant Dupuy’s order of 1727 required rural merchants and flour dealers to deliver their product in bags so that exporters could check the quality and supervise the filling of the barrels.98 The regulation did not affect the Séminaire de Québec and the large Montrealarea millers, who succeeded in demonstrating their professionalism. In the 1730s, the introduction of cylindrical sieves into the export mills helped improve Canadian products, but the role of the exporters themselves must not be underestimated.99 If their flour and biscuit was now well received in the other colonies, it is because they had become more exacting. As one of them stated in regard to a baker who had improperly baked a biscuit order, it was a matter of “public interest and good policing not to suffer the workmen to act [thus], for it does considerable damage to an industry which may be regarded as the colony’s most advantageous.”100 The quality of the biscuit intended for the voyageurs and engagés involved in the pays d’en haut fur trade was clearly of lesser consequence, and it may be that coarser flour mixtures were used for this purpose. There were a large number of such small contracts, for which the outfitters apparently never went to a notary or asked a court to assess their value. Montreal bakers had several months in which to prepare the voyageurs’ provisions. Some are known to have been involved in exporting, since some of their shipments sailed directly for points overseas, but they laboured under fewer constraints than their Quebec counterparts. In the capital, biscuit orders were larger and deadlines tighter, at least when wheat and flour had to arrive from Montreal – normally not until the end of May – before the

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process could begin. All Quebec bakers were employed in this enterprise, often to the detriment of their obligations to the public, but this does not mean that orders were evenly distributed among them; quite the contrary. Merchants and ship captains dealt with a few bakers who possessed large supplies of flour and the latter subcontracted the task to small bakeries, supplying them with the raw materials for this purpose.101 The uncommonness of large bakeries and wage labour in the colony’s artisanal industries, partly a function of the opportunity for tradesmen to start their own businesses upon completing their apprenticeship, might be interpreted as a sign of equality among craft masters. But that impression is contradicted by the prevailing system of subcontracting in the baking industry, and perhaps also in other industries; it serves as a clue to the existence of hidden forms of dependency. While all of these individuals held the title of master baker, some of them worked to order more often than otherwise.102 The following examples show how these divides were incorporated into contracts between merchants and bakers. In February 1727, Montreal baker Antoine Poudret contracted to supply 350 quarters (see Appendix A) of patent flour to a merchant in Nantes; four days later, he purchased 1,000 minots of wheat from Jean-Baptiste Hervieux to fulfill this order.103 For Claude Miaû, another Montreal baker, the procedure was different. The merchants Latour and La Côte, who were readying a shipment to Louisbourg with Lemaître-Lamorille of Quebec, supplied him with the wheat needed to make 400 cwt of biscuit and 50 cwt of farine entière and paid him for his work.104 The stability of the small corps of eighteenth-century Montreal and Quebec bakers began to erode as the industry developed. Among the hundred or so individuals identified in police ordinances, several made only brief appearances, as was the case of Miaû, who, barely four years after opening his business, had to flee Montreal for defaulting on his contracts.105 In a land where judges did not readily issue arrest warrants at creditors’ behest, two bakers could be found languishing behind bars for unpaid debts and default.106 These misadventures ordinarily stemmed from contracts to produce flour and biscuit. Any delay or misappropriation of grain advances for the benefit of the bakery itself caused immediate prejudice to the merchant who had undertaken to supply these provisions on a specified date, hence the severity of the sanctions against small-scale bakers, in sharp contrast to the leniency shown by wheat vendors toward bakers. While some failed at the profession, others endured.

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There are instances of fathers handing their business down to sons, and even of wives taking over until the sons were old enough.107 Finally, there were bakers such as Louis Prat and Pierre Chalou who also built careers as merchants and shippers. Although he remained loyal to the trade, Chalou chartered and owned ships to serve the Louisbourg and West Indian markets, handed out subcontracts to poorer bakers, and managed to stay in business against all odds until the end of the regime.108 Canadian historians have often been criticized for giving too much importance to foreign trade and neglecting local trade as a motive force. This criticism is surely justified with respect to other eras, but not the one in question. Local trade was at an embryonic stage; development was still driven by fluctuations in prices and profits on imported goods and, secondarily, on exported produce. This is an aspect not addressed so far in this book, no more than the other component of the grain economy: the agriculture that managed, under ordinary weather conditions, to produce enough to run this business at a low enough price to make up for the colony’s geographical handicap. My observations relate to the intermediate level of grain surplus redistribution at a time when the marketing system was taking shape, between 1720 and 1740 or thereabouts. It was an auspicious time: no war, no serious shortages, no monetary shocks. The countryside had breathing room, the peasants were learning to market their wares, and the merchants were making money. Together they created a smoothly functioning commercial arena from which money was all but absent. The hard knocks were in the future, and it was then that the colonial government, hitherto unconcerned with these developments, would intervene without mercy.

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6 Shortages and Controls, 1690–1744

For many years, poor Canadian harvests were a cause of amazement in Versailles. For some reason it was believed that shortages, inevitable in France, need never occur in the colony if its inhabitants would only get to work clearing more land and planting beyond their domestic needs. The surpluses from good years could then be warehoused as proof against subsequent years’ deficits. The establishment of such “granaries of plenty,” though rare in the mother country, ought to be straightforward in Canada. With just a bit of good will, the Canadians could supply the Windward Islands and the Gulf of St Lawrence garrisons, thereby diminishing the quantities ordered by these colonies from France and elsewhere. Nor was there any reason why the country could not, at the same time, export hemp for the king’s arsenals, salt beef and pork to the West Indies, and horses.1 But Canada fell far short of these expectations, and the official correspondence presents a portrait of failure that has served as the narrative through-line for much of the historical work on New France. The reality behind this abstract and rather tendentious discourse gives cause for surprise, not at the deficiencies of colonial agriculture but at the fact that despite its extreme fragility, it managed to do a passable job responding to expectations that far outstripped its capacities. The conundrum of subsistence crops in this country confronted three irreducible obstacles. The first was the small number of farmers, discussed earlier in this book: from 1,500 in 1685 to 3,000 in 1715 and 6,000 in the early 1740s, about a third of whom were in the initial stages of land clearing at any given time. This numerical insufficiency amplified the inelasticity of grain supplies. The second obstacle was the harsh climate: while wheat can of course

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be grown in Canada, since the plant is generally frost-hardy, the ploughing and planting season is considerably shorter. As Thomas Wien has clearly demonstrated, farm work had to be carried on at a terrific pace between snowmelt and November’s hard frost. In the eastern part of the colony especially, the work was rarely completed before winter set in. These constraints limited the area of land that could be sown to wheat, hence, indirectly, the production of the majority of peasants who could rely on no resources other than their families’ labour power during the growing season.2 The third obstacle was related to both climate and distance. Canada was completely cut off from the outside world for six months of the year. The extent to which transportation difficulties hampered regional procurement in France is well known, but in a dire emergency and at exorbitant cost, these difficulties could be overcome. Canada’s isolation between December and May was total, inescapable. When the last sail disappeared over the horizon in late November, everyone knew that the mass of provisions put up in granaries and barns would have to last until the following summer. Furthermore, winter interrupted the transportation of food over long distances within the colony, between Montreal and Quebec in particular. Under these circumstances, exports shipped during the summer, before the new wheat had been cut and the heads weighed, were always a gamble. Poor harvests were no more frequent in Canada than elsewhere, but there were good reasons why worry often took hold, and why it sometimes degenerated into panic. This chapter examines the normal workings of the wheat market, how the harvest affected price formation, and the extent of government intervention in the market during peacetime.

H a rv e s t s a n d P r ic e Fluctuati ons How much was wheat worth on the Quebec and Montreal markets? Were there differences in the going prices between these two cities, or between them and the rural areas surrounding them? The absence of official grain price lists means that the answers to these questions may never be known with certainty. To circumvent the problem, some historians have drawn on other sources, such as wheat contracts, religious community account books, and peasants’ after-death inventories. The four series established in this way show an undeniable correlation among annual price fluctuations from one end of the colony to the other, but are insufficient to allow for detection

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of chronological lags on a monthly basis nor, except in one case, for isolation of urban and rural prices. The most homogeneous prices are those compiled by Thomas Wien from the inventories of habitants of the seigneury of Rivière-du-Sud, 50 kilometres east of Quebec. These prices lie below the price curve derived by Jean Hamelin from the accounts of the Séminaire de Québec.3 But what was the basis for the prices charged by the Séminaire, which owned the seigneuries of Île Jésus near Montreal and Beaupré near Quebec, and acted as a major grain supplier to the urban market?4 The same uncertainty characterizes the series I constructed for seventeenth-century Montreal Island from after-death inventories, notarized transactions, and convent accounts.5 Prices at the barns and mills must have differed from those charged in the cities, if only due to the cost of transportation. And what of the grain circulating within the seigneuries, used to pay harvesters and threshers, or lent by farmers to their relatives and neighbours? Do these exchanges and the valuations appearing in the inventories faithfully reflect, everywhere and in every case, the official price promulgated in Quebec? Paradoxically – since price quotes of rural origin occupy a larger place in my composite series – it is this price that is the hardest to discern.6 These considerations – important for anyone seeking to measure the degree of integration of any given region into the market, or the profit margin of wheat suppliers – do not appreciably alter the overall shape of the curve presented in Appendix C. It is based on the price data that I compiled from the Montreal seigneury and the data for 1719 to 1759 compiled by Sylvie Dépatie in the adjacent territory of Île Jésus, a more complete and homogeneous series than mine.7 After several decades of grain self-sufficiency and a period of declining prices uninterrupted by shortages, the seventeenth century had closed on a violent, prolonged crisis in which war and scarcity conspired: enemy attacks on the territory itself, deserted countrysides, militia recruitment, troop movements, excess disease and mortality, and consistently mediocre and often catastrophic harvests. Since contact with France continued, several flour shipments, varying from 2,000 to 6,000 cwt (5,000 to 15,000 minots) of wheat from year to year, helped to offset the deficits and, in particular, to provision the compagnies franches de la Marine (the autonomous naval infantry units, recruited from the colony, that constituted the main French military presence there until the mid-1750s), comprised of some 1,400 men during this decade.8 The Montreal region was the

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hardest hit by the military developments. Several times – in 1701, for example – bakers and other individuals brought in wheat and flour from Quebec, where supplies were barely more abundant.9 The 1701 crop restored prices to a normal level. Agriculture stabilized in the western part of the colony and production ranged from good to passable until 1714–15.10 But other factors began to influence price fluctuations and create tensions. Flour exports – always an isolated enterprise in the seventeenth century, and rarely a significant one – became more frequent. In some years they reached a considerable volume, as shown by the only precise figures mentioned in the official correspondence: the equivalent of 24,000 minots of wheat in 1709 and the same quantity in 1710.11 The decline of traffic between France and its colonies during Queen Anne’s War (1702–13), and the food crises undergone by the mother country at this time, favoured shipments of Canadian crops to Plaisance, Port-Royal, and the West Indies. Could the colony transform itself into a land of exporters overnight? Decidedly not. Its agricultural base was far too small to support such businesses without at times disappointing their promoters. The latter did not have a good idea of how to assess local demand, whether from the expanding cities, the troops who could no longer rely on France for their rations, the burgeoning fur trade (especially after 1716), or the posts just being established on the lower north shore of the St Lawrence and in Labrador. Thus, the first quarter of the eighteenth century appears as a period of supply and demand adjustment. Demand changed abruptly while supply – keyed to population growth and the pace of land clearing – lagged behind. The number of producers gradually attained the critical mass needed to establish regular trading networks with other colonies without the continual threat of jeopardizing subsistence at home.12 This threshold appears to have been reached in the early 1720s. The price increase looming in 1714 was not alarming in and of itself, but a subsequent sequence of mediocre seasons kept the colony from returning to normal before the summer of 1719. In this crisis as in all the others, the volume of any individual harvest mattered less than the cumulative effects of successive ones. An ordinary harvest was one that provided for local subsistence during a twelve-month period, December to December, since fall cultivation kept farmers from threshing the new wheat until winter. All went well as long as quantities were sufficient. But when a poor harvest occurred, the next one had to be threshed in September, thus disrupting the season’s

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labours, reducing the acreage tilled in the fall, and jeopardizing the planting season. If this new harvest proved merely adequate, it would feed the colony for another twelve months and the same scenario would repeat the following year: provisions used up by August, worry, and early threshing of new wheat, again to the detriment of the farmer’s other tasks. It took an above-average crop that provided enough food for fifteen months, from September to December of the next year, to break this vicious cycle and return to the normal agricultural calendar. The harvest of 1719 finally delivered this surplus. There followed a long period in which the curve was nearly flat with respect to earlier and later years, but unease persisted in the countryside, rentiers continued to whimper, and alarms were sounded in the cities whenever production dipped even slightly, as it did in 1722–23, 1728, and 1732. These three cyclical events had one thing in common: brevity. The market immediately returned to the ideal price of 40 sols, which the colony’s businesses relied upon in order to turn a profit. After this lull, the disastrous harvests of 1736–37 and 1741–43 took the colony by surprise. Oblivious to the good years immediately preceding, the merchants despaired; they came to believe that two or three years of abundance in Canada had to be paid for with the same number of years of scarcity.13 Hunger, while surely not as prevalent as during the late-seventeenth-century crises, was widespread and better documented. Although weather anomalies hit the Quebec region harder, the deficit affected the whole colony. Conditions in 1736 were at their worst. At first obscured by the provisions derived from the preceding bumper crop, the effects on prices manifested themselves quite late, hence the relatively low average price, which belies how dire the situation had become. The colony was barely able to sow and reap enough to survive until the next – better, but still far from reassuring – harvest. Prices continued their climb throughout the year. Three good seasons followed, and then another three-year period of dearth consisting of 1742’s very poor harvest preceded and followed by mediocre ones. After this series of poor crops came seven years of normal or slightly above-average production. These were the war years, marked by a radical transformation of the grain market, an interruption of exports, and a rapid rise in military demand.14 From this perspective, the period is in some respects the preamble to the last decade of the regime. But from a production standpoint, it is important not to confound the two decades, to ignore the intervening good years and

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posit a causal relationship between the early poor harvests and the famine conditions prevailing at the end. The use of the term “agricultural crisis” to characterize the last twenty-three years of the French regime introduces a regrettable confusion between short-term phenomena and structural crisis, defined as a permanent decline in productivity giving rise to an irreversible change in an agricultural system. This is the interpretation implicitly adopted by certain authors who invoke rudimentary methods, peasant apathy, and declining soil fertility to explain the era’s deficits.15 Traditional farming was, by nature, rustic, low yielding, and overly weather-dependent; but it also derived from these constraints the capacity to recover from such misfortunes, provided that circumstances unrelated to production did not hinder the recovery efforts. The war, with all its cumulative effects, was not just one factor among several but the primary cause of the 1750s’ subsistence problems. The shortages of the preceding period, essentially linked to poor seasons, were less catastrophic but did bring their share of misery. In the opinion of both the administration and the people, state intervention was needed to mitigate their effects, and these interventions, rather than the shortages themselves, are the subject of this chapter. To study them, another approach will have to be taken. We shall have to leave aside official sources and take up other vantage points, for a full and objective accounting of the situation cannot be derived from the preambles to official ordinances and the intendants’ comments to the minister, whose primary purpose was self-justification. Only an examination of peasant cash flows and series of obligations to merchants and other creditors can reveal the extent of the deficits, any variations between regions, and the widening of economic gaps among producers of a single parish in a time of crisis. The shrinking buying power of the countryside, coupled with the cessation of flour exports, disrupted the credit network connecting the smallest merchants to the large importers, but these effects, like the difficulties experienced in the artisanal sector in a time of high prices, remain poorly known.16 Between the good life alleged by earlier historians to have marked the first half of the eighteenth century and the miserabilism found in more recent historiography, there is room for a more measured assessment of the people’s hardships.17 The shape of the demographic curves suggests that the word “famine” should not be tossed off unthinkingly, since the peaks of mortality do not coincide with the worst harvests of the period.18 Likewise, the hypothesis of a mass flight of famished

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peasants into the cities and the fur trade, which would have left traces in the available sources, must be rejected. Moreover, the number of people hired on as engagés for the pays d’en haut, a function of the demands of the fur trade, was not likely to increase at a time when the cost of feeding the crews had increased.19 When wheat provisions were at their lowest, between the months of May and September, rural people were not totally bereft of resources. “For want of money and the ability to earn wheat from their labour, most of them live on fish,” declared the missionary of Maskinongé to the Conseil’s commissary in July 1729, and references to an obligate diet of fish and vegetables recur throughout the accounts of the parishes visited in the course of that inventory.20 Access to food of any sort was mainly a problem for the cities. The crisis was less acute in Montreal, where a large number of urban activities associated with the fur trade continued to operate normally, whereas the interruption of shipping created much unemployment in Quebec. Everywhere, the high price of bread straitened the circumstances of the poor, defined at the time as those “who live from hand to mouth and can only obtain their subsistence by what they earn each day.”21 In Quebec, about 10 per cent of households fell into this category of families who needed emergency assistance to stave off hunger. These were also hard years for the artisans and other independent workers who made up the bulk of the urban population, but generalizations concerning this group are precluded by the considerable differences in living standards among them.

T h e A d m in is t r at io n and the Market For the longest stretch of the French regime, intervention by the colonial authorities during periods of scarcity drew on the same principles that guided the grain police in France. At the most elementary level, the administration believed that it had no choice – that laissez-faire would inevitably lead to famine and that the state had a duty to ward it off, which followed from the concept of royal paternalism.22 It is true that more immediately political considerations came into play – the imperative of averting social unrest or, in the colonial context, supplying the garrisons – but the grain police cannot be likened to other, deliberate, well-regulated control measures whose purpose was to consolidate the governmental apparatus. Faced with the uncertainties of the environment and the inadequacy of the means at their disposal, the administration and the public had common

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interests: they shared the same fear of want and the same feeling of powerlessness. Yet both groups’ discourse obscures this reality. In their letters to the court, the intendants tried to convey the impression that they were in control of the situation. The series of expedients to which they resorted was a necessary, logical progression guided by a tried-and-true strategy. Their detractors took no issue with the intendants’ agency; where they differed was on the question of whether they had made honest use of it. The intendants bore the blame for the shortages in that they had managed (the detractors intimated) to predict and manipulate prices for their own gain, deliberately jettisoning time-tested recipes for dealing with such crises in the process. The reality was that in most instances, the administrators had found themselves blindsided by the shortfall in the harvest – not surprising in that they were generally ill informed of conditions in the field. Their task was complicated by the lack of systematic control over supplies to markets and domestic movement of grain, combined with the unlimited freedom afforded to exporters. Rather than strengthening regulations whose enforcement lapsed during years of abundance, they had to improvise new legislation at the onset of each new crisis. In this effort, they applied long-standing methods developed in France that appeared to fit the circumstances. The task was difficult, for the intendants were schooled in naval affairs and lacked the training to confront this kind of problem. Ill-inclined to take advantage of their predecessors’ experiences, having ruled out the colonial courts’ assistance, and being rather short-staffed, they had to rely on their own judgment and the help of trusted advisers chosen from among their clientele. I analyzed these interventions by studying the entire set of regulations promulgated during periods of dearth, along with any comments added by their authors or by other colonial officers in their correspondence with Versailles. The documentation is far from transparent: the intendants tried to temper the ordinances with reassuring, deliberately misleading remarks, and also to convince the minister that the measures had been well received and achieved their purpose, with the demonstration of their worth to be found in the eventual resolution of the crisis. In short, the texts obey the rules and patterns of administrative rhetoric. Still, if assembled and read in light of what is otherwise known about the context, they can shed light on the latitude available to the authorities and the scope of certain measures taken. Most of the regulations prescribed penalties, including considerable fines and seizure of goods, which were then to be handed over to the

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persons who turned in the violators, to religious communities, or to the poor. But it is not known whether the intendants and their appointees (subdélégués, “delegates”) – the only judges of such offences after 1714 – ever made good on these threats, if only for exemplary purposes. Nowhere in the archives of the intendancy is there any trace of prosecutions having been brought.23

E x p o rt Bans Flour exports were interrupted frequently between 1700 and 1718 and were banned twice during the ensuing eighteen years, five times between 1737 and 1744, and permanently after 1749.24 Given the colony’s isolation and the narrowness of its agricultural base, the merits of these bans were generally beyond debate. Was it not eminently sensible for the authorities to halt exports immediately, at the slightest doubt as to the bounty of the harvest, even if it meant reversing their decision the following spring when the alarm proved false? This was just elementary prudence. But, for several reasons, it is not the way things actually worked. The naval ministry relied in part on Canada to supply other, nonwheat-producing colonies such as Île Royale and would not countenance any shirking of that duty without a serious reason, and certainly not without notice.25 The arrival of winter and the interruption of contact with France complicated matters, leaving the intendants with practically no room to manœuvre. If an insufficient Canadian harvest loomed, the minister had to be notified in the autumn so that he could commission French ships to load more flour for Louisbourg early the next spring. Once this mechanism had been set in motion, Quebec could hardly go back on its decision. Assuming that the alarm proved unfounded during the winter and that the export embargo was lifted, Canadian flour could not be sold at a profit on a market glutted with shipments from across the Atlantic, or from the English colonies with which Île Royale sometimes did business under such circumstances – not to mention that a premature or unjustified intervention bid fair to displease the minister. There is a paradoxical fact worth noting here: the export regime was much more liberal in Canada than in France, where grain exports were, in principle, always forbidden. Merchants in the kingdom who wanted to engage in this kind of business had to submit detailed bids; when approved, this was nearly always on an individual, limited, and temporary basis, for the country’s

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security hung in the balance.26 In Canada, unlimited exports were the rule, restrictions the exception. The directives issuing from the ministry were clear and often repeated: “Commerce cannot be too free; anything which tends to interfere with it, tends directly to destroy it.”27 Torn between the desire to obey Versailles’s wishes and the imperative to guarantee provisions for the troops and the cities, and with no way of knowing exactly how fulsome the harvest would turn out to be, the intendants relied on ad hoc measures. If the Quebec harvest seemed meagre, they turned to Montreal to make up the deficit. Information took time to arrive and was sometimes erroneous.28 Not until the threshing season, when prices began to rise anyway, could they (and everyone else in the colony) finally put accurate numbers on the crop. A shortfall was likely to go unnoticed for months, since the colony lived on the previous year’s provisions and the new wheat was not threshed until after the ships departed.29 This is what happened in the autumn of 1732. A year later, when reporting on the measures he had applied to mitigate the effects of the grain deficit, Hocquart was quite proud to add that he had given free rein to foreign trade in spite of everything.30 In fact, unless this deficit had been detected in time to warn the minister, the intendant had no choice. The next crop turned out to be moderately good and the one that followed was excellent, so no unfortunate consequences ensued from this imprudent policy. The situation in 1741 was more problematic. After having announced a fulsome harvest in September,31 the administration had to admit that it had been badly mistaken. “The more the season progresses, the more there is reason to believe that it has been poor. There were enough sheaves, but the heads had few grains; the habitants noticed this when they began threshing,” explained the governor in a 15 February letter sent to France via New England. “It is still our intention to favour exports,” he added, but forewarned the minister that this was not a certainty.32 The episode was a perfect storm of sorts, one in which inability to measure the harvest was combined with cowardliness and imprudence: the result was that the colony’s food security was compromised. Exports of provisions left over from the previous crop continued into the fall. It was not until late March that the intendant banned private exports, but even then he adhered to custom by sending 1,600 cwt of flour and 853 of peas to the Louisbourg garrison. The shipment, equivalent to about 4,000 minots of wheat, amounted to a tiny fraction of the ordinary volume of exports, but under the circumstances it was too much.33 The granaries

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were all empty by the time the following crop (of 1742) was discovered to be poor. The intendancy worked feverishly to repair the harm caused by its poor decisions.34 Flour and biscuit export bans were almost always declared between the months of January and April, generally in conjunction with other restrictive measures.35 The delay – whether deliberate or not – had its advantages. The administration knew that the effect of its interventions was to certify the existence of a shortage, with concomitant perverse effects on market supplies and prices. Meanwhile, contracts to supply the king’s stores were signed in October. The naval controller could thus purchase wheat at a better price, and his suppliers might have the time to work out arrangements with farmers before prices skyrocketed. Were the export bans effective? I believe so, despite the contrary opinion held by many contemporaries and bolstered by the intendants’ ordinances, which accused merchants of flouting the regulations in order to justify the Draconian measures imposed. Illicit exports were an important component of the notion of a “famine plot” that captured the public imagination whenever food prices rose. All over France, and elsewhere too, the public was quick to rally to the notion that powerful people or their protégés had monopolized wheat in order to sell it at a profit outside the region, the province, or the country, thus creating artificial shortages. Rumours of conspiracy also circulated in Canada (see chapter 9), and I shall focus in particular on the equivocal discourse of the intendancy. For the moment, there is cause to question the versimilitude of the rampant, uncontrolled smuggling depicted by contemporaries, and by certain historians in their wake.36 All the wheat and flour coming from either upriver or the côtes of Beauport and Beaupré had to pass through Quebec.37 How could significant quantities of it have been loaded onto ships in plain view of Lower Town without anyone notifying the port or urban police?38 Ships could perhaps have put in downstream, at Île d’Orléans, Baie-Saint-Paul, or the Côte du Sud, but these parishes lacked the resources to supply an illicit scheme of any magnitude as well as the equipment needed to barrel biscuit or patent flour. Jean Mauvide at Saint-Jean-de-l’Île-d’Orléans seems to have been the only merchant capable of accommodating foreignbound ships.39 In July 1750, the captain of the Astrée, advised by Havy and Lefebvre, stopped at Mauvide’s to pick up flour bound for Martinique, but “apart from the risks of loading it in violation of the bans,” found only 45 quarters of good quality. With no other flour

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available, and with no chance of picking up cod during its passage through the gulf, the Astrée filled up with planks at Les Éboulements. The captain knew that the price of fish had become prohibitive after the large purchases made by Quebec, French, and West Indian ships that summer.40 This episode illustrates my point. In most instances it is hard to determine whether export interruptions were caused by bans or, quite simply, by grain scarcity, but in this case there is no doubt. The 1749 harvest had been excellent and the price of wheat in the government of Montreal was holding steady at 40 sols, which could have favoured illicit exports. It is clear that the intendant’s ban had caused shippers to substitute cod for flour in their commerce with the West Indies.41 In most cases, however, bans coincided with high prices and were therefore rendered practically superfluous. When wheat was worth more than 50 sols, flour could not be sold at a profit in the other colonies, where it encountered lower-cost competition from France.42 Unless there was also a dearth in the mother country, it was very difficult to engage in profitable speculation. I am not referring here to the entirety of the colony’s large merchants, who in any case were required to obey the rules, but to those who enjoyed special favours, and to intendants who entered into maritime partnerships. Michel Bégon is known to have had Caribbean trade interests in association with Jean Butler of La Rochelle during precisely those years in which he imposed an embargo on flour exports. What with the imprecise extant data on wheat prices from 1714 to 1718, a period of spiralling inflation in Canada, the likelihood that such transactions could have succeeded is difficult to assess.43 Intendant François Bigot, a seasoned businessman who did not scruple too much about the regulations, clearly enunciated the problem of market constraints in an October 1748 letter to his partner in Bordeaux, Abraham Gradis, regarding a shipment scheduled for pickup in Quebec the next spring. It was his intention, he wrote, to prohibit exports the following year, even though the price of flour was not likely to decrease. If Bordeaux planned to send flour to Saint-Domingue, “not too strong an emphasis should be placed on this commodity… since Canada’s flour can only be sold when it is absent.”44 Indeed, Quebec-West Indies trade from 1749 to 1755 largely involved lumber and fish,45 with high wheat prices ruling out speculation on this commodity, even on the part of those best placed to speculate. The only exception to this rule was the wheat sold to the king.

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F e e d in g t h e Colony As discussed in chapter 3 of this study, police regulations on market supply and grain transportation in the colony were either nonexistent or ordinarily not observed. The absence of an established control system that could simply be tightened when shortages loomed forced the intendants to promulgate a series of bans, at the risk of alarming the public. The Canadian authorities were certainly not unaware of a principle well understood by administrators everywhere: that it is always better to downplay a crisis.46 For example, the financial commissary declined to set wheat prices in the spring of 1737 because “it was to be feared that the price would frighten the public and cause unrest.” To avert this outcome, he resorted instead to the classic stratagem of arranging for wheat to be sold at below-market prices for two or three consecutive contracts, “to remove thoughts of dearth from the public mind.”47 But generally, the administration was not overly troubled by these considerations; it did not hesitate to issue ordinance after ordinance and to resort to drastic measures. Each intendant – free to act as he saw fit in matters of domestic policing, and not obliged to deal with other, parallel authorities – put his personal stamp on such emergency measures. Still, a general pattern emerges. Controls became more effective, the enforcement of orders was no longer left to chance, and the foundations of the military procurement system that marked the 1750s were in place well before the war. At the turn of the century, in a continuation of previous practice, ordinances published during shortages had largely targeted the activities of merchants. To prevent people from speculating on a shortage that they themselves had created through hoarding, the intendant banned city dwellers from buying wheat in excess of their domestic needs. They were required to declare their provisions, and officers were sent to inspect the merchants’ granaries. The freedom to carry grain from one government to another without a permit was suspended. Four times between 1701 and 1714, the intendants announced that those bourgeois who refused to part with grain surpluses of their own accord, whether found in their granaries or at the mills, would have them expropriated at a set price for distribution to the poor, the troops, and the bakers.48 The purpose of these ordinances, and particularly those of Jacques Raudot, was to channel all transactions into the market square. By forbidding merchants from buying grain in the côtes, or even from accepting payment in grain, the intendants revived – at least for the

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duration of the crisis – the traditional conception of the market in which producers and consumers negotiate without middlemen. Raudot’s successor, Bégon, introduced a more brutal set of methods: contract termination, seals on bolters to prevent merchants from making flour, official pricing, and requisitions. For the first time, the ordinances were also directed at peasants. In September 1714, the intendant enjoined them to deliver a fifth of their harvest to the king’s stores in Quebec and Montreal since he lacked the means to have the grain picked up. To induce them to act promptly, he penalized dawdlers by having prices dwindle the longer the peasants held out. The across-the-board quota, without regard to individual production volumes or family needs, was excessive and, unsurprisingly, ignored by the peasants. Bégon doubled down in October, ordering the farmers of Neuville to hand over a tenth of their harvest at once; in late December, he revised his price scale upward to overcome the inertia of the peasants in the government of Montreal, who had yet to deliver anything at all.49 This maladroit policy was bound to weaken the intendant’s authority and was not repeated. Nor was it clear to contemporaries that the state of the harvest necessitated the deployment of such compulsory measures.50 When shortages loomed again in 1723 and 1729, the intendant returned to older methods: mandatory reporting by wheat carriers, bans on biscuit manufacturing by bakers, and inventories of merchants’ stocks.51 The turning point came later, with the poor harvests of 1737–38 and 1742–44. A new system was put in place, based on a close association between official prices and requisitions from peasants’ barns. “For all these considerations, we have set the price of wheat in the governments of Quebec, Montreal, and Trois-Rivières at four livres per minot. We prohibit all individuals from selling at a higher price, even where the said wheat belongs to minors or vestries, on pain of a fine of fifty livres and restitution of the amount charged in excess of four pounds.”52 Such price caps were infrequent in eighteenthcentury France. Enlightened minds believed that the cure did more harm than the disease, for it brought trade to a halt. If merchants were expected to supply the cities, they had to be afforded an opportunity to make a profit. This was the principle put forward by Nicolas de La Mare, although it had been clearly enunciated by the financier Samuel Bernard during the crisis of 1693: “Either there is a shortage of wheat in the kingdom, or there is not. If there is a shortage and the price is fixed, then none will come from abroad; if there is enough,

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then we should not fear high prices; on the contrary, if it is dear, then everyone will import it and the ensuing abundance will soon bring the price down.”53 The argument did not hold in Canada because foreign sources of supply were too remote for colonial merchants and their French backers to feel confident in taking a risk on them. Ordered when prices were high, French flour, and even flour from the English colonies, might arrive just as a bumper crop was coming off the fields, when prices had already fallen. If food did have to be imported, it was better that this be done at the king’s risk and expense. In this specific context, the official price had fewer drawbacks than elsewhere, though this did not necessarily mean it was advantageous for the colony. It all depended on one’s point of view. Payments in wheat for advances of goods and other debts – the main source of the wheat supply – were settled at the official price, which favoured creditors; i.e., the merchants in most cases. There was, moreover, a higher-priced parallel market, created in response to demand from well-off city dwellers willing to pay the asking price, whatever it was, in secret, to obtain wheat for their own consumption.54 Peasants forced to sell their surpluses below this premium price had an understandable grievance, and trade, already greatly hindered by scarcity, suffered even more. Some observers, like the governor of Montreal, believed that instead of encouraging planting, official pricing worked as a disincentive: “[The price] was set at one écu for seeds; much less was grown than if one had been able to obtain some for his money.”55 At the onset of each crisis, the price was set at 3 livres, or 50 per cent above normal, and eventually had to be raised to 4 livres to close the gap with the market price.56 In the fall of 1742, that gap was sizable: a Conseil order maintained the price at 3 livres at a time when the intendant himself admitted that wheat could fetch up to 5 livres. This order preceded a series of requisitions in the Côte du Sud and elsewhere in the colony to supply the king’s stores, and from this perspective, the utility of the official price was undeniable.57 Wheat levies “for the subsistence of the troops and the city poor” took place in the autumn and winter of 1737–38 and 1742–43, and again between the months of October 1743 and July 1744.58 It was a systematic procedure applied to all the colony’s parishes and particularly those of the government of Quebec, where the peasants were ordered to thresh right after harvesting, a time normally devoted to ploughing. With one exception, the orders issued by the financial commissary of Montreal have not survived, but it seems that

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procurement posed fewer problems in this part of the colony and that the requisitions, carried out in the winter, did not interfere with the agricultural calendar.59 The intendants were determined to make sure no one disobeyed. After the approximate number of minots to be taken from a given region was established, they sent a commissary to apportion this quantity to the farms in that region. Parish priests were asked to assist him and militia captains were assigned to the enforcement of the requisitions: they ensured that the designated suppliers delivered the grain to a mill, or another warehouse in the vicinity, within the prescribed time period. The grain was paid for in cash, and the king bore the cost of shipping to the city. The text of the ordinances is clear: the peasants were required to hand over everything in excess of the quantities needed to feed their families and plant the next crop, pro rata to the acreage under cultivation. In his report on the recently ended crisis, written in the autumn of 1744, Hocquart took pleasure in informing the minister that the grain stocks obtained from well-off habitants had proved invaluable. He added: “They took it upon themselves, without coercion, and as if of their own accord, to provide all the help of which they were able, and even more.”60 Such docility threw the merits of a good administrator into relief but it was not always in evidence, and even if resistance was not overcome with armed force in every such instance, coercive power was exercised in other ways. Chief road commissioner Jean-Eustache Lanoullier de Boisclerc, ordered to collect 4,000 minots from the parishes of the Côte du Sud in October 1743, attempted to persuade the habitants of Saint-Michel “that the intent of the authorities of this land is to deprive them of neither subsistence nor seed until the end of next May, when wheat will have come down from Montreal and assistance will have arrived in Quebec from France.” The message was: Rest assured, you will not have to lay by provisions for the coming summer – the authorities will take care of that. But to no avail: “They told us to a man that they lacked wheat for their own and their families’ subsistence [and that they did not wish to thresh now, with the ploughing season at hand].”61 These refusals threatened to spread to other areas and Lanoullier relayed them to the intendant, who gave him a new ordinance providing for harder-hitting pressure tactics and sent him back out on the trail. On a copy of the orders published in Saint-Michel less than two weeks later, a habitant noted and signed, “I have supplied the quantity demanded of me.”62 The  Church’s assistance was invaluable in these circumstances.

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The previous year, just prior to carrying out the first requisitions, the government had obtained from the bishop a pastoral letter that could be put to use in bringing the holdouts to heel. He denounced the “hateful greed” of those habitants who took advantage of the circumstances to sell wheat at an exorbitant price and who, inspired by “the angel of darkness,” invoked specious and even criminal pretexts for refusing to hand over their wheat. He reminded them that the cities, with their schools, hospitals, courts, and garrisons, were the heart of the colony and the seat of royal authority. “He who resists the authorities resists the order of God, and he who resists that order brings eternal damnation upon himself… He who hides wheat shall be cursed by the people.”63 These strong words from the pulpit undoubtedly had the desired effect, as they had on previous occasions. Other accounts by commissaries put in charge of these requisitions from time to time have not been preserved, but there is reason to believe that they were not welcomed anywhere. The requisitions rested on the principle that peasants had only two material obligations, to sow and to feed their families, and that if these needs were met, they had no grounds outside of avarice and sordid self-interest for denying the king’s agents their surpluses. In the imaginary world of the ordinances, such necessities as paying debts, wages, and rent, balancing the books, or settling estates did not exist, and neither did prudence and providence. How could such a reality-blind discourse meet with anyone’s favour – especially given that it was directed at farmers who had surpluses even in lean years, at that fraction of the peasantry who had property to protect and had to make good on their commitments in order to do so. The ordinances betray a profound misunderstanding of the social context in which the rural economy was embedded. They ignore the system whereby grain was redistributed through networks of proximity and kinship, as payment for labour, and in the form of loans, all of which enabled peasants to survive when they failed to attain the threshold of self-sufficiency. By emptying the parishes of their surpluses at times of higher than normal local demand, the administration endangered the survival of the poorest inhabitants. After wheat was requisitioned several times in the government of Quebec during the fall and winter of 1737–38, it became necessary to draw down the king’s stores for seed grain; 345 minots of wheat and 375 of peas were returned to the countryside, enough to help a dozen families in each of the nine parishes assisted. The loans would be repaid in kind or in cash at the rate of 4 livres and 4 sols

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per minot, or the value of the grain at time of delivery plus transportation costs. Since prices then fell by half, these habitants had to return a little over 2 minots or the cash equivalent for each minot received.64 They would not have got a better deal had they borrowed the seed within their parishes, for their well-off neighbours were not in the habit of bestowing gifts either. But the terms and conditions of reimbursement would have been simpler and the naval treasury would have spared itself considerable expense. As a final note, these seed loans, presented in the official correspondence as a powerful means of leveraging the colony out of crisis, were utterly insignificant in comparison with the quantities required.65 If a good deal of land was sowed that spring, as the excellent harvest of 1738 proves, it was thanks to advances extended locally out of reserves concealed from the king’s agents. But the intendant did not believe the habitants capable of helping one another, much less planning for the future. Convinced that well-off farmers were hiding wheat with an eye to exorbitant profits while the poor peasants had simply resigned themselves to dying of hunger, he thought it necessary to act in the interest of all by ordering the former to sell their seed to those who had none, and by exhorting the latter to plant.66 The pointlessness of these directives was equalled only by the distrust of rural people by which they were inspired. The clerks who apportioned the levies were at times rather heavyhanded in setting the individual amounts owing, as witness those habitants of Sainte-Famille, Berthier-en-Bas, and Saint-Michel whose barns were emptied in the autumn of 1743 and who had to buy seed the following spring. The intendant gave them 10 sols per excess minot taken, but history does not record whether the compensation was adjudged adequate.67 Finally, it must be noted that the privileged people, the seigneurs and priests, were untouched by the requisitions. Even assuming that the priests contributed to parish subsistence in the form of alms – that the seigneurs did likewise is less certain – this special favour was not such as to render the peasants’ involuntary contributions more acceptable to them. Be all that as it may, the wheat did come in, voluntarily or by force. During these two periods of dearth, the administration managed to amass a total of nearly 22,000 minots a year in its Montreal and Quebec stores.68 These provisions derived in part from wheat sold to the king by merchants, priests, rentiers, and other individuals and in part from requisitions. An accurate estimate of the percentages

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represented by the two sources is impossible, but it is my belief that requisitioned grain accounted for a little over half of the stocks in 1737, 1738, and 1742 and about three-fourths in 1743, the most critical year.69 Assuming that military consumption held constant at about 14,000 minots, the intendant had an additional 8,000 minots of wheat to help the cities get through the crises. In Montreal, the provisions were almost entirely devoted to the requirements of the garrison, which was larger than its Quebec counterpart, and to those of the remote posts. Supplies to the city continued despite the shortage, and the situation does not appear to have required government intervention.70 That said, the region had no surplus with which to offset the more serious deficit in the government of Quebec. The situation in the capital was alleviated with reserves from the king’s stores; the intendant sold wheat at cost to bakers who had failed to procure any in the countryside, and also to certain communities, the parish priest, and the bishop. These latter redistributed it to the needy in the form of alms.71 Thanks to charity on the part of the Church and by bourgeois and officers, facilitated by the provisions put at their disposal by the administration, those whom the crisis had reduced to unemployment received a bit of bread. It also happened that a shortage coincided with the commencement of public works, as in Quebec in 1743, and the administrators could then boast of having given people work at a critical juncture. In short, once the correspondence has been trimmed of its exaggerations and rhetorical flourishes by comparing it with quantitative data from the annual accounts, among other sources, it is easier to take the true measure of the intendant’s acts.72 He worked hard and, in the cities at least, his work bore fruit. Three times during this period, outside help was solicited.73 Foreign flour was a great relief, provided it arrived in good condition and before the end of the crisis, but only the imports of 1743 fully played this role. In the autumn of 1737, the intendant asked the minister to send him 8,000 cwt of flour to save the colony from certain famine.74 The flour that arrived from Dunkerque and Vannes in late June 1738 had not survived the trip and was unfit for human consumption. It sat stinking up the warehouses for months, nearly causing a mutiny at Niagara. The remaining 2,000 cwt or so, sent by Rochefort, was of good quality but arrived “a little late,” just as a bumper crop was nearing harvest, and was shipped on to Île Royale in the form of flour and biscuit.75 The minister was angry at the net loss to the treasury and remained convinced that the shipment had been

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unnecessary, since the colony had managed to survive without it; he greeted a request for 4,000 cwt that reached him in the fall of 1742 with annoyance and skepticism.76 Subsequently calculating that these provisions would be insufficient and fearing a delay, Hocquart dispatched a messenger to Louisbourg during the winter. Via this colony, 800 cwt of flour from New York and Philadelphia reached Quebec in late May 1743, followed by an identical shipment in mid-summer, augmenting the flour that arrived from France, this time in good condition, between mid-July and early August.77 Interestingly, when the Amphitrite docked at Bordeaux, it took 600 cwt on board for Dugard and Company, in addition to the king’s purchases. That Dugard was able to sell the flour at a profit surely increased its willingness to offer its services for the following year’s imports.78 The problem was that the harvest of 1743, though not catastrophic, was insufficient to restore abundance. At first it was believed to have been totally lost when caterpillars began ravaging fields and prairies that June in the government of Montreal. Public exorcisms and prayers did nothing to calm the public’s anxieties, and the intendant, giving in to the climate of fear, asked Louisbourg to organize a massive life-saving operation. “Consider that we have thirty to forty thousand souls to feed with no resources until next May.”79 In late July there was a reversal of fortune: the caterpillars had disappeared, and though the prairies had suffered greatly, the wheat was reported to be in fine shape throughout the colony. The relief requests were cancelled. The euphoria lasted until October, lofted by the good news of the Montreal harvest. But the harvest in the government of Quebec proved rather poor at threshing time. Exhausted by all the nail-biting and miscalculation, the administration opted for prudence and ordered 6,000 cwt of French flour and 2,000 cwt of American flour via Louisbourg.80 The latter never arrived because war with England was declared in 1744, depriving the French colonies of a convenient source of provisions in case of emergency. The French flour arrived very late once again, and Canada had to subsist on its meagre resources until midAugust. Since that year produced a bumper crop, a portion of the imported flour was shipped on to Île Royale and another portion was sold to bakeries at a loss or processed into biscuit in the stores for the winter’s military campaigns.81 There were no more flour imports until 1752.82 These three episodes show that it was difficult and generally unprofitable to provision Canada from abroad. Only the experience

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of 1743 was a success: the flour arrived right on time to cover for a shortfall and was sold at a high enough price to enable the government to break even. Nevertheless, even when French flour arrived late, as in 1738 and 1744, political hay could be made of it. The announcement of its imminent arrival served to calm colonists’ fears of running out of bread, and especially to persuade those who had wheat that they would be wise to sell it immediately, since the arrival of spring augured abundance and low prices (albeit the failures may have blunted the force of this argument). And there was another aspect likely to be obscured by the royal officers’ hyperbolic style: these imports – those of 1743 amounted to 15,000 minots of wheat – were rather small compared with the combined needs of the troops, the cities, and the fur trade, which might amount to as much as 80,000 minots.83 The allocation of local grain stocks between the city and the country remained the key factor, leading me to conclude with some further reflections on this aspect. It is a fact that the colony did not have, as France did, a group of middlemen, lessors, and receivers of all sorts who worked year in and year out to bring the bulk of the grain surplus out of the countryside. Since the intendant could not bully a few large tithe owners into opening their granaries, he had to appeal to the peasantry; thus, as Thomas Wien remarks, the brutal measures used to force the peasants to surrender their wheat clearly illustrate the weakening of traditional mechanisms of appropriation in the colony. Canadian farmers were more apt to guard their grain reserves jealously.84 There is no better explanation of the circumstances justifying the government’s tactics. However, mechanisms other than taxes and dues came into play as a means of prying open this rural economy and preventing the cycle of self-sufficiency from taking hold.85 As we have just seen, requisitioned wheat represented only a fraction of the administration’s reserves, which fell far short of urban consumption. The 11,000 minots collected annually in 1737, 1738, 1742, and 1744 and the 16,000 brought in by more diligent employees in 1743 were not negligible by any means, but it is clear that the lion’s share of the grain that fed the cities and their businesses went through ordinary channels of distribution. And if poor harvests, official prices, and requisitions did not succeed in paralyzing city-country commerce, could it not be said that this whole flurry of coercive activity had been unnecessary? That the wheat would have been distributed without intervention

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and that the colony would have felt no ill effects? The poor of Quebec would have suffered more, no doubt, and the soldiers’ bread might have cost more, but agriculture and the businesses bound up with it would have thrived. But the Ancien Régime administrators never asked themselves these questions. For various political and social reasons, the consumer’s interests took precedence over those of the producer.86 This attitude, raised to the status of a principle, prevailed even in Canada where riots were unlikely – where the military presence was both a guarantee of security and one more reason to take the wheat by force. Richard Cobb, writing about the wage and price controls policy (maximum) adopted for the year II in France, described grain pricing and requisition orders as instruments of war against the peasantry.87 All proportions being equal, the colonial administration’s methods were precisely that – a fact that would be even more obvious eight years later when it put them into practice on a regular basis, this time backed up by soldiers.

