American or British Liberty?

To shed new light on old events can be no small achievement. The great battles of history, revolutions and civil wars, overseas ventures, religious upheavals, and scientific and technological breakthroughs all lend themselves to telling and retelling, to new interpretations and paradigmatic shifts.

One thinks of the feat of intellectual history involved in rethinking the relationship between Christianity and Islam of Henri Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne. Of the grand fresco of republican thought contained in John Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Or of Barrington Moore’s comparative reflections on agrarian social structures in his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World.

To be sure, the subject of Canadian history offers a significantly smaller canvas than the above. Yet it has also been the subject of overarching accounts that have altered ways in which we interpret its unfolding. One example would be Donald Creighton’s The Empire of the St. Lawrence: A Study in Commerce and Politics, with its evocation of an east-west orientation to the Canadian economy rooted in the St. Lawrence River valley.

Another would be John Brebner’s North Atlantic Triangle: The Interplay of Canada, the United States and Great Britain, with its framing of the Canadian economy within a larger Anglo-American world. A more recent example would be Gérard Bouchard’s The Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World, interpreting Quebec and Canada within a hemispheric framework.

All this is by way of prelude to an examination of a new foray into Canadian history during the period 1776–1838 by Michel Ducharme. While accounts of the Constitutional Act of 1791 or of the run-up to the Rebellions in Lower and Upper Canada of the 1830s have not been lacking, there has been little attempt to situate them within a larger Atlantic framework. Nor has nearly enough attention been paid to the intellectual ideas that underlay such developments. For both these reasons, Ducharme’s book—although not a paradigm shifter of the type to which I refer above—represents a noteworthy addition to the still slim literature of Canadian political thought.

Influenced by the work of major historians of the American and French revolutions such as Robert Palmer and Jacques Godechot, Ducharme seeks to insert Canada within the larger Atlantic world of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. No less inspired by the work of figures such as Bernard Bailyn, John Pocock, Quentin Skinner and Gordon Wood, he aims to elucidate the use of the term “liberty” by both the proponents and the opponents of republican forms of government.

Ducharme’s key argument rests on a distinction between what he calls modern liberty and republican liberty. The first, rooted in thinkers such as Locke, Montesquieu, Blackstone and Burke and an evolving British political practice from the late 17th century on, was grounded in a concept of individual rights, the preservation of property and personal security. It was further associated with the mixed constitution of Great Britain, balancing the principles of monarchy (king or queen), aristocracy (the House of Lords) and democracy (the House of Commons).

The republican idea of liberty was associated with the American and French revolutions—the so-called Atlantic revolutions of the late 18th centuries. Key thinkers here, dixit Ducharme, were Rousseau, Condorcet, Paine and Jefferson. The ideas underlying republican liberty were political participation, equality, community and sovereignty derived directly from the people. Republican liberty was more agrarian in character than modern liberty with its predominantly commercial overtones. And it sought to elevate the democratic principle to a predominant place in the political order of things—displacing the monarchical and the aristocratic in the process.

In major chapters of his book, Ducharme examines the unfolding of these two principles in the Canadian context. Conservative and moderate elements in both Upper and Lower Canada, figures such as John Strachan, John Beverly Robinson, Adam Thom and Egerton Ryerson were fierce in their defence of the 1791 Constitutional Act with its division of power among a British-appointed governor, an appointed legislative council and an elected assembly. They were not counter-revolutionaries, Ducharme argues, opposed to the very principle of liberty like their counterparts on the European continent. (Names such as Joseph de Maistre, Count Metternich or Czar Nicholas I come to my mind.) Rather, they believed, as Strachan for one claimed, “that the liberty of our mother country is placed on a much firmer basis than that of the American States.”

The Canadian proponents of the republican form of liberty, Louis-Joseph Papineau and the Patriotes of Lower Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie and his associates in Upper Canada, came with time to reject the version of a mixed constitution that characterized the government of the British North American colonies. They denounced the corruption of the colonial elites, the overwhelming influence of commercial and banking interests, the predominance of individual interests over general welfare and the powerlessness of legislative assemblies— the sole repository of popular sovereignty—to control the political agenda. In a delayed manner, the ideas of the late 18th-century Atlantic revolutions had come home to the Canadas of the 1830s, only to be shattered with the defeat of the Rebellions of 1837–38.

Ducharme places a lot less importance on the purely ethnic or national character of the rebellion, especially in Lower Canada, where the Patriotes enjoyed the kind of permanent majority in the assembly of which the Reformers in Upper Canada could only have dreamt. He argues that the anglo-phone minority in Lower Canada was much more prone to highlight the French-English character of the conflict rending the colony than were Patriote leaders such as Papineau, who was more civic than ethnic in his discourse. The author’s argument here attempts to counter the one more familiar to us from Lord Durham’s Report with its description of “two nations warring within the bosom of a single state.”

Overall, I think Ducharme has written an important study that helps give gravitas to the debates that shaped the political life of the early Canadas. In particular, I commend his attempt to ground his analysis in the discourse of republicanism and of its anti-republican opponents, as a way of illuminating the conflicts that brought Canada to the verge of revolution in the late 1830s.

