Harris, Cole

Cole Harris

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Cahiers de géographie du Québec

Towards a Conclusion

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Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l'Université de Montréal, l'Université Laval et l'Université du Québec àMontréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. Érudit offre des services d'édition numérique de documentsscientifiques depuis 1998.Pour communiquer avec les responsables d'Érudit : info@erudit.org Note "Towards a Conclusion" Cole HarrisCahiers de géographie du Québec, vol. 28, n° 73-74, 1984, p. 329-332.   Pour citer cette note, utiliser l'information suivante : URI: http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/021665arDOI: 10.7202/021665arNote : les règles d'écriture des références bibliographiques peuvent varier selon les différents domaines du savoir.Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politiqued'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter à l'URI https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/Document téléchargé le 10 février 2017 05:58CAHIERS DE GÉOGRAPHIE DU QUÉBEC Vol. 28, nos 73-74, avril-septembre 1984, 329-332 TOWARDS A CONCLUSION by Cole HARRIS Department of Geography University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., V6T1W5 As the fishery underlies Newfoundland so agriculture underlies Québec. Farming is the common expérience in the background of most lives. There hâve been other expériences of course — in the western fur trade, in the Guif fishery, in the timber camps in the pineries around the St-Lawrence Valley, in the early commercial and later industrial towns — but until this century agriculture sustained more lives in Québec than any other occupation. For some 250 years along the lower St-Lawrence it was the occupation of the majority. Parish church and rang loom in the background of Marc-Aurèle Fortin's splendid painting of Montréal (Landscape, Hochelaga) as, in one way or another, an agrarian past looms in the background of modem Québec. At times the expérience and mythology of this past hâve been overwhelming; partly in reaction much of Québec over the last 20 years had pursued an alternative vision of technology and the future. In its way, académie geography has shared this quest. But the past, and the influence of the past, will not go away. To know Québec's past is to know a good deal about the countryside. To know the early countryside is, almost invariably, to work along the borderland of geography and history. This issue of the Cahiers, then, marks a too long neglected step in an important direction. There is an obvious relationship, as Rodolphe De Koninck has rightly stressed, between agriculture and territory. More than most activities, agriculture requires space, and the expansion of agriculture, especially where technology is fairly static and the cost of labour fairly high, requires a lot more space. In gênerai, the availability of space was the principal opportunity for Europeans in the middle latitudes of the New World before industrialization, but in particular, in Québec as everywhere else, this opportunity was subject to many constraints. However constrained, the availability of space for agricultural colonization encouraged population movement and, with each move, reshuffled people. New World seulement tended to mix people of différent backgrounds in settings where the relationships among land, labour, capital, and markets were not those of the more densely settled areas they had left. Therefore, the occupation of territory was not only a conquest of space, but also a process of social and cultural change. There were common threads and endless unique détails in the New World story. So in early, rural Québec there was pattern and variety. Both are inhérent in the papers of this collection, but as pattern is the less readily discerned I shall comment on it hère. 330 CAHIERS DE GÉOGRAPHIE DU QUÉBEC, Vol. 28, nos 73-74, avril-septembre 1984 When French immigrants came to Canada they left a France where 20 million people pressed on the close limits of scarce agricultural land for a broad valley that has been emptied of Indians in the XVIth century and that received only about 9 000 immigrants between Champlain in 1608 and the fall of Québec in 1759. In relation to costs in France, land along the St-Lawrence was plentiful and cheap. Labour was scarce and expensive, its cost driven up by the availability of land. The characteristic shape of the long lot and the flexible geometry of côte and rang that Ludger Beauregard describes and Luc Bureau attributes to the French renaissance are probably less important than the simple fact that land was available. Throughout the French régime a young man could obtain a lot of 30-40 ha. He faced the often overwhelming task of clearing, but also the prospect of a modest farm to support his family. This was the principal opportunity of the early Canadian countryside. There were not plantation crops, and there were limited domestic and external markets for the crops and livestock from northwestern France that could be raised. The countryside was not attractive to capital, and proportionally received much less bourgeois investment that its French counterpart. When seigneurial revenues were low, as long they were in sparcely settled seigneuries, the countryside offered little support for mannered gentility. In thèse circumstances the social range of the French countryside could not be reproduced. Poor people found relatively more in the Canadian country-side than their counterparts found in France, prosperous people found relatively less. Seulement spread along the St-Lawrence in response to population growth Semi-subsistent agriculture tended to reproduce similar farms and, as long as land was available and markets for agricultural products were poor, to discourage capital accumulation. In a weak market economy there was little need for villages. However villages are defined and counted, Serge Courville is certainly right that at the end of the French régime the village was usually no more than «une structure en voie de formation». Immigrants to the St-Lawrence Valley came from most provinces of France. Most of the first of them were Normans, then immigration came from the île de France and the hinterland of La Rochelle, and finally from the Midi and east as well. Only 250 married couples crossed the Atlantic to settle in Canada during the entire French régime. After the 1670's female immigration virtually stopped and immigrant men married daughters of Canadian families. Overall, immigration mixed différent French backgrounds along the lower St-Lawrence with the resuit that the particular régional accents, superstitions, and customs of a still intensely régional France were blended on this side of the Altantic in combinations without précise French équivalents. The early rural cultures in the St-Lawrence Valley were largely French in détail but not in composition. This initial blending was not the end of the process. As the population grew land would not long remain available near the parental farm. In Beauport ail agricultural land had been conceded well before the end of the XVIIith century. (Mathieu and Brisson). In such