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7 The King’s Granaries

“The trade carried on by everyone in the colony, is carried on with the king… the colony’s administrators themselves have that liberty… It is indeed quite necessary to let them sell to the king and buy from him, for it is the king who makes the large purchases in the colony, and, consequently, it is chiefly vis-à-vis him that one can carry on a sizable amount of trade.”1 This plea, entered by François Bigot during his trial at the Châtelet for squandering public monies, sought to establish that the practices of which he was accused were as old as the colonies themselves, and had always been tolerated by the state. What interests me here, however, is not the argument itself but the assumption on which it is predicated, which is that there was no profitable trade outside of trade with the king. While the assertion is, with several important nuances, accurate for the last decade of the French regime, it has to be rejected for the period prior to that. The main colonial industries, chief among them the fur trade, were not tied to government demand. It was quite possible to grow rich in Canada without selling anything to the king. It is perhaps not superfluous to emphasize this point, for the historiography has greatly exaggerated the government’s role as a promoter, employer, and client of colonial businesses, to the point that all economic activity is made to seem like it emanated from the public authorities.2 Before the War of the Austrian Succession, the wheat and flour trade was not reliant on supplies to the troops, although this did represent a sizable outlet, one I have barely touched on in the preceding chapters. To better discern the role of the king’s procurement in this peacetime trade, the purveyors’ profit, and, above all, the rapid growth in military consumption after 1744, I have opted to gather

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all the data on the matter and, in particular, the data that may be derived from the colony’s financial statements. This data does not cover the 1750s; therefore, the chapter adds no new information relating to the supply problems that occurred during the Seven Years’ War. These problems are known, but the insufficient elucidation of the relationship between this period and the preceding one has clouded our understanding of them. What interests me is the shift from a relatively free system of trade to an authoritarian system designed to respond to the dictates of wartime. To grasp this issue fully, a detour through the past is necessary.

T h e M il ita ry S to r e s before 1745 In the early years of the colony, food and other goods imported from France for military use were warehoused haphazardly; it was not until the arrival of a permanent garrison of 1,500 soldiers between 1683 and 1688 that the king’s stores were officially established in Quebec, Montreal, and Trois-Rivières, and subsequently in a few remote outposts.3 At each site, there was a storekeeper answerable to the king for everything entering and exiting the facility. In Quebec and Montreal, the staff included a scrivener; several clerks, one of them assigned to the distribution of provisions; and another clerk reporting to the controller’s office, who kept revenue and expense records and, in general, oversaw operations on behalf of the intendant.4 The stocks were divided into two main categories: supplies and provisions. The first were purchased in France and encompassed all manner of goods, from reams of paper and ornaments for chaplains’ chapels to soldiers’ outfits, weapons, bullets, tools, and items for the Indigenous people.5 The second consisted of wine, aqua vitae, lard, spices, and a few choice items for the officers’ tables, all of these imported, along with meat, grain, and vegetables purchased in the colony. The beef in the soldier’s ration was procured from a single supplier as and when it was needed, but in principle on the basis of a one-year contract awarded to the lowest bidder at public auction. Since there were only five or six butchers in either city, not all of them big enough to guarantee delivery of the required quantities, the contracts were renewed with the same suppliers – in Montreal, Joseph Guyon Després; in Quebec, Romain Dolbec followed by Charles Larche and Joseph Cadet – year after year, apparently without tender.6

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The procedure for bread procurement was different: it was baked in the king’s stores with grain purchased from multiple sellers on the open market. Warehousing and baking took up a great deal of space and required many hands. In Montreal, the intendant had been renting four large granaries since the beginning of the eighteenth century, and was renting at least six during the 1740s; these provided yearround employment for three bakers and three bolters, not to mention bakers and other employees paid by the month during periods of high demand. The Quebec bakery, housed near the Palais de l’Intendance, was nearly as big.7 In 1703, taking note of difficulties and waste associated with this facility, Intendant François de Beauharnois de la Chaussaye had suggested that it be contracted out to a private concern. The ministry objected.8 It revisited this decision thirty years later, but this time it was the intendant of Quebec who turned a deaf ear, managing to preserve the system until 1745.9 With the king’s bakeries no longer able to meet demand, the procurement of soldiers’ bread was, like that of meat, contracted out to private purveyors. Inarguably, in-house baking had been a costly procedure. According to a 1741 document prepared by the financial commissary, the expenses incurred for employees’ board and wages and for rent, utensils, firewood, and transportation of wheat between the stores and the mills amounted to 30 per cent of the cost. In addition, a great deal of waste and a lower flour yield than in the private sector were tolerated.10 Intendant Hocquart adduced three arguments in an attempt to counter or at least fend off the impending changes. No one, he wrote, had the capacity to honour a bread supply contract for a whole year at a reasonable price; this was due to a putative fact that he alleged to be characteristic of the colony: namely, that wheat prices were subject to frequent and considerable monthly fluctuations. His good faith is hard to credit, for in fact the opposite was true. In a normal Canadian year, the price of wheat fluctuated very little from one season to the next. But his other two arguments remain quite consistent with what is known about the practices of this intendant: Hocquart adduced the value of having provisions on hand in the event of a poor harvest, and he claimed that wheat purchases could be used advantageously as a form of patronage. In the event, the shift to the singlesupplier system came about unproblematically and at a price advantage for the treasury. The merchant Nicolas Philibert in Quebec and the baker Antoine Poudret in Montreal supplied “fresh bread” at a price closer to that of the market.11 These arrangements did not interrupt

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wheat procurement but did cause it to decline as supplies of patent flour, farine entière, and biscuit by various merchants burgeoned. The breadmaking role of the king’s stores faded in importance.12 The bulk of the provisions stored before the war were for the 800 or so naval soldiers quartered in the colony and their officers.13 Between the months of October and May, these troops were housed in private homes in the three cities, with nineteen companies in Montreal, seven in Quebec, and three in Trois-Rivières. Hosts were required to provide a bed, a spoon, a pot, and a place near the hearth but they did not feed the soldiers, or at any rate, not officially. Ease of distribution of rations was, moreover, one reason why billeting was concentrated in the cities and the suburbs.14 The remaining six months of the year saw the troops dispersed to the military posts, and every spring the king’s heavy supply transports known as the bateaux du cent carried provisions prepared in the Montreal stores to the outer bounds of the colony, to feed the officers and soldiers as well as the employees, domestics, and labourers assigned to these garrisons and any temporary visitors.15 There were bakeries at the larger posts. Soldiers were entitled to 24 ounces of bread or biscuit per day, or 32 while on the march, and nothing forbade them from purchasing supplemental provisions from the clerks at the forts’ stores. If we note that there must also have been transportation losses, the total volume becomes difficult to ascertain. On a strictly arithmetical basis, 8,000 minots of wheat sufficed to supply the troops’ daily ration, but more was needed when they were on deployment.16 Several times during the Thirty Years’ Peace, Canada waged campaigns against Meskwaki, Sauk, and Chickasaw holdouts with the support of volunteer corps and Indigenous allies, including Indiens domicilés, or Indigenous people who had settled on reserves near the larger towns. These troop movements drove up military consumption.17 There was also secondary demand in the form of small favours for certain individuals, rations for labourers employed on the king’s construction sites, supplies for the prisons, and provisions for the crew of the king’s vessel while it was docked in Quebec and on the return voyage.18 In an average year between 1720 and 1744, the sum total of these requirements is estimated at 14,000 minots of wheat.

S u p p ly o f O v e rs e as Garri sons Flour and legumes exported from Quebec at the king’s expense to supply garrisons in other colonies did not normally come out of the

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stores; instead, the intendant contracted out this aspect of provisioning to a private business and the amount was charged as an expense to the receiving colonies.19 In table 1.1 at the beginning of this study, these shipments are aggregated with merchants’ exports, but to take the full measure of government demand, they must be added to the provisions used locally. During the War of the Spanish Succession, Canada regularly supplied the garrisons of Port-Royal and Plaisance, and from time to time those of the Windward Islands, which were no longer receiving adequate provisions from France. The figures cited by the administrators are not always sufficient to distinguish the king’s shipments from those sent privately by businesses trading with these colonies. There is, moreover, a problem of an administrative nature that I was unable to fully elucidate. Following the procurement contract of 1689, the supply of provisions to naval crews and to troops garrisoned in French ports and the colonies became, in principle, the responsibility of the naval purveyor-general or his subcontractors. Only Canada, which fed its own troops, was an apparent exception. Logically, the purveyor would have had to reimburse the naval treasurer for these purchases, but the corresponding arrangements are unknown.20 In 1710 and subsequent years, Antoine Pascaud of La Rochelle sent ships loaded with flour to Quebec in the purveyor’s name, with 4,065 cwt for Newfoundland and Acadia in 1710, 1,800 cwt for the West Indies in 1714, and 1,100 more for the troops who had just been transferred from Plaisance to Louisbourg.21 James Pritchard has identified two other shipments consisting of 800 and 1,000 cwt to the latter garrison in 1718 and 1719, respectively.22 These exports then ceased for a period of nine years, not because Canadian harvests were insufficient – on the contrary, they were quite abundant – but because there was no longer any reason why the purveyor-general could not supply the troops at Île-Royale and the other colonies with flour from France.23 The minister gave no explanation when he decided to procure some of these provisions from Canada in 1728, and the correspondence does not indicate how this sharing of responsibilities would have been stated in the accounts of the naval treasurer and his purveyor. Starting in 1729, Quebec ordinarily supplied 700 cwt of flour and 530 cwt of peas to Louisbourg, and in 1736 the intendant was asked to add 600 cwt for the troops at Saint-Pierre, Martinique. Note the modest size of most of these official orders during the 1730s, as compared with the volume of market exports to these colonies and the requirements of their garrisons. For example, in 1736 the purveyor shipped

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11,060 cwt from Rochefort, with around 60 per cent of this going to the West Indies, 2,500 cwt to Louisiana, and 2,011 cwt to Île Royale.24 Thus, the flour and peas that Île Royale received from Quebec that year accounted for a little over one-third of its consumption. The minister gave much importance to these supplies: perhaps on the grounds of cost savings, for Canadian flour could be shipped to Louisbourg more cheaply,25 but presumably more on the grounds of security. The remote garrisons would be less likely to experience famine in wartime if they could rely on two sources of supply instead of one. At a time when there seems to have been a thrust to greatly increase the size of these shipments, a series of poor harvests – ­followed almost immediately by the war and the fall of Louisbourg – scuttled these plans. The quantitative data scattered throughout the official correspondence is presented in table form in Appendix F. Converted into wheat at 2.5 minots per hundredweight of flour, these exports add 1,750 minots to government demand up through 1736, 3,250–6,500 minots for 1739 to 1742, and 10,000–12,000 minots during the initial years of the War of the Austrian Succession. Five Quebec merchants were successively in charge of these supplies. The first, Louis-Jean Poulin de Courval, was the king’s attorney in Trois-Rivières during his spare time.26 His son-in-law François Foucault took his place from 1735 to 1739. Foucault, who was simultaneously a councillor and storekeeper, tactfully entrusted the signing of the contracts to someone named Lemieux, “one of his men.”27 Next came François Lemaître-Lamorille, from 1740 to 1742, who was followed by his relatives Jacques-François Lebé in 1744 and Guillaume Guillimin in 1745. All were relatives of Courval, and Guillimin, who served on the Conseil supérieur, was married to Foucault’s daughter.28 In short, family ties played an important role in these arrangements. As I have already noted, the French rule according to which the public service was incompatible with the wheat trade was not retained in the colony, and we have here a good example of this. Procurement contracts were not put out to tender; favouritism, in which the intendant visibly indulged, drew criticism and even the occasional charge that he had a “base self-interest” in these contracts. But on this point, the detractors erred, for the prices charged were only slightly above the going rate, a margin justified by the strict criteria stipulated in the contracts (patent flour derived from “well-sieved Montreal wheat,” etc.). The profit margin was hardly enough to pay

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for kickbacks.29 And for those merchants who regularly exported flour and bore the ordinary risks of trade, contracts with the intendant were straightforward: the grain was paid for on the spot and responsibility for chartering the ships rested with the buyer.30 In short, these small purveyors were doing good business but hardly reaping a windfall. To please the minister, the intendant did his best to keep these supplies beyond reproach. The 1744 order, seven times more voluminous than usual and prepared in haste at the start of autumn, required a great deal of care at a time when the minister was taken up with war preparations. Why not build mills in Louisbourg, suggested Hocquart to the minister in his letter of 10 October, and send all the Canadian wheat there? Of course, he added, the initiative would deprive Canada of the profits to be derived from milling and would consign the bakers and coopers to unemployment. I might add that it would also have ruined the commercial mill owners and annihilated a useful enterprise in a land that had few, but it would have been a benefit to the king’s service and that was what mattered. It was a thoughtless proposal by an overworked employee that evidently remained a dead letter, yet it gives one pause that historians have described this intendant as a promoter of economic diversification and colonial entrepreneurship.31

S u p p l ie rs o f the Stores It is not easy to address the whole question of government procurement without preconceptions. Not a single storekeeper escaped being denounced in his day for influence peddling, fraud, or mismanagement, and their accounting to the naval treasurer at the end of their mandates posed problems enough to sow doubts, if not about their probity, at least about their competence. “It is black magic,” wrote one controller, Claude-Charles Bacqueville de la Potherie, of Montreal storekeeping operations at the turn of the century.32 To make this case is beyond the scope of my present concerns; still, the nature of the charges casts doubt on the fidelity of the sources used to determine the volume of grain and legume procurement, the profiles of the suppliers, and the comparative advantages of these transactions. There are two incomplete series. The first comprises sixty-five contracts awarded between 1730 and 1739 by either the intendant in Quebec or the financial commissary in Montreal to supply the two cities’ stores.33 At the start of his mandate, Intendant Hocquart opened a registry in which the

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details of all the king’s contracts in the colony were, in principle, to be recorded: works contract awards, miscellaneous purchases, leases, etc. But soon the registry goes silent, at least on food procurement. After 1732, the entry of contracts awarded in Quebec was largely neglected, while those awarded in Montreal were no longer reported in the intendant’s books. A portion of the latter – thirty-six to be exact – were kept in bulk and fill out this documentation. My second source is a long series of general expense statements for the colony, but only seventeen bordereaux are extant, covering the period 1726–47 with some gaps and interruptions. Where the entries are complete, the nature and quantity of the product, the unit price, and the total amount of the sale are indicated next to each supplier’s name.34 For the few years in which the two series coincide, all the contracts are followed by a delivery noted on the bordereau. The annual volume of grain receipts by the stores that can be worked out from either of these sources does not exceed the average level of military consumption and other known uses; in fact, the figures tend to understate the case. It is possible that someone was issuing payment orders for fictitious purchases, a classic way of falsifying public accounts, but this practice must have been uncommon during the two decades in question, since all the people appearing in the two series did actually make deliveries. The gaps in the documentation make it impossible to identify all the suppliers, or all the sales by any given supplier, but the data is abundant enough to answer my questions. There were ten to twenty sellers in a normal year and about forty in years of scarcity or war. The increase is solely due to a larger number of small purchases, with the bulk of the provisions always coming from a relatively stable group of large suppliers. These, agglomerated into the first category in table 7.1, are the ones who delivered at least 1,000 minots of wheat, or the equivalent in flour, one or more times during the period. Their number varies from five to eight depending on the year, while the quantities sold vary from 1,000 to 3,000 minots, sometimes more, especially after 1743. In one exceptional case, Pierre Guy supplied the Montreal storekeeper with 7,000 minots in 1734.35 Most signed at least four contracts. Certain names come up repeatedly, but in general, there is a good deal of turnover. Besides four seigneurs and two government employees, all these large suppliers were merchants.36 The group is dominated by Montrealers, who account for twenty-two out of a total of thirty-three for the period 1726–39. The absence of a nominal list for Montreal’s procurement in 1746–47

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Table 7.1 Suppliers of wheat, flour, and legumes to the king’s stores by place of residence and size of contract, 1726–47 Category

Montreal

Quebec

1,000 minots or more

27

20

Less than 1,000 minots, two sales or more

22

16

Less than 1,000 minots, only one sale

87

83

136

119

Total

Trois-Rivières 2

2

Total

%

47

18

40

16

170

66

257

100

Sources: ac, g3, 2040; g 2, 213–15; and other sources cited in Appendix D

precludes continuing the comparison into the following decade, but to all appearances this numerical superiority increased. The intendant often called on Montrealers to supply the Quebec store and several times demanded Montreal wheat from his Quebec suppliers.37 The 1,000-minot cut-off for large suppliers is less arbitrary than it appears, for individuals in the lower two groups rarely delivered more than 500 minots of wheat, and often much less. In 1739, for example, the Séminaire de Québec and Montreal merchant Jacques Pommereau supplied 87 per cent of the 8,109 minots of wheat put by in Quebec, while three other persons supplied the rest. In Montreal, four wellestablished grain merchants delivered three-fourths of the 8,954 minots purchased that year, with nine other vendors accounting for the remaining fourth. Among these latter were six members of the nobility, including Madame Portneuf with 800 minots and Messrs. de Muy and de Beauvais with 100 and 11 minots, respectively.38 When the minister advised him to abolish the store bakeries and put the whole supply out to tender, Intendant Hocquart touted the advantages of his system: “I could not refrain from procuring small quantities from a few poor officers and officers’ widows, thus affording them an outlet for the produce of their own lands or small businesses. This land is in such great need of assistance that it is hard not to engage in such a practice, especially where it costs the king nothing.”39 In other words, food procurement was one way among others of building and cultivating a network of loyalties as a guarantee of untroubled government. The favours extended to all social groups, but the military and seigneurial nobility were particularly well represented in the middle echelons – those appearing regularly in the accounts and in

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contracts for small quantities.40 There were other outlets for dues collected in the form of grain, but it is clear that sales to the king were coveted. The price was no higher but it was paid in cash, no mean advantage in a colony where one rarely got anything more for a surplus than credit on a merchant’s books. And if the volume sold was sizable, the vendor, like the merchants, obtained a bill of exchange on the naval treasurer, a useful method of payment for purchases in France. The smallest contract in the series, signed with the seigneur of Pointe-à-la-Caille, was for 180 minots of non-bolted flour, the accountants not being required to present supporting documents for purchases under 400 livres.41 The occasional vendors grouped together in the third category of table 7.1 crop up mainly during times of scarcity, supplying paltry quantities in most cases. To judge by the title “sieur” preceding their names, these were mainly city dwellers, rentiers, and merchants – rarely peasants.42 Grain requisitioned in the countryside does not appear as such on the bordereaux for 1737 and 1743–44. It is credited to the accounts of the persons assigned to collect this grain, or to their partners or proxies, as if these were ordinary sales by subcontractors, whereas in reality these transactions were financed by the treasury. The agents received an advance to pay for the wheat taken from the peasants at the official price and, in recompense for their labour, resold it to the storekeeper for an extra 2 sols. They were reimbursed for their travel expenses separately and the king bore the freight charges. In Quebec, the intendant used officers such as Jean-Eustache Lanoullier de Boisclerc, councillors Jacques de Lafontaine and Guillaume Estèbe, or an employee named Maufils who brought back 5,032 minots from his excursions to the Côte du Sud in 1743, as well as harbourmaster Jean Lecomte, who delivered 1,571 minots in 1737. In the government of Montreal, the requisitions were entrusted to Jean-Marie Landriève Des Bordes, a clerk in the king’s stores, and to Charles Héry, a merchant already active in the retail and grain trades. Héry, who devoted thirty-five days to collecting the king’s grain in 1742 and another thirty days in 1743, received 6 livres per day for expenses and earned a small profit on the 6,000 or so minots he brought back during these two years. These are the only two cases that can be identified with certainty.43 Freight costs alone accounted for nearly a quarter of the purchase price of the wheat that the intendant sent to Quebec from the Côte du Sud on sleighs during the winter of 1743.44 This is an extreme example, but even when requisitions took place in

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season and closer to the cities, the various commissions and expenses (normally borne by the vendors) drove up the price of this grain. Procurement by the Trois-Rivières store was an exception to the general rule. The small garrison consumed 700 minots of grain per year, which was supplied along with the meat rations by the storekeeper himself. Louis Fafard (dit de Longval) and son had occupied this post and held the corresponding procurement contract since the late seventeenth century; a scandalous arrangement at first sight, yet perhaps unavoidable in a town of only a few hundred inhabitants in which the choice of loyal, solvent suppliers was no doubt quite limited.45 The nature of the contracts awarded by the intendant or the financial commissary varied little. These were ordinarily signed between the months of October and February and the vendor undertook to deliver a certain quantity of grain during the winter, or on a given date between April and June at the latest. The grain was to be paid for the same year by the clerk of the treasury, generally by bill of exchange upon certification of receipt by the storekeeper, with 4 deniers per livre (1.6 per cent of the price) being deducted for the mariners’ provident fund (Invalides de la Marine). Some contracts stipulated that the grain be delivered to a mill instead of a store. Where the vendor was located in Montreal, the intendant at times reserved the right to take delivery in either of the two cities, depending on where the grain was needed. It was priced at the going rate, or at least within 1 or 2 sols of it, the absence of a market price list (mercuriale) making it impossible for us to be more precise. Five sols – precisely corresponding to the cost of freight in the 1730s – were added to the Montreal price when the wheat had to be carried down to Quebec.46 It was often only at threshing time, after the contracts had been awarded, that the harvest deficit and concomitant price rise became known. The suppliers found themselves caught off guard. The intendant proved notably conciliatory toward four of them who had committed in October 1732 to delivering a total of 6,300 minots of wheat at the Quebec price of 47 sols, after the price rose to 60 sols during the winter. The four contracts were summarily terminated and, in three cases, replaced by new contracts at the new price.47 These privileged suppliers were Charles Le Moyne, Baron de Longueuil, and two merchants ­surnamed Poisset and Francheville. It is undoubtedly no coincidence that two of the three prosecutions that I uncovered concerned con­ tracts awarded by the financial commissary, who dared not break the rules while the intendant’s position was vacant. In May 1729, a court

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ordered Montreal merchant Jacques Pommereau to deliver 2,000 minots at 40 sols without delay, despite a 25 per cent price increase since the signing of the contract the previous October, failing which the storekeeper would buy the wheat from someone else, regardless of the price, and Pommereau would make up the difference.48 In another case, the outcome was even worse for baker Charles Demers, with whom the commissary had made an unusual arrangement in October 1736, on the eve of a serious shortage. Demers had undertaken to deliver 1,000 minots to the Montreal store and, backed by two merchants, received an advance for nearly the whole price of the contract. He would spend six months in prison awaiting sentencing after motions for arrest were filed by both the controller and the sureties, who sued the baker for fraudulent bankruptcy after indemnifying the king.49 In years of high prices, the range of wheat prices found on the bordereaux is quite broad, reflecting sharp seasonal fluctuations and the sellers’ capacity to impose their conditions. In 1742, the two cities’ storekeepers paid prices ranging from 60 to 90 sols, with most purchases exceeding the maximum price of 65 sols set by the ordinances. The maximum was raised to 80 sols in April 1743 and more frequently obeyed after that. Thus it is clear (and must have been clear to the administration, which was violating its own rules) that official pricesetting did nothing to curtail rising prices. The administration either could not or – though it amounts to the same thing – would not compel merchants and rentiers to sell wheat to the government. In order to interest them in doing business, it had to acknowledge the prices charged in private transactions. This only confirms the observation in the previous chapter that the official wheat price was put in place as a requisitioning tool and mainly affected the peasants, who were forced to sell their surpluses to the king’s agents. Élisabeth Bégon, widow of a naval officer and daughter of a king’s storekeeper, reported the following anecdote in a letter to her son-inlaw. Commissary Jean-Victor Varin de La Marre had awarded the largest flour and lard supply contract for 1748 to Thomas-Ignace Trottier Dufy Desauniers, a well-known merchant. After delivery, Dufy Desauniers received a payment order exceeding the agreed-upon price by 4,000 livres. He hastened to the commissary’s office to refund the overpayment but the latter refused, whereupon the indignant merchant responded, “Sir, there is your money! Make a gift of it to

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the poor, for it does not belong to me.” Mrs Bégon had heard this story from the lieutenant-general of the jurisdiction, who roundly detested Varin. She did not care much for him either, yet she proffered only a laconic remark: “God willing, may the money be counterfeit and his conscience clear!”50 Since the details of procurement by the Montreal store in 1748 have not been preserved, it is impossible to know whether Dufy Desauniers’s invoice was indeed overpaid, but it seems unimaginable that such a transaction could take place without the supplier’s connivance. Moreover, a careful review of the accounts for 1726–47, containing the records of wheat and flour supplies, reveals no trace of misappropriation. Contracts were signed at the going rate and suppliers’ profit margins were rather narrow, just as they were when the administration was not involved. It should be specified that this conclusion applies to what I was able to observe and should certainly not be taken as a defence of the administration’s virtue. Favouritism was quite common, as we have just seen, but it was practised with some moderation, and the roster of suppliers was long enough to avoid making too many people envious. Am I right that there is a valid distinction to be made between patronage, or the fact of a public officer carrying on private business in parallel with his official duties – with any conflict of interest that this might entail – and outright false accounting entries, the plain and simple embezzlement of government funds? John Bosher rejects the distinction, equating the embezzler, the official who dips into public funds to finance his private concerns, with the magistrate who retains his business interests or the individual who takes advantage of his position to further his friends’ and relatives’ careers. While all these practices are blameworthy according to the criteria of democratic countries, Bosher argues that they were inevitable in an administrative system that conflated the public and private spheres.51 After innumerable dissertations on the good and the bad intendants and governors – a century of preachy history and more – the approach is refreshing, and all the more so in that it is based on a solid discussion of the workings of the naval and colonial treasuries by a specialist on the financiers of the Ancien Régime. It falls within a broader interpretive approach to French institutions according to which modern bureaucracy was born with the Revolution, contrasting with followers of Tocqueville who view it as having emerged slowly since the seventeenth century.52 The issue is beyond the scope of this book but

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prudence is in order, if only from the standpoint of public morality. For if the demonstration is followed to its logical conclusion – if one accepts that institutions inexorably pushed government officials to misuse their power – then these officials must be judged innocent of faults they could not have avoided, or even conceived of. And so the discussion comes full circle to Commissary Varin’s conscience, a matter of concern to Élisabeth Bégon but forgotten by historians. Without denying the archaic character of many of the administrative structures, and those of the financial bureaucracy in particular, it is my belief that the idea of a public sphere, a public service, had gradually taken shape since the end of the Middle Ages. And even if personal loyalties always ran deep and reforms were slow in coming, a plethora of regulations were there to remind the Ancien Régime administrator that he must not confuse the common good with his private interests.53 At every moment, he would have to choose between them. Should he offer the contract to his brother-in-law or close friend, or should he put it out to tender? Should he derive his entire living from his position and devote all his energies to his duties, or should he carry on some outside business? The principles were crystal clear, yet there might be good reasons to set them aside temporarily, on occasion. These things were negotiated at two levels: first with his superiors, to suss out their tolerance threshold so as not to jeopardize his career; and then with God, for let it be remembered that this early-eighteenth-century man had a hyperacute awareness of sin. If no one was harmed and the king’s interest was not betrayed, the sin (if any) was venial and fell into the category of “infidelities” for which a scrupulous soul such as Hocquart would feel remorse at the end of his life.54 But there were also non-negotiable infringements of civil and divine laws, such as embezzlement and false accounting, which were shameful practices and mortal sins. Modern historians can trust the administrator of that time to have known the difference, and it is on this basis that the aforementioned distinction is proposed. In the era just discussed and in the specific area of food procurement, minor irregularities were customary. But the temptation to risk one’s career and sell one’s soul for riches did not yet exist.55 The other question raised in this chapter relates to the government’s role as a driver of the economy. I have noted that procurement contracts for the king’s stores and the overseas garrisons fell largely to merchants who had already made their mark in the retail or export trade. These supply contracts were an opportunity for them to dispose

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of sizable stocks all at once, thus avoiding the risks of maritime shipping and of being at the mercy of foreign demand, as well as those of forward contracts in the colony, with the correspondingly long periods during which their money would be tied up. Contracts with the king contributed to their success but, for most of them, never accounted for an outsized proportion of their business.56 Merchants such as François Perrault, Pierre de Lestage, Jean-Baptiste Hervieux, or Pierre Guy, and rural merchants such as François-Augustin Bailly or Charles Réaume, were undoubtedly happy to sell wheat to the king from time to time, but their business did not depend on such favours, and a number of very prosperous merchants, such as Pierre Ranger, had no such dealings. The fact is that during this period, government demand was considerable weaker than other sources of business. It became more advantageous to sell to the government after poor harvests, when the whole industry languished, but in that case scarcity limited the advantages. The war, with the concomitant acceleration of military demand and inflation, would rapidly change the rules of the game.

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8 Grain during Wartime

Government grain purchases, limited to 15,000 minots per year for several decades, started increasing in 1737, in the wake of recurrent shortages and a few large shipments to overseas garrisons. The quantities purchased rose sharply with the outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1744. Available figures taken from colonial expense statements and store accounts (compiled in Appendix D) provide only an approximate reflection of this increase because the official accounting must be interpreted with caution, what with its omissions and frequent deferrals from one fiscal year to the next.1 Even so, it may be concluded that grain procurement more than tripled and that legume purchases, formerly extremely rare, became relatively significant. This war represented merely the first stage in an escalation of military consumption that would continue without interruption until the British victory sixteen years later. I shall begin by describing the main aspects of military procurement throughout the period. My purpose is to demonstrate that government pressure on agricultural production began well before 1756, that the colony continued to produce variable surpluses from year to year, and that these, instead of being bought and sold as usual, were absorbed by the military enterprises. The argument relies on data concerning military and paramilitary operations, harvest abundance, and flour imports and exports. The growth in military demand gave rise to new regulations, a new distribution system, and a state of chronic scarcity; each of these aspects is addressed in turn.

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G row t h o f M il ita ry Demand, 1744–60 The war that began in North America in the spring of 1744 caught Canada off guard. The colony lacked soldiers, weapons, and even bread after the previous year’s poor harvest. The summer was spent restoring the old forts of the Montreal plain and setting up a signalling system between Rimouski and Quebec. Military operations as such were put off until winter. The good harvest of 1744, put up in the autumn, came at just the right time to support them, and the subsequent harvests were ample enough to meet the considerable requirements of the various campaigns. Procurement served to fit out the “war parties” launched by the colony against the New England and New York borders. The war parties were largely composed of Indiens domicilés, who were joined by allies from Acadia and, at times, from the pays d’en haut. They reported for duty in small bands, first to the commander of the place nearest their residence, where they were fitted out and given rations of bread or biscuit and meat. Supplements were added when they passed through Fort SaintFrédéric and on their return, when they came to report the success of their mission before returning to their villages. The stores of Quebec, Trois-Rivières, and especially Montreal provisioned these incessant troop movements and also fed the families whom the warriors had left behind.2 The intendant claimed that he had had to feed no fewer than 3,000 to 4,000 Indigenous people throughout the war, including two groups of some 400 refugees from Acadia cantoned in the Côte du Sud, to whom he had arranged to provide rations “just as soldiers are given their pay in advance.”3 The colony did not produce enough corn to meet this exceptional demand and the few hundred minots that the storekeepers managed to gather were worth at least 20 sols more than wheat, still only an item of last resort for the Indigenous people.4 The mobilization disrupted these normally self-sufficient populations’ way of life, rendering them entirely dependent on the administration for their subsistence. Smaller numbers of officers, cadets, soldiers, and militiamen also took part in some of these expeditions. The most costly were those involving several hundred combatants, including a majority of Canadians, not just because of the numbers involved but also because of the disorder and waste inherent in such massive troop movements. The large detachments commanded by François-Pierre de Rigaud de

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Vaudreuil in 1746 and 1747 took with them 2,000 minots in the form of flour, biscuit, and legumes, which excludes the rations handed out to the militiamen assembled for more than a month in anticipation of departure and the provisions they were given for the return trip to their parishes.5 During the four years that the war lasted, about 2,000 militiamen were regularly employed in garrisoning and consolidating the forts in the Montreal and Lake Champlain regions, in the service of the boats on the Richelieu River, keeping watch in the lower reaches of the St Lawrence, and performing other military labours, all of them fed at the king’s expense.6 The naval troops, including several companies from Île Royale temporarily quartered in Canada, were constantly on the move and consumed more than in peacetime. The second front in Acadia, which France had sought to reconquer, also absorbed a large quantity of victuals. To keep the Canadian battalions from living at the locals’ expense, and thus to avoid disaffection on the latter’s part, the intendancy handed out provisions lavishly, often at a dead loss. Entrusted to inexperienced purveyors, these provisions often spoiled and the Acadians had to contribute, willynilly, to the subsistence of the expeditionary corps.7 Separate records were kept for the convoys of autumn 1746 bound for the Duke of Anville’s fleet, equivalent to 19,000 minots of wheat, and for the following year’s convoys carrying about the same volume, both supplied by Jacques-François Lebé and Guillaume Guillimin. These amounts represented supplemental purchases at the stores.8 The same is true of a portion of the flour shipped to the Martinique garrison in 1747 and 1748 and of the flour supplied to the king’s vessels in those same years.9 All things considered, the government’s share of grain demand rose from 40,000 minots at the start of the war to well over 60,000 minots subsequently.10 The intendant had no fear of emptying the cupboards, as it were, through his contributions to overseas requirements, for production remained strong and the exceptional harvest of 1747, coinciding with unprecedented port traffic, made a vigorous resumption of exports to the West Indies seem a reasonable proposition.11 Despite the abundance, the price of wheat in the cities and the king’s stores did not drop below 60 sols because the effects of inflation were already being felt. It was touched off as the heightened perils of navigation during the period 1744–46 caused a shortage of imported goods and a rise in retail prices, with the price of grain used as a method of payment following suit. Even after imports resumed, inflation was sustained by the delayed maturities of bills of exchange

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drawn on the naval treasury and by the proliferation of payment certificates for goods and services ordered by the military, which inundated the colony.12 After all, rising government demand affected not only grain and legumes but also the whole of colonial production, both agricultural and artisanal, along with the labour power tied to the latter. The king had become the main customer and would soon be nearly the only one. Grain procurement dipped in the aftermath of the Treaty of Aixla-Chapelle, only to resume almost immediately and with renewed vigour, but there is no data to be gleaned from official sources after 1749. This silence coincides with the arrival of a new intendant in the colony. The correspondence with Versailles, so voluminous during his predecessor’s tenure, thins out. It may be that not everything was preserved, but what remains reveals a different type of discourse and management. Gone are the remarks about the social climate of the colony, the meticulous accounts of various aspects of the service, the indiscriminate transparency formerly typical of the accounting documents, and the long comments of self-justification. The letters of François Bigot are brief, categorical, and stingy with details, especially as regards procurement. The partial expense statements formerly attached to the correspondence disappear, and while the bordereaux completed according to his directions do corroborate the increase in the colonial budget, they are otherwise all but inscrutable.13 Under the heading “Procurement of provisions” is a list of suppliers with the amount of each sale, followed by an entry titled “Miscellaneous” containing enormous sums. This suggests either that the persons identified are not the main suppliers or that the individual payments cited represent only a small fraction of their invoices. From time to time, as if in passing, the accountant indicates the nature and volume of the goods, but on the whole it is impossible to know whether these consist of grain, meat, or wine and aqua vitae, the last two often being supplied by local merchants and recorded under the heading of produce. The same opacity applies to “freight and carriage” and to “contingencies,” which gather, under the headings “Acadia” and “pays d’en haut,” considerable payments in which munitions, provisions, wages, and transportation are all aggregated.14 This being the case, it has been possible for historians to interpret the problem of interwar subsistence solely from the standpoint of ­supply, for there are no figures or official commentary to remind them of the other side of the coin: sustained, incompressible

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government demand.15 In lieu of accurate data on the nature of the expenses, the financial statements offer some clues to the increases in military and paramilitary consumption. Each budget item – work on the roads, fortifications, or artillery; construction of dry docks for boats and canoes; convoys and freight, or garrisons attached to the forts – represents a certain number of jobs that increased as expenses grew. In most cases, these jobs translated into an equal number of mouths to feed. Meanwhile, between 1748 and 1754, total colonial expenses more than doubled, from 2 million to 4.4 million livres.16 The increase affected all parts of the service, and I would conjecture that consumption followed a parallel curve. This would explain how the government’s share of the wheat harvest – approximately 60,000 minots at the end of the war – could reach 100,000–120,000 minots even before the arrival of the French regiments and the start of the major military campaigns. A share of the provisions went to supply the Acadian borderlands and Île Saint-Jean, where there were detachments of soldiers and militiamen to build and maintain new posts, Indigenous people mobilized for incursions into enemy territory, and, most consequentially, several thousand Acadian refugees. The war and the “transmigration” encouraged by the French command had reduced this formerly prosperous farming population to poverty, and they had to be prevented from siding with the English at all costs.17 Thus the shipments of provisions departing Quebec almost every year, which are easily mistaken for illegal exports bound for places further afield.18 The shipments were insufficient or poorly distributed, and more probably both; they did not fulfill their recipients’ needs and aroused popular anger in years when bread was scarce in Quebec. The number of rations distributed in the colony had increased due to a doubling of naval troop numbers in 1751,19 a steady increase in the number of labourers and employees fed by the king, the needs of the Indiens domicilés kept on a war footing, and the service of the government’s numerous warships. But it was the third-largest demand category, the pays d’en haut, that drained the lion’s share of provisions from the stores. During the War of the Austrian Succession, the colonial government felt the support of several indigenous nations slipping away and, starting in 1747, strove to patch the holes in its network of alliances and extend the network to the southwest. To this end, it reinforced the old garrisons, established new ones at various trading posts, and did everything it could to facilitate and

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increase the overall movement of goods throughout its network, regardless of how the posts had formerly operated.20 This strategic deployment took off after the war and encompassed the project of attracting settlers to Detroit, efforts to subdue the rebellious Miami people, and finally, in 1753, the launch of a sweeping operation to occupy the Ohio Valley. There were apparently some 1,000–1,500 militiamen in the west in 1749 and 4,000 in 1754–55, not counting the soldiers and Indigenous people involved in these campaigns. The volume of required provisions outstripped logistical capacities. Flour taken from the colony to these faraway destinations often spoiled on the journey, necessitating continual resupply. The intendant also supplied flour and peas to the Louisbourg garrison for three years between the two wars, but the poor harvest of 1751 and the rapidly increasing demands just enumerated caused him to abandon this part of the service.21 In 1753, the minister likewise suggested that he give up supplying the Acadian frontier and Île Saint-Jean in favour of French purveyors. Since Canada had been incapable of providing this service for two years without importing flour from France, would it not make more sense to have the flour shipped directly to Baie-Verte? But Bigot rejected the suggestion and the region remained dependent on Quebec for its subsistence.22 Wheat demand jumped again in 1755 with the arrival of 3,000 land troops, followed by another contingent of 3,500 men in 1757. It also responded to the mass mobilization of Canadian militiamen and Indian allies, the flow of Acadian exiles toward Quebec, and the start of a series of military operations of unprecedented scope. There is no need to try to quantify military consumption during this last phase of the war, since it is clear that the sum total of these rations, multiplied tenfold by shipping and storage losses, far outstripped the colony’s agricultural capacity, even assuming ideal growing conditions. In the event, these conditions proved far from ideal and the deficit was severe. From the summer of 1752 onward, Canada imported flour from France every year. At first, the quantities imported were rather small with respect to the enormous military demand, and also  with respect to the substantial annual imports of 70,000– 100,000 minots in 1757, 1758, and 1759.23 When added to the undetermined quantities taken from the strapped countryside by force, these provisions kept the troops moving until 1760, although not always as quickly as desired.