I do, however, have a number of criticisms to level at his analysis. His use of the term “modern” to describe the model of liberty that conservatives and moderates in the two Canadas supported—in contradistinction to the “republican” model—is debatable. It was Benjamin Constant, the Franco-Swiss political liberal of the early 19th century, who first sketched the distinction between the liberty of the moderns and that of the ancients (the Greeks and Romans) in a famous 1819 address. Constant’s version of modern liberty—individual rights, religious freedom, a representative rather than participatory form of citizenship—was one associated with all modern states, in particular with England, the United States and France. It made no difference, from his point of view, whether the regimes in question were monarchical or republican in character. For Ducharme to associate the “modern” notion of liberty exclusively with Great Britain and its colonial offshoots is not only a significant departure from Constant’s use of the term. It is ultimately untenable.

It would have made more sense to have emulated William Lyon Mackenzie, who in his pre-Rebellion days had argued: “We like American liberty well, but greatly prefer British liberty … we have sworn allegiance to a constitutional monarchy.” In the same vein, Edmund Burke, in his denunciation of the French Revolution, had defended English liberties against such abstract ideas as the rights of man.

Conversely, Ducharme tends to be somewhat reductionist in his interpretation of republican thought. He places a lot of weight on Rousseau and indirectly on Jefferson. Yet he ignores a key figure such as Madison, whose arguments in the Federalist Papers in particular involve a marriage between republicanism and the “modern” idea of liberty. He fails to note that Montesquieu, the champion of the British mixed constitution in his Spirit of the Laws, was simultaneously the inventor of the modern concept of separation of powers, elevated to the highest of constitutional principles by the American founding fathers and the French authors of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

It would have been more accurate if Ducharme had contrasted the proponents of a British model of liberty, very much prevalent in Canadian political discourse of the early 19th century, with the proponents of more republican models that characterized the Atlantic world of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. And it is worth noting that despite revolutionary antecedents of its own in the 17th century—the Puritan and Glorious revolutions—the British model of liberty meant that its supporters were for the most part suspicious of revolutionary upsurges of the type that the United States, France and the Latin American republics were to experience. They believed in a more temperate form of political evolution of the type that was to bring responsible government to the united Canada of the 1840s.

This makes me query another one of Ducharme’s claims, namely that the term “counter-revolutionary” is not terribly helpful in illuminating Canada’s political evolution. Figures as diverse as Harold Innis, Frank Underhill and Seymour Martin Lipset have made use of the term. In the context of the Atlantic world that Ducharme himself invokes, Canada’s reluctance to follow a revolutionary path set it off from most other countries in the western hemisphere as well as from France. One can legitimately debate whether this was a good or a bad thing—after all, the history of Latin America as well as of France itself is not one marked by an unproblematic adoption of liberal democratic values. But to downplay the rejection of revolution is to minimize a key feature that has marked Canadian political development to this day. It may have contributed to a weaker sense of patriotism in this country than in the countries in which the Atlantic revolutions had occurred. It may have made for a less original type of political theory and practice as well. Is it an accident, for example, that Canadians had to do without a codified charter of rights for well over a century after Confederation, so embedded was the cult of the supposed supremacy of the uncodified British constitution with its absence of a modern bill of rights over that of republican constitutions originating in the late 18th-century Atlantic revolutions? That Quebec had to wait for the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s to finally get out from under the stultifying influence of a church long grounded in ultramontane doctrine? Or that Canada retains an appointed senate to this day (hasn’t Stephen Harper, like so many prime ministers before him, been filling it with his cronies?), a vestige of the aristocratic character of the original House of Lords in Britain and of the unelected legislative councils in pre-Confederation Canada?

Finally, there is the matter of the French-English dimension of the rebellion in Lower Canada. I welcome Ducharme’s effort to root Canadian developments within larger intellectual currents of the Atlantic world—liberty, republicanism, constitutionalism and the like. And I accept his claims that the appeals of the Patriotes were couched in what one can call civic, rather than ethnic, language. Still, it is hard to overlook the deep rift between a French Canadian–dominated Assembly and the largely anglophone commercial and business establishment of Lower Canada. Key members of the Montreal anglophone elite had little hesitation in denouncing “a systematic scheme for fostering national animosities and distinctions” on the part of the Assembly over which Papineau had presided. And support for the Patriotes, despite the odd non-francophone in its ranks, came overwhelmingly from the French-speaking population of Lower Canada. However civic a republic of Lower Canada might have set out to become, its proclamation would inevitably have unleashed the same sort of passions amongst the anglophone population of the day that more recent debates over Quebec sovereignty engendered in 1980 or 1995. So I think there is a certain naiveté on Ducharme’s part when it comes to addressing this aspect of the Rebellions.

Despite these criticisms, I welcome Ducharme’s book as a signal contribution to our understanding of Canada’s early development. It will take its place as a broad-ranging addition to the Studies in the History of Quebec series published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Scholarly presses do not always get the recognition they deserve within the larger Canadian literary and political community. This is a fitting occasion—especially in an era witnessing the increasing commercialization of publishing and bottom-line preoccupations in the media more generally—to give them their due.