AHQ: American Revolution - Quebec Revolts, Then What?

So say Quebec revolts along with the Thirteen Colonies and it rides along with them to victory, does it join the new American republic or not? Why would it do so if it did? And if it survives as an independent republic, would it get the territory known IOTL as the Northwest Territory, or would that go to the USA or be otherwise divided between the two?

I'm curious as I often see timelines where Quebec revolts and then joins the USA, even though the Americans were fairly intolerant and hostile towards the Catholic, Francophonic Quebecois. I rarely see an independent Quebec.
 
As opposed to the dreamers on here, I'm firmly of the opinion that there's no way in hell Quebec joins the USA. However noble and benevolent the Founding Fathers are towards Catholics, the Canadiens are all too aware of the phobia of Catholicism that existed throughout New England for very long periods. The closest you're going to get is some sort of mutual defence pact.

As for the Northwest Territory, Quebec won't be strong enough to keep it. That's going to the USA.
 
I tried to investigate this in a thread about what if Quebec secedes and then doesn't join the U.S.

I link to another good thread which tries to compare Quebecois society to others at the time

Okay, let me complicate this some more. Before we can move forward, I think we have to speculate thoughtfully about the political evolution of Canada between 1776 and 1787.

Canada had no republican tradition. Zero, zip, nada. So, when it throws off the British yoke and joins the Revolutionary side, the Canadiens will have to develop some means of governing themselves more or less from scratch.

I /think/ you get some sort of Committee of the Revolution, at least for a while. But after the war... well, there's a strong tradition of central government. I would guess elections. But the experience of other new democratic states suggests the Quebecois would have a rough time of it. Corruption; conflicts between legislature and executive; severe problems of legitimacy.

Not that all the American colonies were exactly models of good governance and internal peace and order, of course. And the Quebecois would have two things going for them. One, a strong egalitarian tradition. That sounds odd, given that the place had been formally and
officially feudal until a generation earlier. But Quebec was where Jefferson's dream of yeoman farmers came true. There were few poor, few rich, few merchants, and no underclass. To a first approximation, everyone was a middlin' prosperous freeholder. This led to an odd combination of formal deference combined with sturdy, good-as-any-man self-reliance and confidence.

(Of course, there were aspects to Quebecois life that would have turned Jefferson a bit green. He envisioned his noble farmers retiring at evening to read the classics and write lapidary letters and memoirs. The Quebecois had a literacy rate in the 10% range, and spent their spare time dancing, fornicating, feasting and fighting.)

One consequence of this: I think the franchise in Quebec Libre would be either very broad or very narrow. I could see either.

The other asset would be, of course, the Church. The 18th century Catholic Church wasn't usually a devoted helpmate for republican government, but the Church would have a strong interest in a stable and well-governed Quebec. There weren't a lot of priests, but they were educated, disciplined, organized, and influential. Until the 1780s, there' also be some Jesuits around. And -- as long as their privileges and power weren't threatened -- they'd be working to keep the government afloat.

In the long run, I suspect this would lead to an anti-clerical reaction, as in Mexico and elsewhere. But that would come later. In the 1780s, the Church would be the gyroscope, the great internal stabilizer of Quebecois politics.

(Of course, the problem here is that the stronger and more obvious the Church influence in Quebec the better for the Canadiens, but the twitchier the Americans will be.)

So how does the Quebec of 1786-7 look politically? Well, here's one speculation. Say they go the narrow-franchise route, with enforcement via property requirement and/or poll tax. There are less than 5,000 "electeurs" in the whole state, and elections to the _Parlement_ in Quebec City are a cosy affair. No priests stand for office, of course; they're too busy, and besides, the Church does not choose to exercise influence in that particular way. But every candidate is on good terms with the local cure, and the Bishop is a de facto branch of government.

Politics are all about patronage and graft, with an occasional detour into symbolic gestures. The standard of debate is not high. Still, a certain decorum is enforced, and there's a great deal of pride in the province's Republicanism. References to ancient Rome are even more constant and annoying than in Virginia.