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A N e w M o d e o f M anagement Such a major supply operation, relying almost entirely on limited local production until 1757, could not be left to chance. It would no longer do to depend on the initiative of suppliers of varying capacities to honour their commitments to fill the king’s granaries, nor to allow all and sundry to ship grain or sell it wherever and however they chose, without informing the administration. The challenge was to allocate agricultural production to the cities, the countryside, and priority military demands, for which no interruption or decrease could be tolerated. Only civilian consumption could be cut, and a method of supply backed by harsh, ongoing surveillance based on this principle had to be put in place. The intendant who arrived in Quebec in the fall of 1748 set about doing so. The authoritarian practices used by François Bigot’s predecessor during lean years had laid the groundwork, but what had formerly been done on an ad hoc basis now became a bona fide system designed to meet the requirements of wartime. The first measure imposed gave the administration the power to inspect items – grain in particular – transported from one city to another. Boatmen now had to obtain a permit for each trip they undertook, and they were to file declarations with the military command and the intendant or his subordinates.24 Since the control system fell outside the jurisdiction of the police courts, it is not known how the permits were issued, only that the king’s vessels had priority, that permits were paid for, and that the rules seem to have been generally obeyed.25 Gradually, a whole set of processing bans, backed up by heavy fines, were put in place to provide upstream support for control over grain movement. It became forbidden to make biscuit, to bolt flour, to build barrels, to bake for the public, and ultimately to operate the mills.26 Each of these activities was outlawed and turned into a government monopoly. The way was now clear to confiscate wheat in the côtes, the requisitions and (their corollary) the official wheat prices being the cornerstones of the system. These procedures reappeared in 1751 and soon became systematic, with the naval troops ready to assist as necessary.27 There is no need for further comment here on the flour export bans that were tirelessly renewed after 1749, for I have already shown the superfluity of these regulations when the price of Canadian wheat made it uncompetitive on foreign markets.28 Official allegations of illicit export plots by unscrupulous individuals softened public opinion to

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the manufacturing bans. The purpose of these bans was not to interdict phantom exports, as the ordinances claimed, but to block local transactions other than those bound up with the military enterprise.29 The rise in government demand also had the effect of awakening interest in these contracts on the part of merchants, officers, and the king’s employees. Sheltered behind this regulatory wall, they formed powerful, privileged partnerships, resulting in a near-monopoly over procurement that they maintained until 1757.30 There are many accounts testifying to this state of affairs. Several memorials describe the monopolists’ schemes to defraud the king, providing numerous examples of embezzlement: fictitious supplies, altered contracts, marked-up prices, and so forth. Names and dates are given in support of the allegations. The most detailed memorials are undoubtedly those produced by the defendants themselves, the intendant heading the list, when they were summoned before the commission of the Châtelet in 1761. These men were well placed to have intimate knowledge of practices they denounced in others in an attempt to shift blame away from themselves.31 Several historians have drawn on this documentation for descriptions of the economic and social climate that pervaded the closing years of the French regime; an example is Guy Frégault, whose biography of Intendant Bigot largely accepts the validity of the accusations found in contemporaneous accounts from 1748 onward. Meanwhile, those aspects of the grain question that did not interest the memorialists are very hard to grasp. Nothing specific is known about the local grain procurement system operating during the 1750s, the relationships between long-established merchants and new intermediaries, their transactions with farmers, and the respective proportions of voluntary sales and requisitions making up military procurement. What is certain is that the wheat marketing methods in effect before the war were disrupted. While some aspects of the commercial mechanisms that prevailed in this new context remain opaque to the historian, the principal changes can be identified. First, a new category of merchant came onto the scene around 1748–50: one who purchased wheat, in the literal sense of the word “purchase,” for resale to the king. As discussed in chapter 5, most of the grain sold to consumers and users came from urban and rural retail establishments. In contrast to these merchants, who derived their profit from sales of merchandise and used the wheat they received in payment to refurbish their stock, the new suppliers, who were not retailers, had to make a profit on the wheat itself.32 Whether they

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purchased it directly from farmers, parish priests, or seigneurs, or indirectly through merchants, they paid in bills drawn on the naval treasurer. The second change, then, was the sudden infusion of liquid assets into a system traditionally based on credit. The third change was a proliferation of buyers. The parishes in the government of Montreal, where a handful of merchants had once divided wheat surpluses among themselves, were invaded by new arrivals, formerly unknown merchants who won large contracts seemingly overnight. An example was Pascal Pillet of Lachine who, in July 1752, paid 2,000 livres in treasury money to Jean-Baptiste Hébert, a Varennes habitant, for conversion into wheat “at the official price to be determined by the King,” deliverable to Montreal in January.33 Pillet and Hébert were subcontractors, the first working for the Montreal store’s preferred suppliers, the second working for the first. The task of grain collection was increasingly parcelled out among these various intermediaries. This does not mean that merchants active before the war simply vanished from the scene. But while some of them succeeded in playing a part in the new procurement system, the majority had difficulty in doing so: they faced competition on the ground, prices were skyrocketing, and the requisitions interfered with business, yet they were forced to deal with the official suppliers who had become the only game in town. The stable businesses, moderate capital outlays, and steady growth of goodwill formerly typical of rural business gave way to instability, ad hoc arrangements, and disorder. The meteoric career of Joseph Durocher is emblematic of this change. The son of an Angers tailor, hired in this same capacity by the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice in 1726, Durocher practised his profession in Montreal for fifteen years. In the early 1740s, like many small businesspeople striving for a toehold in the fur trade, he outfitted several voyageurs. Suddenly, between 1746 and 1748, he opened a cooperage and a bakery at the gates of the city, obtained a baker’s permit, rented the mill on Île Jésus, and at the same time won the contract to operate the bateaux du cent.34 So far the cash outlay had been modest, but in the fall of 1749, sixteen major Montreal and Quebec merchants invested a total of 50,000 livres worth of goods in the company. Durocher added many new outlets in the côtes, rented a boat for shipping of property and grain, and made a few wheat and flour deliveries to the granaries of the king and his main suppliers. He fled to an unknown destination a few months later, around

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mid-May 1750, leaving behind debts amounting to about 70,000 livres. Quebec merchant François Havy, the creditors’ trustee and the principal supplier to the fugitive, launched proceedings, including filing a motion to have him imprisoned for unpaid debts and having a monitory issued to help locate him, until the priority of the creditors was determined by a court decision of 24 March 1755. By that time, Durocher had died at his place of refuge.35 This spectacular bankruptcy, a consequence of haste and inexperience, would be of mere anecdotal interest were it not for the bottomless trust that experienced business people had placed in the adventurist.36 In order to have such credit extended, Durocher must have had to offer some attractive arrangement with the grain managers as a guarantee. His suppliers’ generosity seemingly betrays their own desire to finance major procurement operations. And it was during these same years of 1749–50 that denunciation of the military procurement monopolies reached a crescendo, attesting to the merchants’ hopes and disappointments alike. Very soon, several would take their distance and a few would even leave the colony, where business as usual was on the verge of ceasing to exist.

P ov e rt y a n d a b u n da nce i n warti me At first, the new situation created by the war was favourable to farmers with surpluses who had yet to be overly troubled by militia recruitment. From 1744 to 1750, harvests were quite good and rising prices benefited the various categories of rentiers and peasants able to take advantage of them.37 No authoritarian measures were imposed on the countryside during this time.38 The remarks about grain yields recorded by the botanist Pehr Kalm on his peregrinations through the colony in the summer of 1749 are unabashedly optimistic, as if the preceding good years had obliterated the memory of the shortages that occurred at the start of the decade.39 The difficulties began with the poor harvest of 1751, which gave rise to the requisitions and pricesetting. Despite the arrival of flour from France the following summer and a harvest that, although not at a historical high, was deemed sufficient to meet ordinary demand, these procedures were repeated. This was the year of the great campaign to occupy the Ohio Valley, and military demand from this point on generally prevented peasants from disposing of their grain as they saw fit. Harvests remained reasonably good until 1757 (when they plummeted due to terrible

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summer weather coupled with war-related disruptions), but they no longer sufficed. The problem was not yield but total production. To gauge this, one would have to measure the cumulative consequences of militia recruitment. The years 1745 to 1755 saw the recruitment of increasing numbers of young people, amounting to a mass mobilization of peasants’ sons – the same people who would normally have been largely responsible for clearing land so that agricultural production could keep pace with demographic growth. The pace of agricultural conversion must have slowed, and it is no surprise to find total production flatlining after ten years of this regime. In fact, the proportion of the harvest available for sale declined even more appreciably due to the crowding of dependents into the parishes.40 The result was that drastic methods had to be employed to gather the wheat. In a letter written in 1753, the intendant mentions the deployment of troops to intimidate the habitants as if it were a routine practice.41 The effect of the requisition regime was to heighten inequalities and social tensions among the peasants, and between them and the elite. As in the past, these tensions affected only the peasantry at first. At some point – perhaps around 1756, although exactly when is unclear – the king’s clerks began taking away the mill toll as well, despite the deference normally due to the seigneurs. The governor was even more circumspect in the case of parish priests, on whom he depended to mobilize the rural areas. It was not until March 1759 that he dared ask them to give up their tithes. “They invoked their privileges, claiming even to be insulted,” reported one disapproving observer.42 In places where the priests were not known for their generosity, this attitude may well have shocked their parishioners. The larger producers might grumble about forced sales but they tolerated them as long as confidence in the treasury bills lasted, especially since other outlets for their produce were not very numerous or certain. The data necessary to address the price issue is lacking; there is no way to compare the official prices with the prices that the peasants could have obtained from private sales, or with the prices they had to pay for basic goods and services. If the official price did in fact shelter wheat from the runaway inflation affecting all other products, then a grave injustice was being done, but this cannot simply be assumed without proof. Public opinion had it that the habitants were being forced to hand over their wheat at bargain prices,

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but these remarks, mainly relating to profits realized on resale to the king, must be interpreted with caution. Be all this as it may, the question of family reserves is more important. While some peasants could give up plenty of wheat without dipping into their reserve, others had to surrender wheat intended for their own or their creditors’ use. Even more crucially, still others had to purchase wheat for food and seed and could no longer find any for sale, “the king having taken it all.”43 The arbitrariness of the procedure was bound to accentuate these differences in living standards. How could it be otherwise in parishes lacking communal institutions, from which the government normally only exacted mandatory labour, without regard to the parishioners’ economic capacities? Who could be relied on to make a fair determination of each family’s needs? Even wheat inventories posed insurmountable problems. Formerly, the administration had left it up to the priests to estimate the parish harvest as a function of the volume of tithes received. But as we have seen, these deliveries were made around Easter, while the requisitions mainly took place in the fall. The administration had no choice but to take inventory at harvest time, yet it lacked both the methods and the competent personnel to do so. Under these circumstances, the allocation could only be based on unverified information gathered by its clerks from the habitants themselves, especially the largest ones, including local militia officers seconded for the operation, and certain families were surely spared to a greater extent than others. For Jean-Guillaume Plantavit de Lapause, there could be no doubt of this; in his capacity as assistant chief of staff of the Régiment de Guyenne, he was well acquainted with the procurement problems. Inventories, he explained, would allow “the commissaries whom [the administration] sends out to the côtes [to] know which are the good habitants, and they would not have to put blind faith in the militia captains, who are, for the most part, as blinkered as they are concerned with their own and their relatives’ interests, and those of others from whom they receive favours.”44 In the longer term, no one was spared. Once conscription was extended to all able-bodied men, whole harvests were lost. An English prisoner recounted that none but old men, children, and women remained in the Quebec suburbs in September 1756, that wheat stalks were dropping their seeds in the field, and that he and his fellows had refused to continue harvesting after two or three days,

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since the families in question had nothing but bad bread to offer them.45 And the critical phase of the war was only just beginning. Even as it was taking away men and grain, the administration was also demanding that rural people supply livestock, horses for the transports, and forage to feed them, in an utterly uncoordinated manner and as dictated by the army’s immediate requirements. The situation degenerated after 1757, when rural habitants were required to feed and house soldiers for a whole winter, “the purveyor lacking the means to do so.” This meant that more grain had to be requisitioned from parishes that were not providing billeting services.46 At the same time, masses of peasants were being mobilized for war, and corvée members had to bring along several days’ worth of provisions.47 Finally, parishes near the camps were continually being visited by soldiers, who literally had to live off whatever they could find.48 In principle, they paid for what they took, but using various kinds of more or less official paper, certificates, and promises issued by random officers or employees. The correspondence and memorials of the time devote considerable ink to the farmers’ distrust of these bills, as if their reactions were just a manifestation of self-interest. Give them good coin, suggested the intendant, and the barn doors would open. But lo, the peasants persisted in their refusals, some of them “taking insolence so far as to declare that their horses would eat nothing else.”49 Money was unpersuasive when food was scarce; fear of starvation was the motivation behind all the false statements and other forms of resistance, ranging to the petty behaviour of one parish that forged a common front to get rid of the Acadians it was supposed to feed.50 Not much is known about the rural experience during this decade of nearly unending confrontation with the administration, when the basic problem of family and parish survival resurfaced year after year alongside all the other calamities engendered by the war. A little more is known about the hardships endured in the cities, to which contemporary observers were more sensitive since they could see what was happening with their own eyes. The new shortages did not resemble those of previous years, when harvest deficits had led to high prices and these, in turn, to unemployment, the result being a relative dearth of bread, especially after the long winter when supplies were running down. But in 1751, the first in a long series of crises, there was hardly any bread at all – not before the harvest but just after, in early November. Another singularity was that Montreal suffered the most, whereas the greater production of its hinterlands

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had always enabled it to endure scarcity and, on several occasions, to supply Quebec with wheat in the spring. This time, emergency supplies travelled in the opposite direction and out of season: 1,200 cwt of flour sent up to Montreal by sleigh that winter. In both cities, the daily bread ration was set at a half pound per head. This scenario recurred the following year. The pattern of these crises – premature shortages, reverse grain movement from east to west, brutal rationing – illustrates that production was not the only factor at play: supplying the remote outposts took priority over feeding the cities. As soon as a deficit loomed, the grain necessary to feed the soldiers had to be seized without delay. The operation had better chances of success in the government of Montreal, where the earlier harvest could be threshed in the autumn if necessary, and this might explain why supplies ran out here so quickly.51 Deprived of Montreal’s wheat, Quebec was reduced to penury, however abundant the harvest may have been. “We are always at risk of dying of hunger,” whimpered one of its inhabitants. The king’s physician described rations distributed by the intendant in 1754 as consisting of old spoiled flour that facilitated the spread of pestilential fevers.52 In 1755, the discretion observed in the official correspondence and the rarity of other accounts of the colony’s predicament gave way to an avalanche of commentary on the people’s misery that can be found scattered throughout the letters and campaign diaries of newly arrived officers. Several of these observers were shocked by the fate of a few thousand Acadians who had taken refuge in the capital during the last phase of the war.53 The refugees were not entitled to the bread ration of 8 ounces per day that all residents were supposed to receive (it was reduced to 4, and then to 2 ounces after 1757). But a historian would have to ascertain the proportion of families of artisans, navigators, and day labourers who could afford these rations and whether bread, meat, and cod were distributed with a modicum of order and fairness. On this point, the spectacular rise in mortality between 1755 and 1760 tells us much more than the written evidence. Clearly, malnutrition had set the stage for epidemics.54

D is o r d e r in t he S ervi ce It was no simple matter to provision several thousand men moving around a vast battle front in a colony difficult to assist from the outside, especially given the remoteness of the territory and the paucity – in

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many cases, the non-existence – of internal lines of communication. The colonial administration was ill-prepared for the task. Since its inception, Canada had tended to conduct its wars in the manner of the Indigenous people: small combat units carrying provisions on their backs and relying on plunder, fishing, and the hope that the expedition would not outlast their capacity to survive. The garrisons at the remote outposts could procure what they needed from Native villages or fur traders when supplies were delayed. Attempts to accommodate large forces and long campaigns using methods for carrying larger quantities of provisions had not worked well; one thinks of the waste that plagued the Acadian campaign of 1745, Vaudreuil’s border raids into New England (1746–47), or the Belle-Rivière campaign of 1751 and subsequent years. In other words, the logistical problems did not begin in 1755 with the arrival of land forces. Neither the insufficient, poorly trained office and store staff nor the merchants to whom the intendant awarded one contract or another had any experience managing large supply depots. Moreover, these employees were poorly assisted by an imprudent command and an undisciplined officer corps. An administration that had not learned to plan, or even to count, during a less demanding time for the service was sure to be highly ineffective when the pressure mounted. Yet authoritative works of history present a contrary image. In an effort to rehabilitate the last intendant of New France and the purveyor-general, both condemned in their day by public opinion and the monarchy to bear the blame for the defeat, these historians defend not the morality of these individuals but their immense talent, their efficiency.55 As is often the case with revisionist arguments, this one substitutes praise for blame without really altering the issues in play. Their gaze riveted on historical figures rather than structures, these historians have continued to set themselves up as judges, turning the old hunger merchants into heroic administrators and saviours. “Undoubtedly a scoundrel, he was also a very efficient administrator,” wrote W.J. Eccles about François Bigot, contrasting this putative efficiency with the supply problems experienced by the English army, which was forced to deal with local interests assumed to be narrow and selfish.56 Eccles’s is a dual profession of faith: in the intendant’s talent, and in the advantages of authoritarian power and centralized management, these being inseparable in the author’s mind. What must be stressed here is precisely the fact that supply operations were not centralized. The intendant might issue orders to his

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purveyors, but neither he nor they had any way to evaluate the feasibility of the operations, nor to ensure that they were successfully carried out. The procurement, transportation, and redistribution of local goods, like the transportation and distribution of imported flour, were in the hands of hundreds of intermediaries, and there was no inspection bureau to oversee these subcontractors and act as a liaison with the military authorities. The decision to work with a single purveyor in January 1757 changed nothing about this situation. The king now had only one supplier, but the service remained just as fragmented at the lower echelons. Supplying Carillon (Ticonderoga) depended on the capacity of François Cherrier, Joseph Demeule, Pierre Boileau, Joseph Paradis, and many other merchants in the Richelieu region to procure differing quantities or wheat and beef and to ensure that they arrived at a given fort when needed.57 Operational fragmentation, pushed everywhere to the limit, was a source of confusion, as was the lack of coordination between supply operations and the military command. When drawing up battle plans or ordering troop movements on short notice, the governors of New France did not concern themselves with logistical problems. It is this that explains the continual comings and goings of troops and provisions and, in one case, why the battalion that was to winter in Niagara in 1755 found the stores empty when it arrived late in the fall.58 “The great miracle of Canada,” wrote one officer ironically, “is that hardly any errand is attempted without risk of starvation; many have experienced this, but no one has died of it.”59 And if the Niagara soldiers survived, it is because they were sent home, their manœuvres abruptly terminated. The fact is that rationing is predicated on head counts, and it was the officers’ job to give their clerks an accurate count of the soldiers and militiamen under their command. This was standard practice for battalion officers in France, but their colonial counterparts were not in the habit of drawing up rosters, giving rise to all manner of waste and abuse.60 Summing up, it should come as no surprise that hardship and disorder typified the military supply operations, although no more so than that which the urban and rural populations had to endure to support these campaigns. For ten years the spectre of famine haunted the colony – perhaps the most terrifying face of a war on which historians have yet to pass definitive judgment.

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9 Public Unrest and Official Discourse

A S m a l l D is t u rbance On Saturday, 18 August 1714, the two brothers Asselin of SaintFrançois-de-l’Île d’Orléans came to Quebec to deliver flour they had sold to a merchant there. As they were carting the flour up from the bank to Mr Lestage’s house: the man Savari and his wife… the Portuguee’s wife, the Polack’s wife, and several other women unknown to them are reported to have set upon the said flour, and taken and removed 2 barrels and 2 full sacks, together weighing 508 pounds, which they allegedly took and carried away by force and violence; to this end they had assembled in a mob of more than 30 to 40. And since such mobs, violence, and theft must in no wise be permitted, for they are illicit public disturbances and assemblies which open the door to public sedition and uprisings that might even be termed brazen public theft – as none intends to pay for the flour he has removed – the supplicants are obliged to appear before you to demand justice.1 The incident in itself is fairly banal. It resembles in microcosm the subsistence riots observed in French and other cities: a grain shipment to a private customer was plundered (not all such cases involved grain bound for market); the participants were, it seems, almost exclusively women; the artisan class was well-represented, judging from the occupations of the four couples identified and summoned before the lieutenant-general of the provost court; and, as might be expected,

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the root cause of this little disturbance was a dearth of wheat and some empty bakery shelves.2 But beyond the apparent similarities with popular movements elsewhere, what stands out about this incident is its singularity: to my knowledge, it is the only one of its kind in the whole history of the colony. What could have caused such behaviour in that year, and what factors ordinarily militated against collective action? The year 1714 was marked by all sorts of commotion. A poor harvest in France had compromised supplies to the West Indies and opened up a profitable outlet for Canadian flour. As noted in an earlier chapter, direct exports to the West Indies were only really attractive under such circumstances. Many wanted to exploit the opportunity, beginning with Intendant Michel Bégon, who had interests in shipping. To anyone with ties to the administration and to large-scale trade – which is to say, just about everyone in the city – this was an open secret.3 Bégon was whispered to have sent emissaries out to the côtes all through the winter and spring to have wheat set aside, and to be exacting a “tribute” – a percentage of the cargo’s value – in exchange for issuing the export permit. The manœuvre was all the more shocking in that an ordinance issued in January prohibited essentially all grain exports, as well as storage of grain in excess of a family’s needs. Violators were liable to heavy fines, but the measure was apparently never enforced.4 The city was out of bread and the arrival of thirty ships in the roadstead during the summer, something unusual in this relatively quiet port, lent weight to the idea of a conspiracy. Moreover, when the autumn came, the administrators had to admit that “the quantity of ships [had] caused a famine of sorts in a time of abundance.”5 Thus, the rumour that the people’s food was being carried away by every ship that set sail was not without basis. The shortage was compounded by an administrative crisis pitting Intendant Michel Bégon against the Conseil supérieur. For two decades, the Conseil had seen its policing-related powers, particularly those relating to grain, steadily revoked. Only the intendant (assisted or unassisted by the Conseil) and the governor-general were now permitted to publish regulations concerning flour exports, supplies to the cities, bread prices, and so forth, and certain councillors were unhappy with this state of affairs. That year, the two royal administrators prolonged their stay in Montreal while the food situation in Quebec deteriorated. Claude de Bermen de la Martinière, first councillor and subdelegate to the intendant, had written in May to inform him of the

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rumours and of the urgency of making regulations, but in vain. As conditions worsened, the public blamed the Conseil for its inaction. It is not enough that people speak of this Company with ­contempt in private conversation, but they do so in public, right out in the street, and even in the houses of those who ­comprise this Council, who are told with impunity that all their power has evidently been taken away, since they do not even hold the power to hand out a minot of wheat to a countless number of poor families, who are turned away even when they offer seven or eight livres per minot, cash in hand, and who suffer from hunger in a time when wheat should only be worth four livres, what with the abundance of it to be found in all the côtes, which is kept hidden along with the flour, so that they can be loaded and shipped out of the colony.6 The Conseil hesitated. Should it turn a deaf ear, or give in to public pressure and resume its policing role? To save its honour while indulging the intendant’s susceptibilities, it opted for a compromise that would displease everybody. At the 16 July session, the councillors discussed the urgency of enforcing the good old regulations and heard the grievances of eight poor women about the weight and quality of what bread could be had. They tasted the bread the women had brought and councillor Michel Sarrazin, who was also a doctor and a surgeon, averred “that the use of such bad bread would inexorably cause pestilential diseases in this people, which would little by little contaminate the air and be transmitted to the most well-to-do citizens of the colony.” The session ended with an order to prepare for a police assembly to be held after the intendant’s return.7 But it never took place. Despite all its precautions, the Conseil had aroused Bégon’s anger, and he attended its 30 July session to remind the magistrates that they were no longer permitted to make police regulations or even “to deliberate on such matters,” but only “to make general regulations where [the Conseil] sees fit to do so.”8 Predictably, the news of the Conseil’s humiliation as it prepared to reinstate the desired control measures did not calm the public’s fears. Bermen notes reports of a disturbance in July, shortly after the intendant’s return, in which bread was distributed to “delinquents,” although the official correspondence is silent on the episode.9 The royal administrators certainly stood to gain by omitting such incidents from their

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reports, and this is perhaps the correct interpretation of the stance taken by the provost court at the trial initiated by the Asselin brothers. Even though the legal practitioner who had drafted their petition stressed the public nature of the incident, the court declined to investigate it as a case of sedition or even theft. It let the victims sue the perpetrators, and the civil proceeding followed its course as if the brothers were merely attempting to collect unpaid debts. Did the prosecutor make this decision so as not to annoy the intendant, or was it the latter who, after consultation, ordered the affair to be kept quiet? In any event, news of the two peasants’ misadventure quickly travelled around Île d’Orléans and it is possible that the impunity enjoyed by the assailants was implicated in the dwindling flow of provisions to the city. For not all was well in the countryside either. While city dwellers were up in arms about the high price of bread, country dwellers were equally upset about the low price of wheat. In either case, the monetary crisis gripping the colony played an important role. The naval treasurer had delayed reimbursement of the card money building up in merchants’ and rentiers’ coffers during the war, and this paper had gradually depreciated as a result. Inflation reached a peak in the spring of 1714 with the news that the cards would finally be redeemed, but at half their face value. The already inflated prices of imported goods suddenly doubled. Wages, subsistence crops, and other farm produce followed suit. There is no way of measuring the impact of these fluctuations on the buying power of urban consumers, but we can be sure that commercial relations were disrupted for a time.10 The exorbitant prices had the additional psychological effect of making the crisis seem more serious than it really was. Wheat was said to be selling for 8 or 9 livres per minot, as if it had just undergone a 300 per cent price increase, when in reality it only cost 3 livres if bought with cash. But cash was understandably scarce in the colony. And notions of price were even more relative for peasants, who considered wheat to be worth exactly as much as the goods they could receive in return for it. Very little is known about what happened near Quebec on Thursday, 23 August 1714, on the eve of St Bartholomew’s Day. According to the text of the attorney general’s petition, a mob of habitants from the neighbouring côtes had formed: “there were even some among them with the temerity to be seen in public armed with rifles, and they pushed their insolence so far as to threaten to enter the city

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thus assembled, if their remonstrance was not heard; and they only withdrew when apprised that the troops and militias of that city were commanded to march upon them.”11 It appears, then, that the demonstrators turned around before reaching the city, though without thereby abandoning their plans. On 28 August, the day of the patron saint of the parish, a habitant of Saint-Augustin reportedly said “that he would march if they rose up again, and enlist the officers of the côte to march as well.” He continued on the same seditious note, saying that “if the intendant did not put things right, he would revolt,” and that “they would wait until the ships departed, and then they would come and set fire to the whole city.” Louis Cotin (dit Dugal), the person accused of uttering these threats, denied everything, even his presence at the assemblies. On the contrary, he claimed to have told the other habitants “that it was very wrong to have gathered before the city; that if they wanted to tell of the hardships of life in the côtes, they should have petitioned the intendant.”12 The Conseil supérieur investigated for a month and then gave up for lack of evidence. Nor could it make anything stick against Laurent Dubault of the same parish, or Charles Routtier of Ancienne Lorette, apprehended thirty days after the events. After a year in prison, Routtier was released on his own recognizance.13 These assemblies had a specific purpose: to obtain a regulation limiting the prices of goods, which the peasants argued were much too high with respect to their wheat. The governor and the intendant deemed the demand ridiculous and the “mutiny” unjustified. They explained to the minister that inflation did not hurt the habitants, who were selling their wares for more than before “and much dearer with respect to what they buy from the merchants,” but that the habitants were unable to comprehend this.14 To anyone who did not share Vaudreuil’s prejudices and could concede that peasants were capable of looking after their own interests, it was obvious that their grievances had merit. It is known, for example, that sales generally took place in the winter, whereas the card devaluation was not announced until May, at which point the price of everything doubled. A number of vendors must certainly have been fleeced in the process. When it came to exchanging wheat for goods, the merchants dictated the terms of trade, and they turned these monetary jolts to their advantage – indeed, it would be surprising for them to have done otherwise. Therefore, the demand for price limits is logical albeit unrealistic, if not supremely naïve.15

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This was the third episode of this kind since the turn of the century. The first had happened in Montreal on 18 November 1704 and concerned the rising price of goods, particularly salt, during meat curing season. Habitants of the côtes marched to the city (in fairly large numbers, it seems, since several parishes were represented) to demand that merchants sell them salt and other goods at a fair price. The garrison commander managed to close the gates before the demonstrators could enter. He dared not, in the governor’s absence, order the soldiers to disperse the crowd; instead, he solicited the intervention of François Vachon de Belmont, superior of the Sulpicians and vicar general of the diocese.16 In the ensuing negotiations, the peasants won every point. They agreed to withdraw in return for a promise of a reasonable salt price and fair distribution, a refund for those who had already paid higher prices, and an assurance “that no one would be sought nor punished for what has happened.” A letter from the superior to the intendant, all but silent on the event itself, is revealing as to the mediator’s state of mind: “after all, the habitants came unarmed, without violence, and heeded my admonitions. These small disturbances would surely never have happened if the merchants had never taken their exorbitant prices and [hardness?] to cruel extremes.” As to the habitants, the priest had only compassion for “their ignorance and coarseness,” reserving his harsh words for the merchants guilty of having driven the peasants to desperate measures “by taking their wheat and their animals for a song… by having their barns seized.”17 He was not alone in this view. A local court order of 22 November setting the price of salt and the manner in which it was to be distributed mentions the “tyrannical monopoly [that] forced the habitants to complain.”18 These extraordinary concessions put the governor general, who had hastened from Quebec to restore order, in a very difficult position. He did not scruple about rescinding the price order, “which had been imposed out of the fancy of certain persons, and not on any justifiable grounds,” but nor did he dare disavow Vachon de Belmont completely, for he had “engaged the honour of the Church in this negotiation.” The rebels went unpunished.19 As if in vindication of those who had criticized such leniency, another disturbance took place in the côtes near Montreal the next autumn, again concerning the mismatch between the low prices of farm produce and the high prices of other goods. Details are even scarcer than for the earlier case. Two of the six individuals arrested went to trial, first in Montreal before the sub-

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delegate, then in Quebec before the intendant. The minutes of the proceedings have vanished but the wording of the judgment clearly shows that the authority intervened as soon as it got wind of the grumblings, even before the planned gathering had occurred. Convicted of “having sought to assemble to present a petition” and “having uttered seditious remarks,” François Séguin of Île Jésus and Jean-Baptiste Lapointe of Mille-Îles were released at the close of the trial.20 In this case, the administration opted for clemency of its own accord. Since the criticism had reached the minister, the governor had to explain why he had not applied an exemplary punishment in these two cases. He did so by minimizing the first incident and by invoking the absence of evidence in the second one, along with the need to “appreciate the people’s misery.” Then he came to the only persuasive argument: that the colony was at war and that large numbers of militiamen might have to be recruited from the côtes at any moment. It was the wrong time to alienate the habitants.21 Ten years later, the same governor and a new intendant would show no pity; on the contrary, they would stress the farmers’ “insolence” and the need for troop reinforcements in the colony to suppress it.22 Thus, depending on the circumstances and the narrator’s interests, these movements were referred to as revolts, conspiracies, sedition, small disturbances, or mere irregularities. The historian does better to dismiss the witnes­ ses and try to find a less self-interestedly filtered set of facts. The specific characteristics of these three rural incidents resemble one another in both form and content. As to the content, there is no ambiguity. The peasants, acting as producers and debtors, were challenging the system of trade being set up in the colony. They demanded a fair price for their grain and other crops, or – what amounts to the same thing – a lower price for the products they received in exchange. Their targets were the city merchants, for there was no trade in the côtes during this period. Thus defined, these movements fit uncomfortably into the various categories that some authors have used to classify European popular movements.23 This is not unexpected, in that protest phenomena tend to reflect the society from which they emanate. The peculiar character of the measures, servile rather than monetary; the absence of an unavoidable layer of rentiers between city and country; and the facilitation of monopolistic schemes by the small size of the market were some of the preconditions for this unique type of clash.24

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It can safely be ventured that all the participants were peasants since, outside of the priest and more rarely the seigneur, they were the only inhabitants of the parishes. The militia captain (capitaine des côtes) – the government’s official agent in the parishes – is treated in the ordinances and administrative reports as the personification of authority and good order, but he was often just a peasant like everybody else; while he might not take part in a protest, neither was he inclined to denounce his relatives and neighbours.25 Finally, it is clear that the instigators were neither newly arrived colonists nor the poorest farmers, but the better-established habitants who had wheat to sell and did business with merchants. Some common features of these movements emerge, despite a lack of information about the form they took. For one thing, they were not confined to a single parish; the discontent was widespread enough for calls to action to spread from place to place. For another, there was nothing spontaneous about them. They did not break out on the heels of a fortuitous occurrence, a specific provocation that lit the powder keg, as so often happened with rural and urban riots in France. In the three cases under consideration, the habitants must have decided on the date and time of the demonstration in advance; they must have given incendiary speeches that could succeed in stirring up momentary excitement while obscuring the risks inherent in the enterprise. The considerable distances between settlements meant that opportunities to meet were few and far between, and generally limited to Sundays and holidays. This explains the hesitancy and abortiveness of these movements, and the fact that they were so easily defused. These were not in fact revolts, but mere threats of revolt. The peasants were not going into the city to do rough justice. They were not on their way to plunder shops and burn account books. They presented themselves peaceably, in procession, to remind the authorities of their existence and ask them to “put things right,” as Cotin explained it; in short, they sought a fair settlement. One finds here, albeit in an entirely different setting, the same mixture of trust and exigency as in the traditional food riot. These wheat sellers, like bread buyers, believed that it was the authorities’ duty to protect them. In their minds, an alliance between rural people and the government against the merchants was a reasonable goal consistent with the natural order of things. The demonstrators had “not the slightest intention of contesting the authority of those whom God and the King had placed

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above them for the purpose of governing them,” affirmed the priests and other parish notables involved in the 1704 demonstration.26 There is a large measure of truth hidden under this high-flown defence of the people. As anodyne as they might appear in comparison to the uprisings in the French countryside, these colonial disturbances sent shock waves through the urban population. “The merchants are making too much of this matter,” wrote Vachon de Belmont. “They were frightened and their fear led them to impute secret intentions to the habitants, something that no one can ever know about anyone else.”27 For the merchants, the mere intent to gather was cause for prompt military intervention. Why such fear? One obvious reason is that the peasants were armed. Even if there were not as many rifles in the parishes as the governor claimed when the time came to recruit militiamen, there were too many not to be afraid. And yet the demonstrators did not use them. No suggestion of firearms, nor even pitchforks or sticks, emerges from the proceedings of 1704 and 1705. A few guns were allegedly seen during the gatherings of 1714, although the investigation did not corroborate this assertion, but at any rate no shots were fired.28 Nevertheless, for their contemporaries, an armed peasantry was necessarily a violent and dangerous one: peasants were too ignorant, too primitive to control their emotions and gauge the consequences of their actions. So they were pitied and feared. In the final analysis, what coalesces out of these small clashes is the image of a worried, geographically and socially divided society.

R e in f o rc in g S t r ic t Subordi nati on There would be no more such incidents. To be sure, all was not social harmony in the colony after 1714, whether in the country or the city. Noisy urban mobs and street tussles were frequently broken up by members of the garrisons. Certain professional groups defied the authorities, and there are reports of a crowd joyfully encouraging criminals to escape on the occasion of a public punishment.29 But no food-related public unrest of any magnitude is recorded. Although the shortages of 1737–38 and 1742–44 were severely felt in Quebec, public worries appear never to have degenerated into anything worse than a shoving match at the doors of a bakery. No raids on granaries or carts, no attempts to carry off wheat as it was being loaded or unloaded on the bank of the river.30 But why should there have been?

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Is food unrest not, by definition, a response to perceived inaction on the part of the authorities, an attempt to get them to enforce the regulations? As is evident in the cases just discussed, control measures were applied without delay, rendering any popular mobilization superfluous. The intendant could congratulate himself on having preserved public order. The redistribution of requisitioned wheat to bakers, churchmen, and private individuals, and through them to charitable works, certainly had a positive effect, not least because such gestures never went unnoticed in such a small city. Similarly, albeit for different reasons, there were no riots in Quebec or Montreal between 1752 and 1760, even though harsh rationing was imposed at the beginning of the period and there was almost no food left at the end of it. The same analytical categories do not apply to these war years, when all manner of catastrophes coincided. The cities were overwhelmed. When bread disappeared from the ration outright, groups of women went loudly knocking on the doors of the responsible officers, in Montreal in December 1757 and in Quebec the next April. Their anger was fierce but the movement was weak.31 How much more unrest could be expected in cities crawling with soldiers and emptied of their youth? Let us return to an earlier period in the countryside, where agitation did not cease altogether but took a different turn. To begin, the peasants and the merchants made peace. While the price of wheat rose slowly, and only after 1725, the terms of trade must have improved earlier, following the end of the sea war that had interrupted the flow of imports and the monetary crisis that had favoured abuses. Intercity and intercolonial trade were now on a regular footing, opening up the parishes to outside influence and intensifying competition among grain buyers, which benefited farmers. The peasants no longer perceived the debt they bore as a matter of public order. It resumed its place in the private sphere, and vertical relations between customers and suppliers made any number of breaches in the wall separating country from city. Henceforth, conflicts involving peasants, which at times led them into acts of violence, were all rooted in local matters. Quarrels between neighbours, a bailiff’s visit, or property disputes pitted small clans against each other and might give rise to altercations, broken fences, kidnapping of wayward livestock, and the like.32 Parish functions, nearly the only occasions on which habitants gathered as a group, gave rise to lively debate over dues, the use of vestry revenues, the location of a new church, or the redrawing of parish boundaries. But only

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exceptionally did such disputes degenerate into brawls.33 Collective defiance of seigneurs was different in nature and was found in most parishes. Setting aside certain isolated acts of banditry, these disputes nearly always went through legal channels. The peasants involved proved themselves to be fierce litigants, capable of forming a common front to impugn a seigneur’s claims or force him to offer better mill service. Rarely did they win but nor did they give up easily, often going to considerable expense to appeal judgments.34 In sum, the rural areas were not a sea of tranquility, but neither did they rise up against the government. A distinction must be made here between civic obligations as old as the colony, such as military corvées and militia recruitment, and an innovation such as the wheat requisitions introduced in 1737.35 The first elicited some limited resistance in the seventeenth century, a bona fide armed riot in Longueuil parish in 1717, and nothing after that.36 The requisitions, despite their novelty, touched off no disturbance in those parishes of the government of Quebec that were seriously drained of surpluses in 1737–38 and 1742–44, no more than they did in the 1750s when the administration’s agents travelled the whole colony seizing the harvest. Resistance was strong, but essentially passive and individual. 37 Everyone tried, each in his own way, to elude the ordinances. Some were better placed to cheat than others, and while unjust allocations divided parishes, nothing transpired outside of them. Is this too categorical a statement, given the insufficiency of the documentation? It can at least be said that if there had been cases of peasants denouncing their neighbours, or militia captains giving “notice of violations,” as the ordinances required, some exemplary punishments would have been meted out, leaving some trace in the archives.38 It is likewise known that these parishes ordinarily kept quiet when the authorities prosecuted one of their number for a crime that “no one had known about,” an attitude suggesting that the administration could hardly count on informants to secure the peasants’ compliance. Their silence on the requisitions, as in other matters, was a form of collective resistance. But it remains that the rural population, which had previously shown signs of unrest, quieted down to a very great extent. Why? It is impossible to venture onto this terrain without thinking of how historians of the Ancien Régime have written about the pacification of the French countryside after 1675.39 There is obviously no analogy between the great wave of peasant uprisings that characterized seventeenth-century France and the sporadic, insignificant unrest

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observed in the colony until the early eighteenth century, and some might be tempted to assert that the contrast between these events and those of later decades is too inconsequential to dwell upon. But perhaps there are interesting commonalities among these peasantries; perhaps they all learned to subsist, to dissemble, to use inertia as a weapon. And perhaps the important debate surrounding the acculturation of the countryside remains relevant when the setting moves to a new continent. The Canadian agrarian system and the absence of community institutions other than the parish posed a constant obstacle to peasant movements. One must look elsewhere, to war perhaps – too pervasive in this colony not to have influenced behaviour – for change-inducing factors. One could venture that war maintained a climate of worry and disorder conducive to protest and that this is what happened during the serial wars that took place under the reign of Louis xi v and in their immediate aftermath; or, contrariwise, that war, and more particularly the threat of invasion looming over a country, can create a feeling of powerlessness that enhances the stature of the protective authority and thereby reassures the threatened parishes that their subordination is appropriate. Which of these equally plausible and perfectly contradictory hypotheses is correct? For the administrators, it all depended on how one governed. An intendant asserted around 1737 that “the habitants had been much more contained” under his mandate, and laid this at the door of the leniency shown by previous governments. Since some resistance remained, he called for reinforcing the garrisons, it being “necessary to fortify the strict submission that must be observed among all orders, particularly men of the country.”40 The same idea was expressed by a governor shortly after the War of the Austrian Succession, during which the population had readily submitted to corvées and military service. “It does no harm to observe,” he wrote, “that when troops are dispensed with, as was the case during this war, the habitants feel their strength a little too keenly and might consider – under circumstances which I do believe to be quite remote – making ill use of it.” He continued by calling for reinforcements of the naval infantry.41 In reality, it is hard to detect any change in governmental style between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Troops were stationed in the colony on an ongoing basis after 1683, always close and numerous enough to intimidate those who might be inclined to rebel. Indecisiveness and leniency in the judicial and administrative spheres

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can be found in all eras, but on the whole, the authorities imposed their will. The peasants rarely had occasion to experience that “proper mixture of firmness and gentleness” boasted of by intendants and governors as being capable of bringing this “naturally indocile” people to heel.42 Here as elsewhere, power was mediated – filtered through personal and quotidian relations. Orders were conveyed by various local notables, each in his fashion, and in the end relations between rural people and the powers that be were limited to watching official processions go by in season.43 More decisive were the transformations of the living environment. In 1683, the intendant could still be found cowering at the very thought of travelling from Quebec to Montreal without a military escort “in such a land of hills and forests, filled with all sorts of warlike bands and Savages.”44 Then the forest, redoubt of beasts and nameless men, began to recede, slowly at first and faster after 1710, under the combined effects of peace and cumulative waves of demographic growth. A peasant standing in an open field and well identified in the parish register was less fearsome. But more importantly, the habitants themselves breathed more easily as the landscape was tamed, built up, civilized. The feeling of isolation and insecurity at the root of many disturbances faded away. The thirty-year truce preceding the wars that led to the end of the regime gave a whole generation the time to consolidate its material underpinnings and internalize the teachings of the Church. The new parishes spreading out along the river were more likely to be served by clergymen imbued with loyalty to the monarchy, who acted as guarantors of public order. By the time the government began to confiscate the fruits of the peasants’ labour, to take their wheat and their children, the idea that one should not openly rebel against authority had been well assimilated.

