HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

In 1774, fifteen years after the surrender of Quebec to the troops of General Wolfe, King George III signed the Quebec Act to restore the coutume de Paris (the ancestor of the present civil code) in the new province. He implicitly recognized, at the same time, the legality of the French language in this part of North America. It was a decision fraught with consequences, as we know, but was done to avoid a possible uprising among the French Canadians and their Amerindian allies. In fact, the French Canadians were living with the obsessive fear of being deported (as were their French fellows in Acadia between 1755 and 1763, an ‘ethnic purification’ that affected more than 90 per cent of the 12,000 Acadians settled in this other colony of France). The threat of an uprising was combined, too, with that of an invasion of the former French possessions by the rebel troops of the United States, whose independence would be unilaterally proclaimed in 1776. These concerns also pushed George III to sign the Constitutional Act in 1791, granting a parliament to Lower Canada. This was another decision fraught with consequences because, to ensure the allegiance of his French subjects – needed to maintain his commercial hold north of the 45th parallel – the king provided them with a form of statehood.