Habitants

Habitants by Cornelius Krieghoff (1852)

See also: Montreal Canadiens

Habitants is the name used to refer to both the French settlers and the inhabitants of French origin who farmed the land along the two shores of the St. Lawrence Gulf and River in what is the present-day Province of Quebec in Canada. The term was used by the inhabitants themselves and the other classes of French Canadian society from the 17th century up until the early 20th century when the usage of the word declined in favour of the more modern agriculteur (farmer) or producteur agricole (agricultural producer).

Family Life

The habitants of New France lived a healthy family life. Most of the families had many children, anywhere from 10 to 12 whom survived childhood.
For women, most of adulthood was spent being a wife and having children. Marriage was essential for the women of New France and widowers often remarried. Due to the significantly greater male population, women often had their choice of partner and arranged marriages were infrequent.
The church played an important role in the life of a habitant; it was the Parish that recorded all the births, marriages and deaths in the colony. These important moments in the habitant life were considered religious traditions and marked by rituals. Nevertheless, parishes only developed in areas with a significant population. The habitants provided the local church and Rectory, which was commonly used as a place of meeting and as a community hall. The habitants also saw Sunday Mass not only as a time for worship but also as a time for socializing.

Habitants and Seigneurial Tenure

Habitants in New France were largely defined by their relationship to a Seigneur. Seigneurs were primarily nobles or ecclesiastical bodies from France that were given huge pieces of land, referred to as fiefs or Seigneuries. The goal was to establish a traditional peasant-lord relationship by establishing a landed elite. The habitant-seigneurial relationship that did emerge in New France however had a few key differences from its old world roots.
The wealth of the land was primarily built through its development by the habitants. King Louis XIII instituted a condition on the land, stating that it could be forfeited unless it was cleared within a certain period of time. This condition kept the land from being sold by the Seigneur, leading instead to its being sub-granted to peasant farmers, the habitants. When a habitant was granted the Title deed to a lot he had to agree to accept a variety of annual charges and restrictions. Rent was the most important of these and could be set in money, produce or labour. Once this rent was set, it could not be altered, neither due to inflation or time. A habitant was essentially free to develop his land as he wished with only a few obligations to his Seigneur and vice versa.
The Seigneur was obligated to build a gristmill for his tenants, and they in turn were required to grind their grain there and provide the Seigneur with one sack of flour out of every 14. The Seigneur also had the right to a specific number of days of forced labour by the habitants and could claim rights over fishing, timber and common pastures.

Habitant in winter dress, by F.A. Hopkins (1858).

Though the demands of the Seigneurs became more significant at the end of the French regime, they could never siphon enough resources off of the habitants to become truly wealthy or leave their tenants in abject poverty. Habitants were free individuals; Seigneurs simply owned a “bundle of specific and limited rights over productive activity within that territory.” The Seigneur-Habitant relationship boils down to the complex idea that both parties were owners of the land who split the attributes of ownership between them.

Relationship to Land and Farming

Throughout the history of New France, property was laid out in long, thin rectangles, facing the river and extending into the depths of the forest behind. This arrangement of land had long been typical of ‘pioneer’ regions of medieval Europe because of the advantages it offered to new settlers. Houses were built close together to minimize the need for roads for transportation. In the case of New France, this organization of land was particularly well adapted to the local terrain, since it facilitated interaction between neighbours and provided multiple points of access to the river, the principal route of transportation. A habitant couple received their grant of land from the seigneur who controlled that particular fief of land. Often, it was a Church body that controlled the seigneury. Such was the case with the Sulpicians, the order of priests who controlled the giant seigneury that encompassed the entire island of Montreal.

Once a habitant couple was granted their land, the first order of business was to cut down the maples, pines and oaks and expand the original clearing. Logs were collected to form the cabin and the remaining brush was burnt to clear the ground. A summer’s work might produce one or two arpents of clearing. The habitant assembled a neat log building in the French Canadian style of ‘pièce-sur-pièce’. A habitant farm was usually consisted of a small assortment of animals as well as a kitchen garden, where cabbages, onions, and other vegetables were grown, as well as the family’s supply of tobacco. It is the habitant wife who was in charge of tending to the farm, animals and crops. Their children would aid the habitant couple with the management of the farm, as they grew older. Extra help was also found in the occasional ‘coup de main’ from neighbours and relatives. As a result of all their hardship, the habitant family was able to survive almost entirely on the produce of their own farm.

The rules of property inheritance were set according to the Custom of Paris which essentially called for parents’ possessions to be divided equally among all their children. This law only conferred a claim on each heir and did not require the literal division of property. For example, in the case of siblings, one sibling could buy out the shares of the others and regain full control of the land while the other siblings could use their shares and inheritance to establish their own farms.

Economy and Taxes

Most habitants grew crops that satisfied their own household needs for food and clothing rather than grow crops to sell on the market. Seigneurial farmers took this subsistence approach because of the smaller market that existed in Quebec. There had always been an exceedingly high number of farmers in New France and even in the early history of Quebec. It is estimated that in 1851 about 70 per cent of Quebec’s inhabitants were farmers. In the Eastern United States, these numbers were drastically different. The earliest census data on this topic shows that in 1870 only 13 per cent of residents in Massachusetts and 25 per cent of residents in New York state were farmers. At this time, the agricultural sector still accounted for over half of the Quebec working population. These contrasting numbers meant that the Quebec farmer faced an internal market that was one-third the size of the market available to the average New York farmer. This smaller market in New France meant that habitants had little surplus wealth. Despite the lack of excess income, habitants still had to pay a variety of annual dues for the land they received from a seigneur.
There were certain responsibilities or “duties” that came with receiving a free plot of land from the seigneur. Firstly, habitants were expected to cultivate and live on the land. If a piece of land was not cultivated within a year, the seigneur had the “droit de réunion,” meaning the right of repossession. Secondly, there were several dues that habitants had to pay to the seigneur. One due was the “cens”, which ranged between 2 and 6 sols. This charge was mostly symbolic, since it was a fairly paltry sum. Rent was typically set at an annual rate of 20 sols for every “arpent” of land. Seigneurs also received “lods et ventes” if habitants sold their land, which was equivalent to one-twelfth of the sale price. Another duty of habitants was to grind wheat at the seigneurial mill and pay a fee of one-fourteenth of the wheat ground. Some habitants also owed the seigneur one-thirteenth of the total amount of fish they caught. In addition, some habitants were responsible for completing 1-4 days of mandatory work during the sowing, harvesting, or haying season, which were called “corvées”. Habitants were expected to fulfill all of these obligations to repay the seigneur for granting them land in the first place.

References

• Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Montreal by Louise Dechêne, McGill-Queen's University Press 1993 (ISBN 0-7735-0658-6)
• The People of New France by Allan Greer, University of Toronto Press 1997 (ISBN 0-8020-0826-7)
• A Seigneury of New France by Emma L. Coleman, The New England Quarterly 1937 (URL http://www.jstor.org/stable/360151)
• Unequal Beginnings: Agricultural and Economic Development in Quebec and Ontario Until 1870 by John McCallum, University of Toronto Press 1980 (ISBN
• The Habitants: The Censitaires' Duties by Canadian Museum of Civilization (URL http://www.civilization.ca/virtual-museum-of-new-france/population/social-groups/)

External links

• Government of Canada, Canadian Museum of Civilization - The Habitant in New France