R u m o u rs in t he Ci ty We had a cruel famine through all of Canada in 1700 and 1701. I knew people who died of it. For long months, the habitants had to survive on root vegetables; the wealthiest in the land could count themselves very lucky to live on meat alone. This public calamity only came about because we suffered a certain Foucault, a merchant of Lower Town, until now one of Mr de Champigny’s servants, to remove all the wheat from

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Île d’Orléans and vicinity. He has a brother-in-law in that area who took payment in wheat for the sale of his goods. The crop looked as if it would be very poor. They bought wheat from all over, offering more than what others would pay; but they exhausted supplies in the government of Quebec. This merchant and none other became the only resort of the whole community; he stood fast and made people beg. He sent a barque of wheat to Montreal in 1700 so that he could make even more money. Headwinds stopped him on the way and more than 400 minots spoiled in the heat… Finally a remedy of sorts was provided by doling out the King’s wheat and some flour; but it would have been better to interrupt this two-years-long torrent at the source by forbidding this monopoly.45 This account is quite representative of comments about shortages heard in the cities of the colony. While natural factors were sometimes taken into consideration, most people believed them to be secondary; they remained convinced that shortages were artificial, wholly created by certain people’s greed. As in France, the belief in a famine pact was anchored in the urban mentality and shared by all social strata.46 The absence of police archives deprives us of testimonials by ordinary citizens, who had their own way of denouncing conspirators. With one exception, the extant sources report the remarks of the elite, but what they recounted were the prevailing rumours, the things everyone believed. As old and universal as it may be, this idea of a plot against consumers was not an essentially unfounded conspiracy theory that remained unchanged from one famine to the next. In the case of France, and in what little is known of Canada, the rumour revolved around genuine facts that were modified, amplified, and interpreted according to the circumstances. Merchants were particularly unloved in this colony and bore the blame for scarcity on many occasions. Claude-Charles Bacqueville de la Potherie’s above-cited account is a good illustration. Note the contempt expressed by Bacqueville, a naval commissioner from a fairly well-placed family of lawyers, for a merchant named François Foucault, as indicated by his use of the word “certain” (nommé) and his reminder that Foucault had once been a servant.47 The same attitude toward the purveyors is espoused fifty years later by the memorialists of the Seven Years’ War: Joseph-Michel Cadet had “spent his youth herding cattle,” while Joseph Brassard Deschenaux had

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been “a shoemaker’s son.”48 The merchant was always suspect, especially the one who rose above his station, and it would be rash to claim that such prejudice was the preserve of the upper classes. Foucault’s crime was, of course, to have hoarded grain, to have stored it in his granaries for resale at a profit once the factitious shortage thus created had caused prices to rise. But there is also the manner in which the monopoly was created. Consider again this brother-in-law with an enterprise in the country who “took payment in wheat for the sale of his goods.” If the author takes the trouble to describe the practice, it is because he regards it as condemnable, illegal, when in reality there was no law against it. The same received wisdom is found thirty years later in a petition signed by some twenty-five artisans, including three bakers: To the Baron de Longueuil, governor of the city and generality of Montreal. We, the undersigned members of the community of this city of Montreal, merchants, bourgeois, artisans and others, respectfully submit to you that an insupportable abuse has taken hold, in the stores that have been and continue to be established, and are increasing every day, in the countryside; an abuse that deprives all those who make up this city of their means of subsistence. This long-standing abuse has come to a point so insupportable that it obliges the petitioners to resort to your protection, to right this disorder. For these reasons, may it please you, Sir, to give consideration and attention to the evil caused by this disorder, which increases every day and reduces the people of this city to an insupportable extreme, commerce having been reduced to nothing and the people suffering from the scarcity of staples, grains, lard, and, in ­general, all the things that customarily arrived in this city, which is now deprived of them. And a single inhabitant, Sir, named Rengé, from Rivière-des-Prairies, has alone amassed ­eighteen hundred minots of peas to this day, and others smaller amounts, following his lead, in all the côtes. Thus, the people are reduced to being unable to survive in the city. And the petitioners shall continue to wish and to pray that the Lord may bless and keep You and Your illustrious family.49 This petition, apparently the only one of popular origin to have survived, confirms that there was indeed a Canadian version

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of the famine plot in which the rural merchant played the role of the villain. It has long been known that these merchants were regular targets of accusations by merchants from the capital and certain officers, but that these complaints may not have been representative of the whole colony, given the pecuniary interests of the persons making them.50 But these artisans had none but consumers’ interests to defend – they shared the same prejudices – and it may therefore be concluded that there was a society-wide belief in the existence of conspirators beyond the city walls, of city dwellers living powerlessly, as if under siege, amid hostile countrymen. Only war would succeed in altering this belief, by bringing the famished peasants into the city. And what had the government done to counter these abuses and machinations? At best, nothing, and it was criticized for its inaction; at worst, it was said to have encouraged and organized them for its own profit. This latter was the most popular version of the conspiracy. While François de Beauharnois lambasted foreigners said to be making off with Canadian flour, he was also rumoured to have banned exports to Île Royale in order to increase the value of his private shipment there, causing shortages in both colonies.51 From the time when Canada had begun exporting flour and biscuit, few were the royal administrators who had not been accused of plotting against the public in this way. Everyone knew that 6,000 minots of wheat sufficed for the troops, explained Bermen, “yet under this pretence of their subsistence, what prodigious heaps are amassed, in order to take out of the colony more than would be needed, at a fair price, for it to enjoy the bounty which divine Providence wishes to bestow.”52 Only the long incumbency of Intendant Hocquart (1729–48), albeit marked by two severe shortages, seems to have eluded such attacks. Either this intendant’s conduct was entirely above reproach or, more likely, any malicious remarks made were less frequent and have not survived. In contrast, when it comes to sources useful in documenting public opinion under the administration of his successor, François Bigot, there is an embarrassment of riches.53 Tongues wagged and much ink was spilled. The Canadian correspondents of Élisabeth Bégon, newly arrived in Rochefort, received precise details: the new intendant had promulgated the flour embargo so as to be the only one in a position to sell a hundredweight worth only 8 livres in Quebec for 18 livres in Louisbourg.54 The engineer Louis Franquet, who came to inspect the fortifications in 1752–53, a poor harvest year, bent an ear to the local officers’ conversations and conducted a little survey of his own, in a utopian militarist vein, with

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a view to developing a proposal for Canadian agricultural reform, which he saw fit to send to the minister. The shortages were almost never real, he explained in the foreword, but only apparent, and for the following reasons: It has at different times, and nearly always, been permitted for individuals suspected of being oddly protected by persons in high places – these suspicions unfortunately being all too wellfounded – to buy or arrange to buy all they could of wheat and flour in the colony, to amass considerable stockpiles thereof, and even to take them by force, on the pretence of service to the king: either for the subsistence of the cities, the troops, the sundry garrisons of this colony, or to let it spoil, or again to employ it in their commerce [and] to that end, to remove the necessary quantities thereof from the colony; so that, in the very midst of abundance, they have often found the means to bring about a terrible famine. Nothing being asserted here has not been seen any number of times; to be convinced of it, one need only ask the sensible and reasonable inhabitants of Canada.55 For historians of the era, the crisis of 1752–53 was unique from nearly every point of view. For contemporaries, it had precedents, for the plotting seemed all the more sinister in that its roots went deep. At times, it was the present that coloured memories of the past; at other times, the past obscured the present. “The great evil derives from the fact that Canadians do not trust the government; they remain convinced that the shortage is artificial and conjured by the greed of certain persons,” reads an entry in Louis-Joseph de Montcalm’s diary for November 1757, when there were no provisions of any kind to be had. “I believe this to be untrue, but the trouble is that the people’s opinion is founded on past experience.”56 At that moment, the population was speaking out, loud and clear. The land forces that had arrived in 1755 voiced constant criticism of the naval personnel governing the colony; they could not be silenced, and the habitants followed their lead. Prior to the new arrivals, critics had been well advised to keep their murmurings to themselves. In 1751, a merchant was imprisoned for spreading the rumour that the intendant had exported wheat in his schooner, the Finette, when it was only carrying cod.57 For this one documented incident, how many other incautious individuals of more modest station were

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punished without trial, or after a form of expeditious justice that left no trace? There was also the risk of falling into disgrace, of being deprived of the perquisites that the administration bestowed on its favourites. Jean-François Gaultier, the king’s physician in Quebec, had been in the habit of sending an annual set of “botanico-­ meterological observations” to Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau, the president of the Royal Academy of Sciences. In 1754, Gaultier could not refrain from writing what was on everyone’s tongue, but was notably circumspect when trying to explain the causes of the illnesses that had struck “the poor people” that year. “That can only be ascribed to the bread made with spoiled, rotten flour, which the people have been forced to eat all winter long [despite the abundance that existed in the government of Montreal. This abundant harvest had been confined by the authority in this government of Montreal, so as to make the people of Quebec eat the spoiled flour left over from an old business: not a word about this]. These illnesses carried off several subjects.”58 Although they readily sympathized with the habitants’ plight, the battalion officers paid more attention to the plot against the king and his army than the plot against the people. What shocked them more than anything in the “abominable and nefarious mysteries” they witnessed was the mismanagement, the immense disorder that hindered troop movements and made their soldiers curse. Yet many of them shared the popular beliefs about stores filled with provisions belonging to entrenched individuals who were waiting for famine to increase before selling to the habitants and the king.59 Several commented on the “prodigious” quantities of livestock and wheat found on Île d’Orléans after the evacuation of May 1759. They had not counted heads and bags, of course, but how could these authors doubt a revelation that confirmed their imaginings?60 The fullest and most emotional account of the famine plot allegedly organized by wellidentified senior officials of the intendancy, with the complicity of the governor, is due to an employee of the administration. The author gets straight to the point. Most of the facts reported are readily verifiable, but what is noteworthy in his account is the careful plotting of the intrigue, the implacable logic and determination of the protagonists, who are said to have planned their diabolical machinations long in advance, step by step. Imported flour represented the most lucrative trade, and so they allegedly began by letting the colony’s flour rot or exporting it so as to starve the people and force the king to send relief, and so forth.61 The author credits these shady officers

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and these opportunistic merchants with superior intelligence. Everything in this tragedy has been meticulously schemed, nothing left to chance. Incompetence – surely the most common failing – had no part to play. Even the waste described countless times in contemporary sources fits into the famine plotters’ strategy.62 To calm fears and keep rumours from spreading, shouldn’t the administration have presented the shortage as a natural disaster, not a consequence of human greed? It had opportunities to do so, for whenever a crisis loomed, the intendancy published ordinances banning exports, prescribing granary inspections, setting prices, and so on. In a colony that lacked a printing press, ordinances were privileged sources of information. Before being posted on the doors of country churches and in “the customary places” in the cities, they were communicated to the public by the crier, who went from street corner to street corner reading them aloud, preceded by a soldier who beat a drum to attract the attention of passersby.63 But what did these passersby hear? That merchants had just bought all the new wheat, depriving them of their food supply; that because of the merchants’ rush to buy and hoard grain, bourgeois and artisans like themselves could no longer find wheat to feed their families; that individuals with no concern for the people’s interest had cornered all the wheat; and other similar accusations. The ordinances generally began with a stock phrase: “Having learned that …,” “Having been informed …,” “Further to representations [or complaints] made to us…” In this way, the crier’s voice became the megaphone for street rumours, sometimes giving them direction, always legitimizing them. Where the matter concerned wheat requisitions at the official price, the guilty parties were peasants who, driven by “greed,” “avarice,” or “sordid self-interest,” hid the grain they harvested, causing prices to rise by the day.64 It seems clear that these preambles did not reflect the thinking of the intendants, who knew how shortages generally worked and had some knowledge of the mechanisms of supply and demand – enough, at least, not to resort to this kind of explanation in the privacy of their correspondence with Versailles.65 So why offer such language for public consumption? To allay suspicions of their own machinations? The argument is tempting but too facile. If it fits the regimes of Bégon and Bigot like a glove, it is inadequate for that of Hocquart, who was not so implicated in the grain trade as to need scapegoats, yet systematically issued such denunciations. Was the purpose to justify the announced measures, to secure the public’s consent for

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them? If so, why would this have been necessary? Consumers’ animus against merchants or peasants could be taken for granted in any case. In short, it is difficult to discern the motives that drove the intendants to flatter popular prejudices, to implicitly incite unrest targeting the granaries, barques, or barns of these famine plotters – an unlikely reaction, but not one that could be dismissed out of hand. When the sources prove so recalcitrant to interpretation, a change of approach is in order. Instead of trying in vain to discover the common feature of a sequence of particular episodes that would explain the use of such discourse, the key to the enigma must be sought in the texts themselves. The repetitiveness of the ordinances over such a long period, the quasi-codification of their language, is suggestive, and it is there that we must begin. While their tone seems odd in the context of a shortage, it is not original in and of itself. It is that of the executive order known as the arrêt portant règlement, which identified the offender or perpetrator, summarized the charge against him, passed sentence, and issued a reminder, for the public’s edification, of the rule that had been transgressed. The intendants, who also acted as police magistrates in the colony, were in the habit of issuing convictions against so-and-so who had not swept his chimneys, or sold beverages without a permit, or sold bread above the official price. The use of the same boilerplate in the promulgation of measures during times of dearth may well have been in part a question of routine, an inability to conceive of regulations as political rather than punitive measures. It also had the advantage of enhancing the intendant’s prestige. Of all such publications, the ordinances concerning grain were the ones with the greatest impact. The habitants assembled on public squares and church doorsteps and listened attentively to these much-awaited pronouncements; thus, these events represented ideal opportunities for the enactment of power. The intendant could have presented himself in prosaic terms, as a careful administrator, but he could do better by assuming the mantle of the righter of wrongs, the defender of the common good. In personifying the enemy, he also personified his own power, substituting the more palpable and traditional image of the avenger for the abstract, less powerful image of the pencil-pusher. He was like the preacher who evokes sin to remind the congregation of the efficacy of mercy. This simple formula, reminiscent of other symbolic systems, had become rote, ritualized, since the turn of the century. It needed no justification.66

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While the official discourse on grain remained a constant until the end of the regime, can the same be said of the discourse used by the public? Were people content to draw up ever-lengthening lists of corrupt officials and monopolists, or was there also a subtext involving a deeper reflection on the uses of authority, and on an administrative system that fostered abuse? Amid the torrent of charges levelled by the memorialists of the Seven Years’ War are scraps of critical thought, but the question mainly concerns those persons whose commercial fate was bound up with that of the colony, the merchants who had interests in its businesses but were not the government’s minions. Exhaustive research into private Canadian and European archival correspondence might perhaps shed more light on their opinions. For the moment, the only known letter germane to the case is the one sent by Jacques Hervieux to France on 25 September 1761 – a year after the capitulation of Quebec, to be sure, yet partaking of a mindset that I believe to have been quite typical of the era’s business people. Hervieux was forty-eight years old. His father had grown wealthy as a wheat merchant, and he himself was well regarded among Montreal merchants. Along with the other urban militia captains, he had been designated by the English command to form a court of first instance with powers of inspection over the city’s policing and markets. He wrote authoritatively, and to some extent on behalf of his peers, as may be inferred from his spontaneous use of “we” and from the general tone of the letter, which is not that of a loose cannon. General Gage did not make any levy for the subsistence of his troops… [He] obliged the habitants to bring their goods into town and he succeeded. The habitants came to the market and there were abundant quantities of everything [details on food prices follow]. Cease, good Sir, to take such pity on us. Our plight is less unfortunate than it has been heretofore. We no longer groan under that intolerable tyranny which is caused by an inordinate desire to invade the whole field of commerce. The habitants are no longer under any obligation to hand over to a purveyor the provisions which they had set aside for their own use. One no longer sees in Canada those leeches who used to bid up the price of staples. Commerce is now free and open to all, and is no longer in a single person’s hands, as it once was. Finally, the only thing lacking for us to be completely happy is to acquiesce to the domination

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of our Sovereign, with generals and masters whom he shall choose to be as honest men as our English general and the administrators under his orders. You can appreciate, Sir, what a forgivable and natural desire this is for any good citizen, for you know that it is tyranny and avarice which caused the loss of Canada, our homeland.67 Would Hervieux have praised freedom of trade if this letter had been written one or two years earlier? No doubt, for the political innocence of the Canadian merchants was not such that they had to experience such a market in order to discover its virtues.68 That said, it should not be forgotten that these merchants had been calling for regulations “to restore good order” not long before.69 In fact, they had always desired liberty and protection, a contradiction not specific to the colony but characteristic of the Ancien Régime economic mentality. The merchant evinced not the slightest embarrassment, writes Roger Chartier, in squaring his striving for privilege with his demand for freedom, which was ideally recognized as advantageous to business.70 But ten years of controls and prohibitions had upset the balance between these two positions and caused opinion to swing to one side. After a long period of wishing for their former liberties to be restored, the merchants now celebrated the freedom offered by the occupiers. Let us note in closing that there were limits to the critique of “tyranny”; it was not aimed at shifting the power dynamic entrenched in a world of hierarchy, domination, and submission.

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Conclusion

The history of the grain police, like that of the French administration more generally, has no sequel. We will never know how the harsh experience of war, Étienne-François de Choiseul’s reforms, and the resumption of trade might have altered the government of Canada and caused a new awareness to dawn among the colonists, one that carried the seeds of long-term change. From the narrow standpoint of regulations, the British administration regularized official bread prices, strengthened market square protections to a small extent, kept records of current prices, and required boatmen to submit declarations. When the harvest faltered, it encouraged merchants to procure foreign grain, which was now more easily available, and otherwise refrained from intervening in distribution mechanisms. But from a political point of view – the point of view forming the through line of this study – there was no continuity from one regime to the next. The relationship between the government and the people was abruptly abolished from without, leading to a reconfiguration of social relations and considerable cultural upheaval. Let us retrace our steps. This study is part of a larger research enterprise, begun several years ago, that focuses on the nature of power in the French colony. The research will cover, among other matters, the whole range of personal income taxes imposed on this supposedly untaxed population. The administration of grain, which was to have occupied only one chapter of the project, became a much larger focus of interest along the way. Without losing sight of the initial purpose, I let myself be carried along by my sources, giving in to the pleasure of teasing out and elucidating problems I had not originally thought about. In this way, what had been intended as a mere sketch of the economic context

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took on perhaps undue proportions. Was it really necessary to devote so much space to local trade, river transportation, larger-scale business, and bakers, with the knowledge that each of these aspects deserved its own in-depth analysis based on more comprehensive documentation? Be that as it may, and despite its imperfections, this inquiry into the grain economy has the merit of revealing the existence of early commercial networks and of highlighting the industry’s importance in the process whereby the rural world was integrated into the colonial economy. Without denying the value of social histories of merchants, it also illustrates the possibilities of research focusing more exclusively on mercantile activities and trade dynamics. As to the long-range study of the grain police presented in this book, it has fulfilled its promises. Above and beyond the false starts and hesitations, the awkwardness, the ambitions, and the special talents of the naval men to whom the king entrusted his overseas domains, the spirit of the regime asserted itself. The perfunctory, ad hoc character of the legislation attests to an intent to stymie any regulatory system that might have restricted the intendancy’s room to manœuvre. In Canada, arbitrariness was more than a practice: it was a principle, as my forthcoming study of the militia will confirm. Analysis of the confrontation between the administration and the peasantry over grain allocation has been another key theme of this book. It seems clear that power dynamics were not circumscribed within the boundaries of seigneuries and parishes; at the same time, one would be wrong to regard this history as a binary opposition between recalcitrant local communities and a central government skillfully wielding carrot and stick to rally them to its ends. On the contrary, the interplay of suspicions, clashes, resistance, and compromise reveals the colony to have been a complex social space in which obedience coalesced out of, and derived its coherence from, a dense web of interactions. Subordination was not so much an outcome of authority as the prior condition for its exercise. What the person who commands and the person who obeys have in common, wrote Hannah Arendt about this type of government, is the very hierarchy in which each has a defined place.1 Such is the basis of the absolutist state – and, since the system worked in the colony, it must be concluded that New France was not that far removed from Old France. But it was also different, and it is this specificity, as compared with other possessions or provinces of the Ancien Régime, and as compared with subsequent Quebec societies, that this study has sought to illuminate.

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A p p e n d ices

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Appendix A

Note on Units of Measure

To facilitate comparisons among different sets of quantitative data, units of measure have been converted into minots, the unit commonly used in Canada to measure grain and legumes. A minot was equal to a quarter setier, or about 60 Paris pounds. As was always the case with volume measures, the real weight differed somewhat from the official weight, depending on the quality of the grain and the manner in which it was measured. Going by a number of examples, it appears that the real mean weight was closer to 57 pounds than 60, which would have to be verified. In the meantime, the official weight has been used in the conversions that follow. The quarter (quart), a volume unit used for exports of flour, biscuit, and peas, was required to contain 180–200 pounds net of flour, according to an order by the Conseil d’État directed at Canadian exporters. I have found several examples in private accounts of quarters of patent flour weighing only 170 or 175 pounds net, but the net weight of farine entière fluctuated around 200 pounds. This last observation is corroborated by barrel contracts, which specified that quarters had to contain “at least two hundred pounds of flour by weight.” The statistics make no distinction between types of flour, but it would appear that exports of farine entière predominated. For this reason, I have considered a quarter to equal 200 pounds net, or 2 hundredweight (cwt). The same variability applies to the units used in Bordeaux for shipments of flour to the West Indies and Canada. The official weight of a “barrel” of Bordeaux flour was 180 pounds, but the actual weight varied from 177 to 198 pounds. (Note that the Bordeaux pound equalled those of Paris and Quebec.) These variations did not hinder trade, since everything was systematically weighed at

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Appendix A

departure and arrival and the price was calculated on the number of hundredweight. Thus, it is often possible to ascertain the exact weight of French flour imported into the colony. But this is not the case for the barrels of flour registered in Bordeaux and shipped to Canada during the Seven Years’ War. In the absence of precise data establishing the weight or even the number of barrels reaching their destination, I have used the official weight of 180 pounds. “We are very much at a loss when attempting to establish anything definitive concerning the yield of wheat into flour,” wrote Antoine Augustin Parmentier. Several factors come into play here, including grain quality. Contemporary authors ventured an average yield of 75 per cent, or less for finer grinds. A choice has to be made for the quantity of flour to be taken as equivalent to one 60-pound minot of wheat: either 45 or 40 pounds. I opted for the second, or a 66 per cent yield, to account for the fairly high proportion of exports that consisted of patent flour and the fact that an actual minot of wheat often weighed less than 60 pounds. On this basis, I have considered 2.5 minots of wheat to equal 1 hundredweight of flour. Biscuit has been converted into wheat on the same basis (1 cwt of biscuit equaling 2.5 minots of wheat), since the water used in the dough would have evaporated during baking. This mode of conversion is surely conservative, and the wheat equivalences given in table 1.2 can be considered minimums. One minot of wheat yielded an equal weight in bread, or 60 pounds. To convert quarters of peas into minots, I used the equivalences in effect in the king’s stores, which were more or less standard for all types of legumes. One quarter of peas weighed 160 pounds on average, and there were 2.5 minots of peas per quarter. It goes without saying that this whole question will eventually have to be analyzed in greater depth as part of a grain economy study. The goal of this study is quite different, but since it was necessary to convert disparate data so as to render them comparable and track the evolution of demand, it made sense to do this as accurately as possible.

W o r k s c o n sulted Parmentier, Le parfait boulanger, 601; Malouin, Description et details; Wien, Peasant Accumulation; Butel, “Métrologie et commerce.” See also the discussion between James T. Lemon and Bettye Hobbs Pruitt on the conversion of wheat into flour and bread in William and Mary Quarterly 42(4) (October 1985): 555–62.

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Appendix B

Transportation Costs for Wheat and Flour within the Colony

L a n d t r a n s p o rtati on

Source

Date

Route

Price per Price minot per Distance minot per km (sols) (deniers) (km)

banq-vm, December 1695 Lachine → Montreal bakers’ petition

12

 2

2

King’s store

12

 3

1.5

1739

Montreal → ← Lachine

” ”

1737

Rivière-des-Prairies → Montreal

15

 3

2.4

” ”

1741

Sault-au-Récollet → ← Montreal

15

 4

1.6

banq-vm, cn601, S 202, 7 September 1751

Winter 1751

Île Jésus → Montreal

17

 2

1.4

King’s store

1743

Île Jésus → Montreal

17

 5

3.5

” ”

1745

Île Jésus → Montreal

17

 4

2.8

ba nq-v m, cn601, S 158, 25 July 1752

January 1752

Varennes → Montreal

20

 3

1.8

ac, c 11a, 82:129–41

Winter 1743

Rivière-du-Sud → Pointe Lévis

50

10

2.4

” ”

Winter 1743

Sainte-Famille → Quebec

[20]

 5

3

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158

Appendix B

W at e r t r a n s p ortati on

Source

Date

Route

Price Price per per minot per km Distance minot (deniers) (sols) (km)

1732 ba nq-Q, c 301, S223, 5 April 1732

Montreal → Beauport

300

5

0.21

King’s store

1736

Montreal → Quebec

290

5

0.21

” ”

1737

Montreal → Quebec

290

5

0.21

” ”

1739

Montreal → Quebec

290

5

0.21

” ”

1741

Montreal → Quebec

290

4

0.17

” ”

1743

Montreal → Quebec

290

4

0.17

” ”

1744

Montreal → Quebec

290

4

0.17

” ”

1745

Montreal → Quebec

290

4

0.17

” ”

1742

Rivière-des-Prairies → Petit-Pré

300

4

0.16

” ”

1744

Rivière-des-Prairies → Quebec

290

4

0.17

” ”

1742

Île Jésus → Petit-Pré

300

4

0.16

” ”

1743

Île Jésus → Quebec

290

4

0.17

” ”

1742

Lachenaie → Saint-Augustin

265

4

0.18

” ”

1742

Verchères → Petit-Pré

270

4

0.18

King’s store

1736–43 Montreal → ← Île Sainte-Hélène

1.5

4.5

” ”

1741

2

2

6.0

” ”

1740–41 Montreal → ← Terrebonne

35

4

0.7

” ”

1742

Terrebonne → ← Montreal

35

4

0.7

” ”

1737

Saint-Sulpice → Montreal

40

3

0.9

” ”

1737

Lachenaie → Montreal

30

3

1.2

” ”

1742

Lachenaie → Montreal

30

4

1.6

” ”

1742

Varennes → Montreal

20

4

2.4

King’s store

1736

Petit-Pré → Quebec

20

1

0.6

” ”

1739–40 Petit-Pré → Quebec

20

1.5

0.9

” ”

1741

Petit-Pré → Quebec

20

2

1.2

” ”

1742

Petit-Pré → Quebec

20

1.5

0.9

” ”

1743

Petit-Pré → ← Quebec

20

1.5

0.4

” ”

1742

Petit-Pré, Île d’Orléans → Quebec

?

4

?

” ”

1737

Rivière-du-Sud → Quebec

60

3

0.6

” ”

1743

Rivière-du-Sud → Quebec

60

3

0.6

” ”

1737

Beaumont → Quebec

20

1.75

1.0

” ”

1742

Cap Saint-Ignace → Quebec

65

4

0.7

30311_Dechene.indd 158

Montreal → ← Île Sainte-Hélène

2

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Transportation Costs for Wheat and Flour within the Colony 159

Note: This data is a sample derived from what I was able to collect, mainly from expense statements (bordereaux) for the colony (Appendix D). It may be summarized as follows: The perkilometre price of land transportation varied between 1.4 and 3.5 deniers with an average of 2. The per-kilometre price of river transportation over long distances (Montreal-Quebec) is uniform throughout the 1730s and declines thereafter, reaching a minimum of 0.16 deniers. The per-kilometre price of river transportation over medium distances (20–60 km) is more variable (0.6–2 deniers) and higher. Finally, transportation between Montreal and the Île Sainte-Helene mill is relatively expensive.

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A p p e n d ix C

Annual Wheat Price Fluctuations in the Vicinity of Montreal, 1675–1759

Me a n a n n ua l p r ic e o f wheat collected i n t h e   M o n t r e a l a n d Îl e Jés us sei gneuri es , in   s o l s to urnoi s Harvest year Mean price

Harvest year Mean price

Harvest year Mean price

1675

71

1695

60

1715

52.5

1676

71

1696

75

1716

60

1677

67.5

1697

52.5

1717

60.5

1678

64

1698

44

1718

60

1679

45

1699

90

1719

40

1680

45

1700

92

1720

35

1681

56

1701

45

1721

40

1682

46.5

1702

37.5

1722

45

1683

41

1703

30

1723

50

1684

37.5

1704

30

1724

40

1685

30

1705

30

1725

40

1686

31.5

1706

30

1726

40

1687

37.5

1707

45

1727

—

1688

41

1708

37.5

1728

60

1689

60

1709

45

1729

—

1690

112

1710

36

1730

40

1691

90

1711

30

1731

40

1692

117

1712

37.5

1732

60

1693

60

1713

45

1733

40

1694

37.5

1714

50

1734

35

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Annual Wheat Price Fluctuations in the Vicinity of Montreal 161

Harvest year Mean price

Harvest year Mean price

Harvest year Mean price

1735

35

1743

80

1751

100

1736

—

1744

60

1752

90

1737

80

1745

42

1753

60

1738

40

1746

40

1754

60

1739

38

1747

50

1755

62

1740

38

1748

55

1756

100

1741

52

1749

38

1757

170

1742

80

1750

60

1758

180

1759

300

Notes: Harvest year 1675 = 1 September 1675–31 August 1676. Pre-1719 prices stated in colonial currency are deflated as follows: for 1675–1712, 1 sol = 0.75 sol tournois; for 1713–18, 1 sol = 0.375 sol tournois. Sources: For the 1675–1718 prices, see Dechêne, Habitants and Merchants, 296. For the 1719–59 prices, see Dépatie, L’évolution, 71. My thanks for her kind permission to use this data.

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30311_Dechene.indd 162

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234

56 2,887 11,948 1,713

53

222

85

93

466 3,695

583

18

334

54

25

9,090

230 605

600

956 11,382 2,476

13,137

11,523 1,054

7,099

8,955

500

50

8 21,870 2,161

9

4,743

7,476

4,204

653

445

59

61

112

99

455

14,050 3,056 1,881

7,209 2,157 13,205 1,859 1,833 26,263 6,279

1,714 10,874 1,462

8,947 1,415 3,368 1,551 1,916 17,197 1,861

17,647

11,135

12,469

11,505

7,006

8,955

8,747

4,743

7,476

4,204

632

600

518

500

76

50

837

59

13

255

91

112

99

38,211 7,992

508

45,470 4,436 2,074

32,264 3,009 1,131

28,792 2,720

21,743 5,439

21,531 1,190

20,458 1,117

10,043

18,165

21,738

9,385

7,568

10,326

** Quebec procurement covers only the period from 1 January to 10 October 1747; Montreal procurement, from 1 January to 31 August 1747.

* Quantities of grain products converted into minots of wheat.

8 5,184

3,813

559 392

3,341 3,408 13,468 6,058 5,145 31,420 1,380 193

6,922

13

1747**

265

30

63 255

27

288

10,361 2,963

8,394

8,935

2,944

9,210

12,648

1746

52 2,353

17

94

2

95

76

478 1,175 3,784 2,720 6,910 15,067 1,148 478

4,252

156

314

545

92 4,642

1745

1744

18

1741

7,968

8,882

1740

10,188

2,944

1739

1742

9,210

1737

1743

51

11,100

1736

908

92

4,642

1735

6,122

6,122

1732

Total

Year

Montreal

Total Total Patent Other wheat Patent Other wheat Wheat Wheat flour flour Biscuit Bread products Peas Corn Wheat flour flour Biscuit Bread products Peas Corn products Peas Corn

Quebec (and Trois-Rivières)

Procurement of Grain, Peas, Flour, Biscuit, and Bread by the King’s Stores, 1732–47*

Appendi x D

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For 1747 at Montreal: “Préparatifs de guerre,” statement of procurement at Montreal, 1 January–31 August 1747 (as at 1 September 1747 at Montreal), C11A, 117: 165–7. As for the previous year, the individual transactions are not itemized but the overall data is more complete, even though it does not cover the whole year.

For 1747 at Quebec: Procurement, 1 January–10 October 1747 (as at 15 October 1747), C11A, 88: 248–54v.

For 1746 at Montreal: “Préparatifs de guerre,” Montreal procurement, 1 January–31 August 1746 (as at 1 September 1746 at Montreal), C11A, 117: 83–6v. Montreal procurement for the last four months of 1746 (as at 15 October 1747), C11A, 88: 255–7. The Montreal data for 1746 is very incomplete: wheat and bread purchases are missing and the names and details of the individual transactions are not noted.

For 1746 at Quebec: “État des vivres fournis par les particuliers ci-après nommés pour munir les magasins de Québec à l’occasion de la guerre, depuis le dernier décembre 1745 jusque et y compris le 20 octobre 1746” (as at 26 October 1746), C11A, 117: 68–74. Also, procurement for the Quebec store from 20 October to 31 December 1746 (as at 15 October 1747), C11A, 88: 248ff.

For 1745: Statement of revenues and expenses for the year 1745 (as at 18 September 1747), C11A, 115: 150–228.

For 1744: Statement of revenues and expenses for the year 1744 (as at 26 September 1746), C11A, 115: 65–118v.

For 1743: Statement of revenues and expenses for the year 1743 (as at 21 October 1744), C11A, 81: 455–500v.

For 1742: Statement of revenues and expenses for the year 1742 (as at 12 October 1743), C11A, 79: 363–430.

For 1741: Statement of revenues and expenses for the year 1741 (as at 20 October 1742), C11A, 114: 335–402v.

For 1740: Statement of revenues and expenses for the year 1740 (as at 20 October 1742), C11A, 114: 261–306v.

For 1739: Statement of revenues and expenses for the year 1739 (as at 20 October 1741), C11A, 114: 98–134. I have excluded several items purchased in 1738 that appear on this statement.

For 1737: Statement (bordereau) of revenues and expenses for the year 1737 (as at 1 October 1738), C11A, 114: 36–59.

For 1736: “Bordereau des dépenses qui excèdent en 1736 les fonds ordonnés par l’état du roi… lesquelles dépenses seront employées dans le compte de 1737…” (as at 1 October 1738), C 11A, 70: 71–89v.

For 1735: “Exercice de 1736… Excédents de 1735 rejetés sur 1736” (as at 1 October 1738), C11A, 114: 11–14. The 1735 statement, with Quebec’s procurement, has not survived. Montreal’s procurement seems to have been entirely deferred to 1736.

Sources: For 1732: “Dépenses de 1732” and “Bordereau par extrait de la recette et dépense contenue au compte de 1732” (as at 25 September 1734), AC, C11A, 113: 468–73v, 474–82. Only contains the suppliers’ names and the nature and price of the provisions. From this data, I was able to deduce the quantities.

A p p e n d ix E

Years between 1702 and 1760 in which Canada Imported Flour and Approximate Volume of these Imports

Year

Hundredweight (cwt)

1738

8,016

20,040

1743

6,120

15,300

1744

5,845

14,612

1752

 6,728*

1753

 2,340*

11,000

Equivalent in minots of wheat

27,500  (5,850)

1754

 3,474*

 (8,685)

1755

10,588*

(26,469)

1756

 4,554*

(11,385)

1757

24,984*

1758

59,339*

1759

25,002*

(62,505)

1760

11,700*

(29,250)

(62,460) 36,000

90,000

Note: The asterisked figures represent flour shipments registered in Bordeaux, the principal port supplying Canada during this period although not the only one. On a further note, not all these Bordeaux shipments reached their destination. The data are in 180-pound “barrels.” The figures in the third column, taken from the general correspondence, represent flour received at Quebec; the figures for 1738, 1743, and 1744 are certain, the others less so. Sources: Pritchard, “Ships, Men and Commerce,” for the years 1752–60, as given in Table 16, 501 (data from the registers of bids of the Admiralty of Bordeaux); Frégault, François Bigot, 1: 399, 2: 238, for the quantities received in 1752 and 1758, which Frégault derived from the general correspondence. For details of flour imported in 1738 from Dunkerque, Vannes, and Rochefort, see AC, C11A, 69: 184–6v, 203–7v, 210–14; 72: 79–81, statement of accounts. In 1743, Quebec received 1,520 cwt of American flour via Louisbourg and 4,600 cwt of Bordeaux flour, 600 cwt of it on the account of Dugard and Co.: C11A, 79: 62–7, 240–2, 250–6v, 260–2; 80: 3, 298–301v. In 1744, the bulk of the flour came from Bordeaux and the rest from Honfleur (shipped by Dugard). Another order, from the United States, was cancelled due to the war. See C11A, 81: 260–3, 300–8, 448–54; 83: 285v, statement of accounts; also B, 78: 5, and 82: 51.

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Appendix F

Supply of Flour and Peas to the Île Royale and Martinique Garrisons by the Intendancy of Quebec, 1729–51 (in cwt)

Île Royale Farine entière

Martinique

Year

Patent flour

Peas

Patent flour

1729

300

530

1730

700

530

1731

700

530

1732

700

530

1733

700

530

1734

2,490

530

1735

700

530

1736

700

530

1739

2,000

530

600

1740

700

530

601

1741

700

483

530

600

1742

700

897

853

1737 1738

1743 1744*

4,800

1745**

4,000

1,500

1746 1747 1748 1749***

10,000

1,500

1750***

13,324

2,300

1751***

6,500

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166

a p p e n di x f

Notes: *  Not including re-exports of French flour. Figure for flour is approximate and is an aggregate of different flour types. Figure for peas is an aggregate, including some corn. **  Aggregate figure, includes different flour types and also peas. These provisions did not reach Louisbourg before the onset of the siege. A part of the provisions was left on Île SaintJean and the rest brought back to Quebec. Note that shipments from Quebec to Acadia and Île Saint-Jean during and after the War of the Austrian Succession are not included in this table. ***  Figures for flour are aggregates composed of different flour types. Sources: These official shipments are discussed at length in the correspondence between the intendancy and the ministry. For a summary of the information along with references to this correspondence, see Lunn, “Economic Development,” 96–104. Other details are found in the following sources: tp1, s777, d 21, 188v, contract of 24 July 1729; AC, C11A, 70: 64–9, statement of revenues and expenses, in re the 1734 shipment; C11A, 81: 14–17v, Beauharnois and Hocquart to the minister, 12 October 1744, mentioning a shipment of flour equivalent to 10,000 or l2,000 minots of wheat, converted here into hundredweight; C11A, 83: 328–34, accounts with Guillimin for 1745.

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Notes

A b b re v i at i o ns f o r a rc hi va l an d o t h e r s o u rce s ac Archives des Colonies (m g 1) a n Archives nationales (France) as q Archives du Séminaire de Québec (housed at Musée de la civilisation, Québec) b Lettres envoyées ba nq - q Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec – Québec ba nq - v m  Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec – Vieux-Montréal c11a Correspondance générale d2d Listes générales de personnel militaire et civil dcb Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 12 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966–) f2b Commerce aux Colonies f3 Collection Moreau de Saint-Méry g1 Registres de l’état civil et recensements g2 Greffes des tribunaux de Louisbourg et du Canada g3 Notariat jdcs Jugements et délibérations du Conseil souverain de la Nouvelle-France l ac  Library and Archives Canada rapq Rapport de l’archiviste de la province de Québec

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168

Notes to pages 4–9

I nt roduc ti o n  1 Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime, 226.   2 See, for example, Hamelin, Économie et société, 62–71; Crowley, “Thunder Gusts”; or John F. Bosher and Jean-Claude Dubé, “François Bigot,” in DCB , 4: 65–78.  3 Meuvret, Le problème des subsistances, 1(1): 24.  4 Meuvret, Le problème des subsistances. Volume 3, Le commerce des grains et la conjoncture, has been particularly useful for my ­purposes; it is unfortunate that the author never got to write the last part of his work on the grain police and the royal administration. See also Kaplan, Bread and Provisioning Paris; Letaconnoux, Les subsistances; Lefebvre, Les paysans and Études orléanaises, vol. 2; Saint-Jacob, Les paysans; Meyer, La noblesse bretonne.   5 The royal ordinances and the decrees of the parlements gradually ­contributed to this standardization: Meuvret, “Le commerce des grains,” 184.

C ha p t e r o n e   1 ac , g1, vols. 460–1.   2 See Appendix A for definitions of units of measure and a discussion of the conversion system adopted for the purposes of this study.   3 Jugements et délibérations du Conseil souverain de la Nouvelle-France (Quebec, 1885–89) [jdcs ], 4: 506–8; ac, c 1 1 a , 24: 336, memorial by the intendant dated 1706.   4 ac , c 1 1a, 76: 77, excerpt from the records of the king’s stores in Quebec, 1741. When a soldier went to war, he received 2 pounds of bread, the same quantity as a militiaman.   5 On the daily lives of peasants, see Kalm, Voyage, 397, 415, 633. “Milk is to the country habitants what chestnuts are to the residents of Limousin”: Navières, “Un voyage,” 30. Pea soup replaced bread when wheat grew scarce, according to Pierre Rémy, the first parish priest of Lachine: ba nq - v m , t l 2 , 1 9 7 1 – 0 0 – 0 0 0 \ 1 1 5 7 7 , “Procès contre Jean-Baptiste Pottier,” 4 May 1693 to 24 March 1695, petition of May 1693. This last source contains information on dietary habits.   6 For comparison, see Meyer, La noblesse bretonne, 460; Pruitt, “Self-Sufficiency.”   7 In 1744, day labourers represented only about 10 per cent of heads of households in Quebec. Even if certain artisans who mainly worked

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Notes to pages 9–11

169

for others are added to this number, the proportion of wage workers remains low. See Dechêne, “Quelques aspects,” 498–500. For a good analysis of consumer habits during a subsequent era, see Fyson, “Du pain au madère.”   8 Consider the procurement system of the Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, described in Rousseau, L’œuvre de chère. On the nature of urban markets in France, see Meuvret, Le problème des subsistances, 3(1): 154.   9 ac , c 11a, 118, passim, general expenses of the colony, supporting documents, 1746–52. The same applies to provisions for war parties: there was not much corn, and all of it was allotted to the Indigenous people: ibid., 115: 254–76v. banq-vm, P218, 1972–00–144/1, reel 3707, account books of Alexis Monière, indicates a few corn ­shipments for the posts but none for the canoeists’ rations. 10 See, for example, Troyes, Journal, 25–6; Raudot, Relation par lettres, 8. Those who told the Swedish botanist in 1749 that the voyageurs were living on corn and bear fat were just adding a picturesque touch, since this was no longer the diet of the majority; see Kalm, Voyage, 473–5. 11 See Allaire, “Les engagements,” for a critical analysis of the sources. Note that the “merchant voyageurs” (junior partners in the enterprise) and various post employees also had to be fed. The garrisons were on the king’s account, hence not included in my calculations, although in some cases the farmer at the post was required to supply them with food. There was a small amount of agriculture at Detroit but, to my knowledge, very little at the other posts. 12 This is the same figure Hocquart put forward, undoubtedly having obtained it by reckoning a per capita consumption of 12 minots per year. Thus, the concordance is merely apparent: ac, c 1 1 a , 67: 34–8, Beauharnois to Hocquart, 30 October 1737. The authorities, who did not keep track of supplies to the fisheries and the pays d’en haut fur trade, were incapable of estimating their volume. In times of penury, there was occasional talk of suspending supplies to the fisheries, but never to the fur trade. 13 ac , c11a, 76: 272–7v, memorial by Commissary Varin, 16 February 1741. 14 Ibid. Also, Archives de la Bastille, 12146, fols. 79–81, “Mémoire pour Jean-Baptiste Martel… cy-devant garde-magasin du roi à Montréal”; Malouin, Description et détails, 236–9. 15 The figures are taken from Pritchard, “Ships, Men and Commerce.” For a brief but good overview of this trade and its fragilities, see Miquelon, New France, 139–44.

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170

Notes to pages 11–14

16 There are also figures scattered throughout the official correspondence. In 1709, Canada shipped 9,590 cwt to the other colonies, or the equivalent of 23,970 minots of wheat, and the following year nearly the same quantity: Rapport de l’archiviste de la province de Québec [rapq ] (1942–43), 419, 441–3; rapq (1946–47), 379, correspondence between Governor Vaudreuil and the court. 17 Pritchard, “Pattern”; idem, Ships, Men and Commerce; Brisson, La charpenterie, 91–100. 18 The intendant was sending 700 cwt of flour to Louisbourg annually in the 1730s, and 600 cwt a year to Saint-Pierre (Martinique) from 1739 onward. See Appendix F. 19 Malouin, Description et détails, 33–5. On the packing of flour and ­biscuit, see infra, ch. 5. 20 ac , f 2b, 11, passim, various itemized statements of merchandise and basic food items loaded in the port of Quebec. See also Moore, “The Other Louisbourg.” 21 ac , f 3, 11: 110–11v, ordinance issued by Dupuy, 29 September 1757, about a contract concerning a shipment of peas to Marseille; and f2 b , 11. See also Moore, “The Other Louisbourg.” 22 See Meuvret, Le problème des subsistances, 1(1): 208–11. The author contrasts the regions selling only their surpluses with those that exported their whole production of soft wheat, such as Brittany, where the peasants lived on secondary grains. For this reason, supply was much more stable in these latter regions.

C h a p t e r t wo   1 For an overview of the historiography on this issue, see Dessureault, “L’égalitarisme paysan,” and also Desbarats, “Agriculture.”   2 Dessureault, “L’égalitarisme paysan,” effectively demonstrates this and it is confirmed by the doctoral work of Sylvie Dépatie, “L’évolution,” and Thomas Wien, “Peasant Accumulation.” See also Michel, “Endettement,” 175n14.  3 Dechêne, Habitants and Merchants, 281–2.   4 Even at 25 per cent of households, the proportion of Canadian ­peasants under the self-sufficiency threshold would be much lower than the figure for France. However, the proportion of those right on the dividing line – i.e., those who sold wheat cheap and bought it dear – was perhaps higher in the colony. See Aymard, “Autoconsommation.” For a comparison with New England, see Pruitt, “Self-Sufficiency.”

