After 1830 signs began to multiply that the racial feud in Lower Canada was growing in intensity. In 1832 a by-election in the west ward of Montreal culminated in a riot. Troops were called out to preserve order. After showing some forbearance under a fusillade of stones, they fired into the rioters, killing three and wounding two men, all of them French Canadians. Immediately the Patriote press became furious. The newspaper La Minerve asserted that a ‘general massacre’ had been planned: the murderers, it said, had approached the corpses with laughter, and had seen with joy Canadian blood running down the street; they had shaken each other by the hand, and had regretted that there were not more dead. The blame for the ‘massacre’ was laid at the door of Lord Aylmer. Later, on the floor of the Assembly, Papineau remarked that ’Craig merely imprisoned his victims, but Aylmer slaughters them.’ The Patriotes adopted the same bitter attitude toward the government when the Asiatic cholera swept the province in 1833. They actually accused Lord Aylmer of having ’enticed the sick immigrants into the country, in order to decimate the ranks of the French Canadians.’

In the House Papineau became more and more violent and domineering. He did not scruple to use his majority either to expel from the House or to imprison those who incurred his wrath. Robert Christie, the member for Gaspe, was four times expelled for having obtained the dismissal of some partisan justices of the peace. The expulsion of Dominique Mondelet has already been mentioned. Ralph Taylor, one of the members for the Eastern Townships, was imprisoned in the common jail for using, in the Quebec Mercury, language about Papineau no more offensive than Papineau had used about many others. But perhaps the most striking evidence of Papineau’s desire to dominate the Assembly was seen in his attitude toward a bill to secure the independence of judges introduced by F. A. Quesnel, one of the more moderate members of the Patriote party. Quesnel had accepted some amendments suggested by the colonial secretary. This awoke the wrath of Papineau, who assailed the bill in his usual vehement style, and concluded by threatening Quesnel with the loss of his seat. The threat proved not to be idle. Papineau possessed at this time a great ascendancy over the minds of his fellow-countrymen, and in the next elections he secured Quesnel’s defeat.

By 1832 Papineau’s political views had taken a more revolutionary turn. From being an admirer of the constitution of 1791, he had come to regard it as ‘bad; very, very bad.’ ‘Our constitution,’ he said, ’has been manufactured by a Tory influenced by the terrors of the French Revolution.’ He had lost faith in the justice of the British government and in its willingness to redress grievances; and his eyes had begun to turn toward the United States. Perhaps he was not yet for annexation to that country; but he had conceived a great admiration for the American constitution. The wide application of the principle of election especially attracted him; and, although he did not relinquish his hope of subordinating the Executive to the Assembly by means of the control of the finances, he began to throw his main weight into an agitation to make the Legislative Council elective. Henceforth the plan for an elective Legislative Council became the chief feature of the policy of the Patriote party. The existing nominated and reactionary Legislative Council had served the purpose of a buffer between the governor’s Executive Council and the Assembly. This buffer, thought Papineau and his friends, should be removed, so as to expose the governor to the full hurricane of the Assembly’s wrath.

It was not long before Papineau’s domineering behaviour and the revolutionary trend of his views alienated some of his followers. On John Neilson, who had gone to England with him in 1822 and with Cuvillier and Viger in 1828, and who had supported him heartily during the Dalhousie regime, Papineau could no longer count. Under Aylmer a coolness sprang up between the two men. Neilson objected to the expulsion of Mondelet from the House; he opposed the resolutions of Louis Bourdages, Papineau’s chief lieutenant, for the abolition of the Legislative Council; and in the debate on Quesnel’s bill for the independence of judges, he administered a severe rebuke to Papineau for language he had used. Augustin Cuvillier followed the lead of his friend Neilson, and so also did Andrew Stuart, one of the ablest lawyers in the province, and Quesnel. All these men were politicians of weight and respectability.

Papineau still had, however, a large and powerful following, especially among the younger members. Nothing is more remarkable at this time than the sway which he exercised over the minds of men who in later life became distinguished for the conservative and moderate character of their opinions. Among his followers in the House were Louis Hippolyte LaFontaine, destined to become, ten years later, the colleague of Robert Baldwin in the LaFontaine-Baldwin administration, and Augustin Norbert Morin, the colleague of Francis Hincks in the Hincks-Morin administration of 1851. Outside the House he counted among his most faithful followers two more future prime ministers of Canada, George E. Cartier and Etienne P. Tache. Nor were his supporters all French Canadians. Some English-speaking members acted with him, among them Wolfred Nelson; and in the country he had the undivided allegiance of men like Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan, editor of the Montreal Vindicator, and Thomas Storrow Brown, afterwards one of the ‘generals’ of the rebellion. Although the political struggle in Lower Canada before 1837 was largely racial, it was not exclusively so, for there were some English in the Patriots party and some French who declined to support it.

