Cartier Week, #7: The Cartier centenary

Out of his own collection, Andrew Thomson sends along scans of a couple of George-Etienne hundredth anniversary postcards from 1914

I collect old postcards and some of the gems of my collection are from the Valentine company's Cartier Centenary collection. There were about 10 of the cards, which I think were designed in the hope of repeating some of the success the company had had with the Quebec tercentenary. I have included a scan of a couple of the cards. 

Many thanks! Who knew?  (Well, Andrew Thomson, obviously.)

Cartier Week, #6

George-Etienne Cartier was born 6 September 1814 at St-Antoine-sur-Richelieu, in the Richelieu valley southeast of Montreal, where his family were grain merchants.

It seems an amazing stretch for all these mid-19th century British North Americans, not only born in mostly entirely rural milieu, but living in an entirely wind-, water-, horse-power world. Cartier is born among farmers, many of them semi-literate and practising a very traditional kind of agriculture, in a society where even a trip to Montreal would have been a substantial journey. Cartier turned fifty during the Charlottetown meetings of 1864, and by that time steamships, railroads, telegraphs, and industry were routine parts of his life and the foundation of his career in both business and politics. Strikes me that the only generation that lived through such a whole transition in human existence was the one born about a century after him, which witnessed the changes of the mid-20th century.

Even in his 1860s persona, Cartier looks back to his roots: representing rural constituents, presenting himself as the protector of traditional society and moeurs, But even in his 1814 situation, he looks forward too.  His grandfather was engaged in international commerce, even in his small local way, and had already held a seat in the new parliamentary assembly of Lower Canada.  Even in 1814 business and politics were not as absent from his world as they might seem.

Cartier Week, #5: making the papers

Jennifer Ditchburn does my work for me today, with a story on Cartier commemorations and an account of his role and reputation:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is expected to be among the dignitaries celebrating the 200th anniversary this weekend of the birth of George-Etienne Cartier, the Quebecer instrumental to the founding of the Canadian federation.  ....

 Quebec’s sovereigntist St. Jean Baptiste Society has criticized the planned celebrations around Cartier’s memory. Ironically, Cartier himself was a member of the society back before it became committed to independence.

“He was a corrupt figure,” society president Maxime Laporte told La Presse newspaper last month, vowing to deconstruct the Confederation “myths circulated by the Conservatives.”

Cartier week, #4: la femme de Cartier

(Does the PMO read this blog?  I've just heard that the prime minister and other members of the government will be in Quebec this weekend for the Cartier bicentennial. 'Course maybe it was planned months ago.)

In 2004, Montreal journalist and novelist Micheline Lachance published Lady Laurier, a big popular romance about, of all things (from an English-Canadian respective), the wife of George-Etienne Cartier. I only skimmed it in a bookstore the one time, I confess. It seemed like a costume drama, on the one hand, and, on the other, that Lachance's Hortense Fabre Cartier was set safely in the mould of a late 20th century nationalist, feminist, péquiste heroine.

But the author was on to something. Hortense Fabre was Cartier's fling with the mid-century radicalism that remains popular in Quebec nationalist opinion. The Fabres were booksellers, but also key figures in the Rouge movement and the lost-cause Papineau-worship circles of the 1850s. Cartier, a reformer more than a radical in the 1840s, was moving farther away from the radicals even when he married into that family.

So it was an awkward marriage politically, and soon became so on more levels than that, as Cartier began a long-lasting affair with Hortense's cousin and friend, Luce Cuvillier.  So Lachance had found a hell of a premise for a sudsy novel with lots of appeal to its target audience: a romantic triangle, high politics, lots of costumes, and at the centre a woman who represents Quebec, being seduced, betrayed, and humiliated by a husband she cannot leave who ... goes over to les anglais.

It's mostly just a sudsy novel, but in its own way an imaginative take on Cartier, too. For the rest of us, there are also Alastair Sweeny's mostly admiring biography George-Etienne Cartier (1976), which argues for Cartier's centrality in Canadian politics, Brian Young's more distanced George-Etienne Cartier, Montreal Bourgeois (1981), which is more focussed on his role in integrating Montreal into the Canadian industrial economy, and the 1972 DCB bio by Jean Charles Bonenfant. And I still like my own Cartier chapter in 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal, which plays with the analogies between Cartier and Brother André.

Cartier bicentennial 3: What's up?

The feds' Canada150 website merely notes the anniversary among many others.