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Notes to pages 15–17

171

  5 This is true for the largest part of the territory, where settlement spread out in a continuous band. A few geographically isolated or very small settlements are exceptions to this rule; for example, the posts scattered between Rivière-du-Loup and Rimouski, which had to be supplied by the upstream parishes. In 1731, the intendant saw fit to intervene in the distribution of wheat among Baie-Saint-Paul, Les Éboulements, and Île-aux-Coudres, three very isolated parishes: banq -q, e1, s 1, P2291, ordinance of 14 April 1731. Also of note is the distribution of 345 minots of seed wheat in 1738, in nine p ­ arishes of the government of Quebec that had been emptied of their harvests by requisitions. Given the paltry quantities at issue and the peculiar circumstances, this episode does not cast doubt on the grain autonomy of these parishes: ac , c11a, 73: 111–12, and infra, ch. 6.  6 ba nq-q, tp1, s 777, d96, plaintiff’s memorandum of instruction to his attorney, 8 February 1738.   7 Practices described in Meuvret, “Monetary Circulation,” 98–9. See also Desbarats, “Agriculture,” 15–16.   8 These examples are taken from records of proceedings held in the seigneurial jurisdiction of Boucherville, 1739–43: asq , Fonds VigerVerreau 41. The defendant, in turn, often produced a memorandum of items, work, or money that he had already provided in return, indicating that there had been a sequence of exchanges between the parties. Money appears in a great many ­settlements as one among several methods of payment.   9 On this subject, see Wien, Peasant Accumulation, ch. 5. One-third of obligations between peasants recorded in after-death inventories, as well as 22 per cent of unpaid wages, relate to advances of wheat or peas (p. 233). 10 The word mainly appears in the minutes of trials in which habitants pled their own case. See, for example, the register of the seigneurial jurisdiction of Boucherville, 3 November 1742 (supra, note 8), or banq-vm , tl4, s 11, d14, fol. 45, 28 July 1733. 11 Registre des audiences de Boucherville, 14 July 1742. 12 Archives du diocèse de Québec, dossier Deschambault 1–7b, Ménage to the vicar general, 23 January 1762. 13 Archives paroissiales de Saint-Nicolas, “État du spirituel,” 1742, cited in Cliche, Pratiques de dévotion, 76. 14 Giovanni Levi demonstrates this by comparing the price of arable land in sales between relatives, between neighbours, and to others. Economic choices were subordinate to the social world, to kinship, marriage, and commercial relations: Levi, Le pouvoir au village, 94–5.

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In the case at hand, one would need to know the relationships between lending and borrowing families in order to discover the strategies behind these transactions. 15 Michel, “Endettement.” 16 Work done to date has focused on market transactions. See Michel, “Un marchand rural”; St-Georges, “Commerce.” 17 The analysis covers approximately one-sixth of the value of amounts receivable and payable contained in 219 inventories from 1720 to 1775, these being the cases in which the origin of the obligation has been identified. Advances of grain account for 6 per cent of payables and 48 per cent of receivables: Dépatie, L’évolution, 353–60. 18 Including four sales reported without details. Note that the sample of 104 respondents does not include a certain number of millers and parish priests who came with the habitants to report their grain holdings. banq-q, tp1–s 777–d21 . 19 It is an interesting example because the 1728 harvest had not been exceptionally poor. The price of wheat did rise from 2 to 3 livres ­during the winter, but as usual the colony managed to survive on its reserves until December of the following year. 20 See Greer, Peasant, Lord and Merchant; Dépatie, Lalancette, and Dessureault, Contributions, and also the works on indebtedness to merchants cited in the preceding notes. 21 Provost, ed., Le Séminaire de Québec, 136–40; asq , Polygraphie 5, nos. 11, 16, 22–3, and Polygraphie 7, no. 23; Frégault, “L’Église et la société canadienne,” in Le xviii e siècle canadien, 86–158; Desautels, Manuel des curés. The minimum subsistence income of a parish priest was established at 400 livres and the king topped up tithes where they fell below this rather high bar. The Church in Canada managed to hold onto these bonuses until the end of the regime, although priests serving two parishes combined their revenues. A final note is that the tithe was covered by a thirty-year prescription, whereas priests in France had only one year in which to claim their due. 22 According to several sources, only one-fifth of parishes had a resident priest in 1730 – an incorrect statement once cited by this author herself: Dechêne, Habitants and Merchants, 262; Jaenen, The Role of the Church, 90; Miquelon, New France, 234. 23 ac , d 2d, c. 1730, “Liste des curés de Canada et du revenu de chaque curé en dîme par an.” Did the intendant – who opposed an increase in tithes – overvalue the revenues to add weight to his arguments, as

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Thomas Wien suggests? There is no certainty of this, since the figures, applicable to the whole colony, correspond quite closely to the volume of wheat harvested in 1731, which appears in the census. However, there are sizable discrepancies at the parish level; for example, a 50 per cent overage in the rural part of Montreal Island. And, since the censuses themselves must be interpreted with caution, the comparison is not very useful. Wien, “Visites paroissiales.” 24 This data is from the list given by Marcel Trudel in L’Église canadienne, 1: 91–112, and a draft report from the bishop of Quebec to the keeper of the seals (1756): asq , Polygraphie 7, no. 23. 25 As Christine Hudon notes in regard to a previous era in “Carrières et vie matérielle.” These priests had considerable costs but were rewarded with relatively high revenues. 26 ba nq-vm , cn 601, s 108, 7 May 1760, will dated 12 January 1757. La Coudraye was the parish priest of Varennes. See also Wien, Peasant Accumulation, 189–91, for the fortunes of the parish priests of Rivière-du-Sud. 27 Some priests who collected the tithe in the field claimed that they did not. “Since it is in winter when the merchants buy their grain, and when the habitants deliver their grain to them over the ice and snow, and arrange payment, the parish priests are idle at this time; they can neither sell nor deliver anything, for they have nothing and… can know neither the quantity of grain they will obtain nor the quality it will possess”: as q, Polygraphie 5, no. 11, n.d. (early 1700s). Yet the big grain shipments took place when shipping resumed after Easter. In addition, the parish priests had good knowledge of the state of the harvest, since they sometimes sued habitants for specific quantities. As a result, they were able to make agreements with merchants during the winter. See, for example, banq-vm, tl4 ,s1 1 ,d2 6 , contract between Louis-Marie-Melchior de Kerberio, priest of Berthier-enHaut, and Joseph Durocher, merchant, signed 21 January 1750, for supply of 500 minots of wheat and peas. Quality could pose a problem, but all grain consolidators were in the same position. Another clergy memorandum dated 1737 specifies that when collecting a tithe of one-thirteenth of the harvest in the field, the parish priests “will arrange” for barns to be built, an expense spared them by the Easter deliveries until that point; asq, Polygraphie 5, no. 22. In short it is hard to believe in the good faith of these documents’ authors. 28 banq-q, tp1–s777–d96, lawsuit before the Conseil supérieur, 1731. 29 ba nq -q, tl1–s 11–s s 2–d627.

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Notes to pages 19–21

30 Dupuy, De la Révolution, 325. I have not tried to identify the social class origins of all the parish priests appearing on the lists of 1731 and 1760, but the following names are found: Duchouquet, Perrault, Pétrimoulx, Papin, Gaillard, Petit, Fréchet, Poulin, Maugé, Gamelin, and Jorian, as well as the names of officer families (for example, La Corne) involved in commerce. When the young Joseph-François Perrault took possession of the vicarage on Île Dupas, his father was one of the largest grain buyers in the region: DCB , 3: 551. 31 ba nq -q, tp1–s 777–d21, general inventory of wheat, 7 June– 5 August 1729. 32 Cliche, Les pratiques, 102–27. 33 ba nq -vm , cn 601, s 111, obligation of Charles Demers, Montreal baker, to the vestry of Boucherville for the remainder of 84 minots of wheat, 30 March 1720. banq-q, e1, s1 ,p2 7 0 5 , ordinance of 14 October 1734 further to a petition by Joachim Fornel, parish priest of Saint-Pierre-de-la-Rivière-du-Sud (Saint-Pierre-Montmagny), acting for the vestry, against a parish resident named Suzor for payment of 200 livres, the value of 100 minots purchased for Jacques Gourdeau of Quebec. See the discussion of wheat received at La Prairie and the examples of on-site redistribution in Lavallée, La Prairie, 135–6; also, Greer, Peasant, Lord and Merchant, 141; “Livre de revenues et dépenses de l’église Sainte-Anne” [Beaupré], rapq (1967), 173–244; and the revenue and expense statements for Notre-Dame church, Montreal. 34 Mathieu and Brisson, “La vallée laurentienne.” My figures are based on Figure 2 of this paper, which analyzes the series of seigneurial ­censuses (aveu et dénombrement) drawn up, for the most part, between 1724 and 1730. It covers 180 seigneuries, or the territory occupied under the French regime minus the seigneury of SaintSulpice. See also Mathieu and Laberge, “La diversité.” 35 This rough-and-ready estimate is derived from the 1765 census. See Landry, “Étude critique du recensement”; Beauregard, “Géographie historique,” 55. Richard Colebrook Harris estimates that the population of only a dozen fiefs exceeded one hundred families in 1760, but he underestimates the development and profitability of seigneurial property: The Seigneurial System, 79. 36 Rental rates varied from one seigneury to another, and from one period to another in the same seigneury. Almost all the dues on eighteenth-century Montreal Island were payable in wheat at a rate of 7.5 minots per 100 arpents. In contrast, rent on Île Jésus was

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stipulated in cash only (excluding the period from 1742 to 1752), which does not mean that it was never paid in wheat. See Dechêne, “L’évolution,” 151–2; Dépatie, Lalancette, and Dessureault, Contributions. 37 Chaumaux, “Instructions,” 207–11. 38 The seigneur could, of course, demand cash, as occurred at SaintDenis around 1772, when habitants were forced to borrow money from the local merchant to pay their rents: Greer, Peasant, Lord and Merchant, 285n52, 285n53. 39 The personal relations binding the seigneurs, and even their tenant farmers, to the censitaires meant that they were obliged to contribute to the subsistence of the parish. As Jean Meuvret notes, “To lend grain was a route to prestige, to power, but also, ipso facto, a means of exploitation”: Meuvret, Le problème des subsistances, 3(1): 41–6 (quote on 42). The inventory of 1729 shows that the seigneurs, like the parish priests and the wealthier peasants, extended advances to needy families: ba nq-q, tp1–s 77 7 –d2 1 . Ecclesiastical seigneurs were particularly attentive to local needs, while bearing in mind that “alms and business are two different things and that each has to be practised separately,” as the procurator of the Séminaire de Montréal put it: Chaumaux, “Instructions.” 40 Jacques Saint-Pierre reports that in the seigneuries of Beaumont, La Durantaye, and Saint-Vallier, censitaires were obligated by their deeds of grant to give the seigneur first choice of lumber and food crops offered for sale. This abusive clause was quite common in the case of lumber but exceptional in the case of wheat, the main crop in question. But how was it applied in practice? Were this region’s farmers really forced to sell their surpluses to the seigneur? This seems unlikely. Be that as it may, it appears to have been an attempt to monopolize the harvest: Saint-Pierre, “L’aménagement,” 95. 41 Boutaric, Traité des droits seigneuriaux, 368. 42 In the seventeenth century, the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice did not hesitate to assess fines and confiscate goods from Montreal merchants who used mills other than its own. The merchants’ protests became louder at the start of the eighteenth century when they began milling flour for large-scale trade and using the new mill built by the Baron de Longueuil on Île Sainte-Hélène. How can the share of the proceeds sold on-site be distinguished? Pierre-François Magnien, procurator of the Sulpician seminary in Paris, counselled prudence, since wheat purchased outside the seigneury to make bread (or biscuit or flour) sold

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elsewhere eluded the seigneurial monopoly. No subsequent lawsuits against merchants have been found: lac , mg1 7 –a 7 –2 , 1: 508–11, letter from Magnien, 1717. In 1726, the Montreal seigneurs brought garnishment proceedings against two bakers who had taken their wheat to the Charron brothers’ mill. The defendants argued that they were not subject to the same charges as the censitaires, but the seigneurs won because the bread was intended for consumption within the seigneury: banq-vm , tl4, s 1, d3 2 6 4 , 31 May 1726. I was unable to find the judgment itself, however. 43 Another example: all customs in France limited banalité to a distance of 1 league (about 5 kilometres), while Canadian censitaires remained bound by it even if they had to travel 3 leagues or more to get to the mill. Cugnet, Traité, 38–9. 44 Petition from the habitants of La Prairie to their seigneur, Pierre-René Floquet, superior of the Jesuits in Montreal: “Your mill [at Sault-auRécollet] is dead to everyone in winter… in the summer it lacks water,” and the windmill was no better: ba nq-v m, tl4 ,s1 ,d6 1 2 2 , and cited in full in Lavallée, La Prairie, 91–2, which situates the case in 1765. Few were the seigneuries in which censitaires did not state such grievances. See, for example, banq-q, e1 ,s1 ,p2 2 3 8 , e 1 ,s 1 , p2532, and e1, s 1, p2996, ordinances of 22 November 1730, 20 March 1733, and 20 March 1738 in re the Neuville mill; e 1 ,s 1 , p1978, ordinance of 10 July 1728 in re the Sainte-Anne-dela-Pérade mill. Whence the habitants’ sardonic term trompe-souris (“starve-a-mouse”) to refer to these mills. 45 The Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice often resorted to such arrangements for the small mills on Montreal Island. After almost a century of bad experiences, the bursar concluded that it was more advantageous to relieve the millers of the expense of making repairs, or else the mills would never work properly: “Notes sur les moulins et les meuniers,” Archives du Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice, cited in Objois, “Les meuniers,” 197. 46 The calculation is of necessity rough, but it does help avoid misleading generalizations, such as the oft-cited model by Richard Colebrook Harris, which puts all the seigneurs on the same footing when evaluating the costs and revenues of the mills: Harris, The Seigneurial System, 72–5, 78. I assume here that all the wheat eaten by the peasants went through the mill, but there was also broth made from hand-crushed grain, cheaper than bread, which subtracts a quantity impossible to determine. This means that the discrepancy between the average receipts could be even wider.

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47 Roy, Histoire, 2: 140. Wheat was then worth 2 livres per minot; I assume that the seigneur’s share accounts for two-thirds of the mill toll, and that the period of operation of the large mill was ending or had already ended. I have written in the past that the Montreal seigneury’s mills were poorly maintained and hence quite unprofitable in the seventeenth century. But I never claimed, as Dale Miquelon asserts, that banalité was in and of itself unprofitable – quite the contrary. Therefore, to avoid any misunderstandings, I wish to clarify that a second-rate mill yielding 150–200 minots for the seigneur, year in and year out, after netting out the miller’s share and the minimum maintenance costs, was obviously profitable. But these were meagre profits as compared with the profits earned by owners who operated their mills as a business. Miquelon, New France, 197–8 and 317n24. 48 The mill was built c. 1717. See the description in Kalm, Voyage, 190. In the 1730s and 1740s, the bulk of the wheat purchased by the king’s stores in Montreal was milled at Île Sainte-Hélène. The importance of these facilities is stressed in Bouchette, Topographical Description, 169. 49 ba nq-q, tp1, s 777, d21. See biography of Lepage in DCB , 3: 420–2. The author puts more emphasis on the financial difficulties than on the mill’s incontrovertible success. It was sold in 1745 to Louis de La Corne, an officer in the colonial regular troops, who continued to turn a tidy profit from it. See the observations made by Louis Franquet in 1753 in Voyages, 157. 50 In 1731, there were seven windmills and five water mills on Montreal Island: rapq (1941), 401–15, seigneurial census; Kalm, Voyage, 466–7; Objois, “Les meuniers”; Beutler, “Les moulins.” This last paper poses problems, however. The water mill at Sault-au-Récollet, with three sets of grinding machinery, is not mentioned among those built before 1760, and the figures cited, without scholarly apparatus, on mill output between 1670 and 1760 are inaccurate. It is highly implausible that the maximum yield should have occurred in 1708–09, when the flour industry was just getting started, and given that the number of censives nearly doubled between that date and the end of the French regime. And this excludes the wheat from the Saint-Sulpice seigneury that was added later. 51 Baillargeon, Le Séminaire de Québec, sporadic notes on the mills, ­particularly at pp. 228–31. 52 banq-q, tp1, s 777, d21, fols. 178–91. The grain and flour still stored in July and August does not take account of the quantities milled since the start of the season, but the fact that the

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Notes to pages 24–5

thirty-four merchants and bakers interviewed mentioned only these mills is significant. 53 The descriptions provided by Pehr Kalm and the bursar of the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice, as well as those found sporadically in notarized documents, may be compared with the descriptions of mills in the Paris region given in Kaplan, Provisioning Paris, ch. 6. See also Malouin, Description et détails. 54 Sieves are mentioned as being among the utensils used by the small mills on Montreal Island (and elsewhere, no doubt), but they did not do a very good job of cleaning the grain. 55 Kaplan, Provisioning Paris, 77–8. 56 ac , f 3, 12: 58–61, royal ordinance, 18 May 1732; banq-q, e 1 ,s 1 , p2488 and p2588, ordinances by the intendant, 29 September 1732 and 8 February 1734. The mill owners were compensated for the cost of the device and the expense of operating it by collecting 6 deniers per minot screened, over and above the mill toll collected on the net grain: ac, c11a, 57: 197, 15 October 1732. 57 Duhamel du Monceau, Traité. The author presents his research on a new type of granary designed “for the benefit of the Marine.” See also Kaplan, Provisioning Paris, 69. Canadian sieves like the one described by Duhamel were hand-actuated. Sieving was later incorporated into the mill mechanism, and the prize in question was perhaps related to this innovation. Historians have always presented the introduction of cylindrical sieves in Canada as a measure designed to counter the laxity typical of the colony, so as to attain the same quality of flour as in the mother country. This is an error of perspective, for until 1760, only the principal ports of the realm had the capacity to prepare a product that would keep well over long distances and in the heat, thanks to the combined efforts of the millers and coopers in the purveyors’ employ. 58 These being the two mills of the Séminaire de Québec at Beaupré, the Charest mills at Pointe-Lévy and Saint-Nicolas, the Gaillard mills at Sainte-Famille, and the Jesuit mill at Beauport. In the government of Montreal, the four sieves went to the mills on Île Sainte-Hélène and Île Jésus and at Lachine and Terrebonne. 59 In 1729, the mill was serving the habitants of Lanoraie, Berthier, and Île Dupas and also those of the côtes of Sorel, Yamaska, and Saint-François across Lake St Pierre: banq-q, tp1 ,s7 7 7 ,d2 1 . 60 Russ, C.J., “Péan de Livaudière, Jacques-Hugues,” DCB , 4: 665–8; ba nq -vm , cn 601, s 202, 21 June and 7 December 1741, 7 October

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1744, and 20 December 1745, leases on Chambly mills by JeanBaptiste Boucher de Niverville and Louise de Ramezay; c n6 0 1 ,s108, leases on Berthier mills by P.-N. Courthiau, 10 May 1745, 28 December 1747, 30 August 1753, and 22 October 1759. Boucher de la Bruère, “Le ‘livre de raison.’” One or two other mills in the vicinity of Quebec should perhaps be added to this list, such as the one built by Antoine Juchereau Duchesnay at Beauport. 61 ba nq -vm , cn 601, s 202, lease on Île Sainte-Hélène mills by Charles Lemoine, governor of Montreal, to François Cherrier, a Longueuil notary, who was also the lessor of the domain, 23 April 1750, and renewal, 16 August 1753; Lemoine, “Une société seigneuriale”; Baillargeon, Le Séminaire de Québec, 334–6; Dépatie, “La seigneurie de l’Île Jésus au xvi i i e siècle,” in Dépatie, Lalancette, and Dessureault, Contributions, 57–61. The leasing of seigneurial rights was not in itself new. By the seventeenth century, the Montreal seigneurs were holding auctions to choose leaseholders, and there are surely other examples. The new features were the large size of the leased properties, consolidated into a single lease; the presence of merchants among the leaseholders, and cash payment of rent in whole or in large part. 62 This statement contradicts Allan Greer’s demonstration that half the peasants’ surpluses (three-fourths when the mill toll is added) were absorbed by dues. Two factors contribute, in my view, to exaggerating the amount deducted: first, the calculation is based on the production of the seigneury of Saint-Ours in 1765, shortly after a long war that had interrupted the clearing of land, so that the high proportion of new colonists among the habitants included in the census lowers the average; second, the consumption estimate is very high. The same calculation for a seigneury under cultivation since the seventeenth century would undoubtedly yield a very different result. Greer, Peasant, Lord and Merchant, 136–7. 63 Michel, “Le livre de compte,” 371, 375. The author specifies that the “general ledger” is rarely sufficient to retrace advances of wheat by merchants, but he believes them to have been rare, since, as he writes, needy habitants appealed first to their relatives and friends. I do not doubt this, and the loans of wheat by peasants are there in the archives to prove it. But if these relatives and friends were indebted to the merchant, would they not have preferred to pay their debts and let the merchant extend the loan? See also Michel, “Endettement,” 173. Another paper (albeit based on an accounting

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Notes to pages 26–8

journal) contradicts my hypothesis, since the author does not speak of deliveries by proxy: Desrosiers, “Un aperçu des habitudes.” 64 Since some of his customers were based in rural areas, Alexis Monière had to accept payments in wheat, which he had them bring directly to artisans and other urban customers as a means of cancelling debts on the books: Dechêne, Habitants and Merchants, 97–100. 65 Allan Greer has demonstrated this for a subsequent period: Greer, Peasant, Lord and Merchant, 164ff. 66 Contrary to Ouellet’s unsupported assertion in “Libéré ou exploité,” 346.

C h a p t e r t h re e  1 Nouvelle-France, Ordonnances, 1: 100–1, ordinance by Intendant Talon, 20 January 1671.   2 The following sources were used: Nouvelle-France, Édits; Canada, Conseil supérieur de Québec, Jugements et délibérations; Roy, Inventaire des jugements; Roy, ed., Ordonnances; Massicotte, Répertoire. These sources provide access to all the important regulations concerning the grain trade published by the intendant, or by the Conseil supérieur in conjunction with the intendant, until 1708, or by the intendant acting alone after that. The regulations of the royal courts of first instance of Quebec and Montreal do not form continuous series. Those of the Montreal jurisdiction, inventoried in part by Massicotte, are scattered in the court records, boxes of isolated documents (pièces détachées), and registers of insinuations (a term covering a wide range of public acts) for the years 1743–60. The police register of the provost court of Quebec only covers the period 1746–51.   3 The market would remain in Lower Town. The governor’s regulation of 23 March 1673 (the colony had no intendant at that time) was registered by the Conseil and partially enforced, as witness the aldermen’s petition of 15 April: they offered, while awaiting the covered market, to build stalls and shops at their own expense and to collect rent from them, and this was in fact done. Colbert blamed Frontenac for not publishing this regulation in concert with the Conseil, and especially for proposing to place the police under the aldermen’s responsibility. The regulation, which was not revoked, would be subsumed by the regulation of 1676. Roy, ed., Ordonnances, 1: 130–43; rapq (1926– 27), 27–79, correspondence between Colbert and Frontenac, letters of 13 November 1673, 17 April 1674, and 14 November 1674.

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 4 jdcs 3: 591–3, 3: 869–72, and 4: 159–65, decisions of 5 December 1691, 31 March 1694, and 22 February 1698.  5 jdcs 2: 63–73. See, for example, the case of Jean Mauvide, who, when paying a debt of 1,142 livres in wheat, contended that the offer of 50 sols per minot made by his creditor, Pierre Trottier Desauniers, was below the going price. Ten certificates from merchants were needed in order to rule on the case: ba nq-q, e1,21,p2102, ordinance of 29 April 1730. The proof was even trickier in cases of arrears, the most common scenario: Dickinson, Justice et Justiciables, 48–9. The word mercuriale also denoted police assemblies, which, as discussed below, were held more or less regularly in the colony. The ­double meaning could lead to confusion.   6 These “general police regulations” consisted of forty-two articles covering all aspects of the administration. For an overview, see Dickinson, “Réflexions.” Note, however, that this was a regulation of the Conseil souverain and not, per Dickinson, an ordinance by the intendant. Without denying the intendant’s influence over the Conseil, it is important to observe that the intendant’s monopolization of legislative functions was a later phenomenon. Nearly all grain-related legislation issued from the Conseil until the early eighteenth century.   7 Detail added in the ordinance issued by the baillif of Montreal on 24 September 1676. See infra, note 9.   8 This prohibition was repeated at least eight times: jdcs 3: 591–3, 3: 869–72, 4: 159–65, and 5: 233–40, decisions of 5 December 1691, 31 March 1694, 22 February 1698, and 1 February 1706; ba nq-q, e1,s1,p458 and p576, ordinances by the intendant of 23 October 1708 and 15 October 1709; ac, f3, 13: 205, 220, ordinance by the lieutenant-general of the provost court of Quebec, 19 November 1745 and 13 April 1746; Massicotte, Répertoire, 112, ordinance issued by the lieutenant-general of the jurisdiction of Montreal, 11 January 1748.   9 Petition by Gabriel Souart, superior of the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice, 5 August 1676, followed by Duchesneau’s ordinance and that of the bailiff dated 24 September 1676, which reiterates the Conseil’s regulations: Archives du Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice, Paris, cahiers Faillon, h 6 2 9 and g g 7. These documents do not appear in Massicotte’s inventory. The ordinance issued by Intendant Jacques Raudot on 22 June 1706 has misled several historians, who have derived from it the highly implausible inference that there was no market in Montreal before that date.

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Notes to pages 30–3

10 From 1689 on, the square was also used for troop exercises on nonmarket days, until a parade ground was built near Notre-Dame Church in 1741. Note, too, that this square was always known as the market square and that the name “Place Royale” used in today’s tourist literature dates from the nineteenth century. Poirier, “Fortifications,” 54. An ordinance dating from 1722 officialized the Trois-Rivières market, which had surely also existed for much longer: Édits, 3: 443. 11 La Mare, Traité. The best analysis of the French grain police is Kaplan, Bread, 1–96 in particular. See also Kaplan, Provisioning Paris, and in particular ch. 1, “Market Principle and Marketplace.” 12 Letaconnoux, Les subsistances, 86. 13 Meuvret, Le problème des subsistances, 1(1): 22–3. 14 jdcs 2: 109, decision of 15 February 1677. 15 jdcs 3: 327–31, decision of 21 March 1689. 16 Ibid., 869–72, decision of 31 March 1694, and jdcs 5: 233–40, decision of 1 February 1706. This second regulation delayed the admission of tavern-keepers and hucksters to the market by one hour. 17 Kaplan, Bread, 66–8. 18 jdcs 4: 506–8, decision of 22 November 1700. As always, the intendant’s opinion prevailed even though most councillors secretly supported the attorney general. 19 jdcs 5: 233–40, police regulation of 1 February 1706 making several minor amendments to thirteen sections of the 1676 regulation. 20 Roy, Inventaire des jugements, 2: 57, decision of 26 November 1728. 21 The affair was recounted in great detail by Attorney General LouisGuillaume Verrier, who likewise disapproved of the decision but did not venture to intervene, having only been in Canada for three weeks. He contented himself with searching the archives of the Conseil for the precedents everyone claimed were there, only to conclude that there were none: ac , f3, 2: 475–86v. 22 ac , f 3, 2: 273–5v, copy of a letter from the Baron de Longueuil, ­governor of Montreal, probably addressed to the intendant, c. 1727. For other accounts gesturing toward the same confused notion of the ­legislation, see infra, ch. 9. 23 See infra, ch. 5. 24 “There is wheat in the government of Montreal,” wrote the governor in July 1729, “for the habitants are bringing it to market.” Pierre Dufort of Rivière-des-Prairies stated during the inventory taken that year that he had sold 50 minots “at the Montreal market,” but all the other respondents mentioned sales to merchants or “various

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persons of Montreal,” an indication of a preponderance of private transactions: banq-q, tp1, s 777, d2 1 , fols. 175ff. See also ac, c 1 1 a , 68: 56–70, letter from the financial commissary of 10 May 1737 explaining that he had required wheat to be sold in Montreal below the going rate on two or three consecutive market days so as “to remove the idea of a shortage from people’s minds.” 25 The illegality of forestalling (adventement) should not be interpreted as a general obligation to exhibit wheat on the market square. For example, the king’s attorney of the provost court pressed charges against Augustin Langlois of Saint-Antoine and a Quebec baker named Voyer for having haggled on the riverbank over flour that Langlois was taking to market: banq -q, tl5 ,d1 6 2 6 , 28 May 1751. But Voyer would not have committed an offence if he had arranged for the sale in advance. 26 John A. Dickinson observes that occurrences of the designation “Prévôté et Amirauté de Québec” can be found in the court records as early as 1701. Established by letters patent on 12 January 1717, the admiralty court held its first session in April 1719. The special lieutenant of the provost court, formerly responsible for maritime affairs, was named the lieutenant-general of the new court. Very little remains of the archives of the admiralty court; however, miscellaneous documents from this institution are to be found elsewhere in the archives: Dickinson, Justice et justiciables, 38–9. See also ac, f 3, 10: 1–7, and banq -q, e1,s 1,p1067, ordinance dating from 3 September 1716. 27 Note the ambiguity of the regulation: “Captains navigating on the river and in the Gulf of St Lawrence shall also obtain fur-trading licences from the Admiral.” In other words, the demarcation between river and maritime traffic became hazy when one travelled down river. 28 banq -q, e1, s 1, p1005, ordinance of 10 October 1715. 29 Ordinance of 2 June 1728 followed by a reminder on 25 July: banq-q, t p 1 ,s 777, d20, fols. 174ff. This regulation, archived with isolated documents of the Conseil supérieur, is not included in the series of intendants’ ordinances. After a brief and turbulent term in the colony, Dupuy was recalled to France by an order of 31 May 1728. 30 banq -q, e1, s 1, p3957, ordinance by the governor and the financial commissary, 22 August 1749. The purpose was to requisition the ships to carry the king’s effects. 31 Kaplan, Provisioning Paris, 446. 32 rapq (1946–47), 28, Frontenac to Colbert, 13 November 1673.

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33 jdcs 2: 109ff and 3: 10–11 and 205–6, decisions of 15 February 1677, 4 February 1686, and 26 January 1688; Roy, ed., Ordonnances, 1: 243–4, ordinance by Champigny regulating Montreal bakeries, 8 August 1695; jdcs 3: 869–72, decision of 31 March 1694 reminding tavern-keepers that they were forbidden to sell bread. In 1680s’ Montreal, there were still businesses for “the sale of wine, bread, and meat”: banq-vm , cn 601, s 280, 5 October 1682 and 7 June 1683. Note as well that peasants were permitted to sell bread at the market, at the same price as bakers. This business remained marginal: jdcs 3: 385; banq-q, tl5, d815, 2 December 1729, in re bad bread and flour sold in the city by a habitant from Île d’Orléans. 34 Croix, La Bretagne, 1: 386; Kaplan, Provisioning Paris, ch. 7. 35 This decision of 1 February 1706 upheld the bakers’ monopoly over biscuit manufacturing, previously granted to them by a decision of 11 February 1686: jdcs 3: 12–13, 5: 233–5. 36 jdcs 5: 514, decision of 7 February 1707. The importance of hardtack in wheat exports explains the dispute. See supra, Table 2. 37 Letaconnoux, Les subsistances, 95–109; Croix, La Bretagne, 1: 386–93. 38 On the policing powers of the provost court, see Dickinson, Justice et Justiciables, ch. 2. 39 jdcs 3: 10–11, 5: 1056–9, decisions of 4 February 1686 and 2 December 1715. Only the 1715 prices appear in the Conseil’s records. The prices are stated in cards at a time when these were being decried. I have tried in vain to establish the relationship between these deflated values and subsequent prices. A breadmaking test was performed in Montreal in 1695 but it too had no long-term consequences: Massicotte, Répertoire, 47, ordinance issued by the lieutenant-general of the jurisdiction, 8 December 1695. 40 For example, when wheat was worth 40 sols, wheatmeal bread was sold at 12 deniers per pound in 1706 and 17 deniers in 1749; or, on the basis of wheat at 60 sols, a pound of wheatmeal bread was worth 15 deniers in 1715, 17 in 1737, and 21.5 in 1751. In all, I examined fifty-eight regulations governing the price of bread, twenty-six of them issued by the Conseil, twenty-seven by the jurisdiction of Montreal, four by the provost court, and one by the intendant. The Montreal regulations are dispersed in the court records and in two registers containing various official Acts (1743–60). The bread regulations of the provost court of Quebec for the period 1746–52 are set down in a r­ egister of police business (section 95).

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41 banq -q, tl5, d440¾, minutes of Quebec police assembly, 30 April 1710. The Conseil granted a bread price increase halfway between the two opinions. 42 jdcs 4: 153. The Conseil supérieur minutes mention fifteen public assemblies, called mercuriales, that were held in Quebec between 1677 and 1712. If this is the sum total of such meetings, it is many fewer than the number prescribed by the regulation of 1676. There is, however, no cause to doubt the existence of these assemblies after 1677, as John Dickinson does in “Réflexions,” 505. A systematic search in the provost court archives might turn up other sets of minutes. 43 In March 1701, the Conseil did not send its bread regulation to the provost court and took charge of prosecuting offenders itself, claiming that the officers of the provost court had been delinquent in this duty. These officers appeared twice before the Conseil to ask that their powers be restored to them: jdcs 4: 542, 549–50, 563–4, 580–1. 44 jdcs 5: 794–7, 804–7, decision of 16 July 1714 to adopt new regulations, signed by first councillor Claude de Bermen de la Martinière in Intendant Bégon’s absence, and Bégon’s decree of 30 July 1714 cancelling it. Bulletin des recherches historiques 38 (1932): 18–39, correspondence of Bermen; see also infra, ch. 9. This clash followed upon several decades of latent conflict concerning the extent of the Conseil’s jurisdiction over policing. See Cahall, Conseil souverain. 45 They would certainly have left traces. Moreover, this was very much how Bégon understood the matter in his decision of 29 December 1715: “Beginning next January 1, the price and weight of white and wheatmeal bread shall be set by the officers of police with consideration to the going price of wheat and conforming to the below tariff which they shall be given for this purpose.” jdcs 5: 1072. This decision had the effect of cancelling article 42 of the regulation of 1676. 46 ac , c11a, 85: 270–4, 298–301v, representations by Monrepos to the minister, n.d., and letter from Intendant Hocquart to Monrepos, 8 September 1746, with attached draft granting prerogatives to the financial commissary at the expense of the judge of Montreal. 47 Croix, La Bretagne, 1: 386ff. Irsigler, “La mercuriale,” 94. This system was also in effect in London and would be applied in the colony after 1760. See the ordinances of 3 September 1764 and 29 March 1777, cited in Beutler, “Le rôle du blé,” 249. However, Beutler does not fully grasp how things worked under the French regime. 48 A first pass through a fine-mesh sieve removed approximately half the patent flour for white bread. A second sieving with a coarser mesh

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produced the wheatmeal mixture. jdcs 6: 1056–9, breadmaking test of 2 December 1715. 49 jdcs 4: 393–4, decision of 15 February 1700. 50 The modifications made between 1700 and 1720 had to do with weight. I was unable to obtain data for 1721–42; from 1743 until the end of the regime, price was the main variable that fluctuated. 51 Established in the early seventeenth century, the public markets of Massachusetts soon ceased to play an important role in the wheat economy of that colony: Rothenberg, “The Market,” 312–13. The coincidence is worth noting, although no necessary parallel can be drawn with Canada, for the geographic, demographic, commercial, and political context was too different. 52 See infra, ch. 6.

C ha p t e r f o u r   1 Wien, “Les travaux pressants.”   2 “The rain made the roads impassable for carriages,” reads an ordinance of 28 May 1749 about Montreal’s suburban roads: ba nq-q, nf 2–36.   3 Chaumaux, “Instructions,” 210, 245.  4 ba nq -q, tp1, s 777, d21, general inventory of wheat, Quebec, JulyAugust 1729. See banq-vm , cn 601,s3, 23 August 1724, and t l 4 ,s 11, d9, 31 May 1726, for examples of granary rentals. The ­lessees were bakers who needed extra space.   5 For proper aeration, wheat piles could not exceed 45 cm in depth and had to be surrounded by wide walkways to allow for maintenance. To solve this problem, which made unfeasible the construction of permanent granaries large enough to feed the population for an extended period during a shortage, Duhamel du Monceau, Traité, proposed another storage method requiring less space.   6 Allan Greer notes that, for lack of space, a merchant named Jacobs asked certain peasants to keep the wheat they had sold him until the arrival of the riverboats: Peasant, Lord and Merchant, 163–4.  7 a n, Marine, d3, 44 (c. 1785), “Mémoire et observations sur les boulangeries des vivres de La Marine,” 11. The author stresses the advantages of storing wheat in the barn, in small stacks mixed with straw to shield it from humidity and heat. Thanks to Catherine Desbarats for providing this document. Barn storage was typical of the colony and Robert-Lionel Séguin mistakenly wrote that the habitants stored wheat in bags in their homes: Séguin, L’équipement, 178.

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  8 J. Robin charged 6 livres for “turning and having charge of 60 minots of wheat”: banq-q, tl5, d1303, April 1742. Gilles Lecourt asked the court to allow his costs for “stirring and ventilating the wheat, plus storage charges”: banq-vm , tl4 ,s1 1 ,d1 3 , fols. 167–8, 29 March 1735.   9 Lambert and Stewart, eds., Opening the Gates; Poirier, “Fortifications,” 67–73. 10 Expense statements for the colony indicate that some wheat travelled overland around Montreal, whereas in Quebec all of it apparently travelled by water. 11 banq -q, e1, s 1, p2630, ordinance of 30 April 1734 setting the price of river crossings at 20 to 22 sols and 6 deniers for one cart. The ordinance lists ten ferry routes. 12 Examples are the wheat shipments between the Lachine and Sault-auRécollets mills and the king’s stores in Montreal, delivered by the carters Étienne Blot and Pierre Lebeau: ac , c 1 1 a , 114: 98–134 and 79: 363–430, expense statements of the colony for 1739 and 1742. The carter earned either 5 livres per trip or 3 sols per minot. Juxtaposing this data yields 33 minots as an average load. Pehr Kalm observes that aside from the occasional carriage, all these shipments travelled in two-wheeled carts pulled by teams of two horses yoked one behind the other: Voyage, 314, 337. 13 as q, Polygraphie 23, no. 10–A, statement of flour sent to Mr. Chaumont by the miller, 3–25 February 1734. Thanks to Sylvie Dépatie for providing this document. 14 ba nq - v m , c n 6 0 1 , s 259, 14 December 1736: Pierre Ranger, a ­merchant of Rivière-des-Prairies, promised to deliver 120 cwt of flour to a Montreal baker “from the first day passable by sleigh to January 15,” representing about six trips over a distance of 15 km. 15 “The weather turned frostier at the start of this month and a great deal of snow fell, making it possible to transport all the necessities of life by sleigh”: Duhamel du Monceau, “Observations botanico– météorologiques,” 89. 16 Supra, note 13. For an analysis of farm-to-market land transportation costs, see Rothenberg, “The Market.” 17 banq -vm , cn 601, s 108, contract of 2 April 1754 between Maurice Jean, a Quebec baker, and Charles Réaume, a merchant, for 300 minots of wheat at 3.5 livres per minot loaded at Île Jésus. Réaume added 1 sol per minot for loading fees. Abel Poitrineau notes, a propos of shipping on the Loire, that true mariners were unwilling

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to handle cargo, and this seems also to have been the case on the St Lawrence: Poitrineau, “La production.” 18 See Jean Meuvret’s observations on the subordination of wheat shipping to that of other goods: Le problème des subsistances, 3(1): 91–3. 19 There are two anomalies in the prices compiled in Appendix B: the relatively high cost of shipping to the mill on Île Sainte-Hélène, which lies in the St Lawrence just a stone’s throw from the city, and the 10 sols per minot paid by the habitants of Rivière-du-Sud in 1743, a year of scarcity. Both cases concern the king’s wheat, and we return to this data in chs. 6 and 7. 20 Kalm, Voyage, 426. 21 Malartic, Journal, 55. These observations were made in the vicinity of Montreal. 22 The same conflation appears in Furetière’s dictionary definition (1690): “Canot: a small vessel used by the Indigenous people, made of a single piece of a hollow tree trunk. In Canada they are made out of birch.” Usage evolved, however, and in a 1739 inquest by the admiralty court of Quebec, local witnesses used the word canot for what a French captain passing through the colony called a pirogue (dugout): ba nq -q, tl5, d1206. The word pirogue was, however, in common use in the pays d’en haut: Grenier, ed., Papiers; see also excerpts from the glossary of Pierre Pothier in Revue d’ethnologie du Québec, 12 (1980), 78, 96. 23 Bouchette, Topographical Description, 473–6, provides a good description of the wooden canoes. The archivist Pierre-Georges Roy covers the subject in considerable detail in his La traverse, but baselessly and erroneously asserts that the dugout only appeared after 1760. Réal Brisson contends that the dugout was used in the early days of the colony but soon abandoned: La charpenterie, 24, 64n14, 126. In short, the image of Canadians travelling around in birchbark canoes like their Indigenous neighbours persists in the face of the evidence. Wooden canoes sometimes appear in farm leases, as noted in Waywell, “Farm Leases,” 114. 24 Brisson, La charpenterie, 123–7. This work mainly deals with the shipwright’s trade, devoting only a few pages to smaller boats. It contains a good inventory of ships built in the government of Quebec from 1663 to 1763. Dufour, “La construction,” contains useful information for a subsequent period. 25 Meuvret, Le problème des subsistances, 3(1): 88. 26 banq -q, cn 301, s 223, 29 March 1734. See also a similar case in banq -vm , cn 601, s 158, 25 July 1752.

