L’éruption patriote: The Revolt against Dalhousie and the Petitioning Explosion in Nineteenth-Century French Canada

Abstract

As much as any other site in the nineteenth century, Francophone Lower Canada saw immense waves of popular petitioning, with petitions against British colonial administration attracting tens of thousands of signatures in the 1820s. The petition against Governor Dalhousie of 1827–28 attracted more than 87,000 names, making it one of the largest mass petitions of the Atlantic world on a per-capita scale for its time. We draw upon new archival evidence that shows the force of local organization in the petition mobilization, and combine this with statistical analyses of a new sample of 1,864 names from the anti-Dalhousie signatory list. We conclude that the Lower Canadian petitioning surge stemmed from emergent linguistic nationalism, expectations of parliamentary democracy, and the mobilization and alliance-building efforts of Patriote leaders in the French-Canadian republican movement. As elsewhere in the nineteenth-century Atlantic, the anti-Dalhousie effort shows social movements harnessing petitions to recruit, mobilize, and build cross-cultural alliances.

Imperial Governance and the Growth of Legislative Power in America

“…Incorporating the declining talent pool of government could provide an intriguing answer (Dewan and Myatt 2010). A second direction relates to strategic aspects of colonial petitioning, which tended to improve the crown's information about colonial politics (Carpenter and Brossard 2019). Yet petitions, like "fire alarm" oversight, are partly cheap talk; thus their informativeness is not obvious.…”

“…The case of New York is treated more fully below, after analysis of the model.16 The crown often received petitions from colonists or assemblies on colonial conditions(Carpenter and Brossard 2019;Hulsebosch 2014). For petitions from assemblies, one problem for the crown is that they came from an interested party and could not necessarily be taken at face value.…”

Colonial Petitions, Colonial Petitioners, and the Imperial Parliament, ca. 1780–1918

“…59 The petition to the Commons for the recall of Governor Dalhousie in 1827 was signed by over 87,000 Francophone subjects in Lower Canada-one of the highest per capita rates of subscription across the Atlantic world during a period when mass petitioning was emerging in a number of different polities. 60 In the continuing crises of the 1830s, Anglophone and Francophone communities alike used mass petitions to mobilize and demonstrate their support for different institutions of imperial rule in the Canadas. In March 1834, the speaker of the legislative assembly of Lower Canada, Louis-Joseph Papineau, communicated ninety-two resolutions of patriote grievances by means of a petition to the Commons.…”

Becoming E-Petition: An Assemblage-Based Framework for Analysis and Research

“…The right to petition is written in the First Amendment of the US Constitution (Carpenter, 2016b;Zaret, 2000) and the European Parliament established the right to petition in the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht (Lindner & Riehm, 2011). Numerous studies highlight the role of historical petitions in bringing about social, economic, and political change (Calhoun, 2012;Carpenter, 2016b;Carpenter & Brossard, 2019;Zaeske, 2003;Zaret, 2000).…”

“…The study of e-petitions has attracted considerable interest because the data they provide 2 enhance learning and support the study of, on one hand, the political and other aspects of socio-spatial issues (e.g., political behavior and preferences, online political participation and mobilization/ protest, collective emotions, social needs, policy impacts and effectiveness) and, on the other hand, the contribution of e-petitions to issue-related decision-making. Studies of traditional printed petitions have also been and are undertaken for similar reasons (e.g., Carpenter, 2016a;Carpenter & Brossard, 2019;Zaeske, 2003;Zaret, 2000).…”