Conquest of New France

See also: French and Indian War § 1759–1760

The Conquest (French La Conquête) was the British military conquest of New France during the French and Indian War, otherwise known the Seven Years' War. The conquest was undertaken by the British as a campaign in 1758, with the acquisition of Canada made official in the Treaty of Paris that concluded the Seven Years' War. The term is usually used when discussing the impact of the British conquest on the 70,000 French inhabitants, as well as the First Nations. At issue in popular and scholarly debate ever since is the treatment Britain provided the French population, and the long-term historical impact for good or ill.

Military history

The Conquest of 1760 represents the final episode of a long series of conflicts between Britain and France over their North American colonies. In the decades preceding the Seven Years' War and the Conquest of New France, both Britain and France’s interest toward their North American colonies rapidly grew and the region became an important source of tensions between the two powers. British North America became a very lucrative export market during the first half of the 18th century and gained in importance in the eyes of British policymakers. The growing economic value of the North American colonies convinced many influential members of the British public that those colonies should be expanded and that France’s territorial claims on the continent should not be allowed to stand in the way. Furthermore, the nature of the British Empire fundamentally changed in the years following the War of the Austrian Succession; moving from a maritime and commercial empire to a more centralized and controlled empire. This change encouraged the British government to increase its commitments toward its North American colonies and their backcountry (ex: the Ohio Valley).

In opposition to the British, France did not justify the defense of its colonies through economic interests. On the contrary, many French policymakers believed that the colony was an economic drain for France and argued that its value was mostly strategic. France’s leaders felt it would be difficult to compete with Royal Navy and were afraid that Great Britain’s maritime superiority could threaten its profitable colonies in the West Indies as well as its standing in Europe.

Forces in presence before the beginning of the conflict

From a numerical point of view, New France had always been at disadvantage when compared to the more populous British colonies. When the hostilities began, New France could only claim a population of approximately 80,000 white inhabitant; 55,000 of which lived in Canada. In opposition, the British colonies could count on a population of 1,160,000 whites inhabitants and 300,000 black slaves. Yet, the number of regular troops available, at the beginning of the conflict, didn’t reflect this demographic inequality. In 1755, New France was defended by 3,500 professional soldiers while the English colonies relied on two Irish regiments, between 1,500 and 2,000 soldiers of career, who were supported by two other regiments of New England conscripts. Thus, the balance of power on land was initially equilibrated. On the seas, the situation was clearly more one-sided with a clear domination of the British Navy. In 1755, Britain aligned 90 warships against France’s 50; a disparity that would only widen with time. This maritime domination gave Britain a clear advantage in term of its ability to send reinforcement and supply to its North American colonies.

Beginnings

What would later be dubbed “The Conquest” began in 1758, when, under the direction of statesman William Pitt, the British made a conscious effort to bolster their military efforts in the North American theatre. That they would actually succeed in conquering the entire French colony of Canada was, at the time, entirely uncertain. In July, a British expedition led by Major-General James Wolfe successfully captured the Port of Louisbourg in the French colony of Île Royale. The siege of Louisbourg would represent the first major battle (and the first major British victory) of The Conquest. From Louisbourg, Wolfe led his troops up the Saint Lawrence River and headed towards Quebec. Upon arrival, the army set up base five kilometers from Quebec City at the Île d'Orléans (whose French inhabitants had evacuated when the news of Louisbourg surfaced). After the British base was firmly established, Wolfe ordered his artillerymen to begin bombarding Quebec City. Though the constant bombardment took its toll on civilian morale, it did not represent a real military threat for the French.

From the beginning, Wolfe understood that British success hinged on being able draw the French army out of their fortifications and into in a decisive battle. The French army’s principal commander, Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, was, however, always hesitant to commit his troops to a single attack or position. Believing that the British campaign would eventually run out of supplies (or would be crushed by Canada’s harsh winter), Montcalm’s strategy focused primarily on defense. As a result, French retaliations were often sporadic, and were sometimes carried out solely by untrained civilian volunteers. By August 1759, both sides (especially the British) were weakened from a year of intermittent battles, and Wolfe had still not made significant headway. Aware that the British campaign was on its last legs, he mustered his remaining troops and resources for one last campaign. Wolfe would land his troops on the north-shore of Quebec City, and force the French into a fight by marching directly toward the city’s core.

Battle of the Plains of Abraham – 1759

On 13th of September, Wolfe’s plan seemed to work: with uncharacteristic haste, Montcalm ordered the bulk of his men to stop the British in their tracks, fearing that, “If we give them the time to dig in, we’ll never be able to attack them with the troops we have.” The two armies would clash a kilometer away from Quebec City just north of the Plains of Abraham. In the ensuing battle, Major-General Wolfe was fatally wounded. Nonetheless, the British were able to break the French lines relatively quickly and pursue the French fighters as they fled back to Quebec. During the pursuit, General Montcalm was struck and fatally injured – he would die shortly later in his house on rue Saint-Louis.

