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Updated: June 15, 2025
Lafontaine introduced the resolution on which the Rebellion Losses Bill was founded. In various parts of Upper Canada meetings were held and protests made against the measure. In Toronto the protests took the form of mob violence, foreshadowing what was to come in Montreal. Effigies of Baldwin and Blake were carried through the streets and burned.
LaFontaine was peaceably returned for his 'pocket borough, the fourth riding of York, but the candidacy of Baldwin for Hastings had another issue. In those good old days of open voting an election was no such tame affair as walking into a booth and marking a cross on a piece of paper opposite a name. An election lasted for days or even weeks.
At all events, when a second partnership was formed later in that same month of April, with a view to the publishing of a Moliere, to form a part of the same collection as the Lafontaine, the only members left were Canel and Balzac, who agreed each to put up half the capital and divide the profits and losses equally.
Even Lafontaine and others who recognise certain vested rights of the Protestant churches under the Constitutional Act, advocate the repeal of the Imperial Act of 1840: partly because Lower Canada was not consulted at all when it was passed; and, secondly, because the distribution made under that Act is an unfair one, and inconsistent with the views of the Upper Canadian Legislature, as expressed at the time but set aside in deference, as it is alleged, to the remonstrances of the English bishops.
Lafontaine, who was playing Ruy Bias, often had long discussions with the Master, in which Victor Hugo never yielded. And I must confess that he was always right. Lafontaine had conviction and self-assurance, but his elocution was very bad for poetry. He had lost his teeth, and they were replaced by a set of false ones.
Lafontaine, Schlegel, and Hartman all assure us that the section of the affected masses before this time has been known to be followed by amaurosis, convulsions, apoplexy, epilepsy, and even death. Alarmed or taught by such occurrences, the common people often went about all their lives with the plica gradually dropping off.
He dropped some expressions, too, which indicated that he was moved by larger considerations. He was conservative in his views, and he regarded the Mackenzie vote as a sign of a flood of radicalism which he felt powerless to stay. Shortly afterwards Lafontaine retired. He, also, was conservative in his temperament, and weary of public life.
But in all this mass of imitative literature, which has since fallen into well-merited oblivion, there are very few traces of genuine originality. To obtain the title of the Russian Racine, the Russian Lafontaine, the Russian Pindar, or the Russian Homer, was at that time the highest aim of Russian literary ambition.
When the debate was resumed on the following day, LaFontaine brought it again to the proper level of argument and reason, and showed that both parties were equally pledged to a measure based on considerations of justice, and declared positively that the government would take every possible care in its instructions to the commissioner; that no rebel should receive any portion of the indemnity, which was intended only as a compensation to those who had just claims upon the country for the losses that they actually sustained in the course of the unfortunate rebellion.
Mr Rodier, it was remarked, had no shirt on, having doubtless been unable to smuggle or manufacture one. But Louis LaFontaine and 'Beau' Viger limited their patriotism, it appears, to the wearing of Canadian-made waistcoats. The imitation of the American revolutionists did not end here.
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