In the year 1812 a young man took his seat in the House of Assembly for Lower Canada who was destined to play a conspicuous part in the history of the province during the next quarter of a century. His name was Louis Joseph Papineau. He was at that time only twenty-six years of age, but already his tall, well-built form, his fine features and commanding presence, marked him out as a born leader of men. He possessed an eloquence which, commonplace as it now appears on the printed page, apparently exerted a profound influence upon his contemporaries. ‘Never within the memory of teacher or student,’ wrote his college friend Aubert de Gaspe, ’had a voice so eloquent filled the halls of the seminary of Quebec.’ In the Assembly his rise to prominence was meteoric; only three years after his entrance he was elected speaker on the resignation of the veteran J. A. Panet, who had held the office at different times since 1792. Papineau retained the speakership, with but one brief period of intermission, until the outbreak of rebellion twenty-two years later; and it was from the speaker’s chair that he guided throughout this period the counsels of the Patriote party.

When Papineau entered public life the political situation in Lower Canada was beginning to be complicated. The French-Canadian members of the Assembly, having taken great pains to acquaint themselves with the law and custom of the British constitution, had awakened to the fact that they were not enjoying the position or the power which the members of the House of Commons in England were enjoying. In the first place, the measures which they passed were being continually thrown out by the upper chamber, the Legislative Council, and they were powerless to prevent it; and in the second place, they had no control of the government, for the governor and his Executive Council were appointed by and responsible to the Colonial Office alone. The members of the two councils were in the main of English birth, and they constituted a local oligarchy known as the ‘Bureaucrats’ or the ’Chateau Clique’ which held the reins of government. They were as a rule able to snap their fingers at the majority in the Assembly.

In England the remedy for a similar state of affairs had been found to lie in the control of the purse exercised by the House of Commons. In order to bring the Executive to its will, it was only necessary for that House to threaten the withholding of supplies. In Lower Canada, however, such a remedy was at first impossible, for the simple reason that the House of Assembly did not vote all the supplies necessary for carrying on the government. In other words, the expenditure far exceeded the revenue; and the deficiency had to be met out of the Imperial exchequer. Under these circumstances it was impossible for the Lower Canada Assembly to attempt to exercise the full power of the purse. In 1810, it is true, the Assembly had passed a resolution avowing its ability and willingness to vote ’the necessary sums for defraying the Civil Expenses of the Government of the Province.’ But Sir James Craig had declined on a technicality to forward the resolution to the Houses of Parliament at Westminster, realizing fully that if the offer were accepted, the Assembly would be able to exert complete power over the Executive. ‘The new Trojan horse’ was not to gain admission to the walls through him.

Later, however, in 1818, during the administration of Sir John Coape Sherbrooke, the offer of the Assembly was accepted by the Imperial government. Sherbrooke was an apostle of conciliation. It was he who gave the Catholic bishop of Quebec a seat in the Executive Council; and he also recommended that the speaker of the House of Assembly should be included in the Council a recommendation which was a preliminary move in the direction of responsible government. Through Sherbrooke’s instrumentality the British government now decided to allow the Lower-Canadian legislature to vote the entire revenue of the province, apart from the casual and territorial dues of the Crown and certain duties levied by Act of the Imperial parliament. Sherbrooke’s intention was that the legislature should vote out of this revenue a permanent civil list to be continued during the lifetime of the sovereign. Unfortunately, however, the Assembly did not fall in with this view. It insisted, instead, on treating the civil list as an annual affair, and voting the salaries of the officials, from the governor downwards, for only one year. Since this would have made every government officer completely dependent upon the pleasure of the House of Assembly, the Legislative Council promptly threw out the budget. Thus commenced a struggle which was destined to last for many years. The Assembly refused to see that its action was really an encroachment upon the sphere of the Executive; and the Executive refused to place itself at the mercy of the Assembly. The result was deadlock. During session after session the supplies were not voted. The Executive, with its control of the royal revenue, was able by one means or another to carry on the government; but the relations between the ‘Bureaucrats’ and the Patriotes became rapidly more bitter.

Papineau’s attitude toward the government during this period was in harmony with that of his compatriots. It was indeed one of his characteristics, as the historian Christie has pointed out, that he seemed always ‘to move with the masses rather than to lead them.’ In 1812 he fought side by side with the British. As late as 1820 he publicly expressed his great admiration for the constitution of 1791 and the blessings of British rule. But in the struggles over the budget he took up ground strongly opposed to the government; and, when the question became acute, he threw restraint to the winds, and played the part of a dangerous agitator.

What seems to have first roused Papineau to anger was a proposal to unite Upper and Lower Canada in 1822. Financial difficulties had arisen between the two provinces; and advantage was taken of this fact to introduce a Union Bill into the House of Commons at Westminster, couched in terms very unfavourable to the French Canadians. There is little doubt that the real objects of the bill was the extinction of the Lower-Canadian Assembly and the subordination of the French to the English element in the colony. At any rate, the French Canadians saw in the bill a menace to their national existence. Two agents were promptly appointed to go over to London to oppose it. One of them was Papineau; the other was John Neilson, the capable Scottish editor of the Quebec Gazette. The two men made a very favourable impression; they enlisted on their side the leaders of the Whig party in the Commons; and they succeeded in having the bill well and duly shelved. Their mission resulted not only in the defeat of the bill; it also showed them clearly that a deep-laid plot had menaced the rights and liberties of the French-Canadian people; and their anger was roused against what Neilson described as ‘the handful of intrigants’ who had planned that coup d’etat.