In 1832 and 1833 Papineau suffered rebuffs in the House that could not have been pleasant to him. In 1833, for instance, his proposal to refuse supply was defeated by a large majority. But the triumphant passage of the famous Ninety-Two Resolutions in 1834 showed that, for most purposes, he still had a majority behind him.

The Ninety-Two Resolutions were introduced by Elzear Bedard, the son of Pierre Bedard, and are reputed to have been drawn up by A. N. Morin. But there is no doubt that they were inspired by Papineau. The voice was the voice of Jacob, but the hand was the hand of Esau. The Resolutions constituted the political platform of the extreme wing of the Patriote party: they were a sort of Declaration of Right. A more extraordinary political document has seldom seen the light. A writer in the Quebec Mercury, said by Lord Aylmer to be John Neilson, undertook an analysis of the ninety-two articles: eleven, said this writer, stood true; six contained both truth and falsehood; sixteen stood wholly false; seventeen seemed doubtful and twelve ridiculous; seven were repetitions; fourteen consisted only of abuse; four were both false and seditious; and the remainder were indifferent.

It is not possible here to analyse the Resolutions in detail. They called the attention of the home government to some real abuses. The subservience of the Legislative Council to the Executive Council; the partisanship of some of the judges; the maladministration of the wild lands; grave irregularities in the receiver-general’s office; the concentration of a variety of public offices in the same persons; the failure of the governor to issue a writ for the election of a representative for the county of Montreal; and the expenditure of public moneys without the consent of the Assembly all these, and many others, were enlarged upon. If the framers of the Resolutions had only cared to make out a very strong case they might have done so. But the language which they employed to present their case was almost certainly calculated to injure it seriously in the eyes of the home government. ‘We are in no wise disposed,’ they told the king, ’to admit the excellence of the present constitution of Canada, although the present colonial secretary unseasonably and erroneously asserts that the said constitution has conferred on the two Cañadas the institutions of Great Britain.’ With an extraordinary lack of tact they assured the king that Toryism was in America ’without any weight or influence except what it derives from its European supporters’; whereas Republicanism ‘overspreads all America.’ Nor did they stop there. ‘This House,’ they announced, ’would esteem itself wanting in candour to Your Majesty if it hesitated to call Your Majesty’s attention to the fact, that in less than twenty years the population of the United States of America will be greater than that of Great Britain, and that of British America will be greater than that of the former English colonies, when the latter deemed that the time was come to decide that the inappreciable advantage of being self-governed ought to engage them to repudiate a system of colonial government which was, generally speaking, much better than that of British America now is.’ This unfortunate reference to the American Revolution, with its hardly veiled threat of rebellion, was scarcely calculated to commend the Ninety-Two Resolutions to the favourable consideration of the British government. And when the Resolutions went on to demand, not merely the removal, but the impeachment of the governor, Lord Aylmer, it must have seemed to unprejudiced bystanders as if the framers of the Resolutions had taken leave of their senses.

The Ninety-Two Resolutions do not rank high as a constructive document. The chief change in the constitution which they proposed was the application of the elective principle to the Legislative Council. Of anything which might be construed into advocacy of a statesmanlike project of responsible government there was not a word, save a vague allusion to ’the vicious composition and irresponsibility of the Executive Council.’ Papineau and his friends had evidently no conception of the solution ultimately found for the constitutional problem in Canada a provincial cabinet chosen from the legislature, sitting in the legislature, and responsible to the legislature, whose advice the governor is bound to accept in regard to provincial affairs. Papineau undoubtedly did much to hasten the day of responsible government in Canada; but in this process he was in reality an unwitting agent.

The Ninety-Two Resolutions secured a majority of fifty-six to twenty-four. But in the minority voted John Neilson, Augustin Cuvillier, F. A. Quesnel, and Andrew Stuart, who now definitely broke away from Papineau’s party. There are signs, too, that the considerable number of Catholic clergy who had openly supported Papineau now began to withdraw from the camp of a leader advocating such republican and revolutionary ideas. There is ground also for believing that not a little unrest disturbed those who voted with Papineau in 1834. In the next year Elzear Bedard, who had moved the Ninety-Two Resolutions, broke with Papineau. Another seceder was Etienne Parent, the editor of the revived Canadien, and one of the great figures in French-Canadian literature. Both Bedard and Parent were citizens of Quebec, and they carried with them the great body of public opinion in the provincial capital. It will be observed later that during the disturbances of 1837 Quebec remained quiet.

None of the seceders abandoned the demand for the redress of grievances. They merely refused to follow Papineau in his extreme course. For this they were assailed with some of the rhetoric which had hitherto been reserved for the ‘Bureaucrats.’ To them was applied the opprobrious epithet of Chouayens a name which had been used by Etienne Parent himself in 1828 to describe those French Canadians who took sides with the government party.