>>Desmond Glynn:	The early exploration of Canada is usually credited 
to Jacques Cartier. He was a treasure-seeking sea captain sent across the 
dangerous Atlantic by the French crown in the mid-16th century. Cartier 
made three trips to this "new found land", as the Europeans viewed it. Alas, 
no gold and silver mines were ever found. 

It was not until the arrival of Samuel de Champlain in the early 17th century 
that significant exploration of the interior took place. Champlain is 
generally credited as the founder of New France. He was, however, the agent 
of fur-trading companies that were far more interested in furs than 
colonists, and capturing furs was far easier achieved by fur trapping and 
trading indigenous peoples than colonists, who could stomach the lengthy, 
sea-sickening Transatlantic voyage. Despite Champlain's historical 
reputation, little settlement actually took place during the first-third 
of the 17th century. 

The second-third of the 17th century saw more involvement by the French 
crown in promoting colonial settlement. The renowned Cardinal Richelieu 
wanted New France to match the economic success enjoyed by the colonies 
to the south, especially New England. Greater colonization was to be 
accomplished through a society of well-to-do investors called the Company 
of a Hundred Associates, an interesting mixture of profit-seeking investors 
and soul-saving Catholic missionaries, presently the Jesuit Order. This 
religious mission made New France a veritable offspring of the Catholic 
Counter-Reformation and contributed significantly to its early survival. 
The missionary activities directed exclusively at the indigenous peoples, 
however, achieved very limited success. 

It was not until the last third of the 17 century, beginning in 1663, when 
Canada was made a royal province by Louis XIV that the French crown took 
a direct role in the economic development of the colony. The goal: to 
integrate it into France's expanding global trading system. During the 
following 18th century, the population of New France, barely 3,000 in 1663, 
doubled every generation. By the time that New France was finally conquered 
by the British in 1759, there were 65,000 to 70,000 people in the colony. 
The most striking feature about the population was its comparative 
smallness. The reason for this, it attracted so few immigrants, only about 
8,500 or so, most of whom came across after Canada became a royal province. 

What do we know about the roots of these people? Just over half came from 
urban areas, chiefly Paris and the French port of La Rochelle. The other 
half came from agricultural villages or hamlets. Even so, half of these 
rural people were tradespeople or artisans, not farmers or farm labourers. 
As you can see, a minority of French immigrants had farming experience. 
Of these arrivals, nearly 7,000 were men. Over 1,500 were women. Nearly 
all of whom were single on arrival from all of France's provinces, and almost 
all of whom were Catholic. This colony was designed to keep out Protestants, 
who the French Catholics called Huguenots, and to keep out Jews. 

Even though the migration was small compared to the English colonies to 
the south, population growth in 18th-century Canada was incredibly high, 
and it turned out to be crucial to the very survival of the colony. 
Historians have been intrigued by this rapid growth. A longstanding 
argument had it that French Canadians married very young and had especially 
large families. Others believed it was due to low death rate of children 
and high survival rate for adults, meaning "les Canadiens, les habitants" 
lived longer than their French counterparts. In our following interview 
with professor John Bosher, a distinguished professor of history at York 
University, the mystery of French Canada's population boom was unravelled 
through his commentary on the demographic profile of this French colony 
and the imprint of its religious values. 

We began by asking, "Was an unusually high birthrate responsible for the 
rapid population growth?" 

>>Professor John Bosher:	 Well, it seems to me from the work that's being 
done that the birthrate was not particularly rapid, but that there is simply 
a high survival rate. It's true that the death rate for children, for 
infants, was about the same as in the European continents, so I think 
[inaudible] puts it at 246 per thousand. But at the same time, probably 
the total death rate is lower, and it seems to me that the marriage rate 
is higher. There's a very high propensity to marriage in the society of 
New France. 

>>Desmond Glynn:	 Do you think the fact that people are marrying younger 
has anything to do with the fact that there's a higher survival rate, or 
there seems to be more people born and living? Do you think the fact that 
people are marrying younger has anything to do with it? 

>>Professor Bosher:	 No, I don't think in the first place that they were 
marrying younger. If you look at the marriage age, you find that it's 
something of the order of 22, 23 for women. And I think it's something of 
the order of 25, 26, 27 for men. This varies according to the studies, but 
it's not a low marriage age. And that's one of the old myths based upon 
studies of a few people, generally among the aristocratic or well-off 
classes who might marry their children young. There's the famous case of 
Champlain, who married an 11-year-old girl. But these are exceptional. The 
normal marriage age was a fairly high one. 

>>Desmond Glynn:	 Since we're dealing with the mythology of the birthrate 
in New France. Part of that mythology is that women in New France virtually 
had a child every year, that they no sooner went from having one pregnancy, 
that they were having another one. Is that also a myth? 

>>Professor Bosher:	 Yes. This is not only true for Canada. What you're 
saying, what we're saying, now applies to other societies. There's nothing 
very much peculiar about New France other than the total survival rate or 
the slightly lower death rate, which is probably due to a reasonably 
prosperous economy. There is not starvation on a large scale in Canada as 
there was, for instance, in France at certain periods in 1693 and 1694 and 
in 1708, 1709. Bad winters like that, people would die in thousands, tens 
of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands in France, as in any agricultural 
economy. 