The impact of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, especially the deaths of Montcalm and Wolfe, has sometimes been exaggerated. Though a major victory, the epic battle did not, at the time, guarantee success for the British campaign. Likewise, though Montcalm’s death was a huge blow to French morale, it was not the essential element of defeat. The Conquest, simply put, was more than the efforts of two men culminating in one battle. As Matthew Ward argues, the success of the British Conquest in fact hinged more on the safe arrival of the British relief fleet in May 1760. After the Plains of Abraham, the French had regrouped in Montreal under the command of François Gaston de Lévis, leaving the under-supplied British to endure a harsh Canadian winter in a city they had already destroyed.

In April 1760, in a final effort to reclaim Quebec City, the French army (now based in Montreal) launched an assault against the British at Sainte-Foy, just outside the walls of Quebec City. The battle, in sheer casualties, represented a French victory. Ultimately, however, the French were unable to retake Quebec City and forced to retreat to Montreal, where they would soon surrender.

Surrender of Montreal – 1760

After the failed siege of Quebec, the British commanders were eager to bring the Conquest to a close. Thus, in September 1760, three British armies – led separately by James Murray, Brigadier William Havilland, and Major-General Jeffery Amherst – convened on the remaining French forces in Montreal. On 8 September 1760, to avoid another bloodbath, General Lévis and Governor General Pierre, Marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnal surrendered the entire French colony of Canada. Thus, with the capitulation of Montreal, the British had effectively won the war. The details of the Conquest, however, still had to be sorted out between England and France. In line with the Old World’s “rules of war”, Britain assured the 60,000 to 70,000 Francophone inhabitants freedom from deportation and from confiscation of property, freedom of religion, the right to migrate to France, and equal treatment in the fur trade.

Treaty of Paris – 1763

The final details were worked out between British and French diplomats in Europe, an ocean apart from the actual battlefields. In February 1763, The Treaty of Paris made the northern portion of New France (including Canada and some additional lands to the south and west) officially a British colony. Ultimately, Canada would be transferred over to the British without much protest. As I.K. Steele points out, the Conquest of Canada was only one part of the Seven Years' War, and France was willing to surrender Canada peacefully in exchange for their more profitable colonies in the West Indies, particularly Guadeloupe. In addition, the deal struck between France and England allowed France to retain the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland, securing their access to the lucrative Atlantic fisheries.

Consequences

Britain's decision to retain Canada was the result of different strategic priorities. On the one hand, there was a need to appease the French, who – defeat in war notwithstanding – continued to present a major threat to British interests given their demographic advantage. This implied giving up either Canada or the French Caribbean islands. Ultimately, the decision was taken to forfeit the French sugar islands even though they were far more economically significant than the North American French colonies. This was in part because annexing the French Antilles would have been a blow to national pride that the French Monarchy would have been unable to accept, thus hampering the prospect of a rapid and mutually beneficial peace settlement. But more importantly, the retention of Canada was motivated by the argument that removing the French presence from North America would reinforce the security of Britain’s Empire in the region.

Quebec Act

The Quebec Act was voted in the commons on June 15th 1774. It extended the frontier of the colony, giving control over the region exploited by Montreal fur traders to the Province of Quebec, it endowed Canadiens with freedom of worship and confirmed the continuance of the Coutume de Paris in Civil law and English practice in criminal law. It also abandoned the commitment to calling a legislative assembly, a belated recognition that the Irish model had failed in Quebec.

Mutual adaptations

The consequences of the change of imperial regime are best described by Donald Fyson’s notion of mutual adaptations. His conception of the relationship between the conquered and the conqueror implies that one must to do away with the idea that, as British identity and the English language came to underpin the mode of governance, the legislative, administrative and judicial branches of the old legal and social order collapsed and the Canadiens population was too passive to actively participate in this transformation for better or for worse. Instead, everyday practices and structures highlight the practical and utilitarian nature of the mutual adjustments that occurred between colonial administrators, British civilian population and Canadien inhabitants.

Religious adaptation

A first example of mutual adaptation is the status of Catholics within the legal framework of the colony. Official policy following the incorporation of the first civil government of Quebec in 1763 mandated the imposition of all penal acts that formed the public law of Britain, including the 1558 Act of Supremacy which barred Catholics from holding remunerated government positions. This exclusionary sentiment is echoed in the Quebec grand jury presentment of October 1764, which objected to the presence of Catholic Jurors as an “open Violation of our most sacred Laws and Libertys, and tending to the utter subversion of the protestant Religion and his Majesty’s power authority, right, and possession of the province to which we belong.” However, beyond this seemingly rigid religious ideology, the judicial framework presented ambiguities that permitted Governor Murray to make exceptions to accommodate practical realities. Nuanced language in the framing of the October 1764 presentment, which only excluded “papist[s] or popish recusant convict[s]” and not papists in general, provided colonial administrators the leeway to account for the administrative necessities of running a country populated in majority by a foreign ethnic group. Indeed, the limited number of Protestant males in the colony (they numbered 200 in 1763 and crept to no more than 700 by 1775) meant that Carleton, and Murray before him, had to look elsewhere to staff the state apparatus, and the only available pool was the Canadien population. The shifting legal definition of Catholicism in the Province of Quebec represents not an instance of British cultural domination and paternal enforcement, but rather a propensity for mutual adaptation in the face of regional circumstances and challenges.