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27 banq -q, tl5, d808, declaration by François-Étienne Cugnet in re flour and biscuit for the Tadoussac trade, 26 July 1729. 28 Cited in Sévigny, “Le commerce du blé,” 19. Sévigny believes this ­practice may represent evidence of attempted fraud. He also claims (pp. 16, 18) that the sloops used on the Richelieu in a later era – equivalent to the bateaux in this sample, but larger – were rarely decked (despite the illustration accompanying the paper that depicts a decked sloop being loaded). Bigot’s ordinance concerning boatmen who took dishonest advantage of increases in the volume of shipped grain caused by humidity corroborates our observations: ba nq-q, e 1 ,s 1 , p3996, 14 August 1750. 29 ba nq-q, cn 301, s 223, 5 April 1732, and Barolet, 5 April 1743 and 26 March 1749. The Saint-Louis, with a capacity of 700 minots, shuttled between Quebec and the mills in the Côte de Beaupré; there was also the Saint-Joachim (700 minots) and another small unidentified boat (400 minots). 30 Thanks to Thomas Wien for this document. Also recorded are ships from overseas and the downriver and gulf fisheries, which are not included in my table. Of a total of 112 trips up the river from Quebec, only seven boats are indicated as having loaded at a port other than Montreal – specifically, at Trois-Rivières, Chambly, or Sorel – but this is hardly plausible. It seems that the word “Montreal” here denotes the district and not the port of lading. These boats carried approximately 51,000 “bushels” (probably 51,000 minots, unless the port employees took the trouble to make the conversion, in which case the total would be 47,663 minots) of wheat to Quebec during the season, two-thirds of it taken from the harvest of 1763. The poor harvests of the recent past explain this uncharacteristic haste and the small overall volume. 31 This information is based on both data gleaned from the period 1720– 54 and data from 1763. I was unable to establish a relationship between the tonnage of the boats and the volume of wheat they could carry. Obviously, this depended on the mode of storage. In maritime shipping out of Quebec, this ratio was quite stable. There were 8 quarters of flour (1,600 pounds) to the ton and 10 cwt of biscuit (1,000 pounds) to the register ton. This appears to confirm that biscuit travelled in bulk and thus took up a lot of space. See ac, c 1 1 a , 81: 455–500, revenue and expense statements, 1742; ba nq-q, c n3 01, s 190, charter contract of 12 August 1729 for the brigantine Claude-François awarded by the naval commissary. 32 ba nq-q, tl5, d2642, 8 May 1734, petition to the roads superintendent by François Brunet, “common carrier, and employed in said

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Notes to pages 46–8

capacity to carry the wheat of the king and his subjects,” to cut trees along the banks of the Rivière des Mille-Îles, as had been done for the St Mary’s Current, so that boats could be hauled. 33 The six shipwrecks that I found in the archives all occurred in Lake St Pierre in November: ba nq-q, tl5,d2 0 8 , d4 4 6 , and d6 3 3 ; ba nq -q, e1, s 1, p1294, ordinance of 29 June 1721; c n3 0 1 ,s11, 3 November 1734. banq-vm , tl4, s 1 1 ,d8, 27 November 1722. See, in particular, the shipwreck report in the registry of Trois-Rivières by J.-B. Hallé, travelling with Louis Dugal: banq-q, tl5 ,d6 3 3 . 34 as q, Seigneuries 54, no. 8a: travel diary of Joseph-André-Mathurin Jacrau, procurator, on Île Jésus. 35 To ship some 7,000 minots of wheat to Quebec, Jean-Baptiste Hervieux contracted with two captains, Étienne Fréchet and Charles Turgeon, both of whom loaded cargo once in early May and again about a month later: ba nq-q, cn 301 ,s11, accounts between Hervieux and the baker Pierre Chalou, 1 November 1735. The 1763 data corroborates these observations: arrivals in Quebec of boats from the district of Montreal were separated by at least thirty days. 36 Franquet, Voyages; Kalm, Voyage, 209, 409ff. 37 ac , c 11a, 70: 179–80v, letter from M. de Beaucour, 13 October 1738; banq-q, cn 301, s 11, 28 September 1736; ba nq-v m, c n6 0 1 , s 260, 4 February 1727. The administration, too, preferred Montreal wheat for its Quebec store and for export on the king’s account. See infra, ch. 7. 38 The wheat sold by Bailly to Chalou “will be picked up at Cap SaintMichel on the second voyage of the barques, which will depart from [Quebec] for the côtes of Montreal, since all the ships that carry wheat are retained for an initial voyage”: ba nq-q, c n3 0 1 ,s223, 29 March 1734; also, cn 301, s 11, 5 April 1734. Alexandre d’Ailleboust, who had chartered Campagna’s ship to carry biscuit to Quebec, immediately contracted with another boatman when he learned that it was delayed, for fear of missing the departure of the ship that was to carry the product to Île Royale. Campagna sued for enforcement of their charter party. The affair provides a good illustration of the necessary haste involved in such transactions: ba nq -vm , tl4, s 11, d10, fol. 252, 22 June 1728. 39 banq -q, cn 301, s 223, contract between J.-B. Tétreau and Joseph Pagé Quercy, 15 October 1727. 40 Ibid. and banq-vm , cn 601, s 339, 27 May 1734; c n6 0 1 ,s3, 16 May 1731; cn 601, s 259, 30 September 1735; c n6 0 1 ,s260, 3 March 1726. Three of these ships belonged to Quebec merchants,

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the fourth to Joseph Guyon Després, a Montreal butcher. See also the undertaking by Jean James, “master pilot offering cabotage between this city and Quebec,” residing in La Prairie, to skipper the brigantine: c n6 0 1, s 259, 23 March 1736. 41 The years in question are again 1720–54. Only seventeen of the fortytwo navigators in my file can be identified as owners of their own ships, but this small proportion is due to the incompleteness of the data. The majority of these navigators were undoubtedly part or sole owners of boats at some point in their careers. 42 ba nq -q, cn 301, s 11, partnership agreement of 5 April 1734 between Perrault and Lemarié followed by accounts. 43 See transactions between François Roy of Montreal and Jean Luineau, a Quebec navigator; ba nq-q, cn 301 ,s135, 14 March 1732; c n3 0 1, s 11, 21 October 1735 and 17 October 1739; c n3 0 1 ,s223, 8 April 1744; or the agreements between Montreal merchant J.-B. Lecomte Dupré and Louis Chevalier, a captain and shipbuilder residing in Quebec: banq-q, cn 601, s 372, 5 January 1742; or the partnership between the navigator Thomas Brulart and Maurice Jean, both of Quebec: ba nq-q, cn 301, s 251, 21 April 1752. 44 ba nq, cn 601, s 339, hiring of Joseph Fisque, navigator, by Ignace Gamelin, 31 January 1728; banq-q , c n3 0 1 ,s223, statement of accounts between François Robert Évêque, owner of the SainteGeneviève, and Philippe Tineau (dit Saint-Onge), captain and coastal navigator, 5 February 1740. 45 See Dépatie, L’évolution, 122–3; also, the partnership agreement and deed of sale between Réaume and the widow Cachelièvre, and between her and Quebec carpenter and navigator Étienne Fréchet, who ultimately bought the Marie-Catherine: banq-q, cn301,s223, 11 October 1740, 28 May 1741, 19 October 1742, and 27 September 1743. 46 ba nq-vm , cn 601, s 2, obligation by Quebec captain Charles Amiot to the Congregation of Notre-Dame for the value of wheat spoiled during shipping, 20 May 1697. The wheat, delivered damp, was dried in the recipient’s granary and then inspected and remeasured to assess the loss. 47 See, for example, the contract between L. Nadeau and J.-B. Derome: ba nq-q, cn 301, s 11, 26 March 1749. Abel Poitrineau notes that there was no insurance on the Loire before the end of the eighteenth century: Poitrineau, “La production.” 48 Charles Turgeon, “master and captain after God of the schooner La Madeleine,” signed a receipt for 168 quarters of white peas, which he undertook to deliver to Quebec and store at his home until the sale.

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Notes to pages 49–51

It is this latter detail that justified the notarized contract in this case: ba nq -vm , cn 601, s 98, 27 June 1736. 49 See ch. 5, note 1 for the list of minute books consulted and the method used to identify acts relating to the wheat trade. Contracts relating to river transportation are easy to identify in the inventories of Montreal notaries, but in Quebec minute books they are lost amid a plethora of fisheries- and shipping-related contracts. The idea of conducting an exhaustive survey of these books had to be abandoned, and a few contracts for intraregional cabotage may have escaped notice. 50 This was the second-largest occupational category after carpenters: Dechêne, “Quelques aspects.” It appears that, unlike sailors, people who called themselves navigators had had access to ownership at some point. A study of Quebec maritime trades is long overdue. 51 There were also trips to load and unload ships in the port. The shallop in question, undoubtedly smaller than the boats going up to Montreal, could nonetheless carry 500 minots: banq-q, tl5 ,d3 3 2 , account book of C. Trépagny. See also boat purchases and sales by bakers Gervais Voyer and Pierre Lebeau and journeyman baker François Bonneville: ba nq-q, cn 301, s 223, 24 July 1743, and c n3 0 1 ,s11, 29 October and 5 December 1740. 52 These peasants would thus have been at a disadvantage with respect to those living in the government of Montreal. Moreover, the peasants of the Côte du Sud were not necessarily captives of the Quebec market – did some of them, perhaps, find it more profitable to sell their flour to the merchants and fishermen of the lower St Lawrence and the Gaspé Peninsula? If so, they would have managed to elude the obligatory marketing channels that were the lot of their fellow farmers.

C ha p t e r f i ve   1 Not counting the charter parties and other transportation-related documents used in chapter 4. The following notarial registries were consulted based on printed inventories and that of the Archiv-Histo project (before computerization), with the kind permission of Normand Robert. The dates are those of the minutes consulted, not necessarily each registry’s entire span of existence.  banq-q, cn301: J. Barbel, 1703–29 (s10); C. Barolet, 1728–50 (s11); N. Boisseau, 1729–44 (s32); G. Boucault, 1736–53 (s36); C.-H. Dulaurent, 1734–59 (s91); H. Hiché, 1725–36 (s135); J. Imbert, 1740–49 (s142); J. Latour, 1736–53 (s164); J.-C. Louet, 1717–37

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(s190); J.-C. Panet, 1745–59 (s207); J. Pinguet, 1726–48 (s223); J.-A. Saillant, 1750–54 (s248); S. Sanguinet, 1748–56 (s251).  banq-vm , cn 601: A. Adhémar, 1668–1714 (s2); J.-B. Adhémar, 1714–48 (s 3); G. Barette, 1714–52 (s15); N.-A. Guillet de Chaumont, 1717–52 (s 86); F. Comparet, 1735–55 (s95); C.-F. Coron, 1734–59 (s98); C. Danré de Blanzy, 1738–55 (s108); J. David, 1719–26 (s111); A. Foucher, 1746–59 (s158); G. Hodiesne, 1740–58 (s202); F. Lepailleur, 1733–39 (s259); M. Lepailleur, 1701–32 (s260); C. Maugue, 1677–96 (s280); P. Panet de Méru, 1755–59 (s308); J.-C. Raimbault, 1727–37 (s339); S. Sanguinet père, 1734–48 (s362); N. Senet, 1704–31 (s368); F. Simonnet, 1737–55 (s372); J.-B. Tétro, 1712–28 (s 382).  2 Meuvret, Le problème des subsistances, 3(1): 163–4.   3 A phrase used by Jean Meuvret, who stressed this distinction between voluntary and involuntary sales: Meuvret, Le problème des subsistances, 3(1): 163–5.   4 This documentation consists of thirty sales or contracts signed before a notary, nine obligations, and thirteen court cases relating to grain sales. The sellers were farmers (eighteen cases) or merchants (twentyseven cases). The buyers were mainly bakers (twenty-two cases), with some merchants, bourgeois, artisans, and others.   5 Cases in which the buyer was a baker: banq-vm, cn601,s3, 26 July 1717, obligation of Pierre Thuot (dit Duval) to Joseph Aubuchon of Longue-Pointe; cn601,s111, obligations of Charles Demers to Michel Charbonneau, churchwarden at Boucherville, 30 March 1720; ibid., obligation of Antoine Poudret to Michel Dubuc of Longueuil, 25 February 1721; ibid., obligation of Charles Demers to Dubuc, 18 May 1723; banq-vm, cn601,s259, obligation of Claude Miaû to François Labelle of Île Jésus, 1 March 1737; ibid., obligation of Antoine Poudret to Athanase Hubon of Lachenaie, 26 March 1737; cn601,s108, contract between Michel Bouvet and Jacques Deshôtels of Longue-Pointe, 31 July 1742; tl4,s11,d15, fol. 154, lawsuit between François Labelle of Île Jésus, seller and defendant, and Claude Miaû, baker, 18 January 1737; banq-q, tl5,d1370, lawsuit between François Sarrazin of Île Jésus, seller and plaintiff, and Michel Pampalon, baker, 1 April 1742; tl1,s11,ss2,d868, provost court of Quebec, lawsuit between the churchwarden in charge of Notre-Dame-de-Bellechasse, seller and plaintiff, and Joseph Trudel, Quebec baker, 17 May 1732.   Cases in which the buyer was someone other than a baker: ba nqv m, c n 601, s 339, obligation of Jacques Dielle, blacksmith, to

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Jacques Moquin of La Prairie, 28 July 1730; c n6 0 1 ,s108, contract between Louis Ménard of Longueuil and F. Bourbonnière of L’Assomption, 27 August 1743; cn 60 1 ,s202, contracts between Joseph Labelle of Île Jésus and G. Hodiesne, M. Simonnet, notaries, and Noël Toupain, bourgeois of Montreal, 6–7 September 1751; ibid., contract between Pierre Richaume of L’Assomption and Montreal merchant Pierre Ranger, 14 September 1752; t l 4 ,s 1 1, d15, fol. 103, lawsuit between Angélique Courreau, buyer and plaintiff, and Belhumeur Sr., 27 November 1736; tl4 ,s1 1 ,d1 6 , fol. 11, between Jean Frenière (dit Biron), buyer and plaintiff, and Louis Duhamel (dit Sansfaçon), 25 June 1737; ba nq-q, e 1 ,s 1 ,P2066, ordinance of 17 February 1730 concerning a dispute between a Mr. Parisien, buyer and plaintiff, and Joseph Drouin.  6 ba nq -vm , tl4, s 11, d15, fol. 154, lawsuit by baker Claude Miaû against Jacques Labelle, 18 January 1737.  7 ba nq -vm , tl4, s 11, d27, court decision on creditor priority.  8 banq -vm , tl4, s 11, d16, fol. 11, lawsuit by J. Biron against Louis Duhamel for 30 minots of wheat not delivered, 25 June 1737.  9 ba nq -vm , cn 601, s 108, contracts of 31 July 1742 and 27 August 1743. 10 ba nq -q, cn 301, s 223, bill of sale of 29 March 1734 and schedules. 11 See the following contracts: ba nq - v m , c n 6 0 1 , s 3, between Rivièredes-Prairies merchant François Poisset and Quebec baker Pierre Chalou, 17 January 1727; ibid., between Pierre Ranger of Rivièredes-Prairies and N.-A. Guillet de Chaumont of Montreal, 17 January 1734; c n 6 0 1 , s 260, between Montreal merchant Jean-Baptiste Hervieux and Mrs Gendron and her son Antoine Poudret, Montreal bakers, 8 February 1727; c n 6 0 1 , s 259, between Ranger and Montreal baker Antoine Cadignan (dit Toulouse), 14 December 1736; c n 6 0 1 , s 372, between Montreal merchant Charles Héry and Angélique Courault (dit La Côte), wife of P. Lupien (dit Baron), also of Montreal, 26 May 1741; c n 6 0 1 , s 202, between Montreal merchant Charles Réaume and Montreal baker F. Millet, 23 August 1752; c n 6 0 1 , s 108, between Réaume and Quebec baker Maurice Jean, 27 April 1754. ba nq - q , c n 3 0 1 , s 223, between FrançoiseAugustin Bailly of Varennes and Pierre Chalou, 29 March 1734; c n 3 0 1 , s 248, between N.-A. Guillet de Chaumont and Chalou, 20 February 1750; c n 3 0 1 , s 9 1 , between merchant Louis Leroux of the fief of Saint-François and Quebec ­confectioner Charles Pélissier, 18 October 1753.

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12 Chalou, who was both a baker and a flour and biscuit exporter, experienced serious difficulties around 1734–35, and the poor harvests of 1736 and 1737 caused the payment to be further postponed: ba nq-q, c n3 01, s 11, sale of the Foudroyant by Chalou to J.-B. Hervieux, 1 November 1735. 13 See infra, ch. 8 on official wheat pricing during this decade. 14 The point is not that these transactions never existed but that they were unprofitable. This does not mean that a merchant would never buy wheat and give it to his supplier in partial settlement of their accounts. Note too, as an exception, the small profit realized on several large wheat deliveries to the king’s stores, for the king could afford to have middlemen involved: infra, ch. 7. 15 This may be assumed, at any rate, in the absence of a good study of these exports. 16 banq-q, tl5,d808, general inventory of wheat, July 1729; banq-q, t p 1 ,s 777, d21, fols. 175–91. 17 The declarations and audits concerned forty-four persons in all. Of these, I excluded from consideration five navigators, eight small ­merchants, and two bakers not involved in maritime trade. 18 Census of Quebec in 1744, rapq (1939–40), 3–154. The census taker’s vocabulary is imprecise: he identifies seventy merchants but makes no distinctions among them. Three years earlier, the intendant had spoken of one hundred retailers in the city, which is certainly an exaggeration: ac, c11a, 75: 7–13v. 19 Miquelon, Dugard of Rouen, ch. 6. Among the nine largest customers of Havy and Lefebvre mentioned by Miquelon, the majority of them fur traders, three were involved in the wheat trade: François Demers (dit Montfort), Étienne Auger, and the Bômer brothers (p. 78). 20 Larouche, “Joseph Fleury.” This complete survey of notarial instruments related to Fleury uncovers no evidence of wheat receipts from a retail business. 21 DCB , 3: 552, biography of Perrault by Roland-J. Auger; banq-q, c n3 0 1, s 11, partnership between Perrault and Lemarié, navigator, 5 April 1734. banq-q, tp1, s 777, d9 6 , lawsuit between the Séminaire de Montréal and Pierre de Lestage, contains discussion of Philibert’s purchases in the seigneury of Saint-Sulpice. 22 banq-vm, tl4,s11,d15, fols. 249, 267–8, 340–1, and tl4,s11,d16, fol. 113. 23 A good analysis is needed of charter parties found in Quebec minute books. See, for example, ba nq-vm , c n6 0 1 ,s259, partnership

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agreement of 30 September 1735 between F. Lemaître-Lamorille, owner of the brigantine Le Dauphin, and Montreal merchants J.-B. Latour and P. Courault (dit La Côte), who supplied flour, peas, and biscuit. Lemaître-Lamorille took a third of the shipment in payment for the ship rental and the handling fees at Île Royale. Jacques Mathieu’s work Le commerce sheds no light on the matter. Research by John F. Bosher on merchant families involved in colonial commerce has been very helpful in turning up various forms of partnership; see, for example, Bosher, “Une famille de Fleurance”; idem, Men and Ships. 24 Such petitions were presented in 1719, 1728, 1733, 1735, and 1740: ac , c 1 1a, 124: 365; 40: 264ff; 46: 51, 128, 244–67; 49: 168ff; 121: 134–5; ac , b, 58: 401; banq-q, tp1 ,s7 7 7 ,d4 0 . 25 Cited in Lunn, “Economic Development,” 89–91, 351. 26 Miquelon, New France, 302n23. 27 See supra, ch. 3. 28 ac, c 11a, 73: 53–5, excerpt from a memorial presented by Pierre Trottier Desauniers, representative of the Quebec merchants, to the governor and the intendant and relayed by them to the minister on 11 November 1740. The text of the 1752 petition mentioned by the intendant, also directed against the rural merchants, has not been preserved. Mémoire pour Messire François Bigot, 1: 122–3. 29 The minute books contain several ship provisioning contracts. In the ones I found, the suppliers are all Quebec merchants and bakers. See, for example, banq-q, tl5, d1189, supply of biscuit for the Fleuron, September 1739; tl1, s 11,s s 2, d2021 , statement of accounts between Pierre Chalou and Bernard Thouron for the provisioning of the Beauharnois, 20 October 1756. 30 ba nq -q, e1, s 1, p2102, proceedings between Trottier Desauniers and Mauvide before the intendant, 29 April 1730. 31 For Miquelon, the divisions among the colony’s merchants were, in the final analysis, ethnic in nature, the attacks against the forains revealing the Canadians’ hostility toward all French merchants. This xenophobia was, he contends, exacerbated by the fact that the upper echelons of the profession consisted largely of Frenchmen, with only the odd Canadian, and that Canadians were alone in occupying the lower echelons: Miquelon, New France, 131. To begin with, this last assertion is incorrect. Frenchmen were overrepresented at all levels, including the humblest. But the important observation is that the commercial supremacy of a mother country over its colony is an inescapable fact, especially when the colony is a small one, as Canada was. The domination

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generally takes the form of interdependence, between partners or correspondents, or between debtors and creditors. Reason and experience told the local merchants that they could not do without French traders. John F. Bosher’s attempt to identify alliances between merchants domiciled on either side of the Atlantic seems more promising. Bosher, “A Quebec Merchant’s Trading Circles”; idem, Canada Merchants. 32 When the Conseil supérieur was deliberating in November 1728 on the merits of closing the rural stores, it made much of a petition by Montreal “merchants, bourgeois, and artisans” imputing the high price of wheat to these stores: ac, f3 , 2: 475v–6. However, only artisans, bakers, and a few small merchants signed the petition (reproduced infra, ch. 9). 33 Roy, Inventaire des jugements, vol. 6, passim. The parties’ profession was ordinarily mentioned in commercial cases, if rarely in family cases, and any omissions would have affected the two governments equally. 34 Létourneau and Labreque, “Inventaire.” The collection comprises some 2,500 documents, the vast majority of them concentrated between 1720 and 1759. The names of the persons in question were Dastous (Îlet Saint-Jean), Gautron (Beaumont), Chenard (Saint-Roch), Bertody and Chevalier, (Rivière-du-Sud), Gourdeau and Mauvide (Île d’Orléans). 35 Saint-Pierre, “L’aménagement,” 164–70. The only merchants mentioned by this author are those of Saint-Thomas de la Rivière-du-Sud, a seigneury to which careful study is devoted in Wien, Peasant Accumulation, 202ff. 36 A surgeon by profession, Mauvide began doing business in the 1720s and was still active in 1750. He commissioned two boats to be built and had customers in the nearby côtes of the south shore. ba nq-q, t p 1 , s 37, d202, fol. 202, Conseil supérieur, inquest of 28 March 1744; cn 301, s 164, agreement with Poulin de Courval, 27 November 1736; ibid., obligation, 16 April 1737; c n3 0 1 ,s223, sales of boats, 11 March 1735 and 16 November 1736; lac, mg3 –III–62aq , sale of forty-eight barrels of flour to the captain of the Astrée, July 1750. Brisson, La charpenterie, 230, 232. 37 ba nq -q, tl5, d1928, criminal trial of Rodriguès, charged with breaking into a Quebec store, July 1758. He stated that he had been working the côtes for eight years. 38 ba nq -q, tl5, d1422, trial for debts, October 1744 to January 1745. Born and married in Quebec, Chamberland finally settled in Kamouraska. Tanguay, Dictionnaire, 2: 607.

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39 Tanguay, Dictionnaire, 5: 45; banq-vm, tl4 ,s1 ,d6 0 7 3 , February 1756: Labaty, a native of the Dauphiné region of France, was prosecuted for having bit the nose of a Chambly merchant who had allegedly dishonoured his first wife as well as his second, whom he had just married. This misadventure, along with a court-ordered seizure of his property and a fire in his home, perhaps hastened his death in December of that year. The inventory of his belongings after his death (gr. Loiseau, 16 February 1757) mentions “five small account books indicating amounts owed by sundry persons for small quantities of drink,” which fills out his activities. Thanks to Louis Michel for this latter information. 40 ba nq -q, tl5, d1206, August-December 1739, investigation in the case of Duchesny, who was suspected of murdering a sailor in Quebec harbour for trying to make off with his canoe. The canoe was loaded with goods in anticipation of its departure for Maskinongé the next day. He was released. 41 Recent emigrants, ex-soldiers, engagés (thirty-six months), and salt smugglers are probably overrepresented among the peddlers, which would accord with the description of the above-cited petition. Examples are Charles Bertody and Louis Brulot of the Côte du Sud (Saint-Pierre and Saint-François, respectively), who were peddling in the downstream parishes in 1747: banq-q, tl5 ,d1 4 7 9 . 42 Descriptions of cheap goods in banq-v m, tl4 ,s1 ,d6 2 0 2 , statement of Félix Dinant, 12 December 1757; t l4 ,s1 ,d4 6 7 4 , proceedings against wigmaker and peddler Pierre Marcheteau, January–August 1740; banq-q, cn 301, s 11, obligation of Pierre Paquet, 29 February 1736. 43 ba nq -q, cn 301, s 11, obligation of Pierre Paquet to F. Perrault, 29 February 1736. 44 ba nq -vm , tl4, s 1, d4674, monitory and other proceedings against the peddler Marcheteau, January 1740; tl4 ,s1 ,d5 8 7 4 , proceedings against Félix, March 1754. 45 Dechêne, Habitants and Merchants, 97–9 and Graph 12b, 309. 46 banq -vm , p345, 1991–04–024/ 4 4 and 4 5 , general ledger begun 19 December 1732 and journal no. 4 begun 29 September 1737, by Monière; general ledger begun 24 November 1735 and another covering the years 1742–45, by Pierre Guy. These merchants’ rural customers may have been tied to the presence in the côtes of voyageurs, engagés, and ex-engagés involved in the fur trade, which would

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explain how widely dispersed the customers were. The hypothesis remains to be verified. 47 Only considered here are merchants who had begun regular operations before 1744. For the changes set in motion by the war, see ch. 8. 48 ba nq -vm , cn 601, s 260, partnership agreement between Trottier and baker Nicolas Perthuis, 24 April 1713. The merchant supplied the bakery and purchased the wheat. 49 banq-q, tp1, s777, d21, general inventory of wheat; DCB , 3: 424–5, biographical article on Lestage (1682–1743) by Dale Miquelon. The seigneury would mainly benefit his widow and his nephew, ­Pierre-Noël Courthiau. 50 banq-q, tp1,s777,d21, general inventory of wheat; DCB, 4: 306, biographical article by Raymond Dumais; banq-vm, cn601,s339, 31 January 1728, undertaking by a navigator to helm the Mignonne, a 60-ton schooner that also performed chartered shipping for third parties. 51 Montfort, succeeded by his widow, was among the largest customers of Quebec merchants Havy and Lefebvre: Miquelon, New France, 132–3. On wheat provisions for the troops, see infra, ch. 7. 52 Archives de la Bastille, 12146, fol. 448, [1763], “Mémoire pour JeanBaptiste Martel… ci-devant garde-magasin du roi à Montréal.” Martel invokes the case of Hervieux (d. 1747) to prove that it was possible to get rich honestly in Canada. The information on Hervieux’s estate is unverified but it is known that he paid dowries of 10,000 livres for his daughters, a generous sum by the standards of the colony. rapq (1947–48), J.-J Lefebvre, “Luc Lacorne de Saint-Luc,” 31–6. 53 ba nq -q, cn 301, s 11, 1 November 1735, and c n3 0 1 ,s223, 27 October 1740, sale of half of the Foudroyant by Chalou to Hervieux, attached obligations and accounts. Hervieux owned at least one farm near the city, whose management and yields would have to be studied. 54 ba nq -vm , cn 601, s 3, 23 July 1724; DCB , 4: 193–4, biographical article by José Igartua. A native of Angoulême, La Côte moved to Canada, where he had relatives, c. 1717, and began his career as a surgeon’s apprentice in Quebec. 55 ba nq -vm , cn 601, s 3, contract with J. Guyon Després, owner of the Saint-Joseph, 16 May 1731; cn 601,s259, partnership among Latour, La Côte, and Lemaître-Lamorille of Quebec, 30 September 1735; as q , Polygraphie 23, no. 10–A, January-February 1734, wheat supplies to the Île Jésus mill. Jean Latour, a Montreal merchant until his death in 1749, should not be confused with the notary of the same

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name who practised in Quebec from 1736 to 1741 before moving back to France. 56 ba nq -q, cn 301, s 223, contract between Tétro and J. Pagé Quercy to ship up to 80 tons of flour and biscuit for the Louisbourg trade, 15 October 1727; banq-vm , cn 601 ,s372, partnership between Guillet and J. Chalifoux of Pointe-aux-Trembles, 20 July 1739; c n6 0 1 , s 3, contract for 2,000 minots of wheat between Guillet and P. Ranger, 17 January 1734; banq-q, c n3 0 1 ,s248 contract between Guillet and P. Chalou for 2,300 minots, 20 February 1750. The DCB article (3: 289–90) neglects Guillet’s commercial activity. 57 Perhaps also including Alexandre d’Ailleboust, Jean-Baptiste Barsalou, and Jacques Pommereau Sr. Clearly, it would take a systematic survey of Montreal minute books, in particular the series of obligations, to shed much light on this professional group. 58 Specifically, Rivières-des-Prairies, Boucherville, and Varennes: banq-q, t p 1 ,s 7 77, d21. 59 rapq (1924–25), 231ff, “État des billets d’ordonnance vérifiés par M. Panet,” government of Montreal, June 1763. The source, which specifies the residence and profession of payment order holders, obviously lacks the evidentiary value of a census and undoubtedly understates the case, giving more weight to my argument. 60 Settlement in Rivière-des-Prairies and Pointe-aux-Trembles dates back to the late seventeenth century, on Île Jésus to the early eighteenth, and the amount of tithes paid by these parishes was higher than the colonial average: ac , d2d, “Liste des curés de Canada et du revenu de chaque curé en dîme par an,” c. 1730. 61 Poisset came to Canada as a child, with his father, and obtained letters of emancipation from the Conseil supérieur in 1712: rapq (1971), 101, petition of 17 May 1713. The place and date of his wedding are unknown, but his children’s births and burials show that he arrived in Montreal around 1716 and lived there for a decade or so: Tanguay, Dictionnaire, 6: 403. 62 Lunn, “Economic Development,” 474; ba nq-q, c n3 0 1 ,s11, sale of half of the Saint-François and its cargo for 16,000 livres, 26 August 1732; ibid., obligation of Poisset to Beauvais merchants, 7 October 1734; tl4, s 11, d14, fol. 112, lawsuit by P. de Lestage against Poisset, 25 September 1733. 63 ba nq -vm , cn 601, s 108, partnership agreement between Jean Léchelle, Charles Héry, and Poisset, 9 September 1752, with quittance of 4 June 1757.

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64 banq -q, tp1, s 777, d40, petition to the governor by Montreal ­artisans, cited in ch. 9. Ranger lived in Rivière-des-Prairies in 1720, the year of his (childless) marriage, and the first traces of his activity as a merchant date from 1725: banq -v m, c n6 0 1 ,s111, 31 December 1720; tl4, s 11, d9, 11 December 1725; Tanguay, Dictionnaire, 6: 505. 65 ba nq-vm , tl4, s 11, d13, proceedings involving coopers and the baker Perthuis, 22 April and 7 May 1735; c n6 0 1 ,s98, transactions with C. Réaume for the Saint-Pierre, 6 August 1737. 66 ba nq-vm , cn 601, s 202, passim, for series of loans extended by Ranger; in 1745, he purchased half the seigneury of Verchères for 8,000 livres on the occasion of a court-ordered seizure, only to lose it almost immediately when the Verchères family exercised its right of lineal repurchase: Roy, Inventaire des concessions, 5: 232, 241; ba nq-vm , p345, 1991–04–024/ 4 4 , fol. 203, book of accounts of Pierre Guy, who purchased the land in the Saint-Joseph district in 1766; Igartua, “The Merchants of Montreal.” 67 Dépatie, L’évolution, 107–32. Dépatie meticulously traced Réaume’s activities. 68 The father was a councillor in the bailiwick of Coutances. JeanNicolas, who came over with his wife, had dealings with Quebecbased merchant François Perrault. He died in 1743, probably while journeying to France. banq-vm , cn6 0 1 ,s95 (notary of Pointe-auxTrembles), power of attorney of 9 May 1741 and undertaking of 15 September 1743. 69 Guillaume married in Trois-Rivières in 1741 but had no children, ­hindering attempts to trace his activities. He was no longer in Pointeaux-Trembles in 1763; he had either died or returned to France. ba nq-vm , cn 601, s 95, passim. There are fifty-five obligations to G. Bômer for advances of goods and grain in this minute book, as well as other property-related acts and fisheries-related undertakings. I have identified seventeen men from Coutances who lived in Pointeaux-Trembles from 1736 to 1755. Most took a wife and bought land in the region, and sooner or later put seafaring behind them. banq-q, c n3 01, s 248, obligation of Bômer to Havy and Lefebvre; Miquelon, Dugard of Rouen, 78. 70 Dépatie, L’évolution, 115; see, for example, Joseph Réaume of Rivièredes-Prairies, and also J.-B. Dumay of Pointe-aux-Trembles, an agent of Lestage and Jacques Chalifour and a business partner of Guillet de Chaumont. These were men of the parish for whom trade was only

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a secondary occupation. banq-q, tp1 ,s7 7 7 ,d2 1 , general inventory of wheat, 1729; banq-vm , cn 601, s372, 20 July 1739; c n6 0 1 ,s95, various obligations to Chalifour, 1740–55. 71 The outlets established by Nicolas Philibert in these seigneuries were mentioned earlier: ba nq-q, cn 301, s207, transactions with Jean Rochon of Lachenaie, 2 March 1747; ba nq-v m, c n6 0 1 ,s95, obligations to Lachenaie militia captain Gilles Lecourt, a representative of Gamelin and Lamarque, 12 April 1737 and 21 March 1740. 72 Michel, “Un marchand rural.” Also of note are Michel Dubuc, Louis Briquet, and François Cherrier in Longueuil, Noël Bulteau and Joseph Marchand in Verchères, and René Lemoine Despins in Boucherville in the 1720s, followed by Bougret-Dufort, Jacques Lebé, etc. La Prairie, another well-developed south-shore seigneury, lacked a major merchant before the war: Lavallée, La Prairie, 259–60. Lavallée suggests that this was due to proximity to the city, but since there were equally close large rural businesses elsewhere, other factors, such as shipping or the role of undertakings for the pays d’en haut, must be invoked to explain the persistent urban domination over this seigneurie. 73 ba nq -vm , tl4, s 1, d5888 and tl4,s1 ,d6 0 7 3 , lawsuits over blows and injuries involving Leroux, Jehanne, and Pierre Labaty, 28 May 1754 and 4 February 1756; Cardin, “Jean Leroux.” Cardin overestimates the importance of this merchant, who owed his good fortune to the war, and uses the example of Sorel to situate the emergence of rural merchants in the government around 1760–65, later than it must have actually occurred. 74 See, for example, Joseph Paradis, a Saint-Antoine merchant who in 1763 held 83,689 livres in bills drawn on the naval treasurer in France: rapq (1924–25), 231–359, passim. Paradis first appears as agent to the purveyor-general of the armies for the organization of transports: banq-vm , cn601,s308, 9–10 February 1758, 4 March 1759, etc. 75 Greer, Peasant, Lord and Merchant, ch. 6, where the author traces the activities of Samuel Jacobs, one of these newcomers. The presence of merchants coincides to a significant extent with the formation of the villages. It is no accident that around 1760, the government of Montreal comprised seven villages with ten or more houses, Quebec only one: Courville, Entre ville et campagne, 18–26. Courville attributes the difference to the war, but in my view it owes more to the trade that preceded the war. 76 See the bakery regulations, supra, ch. 3.

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77 One or two bakers in Trois-Rivières and at the Saint-Maurice ironworks must be added. To produce flour and biscuit at this Rivière-desPrairies facility, Pierre Ranger brought in bakers from Montreal. 78 rapq (1939–40), 3–156, Quebec census of 1744. Philibert would later supply the garrison with bread. 79 Wheatmeal was ordinarily measured as wheat was, by volume; i.e., in minots, as opposed to bolted flour, which was measured by weight. See the accounts of the king’s stores (sources cited in Appendix D). 80 banq -q, tl5, d807, removal of seals in the Côte de Beaupré, 12 July 1729; also, banq-q, tl5, d808 and ba nq-q, tp1 ,s7 7 7 ,d2 1 , general inventory of wheat, 1729, fols. 178–91. The inventory did not find any flour being stored at the Lévis, Sainte-Famille, or Saint-Roch mills. banq-q, cn 301, s 248, 28 October 1748, lease of Petit-Pré mill to master baker Jacques Hubert (dit Saint-Hubert), financed by François Foucault and followed by a conveyance between the two parties. 81 banq-q, tp1, s 777, d21, general inventory of wheat, 1729, and supra, note 80. 82 “The bran and coarse meal to be shared or sold and the profits divided equally”: banq-vm , cn 601,s260, partnership between Montreal merchant Pierre Trottier Desauniers and baker Nicolas Perthuis Jr, 27 April 1713. 83 Patent flour accounted for two-thirds of output by weight with ordinary gristmilling, three-fourths with the new method. See Malouin, Description et details, 25–37; Parmentier, Le parfait boulanger, passim and particularly 153–70; an , Marine, d3 , 44 [c. 1785], “Mémoire et observations sur les boulangeries des vivres de la Marine.” The author criticizes the low grinding method used in the ports of the realm and discusses the advantages of the new process. 84 See Kaplan, Provisioning Paris, 272–81 and ch. 2. 85 Noël, “Chambly Mills.” A paper by Corinne Beutler on the Sulpicians’ mills mentions expenses for bolters in the early nineteenth century, but the demonstration concerning relations between millers and bakers is hard to follow. The possibility of technical transformations having occurred over a period of two centuries is not even raised: Beutler, “Les moulins à farine,” 200–1. 86 ba nq -q, cn 301, s 11, accounts between J.-B. Hervieux and P. Chalou, appended to a bill of sale, 1 November 1735; ba nq-v m, c n6 0 1, s 339, inventory of property of Nicolas Perthuis, baker, 3 January 1739; one bolter, albeit “in very poor condition,” was ­valued at 60 livres.

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87 Dechêne, “Quelques aspects.” There were 458 households in 1716 and 1,007 in 1744. Although less populated, Montreal had just as many bakers. These are high numbers in comparison with England during the same era, where many large towns and small cities still lacked bakers. Stevenson, “The ’Moral Economy,’” 228. A comparison should be made with the small French cities, where patterns of consumption were more similar to that of the colony. 88 Canadian Parks Service, National Historic Sites, A Tenant’s Town, 126. 89 These were verbal or private agreements that later surfaced in court or in obligations. banq-q, tl5, d3841 , in re wheat supplies to Michaud, master wig-maker; jdcs 6: 32–3, 79–82, lawsuit between Montreal baker N. Perthuis and cooper J. Héry, 25 February and 28 July 1710; banq-vm , tl4, s 11 ,d8, fol. 672, lawsuits by the same against Étienne Petit, 12 May 1724; tl4 ,s1 1 ,d15, fol. 146, lawsuit between Jean Truillet (dit La Combe), baker, and Jacques Gadois, merchant, 15 January 1737; c n6 0 1 ,s108, obligation of P. Crevier Duvernay, innkeeper, to Poudret, baker, 14 April 1742. John A. Dickinson has noted this custom of home deliveries: Justice et Justiciables, 129. The ancient custom of tally sticks persisted in baking, even where the parties were literate. These sticks had evidentiary value in court, just as ledger entries did. 90 Jean Meyer observes that in small Breton towns, bakers only sold to those who did not make provisions: La noblesse bretonne, 445–51. Here it is necessary to correct an error that slipped into a paper by Massicotte and has since snowballed. There was no regulation obligating Montreal bakers to deliver bread door to door. Quite the contrary, their primary duty was to sell bread from their bakeries, and delivering to customers’ homes might even conflict with this obligation. In 1741, a year of scarcity, the public complained that bread was nowhere to be found; on 26 November, a judge ordered the bakers to arrange among themselves “for bread to be distributed” by at least one of them; i.e., for at least one bakery to be open at 8:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m.: Massicotte, Répertoire, 102. The word “distributed” is not used here in the “home delivery” sense, as these authors claim. Massicotte, “La boulangerie,” 82; Beutler, “Le rôle du blé,” 260; Montbriand, “La boulangerie,” 214. 91 rapq (1971), passim: in this collection of minutes taken by bailiffs of the provost court of Quebec, there are some fifteen suits brought by various bakers between 1735 and 1751, for sums ranging mainly between 6 and 20 livres.

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205

92 On this subject, see Croix, La Bretagne, 1: 398–93. Moreover, there is more than wheat to be taken into consideration. The dearth and high price of firewood in the last decade of the French regime caused serious hardship for bakers. 93 See banq-vm , cn 601, s 259, 6 December 1735, for an example of a biscuit contract. There was also a white biscuit made with patent flour for officers’ rations on military campaigns, but Farine entière was the rule in bakeries. 94 ac, c11a, 72: 79–81, statement of use of French flour [1738]; Bulletin des recherches historiques, 38 (1932): 34–5, Bermen de la Martinière to the Duc de Saint-Simon; Proulx, Between France and New France, 106, concerning 50 barrels of flour recovered from a shipwreck that the intendant wanted to process into biscuit. Clearly, the soldiers were expected to eat whatever they were given. The Detroit garrison nearly mutinied in 1738 to protest spoiled flour, and bean rations unfit for consumption caused a mutiny at Louisbourg: Greer, “Mutiny at Louisbourg,” 307. 95 Dale Miquelon adduces a quote by Hocquart in support of his assertion that Canada got rid of its “inferior” products – biscuit and coarse flour – by selling them to Île Royale, and that it kept the quality flour for its trade with the West Indies: New France, 141. First, the intendant’s remarks notwithstanding, Louisbourg did not purchase coarse flour. Patent flour was unquestionably worth more than farine entière but the latter remained a good product, whether as is or processed into biscuit. Moreover, the volume of grain sales to Île Royale is known to have been three to four times larger than that of Caribbean exports. One can scarcely imagine Canadian merchants deciding to palm off their bad products on their principal market. 96 banq-vm , cn 601, s 259, flour and bread contracts, 5 February 1716, 4 February 1727, 6 December 1735, 14 December 1736; t l 4 , s 11, d10, fol. 108, 1 July 1727; banq-q, tl5 ,d1 1 8 9 , September 1739; tl5, d1233, trial before the provost court concerning flour and biscuit quality, 6 August 1740; banq-v m, c n6 0 1 ,s98, 12 May 1741; cn 601, s 372, 26 September 1747; c n6 0 1 ,s3, 10 December 1725; tl4, s 11, d9, various barrel contracts, 9 November 1726. 97 The most relevant document is the royal ordinance of 18 May 1732 setting the rules for the marking of barrels and the sanctions applying to anyone exporting bad flour. The ordinance was a response to complaints by Caribbean merchants to the minister that he had several

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Notes to pages 72–3

times relayed to the intendant of Quebec. Jacques Mathieu, in Le commerce (particularly at pp. 43 and 50–1), evokes an image of cheating, irresponsible merchants. It may be noted in passing that even Bordeaux purveyors, albeit experts in flour packing, were often criticized for the poor quality of their shipments to the West Indies, where the heat during the crossing posed enormous problems: Porteous, “The Administration of François Bigot,” 158ff. The archives of the Bordeaux-based firm Gradis contain much detail about the matter and Porteous quotes several excerpts from them.  98 a n, f3, 11: 110–11v, ordinance of 29 September 1727.   99 On the subject of sieves, see supra, ch. 2. 100 ba nq -q, tl5, d1189, lawsuit between the bakers Pierre Chalou and Michel Pampalon, September 1739. 101 See the lawsuit cited in the preceding note; also, jdcs 4: 1075, ­lawsuit between the bakers Louis Prat and Jean Duprat, 1 September 1704; ba nq-vm , cn 601, s 3, contract between the bakers Nicolas Perthuis and P. Lachenaye, 15 December 1723; rapq (1971), proceeding between P. Chalou and Louis Pascaud, bakers, 12 March 1751. The dependent relationship could also take the form of a partnership between two bakers, one providing funds and the other labour: banq-vm , cn 601, s 3, partnership between Perthuis and Lachenaye, 23 August 1724. 102 Some years ago, I would have considered subcontracting a phenomenon specific to the colony, resulting from the absence of guild-masters and contrasting with the strictly regulated, hierarchical French system of trades. But Michael Sonenscher’s study shows that subcontracting, fleeting partnerships, and other short-term arrangements were very common in Ancien Régime France, where the organization of labour more closely resembled the Oriental bazaar than the image evoked by the craft manuals: Sonenscher, Work and Wages, in particular 22–3 and 31–2. 103 ba nq - v m , c n 6 0 1 , s 260, 4 and 8 February 1727. Note that 1,000 minots did not suffice to fulfill this order; at 2.5 minots per hundredweight, 1,750 minots would have been needed. 104 ba nq -vm , cn 601, s 259, 6 December 1735. 105 Born in France, Miaû opened his bakery c. 1736, signed two obligations to merchant outfitters Pierre Trottier Desauniers and Jacques Gadois in 1737, and left shortly afterward for Boucherville, where his furniture was seized in 1742 for rental arrears. He had two children baptized in Quebec in 1742 and 1743, and then he vanishes

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207

from the archives: Tanguay, Dictionnaire, 6: 20; banq-v m, c n6 01, s 259, 6 December 1735, 22 April 1736, 1 March and 30 March 1737; asq, Fonds Viger-Verreau 41, no. 85, Registres des audiences, Boucherville, 4 April 1742. 106 The bakers were from Montreal. Pierre Prenais (dit Marchand) had been incarcerated at the demand of Alexandre d’Ailleboust, while Charles Demers Dessermons Sr had been sued by merchant outfitters Alexis Lemoine Monière and Julien Trottier Desrivières: banq-vm, cn601,s3, obligation, 1 July 1728; banq-vm, cn601,s259, power of attorney by Demers, 31 January 1737; JCDS 3: 185. 107 Examples are the Joly and Voyer families of Quebec and the Perthuis, Poudret, Truillet (dit La Combe), and Lebeau families of Montreal. 108 Prat, who was a baker around the turn of the eighteenth century, seized the opportunity of the War of the Spanish Succession to go into business fitting out ships for privateering: DCB , 2: 554–5. A native of a Poitou village, married in Quebec in 1723, Chalou is the most frequent participant in the contracts I viewed. His shipbuilding ambitions damaged his credit, but Montreal suppliers were patient, and his affairs seem to have righted themselves after 1740. In 1756, he was one of three bakers authorized to practise their profession in Quebec, the intendant having expelled the others. In addition to the contracts already cited, see banq-q, c n3 0 1 ,s223, 13 November 1731; cn 301, s 11, 11 June 1736, 14 October 1737, and 31 December 1739; cn 301, s 91 , 5 December 1742, etc. Antoine Poudret Jr in Montreal and Maurice Jean in Quebec also deserve mention among the large bakers.