>>Desmond Glynn:	 Could you perhaps elaborate on these economic factors 
that permitted people to have a longer survival or why the survival rate 
was longer? 

>>Professor Bosher:	 Well, I think the important thing to remember is 
that these are statistical statements that the longer survival is simply 
if you take the statistics for a certain sample or a certain part of society, 
you find that they lived longer. Therefore, statistically, people had a 
better chance to live longer, and the reasons, it seems to me, are that 
they were slightly better off, on the whole, and they didn't suffer these 
terrible famines which they suffered in France. They had hard times, but 
you don't find that terrible decimation which you find particularly in those 
years because French historians are never tired of telling us that there 
is a crisis in Louis XIV's reign, particularly from the 1680s up to the 
1730s. And after that, things tend to get a little bit better. There are 
crises: 1770, 1788, 1789, but generally speaking, things got better. 
Whereas, in the earlier period, which is the one that interests us for New 
France, there's a long term inter-cyclical economic depression, or 
recession, really. And I think France suffered from this. 

New France didn't for a variety of reasons. One of them is that the economy 
was slightly artificial by European standards. A great deal of the 
foodstuffs came to New France in the cargos of ships. The cargos of ships 
sent from the French ports were full of foodstuffs. Not as much as there 
is of wine and brandy, but still a great deal of food was shipped. And they 
were not self-sustaining except for a very few years. And then on the other 
hand, they are living in an economy in which there was game and fish. And 
these were resources which the ordinary mass of French peasants didn't have. 

>>Desmond Glynn:	 Didn't have access to. Your explanation for why there was 
such a high birthrate was that there was such a high marriage rate. 

>>Professor Bosher:	 Yes. I've been contradicted by people who, in this 
field, are reckoned to be experts. But that still seems to me to be, at 
any rate, the most satisfactory explanation. If you study the numbers, you 
have very, it seems to me, very difficult to distinguish between the 
demographic events in Canada and the demographic events in France or in 
England, or anywhere else in Western Europe for that matter. The standard 
indices are approximately the same wherever you go. The same marriage ages, 
give or take a couple of years. The same death rates, approximately, among 
children. The same size of families and birthrate. That sort of thing. 

But you do find, for example, in Old France, you find, I think, a higher 
proportion of the clergy who did not marry, or secular and regular clergy. 
And it seems to me that from studies that had been done, the remarriage 
rate is not so great, and nor is the marriage rate. If you take a case of 
Lyon for example, which has been studied, it's clear that there's a flow, 
for example, to take one sector, there's a flow of girls from villages, 
into Lyon as housemaids, hoping to save a little bit of money as a dowry 
with which they could return to the village and marry a peasant or a 
craftsman or somebody of this sort. And the death rate among them is 
extraordinarily high. In fact, all French cities, perhaps all European 
cities, but certainly all French cities in the 17th and early 18th centuries 
were great death centres. People came pouring in from the country and they 
died in large numbers. Now this is a phenomenon you don't find in New France. 

>>Desmond Glynn:	 Why is it that people in Canada married with such a high 
rate? You've mentioned that not only did everybody seem to get married, 
but if people had problems with a spouse dying, that they in fact had a 
high remarriage rate. 

>>Professor Bosher:	 Yes. Well, that of course is New France, is the child 
of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. People, it seems to me, try very hard 
to forget that these days. I could give you some interesting stories on 
that subject. But the fact is that it was a thoroughly Catholic society. 
And not only that, it's not simply a conforming Catholic society, it's 
filled with the enthusiasm of the Counter-Reformation. It is intolerant. 
It would not allow Protestants or Jews, except those few that could slip 
through the net with Catholic birth certificates. But on the other hand, 
it was a genuine or a sincere Catholic society, and of course, the Catholic 
rules were and are that marriage is the only acceptable form for sexual 
relations, and is also really the only acceptable form of social 
organization. I don't think there is any, among the Catholic society of 
New France, there's no particular coercion to this effect, but it's simply 
that everyone is brought up this way, and this was just simply the natural 
thing to do. 

The whole of society was arranged in families. And there's virtually no 
other society other than the clerical one. And there are the unmarried or 
the young, the very young, the very old and the clergy. Otherwise, 
everybody's married. I also think that the world of the habitant of New 
France was a fairly restricted world like that of all the lower classes 
of that age. And I think family life is probably a better life than other 
for most people, It offered the only form of a comfortable, satisfactory 
social arrangement. 

>>Desmond Glynn:	 Do you think people in the 18th-century New France saw 
marriage differently, I mean, in terms of the social function that it'd 
have today? 

>>Professor Bosher:	 It's this arranged marriage which is so puzzling to 
our society. How, we wonder, how could people who had a mate thrust upon 
them by some family arrangement, how could they find that satisfactory? 
And I think the question is much deeper than you might imagine. For example, 
you do not choose your parents. And you can find yourself, in most cases, 
very affectionate towards your parents, but you didn't choose them. And 
I suspect the same is true when you had a wife or a husband thrust upon 
you. I also suspect that there must, in the ordinary way of being a fair 
amount of consultation with the men and women involved.