The economy has problems. Joining the Revolution trashed foreign trade for seven years. Quebec is self-sufficient in food and other basics (iron, wool) but people are going to get pretty desperate for tea and sugar, tobacco and wine, cotton cloth... By the 1780s this will be a fading memory, but Indian problems (there will be Indian problems) will be threatening the fur trade. Still, it's no worse than some American colonies. There's a lot more trade south than iOTL, with barges going down Lake Champlain for portage overland to the Hudson.

Okay. So these guys send a delegation to Philadelphia...

Thoughts?


Doug M.

Some more thoughts on the development of "American" Quebec postwar.

ISTM Quebec Libre will resemble the US in one respect: it will ultimately be a conservative "revolution", dominated by men of property. But there will be significant differences. On one hand, there will be no remote equivalent to the civil war with Loyalists that helped radicalize postwar American politics. On the other, as noted upthread, Quebec in 1775 had almost no tradition of republican government, and was still dominated by traditional colonial elites -- basically, the big seigneurial landowners and the Church plus a few merchants (the latter, by 1775, mostly Scottish). OTL the seigneurial class went into rapid decline after around 1800 and was pretty much gone within a generation or two, but TTL that hasn't happened yet.

So I think we end up with a Quebec that's nominally republican, but actually somewhat less free and egalitarian than OTL.

There are economic incentives for this, too. OTL, Quebec was subsidized heavily by the French, then somewhat less heavily by the British; it was a money-loser for both crowns for a long time. The key problem was that, other than furs, there wasn't a lot Quebec could produce that was economical for export. (And by the 1780s, the fur market was starting to get iffy; the easy sources had been cleaned out, and the Hudson's Bay people were coming online.) The long dogleg up the St. Lawrence, and the fact that the province was closed to commerce half the year, meant that trading there had crappy margins. British tried to encourage wheat exports; OTL, by the early 1770s these were starting to take off, but the war killed them and they never really recovered.

This, BTW, accounts for much of the legendary hedonism of traditional Quebecois culture. In the American colonies, surplus was brought to market and exported. In Quebec, it was consumed in riotous good living. One interesting side effect: while the Canadian standard of living was quite low compared to the American, the Quebecois themselves were the strongest, healthiest people on the continent. The Americans had more and better stuff, but the Quebecois ate more fat and protein and didn't get sick as much.

Anyway: The new regime will want to export -- will need to; they'll hit a specie crisis almost at once -- but in what bottoms? I think they'll have to give licensed monopolies to local merchants. There are other options, but that would be the most obvious to the 18th century mind.

Note one big difference between Quebec and any other part of North America: such a monopoly could be enforced. The American colonies had three thousand miles of coastline, making it impossible for any government -- British, state or federal -- to block smuggling. The whole Royal Navy could not enforce the excise laws. But a single fort on the lower St. Lawrence could control the whole commerce of Quebec.

So, in addition to being authoritarian, I think *Quebec begins to rapidly develop a class of rent-seeking merchants and monopolists without a close equivalent OTL. Without a close equivalent; but note that iOTL, the seignurage system had been growing slowly more oppressive for a couple of generations before the conquest, and for another generation after, as population density increased and land values rose. OTL this was slowed by the Quebec Act and then thrown into reverse by the reforms of the 1790s. After which the seigneurial class went into a fairly rapid decline... but anyway: TTL there's no British governor to reign in the arrogance of the local elites. So ISTM this is a plausible intensification of an existing OTL trend.

So: by 1787 we have a stable Quebecois government, nominally republican, but in reality run by a few big landowners, a handful of monopoly-holding merchants, and the Church. There may be a single man-on-a-horse Governor, or things may be run by a committee -- sorry, un conseil -- but anyway, it's rather authoritarian and, to be a bit anachronistic, dirigiste.

The franchise is very limited. Literacy rates are low. Total population is something over 150,000, but there are only two towns of any size, Quebec City and Montreal. Otherwise, it's a nation of small yeoman farmers. There's a bit of mining, and some iron working, but nothing resembling the complex mix of trades that made up, say, New England's shipbuilding industry.

In some ways, it looks more like a Latin American republic (albeit a very cold one, and with unusually broad distribution of land) than a British North American colony.


Doug M.

2) Er, Quebec /did/ have an incredibly unequal social system.

