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The rapid growth of Upper Canada, overtopping that of the French-speaking and Catholic Lower Province, led to demands to upset the great settlement of 1839, and to substitute for an equal representation, such a redistribution of seats as would have followed the numerical progression of the country.
It is significant that the movement started in Flanders before influencing the French-speaking part of the country. The Flemish language was, at the time, struggling against great difficulties. It had been entirely neglected, from the literary point of view, during the eighteenth century, and suffered now from the natural reaction which followed the 1830 Revolution.
No attempts, moreover, were made to Gallicise the German- speaking population of the Rhine provinces. Thus the wrench was much less felt here than in Catholic, French-speaking Lorraine. Higher stipends, good dwelling-houses and schools, have done much to soften annexation to the clergy.
And yet at the time of his death all that this fine critic and profound thinker had given to the world, after a life entirely spent in the pursuit of letters, was, in the first place, a few volumes of poems which had had no effect except on a small number of sympathetic friends; a few pages of pensees intermingled with the poems, and, as we now know, extracted from the Journal; and four or five scattered essays, the length of magazine articles, on Mme. de Stael, Rousseau, the history of the Academy of Geneva, the literature of French-speaking Switzerland, and so on!
Since 1299 a French-speaking dynasty, that of Hainault, had ruled Holland.
The Reform agitation in Upper Canada had been, indeed, influenced by the struggle for parliamentary reform in Great Britain; but the French-speaking half of Canada, carefully sheltered in the quiet St Lawrence valley, a bit of seventeenth-century Normandy and Brittany preserved to the nineteenth, had known little and cared less for the storms without.
So, away off in the heart of France, high up in the Black Mountains, surrounded with French-speaking relatives and patois-speaking peasants, I found myself once more putting bad English into the best I could command, just as I had so often done in America, when editor of The Revolution, or when arranging manuscript for "The History of Woman Suffrage."
It must be made clear that this language question played a secondary part among the causes of discontent. It alienated the Flemish bourgeoisie without conciliating the working classes, whose influence in politics, at the time, was very small. It scarcely affected the French-speaking population, since only few Walloon officials were concerned in the matter.
The mass of the French Canadians, especially in the rural districts, no doubt looked with great indifference on the progress of the conflict between the King of England and his former subjects, but in Quebec and Montreal, principally in the latter town, there were found English, as well as French-speaking persons quite ready to welcome and assist the forces of congress when they invaded Canada.
In The New York Times of November 25, 1997, Bruno Giussani explained: "Almost no one in the United States has ever heard of Jean-Pierre Cloutier, yet he is one of the leading figures of the French-speaking Internet community. It was a publication that gave readers the feeling that they were living 'week after week in the intimacy of a planetary revolution'."
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