The Macdonald-Cartier Society of Ottawa --

We are a non-partisan, independent, federal not-for-profit organization named to honor Canada’s leading two Fathers of Confederation, Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir George-Étienne Cartier. What makes us unique is that we are a group of young Canadians who share a common interest in Canadian history. Our dedication is to upholding Canada’s history and protecting our heritage. We want to educate other young Canadians about the cornerstones of our society, reflected in our constitution

-- seems to have become inactive.

But Alasdair Sweeny's Canada Channel has its George-Etienne Cartier Portal up.

Mes anciens collègues at Parcs-Canada have a substantial program at the Cartier house in Montreal, including a talk by Sweeny and one by David Ledoyen accompanied by period music.

And the Salon Acting Company of Kingston, who run the SirJohnA2015 projects there, have an original theatrical production launching six performances on September 6:

Set against the backdrop of the London Conference in 1866, the play will take place within St. Andrews Presbyterian Church and The Manse with the plot unfolding in and around a mobile audience as characters move seamlessly through the space. The action of the play will take you from Cartier’s funeral back through the days leading up to and including the London Conference, right through to the scandal and downfall of the Tories in 1873.
The play will be complete with food and drink for audience and actors alike as SALON Theatre, in the true spirit of their name, create a fully immersive, and entirely hospitable, two-hour experience. 

George-Etienne Cartier's 200th birthday 2

John A Macdonald once said he could usually beat George Brown because Brown always went for the immediate victory while Macdonald could look a little way ahead.

Like a lot of Macdonald's catchy aphorisms, the reverse is also likely to be true (and Macdonald probably knew it!).  Brown was for federalism and for rep-by-pop when these were, shall we say, polling badly and most unlikely to be accomplished. For years, his rivals hammered him successfully for his positions. Macdonald had the tactical sense to stay away from unpopular causes like these until they became popular, and the political skills to be able to put himself at the head of the newly-forming parade once an idea began to poll well.

In this context, Cartier's strategic sense is interesting. In the late 1850s, it was easy for francophone leaders to deride Canada West politicians (like Brown) who started advocating rep by pop just when the numbers turned in favour of Canada West.  Cartier did not refrain. But in the long run, giving everyone's vote the same weight was going to be a pretty plausible cause.

So it is impressive to watch Cartier beginning to consider French Canada's longer term options as early as 1858. If rep by pop has to come eventually, he grasps, then federalism has to come, too: If the English have all the votes their numbers justify, then French Canada has to get out from the union with Canada West and take charge of what's essential to it. It's really Cartier and Alexander Galt, an anglo in Quebec, who float the federalism idea in 1858, when it is dangerous in both French Canada (give up the protection of the 50/50 union?) and English Canada (John A. wouldn't touch it for years, even though he was already in government with Cartier.)

So for several years Cartier seems to be positioning himself both for short-term political success and for long-range planning. He has the luxury of attacking Brown's policies as dangerous and anti-French, while also putting out his markers for when it will be time to occupy that ground himself.

Image: Globe and Mail

George-Etienne Cartier's 200th birthday 1

George-Etienne Cartier does not have the bicentennial industry that has grown up around John A. Macdonald. In Quebec he lacks nationalist cachet. In English-Canada he's often assumed to be merely the useful sidekick to the boss.

In anticipation of his bicentenary anniversary, September 6, 1814, six things about Cartier over the next six days.

1.  "A French-Canadian is an Englishman who speaks French"

It sounds like the most cringing, self-abnegating thing a Quebecker could say. Surely identity begins with the understanding that a French-Canadian is not an Englishmen.

But Cartier like to say this in England, in the presence of the Queen, of British aristocrats and gentlemen, and he surely intended the saying to discomfit them, not his own compatriots.

In 19th century Britain, British statesmen like to speak of the "rights of Englishmen."  There was not a lot of belief in universal human rights (Look where they got the French Revolutionaries, egad!). Instead, there was a comfortable understanding that the common law, parliamentary democracy, and most of the essential freedoms were peculiarly English achievements, more or less unavailable to Europeans and other breeds. There was some understanding that English colonists in British North America (and elsewhere) had carried the rights of Englishmen with them, but surely it hardly applied to colonized Frenchmen.

Here lay the radical challenge in Cartier's aphorism. He was asserting that as a Canadian, as a British North American, he (and all his fellow French-Canadians) enjoyed all the same rights of Englishmen enjoyed by anglophone British North Americans -- and by the English themselves. Among a crowd of snobbish bigoted English gentlemen, he was announcing he was their equal, with political rights equal to theirs.

Quoted in 21st century Quebec, Cartier's phrase is not likely to be well received.  Quoted in a London salon in the 1860s, it must have been confrontational to the point of being revolutionary.