What made it different from Latin America -- as I noted -- was that land distribution was much more equal. While the seigneurial class owned vast tracts of land, the majority of Quebecois were small yeomen rather than tenant farmers.

...

Quebec Libre would be sui generis, with no very close analog in OTL history. But I think comparisons to Latin America are not completely useless.
 
I think it all depends on the POD: if we stick with something mostly like OTL, then I think it'd be more likely that Upper Canada/Ontario ends up joining the US by a long shot, whereas Quebec would indeed be aware of the anti-Catholic sentiment in the 13 Colonies (or rather, anti-Catholic Expansion at the expense of the Protestant majority...the Quebec issue in the Intolerable Acts was over perceived loss of settler rights more than any other factor).

Go back to the beginning of the 18th. Century or earlier, and things have more capacity for change. Of course, that then calls into question the fate of the 13 Colonies as a whole, so YMMV.
 
If it gains independence in the 18th century, it's going to be called Canada. That was its name under French rule. Naming the colony "Quebec" was a British idea, and the people did not come to be widely known as Québécois until the mid-20th century.

I would not rule out the possibility that Canada* sends envoys to France and requests re-annexation. This is still ancien régime France, which the Canadiens were strongly loyal to. (After the Revolution, the Canadiens start to distance themselves more from France, but not before.) Also, the concept of overseas colonies declaring independence was entirely new.
 
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Why would the Northwest territories go to Quebec? I am assuming Upper Canada and Rupert's Land are still British?
 
I thought every time we have one of these threads people say that the Canadiens hated the French for previously abandoning them following the Seven Years' War, or something.
 
Why would the Northwest territories go to Quebec? I am assuming Upper Canada and Rupert's Land are still British?

There was no Upper Canada at this point in time and the 1774 Quebec Act extended the Province of Quebec's borders to include the Northwest Territories. An independent Quebec would probably claim them due to this fact.
 
I thought every time we have one of these threads people say that the Canadiens hated the French for previously abandoning them following the Seven Years' War, or something.

The attitude of the time is hard to gauge as the vast majority of the habitants were illiterate. However, primary sources from the time written by clergy, seigneurs and merchants seem to express more dismay at being abandoned by France. The fact that the British agreed to preserve the French language, laws and customs appealed to the habitants. As mentioned above, the Bishop of Québec probably had more sway over public opinion than anyone else. Also, the seigneurial system was strengthened by the British, and for the most part the habitants respected the seigneurs. Essentially in Canada of 1775 you have a population living in the Middle Ages, but in a frontier region. The American colonists who had far more in common with the British bourgeois classes of London, failed to grasp the character of the Canadiens.

I definitely would not say that the Canadiens hated the French. However, they felt abandoned and that modern French society was alien. There certainly was enough sympathy for France as most of the Canadiens were shocked and horrified by the execution of the King and Queen during the revolution. Events in France were still widely followed, and when Britain declared war on Republican France in 1793, the Canadiens stood firmly with the British. In many ways Canada was similar to the Vendée, a fairly content third estate which supported its nobles (seigneurs in this case) and clergy.
 
Could we call this region New France? If they were independent, would the Canadiens reassert their original name?

Anyway, I like the idea of them having their own country distinct from the U.S.- once the French Revolution rolls around, they could have some immigration from the emigres and so forth. Could preserve the distinctly non-Anglo nature of the region.
 
Personally, I can see several things if Quebec (and it would be called Canada, as Canada/Canadians until the Loyalists referred solely to Francophones) joined the ARW:

1) Canada would try out the Articles of Confederation,
2) It would NOT join the Constitution and opt out (as has been mentioned a couple times in the thread),
3) It would maintain good trade relations as an American ally,
4) But it would be ceding the land west of the Ottawa River.

A lot of the western boundaries of the states ended at a natural border. New York stretched to the Great Lakes. Virginia to South Carolina extended to the Appalachians. Georgia went to the Chattahoochee (spelled right?) River, and so I can see Canada during the Articles period giving up its claims to all land west to the NW Territory. There's not many whites on the ground in *Ontario without the Loyalist exodus and certainly not Quebeckers. I see the Ontarian Peninsula/Southern Ontario becoming one state in time, and Northern Ontario (below the Hudson Bay watershed, since Rupert's Land obviously isn't American) as another.

