The Intendant and His Grievances

The luckless intendant was liable to be held to account for the action of natural laws.

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

Previously in The Old Regime In Canada. Continuing chapter 16

These were far from being his only troubles. The enormous powers with which his commission clothed him were sometimes retrenched by contradictory instructions from the king; [1] for this government, not of laws but of arbitrary will, is marked by frequent inconsistencies. When he quarreled with the governor, and the governor chanced to have strong friends at court, his position became truly pitiable. He was berated as an imperious master berates an offending servant. “Your last letter is full of nothing but complaints.” “You have exceeded your authority.” “Study to know yourself and to understand clearly the difference there is between a governor and an intendant.” “Since you fail to comprehend the difference between you and the officer who represents the king’s person, you are in danger of being often condemned, or rather of being recalled, for his Majesty cannot endure so many petty complaints, founded on nothing but a certain quasi equality between the governor and you, which you assume, but which does not exist.” “Meddle with nothing beyond your functions.” “Take good care to tell me nothing but the truth.” “You ask too many favors for your adherents.” “You must not spend more than you have authority to spend, or it will be taken out of your pay.” In short, there are several letters from the minister Colbert to his colonial man-of-all-work, which, from beginning to end, are one continued scold. [2]

[1: Thus, Meules is flatly forbidden to compel litigants to bring causes before him (Instruction pour le Sieur de Meules, 1682), and this prohibition is nearly of the same date with the commission in which the power to do so is expressly given him.]

[2: The above examples are all taken from the letters of Colbert to the intendant Duchesneau. It is an extreme case, but other intendants are occasionally treated with scarcely more ceremony.]

The luckless intendant was liable to be held to account for the action of natural laws. “If the population does not increase in proportion to the pains I take,” writes the king to Duchesneau, “you are to lay the blame on yourself for not having executed my principal order (to promote marriages) and for having failed in the principal object for which I sent you to Canada.”

[Le Roi à Duchesneau, 11 Juin, 1680.]

A great number of ordinances of intendants are preserved. They were usually read to the people at the doors of churches after mass, or sometimes by the curé from his pulpit. They relate to a great variety of subjects, — regulation of inns and markets, poaching, preservation of game, sale of brandy, rent of pews, stray hogs, mad dogs, tithes, matrimonial quarrels, fast driving, wards and guardians, weights and measures, nuisances, value of coinage, trespass on lands, building churches, observance of Sunday, preservation of timber, seignior and vassal, settlement of boundaries, and many other matters. If a curé with some of his parishioners reported that his church or his house needed repair or rebuilding, the intendant issued an ordinance requiring all the inhabitants of the parish, “both those who have consented and those who have not consented,” to contribute materials and labor, on pain of fine or other penalty. [3] The militia captain of the cote was to direct the work and see that each parishioner did his due part, which was determined by the extent of his farm; so, too, if the grand voyer, an officer charged with the superintendence of highways, reported that a new road was wanted or that an old one needed mending, an ordinance of the intendant set the whole neighborhood at work upon it, directed, as in the other case, by the captain of militia. If children were left fatherless, the intendant ordered the curé of the parish to assemble their relations or friends for the choice of a guardian. If a censitaire did not clear his land and live on it, the intendant took it from him and gave it back to the seignior. [4]

[3: See, among many examples, the ordinance of 24th December, 1716. Edits et Ordonnances, II. 443.]

[4: Compare the numerous ordinances printed in the second and third volumes of Edits et Ordonnances.]

Chimney-sweeping having been neglected at Quebec, the intendant commands all householders promptly to do their duty in this respect, and at the same time fixes the pay of the sweep at six sous a chimney. Another order forbids quarrelling in church. Another assigns pews in due order of precedence to the seignior, the captain of militia, and the wardens. The intendant Raudot, who seems to have been inspired even more than the others with the spirit of paternal intervention, issued a mandate to the effect that, whereas the people of Montreal raise too many horses, which prevents them from raising cattle and sheep, “being therein ignorant of their true interest…. Now, therefore, we command that each inhabitant of the côtes of this government shall hereafter own no more than two horses or mares and one foal; the same to take effect after the sowing-season of the ensuing year, 1710, giving them time to rid themselves of their horses in excess of said number, after which they will be required to kill any of such excess that may remain in their possession.”

[Edits et Ordonnances, II. 273.]

Many other ordinances, if not equally preposterous, are equally stringent; such, for example, as that of the intendant Bigot, in which, with a view of promoting agriculture, and protecting the morals of the farmers by saving them from the temptations of cities, he proclaims to them: “We prohibit and forbid you to remove to this town (Quebec) under any pretext whatever, without our permission in writing, on pain of being expelled and sent back to your farms, your furniture and goods confiscated, and a fine of fifty livres laid on you for the benefit of the hospitals. And, furthermore, we forbid all inhabitants of the city to let houses or rooms to persons coming from the country, on pain of a fine of a hundred livres, also applicable to the hospitals.” [5] At about the same time a royal edict, designed to prevent the undue subdivision of farms, forbade the country

[5: Ibid., II. 399.]

people, except such as were authorized to live in villages, to build a house or barn on any piece of land less than one and a half arpents wide and thirty arpents long; [6] while a subsequent ordinance of the intendant commands the immediate demolition of certain houses built in contravention of the edict. [7]

[6: Edits et Ordonnances, I. 585.]

