In late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Saint-Henri, the street was a contested space. The local elite's municipal management of public space conflicted with the popular social use of the streets, both in the design and promotion of the main commercial street, rue Notre-Dame, and in the moral regulation of street behaviour. Political negotiation was limited to male property owners, for restrictions on the municipal franchise in a bourgeois liberal democracy excluded most women, many tenants, and all street vagrants. Mounting public debt resulting from the promotional politics of expropriation and bonusing incited popular resistance and, in 1905, led to annexation to the city of Montreal. The local elite directed the use of public space in ways that conformed with their private perspectives. Local by-laws and policing efforts largely succeeded in eliminating or displacing criminal and disruptive behaviour on rue Notre-Dame by day, but nightly disturbances and illicit activities were common on adjoining residential streets, in hidden areas, and in the neighbouring community of Sainte-Cunégonde. A wider range of primary sources, including photographs and sketches, are crucial to disclosing the class and gendered nature of street life.
Urban spaces and streets have been studied in a variety of ways in Montreal and Paris, but rarely have historians examined the specific relationship between the function of the street and social usage to reflect changes over time. The argument here is for an analytical approach to photographs combined with textual evidence to reveal the urban processes affecting the retail streets of rue Notre-Dame and rue Sainte-Catherine in Montreal, the through street of Boulevard de Sébastopol, and the pedestrian street of rue Mouffetard in Paris. Photographs reflect the success of modern urban transformations to rework the images of the city from various perspectives and for different purposes. They include the bourgeois female shopper on the late nineteenth-century retail and through streets, female retail and office workers interspersed among men on early twentieth-century rue Sainte-Catherine, and the agency of working-class women in the market transactions and peddler trades of rue Mouffetard.
In the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, municipalities throughout Quebec used various means to attract railways and industries to their locality. Saint-Jean was no exception. The incentives its municipal leaders employed included investments, tax exemptions, loans, bonuses, land grants and other concessions. As was often the case in other towns and cities, the stimuli Saint-Jean offered had little favourable effect on the local economy, particularly the industrial sector.
This paper attempts to discern the motives of the local entrepreneurial elite responsible for these actions. Insofar as this study has determined, economic weakness and competition from other more prosperous Quebec towns were at the root of the behaviour of Saint-Jean's leaders. Once a thriving centre for Canadian-American trade, Saint-Jean eventually suffered a decline in commercial activity in the 1870s as a result of the construction of the Grand Trunk Railway in the 1850s. The town's business elite thus tried to "boost" the industrial sector of the economy by generously dispensing municipal assistance. However, precisely because of the town's disadvantaged position, their efforts were largely futile.
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