Canada meanwhile would border the Ottawa River to the southwest, Rupert's Land to the north, Labrador (probably its 1763 extension to the Goose Bay watershed, so Canada in turn borders the St. John River above Anticosti Island) to the northeast, and its OTL border with New England and the Maritimes to the south and southeast. It would have Anticosti.

I forget the kind soul who made this is, but here (Canada's still in the USA in this map, but the borders are what I'm thinking of, except maybe the real-world Maine border. The split in Northern Ontario wasn't my idea and following the temporary Ohio Territory border up to the northern *USA's frontier):
 
What happens if Quebec then rejoins France, but is then sold to the US with the Louisiana Purchase for a higher price than otl? Could that happen?
 
Very doubtful. Why would Quebec join France when France gave it up once already in 1763?

Well, it's not like France just gave it away on a whim - the colony was invaded and forced to surrender. Now, in 1780-whatever, France has a different king (Louis XVI), one who might take more of an interest in Canada than his grandfather.

The issue is that the Canadiens have zero experience in self-government and may not be in favor of it. Most of the Western world at this time is not democratic. The Canadiens were accustomed to arbitrary rule by appointed royal governors. They might want to return under French protection, given the huge population disparity between their country and the United States.
 
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The issue is that the Canadiens have zero experience in self-government and may not be in favor of it. Most of the Western world at this time is not democratic. The Canadiens were accustomed to arbitrary rule by appointed royal governors. They might want to return under French protection, given the huge population disparity between their country and the United States.

This is true, one has to remember that at the time of the conquest, most of the French merchants and upper class returned to France, leaving the seigneurs, habitants and clergy behind. To fill that void, British/British-American merchants arrived in Québec and Montréal and shortly thereafter began demanding self-government. The French habitants were mostly illiterate and relied on parish priests to transmit news of the outside world. They were fed the idea that having a parliament would only lead to more taxes (as had been the tradition in France), also they saw it as a tool to advance the power of the new British arrivals.

The English minority (many of whom were from New England) formed the Citizens Party and were opposed to the Quebec Act of 1774. The act entrenched the French feudal and ecclesiastical form of governance where a Governing Council existed, but no Legislative Assembly. The habitants overwhelmingly supported maintaining the status quo.
 

Redhand

Banned
This is true, one has to remember that at the time of the conquest, most of the French merchants and upper class returned to France, leaving the seigneurs, habitants and clergy behind. To fill that void, British/British-American merchants arrived in Québec and Montréal and shortly thereafter began demanding self-government. The French habitants were mostly illiterate and relied on parish priests to transmit news of the outside world. They were fed the idea that having a parliament would only lead to more taxes (as had been the tradition in France), also they saw it as a tool to advance the power of the new British arrivals.

The English minority (many of whom were from New England) formed the Citizens Party and were opposed to the Quebec Act of 1774. The act entrenched the French feudal and ecclesiastical form of governance where a Governing Council existed, but no Legislative Assembly. The habitants overwhelmingly supported maintaining the status quo.

The English population of Canada was actually quite pro American and formed two regiments in support of Congress during Montgomery's invasion. The Scottish however were virulently loyalist and flocked to Carleton's army.

Legitimate French support of either side was limited with some joining the British but mostly tepid indifference to the conflict. Congress found its opinion on Canadian support among the loudest of the English settlers and when it actually sent a committee to Canada, the token appearance of Catholic Charles Carroll didn't convince the French upper class to throw in with the rebels, mostly because the undisciplined American Army occupying Montreal had problems with not imposing on the civilian population.
 
Variation on a theme: What if the Americans successfully seize Quebec City, and hold on against the British counter-assault: the British realising there's not much point to keep trying to retake Quebec while the rest of the colonies are sipping away.

Then you have a Quebec whose independence was won by Americans, with an English-speaking, largely Protestant, American army (however small) with the support of English Quebeckers, as Redhand noted, probably not too willing to withdraw and hand things over to a bunch of Catholics who might invite either the British or the French back.
 
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