The Seigneurs of Old Canada: A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism | Page 7

named by the king on the advice of his colonial
representatives. This council was both a law-making and a judicial
body. It registered and published the royal decrees, made local
regulations, and acted as the supreme court of the colony. But the
official who loomed largest in the purely civil affairs of New France
was the intendant. He was the overseas apostle of Bourbon paternalism,
and as his commission authorized him to 'order all things as he may
think just and proper,' the intendant never found much opportunity for
idleness.
Tocqueville, shrewdest among historians of pre-revolutionary France,
has somewhere pointed out that under the old regime the administration

took the place of Providence. It sought to be as omniscient and as
omnipotent; its ways were quite as inscrutable. In this policy the
intendant was the royal man-of-all-work. The king spoke and the
intendant transformed his words into action. As the sovereign's great
interest in the colony moved him to speak often, the intendant's activity
was prodigious. Ordinances, edicts, judgments and decrees fairly flew
from his pen like sparks from an anvil. Nothing that needed setting
aright was too inconsequential for a paternal order. An ordinance
establishing a system of weights and measures for the colony rubs
shoulders with another inhibiting the youngsters of Quebec from
sleigh- riding down its hilly thoroughfares in icy weather. Printed in
small type these decrees of the intendant's make up a bulky volume, the
present-day interest of which is only to show how often the hand of
authority thrust itself into the daily walk and conversation of Old
Canada.
From first to last there were a dozen intendants of New France. Jean
Talon, whose prudence and energy did much to set the colony on its
feet, was the first; Fracois Bigot, the arch-plunderer of public funds,
who did so much to bring the land to disaster, was the last. Between
them came a line of sensible, hard-working, and loyal men who gave
the best that was in them to the uphill task of making the colony what
their royal master wanted it to be. Unfortunate it is that Bigot's
astounding depravity has led too many readers and writers of Canadian
history to look upon the intendancy of New France as a post held
chiefly by rascals. As a class no men served the French crown more
steadfastly or to better purpose.
Now it was to the intendant, in Talon's time, that the king committed
the duty of granting seigneuries and of supervising the seigneurial
system in operation. But, later, when Count Frontenac, the iron
governor of the colony, came into conflict with the intendant on various
other matters, he made complaint to the court at Versailles that the
intendant was assuming too much authority. A royal decree therefore
ordered that for the future these grants should he made by the governor
and intendant jointly. Thenceforth they were usually so made, although
in some cases the intendant disregarded the royal instructions and

signed the title-deeds alone; and it appears that in all cases he was the
main factor in determining who should get seigneuries and who should
not. The intendant, moreover, made himself the chief guardian of the
relations between the seigneurs and their seigneurial tenants. When the
seigneurs tried to exact in the way of honours, dues, and services any
more than the laws and customs of the land allowed, the watchful
intendant promptly checkmated them with a restrictive decree. Or when
some seigneurial claim, even though warranted by law or custom,
seemed to be detrimental to the general wellbeing of the people, he
regularly brought the matter to the attention of the home government
and invoked its intervention. In all such matters he was praetor and
tribune combined. Without the intendancy the seigneurial system
would soon have become an agent of oppression, for some Canadian
seigneurs were quite as avaricious as their friends at home.
The heyday of Canadian feudalism was the period from 1663 to about
1750. During this interval nearly three hundred fiefs were granted.
Most of them went to officials of the civil administration, many to
retired military officers, many others to the Church and its affiliated
institutions, and some to merchants and other lay inhabitants of the
colony. Certain seigneurs set to work with real zeal, bringing out
settlers from France and steadily getting larger portions of their fiefs
under cultivation. Others showed far less enterprise, and some no
enterprise at all. From time to time the king and his ministers would
make inquiry as to the progress being made. The intendant would reply
with a memoire often of pitiless length, setting forth the facts and
figures. Then His Majesty would respond with an edict ordering that all
seigneurs who did not forthwith help the colony by putting settlers on
their lands