But the fact is that a girl was a minor until she was 25 and had no power 
of decision or freedom, and a man until he was 30 under that law. So that 
the parents could provide, and at the worst, you find the parents exercising 
almost police powers over their children. The aristocratic families could 
have their children shut away in the Bastille, for instance, by simply 
sending a letter to the lieutenant general of police. And at the lower level, 
they were also equivalents, the worst of them, being of course that they 
could cast their children off without any backing, without any support, 
financial support. And this is the key to it all. This poor, strained 
agricultural economy where wealth is so scarce and so hard to come by. That's 
the key to this kind of a marriage. It's an economic marriage. It's an 
arrangement whereby two people could do better than one person alone, and 
both partners are essential to the progress of the whole and to the provision 
for the children. 

>>Desmond Glynn:	 I'd like to continue by talking about the family itself 
as an institution. You've suggested that the family was a social enterprise 
in which every member tried to assist in the advancement of the whole. Could 
you explain to our listeners what that means? And we have a rather different 
idea about what family means today. 

>>Professor Bosher:	 Well, it means, for one thing, that the young had 
fewer opportunities to strike out on their own. The world was not arranged 
so that you could strike out on your own in respect of jobs and residencies 
and the kind of patronage necessary to get a post of some sort. And you 
see it very clearly, particularly among the merchant and business classes 
of one sort or another or the tradesmen classes. You find, for instance, 
the father of tradesmen or goldsmiths, and blacksmiths, and weavers, and 
tinkers and so on, putting their sons out to apprenticeship with another 
master craftsman, possibly in another town, and paying out 100 or 200 livres 
for this purpose. But the boy keeps in contact with the father. And to a 
great extent, there's a sort of a family enterprise that goes on for quite 
a long time. And it's normally expected that the son would take, one of 
the sons, of course, that's one of the troubles, one of the sons would take 
over the father's workshop and the father's practice or trade. 

And you see also in merchant classes on an even grander scale, because their 
means allowed it, you get these enormous interlocking clans of 
businesspeople which I find so fascinating where a merchant in one town 
would send his sons and would establish, or his cousins would establish 
themselves. And his sons might be established in other towns, not only in 
France, but also in other parts of the world. Now this was true for all 
big merchant families in the 18th century. 

But it's even truer for some of those groups that were affected by 
persecution or intolerance like the Protestant Huguenot or the Jewish 
groups which came from Portugal. 

>>Desmond Glynn:	 Would that be why the trade between France and New France 
just prior to the conquest was dominated by Huguenots or Protestant 
merchants? That's something that certainly strikes somebody when you think 
of the monolithic Catholic character of the colony. And yet, here you are 
before the conquest. Most of the families, evidently, that have control 
of the wholesale trade to Canada are French Huguenots. 


>> Professor Bosher:	That's an interesting phenomenon that I don't fully 
understand. It's clear that there were Huguenots in the Canada trade in 
the 1660s and 1670s and 1680s because most of the trade came from La 
Rochelle, and La Rochelle was a big Huguenots centre. And then the 
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes removed the only legal protection which 
the Huguenots had, although goodness knows they were being persecuted long 
before that. And so then they are driven out after 1685. 15th of October, 
1685, the Revocation of Edict of Nantes. And then they are driven out, and 
you have big merchants in Quebec like one of the Bernon family, B-E-R-N-O-N, 
being ordered out by the governor. And you find a lot of Huguenot merchants 
taking refuge in New England, coming out to the Protestant colonies of 
Massachusetts and so on. And so then they disappear, not completely, because 
by having a Catholic birth certificate, they could be established as what 
are known as "nouveau convertes", or the new Catholics, and could make their 
way. They could, for instance, get a passport with which they could go to 
Canada. And I find, for instance, a member of the Bonfils family, 
B-O-N-F-I-L-S, established in Quebec in 1715, 1716, the whole family went 
bankrupt in 1760, but there he is in Quebec, the only one that I could find 
in that era. 

And this is what I'm coming to. In the 1740s, approximately 1740, they begin 
to come back. Now there's no statutory permission for them to come back. 
Persecution still goes on. It's in 1762 that Jean Calais, a merchant in 
Toulouse, was horribly tortured to death in public for an alleged crime. 
And as Voltaire pointed out, copiously enough, it was simply prejudice 
against the Huguenots that was behind this. And that's in the last year 
of the French Regime. So persecution is still possible, but not everyone 
was persecuted and not everywhere. And besides which, as I say, these 
Huguenots all had Catholic birth certificates. 

So for reasons that aren't quite clear, they're allowed back. And through 
the mid-century wars of Austrian succession in the Seven Year's War through 
the 1740s and 1750s, the numbers grew. And they grew enormously until the 
minister in Versailles wrote back to Quebec and said something like 
two-thirds, three quarters of the merchants in the trade with Canada are 
Huguenots. Now there's still a lot of Catholics, but there's this Huguenots 
network. And of course, they are related by marriage and they all write 
back and forth. And they are a large, tough, very resourceful group.

End of interview…