[7: Ibid., II. 400.]

The spirit of absolutism is everywhere apparent. “It is of very great consequence,” writes the intendant Meules, “that the people should not be left at liberty to speak their minds.”

[“Il ne laisse pas d’être de très grande conséquence de ne pas laisser la liberté au peuple de dire son sentiment.” — Meules au Ministre, 1685.]

Hence public meetings were jealously restricted. Even those held by parishioners under the eye of the curé to estimate the cost of a new church seem to have required a special license from the intendant. During a number of years a meeting of the principal inhabitants of Quebec was called in spring and autumn by the council to discuss the price and quality of bread, the supply of firewood, and other similar matters. The council commissioned two of its members to preside at these meetings, and on hearing their report took what action it thought best. Thus, after the meeting held in February, 1686, it issued a decree, in which, after a long and formal preamble, it solemnly ordained, “that besides white-bread and light brown-bread, all bakers shall hereafter make dark brown-bread whenever the same shall be required.” [8] Such assemblies, so controlled, could scarcely, one would think, wound the tenderest susceptibilities of authority; yet there was evident distrust of them, and after a few years this modest shred of self-government is seen no more. The syndic, too, that functionary whom the people of the towns were at first allowed to choose, under the eye of the authorities, was conjured out of existence by a word from the king. Seignior, censitaire, and citizen were prostrate alike in flat subjection to the royal will. They were not free even to go home to France. No inhabitant of Canada, man or woman, could do so without leave; and several intendants express their belief that without this precaution there would soon be a falling off in the population.

[8: Edits et Ordonnances, II. 112.]

In 1671 the council issued a curious decree. One Paul Dupuy had been heard to say that there is nothing like righting one’s self, and that when the English cut off the head of Charles I. they did a good thing, with other discourse to the like effect The council declared him guilty of speaking ill of royalty in the person of the king of England, and uttering words tending to sedition. He was condemned to be dragged from prison by the public executioner, and led in his shirt, with a rope about his neck, and a torch in his hand, to the gate of the Chateau St. Louis, there to beg pardon of the king; thence to the pillory of the Lower Town to be branded with a fleur-de-lis on the cheek, and set in the stocks for half an hour; then to be led back to prison, and put in irons “till the information against him shall be completed.”

[Jugements et Délibérations du Conseil Supérieur.]

If irreverence to royalty was thus rigorously chastised, irreverence to God was threatened with still sharper penalties. Louis XIV., ever haunted with the fear of the devil, sought protection against him by his famous edict against swearing, duly registered on the books of the council at Quebec. “It is our will and pleasure,” says this pious mandate, “that all persons convicted of profane swearing or blaspheming the name of God, the most Holy Virgin, his mother, or the saints, be condemned for the first offence to a pecuniary fine according to their possessions and the greatness and enormity of the oath and blasphemy; and if those thus punished repeat the said oaths, then for the second, third, and fourth time they shall be condemned to a double, triple, and quadruple fine; and for the fifth time, they shall be set in the pillory on Sunday or other festival days, there to remain from eight in the morning till one in the afternoon, exposed to all sorts of opprobrium and abuse, and be condemned besides to a heavy fine; and for the sixth time, they shall be led to the pillory, and there have the upper lip cut with a hot iron; and for the seventh time, they shall be led to the pillory and have the lower lip cut; and if, by reason of obstinacy and inveterate bad habit, they continue after all these punishments to utter the said oaths and blasphemies, it is our will and command that they have the tongue completely cut out, so that thereafter they cannot utter them again.” [9] All those who should hear anybody swear were further required to report the fact to the nearest judge within twenty-four hours, on pain of fine.

[9: Edit du Roy contre les Jureurs et Blasphémateurs, du 30me Juillet, 1666 See Edits et Ordonnances, I. 62.]

This is far from being the only instance in which the temporal power lends aid to the spiritual. Among other cases, the following is worth mentioning: Louis Gaboury, an inhabitant of the island of Orleans, charged with eating meat in Lent without asking leave of the priest, was condemned by the local judge to be tied three hours to a stake in public, and then led to the door of the chapel, there on his knees, with head bare and hands clasped, to ask pardon of God and the king. The culprit appealed to the council, which revoked the sentence and imposed only a fine.

[Doutre et Lareau, Histoire du Droit Canadien, 163.]

The due subordination of households had its share of attention. Servants who deserted their masters were to be set in the pillory for the first offence, and whipped and branded for the second; while any person harboring them was to pay a fine of twenty francs. [10] On the other hand, nobody was allowed to employ a servant without a license. [11]

[10: Réglement de Police, 1676.]

[11: Edits et Ordonnances, II. 53.]

– The Old Regime In Canada, Chapter 16 by Francis Parkman

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Introduction.

If, at times, it may seem that range has been allowed to fancy, it is so in appearance only; since the minutest details of narrative or description rest on authentic documents or on personal observation.

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them, he must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

With respect to that special research which, if inadequate, is still in the most emphatic sense indispensable, it has been the writer’s aim to exhaust the existing material of every subject treated. While it would be folly to claim success in such an attempt, he has reason to hope that, so far at least as relates to the present volume, nothing of much importance has escaped him. With respect to the general preparation just alluded to, he has long been too fond of his theme to neglect any means within his reach of making his conception of it distinct and true.

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