On returning to Canada Papineau gave vent to his discontent in an extraordinary attack upon Lord Dalhousie, who had become governor of Canada in 1819. Dalhousie was an English nobleman of the best type. His tastes were liberal. He was instrumental in founding the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec; and he showed his desire for pleasant relations between the two races in Canada by the erection of the joint monument to Wolfe and Montcalm in the city of Quebec, in the governor’s garden. His administration, however, had been marred by one or two financial irregularities. Owing to the refusal of the Assembly to vote a permanent civil list, Dalhousie had been forced to expend public moneys without authority from the legislature; and his receiver-general, Caldwell, had been guilty of défalcations to the amount of L100,000. Papineau attacked Dalhousie as if he had been personally responsible for these défalcations. The speech, we are told by the chronicler Bibaud, recalled in its violence the philippics of Demosthenes and the orations against Catiline of Cicero.

The upshot of this attack was that all relations between Dalhousie and Papineau were broken off. Apart altogether from the political controversy, Dalhousie felt that he could have no intercourse with a man who had publicly insulted him. Consequently, when Papineau was elected to the speakership of the Assembly in 1827, Dalhousie refused to recognize him as speaker; and when the Assembly refused to reconsider his election, Dalhousie promptly dissolved it.

It would be tedious to describe in detail the political events of these years; and it is enough to say that by 1827 affairs in the province had come to such an impasse, partly owing to the financial quarrel, and partly owing to the personal war between Papineau and Dalhousie, that it was decided by the Patriotes to send another deputation to England to ask for the redress of grievances and for the removal of Dalhousie. The members of the deputation were John Neilson and two French Canadians, Augustin Cuvillier and Denis B. Viger. Papineau was an interested party and did not go. The deputation proved no less successful than that which had crossed the Atlantic in 1822. The delegates succeeded in obtaining Lord Dalhousie’s recall, and they were enabled to place their case before a special committee of the House of Commons. The committee made a report very favourable to the Patriote cause; recommended that ’the French-Canadians should not in any way be disturbed in the exercise and enjoyment of their religion, their laws, or their privileges’; and expressed the opinion that ’the true interests of the provinces would be best promoted by placing the collection and expenditure of all public revenues under the control of the House of Assembly.’ The report was not actually adopted by the House of Commons, but it lent a very welcome support to the contentions of Papineau and his friends.

At last, in 1830, the British government made a serious and well-meant attempt to settle, once and for all, the financial difficulty. Lord Goderich, who was at that time at the Colonial Office, instructed Lord Aylmer, who had become governor of Canada in 1830, to resign to the Assembly the control of the entire revenue of the province, with the single exception of the casual and territorial revenue of the Crown, if the Assembly would grant in exchange a civil list of L19,000, voted for the lifetime of the king. This offer was a compromise which should have proved acceptable to both sides. But Papineau and his friends determined not to yield an inch of ground; and in the session of 1831 they succeeded in defeating the motion for the adoption of Lord Goderich’s proposal. That this was a mistake even the historian Garneau, who cannot be accused of hostility toward the Patriotes, has admitted.

Throughout this period Papineau’s course was often unreasonable. He complained that the French Canadians had no voice in the executive government, and that all the government offices were given to the English; yet when he was offered a seat in the Executive Council in 1822 he declined it; and when Dominique Mondelet, one of the members of the Assembly, accepted a seat in the Executive Council in 1832, he was hounded from the Assembly by Papineau and his friends as a traitor. As Sir George Cartier pointed out many years later, Mondelet’s inclusion in the Executive Council was really a step in the direction of responsible government. It is difficult, also, to approve Papineau’s attitude toward such governors as Dalhousie and Aylmer, both of whom were disposed to be friendly. Papineau’s attitude threw them into the arms of the ‘Chateau Clique.’ The truth is that Papineau was too unbending, too intransigeant, to make a good political leader. As was seen clearly in his attitude toward the financial proposals of Lord Goderich in 1830, he possessed none of that spirit of compromise which lies at the heart of English constitutional development.

On the other hand, it must be remembered that Papineau and his friends received much provocation. The attitude of the governing class toward them was overbearing and sometimes insolent. They were regarded as members of an inferior race. And they would have been hardly human if they had not bitterly resented the conspiracy against their liberties embodied in the abortive Union Bill of 1822. There were real abuses to be remedied. Grave financial irregularities had been detected in the executive government; sinecurists, living in England, drew pay for services which they did not perform; gross favouritism existed in appointments to office under the Crown; and so many office-holders held seats in the Legislative Council that the Council was actually under the thumb of the executive government. Yet when the Assembly strove to remedy these grievances, its efforts were repeatedly blocked by the Legislative Council; and even when appeal was made to the Colonial Office, removal of the abuses was slow in coming. Last, but not least, the Assembly felt that it did not possess an adequate control over the expenditure of the moneys for the voting of which it was primarily responsible.