C ha p t e r s i x    1 See the annual memoranda from the king to the governor and the intendant; for example, that of 6 July 1709: ac, b , passim, and rapq (1942–43), 407–8. Adhering to the conventions, the administrators replied that they were busy “inciting” the colony’s inhabitants to do one thing or another.    2 Wien, “Les travaux pressants.”   3 Wien, Peasant Accumulation, fig. 304, p. 330, and pp. 287–90.   4 Hamelin, Économie et société, 59–61.   5 Dechêne, Habitants and Merchants, 321, Graph 23.    6 The accounts of the king’s stores in Quebec and Montreal are of no use, for the exact dates of the purchases are missing. All that

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Notes to pages 77–80



can be measured is the range of prices paid during the year, which is quite wide when prices were high, much narrower when they were low. The quality of the wheat would also have been relevant, but remains imponderable to the historian.  7 Dépatie, L’évolution, 67–78.   8 Cassel, “The Troupes de la Marine,”371 and Appendix C; ac, c 1 1 a , 11: 83–99, Frontenac to the minister, 30 April 1690; ibid., 12: 1–11, 50–5, Frontenac and Champigny to the minister, 15 and 21 September 1692.  9 jdcs 4: 542–8, decision by the Conseil supérieur, 30 March 1701, and lawsuit between Gilles Papin and bakers Perthuis and son, 4 April 170l. 10 Until 1719, prices were stated in local currency inflated 25 per cent above the livre tournois. Parity was established in 1720. To obtain a continuous curve, the prices of the earlier period must therefore be deflated. Jean Hamelin did this but forgot to factor in the devaluation of the local paper currency decreed in 1713, whence the spikes in his graph. Hamelin, Économie et société, 61. All prices doubled between 1714 and 1719 and must therefore be multiplied by 3/8 (½ x ¾), as merchants did when accounts were settled in anything other than cards. 11 Or 9,589 cwt of flour and biscuit in 1789 and 9,412 the following year, with 8,125 minots of peas: rapq (1942–43), 419, Vaudreuil and Raudot to the minister, 14 November 1709; Pritchard, “Ships, Men and Commerce,” 290–1. 12 Demographers have shown that of all the censuses taken under the French regime, the ones taken between 1713 and 1724, while Bégon was the intendant, were particularly botched: the population was underestimated by as much as 20 per cent in some years, and agricultural statistics undoubtedly exhibit the same bias. In my view, progress on land clearing is more likely to have been continuous than episodic. Lalou and Boleda, “Une source en friche.” 13 Quebec traders Havy and Lefebvre to César-Marie de La Croix, intendant of Martinique, Quebec, 30 May 1743, cited in Miquelon, New France, 143. The bishop of Quebec wrote the same thing, practically word for word: ac, c11a, 78: 398, letter to the court, 22 August 1742. 14 See infra, ch. 8. 15 Lunn, “Agriculture and War,” discusses a long-term decline in ­productivity; among more recent work, see Pritchard, “Ships, Men and Commerce,” 371; Cassel, “The Troupes de la Marine,”389.

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209

16 A systematic study of lawsuits to recover loans before the royal judges might serve to discern the impact of poor harvests on various occupational categories. Fluctuations in obligations would be another clue, but not all debtors would be identified by this method. 17 The work by John Hare, Marc Lafrance, and David Thiery Ruddel, Histoire de la ville de Québec, is representative of the recent trend. The chapter on the French regime (pp. 48–57) describes the “march of misery,” the continual erosion of living standards in the eighteenth century. Desloges, A Tenant’s Town, presents the same image of a population traumatized by recurrent crises, exploited by foreigners, and becoming increasingly impoverished with the development of trade. Serious methodological problems plague both works. 18 The peaks of mortality are of epidemic origin. There was a smallpox epidemic in 1733, coinciding with a poor harvest, which does not necessarily indicate a cause-and-effect relationship; after all, the shortfall was small as compared with those of 1736–37 and 1741–43, which did not result in higher mortality rates. Gauvreau, Québec, 34–40. However, in the last decade of the regime, malnutrition and mortality are closely linked. 19 Miquelon, New France, 206. The annual variations in numbers of engagés traced by Gratien Allaire give no evidence of such a trend: Allaire, “Les engagements,” 8. I do not, however, reject the hypothesis on this basis – since caution must be observed as regards the representativeness of licence registrations – but rather on that of the internal logic of the fur trade, which was not a charity. 20 ba nq -q, tp1, s 777, d21, general inventory of wheat, 1729. 21 banq-q, e1, s 1, p618, ordinance of 1 February 1710. 22 Kaplan, Bread, 1–51, 677ff. 23 Fines varying from 50 to 200 livres at the beginning of the century were increased to 500 livres plus six months’ imprisonment after 1750. There were two or three prosecutions for illegal exports but none against violators of other regulations, which proves nothing, since the archives of the intendancy are incomplete. banq-q, e 1 ,s 1 , p1067, ordinance of 3 September 1716. 24 More specifically, freedom of trade was suspended for all or part of the season in 1700, 1701, 1707–10, 1714–18, 1723, 1729, 1737–38, and 1742–44. This data is inconsistent with the data compiled by Jacques Mathieu into a table, which is marred by a number of mistakes (for example, 1737–38) and by a needless and superficial categorization into justified and unjustified bans. Mathieu, Le commerce, 52–3.

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25 See, for example, ac , b, 61: 537, memorandum from the king to Beauharnois and Hocquart, 27 April 1734. 26 The liberal experience of 1764–71 being an exception: Kaplan, Bread, 64. Since occasional exports did not jeopardize the security of the realm, they did not come up for political debate, as Kaplan notes. In Canada, by contrast, all criticism of the grain police essentially revolved around this issue. 27 ac, b, 58: 401, minister to Hocquart, 17 March 1733, and the king’s annual memorandum to the colonial administrators, in the same series. 28 Fifteen years after his arrival in the colony, Hocquart acknowledged the dubiety of his information sources. “Experience has taught me that one can put no stock in the reports of the habitants living in the côtes”: ac, c11a, 81: 267–68v, letter to the minister, 22 September 1744. 29 When there were two consecutive poor harvests, the second was detected very quickly because the colony was on alert and the crop was threshed earlier. 30 ac , c 11a, 60: 88–9, letter to the minister, 18 October 1733. 31 ac, c 1 1a, 75: 304–304v, Hocquart to the minister, 7 September 1741. 32 Ibid., 85–6v, Beauharnois to the minister, 15 February [1742]. The letter is erroneously dated 1741. It arrived too late, causing a host of complications that exasperated the minister. See his dispatches to the financial commissary of Louisbourg during the summer of 1742: ac, b, 74, passim. 33 ac, c 11a, 77: 277–83, Hocquart to the minister, 11 June 1742. 34 Dale Miquelon pinpoints this administrative lapse: New France, 208. 35 That is to say, the bans that followed a period of laissez-faire. In the case of consecutive poor harvests, the bans were reiterated right after the harvest. 36 Hamelin, Économie et société, 63; Mathieu, Le commerce, 54. 37 Ships taking on their cargo in Montreal were required to stop in Quebec and obtain leave from the admiralty court. At any rate, such direct voyages did not take place in poor harvest years. 38 When, in one instance, a ship from Louisbourg loaded flour and biscuit across from La Canoterie in Lower Town at nightfall, the subterfuge was immediately denounced: banq-q, tl5,d809, minutes of bailiff of the Conseil (in the intendant’s absence), 30 July 1729. Apparently, the bans also applied to provisions bound for the gulf fisheries. Thus, in 1743, a merchant was denied permission to freight a ship for Labrador, forcing him to go and collect it on the northern coast of

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211

Newfoundland: rapq (1920–21), 63–75, “Relation de la découverte qu’a fait le sieur Louis Fornel en 1743 de la Baie des Eskimaux.” 39 It is my belief that the Côte du Sud parishes sold flour to the fisherman of Labrador and the Gaspé Peninsula at all times, no doubt even during export bans. This type of provisioning did not require the same savoir-faire. But these were not exports, since these establishments were part of the colony. Moreover, provisions departing Quebec for these fishing posts were grouped separately, under the heading of “cabotage,” in the official statistics: ac, f2 b , 11. 40 l ac, m g 3–i i i –62aq, voyage of the Astrée, 1750. Thanks to Thomas Wien for this reference. 41 On cod exports to the West Indies by Quebec shipowners, as well as profits on flour and biscuit exports, see Pritchard, “Ships, Men and Commerce,” 365, 378–84, 414. 42 See the figure in Appendix C. If a line is drawn at 50 sols, all years in which exports occurred can be seen to fall under this line. ac, b, 99: 7, minister to Duquesne and Bigot, 30 May 1754. To put an end to the much-decried arbitrary bans, he suggested that they use the price of wheat as a reference, and the intendant proposed a threshold of 50 sols – an interesting discussion but, under the circumstances, a needless one. This idea of a sliding scale is found again ten years later in Turgot’s reforms. The system had been in use in England since the seventeenth century as a method of regulating grain imports and exports. 43 Bermen de La Martinière, “Lettres”; Yves F. Zoltvany, biography of Michel Bégon, DCB , 3: 60–7; Dubé, Les intendants, 142–3. 44 Cited in Porteous, “The Administration of François Bigot,” 267. 45 Pritchard, “Ships, Men and Commerce,” 414. 46 The ideal, explained the intendant of Paris, was to enforce the police regulations at all times so as not to have to impose bans when shortages occurred: Kaplan, Bread, 78–84. 47 In the intendant’s absence, the subdelegate, assisted by the governor and the Conseil, was in charge of policing. ac, c 1 1 a , 68: 56–70, Michel to the minister, 10 May 1737. 48 jdcs, vols. 4–6; banq-q, tp1,s 28,p 5554, p7495 and p7520, and e1,s 1,p576, p590, p611 and p618, and parts of p 874 and p 931, decisions and ordinances of 22 November 1700, 30 March and 25 April 1701, 15 October and 16 November 1709, 1 January and 1 February 1710, 24 January, and 18 August 1714. 49 banq-q, e1, s 1, p931, ordinance of 18 August 1714 setting the price of wheat; e1, s 1, p938, p941, and p9 5 1 , ordinances of

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23 September, 27 October, and 30 December 1714 concerning requisitions; e1, s 1, p934, ordinance of 12 September banning the use of bolters. The last measure was repeated on 4 and 8 February 1718. In addition to being maladroit, Bégon’s policy was not always consistent. A merchant refused to deliver 300 quarters of patent flour to his customer, invoking the contract cancellation order that the intendant had just promulgated. This ordinance reversed an initial judgment by his subdelegate in favour of this vendor and ordered the contract to be faithfully performed: e1, s 1, p931, ordinance of 18 August 1714. 50 The price curve would seem to indicate that the deficit was rather small that year. The depreciation of card money by half its value, announced by Versailles in the spring of 1714, was not unrelated to this episode. The intendant offered to pay for the wheat in card money at a time when merchants were having trouble redeeming it, even at half its face value – yet another reason for the peasants to disobey. See Dechêne, Habitants and Merchants, 70–2, and infra, ch. 9 on the winds of revolt blowing through the colony in 1714. 51 banq-q, e1,s1,p1540, ordinance of 14 July 1723; tp1,s28,p16853, p 1 6 8 5 6, p16878, and p16888, Conseil supérieur decisions of 21 May, 27 June, 24 July, and 1 August 1729. The Conseil, acting alone that summer in the intendant’s absence, also ordered parish reserves to be inventoried. 52 ac , c 1 1a, 69: 3–5, ordinance issued by Beauharnois and Hocquart, 28 February 1738. Official wheat prices had been set in the early years of the colony, but this practice had ceased in 1665. Even during the severe crisis of 1690–93, the authorities preferred to leave the market alone, “besides the fact that there is no example of wheat price setting in France, except where a particular individual has stockpiled large quantities”: ac , c11a, 12: 211, Frontenac and Champigny to the minister, 4 November 1693. Several subsequent ordinances decreed that the intendant would force merchants to sell their surpluses to him at a set price, but without otherwise acting on the market price, as happened in 1738 and repeatedly in later years. 53 Kaplan, Bread, 81–4; Bernard to the controller general, 8 October 1693, cited in Meuvret, Le problème des subsistances, 3(2): 112. Instances of official price-setting in eighteenth-century France were rare and sharply criticized; see, for example, Lhéritier, L’intendant Tourny, 2: 343–4, 391–416, on the crisis of 1746–47 in Guyenne. In Normandy, despite public pressure, the idea of setting the price of wheat was never considered: Chaline, “Le juge et le pain.”

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213

54 Since notarized wheat supply contracts were very rare even under normal conditions, there are scant traces of such transactions. Even so, I was able to find two instances: banq-v m, c n6 0 1 ,s3, contract of 12 September 1742; cn 601, s 108, contract of 9 August 1743. 55 ac , c 11a, 78: 319, “Petit mémoire du Canada” by Josué Dubois Berthelot de Beaucours, 20 September 1742. 56 ba nq -q, e1, s 1, p2943, p2986, p29 8 8 , p3 4 0 2 , and p3 4 8 3 , ­ordinances issued by the intendant between 1737 and 1743; t p 1 , s 777, d70, ordinance issued by the governor general and the intendant, 24 November 1743; tp1,s2 8 ,p1 9 3 2 3 , Conseil supérieur decision, 25 October 1742; ac, f3, 13: 95. 57 ac, f 3, 13: 95, Conseil supérieur decision, 25 October 1742; c 1 1 a , 77: 63–5, Beauharnois and Hocquart to the minister, 26 October 1742; banq-q, tl5, d1277, order to Lanoullier de Boisclerc to go to the Côte du Sud to purchase wheat on behalf of the king, 30 October 1742. The statement of expenses (bordereau) for these requisitions shows that wheat was also taken from the Côte de Beaupré: ac, c 1 1 a , 82: 129–41v. 58 ba nq-q, e1, s 1, p2935, p2978, p29 8 8 , p2 9 9 6 , p3 4 4 4 , p3 5 4 5 , p 3 5 48, and p3597, ordinances issued by the intendant between 1737 and 1744; also, ac, f3, 12: 327. 59 ac, f3, 12: 327, ordinance issued by Michel, 20 March 1738. The expense statements prepared by the intendancy, under the item “Courses et voyages,” show expenses claimed by various commissaries for wheat collection in both governments. See, for example, the statement for 1744: ac, c11a, 115: 65–118v. 60 ac, c11a, 81: 14v, letter from Beauharnois and Hocquart, 12 October 1744. 61 The bracketed words are indicated as “struck out, null, and void” in the text. banq-q, tp1, s 777, d32, fol. 256, and tl5 ,d2 6 8 6 , order issued by Lanoullier de Boisclerc, 8 October 1743, followed by minutes of Saint-Michel meeting. 62 ba nq-q, e1, s 1, p3548, ordinance by Beauharnois and Hocquart of 11 October 1743 indicating the date of publication in each parish, this being October 22 for Saint-Michel. The note attests that the habitants had accepted the allocation, but delivery was slow and wheat was shipped from the Côte du Sud to Quebec all through the winter: ac, c 1 1 a , 82: 129–41v. 63 Gagnon and Têtu, Mandements, 2: 22–4, pastoral letter of 15 October 1742. Even during an era when the Church did not hesitate

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to call down fire and brimstone, one is taken aback by the extravagant style of this long pastoral letter, which ought to be quoted in its entirety. 64 ac , c 1 1a, 73: 111–12, “État de la distribution des blés… et des recouvrements,” c. 1740; banq-q, e1 ,s1 ,p3 0 8 8 , ordinance of 4 January 1739. The list includes the Côte du Sud parishes, which were hit hard by the drought and not affected by the requisitions; also, those of Neuville, Saint-Augustin, Saint-Jean-de-l’Île-d’Orléans, and Saint-Nicolas, situated in the vicinity of Quebec, where the king’s clerks had requisitioned wheat in the preceding months. 65 It is impossible to believe that helpless peasants would not have been relying on the intendant for seeds when one reads: “Try as we might, it has not been possible for us to procure seeds in as great abundance as in previous years.” ac, c11a, 79: 11–13v, Beauharnois and Hocquart to the minister, 17 June 1743. 66 banq-q, e1,s1,p2986, e1,s1,p3007, and e1,s1,p3483, ordinances of 28 February 1738, 11 April 1738, and 30 March 1743. These specify that the buyers had to pay cash for the wheat, which was entirely uncustomary, and certainly impossible under the circumstances. 67 ac , c 1 1a, 82: 135v, “État des paiements faits par le receveur du domaine.” The blunders noted here concern only the government of Quebec, the only one covered by the documentation, but it may be assumed that requisitions in the western part of the colony did not go off without a hitch. 68 See Appendix D. There is no detailed expense statement for the year 1738, but the volume of purchases is assumed to be about the same as in 1737, 1742, and 1743. The statements are for the calendar year. The statement for 1744 thus covers both the provisions purchased between January and July, a period of scarcity, and the provisions taken from the good harvest of 1744 in preparation for war – whence the higher volume of storage that year. 69 This grain appears in the accounts under the names of the persons assigned by the intendant to gather it, who acted as subcontractors; infra, ch. 9. 70 The accounts confound sales of provisions to the troops with sales to private individuals. My hypothesis, of necessity tentative, is based on the fact that the correspondence does not mention sales to Montreal bakers or religious communities. 71 These were the main customers. See Saint-Félix, Monseigneur de SaintVallier, 309, in re sales to this hospice; letter from Marie-Andrée Regnard Duplessis (dite de Sainte-Hélène), Superior of the Hôtel-Dieu

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de Québec, 30 October 1744, in La Revue canadienne 12 (1875): 532: “without the good coordination of the city’s charities by our Bishop, the poor would have greatly suffered; but he had a list of all the indigents, and had assigned to each community those it was responsible for helping, in proportion to their capacities. He himself saw to the distribution of eighty loaves each week. In this way has he aided us all.” ac, b, 76: 72, 14 May 1743, minister to Regnard Duplessis in re reimbursement of the wheat loaned by the intendant to the Hotel-Dieu the previous year. 72 The alms paid out of public funds, of which much is made in the correspondence, amounted to a pittance. The authorities doled out about 200 minots of wheat (some of it in the form of bread) or peas in each city in 1737, 1738, and 1742, and around double that amount in Quebec in 1743. The project to extend the piers of the intendant’s palace and to dig a large basin for the new royal shipyard had been submitted several years prior and was given approval in 1743, so what occurred was more of a fortunate coincidence than an instance of innovation or a genuine job creation program. Similarly, the ongoing work on the Montreal fortifications helped the population during the period of high prices in the summer of 1733. Miquelon, New France, 207. 73 The wheat import data is assembled in Appendix E. 74 ac , c11a, 67: 23–7, Beauharnois and Hocquart to the minister, 20 October 1737. 75 ac , c11a, 69: 210–14, account of flour inspection, 23–25 June 1738; ibid., 72: 79–81, statement of use of French flour (drawn up in 1739); ibid., 69: 184–6, 203–7v, Hocquart to the minister, 8 July and 15 August 1738. 76 ac , b, 68: 45 and 76: 3, letters from the minister, 1 May 1739 and 13 February 1743; c11a, 77: 79–80, Beauharnois and Hocquart to the minister, 13 November 1742. The loss was all the more bitterly rued in that this flour had been expensive, for the French harvests had likewise been poor. 77 ac, c11a, 79: 11–13v, Beauharnois and Hocquart to the minister, 17 June 1743; ibid., 240–2, 250–6v, 260–2, and 80: 244, Hocquart to the minister, 14 July, 9 August, and 30 November 1743, and to Duquesnel and Bigot, 19 and 27 July and 30 November 1743; ibid., 79: 62–7, Beauharnois and Hocquart to the minister, 14 October 1743; ibid., 80: 3, Hocquart to the minister, 14 October 1743. 78 See letter from Beauharnois and Hocquart of 14 October 1743, cited in the preceding note. In 1743, Dugard shipped these 600 cwt

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at its own risk and expense. In 1744, it signed a prior contract with the naval ministry for 2,000 cwt. 79 ac, c11a, 79: 250–3, Hocquart to Duquesnel and Bigot, 19 July 1743; Têtu and Casgrain, Mandements, 2: 31–3, pastoral letter ordering public prayers. 80 ac , c 1 1a, 79: 62–7, Beauharnois and Hocquart to the minister, 14 October 1743; b, 78: 5, minister’s reply, 13 March 1744. On the radical changes in the outlook over the course of the season, see the lengthy correspondence of the summer of 1743, cited earlier. 81 The first flour arrived only twelve to fifteen days before the crop came in. The other ships, including a party from Honfleur, were harried by privateers and reached Quebec much later. ac, c 1 1 a , 81: 228, 251, 260–3, 300–8, 448–54, Hocquart to the minister, 5 and 22 July, 7 September, and 9 and 28 October 1744; ibid., 83: 285, statement of use of French flour, 1744; b, 82: 51, minister to Dugard in re flour sold to the king, 16 March 1745. 82 See Appendix E. It thus seems difficult to link the increased tonnage from Bordeaux, beginning abruptly in 1738, to the failure of Canadian agriculture, as James Pritchard does: on the one hand, because the first flour from Bordeaux only arrived in 1743, and on the other, because traffic between that port and Quebec continued to increase from 1745 to 1751, in the absence of grain imports. Certain Bordeaux flour shipments noted by Pritchard (1,600 cwt in 1740, 812 in 1746, 2,192 in 1748) pose a problem, since these were years of low prices in the colony and it exported abundantly in 1740 and 1748. French flour would have been sold there at a loss. It appears that these Bordeaux shipping companies, perhaps ill-informed at the time of the declarations, may have taken this flour elsewhere than Quebec: Pritchard, “Ships, Men, and Commerce,” 322–4 and also 501, Table 16; idem, “Pattern.” 83 “Canada is once again saved by your generous favour,” exclaimed the naval controller, forgetting that the sole precedent, in 1738, had been a total failure: ac, c11a, 80: 300, Varin to the minister, 26 June 1743. The estimates in Table 1.1 (ch. 1) are used here to put the various contributions in perspective. 84 Wien, Peasant Accumulation, 197–8. 85 For a comparison with seventeenth-century France, see Meuvret, “Monetary Circulation,” 146. 86 Hilton Root, in “Politique frumentaire,” contends that the interventions created price distortions that resulted in a transfer of revenue

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from country to city, basing this assertion on a comparison of the French and English authorities’ attitudes in times of scarcity. 87 Cobb, The Police and the People, 297ff, 370–4. When Tocqueville wanted to show just how far arbitrariness and administrative violence could go under a monarchy, he reached for the example of price-setting and requisitions; see The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, 168 in particular.

C h a p t e r s e ve n  1 Mémoire pour Messire François Bigot, 2: 9–10.   2 See, for example, Fauteux, Essai sur l’industrie; Horton, Gilles Hocquart, or Hamelin, Économie et société, as well as other works emphasizing the economic “œuvre” of Intendant Talon and the downturn that followed his departure.  3 ac, c 11a, 6: 61, letter from Governor La Barre in re the establishment of wheat stores in Quebec and Montreal, 12 November 1682. On these matters, see Cassel, “The Troupes de la Marine.”   4 The list of career administrative officer (officier de plume) and office employee positions is found in the annual financial statements. See the source list in Appendix D.   5 On occasion, when the items ordered from France did not arrive, the intendant purchased these goods from merchants in the colony. Desbarats, Colonial Government Finances, discusses the procurement policy of the naval ministry for its colonies, along with all the other aspects of public finances; see, in particular, chs. 3 and 4.  6 banq -vm , cn 601, s 86, contract with Guyon Després “to supply all the beef and lard necessary to the subsistence of the troops of the garrison for the current year at 3 sols and 6 deniers per pound of beef and 7 sols per pound of lard,” 18 December 1731. He supplied meat for ninteen companies stationed in Montreal from the early 1730s to the early 1750s; banq-q, cn 301, s1 9 0 , contracts of 4 November 1726 and 24 January 1729 between the king and Dolbec, who had been supplying Quebec since 1726 or earlier and retained the contract until 1738, when Joseph Cadet took over. Also, ac, g3 , 2040, passim; Archives de la Bastille, 12142, fols. 148ff, examination of Cadet.  7 l ac , m g 17–a7–2, 13: 7803–4, 7814–15, leases between the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice and the subdelegate on “four large granaries for storage of wheat and flour to feed the troops,” 17 February

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1710 and 14 March 1712; for renewal of these leases, see revenue and expense statements of the colony, passim, and Appendix D.  8 rapq (1938–39), 20, 35, Vaudreuil and Beauharnois to the minister, 15 November 1703, and memorandum from the king to Vaudreuil and Beauharnois, 14 June 1704. Canadian custom was consistent with that of the French ports, where the naval ministry also had its own bakeries: an , Marine D3, 44, “Mémoire et observations sur les boulangeries des vivres de la Marine,” c. 1785.  9 ac , b, 57: 632, and 72: 379ff, minister to Hocquart, 8 April 1732 and 6 May 1741; c11a, 76: 57–78, and 80: 240–8v, Hocquart to the minister, 30 October 1741 and 30 November 1743. 10 ac , c 1 1a, 76: 272–7, memorial by Varin on several expense categories, recommending changes: Archives de la Bastille, 12146, fols. 78ff, “Mémoire pour Jean-Baptiste Martel… ci-devant garde-magasin du roi à Montréal,” 1763. 11 ac , c 1 1a, 89: 52–5, Hocquart to the minister, 4 November 1747; ibid., 92: 1127–9v, Bigot to the minister, 27 October 1748. 12 See table in Appendix D. 13 The numbers decreased steadily between 1715 and 1750: Cassel, “The Troupes de la Marine,” Appendices A and B. 14 The soldier often gave his ration to his host and shared in the family’s daily existence. These were private arrangements. During the War of the League of Augsburg and the Seven Years’ War, soldiers housed in rural areas were required to be fed by their hosts, who were compensated, at least in principle. Jay Cassel erroneously believes that this exceptional policy had been in common use since 1685: Cassel, “The Troupes de la Marine,” 347–9. 15 I have done much research to elucidate the origin of the phrase bateaux du cent. It may have been a reference to contracts signed with the carrier in which the price was calculated in fixed increments for each additional 100 pounds. See, for example, banq-q, c n3 0 1, s 190, contract of 4 May 1724 between Intendant Bégon and voyageur J.-B. Girard to carry a certain quantity of ammunition and provisions from Lachine to Fort Frontenac at a price of 5 livres “per hundredweight.” 16 François Rousseau wonders whether these military rations were relatively close to actual consumption or a mere “administrative convenience”: Rousseau, L’œuvre de chère, 376. Rousseau’s examples took place during the Seven Years’ War.

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17 The campaigns in question were the ones against the Meskwaki in 1715, 1730, 1734–35, and against the Chickasaw in 1736 and 1739. A portion of these expenses appears in the 1736 and 1740 fiscal years: ac, c 11a, 114: 11–14, 261–306. See Miquelon, New France, 167–8, 176–9, 187–8. 18 The statements do not allow for an itemization of these latter items. Charities, for example, are under the line item “sales of provisions to the troops and to individuals.” A more detailed statement shows that they were not very significant, involving aid to disabled soldiers remaining in the colony, widows of the king’s employees living in poverty, a few poor gentlemen, etc., for a total of seventeen beneficiaries and 97 cwt of bread for Quebec, and perhaps the same amounts for Montreal: ac , c11a, 76: 77–8, “Extrait des registres des magasins du roi à Québec – Rations,” 1 September 1741. 19 There are exceptions. For example, in 1741, the intendant added 483 cwt of bread taken from the stores to the 700 supplied by Lemaître-Lamorille: ac , c11a, 76: 122–3. The provisioning of the Tadoussac trade was also entrusted to the company: ba nq-q, e 1 ,s 1 , p2476, ordinance of 19 August 1732. For all financial aspects, particularly those relating to the Naval Ordinance of 1689, see Desbarats, Colonial Government Finances, passim. 20 The problem is not addressed in Jay Cassel’s thesis, The Troupes de la Marine, 374–81. Contracts with French purveyors, which existed even before 1689, might explain why Canada imported flour for the garrisons in the 1680s, when the colony’s wheat could find no buyers. Dechêne, Habitants and Merchants, 192–3. See also Desbarats, Colonial Government Finances, 123–4. 21 rapq (1939–40), 419, 425, 433; rapq (1942–43), 407–8, 418–25, 441–3; rapq (1946–47), 379; rapq (1947–48), 170, 184, 245, 283: correspondence of Governor Vaudreuil with the court. These purchases correspond to a period of catastrophic harvests in France. 22 Pritchard, “Ships, Men and Commerce,” 350–60. 23 At least, that is the most plausible hypothesis, and the fact that the possibility of a Canadian contribution is no longer even mentioned in the correspondence with Versailles appears to confirm it. Certain historians have ascribed the interruption to poor harvests, a notion contradicted by the low price of wheat between 1719 and 1727. Moreover, merchants were exporting flour during the period. 24 ac , b, 64: 21, minister to M. de Saint-Léon, 17 January 1736.

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25 When wheat was worth 40–45 sols in Canada, patent flour could fetch up to 10 livres per hundredweight. Freight between Quebec and Louisbourg was 30 livres “per ton of eight quarters,” which makes 1.87 livres per hundredweight, for a total delivered cost of about 12 livres. It would have been hard to beat these shipping costs out of French ports; for example, the flour sent from Rochefort in 1736 cost 12.5 livres per hundredweight, before freight. However, freight between Quebec and the West Indies cost 75 livres per ton, considerably reducing the competitiveness of Canadian flour. 26 DCB , 3: 384, biographical article by André Lachance; ac, c 1 1 a , 60: 88–99, Hocquart to the minister, 18 October 1733; ibid., 70: 64–9, expense statement for 1734. 27 DCB , 3: 241–3, article by Donald J. Horton; ac , c 1 1 a , 73: 377–9v, Hocquart to the minister, 2 November 1740; Bosher, “A Quebec Merchant’s Trading Circles,” 36–7. Lamaletie married one of Foucault’s daughters. 28 Tanguay, Dictionnaire, passim; ac, c11 a , 76: 122–4v, excerpt from expenses of 1741; 78: 124, excerpt from expenses for 1742; 83: 328– 34, Hocquart to the minister, 29 October 1745, followed by purchases in 1744 and 1745. Pierre Trottier Desauniers complemented Courval’s supply in 1733 and Lemaître-Lamorille’s in 1741; this latter shipment was defective: ac , c11a, 78: 314. 29 banq-q, tp1, s777, d21, fol. 188v, contract with Courval, 24 July 1729; ac, g3, 2040, other contracts with Courval, 31 March 1731 and 18 February 1732; see also the accounting documents cited in the ­previous note. 30 Farm produce, delivered on the bank at the desired time, did not enter the stores. The freight charge was 30 livres for a ton consisting of 8 quarters of flour, or the same as in charters by individuals: c n3 0 1, s 190, charter contract by the intendant, 12 August 1729; ac, g3 , 2040, other contracts, 10 May 1731 and 10 June 1732. 31 ac, c 11a, 81: 323–4v, Hocquart to the minister, 10 October 1744. It took several decades for Canadians to learn how to pack flour exports properly; Île Royale, which lacked the same advantages, equipment, and qualified labour, could not have learned to do it overnight. Donald J. Horton’s thesis, Gilles Hocquart, which presents the intendant as an industrial developer of sorts, has too often been cited. 32 a n, M, 1031, doc. 20, anon. memorial, n.d. [by Claude-Charles Bacqueville de La Potherie, written c. 1702 and apparently addressed to the new intendant, F. de Beauharnois]. Several passages are quoted

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in his Histoire de l’Amérique septentrionale. Thanks to Thomas Wien for providing me with this document. 33 ac , g3, 2040, passim. Thanks to Mario Lalancette for pointing out this series of contracts, which do not appear in the inventories. Two of the sixty-five contracts concern flour purchases for the Île Royale garrison. 34 There are thirteen statements that are relatively complete from this point of view, dating from 1732 to 1747. However, in 1746 and 1747, nominal lists of vendors exist only for purchases by the Quebec stores: Appendix D. For the study of suppliers that follows, I have added four statements for 1726–29, in which wheat and flour supplies are generally confounded with other provisions. Among the twenty-two grain suppliers clearly identified as such, eleven vanish from my sources in subsequent decades. Thanks to Catherine Desbarats for supplying these latter documents. 35 ac , g3, 2040, contract signed 23 December 1733 and deliveries from January to late March 1734. 36 The seigneurs were the Séminaire de Québec, the Baron de Longueuil, Louis Lepage de Saint-Claire, and Louis de La Corne, the last two being succesive seigneurs of Terrebonne. I shall return to the presence of employees among the suppliers, which is linked to wheat requisitions. 37 Grain movement in the opposite direction is observed in 1728, but for reasons having nothing to do with production. Claude-Gabriel Walon de Messy, a Quebec merchant and a partner of François Foucault, delivered 2,000 minots to the Montreal store. The origin of this wheat is unknown, but given that Foucault was a Quebec storekeeper, the place of delivery would appear to have been a means of hiding the conflict of interest to some extent. banq-q, tp1 ,s7 7 7 ,d2 1 , statement by Walon de Messy to the Conseil supérieur, 24 July 1729, and ac, G 2, 215. 38 ac , c 11a, 114: 98–134, and g 3, 2040, contracts dating from 25 November 1738 to 6 January 1739. The main suppliers were ­merchants Charles Héry, François-Augustin Bailly, François Demers, and Alexandre d’Ailleboust. 39 ac , c 11a, 76: 65, letter to the minister, 30 October 1741. This intendant often used the argument of poverty, in some instances that of the peasants, in others that of the merchants or officers, to counter changes unfavourable to him. 40 There are some seventeen members of the nobility or other seigneury owners or their tenant farmers in the second category of suppliers,

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and fifteen more among the occasional suppliers, ignoring all those who inevitably eluded my attention. Since nobles accounted for about 2 per cent of the total population of the period, they can be said to be rather well represented. See Gadoury, La noblesse, 154–5. 41 According to the Naval Ordinance of April 1689, book 21, title ii, art. vii, reproduced in Desbarats, Colonial Government Finances, Appendix 3.3. Desbarats clearly establishes that the regulations were the same in the colonies as for the French arsenals. See, in particular, ch. 3. 42 The figures for the third category, composed of individuals of modest social status, are more approximate, for the difficulties of identification are such that several individuals may have been counted more than once. 43 The heading “contingencies” comprises miscellaneous expenses incurred in the search for wheat, which makes it possible to identify the agents. In principle, these persons should also appear as suppliers under the heading “procurement of provisions,” but in some cases the supply is listed under another name. Contrariwise, certain suppliers, such as Pommereau in Montreal, Joseph Léveillé, and Jean Brassard, whom I believe to have been requisition officers in 1742–43, are not mentioned in connection with search expenses. Where the agent was a merchant, as in the case of Héry, who supplied a total of 5,754 minots in 1742, in three deliveries at different prices, how can the wheat he requisitioned be differentiated from the wheat that came from his own business? In short, these accounts do not suffice to obtain a precise estimate of the volume of requisitions. See the sources of the 1742–43 statements in Appendix D. 44 ac , c 1 1a, 82: 129–41v, statement of payments by the receiver of the domain. 45 The name Louval, instead of Longval, appears on the statements – is this a subterfuge or merely a variant spelling? Impossible to say. The case was cited by Bigot at trial to prove that abuses had existed before his administration: Mémoire pour Messire François Bigot, 2: 9–10. Someone named Goubault occasionally (e.g., in 1732) supplied provisions. These latter contracts, along with contracts concerning supplies of goods, are preserved in the minute books of the notary Pierre Petit (1721–35). 46 ac, g3, 2040, passim. See, for example, the contracts of 5 October 1730, 26 September and 11 October 1731 with Pierre Trottier Desauniers, Joseph Poulin Nicolet, and Joseph Guyon Després. 47 Ibid., contracts of 25 September and 2, 8, and 11 October 1732 with Charles Lemoine of Longueuil, François Poisset, Jean-Pascal Taché,

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and François Poulin de Francheville, as well as the new contracts signed on 20 February. 48 ba nq -q, cn 301, s 190, contract of 21 October 1728; ba nq-v m, t l 4 , s 11, d15, fol. 406v, lawsuit filed by Rocbert, the king’s storekeeper in Montreal, 13 May 1729; ba nq-q, e1 ,s1 ,p2 9 0 5 , ordinance of 28 February 1737 concerning a proceeding against Auguste Guillet de Chaumont for an incomplete delivery in 1734. 49 banq-q, cn 301, s 91, contract of 24 October 1736 between the financial commissary and Madeleine Laverdière, wife of Charles Demers (dit Desermont); e1,s1,p2902, ordinance of 26 January 1737; banq-vm, cn601,s259, power of attorney of 31 January 1737 given by Demers, “now prisoner in the prisons of the Conciergerie of Montreal,” to Charles Ruette d’Auteuil; Roy, Inventaire des jugements, 3: 185, appeal to the Conseil and judgment of 5 July 1737 ordering the Montreal jailer to release the prisoner and strike the detention off the prison register. Note that contracts signed with Demers and Pommereau do not appear in the series of contracts of the intendancy, but were exceptionally recorded in the minute books of the notaries who drafted them. 50 “La correspondance de madame Bégon,” rapq (1934–35), 19, letter of 22 December 1748. This contract had evidently been signed one year earlier, with payment in the summer of 1748. Dufy had been a regular supplier since 1743, at first for small quantities, which increased starting in 1747. Judge Jacques-Joseph Guiton de Monrepos accused the commissary of encroaching on his jurisdiction, a power struggle discussed briefly in ch. 3, supra. Élisabeth’s chilliness toward Varin was perhaps due to the fact that he had succeeded her beloved son-in-law, Honoré Michel de Villebois de La Rouvillière. 51 Bosher, “Government and Private Interests”; idem, “A Quebec Merchant’s Trading Circles,” 40–1. 52 Bosher, French Finances; idem, The French Revolution, 243–66. 53 Catherine Desbarats has demonstrated the existence of these principles in the regulation of colonial public finances: Colonial Government Finances, 108–16. The negligence of the king’s officers was more often to blame than any intrusions by private interests into affairs of state. 54 Dubé, Les intendants, 243. 55 Dale Miquelon offers some interesting reflections on patronage in the colony: New France, 245–58. On corruption in general, see Waquet, De la corruption. On the emergence of the state and the contours of the public and the private, see Castan, “Politique

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Notes to pages 111–4

et vie privée.” These issues, and in particular the implementation of a bureaucracy, are addressed in Le Roy Ladurie, “The Snake and the Sun,” ch. 4 of The Ancien Régime, 126–79. 56 The case of Joseph Guyon Després, a Montreal merchant butcher, is an exception. He supplied not only all the garrison’s meat over a very long period but also its wheat from the 1720s on. His business was undoubtedly built to a large extent on these contracts. The case of François Poisset of Rivière-des-Prairies is less clear, but government procurement of meat and grain certainly played a very important role for him at the start of his career.

