All Work, No Pay

The corvée system was a model of unpaid forced labour that was practised before the Industrial Revolution. Unlike indentured servitude, which involved signing a contract for a set number of years, corvée labour was an expectation, viewed as an obligation to the ruling class. Most commonly associated with medieval Europe, it also functioned in ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, the Incan Empire, and pre-modern Japan.

This form of labour also existed in eighteenth-century Canada. As Richard H. Tomczak explains in Workers of War and Empire from New France to British North America, 1688–1783, the corvée system “was introduced by the French to Canada but was later exploited by the British.” A lecturer in history at Stony Brook University, in New York State, Tomczak adds that “both French and British officials imagined utilizing corvée labour to provide the raw output of energy necessary for colonization in the woodlands of North America.” His fascinating look at a little-known chapter of our country’s history reveals surprising layers of French-British tensions as well as corvée’s role in the American Revolution.

“Large-scale colonial warfare,” Tomczak writes, “ushered in a new era of corvée in Canada.” Whereas previous uses of corvée were primarily agricultural and local in nature, French colonial officials began to experiment with “mass corvée labour mobilization” following the Nine Years’ War, fought throughout Europe between 1688 and 1697. After a “brief, yet traumatic,” English siege of Quebec City in 1690, the French sought to harden their positions throughout the St. Lawrence Valley. Louis XIV ordered Jacques Levasseur de Néré, an engineer from Paris, to travel to New France to assess Quebec’s fortifications and to construct stone walls that could withstand future attacks. Levasseur “expected” habitants living in the Upper Town to “contribute to the fortifications as part of their obligation to the Crown.” This, he considered, was their “legally owed” duty.

Habitants located in the city would “do their own corvée,” which included stone extraction, excavation, and transport. Those from elsewhere in New France had to pay in cash “ ‘the number of days to which they [would] be taxed,’ in lieu of performing hard labour.” Understandably, those ensnared by corvée objected, especially as Levasseur’s construction project took precious time away from farming, which was necessary for survival. This led to the rise of “refusers” or “offenders” who wanted to “evade any form of corvée mobilization.” Even the threat of a twenty-livre fine didn’t persuade them.

Officials learned some harsh lessons after the habitant revolt and sought to placate the masses during later corvée mobilizations. In 1732, Jean-Eustache Lanoullier de Boisclerc became the grand voyer — or royal surveyor of roads. Tasked with connecting various parts of New France — including a road between Montreal and Fort Chambly, as well as the Chemin du Roy between Montreal and Quebec City — Boisclerc and other colonial administrators attempted to counter social unrest by issuing orders of corvée only “during breaks in the agricultural cycle” and by allowing “an assembly of habitants to represent their parishes’ interests.” Decades later, after the British took Louisbourg and other forts, “service in the Canadian militia superseded the demand for civilian corvée labour.” As Tomczak observes, “The safety-valves that the French regime and Canadian parishes had ironed out during the eighteenth century failed to mitigate the burdens related to military labour.”

Following the conquest of Quebec City in 1759, the British “sought to use habitant labour and attempted to harness it through a combination of military rule and French custom.” Until the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, habitants were “torn between the conquerors and their oaths to the French king.” Upon winning the war, the British immediately built upon the corvée system that the French had developed over the past six decades. Like their predecessors, officials sent to Quebec from throughout the British Empire took advantage of a “subsidized labour force that could meet the demands of an expanding imperial market economy.”

A decade later, the British high command’s attempt to mobilize corvée to counteract the American Revolution proved unsuccessful, despite enticements and small payments to encourage loyalty. Corvée workers were tasked with building roads in Quebec and maintaining supply lines into New York, though many were reluctant to cross the border. While the habitants “understood their obligation to the seigneur and state as a contractual agreement,” Tomczak notes, “they refused to travel further when they felt the military had violated that contract.” Hundreds of habitants “faced criminal prosecution for their evasion, or desertion, of corvée” during the war’s final stages, a clear sign that the antiquated system was nearing its end.

“Corvée highlights the entangled relationships between law and empire in the eighteenth century,” Tomczak writes in the epilogue of his engrossing book, “and the communities of habitants that protested unremunerated labour in the North American borderlands.” As difficult as the shackles of French and British rule were to break for almost a century, the fight for freedom in Canada was ultimately successful.