The British did not treat the French inhabitants of Canada as a conquered people; not as other countries won by conquest have been treated by their victorious invaders. The terms of the Capitulation of Montreal in 1760 assured the Canadians of their property and civil rights, and guaranteed to them ‘the free exercise of their religion.’ The Quebec Act of 1774 granted them the whole of the French civil law, to the almost complete exclusion of the English common law, and virtually established in Canada the Church of the vanquished through legal enforcement of the obligation resting upon Catholics to pay tithes. And when it became necessary in 1791 to divide Canada into two provinces, Upper Canada and Lower Canada, one predominantly English and the other predominantly French, the two provinces were granted precisely equal political rights. Out of this arose an odd situation. All French Canadians were Roman Catholics, and Roman Catholics were at this time debarred from sitting in the House of Commons at Westminster. Yet they were given the right of sitting as members in the Canadian representative Assemblies created by the Act of 1791. The Catholics of Canada thus received privileges denied to their co-religionists in Great Britain.

There can be no doubt that it was the conciliatory policy of the British government which kept the clergy, the seigneurs, and the great body of French Canadians loyal to the British crown during the war in 1775 and in 1812. It is certain, too, that these generous measures strengthened the position of the French race in Canada, made Canadians more jealous of their national identity, and led them to press for still wider liberties. It is an axiom of human nature that the more one gets, the more one wants. And so the concessions granted merely whetted the Canadian appetite for more.

This disposition became immediately apparent with the calling of the first parliament of Lower Canada in 1792. Before this there had been no specific definition of the exact status of the French language in Canada, and the question arose as to its use in the Assembly as a medium of debate. As the Quebec Act of 1774 had restored the French laws, it was inferred that the use of the French language had been authorized, since otherwise these laws would have no natural medium of interpretation. That this was the inference to be drawn from the constitution became evident, for the British government had made no objection to the use of French in the law-courts. It should be borne in mind that at this period the English in Canada were few in number, and that all of them lived in the cities. The French members in the Assembly, representing, as they did, nearly the whole population, did not hesitate to press for the official recognition of their language on a parity with English.

The question first came up in connection with the election of a speaker. The French-Canadian members, being in a majority of thirty-four to sixteen, proposed Jean Antoine Panet. This motion was opposed by the English members, together with a few of the French members, who nominated an Englishman. They pointed out that the transactions between the speaker and the king’s representative in the colony should be ’in the language of the empire to which we have the happiness to belong.’ ‘I think it is but decent,’ said Louis Panet, brother of Jean Antoine, ’that the speaker on whom we fix our choice, be one who can express himself in English when he addresses himself to the representative of our sovereign.’ Yet the majority of the French members stuck to their motion and elected their speaker. When he was sworn into office, he declared to the governor that ’he could only express himself in the primitive language of his native country.’ Nevertheless, he understood English well enough to conduct the business of the House. And it should not be forgotten that all the sixteen English members, out of the fifty composing the Assembly, owed their election to French-Canadian voters.

Almost immediately the question came up again in the debate on the use of the French language in the publication of official documents. The English members pointed out that English was the language of the sovereign, and they contended that the exclusive official use of the English language would more quickly assimilate the French Canadians would render them more loyal. To these arguments the French Canadians replied with ringing eloquence.

‘Remember,’ said Chartier de Lotbiniere, ’the year 1775. Those Canadians, who spoke nothing but French, showed their attachment to their sovereign in a manner not at all equivocal. They helped to defend this province. This city, these walls, this chamber in which I have the honour to speak, were saved partly through their zeal and their courage. You saw them join with faithful subjects of His Majesty and repulse attacks which people who spoke very good English made on this city. It is not, you see, uniformity of language which makes peoples more faithful or more united.’

‘Is it not ridiculous,’ exclaimed Pierre Bedard, whose name will appear later in these pages, ’to wish to make a people’s loyalty consist in its tongue?’

The outcome of the debate, as might have been expected, was to place the French language on a level with the English language in the records and publications of the Assembly, and French became, to all intents and purposes, the language of debate. The number of English-speaking members steadily decreased. In the year 1800 Sir Robert Milnes wrote home that there were ’but one or two English members in the House of Assembly who venture to speak in the language of the mother country, from the certainty of not being understood by a great majority of the House.’

It must not be imagined, however, that in these early debates there was any of that rancour and animosity which later characterized the proceedings of the Assembly of Lower Canada. ’The remains of the old French politeness, and a laudable deference to their fellow subjects, kept up decorum in the proceedings of the majority,’ testified a political annalist of that time. Even as late as 1807, it appears that ’party spirit had not yet extended its effects to destroy social intercourse and good neighbourhood.’ It was not until the regime of Sir James Craig that racial bitterness really began.