circumstances some sons and daughters of established families would move some distance to new settlements. Older areas exported people and had no land for newcomers (unless they could pay well for it) ; new areas received the exodus. Mixing of people of différent background and exogamous marriage characterized the receiving end of this migration, and isolation and increasingly endogamous marriage charac-terized the sending end. Eventually the réception area filled up and became, in lurn, an exporter of people — a process that usually took several générations in the XVIlth century and often was achieved in one génération in the XIXth century. Joël Rouffignat's study of matrimonial space at Saint-Jean-Port-Joli catches stages of this process. As TOWARDS A CONCLUSION 331 his analysis shows, there was both stability and movement in the countryside of the lower St-Lawrence, both increasingly inbred local communities and, in other areas, new blends of people drawn from différent places. Nor was there a single threshold separating a period when land was available from another when it was not. Overall, land was becoming more scarce and the spatial expansion of agriculture was being increasingly blocked as the XIXth century advanced, but new agricultural land was being opened up in Québec well into the XX*h century. The migration from the Beauce into space created in Compton township by the departing English (described by Marcel Bellavance) is a late instance of the protracted French Canadian expansion of its ecumene. Even so, by the mid-XIXth century the migratory System, on which French Canadian agriculture and rural society depended to syphon off its surplus population, was running out of land. Hence the accelerated migration to the United States in the second half of the XIXth century. Because migration tended to force change upon the emigrating young while protecting the society whence they came, migration directed towards the industrial towns of New England tended to deflect change from rural Québec. Marcel Bélanger's picture of a fossilised rural society suddenly transformed after World War II exaggerates — but correctly identifies — an important relationship between the migratory System and a conservative rural tradition. As land became scarce its value rose. As the population grew markets increased. In thèse changed circumstances some people found more opportunity in the countryside. The socio-economic range increased, occupations became more diver-sified, and villages and small towns became common (Courville). Again, the increasing intégration of the countryside with the larger economy and the associated diver-sification of rural occupations and settlements took place at différent times in différent places. Thèse différences account for much of the variety that Jacques Mathieu and Real Brisson find in the XVIIIth century countryside. Behind the arguments reviewed by Robert Lavertue is évidence for the sudden increase in the rural pénétration of the market economy at the end of the XVIIlth century. Thestudies by Jean-Claude Robert and Michel Monette describe rural societies in the early and mid-XIXth century that undoubtedly were more stratified than their XVIIth century and XVIIlth century counterparts. And throughout the XIXth century an increasing number of French Canadians found non-agricultural employment — some in New England factory towns, others in the lumber camps around the fringe of the Canadian Shield, others in the Gaspé fisheries, others in hard-rock mines, and more and more in the lowland cities, particularly Montréal. Away from the protection of the old agricultural world they were often exposed to the unmitigated effects of industrial capitalism in settings where labour was now cheap and unprotected and capital unregulated. The traditional rural economy exported largely defenseless labour to this industrial and usually English-speaking world. The articles by John Willis and Roch Samson show what could happen when the support of family farming was left behind. Shortly after the middle of the XIXth century, Québec began to urbanize rapidly although even in 1911 almost 60% of its population still lived in places with fewerthan 3000 people. By 1981 less than 20% of the population lived in such places and even there, as Clermont Dugas shows, agriculture was the occupation of a tiny minority. After a lifespan of more than 300 years agricultural, rural Québec has been overwhelmed. A short génération ago some Montréal sociologists (most notably Philippe Garigue) argued that Québec's society had always been urban, by which they meant that it had always participated in a vigorous exchange economy. But if, to be more simple minded, family farming is some measure of rurality, then until less than 100 years ago Québec was primarily rural. Much of this agriculture was substantially 332 CAHIERS DE GÉOGRAPHIE DU QUÉBEC, Vol. 28, nos 73-74, avril-septembre 1984 subsistent, not because farmers lacked commercial ambition but because with the factors of production and the markets at their disposai commercial opportunity often was very restricted. Surrounding this family-centered agriculture was a rural tradition that certainly was not static ; that also varied from place to place ; and that in the tools it used, the skills and work routines it required, the intégration of place of work and place of résidence that accompanied it, and the web of sociability that surrounded it was a far cry from the world of wage labour, factory, and town. For some, certainly, the two worlds overlapped, perhaps for générations — a man had a farm and worked in the logging camps — but, overall, the urbanization of Québec has been a drastic, rapid change, the lintering effects of which, it seems to me, reverberate through the province. So much for an outline of the story to which the articles in this volume are addressed. That story is at the heart of Québec, and deserves to be fully elaborated. In this élaboration geography, especially a geography rooted in a French intellectual tradition, should play a vigorous part. That it has hardly done so over the last two décades is a reflection of the view that, for ail its charm, the Vidalian tradition has seen its day, and of the attraction of a theoretical geography that has downplayed the complexities of particular pasts and places. The limitations of this theoretical perspective are now clearer. On the other hand it is probably neither possible nor désirable today to write régional monographs in the style of the French classics. Perhaps we do not need to approach the countryside of Québec with defined models. So long as we keep our geographical bearings — our interest in place, landscape, spatial patterns and, if you will, human ecology — are open to interdisciplinary contacts, remember that we cannot study early Québec very profitably without immersing ourselves in the archives, are sensitive both to the variety of particular circumstances and to opportunities for generalization, keep in mind that it is safer to use theory suggestively rather than deductively, and throw our créative énergies to the task, then some very good and revealing studies will be the resuit. This volume of the Cahiers is already évidence. 

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