Political adaptation

The political dimension of the colony under early British rule is also revelatory of a series of intertwined adaptive processes. Indeed, not only did the Canadiens have to adapt to unfamiliar power dynamics, but the British officials and civilian population were also forced to adjust in order to acclimate to new constructs of governance. At the macro level, authoritarian political structures were retained under both the military regime and civil government. Murray presided over a “paternalistic, intrusive and controlling government,” which was in many ways reminiscent of the French regime. In this arrangement, it was incumbent upon the British civilian population to adapt to an unusual lack of parliamentary institutions. So, for example, many conflicts erupted between British merchants and colonial administrators, explaining in part why many of the former came to support American revolutionaries in 1775-1776.

Colonial space

The continued use of French structures ran deeper than this flavour of authoritarianism: it also included a spatial and symbolic dimension. Rather than reorganize the division of property into the traditional English township, the British made do with the existing organization of land. The continued use of the French-Canadian parish as the basis of the administrative spatial conception of the colony's territory illustrates British adaptation to existing modes of land-ownership instead of imposing their own. Spatiality and political symbolism were also integral to the decision to continue using previously French loci of power. So, for example, the Chateau St-Louis, the Jesuit college and the Recollet church preserved their administrative functions under British rule. This was particularly disconcerting for British civilians who found themselves being tried in Catholic buildings.

Economic effect

The economic outcome of the Conquest of New-France is best understood within the larger context of the imperial economic structures in which it participated and thus in relation to the events and economic imperatives of the metropoles of France and Great-Britain. At the close of the Seven Years' War, both belligerents faced widely divergent economic outcomes.

Impact on British economy

During the war, British territorial expansion and naval hegemony had proven a great boon for maritime commerce as well as for internal production. Military expenditure – and in particular spending on naval construction and armament – fuelled a burgeoning metal-working sector. There was also an expansion of the British textile industry, with the purchase of uniforms serving as catalyst. Overall, during the war, exports went up fourteen per cent and imports, eight per cent. The return to peace brought two decades of quasi-depression. The government had contracted important sums in debt in order to wage war, and annual spending rose from a peace-time low of 6-7 million pounds to a high of 21 million during the conflict. The economic irrelevance of the war was compounded by the fact that the territory won in North America (i.e. Canada) was only valuable in that it provided security for the other British colonies on the continent, its most important trade –the fur-pelt – having crumbled due to the war and to Pontiac’s revolts. This fact, combined with the failure of the Irish solution for populating Quebec left the British with few options to alleviate their outstanding war debts except by raising taxes on its other colonies. The series of taxation methods implemented in the wake of the Seven Years' War participated in the mounting frustrations that climaxed in the American Revolution. Furthermore, it can also be concluded that the absorption of Quebec directly contributed to the frustrations that boiled over in the American Revolution because it removed the reason for blocking the westward expansion of the thirteen colonies – i.e. the French threat. Indeed, without a rational basis for stopping western settlement, the British decision to call western territories 'Indian land' frustrated colonial expectations of expansionism and gave legitimacy to complaints of metropolitan despotism. In brief, the war of Conquest and by extension the Seven Years' War proved unprofitable to the British, bringing little economic reward and instead precipitating the dislocation of the most profitable portion of the empire.

Impact on French economy

The French situation was quite the opposite. During the war, the French Atlantic commerce suffered due to reduced trade with its Caribbean colonies: exports dropped by 75 per cent and imports dropped by 83 per cent. French industry did not profit so radically from wartime expenditure, in part because its members failed to impose themselves as contenders on the high seas, but also because they did not have the same level of economic infrastructure as the British to begin with. The 1763 Traité de Paris confirmed the British possession of the province of Quebec and the French retention of Caribbean colonies and Newfoundland fisheries. This arrangement explains why defeat was of little to no economic consequence to the French state: it had managed to rid itself of territory it had long considered excess weight, while holding on to the parts of the empire that were central to its commercial prosperity. Furthermore, given the lull in French economic activity that took place during the war, the return to peace meant a revival of French trade. The year following the peace agreement saw sugar production from the Caribbean surpass the 1753 high of 46 million livres, to 63 million livres. By 1770, the sugar trade was yielding 89 million livres; by 1777, it accounted for 155 million livres.

