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Updated: June 11, 2025
Hundreds of French Canadians fled across the border; and from this year dates the immigration from Quebec into New England which has had such an influence on its manufacturing cities and such a reaction on the population which remained at home. Another fruit of this ill-starred rebellion was the haunting dirge of Gérin-Lajoie, Un Canadien errant.
The leading papers, in 1840, were the Montreal Gazette, the Montreal Herald, the Canadien, the Quebec Gazette, the Quebec Mercury, in Lower Canada; the British Colonist, British Whig, and Examiner, in Upper Canada; the Nova Scotian and Acadian Recorder, in Nova Scotia; the News, in New Brunswick.
It no more consulted that which it was expedient for a free press to do, than did the House of Assembly consider that which was suitable to it, a few years past, on the article of privilege. Mr. Ex-Speaker Panet was connected with the Canadien. He was also a Colonel of Militia. It occurred to Mr. Ryland that the position of a militia officer was incompatible with the proprietorship of a newspaper.
'In the ministerial dictionary, complained Le Canadien, 'a bad fellow, anti-ministerialist, democrat, sans culotte, and damned Canadian, mean the same thing. Surrounded by such advisers, it is not surprising that Sir James Craig soon took umbrage at the language and policy of Le Canadien. At first he made his displeasure felt in a somewhat roundabout way.
The editor of the Quebec Mercury, an organ of the British minority, was arrested on this ground. Le Canadien was established as an organ of the French Canadian majority with the motto, Nos institutions, notre langue, et nos lois.
Their members informed them, or they were informed by the Canadien, that when the House of Assembly had the entire management of the civil list, they would not fail to reduce the sum necessary to keep up the hospitality of Government House, and only, consequently, consideration for the Governor-in-Chief; nor would they fail to retrench the several pensions, reduce the heavier salaries of the employees, cut off the sinecurists, and, in a variety of ways, lessen the public burthens.
The first question, that of the right of private judgment, concerned the future leader of Canadian Liberalism and became acute in connection with the Institut Canadien of Montreal. This was a literary and scientific society, founded in 1844 by some members of the same group who later organized the Rouge party.
That he himself realized this is clear from a laughing remark which he made when explaining his late arrival at a meeting: 'I waited to take an opposition boat. His real importance after his return to Canada lay not in the parliamentary sphere, but in the encouragement which he gave to those radical and anti-clerical ideas that found expression in the foundation of the Institut Canadien and the formation of the Parti Rouge.
In the next year Elzéar Bédard, who had moved the Ninety-Two Resolutions, broke with Papineau. Another seceder was Étienne Parent, the editor of the revived Canadien, and one of the great figures in French-Canadian literature. Both Bédard and Parent were citizens of Quebec, and they carried with them the great body of public opinion in the provincial capital.
We can also see the beginnings of that strife of races which ultimately led to bloodshed and the suspension of the constitution given to Lower Canada in 1791. In 1806 Le Canadien, published in the special interest of "Nos institutions, notre langue, et nos lois," commenced that career of bitter hostility to the government which steadily inflamed the antagonism between the races.
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