Chapter eight   1 The practice of deferring certain expenses to a subsequent fiscal year complicates the interpretation of the accounts. For example, 7,476 minots of grain delivered to the Montreal storekeeper in 1735 were found on a statement dating from 1736. In this case the entry was corrected, but such deferrals were not always equally visible: ac, c 1 1 a , 88: 184–98, Hocquart to the minister, 31 October 1747. More serious is the uncertainty as to the purchases of flour intended for other colonies and the Acadian borderlands. Before 1744, these supplies are additional to those of the stores, which appear in Appendix D unaugmented, but subsequently this is less certain. At any rate, the upward trend is undeniable.  2 ac, c11a, 86, fols. 178–236, expenditures made in the king’s stores in Montreal on the occasion of the war, 1 September to 31 December 1746; also, 87: 02–14v, other details about this equipment.  3 ac , c 11a, 88: 3–6, 15–27, 184–98, Hocquart to the minister, 9 July, 24 September, and 31 October 1747; ibid., 96–7, 186–7, on the encampments on the Etchemin River and at Saint-Michel and Pointe-à-la-Caille.  4 ac , c 11a, 88: 248ff, procurement of provisions at Quebec, October 1746 to October 1747. The corn was sold at 4.5–5 livres per minot, while a minot of wheat was worth 3–3.5 livres.  5 ac , c 11a, 115: 254–77, and 88: 13ff, expense statements for these two expeditions. The campaigns as such were very short, as compared with the preparations, and not very successful.   6 In the summer of 1745, fearing an invasion, the governor brought 2,000 militiamen from the Montreal region down to Quebec, where they spent the whole season. That year, the total number of men

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mobilized was more than 2,000. Six months of provisions a year must be reckoned, since the garrisons were reduced in winter.  7 ac , c 11a, 83: 3–36; ibid., 84: 103–7v; ibid., 85: 101–69, accounts of movements of detachments commanded by Paul Marin de La Malgue in 1745 and by Jean-Baptiste-Nicolas-Roch de Ramezay in 1746–47.  8 ac , c 11a, 85: 93v and 268, Beauharnois and Hocquart to Duc d’Anville, 27 October 1746; ibid., 88: 147, in re shipments of provisions for 1747.  9 ac , c 11a, 88: 20, letter from Hocquart, 24 September 1747; ibid., 91: 269–71, letter from Hocquart, 16 August 1748. These shipments outside the colony were, it seems, partly composed of flour taken from the Quebec store, which had an oversupply. 10 This includes the 1744–45 shipments to the Louisbourg garrison, which appear in Appendix F. 11 ac , c 11a, 88: 15–27; ibid., 89: 21–6v, Hocquart to the minister, 24 September and 2 November 1747. 12 The announcement of the fall of Louisbourg caused flour prices to decline momentarily, but the trend was immediately counterbalanced by other factors. The main factor in the ensuing price rises, which accelerated after 1752, was the depreciation of bills issued by the administration. 13 After criticizing the messiness of past financial administration, Bigot boasted of having introduced a better accounting system, and historians – even those most critical of him – have lauded his competence in this area. While it is true that the financial statements were henceforth kept up to date, the vagueness and arbitrariness characteristic of these documents do not seem to be the traits of a sound accounting system. See Frégault, François Bigot, 1: 328–9, for a complimentary account. 14 ac , c 11a, 116: 91–140, 163–90, 295ff, revenue and expense statements for 1748 and 1749; ibid., 119: 332–60v, 371–97, 431–44 for 1750 and 1751. The subsequent vouchers were filed with the Châtelet in Paris for the intendant’s trial and have since disappeared. 15 A.J.E. Lunn and other historians believed that the supply problems were essentially due to a decline in production, and they discussed military demand only in connection with the final years of the war. Lunn, “Agriculture and War.” 16 Frégault, “Essai sur les finances canadiennes,” in Le xviii e siècle canadien, 322, 332–46. 17 ac , c 11a, 97: 116, letter from Governor La Jonquière, 11 October 1751. There were 2,000 habitants on Île Saint-Jean in 1752; according

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to a 1753 report, there were 150 families on the Chignecto Isthmus and an equal number along the St John River. For the location of these habitants, see Jean Daigle and Robert Leblanc, “Acadian Deportation and Return,” in Harris and Matthews, eds., Historical Atlas, vol. 1, plate 30. 18 Four to five ships carried 10,000–12,000 cwt of flour and biscuit to Baie Verte and the St John River and around 2,000 to Île Saint-Jean – in total, the equivalent of at least 40,000 minots of wheat. Bigot cited these figures when summarizing the main facts of his administration for the Châtelet judges, drawing on excerpts from his correspondence. Following the poor harvest of 1751, he asked the minister for the 11,600 cwt of flour that Canada was unable to supply that year: Mémoire pour Messire François Bigot, 1: 89; see also Mémoire pour le Sieur de Boishébert. 19 The numbers increased fron 800 to around 1,500, or thirty companies of fifty men each. 20 So that the allies would not complain about prices or selection, the government began to play an increasingly prominent role in supplying the posts, an endeavour formerly left to private enterprise. It had to increase the numbers of soldiers, militiamen, and employees as well as the number of men assigned to the transports. See Stanley, New France; White, Middle Ground; Conrad E. Heidenreich and Françoise Noël, “France Secures the Interior, 1740–1755,” in Harris and Matthews, eds., Historical Atlas, vol. 1, plate 40. 21 The quantities in question were 10,000 cwt of flour and 1,500 of peas in 1749; 13,324 and 2,300 in 1750; and 6,500 cwt of flour only in 1751. Lunn, “Economic Development,” 103–4. 22 ac , b, 97: 50, minister to Bigot, 30 June 1753. The intendant’s response, containing the arguments that succeeded in persuading Versailles to entrust him with this responsibility, has not been found. On the provisions sent to Acadia, Île Saint-Jean, and Miramichi, see Mémoire pour le Sieur de Boishébert, passim. 23 See Appendix E. The figures are approximate. Sizable shipments duly registered in France sailed for Canada, but losses at sea were considerable and it is not always easy to know how much reached its destination. 24 ba nq -q, e1, s 1, p3957, e1, s 1, p40 1 8 , e1 ,s1 ,p4 0 6 5 , e 1 ,s 1 , p4108, and e1, s 1, p4159, ordinances by the financial commissary and the intendant issued between 1749 and 1754. 25 Recall that similar regulations had been published previously, but always in conjunction with a food crisis, and they had always been

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scrapped once the crisis was over; supra, ch. 3. In a further innovation, the year 1749 saw the inauguration of ongoing supervision under the dual authority of the military command and the intendant. A lease on a ship for trips to Montreal, signed at Quebec on 7 April 1755, stipulates that the navigator (lessee) would pay for the permit: ba nq-q, t l 5 , d1787. In a hearing before the provost court, the Séminaire de Québec mentioned that it had been denied a permit to carry wheat from its Île Jésus seigneury in 1757: ba nq-q, tl5 ,d1 0 7 0 . 26 banq-q, e1,s1,p4018, e1,s1,p4019, and e1,s1,p4108, ordinances of 19 and 22 March 1751 and 6 October 1752, prohibiting flour milling and biscuit making; also, e1,s1,p4202 and e1,s1,p4238, ordinances of 1 October 1755 and 16 November 1756 in re seals on bolters and bans on barrel-making and baking. Several ordinances from this period were not written down, such as the one dated 24 December 1757 to place seals on mills, a measure whose existence is corroborated by a number of sources, such as Récher, “M. Jean-Félix Récher,” 304, and Courville, Mémoires sur le Canada, 87–8. 27 Several of the wheat price ordinances issued during the last three years of the war are missing. As to the requisitions, these were not the subject of ordinances – no more than they had been under Hocquart – but they left traces everywhere: in the official correspondence, the commissions and reports of the persons responsible for the requisitions, observer accounts, legal proceedings, and notarial instruments. Thus, it is quite surprising to read in two recent theses that the habitants were always free to dispose of their harvests as they saw fit – that commerce was largely unrestrained throughout the war. The mistake is likely to gain currency if left uncorrected. Côté, “Joseph-Michel Cadet,” 258–9; Cassel, “The Troupes de la Marine,” 385. 28 Supra, ch. 6. banq-q, e1, s 1, p420 3 , ordinance of 8 October 1755. 29 See the analysis of the preambles to these ordinances, infra, ch. 9. 30 After 1 January 1757, supply operations were entrusted to a purveyor-­ general, Joseph Cadet. He was already involved in procurement operations and relied on existing companies for procurement of local food crops. 31 Around fifty employees and career naval officers were prosecuted. See the analysis of this trial in Bosher, “The French Government’s Motives.” 32 The most notable of these were partnerships among storekeeper Guillaume Estèbe, Pierre Claverie, and J.-P. La Barthe, in Quebec; among Victor Varin, financial commissary, J.-P. Martel, storekeeper, and Lemoine Despins, in Montreal; and later, among Cadet, Corpron, Morin, and Pénisseau.

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33 banq -vm , cn 601, s 158, contract of 25 July 1752. Note that everything about this contract – signed before the harvest, at an undetermined price, paid in advance – was atypical. Pillet would become a major entrepreneur during the Seven Years’ War. 34 ba nq -vm , tl4, s 11, d10, fol. 281v, lawsuit by Durocher against the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice for his wages and the price of his passage to Canada, 11 August 1728; cn 6 0 1 ,s372, agreement between Durocher and Pierre Pépin (dit Laforce), captain of the bateaux du cent, 24 May 1749; cn 601, s 372, several obligations and undertakings for the trade in favour of Durocher, 1739–44, passim; banq-q, c n3 0 1, s 207, several undertakings by Quebec coopers in 1748 and on 15 April 1749; Dépatie, “La seigneurie de l’Ile-Jésus au x v iiie siècle,” in Dépatie, Lalancette, and Dessureault, Contributions, 59–60, lease of domain and mill in October 1748 and cancellation in July 1749. 35 All the information is taken from banq-v m, tl4 ,s1 1 ,d26, proceedings of 28 November 1750, 30 July 1754, and 24 March 1755 following Durocher’s flight and bankruptcy. ac, c 1 1 a , 116: 163–90, colonial revenue and expense details for 1749. The near-total absence of commercial debts contracted by Durocher before 1749 ­suggests that he did not enjoy much credit before that date. Most of the creditors were Quebec merchants and factors of La Rochelle merchants. Havy and Lefebvre advanced 10,933 livres against notes. Besides commercial debts, the liabilities included rentes constituées (annuities secured by real estate), workers’ wages, debts to wheat s­ uppliers, and inheritance taxes for children from a first marriage. Durocher fled in 1750 and his wife was deemed a widow in 1755. The biography of this merchant in DCB , 3: 225 is riddled with errors. 36 A business volume of 50,000 livres was quite extraordinary in this ­colony. As to goods supplied on credit, the amount rarely exceeded 10,000 livres and these debtors were trusted regular customers. See Miquelon, Dugard of Rouen, 77–9. 37 See Kalm, Voyage, 332, 334, 422, 437–8, 863–4 for information about the harvests in general, and the 1749 harvest in particular. On the following year’s harvest, see Duhamel, “Extrait des observations botanico–météorologiques.” 38 In the spring of 1747, fearing an invasion, the intendant ordered the merchants to deliver to his stores a large part of the wheat and legumes they had purchased in the government of Montreal. The prices offered were attractive enough for them to comply of their

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own accord: ac, c11a, 87: 36, “Extrait en forme de journal.” The inventory of provisions stored in the Quebec granaries, ordered the previous year and motivated by the same fear, was not followed by requisitions: banq-q, e1, s 1, p37 0 3 , ordinance of 11 April 1746. 39 Supra, note 37. Public opinion was still inclined to generalize based on recent events. Thus, as noted earlier (ch. 6, note 13), it was erroneously repeated in the aftermath of the shortages of 1741–43 that two good harvests were inexorably followed by three years of scarcity in this colony. 40 This phenomenon is nearly impossible to gauge in the absence of an agricultural census. Concessions continued to be granted at the same pace during the war, if not considerably faster, but it would be incorrect to conclude that all this land was necessarily cleared; on the contrary, everything conspired to delay clearing during this period. 41 “He sent garrisons to take from several habitants the quantity of wheat required of them,” wrote the former intendant, citing his own letter to the minister of 10 October 1753: Mémoire pour Messire François Bigot, 1: 132–4. 42 Courville, Mémoires sur le Canada, 145; Malartic, Journal, 223. A year earlier, the bishop had encouraged the priests to surrender their tithes: Lévis, Collection, 6: 129, Montcalm to Lévis, 12 February 1758. 43 In the words of one Rivière-des-Prairies habitant: banq-v m, Archives judiciaires, pièces détachées, proceedings against Joseph Leroux, 2 March 1752. 44 Journals of Lapause, rapq (1931–32), 74. The observation dates from 1757. He was not the only one to denounce the militia captains’ schemes, whether these related to raising a militia or requisitioning wheat. On requisitions and the evaluation of family reserves, food for thought is found in the following works, among many others dealing with the wage and price controls (maximum) in revolutionary France: Lefebvre, Études orléanaises, vol. 2; Cobb, Terreur et subsistances; Mathiez, La vie chère, vol. 2. 45 Williamson, French and Indian Cruelty, 89ff. 46 rapq (1944–45), 114, André Doreil, Financial Commissary of Wars, to the minister of war, Quebec, 22 October 1757. Winter quarters were located near the cities to facilitate the service: for Quebec, at Beauport, in the Côte de Beaupré, on the Saint-Charles River, and on Île d’Orléans; and for Montreal, on Montreal Island, on Île Jésus, and in the south-shore parishes facing Montreal. These were the most productive rural areas.

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47 Habitants who came empty-handed had to pay 30 sols for the daily ration, but they only received 10 sols per day for each soldier they were forced to board. Any ensuing disputes would have been handled by the military authorities, who did not produce or keep records of these operations. This certainly does not justify a conclusion that all went well: “Le journal de M. de Bougainville,” rapq (1923–24), 353; “Mémoire du Canada,” rapq (1924–25), 191. 48 See the letters of Jean-Daniel Dumas, adjutant general and inspector of the colonial regular troops in Canada, datelined Jacques-Cartier, March-June 1760, in Public Archives of Canada, Report, fourth part, passim. His account accords with the recollections of the region’s inhabitants as compiled in the early nineteenth century in Gatien, Histoire, 109–10. 49 “Mémoire du Canada,” rapq (1924–25), 181; “Journal du siège de Québec,” in Hébert, ed., Le siège de Québec, 65. 50 Public Archives of Canada, Report, fourth part, 6ff, correspondence between Governor Vaudreuil and Adjutant-General Dumas, 4, 6, 9, 12, and 22 March 1760, in re Saint-Pierre-les-Becquets and its plan to send the Acadians to the Beauce region in order to unburden this parish and others in the government of Trois-Rivières. 51 ac , c 11a, 98: 111–16v, 132, 141, 210–13, intendant to minister, 8 and 15 May, 9 September, and 14 October 1752; b, 95: 199–200, minister to intendant, 28 February 1752. 52 Université de Montréal, Collection Louis-François-Georges Baby, p5 8 , microfiche 4417, Philippe-Marie d’Ailleboust de Cerry to his brother Jean d’Ailleboust d’Argenteuil, Quebec, 14 May 1753; Gaultier, Journal des observations météorologiques. Thanks to Thomas Wien for this reference. 53 Most of these accounts devote space to their sad fate. See, in particular, Récher, “M. Jean-Félix Récher,” 303; Malartic, Journal, 163; Pouchot, Mémoires, 180–4. 54 This urban mortality, also very high in Montreal, has yet to be analyzed. See the graph of burials in the parish of Notre-Dame de Québec in Gauvreau, Québec, 139, as well as the comments, 135. In the besieged Quebec of 1759, the well-off were buying the soldiers’ rations while the people had nothing to eat, wrote the bishop to the minister on 9 November 1759: ac, c 1 1 a , 104: 366–70v. Nor was there anyone left to fend for the civilian population, the intendant and his retinue having left the city at the announcement of the enemy’s approach to live with the army and devote closer supervision to its supply operations.

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55 This interpretation is not new. It is found in an important compendium prepared by Adam Shortt at the turn of the century: Documents, 2: 912ff. Shortt or his collaborators drew upon Barbier, Un munitionnaire du roi. The interpretation has recently been revisited with great vigour by John F. Bosher; see, for example, “The French Government’s Motives” and the biographies of Joseph Cadet and François Bigot (the latter co-written with Jean-Claude Dubé) in DCB , 4: 134–9 and 65–77. Hugh A. Porteous makes the same case in “The Administration of François Bigot.” 56 Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 177; idem, “The French Forces in North America during the Seven Years’ War,” DCB , 3: xv–xxiv. Eccles raises only one aspect of the problem, that of shortages, but concludes that they did not hamper military operations. The hypothesis that procurement might have been mismanaged is not entertained. 57 See the numerous contracts signed by Joseph Cadet for supplies and transportation of provisions on the Richelieu and the St Lawrence upstream of Montreal: banq-vm, cn601,s308, November 1756– January 1757; or, for example, banq-q, cn301,s207, contract with J. Roberge of Beaumont parish to feed the Acadians, 14 November 1756. 58 This is one episode among many others reported in Pouchot, Mémoire, 1: 59–65, and the journals of Lapause, rapq (1931–32), 15–17. For other examples of disorganization in the service, see rapq (1944–45), 1–171, letters from André Doreil, Financial Commissary of Wars, 1755–59, passim, and other accounts in Lévis, Collection. Cassel, “The Troupes de la Marine,” 385, notes Governor Vaudreuil’s indifference to matters of logistics. 59 rapq (1931–32), 45, remarks of Jean-Guillaume Plantavit de Lapause. 60 “The custom of rosters is unknown here. There is no military discipline of any kind,” wrote an intendancy employee, claiming that he had never been able to ascertain troop numbers: ac , c 1 1 a , 104: 344–5, Charles-François Pichot de Querdisien Trémais to the minister, 22 September 1759. Although I make no claim to being a military historian, it seems odd to me that those who extol the administration’s efficiency should give so little weight to contemporaneous criticism, particularly by military officers.

Chapter nine   1 banq -q, tl5, d500, petition by Jacques and Thomas Asselin, 21 August 1714. The petition is followed by the minutes of the summons of François Savari and his wife, Pierre Da Silva (Le Portuguais)

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and his wife, André Leloup (Le Polonais) and his wife, and Desjardins and his wife before the lieutenant-general of the provost court. They were jointly sued for the sum of 203 livres, the value of the stolen flour, plus damages and interest.   2 Among the many studies of grain riots, the following are of particular interest: Thompson, “The Moral Economy”; Tilly, “The Food Riot”; Rudé, Paris and London; Bercé, Revolt and Revolution; Nicolas, ed., Mouvements populaires; Gauthier and Ikni, eds., La Guerre du blé; Beik, “The Culture of Protest”; Bouton, “Gendered Behavior; Farge, “Évidentes émeutières.”   3 On the partnership formed by Bégon and Jean Butler, an important merchant of La Rochelle, for trade between the colony and the West Indies, see the article by Yves Zoltvany in dcb , 3: 60–7; also, ac, b , 37: 204. The letters of Claude de Bermen de la Martinière provide the backdrop to this episode; they were published in Bulletin des recherches historiques 38 (1932): 18–39, and Roy, Claude de Bermen.  4 ba nq -q, e1, s 1, p874, ordinance of 24 January 1714. It was only on 18 August, or nearly three weeks after the stormy Conseil session, that the intendant published a second order requiring enforcement of the first and compelling city dwellers who had more wheat than they needed to sell it to the bakers at a set price. In September, after the rural unrest discussed below, and during the autumn and winter, the intendant issued a number of additional orders to force the peasants to deliver 20 per cent of their harvest, without success. See supra, ch. 6.  5 rapq (1947–48), 269, 283, governor to minister, 16 September 1714, and joint letter of 20 September 1714. Most imprudently, the authorities let so much wheat be exported that the naval purveyor’s clerk struggled to find enough to supply the gulf garrisons as agreed.  6 jdcs , 6: 794–7. This was Bermen’s summary, during the 16 July assembly, of the rumours going around about the Conseil. See also his letter to Bégon of 12 March 1714, another of 15 August, and his letter of 28 October 1715 to his protector the Duc de Saint-Simon: Roy, Claude de Bermen, passim. He was seventy-eight at the time and no longer expected any favours, so he could afford to speak forthrightly.  7 jdcs , 6: 798. The councillors were so terrorized by the intendant that they did not even dare crack down on the bakers denounced by these women, or instruct the provost court to do so: Bulletin des recherches historiques 38 (1932), 23, Bermen to Bégon, 15 August 1714.  8 jdcs , 6: 804–7, deliberations and decision of 30 July 1714. It was a stormy session, in which Bégon told the first councillor to “shut up” and even interrupted the bishop in mid-sentence.

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 9 Roy, Claude de Bermen, 71, letter to the Duc de Saint-Simon, 28 October 1715; an ambiguous document in which the councillor seems to refer to both an urban incident and the events in SaintAugustin, to which we return. 10 Light could be shed on this matter by comparing the debt-related proceedings of this period with those of the preceding and following periods. 11 jdcs , 6: 997, session of 12 August 1715. 12 ba nq -q, tp1–s 777–d8. This examination of Cotin is the only extant document from the trial. For the rest, all that remain are the summaries in the court register (see next note). 13 jdcs , 6: 834–7, 888–9, 842–3, 866–7, 988–9, 996–1000. Ten witnesses were heard during the inquest but only four, all of them bourgeois or officers of justice, are identified as having had their statements read back to them. This would appear to indicate that the Conseil was unable to find any witnesses for the prosecution in the defendants’ parishes, and could explain why the trial made no headway. The Conseil ordered that it be “provided with further information”; the defendants were released and the matter ended there. 14 rapq (1947–48), 277 and 269, Vaudreuil and Bégon to the minister, 20 September 1714, and Vaudreuil to the minister, 16 September 1714. The only victims of inflation, he wrote, were the officers and employees of the government, who, like them, were on fixed incomes and not involved in trade. 15 It is true that the habitants of the Montreal côtes successfully obtained price limits on goods in 1704, as discussed below. But their victory was short-lived and there is nothing to support the conclusion that the events of Montreal influenced those of Quebec at ten years’ remove. 16 See the account of the incident in Frégault, Le xviiie siècle canadien, 201–4; or, with fewer details, in Zoltvany, Philippe de Rigaud, 57–9. These authors concern themselves only with Vaudreuil’s role in the affair. 17 a n, m, 1031, v, doc. 7, Vachon de Belmont to the intendant, 26 November [1704]. Thanks to Thomas Wien for providing this document. Guy Frégault cites another letter from the former to the latter, dated 18 December, in which Belmont returns to the causes of the ­disturbance: Le xviii e siècle canadien, 203. 18 ba nq-vm and Archives du Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice, cahiers Faillon, GG 235: ordinance issued by the lieutenant-general of Montreal, 22 November 1704. 19 “We do wish to accede to their remonstrance [that of the city governor and the Sulpician] and forget what has happened”: ordinance issued

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by Vaudreuil, 12 December 1704, in Roy, ed., Ordonnances, 2: 326–7; rapq (1938–39), 163–4, Vaudreuil to the minister, 4 November 1706. 20 banq -q, e1, s 1, p22, p40, and p46 , ordinances of 31 October, 26 November, and 5 December 1705; e1 ,s1 ,p5 3 and p5 4 , ordinances of 4 and 9 January 1706, the second of these documents being the final judgment. 21 rapq (1938–39), 109, 112–13, 163–4, Vaudreuil to the minister, 28 April and 4 November 1706; Vaudreuil and Raudot to the minister, 30 April 1706. 22 See letters cited supra, note 14. 23 The reference is to the classification scheme devised by Jean Nicolas and his co-authors, which distinguishes sixty-seven types of public disturbances grouped into thirteen categories, solely on the basis of their aims: Nicolas, ed., Mouvements populaires, 761–7. See also ibid., 731–4, for Jean Jacquart’s summary report on the rural protests. 24 There is nothing novel about city-country antagonism in and of itself. It has been observed in many places: for example, in western France before and during the revolution. See Bois, Paysans, and Dupuy, De la Révolution. In that case, land ownership was the root cause of the opposition between the richest segment of the peasantry and the bourgeoisie; i.e., the problem was entirely different. 25 The social background of the militia captains varied from one time period and region to another. Members of seigneurial families dominated their ranks in the early days of the colony, but their numbers dwindled as time went on. 26 Attorney Raimbault to the intendant, 25 November 1704, cited in Frégault, Le xviii e siècle canadien, 201. 27 a n, m , 1031, v, doc. 7, Belmont to the intendant, 26 November 1714. 28 Christian Desplat has observed that in certain regions of the Pyrenees where the rural communities were well armed, the peasants rarely used these guns when they revolted: Desplat, “Le peuple en armes dans les Pyrénées occidentales françaises à l’époque moderne,” in Nicolas, ed. Mouvements populaires, 217–27. 29 Two convicted counterfeiters, the soldiers Jean Dupont (dit Printemps) and Jean Bontemps, escaped as their sentence was being enforced in Montreal; as one witness recounted, “the cry of ’Run away!’ was heard from every observer”: ac, c 1 1 a , 76: 262. 30 This can be affirmed because, unlike the turn-of-the-century administrators, Hocquart produced highly detailed reports of these shortages. On how they took place, see supra, ch. 6.

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31 Lévis, Collection, 1: 118: “Journal des campagnes du Chevalier de Lévis en Canada,” and rapq (1923–24), 315, 318, “Le journal de Bougainville.” The Quebec women’s protest is not even mentioned in the detailed reports sent to the minister of war by François Daine: Archives de la Guerre, A1, 3498, fol. 85, letter of 19 May 1758 summarizing the problems plaguing the supply operations. 32 Audrey Lachance has noted a significant decrease in violent crime between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as had been observed in France: Crimes et criminels, 78. 33 Greer, “L’habitant.” 34 Some of these cases were heard by the intendant or his subdelegates. The judgments have been lost, and while the decisions are known, the proceedings have not survived. The remainder of cases, perhaps the largest portion, is contained in the seigneurial and royal court registers. Such a study remains to be done. John A. Dickinson thinks he descries a decrease in cases of seigneurial origin between 1685 and 1753, but the periodization is problematic and so is the definition of categories. One would have to know, for example, who brought the lawsuit and (as Dickinson suggests) extend the research to the whole court system. Dickinson, Justice et Justiciables, 122–3. 35 This is not to overlook the wheat requisitions ordered in 1714 by Intendant Bégon; however, since they were never put into effect, they do not constitute a precedent. See supra, ch. 6. 36 The Longueuil uprising in connection with the corvées to build the fortifications surpassed the movements just discussed in both intensity and duration. It was an exceptional episode but has no bearing on the subject at hand. 37 There was no concerted resistance in the case of wheat, but on other occasions the peasants were capable of uniting. Rather than obey a regulation modifying the length of cordwood, Montreal-area peasants more or less stopped supplying the city, despite threats to send troops to force them to cut and deliver wood. After a year-long confrontation, the government had to rescind its regulation. Massicotte, Répertoire, ordinances of 20 September 1748 and 12 April, 28 May, and 14 October 1749. 38 The ordinances imposed considerable fines on people who hid wheat or sold it above the official price, and offered rewards for informants. See, for example, banq-q, e1, s 1, p 3 5 5 6 , p4 1 0 2 , and p4 2 3 9 , ordinances of 24 November 1743, 25 August 1752, and 20 November 1756.

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39 Le Roy Ladurie, “Révoltes”; Chartier, Cultural Origins, 141–54; Muchembled, Le temps des supplices, 202–24; or, for another perspective, Lemarchand, “Troubles populaires.” 40 ac, c 1 1a, 67: 40–62, report said to have been written by Hocquart during his stay in France, 1736–37. 41 ac, c 1 1a, 118: 159–63v, Marquis de La Galissonière to the minister, 15 September 1748. 42 I wish to stress the frequent occurrence of such phrases in the official correspondence. The idea that the Canadians were particularly independent and fractious is no doubt the most overworked cliché in our historiography. It finds its source in the complacent rhetoric according to which the people were indocile by nature, and depends on construing remarks utterly typical of the era’s administrators, wherever they governed, as references to ethnic characteristics. See Miquelon, New France, 258 on Canada as an Ancien Régime country “unlike the others” by virtue of its inhabitants’ putative insubordination. 43 Terence Crowley gives credit for the infrequency of popular uprisings to an enlightened administration that, instead of punishing, did everything it could to eliminate the causes of grievances. In this reading, unrest was welcomed by the authorities, who perceived it as a clap of thunder that purified the atmosphere: Crowley, “Thunder Gusts.” The argument, repeated by numerous subsequent authors, rests on a misunderstanding of the context as well as several methodological errors: confusion between urban and rural movements, absurd comparisons with major European uprisings, etc. It is a dire misinterpretation of the character of this government to imagine that it greeted riots as a necessary evil. Moreover, in France, “riots do not seem to have acted as a safety valve for words or opinions”: Farge, Subversive Words, 120. 44 ac, c 1 1a, 6: 187–8, Jacques de Meulles to the minister, 4 November 1683. 45 a n, m, 1031, doc. 20, anon. memorial, n.d. [c. 1702, from ClaudeCharles Bacqueville de La Potherie, former naval controller in Canada]. See also ac , f3, 2: 295. 46 Kaplan, The Famine Plot; Farge, Subversive Words, 114–20. 47 See supra, ch. 7, note 32, and also the genealogy of Bacqueville de la Potherie in Le Blant, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, 65–76. Foucault, the defendant, came to Canada with the intendant’s retinue, married in Montreal in 1691, and died at Quebec in 1734 after a modest merchant’s career. He is to be distinguished from another François Foucault, a career naval officer, who arrived in 1715.

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237

48 rapq (1924–25), 116–17, “Mémoire du Canada,” anon., modelled on Courville’s report. 49 banq -q, tp1–s 777–d40. The petition, like all of them, is undated. There are twenty-five signatures, but since the bottom of the sheet is torn, there may have been two or three more. The name appearing at the top, suggesting that he may have been the instigator, is that of a mason named Janson Lapalme. There do not appear to be any merchants among the signers. 50 On complaints against rural businesses, see supra, chs. 3 and 5. 51 Remarks reported by former intendant Dupuy, the governor’s adversary: Memorial, c. 1729, in rapq (1920–21), 93. 52 Roy, Claude de Bermen, 85–6, letter to the Duc de Saint-Simon, 28 October 1715. See also rapq (1922–23), 36–51: accusations against Vaudreuil, Beauharnois, and Raudot by François Ruette d’Auteuil. 53 The phrase “public opinion” is used here in its conventional sense of shared sentiments and not with the political connotations it acquired toward the end of the eighteenth century. See Baker, “Politique et opinion publique,” 55–6. 54 rapq (1934–35), 132, Madame Bégon to her son-in-law, 17 December 1750. Louis Du Pont Duchambon de Vergor, an officer at Louisbourg and the intendant’s protégé, was rumoured to have shipped the flour. 55 “Canada, 1753. Mémoire sur les moyens d’augmenter la culture des terres en Canada, et d’y entretenir l’abondance, sans qu’il en coûte au Roy et à la colonie, et par là, éviter toutes disettes,” in Franquet, Voyages, 179–200 (quote, 180). This half-baked memorial proposed to abolish the market and create a bureau in charge of overseeing ­agriculture in minute detail. 56 “Journal du marquis de Montcalm,” in Lévis, Collection, 7: 316. 57 It was Bigot himself who adduced the fact at his trial in an attempt to prove that the charges against him were nothing but slander. Mémoire pour Messire François Bigot, 1: 279. 58 Gaultier, Journal des observations météorologiques. The bracketed portion is struck out but remains legible; the words “not a word about this” (silence sur ceci) are in the margin. On the ambiguous relationship between Gaultier and the intendant, see Gaultier’s biography by Bernard Boivin in dcb , 3: 731–7. 59 Coste, ed., Aventures militaires, 50–1. 60 Hébert, ed., Le siège de Québec, 56, 58; see also, among other commentaries on these purportedly fabulous stockpiles, “Journal du marquis de Montcalm,” in Lévis, Collection, 7: 534.

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Notes to pages 145–51

61 Courville, Mémoires sur le Canada. 62 Steven Kaplan observes that the conspiracy theory was so widely believed by contemporaries because of the “stunning coherence” of a whole set of facts and incidents that they observed. These “fit together like the pieces of a puzzle and they invariably pointed to a plot”: Kaplan, The Famine Plot, 71. 63 In rural areas, the militia captains were to “read the documents to the people at the doors of the parish churches”: banq-q, e1 ,s1 ,P1972, ordinance issued by Intendant Dupuy, 27 March 1728. In the big cities of France, Paris in particular, the bellman and three trumpeters rode the streets on horseback: Fogel, Les cérémonies, 23–5. Colonial cities were too small to justify such employees. Depending on the source of the ordinances, the bailiffs or the archers of the marshalcy played the role of criers and the military command provided the drummer: banq -q, e1, s 1,P1930, drummer’s commission, 1 March 1727; see also ac, f3, 11: 30. 64 These observations apply to ninety-one grain-related ordinances published between 1700 and 1757. Orders adopting neutral language such as “It being necessary to observe prudence” are the exception. 65 After describing the natural disasters, demand fluctuations, and market reactions that had caused the dearth, the reports to the minister change tack, stressing the merchants’ and peasants’ good will, a discourse designed to flatter administrators for their ability to secure ­obedience. Bigot’s frankly bitter correspondence is the exception. 66 On this subject, see Fogel, Les cérémonies, particularly 411ff. 67 Archives de la Bastille, 12142, fol. 255, letter from Montreal of 25 September 1761. The recipient’s name is not given. 68 See Igartua, “A Change in Climate.” 69 See supra, ch. 5. 70 Chartier, Cultural Origins, 44–7. The author draws a parallel between trade in books and trade in grain.

C o nc l usio n  1 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 93. On the ubiquity of power, see also Foucault, History of Sexuality, 92–8.

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Index

admiralty court, 33, 183n26, 188n22, 210n37 Ailleboust, Alexandre d’, 190n38, 200n57, 207n106, 221n38 Allaire, Gratien, 209n19 Arendt, Hannah, 151 Auger, Étienne, 195n19 Bacqueville de la Potherie, ClaudeCharles, 103, 141, 220n32 Bailly de Messein, FrançoisAugustin, 53–4, 67, 111, 190n38, 221n38 bakers and baking, 34–5, 39, 68–74, 93, 99–100 banalité, 22–3 Barsalou, Jean-Baptiste, 200n57 bateaux du cent, 100, 120 Beauharnois de la Chaussaye, François de, 99, 143 Bégon, Élisabeth, 108–10 Bégon, Michel, xvii, 86, 88, 129–30 Bermen de la Martinière, Claude de, 129–30, 143, 185n44 Beutler, Corinne, 185n47, 203n85 Bigot, François, 86, 97, 115, 115– 19, 126, 143, 146, 222n45

30311_Dechene.indd 253

biscuit. See hardtack Bissonnette, Joseph, 16 boats, types used for grain transportation, 45–7 Boileau, Pierre, 127 bolters, 25, 68–70, 88 Bômer, Guillaume, 67, 195n19 Bômer, Jean-Nicolas, 67, 195n19 Bontemps, Jean, 234n29 Bosher, John, 109, 196n23, 197n31, 231n55 Brassard, Jean, 222n43 bread, government procurement of, 99–100; pricing of, 35–9, 81; rationing and, 100, 125, 137; shortages of, 124; types of, 38–9. See also mercuriale Brisson, Réal, 188n23 Butler, Jean, 86, 232n3 Cadet, Joseph, 98 card money, 15, 53–4, 131–2, 184n39, 212n50 Cassel, Jay, 218n14, 219n20 casuel fees, 20 Chalou, Pierre, 53–4, 64, 70, 74 Chamberland, Simon, 62

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254 Index

Charest, Étienne, 23–4, 178n58 Chartier, Roger, 149 Cherrier, François, 127, 202n72 Choiseul, Étienne-François, Duc de, 150 Cliche, Marie-Aimée, 20 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 28 commissaire ordonnateur. See financial commissary compagnies franches de la Marine, 77 Conseil souverain. See Conseil supérieur Conseil supérieur, 8, 28–32, 35–7, 129–30, 197n32 corn, 10, 113 corps de ville, 28 Côté, Jean-Baptiste, 57 Cotin, Louis, 132, 135 Courault, Pierre, 65, 196n23 Courthiau, Pierre-Noël, 199n49 Crowley, Terence, 236n43 Custom of Paris, 22

Desplat, Christian, 234n28 Després, Joseph Guyon, 64, 98, 191n40, 224n56 Dickinson, John A., 183n26, 185n42, 235n34 Dolbec, Romain, 98 Dubault, Laurent, 132 Duchesneau de la Doussinière et d’Ambault, Jacques, 29 Duchesny, François, 62 Dugard and Company, 56, 94 Duhamel du Monceau, HenriLouis, 25, 145, 186n5 Dumas, Jean-Daniel, 230n48 Dumay, J.-B., 201n70 Dupont, Jean, 234n29 Du Pont Duchambon de Vergor, Louis, 237n54 Dupuy, Claude-Thomas, 34, 72 Durocher, Joseph, 53, 120–1

Da Silva, Pierre, 231n1 Demers, Charles, 108, 207n106 Demers, François, 64, 195n19, 221n38 Demeule, Joseph, 127 Dépatie, Sylvie, 17, 67, 77, 170n2, 201n67 Desauniers, Pierre Trottier, 60, 64, 181n5, 196n28, 206n105, 220n28 Desauniers, Thomas-Ignace Trottier Dufy, 108–9 Desbarats, Catherine, 222n41, 223n53 Deschenaux, Joseph Brassard, 141–2

Fafard, Louis, 107 famine plot, 32–3, 85, 129, 140–7 farine entière, 71, 100, 155 financial commissary (commissaire ordonnateur), 37–8, 87, 89, 99, 103, 107–8 Fleury de la Gorgendière, Joseph, 56 flour: bans on exports of, 83–7, 118–19; emergency supply to Montreal, 125; exports of, 11–13, 73, 85, 101–3, 114, 129; imports of, 7, 77, 89, 93–5, 114, 117, 121; patent, 12, 38, 69–71, 102, 203n83; wheatmeal, 38, 203n79. See also grain

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Eccles, W.J., 126 Estèbe, Guillaume, 106, 227n32

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Index 255

forains, 29, 57–8 forestalling, 183n25 Foucault, François, 102, 141–2, 221n37 Franquet, Louis, 143–4 Fréchet, Étienne, 190n35, 191n45 Frégault, Guy, 119, 233n17 “French missions,” 19 Frontenac, Louis de Buade, Comte de, 28–9, 180n3 fur trade, 10, 63–4, 72, 81, 116 Gaillard, Guillaume, 24 Gamelin, Ignace, 64 Gaultier, Jean-François, 145 Gradis, Abraham, 86 grain: as currency, 15–17, 20, 26, 89; government procurement of, 11, 38, 77, 85, 97–121; harvest and market dynamics of, 76–80, 84–5, 93–5, 107, 114–15, 121, 132; inventory of (1729), 17–18, 20, 24, 42, 55–6; movement of, 33–4, 41–50, 87; in overseas trade, 11–13, 33, 55–6, 64, 71–3, 78; regulation of, 27–40, 81–94, 118; requisitioning of, 87–93, 95–6, 106, 118, 121, 122–5; as seigneurial dues, 20–2, 42; storage of, 41–3; tithes of, 18–19, 21; transactions involving, 51–60, 63–5. See also corn; oats “grain police,” 3, 30, 35–6, 39–40, 81, 150–1; criticism of, 210n26. See also grain: regulation of Greer, Allan, 179n62, 180n65, 186n6, 202n75 Guillet de Chaumont, NicolasAuguste, 65, 201n70 Guillimin, Guillaume, 102, 114

30311_Dechene.indd 255

Guiton de Monrepos, JacquesJoseph, 37–8, 223n50 Guy, Pierre, 63, 104, 111 Hamelin, Jean, 77, 208n10 hardtack, 11, 13, 68, 71 Harris, Richard Colebrook, 174n35, 176n46 Havy, François, 56, 67, 85, 121, 199n51 Hébert, Jean-Baptiste, 120 Hervieux, Jacques, 148–9 Hervieux, Jean-Baptiste, 64, 73, 111, 190n35 Héry, Charles, 64, 106, 221n38 Hocquart, Gilles, 38, 94, 110, 143, 146, 234n30; in correspondence with France, 84, 90, 99, 103, 105, 169n12; on flour exports to Île Royale, 205n95 Horton, Donald J., 220n31 Hudon, Christine, 173n25 Île Jésus, 17, 77 Île Royale, 11–12, 71, 83, 114, 143, 220n31; as destination for wheat shipments, xiii, 46, 48, 56, 93–4, 101–2 Indiens domicilés, 100, 113, 116 Invalides de la Marine, 107 Jacrau, Joseph-André-Mathurin, 47 Jean, Maurice, 191n43, 207n108 Jehanne, Marin, 68 Juchereau Duchesnay, Antoine, 179n61 Kalm, Pehr, 45, 121, 178n53, 187n12 Kaplan, Steven, xiii, 5, 238n62

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256 Index

king’s stores, 38, 44, 64, 69, 85, 98–9, 113–14. See also grain: government procurement of Labaty, Pierre, 62 Labelle, Jacques, 53 Lachance, Audrey, 235n32 La Corne, Louis de, 64, 177n49, 221n36 La Coudraye, Jean-Baptiste, 19 Lafontaine, Jacques de, 106 Lake St Pierre, 46 Lamaletie, Jean-André, 220n27 La Mare, Nicolas de, 30, 88 Lamarque, Charles Nolan, 64 Landriève Des Bordes, Jean-Marie, 106 Langlois, Augustin, 183n25 Lanoullier de Boisclerc, JeanEustache, 90 Lapalme, Janson, 237n49 Lapause, Jean-Guillaume Plantavit de, 123 Lapointe, Jean-Baptiste, 134 Larche, Charles, 98 Latour, Jean, 65, 73, 196n23, 199n55 Lebé, Jacques-François, 102, 114, 202n72 Lecomte, Jean, 106 Lecourt, Gilles, 187n8 Lefebvre, Georges, 5 Lefebvre, Jean, 56, 67, 85, 199n51 Leloup, André, 232n1 Lemaître-Lamorille, Antoine, 66, 72–3, 102, 196n23 Le Moyne, Charles, Baron de Longueuil, 23, 175n42 Lepage de Sainte-Claire, Louis, 23, 221n36

30311_Dechene.indd 256

Leriche, François, 16 Leroux, Jean, 68 Lestage, Pierre de, 64, 111, 201n70 Letaconnoux, Joseph, 5, 30 Léveillé, Joseph, 222n43 Levi, Giovanni, 171n14 Louisbourg, 11–13, 48, 71–2, 103, 205n94–5 Lunn, A.J.E., 225n15 Magnien, Pierre-François, 175n42 Malartic, Anne-Joseph-Hippolyte de Maurès, comte de, 45 marchands forains. See forains markets, public, 14, 28–33, 39, 87–8 Martel, Jean-Baptiste, 199n52 Martin de Lino, Mathieu-François, 36 Massue, Gaspard, 26 Mathieu, Jacques, 196n23, 206n97, 209n24 Mauvide, Jean, 60–1, 85, 181n5 merchants: complaints by, 57–61; role in rural trade, 25–6, 53, 58–61, 63–8, 119–20. See also peddlers mercuriale (official price list), 29, 35–6, 107 mercuriale (public assembly), 36–7, 181n5, 185n42 Meuvret, Jean, xiii, 4–5, 52, 175n39, 188n18, 193n3 Meyer, Jean, 5, 204n90 Miami (nation), 117 Miaû, Claude, 73 Michel, Louis, 26 military campaigns, 113–14, 116– 17, 122

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Index 257

military supply operations, 125–7, 145 militia captain, 123, 135, 138 mills and milling, 22–5, 68–91, 72, 103; restrictions on, 118–19 mill toll, 18, 21–5, 122 minot (unit of measure), 155 Miquelon, Dale, 58, 177n47, 196n31, 205n95, 210n34, 247n55 Monière, Alexis, 10, 63, 180n64, 207n106 Montcalm, Louis-Joseph de, 144 Neveu, Jean-Baptiste, 25 Nicolas, Jean, 234n23 oats, 7 Paquet, Pierre, 63 Paradis, Joseph, 127, 202n74 Pascaud, Antoine, 101 patronage, 109 payment orders, 15, 53, 62, 104 pays d’en haut. See fur trade Péan de Livaudière, Jacques-Hugues, 25 peas, 7–9, 46; exports of, 12–13, 72, 84, 102, 117; government procurement of, 112 peasants, 13–17, 52–3, 95; boats used by, 45; diet of, 9, 13, 81; farming practices and conditions, 41–3, 76, 80; numbers of, 13, 75; targeted by grain requisitions, 88–93, 95–6, 122–5, 138, 146; unrest among, 128–40 peddlers, 61–3, 68. See also merchants Perrault, François, 48, 56, 111, 201n68

30311_Dechene.indd 257

Philibert, Nicolas, 19, 56–7, 68, 99, 202n71 Pillet, Pascal, 120 Poisset, François, 66, 224n56 Poitrineau, Abel, 187n17 Pommereau, Jacques, 105, 108, 200n57 Porteous, Hugh A., 231n55 Poudret, Antoine, 73, 99, 207n108 Poulin de Courval, Louis-Jean, 102 Poulin de Francheville, François, 64, 223n47 Prat, Louis, 74 Prenais, Pierre, 207n106 Pritchard, James, 101, 216n82 provost court, 33–7, 128, 131, 180n2, 232n7 quarter (unit of measure), 46n31, 155–6 Raimbault, Pierre, 37 Ranger, Pierre, 49, 66–7, 111, 187n14, 203n77 Raudot, Jacques, 87–8, 181n9 Réaume, Charles, 48–9, 66–7, 111, 187n17 requisitions. See grain: requisitioning of Rodriguès, François, 62 Rousseau, François, 218n16 Routtier, Charles, 132 Roy, Pierre-Georges, 188n23 Saint-Jacob, Pierre de, 5 Saint-Pierre, Jacques, 61, 175n40 Sarrazin, Michel, 130 Savari, François, 128 Séguin, François, 134 Séguin, Robert-Lionel, 186n7

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258 Index

seigneuries, economic advantages of, 21–2 Séminaire de Québec, 24, 56, 68, 72, 105, 178n58, 221n36, 227n25 Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice, 175n42, 176n45, 177n50, 195n21, 203n85 Sévigny, P.-André, 189n28 Shortt, Adam, 231n55 sieves and sieving, 25, 72, 185n48 Sonenscher, Michael, 206n102 syndic, 28

Trépagny, Charles, 50 Turgeon, Charles, 190n35, 191n48

tenant farmers, 41, 70, 175n39, 221n40 Tétro, Jean-Baptiste, 65 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 4, 109, 217n87

Walon de Messy, Claude-Gabriel, 221n37 wheat. See grain Wien, Thomas, 61, 76–7, 95, 173n23

30311_Dechene.indd 258

Vachon de Belmont, François, 133, 136 Varin de La Marre, Jean-Victor, 108–10 Vaudreuil, François-Pierre de Rigaud de, 113–14, 126, 132 Verrier, Louis-Guillaume, 182n21 Vidal, Jean, 65 Villebois de La Rouvillière, Honoré Michel de, 223n50

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