Impact on Quebec economy

As for the local economic consequences, it was established by Fernand Ouellet that once the direct damage of warfare was addressed, economic fallout was minimal. In fact, the outcome of British conquest was manifestly positive on the economic front. For example, the conquest of Quebec formed the genesis of a logging trade that was inexistent during the French regime. From 6000 barrels of pine per year, the Colony under English dominion increased production to 64 000 barrels by 1809. Furthermore, the British encouraged the immigration prerequisite to the economic expansion of Canada during the 19th century. Indeed, in 1769, Canadian exportations were valued at 127,000 pounds sterling, and by 1850 they had grown to 2,800,000 pounds sterling.

Historiography and memory

The Conquest is a central and contested theme of Canadian memory. Historical opinion remains divided over the ultimate legacy of the Conquest, particularly in Quebec. Much of the contention is between those that see it as having negative economic and political consequences for Quebec and French-Canadians and those that see the Conquest as positive and integral to the survival of Quebec in North America. Much of the historiographical debate surrounding the Conquest is linked to the rise of Quebec nationalism and new schools of thought developed at the time of the Quiet Revolution.

The Quebec school of history, originated from Laval University in Quebec City, posits that the Conquest was ultimately essential to the survival and growth of Quebec. The Laval school includes those Francophone historians such as Fernand Oullet and Jean Hamelin who see the positive benefit of the Conquest as enabling the preservation of language, and religion and traditional customs under British rule in a hostile North America. They argue that the Conquest exposed French Canadians to constitutional government and parliamentary democracy and with the Quebec Act, guaranteed the survival of French customs in an otherwise Anglo-Protestant continent. Scholars such as Donald Fyson have pointed to the Quebec legal system as a particular success, with the continuation of French civil law and the introduction of liberal modernity.

The Montreal school, originating at the University of Montreal and including historians such as Michel Brunet, Maurice Seguin, and Guy Fregault, posits that the Conquest is responsible for the economic and political retardation of Quebec. These historians tried to explain the economic inferiority of the French-Canadians by arguing that the Conquest "destroyed an integral society and decapitated the commercial class; leadership of the conquered people fell to the Church; and, because commercial activity came to be monopolized by British merchants, national survival concentrated on agriculture."

A major figure of the Montreal school was the nationalist priest and historian Lionel Groulx. Groulx promoted the view that the Conquest began a long legacy of underdevelopment and discrimination. It was only the tenacity of French Canadians in opposition to the alien rule of the British, Groulx argued, that had helped the French Canadians survive in a hostile North America.

Before the growth of Quebec nationalism, much of elite opinion saw the Conquest as positive, with one provincial politician claiming, “the last shot fired to defend the British Empire in North America would be fired by a French-Canadian.” French Canadian debates have escalated since the 1960s, as the Conquest is seen as a pivotal moment in the history of Québec's nationalism. It should be noted that even the “pro-Conquest” Laval school is part of the larger trend of renewed Quebec scholarship during the Quiet Revolution. Historian Jocelyn Létourneau suggested in the 21st century, "1759 does not belong primarily to a past that we might wish to study and understand, but, rather, to a present and a future that we might wish to shape and control."

Further reading

• Brunet, Michel. "The British Conquest: Canadian social scientists and the fate of the Canadiens." Canadian Historical Review 40.2 (1959): 93-107.
• Buckner, Phillip and John G. Reid, editors. Revisiting 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Perspectiv. (University of Toronto Press, 2012).
• Cook, Ramsay. "Some French-Canadian Interpretations of the British Conquest: une quatrième dominante de la pensée canadienne-française." Historical Papers/Communications historiques 1.1 (1966): 70-83. online
• Dewar,Helen. "Canada or Guadeloupe? : French and British Perceptions of Empire, 1760–63." Canadian Historical Review 91 (2010).doi: 10.3138/chr.91.4.637
• Frégault, Guy. Canada: the War of the Conquest (Oxford University Press, 1969).
• Fyson, Donald. "Between the Ancien Régime and Liberal Modernity: Law, Justice and State Formation in colonial Quebec, 1760-1867," History Compass (2014), 1#5 pp 412-432
• Gagnon, Serge. Quebec and its Historians, 1840 to 1920 (Vol. 1. Harvest House Limited Pub, 1982).
• Gagnon, Serge. Quebec and Its Historians: The Twentieth Century (Vol. 2. U of Ottawa Press, 1985).
• Miquelon, Dale. "Conquest", in The Canadian Encyclopedia, Volume 1, pp. 491–2. (1988) online.
• Miquelon, Dale, ed. Society and Conquest: The Debate on the Bourgeoisie and Social Change in French Canada, 1700-1850 (Copp Clark Pub., 1977); Exurbs from primary sources and historians