Society in the Eighteenth Century

The international peace that prevailed into the 1740s benefited all of France’s North American possessions. The French Caribbean colonies exploited a rapidly growing slave population to produce huge amounts of sugar for Europe, and the labour of slaves also provided a modest prosperity for the planters in the struggling new colony of Louisiana. The fisheries of the Atlantic coast and the fur trade of Canada did well, and an expanding commerce began to link the colonies together. At last there was a demand—from He Royale’s fishermen and the Caribbean slave plantations—for New France’s abundant wheat, vegetables, and timber. Shipping in and out of Quebec City began to grow, river traffic increased as colonists expanded their activities towards Gaspe and the St. Lawrence north shore, and the price of the habitants" wheat finally began to rise as markets appeared for what had always been subsistence crops.

Along the St. Lawrence a population ravaged by epidemics and war resumed its rapid growth. From fifteen thousand in 1700 and eighteen thousand at the peace of 1713, it had doubled to thirty-five thousand by the 1730s and would almost double again by the 1750s. Immigration remained slight; by now most of the people were descended from generations of Canadian-born colonists. This increasingly rural population expanded most rapidly on the flat, fertile lands around Montreal, but land remained available even in the Quebec City region, stHl home to more than half the people. Population growth at last made seigneuries valuable to at least a few of their owners, and the Crown granted new seigneuries in areas of new settlement, such as the Beauce region south of Quebec City. Only after the seigneuries had been allocated were settlers permitted to move in from the crowded lands along the St. Lawrence.

From the beginning, land had been cleared and put to use in New France only about as fast as the population grew. In the early decades of the 1700s, however, Canada’s farm output grew nearly twice as fast as the rural population. This meant, in part, that the habitants simply grew more in order to feed and clothe themselves better, but the expanding market for wheat and other farm products exported from Quebec City also encouraged greater productivity. As production increased and prices finally began to rise, there was a chance for prosperity to reach the countryside. If farmers could sell more, their land would become more valuable, farming would be less a vocation and more a business, and the interest of both seigneurs and merchants in the countryside would be revitalized. In the transformation from subsistence farming to commercial agriculture, everything in rural New France—from the look of the land to the size of the farm family—could have been transformed.

In fact, no transformation on this scale took place in New France. Traditional ways changed very slowly, and the market for wheat was both new and risky. A crop failure—there were several in the 1730s and 1740s—a crisis in shipping, or a disaster in the market regions (as when He Royale fell to the British in 1745) could wreck the trade in wheat. Even without knowing that in advance, habitant farmers would not gamble on the possible benefits of selling off the crops that were also their family’s food supply and seed bank. Although wheat was exported and the prosperity of the eighteenth century slowly worked its way down to the habitants, the changes

As seaport, religious centre, and capital of New France, Quebec was always the colony’s largest and most sophisticated city. Attacked four times during the French regime, the city was protected chiefly by its geography; only in the 1740s was a wall finally built around it. Engraving in A. Mallet, Description de VUnivers (Paris, 1683).

With stark realism, some unknown artist, painting around 1700, has impressively conveyed the care offered to the sick by the religious orders who founded hospitals in New France’s major towns—in this instance, in the Hotel-Dieu, Montreal.

Were not fundamental. Subsistence farming remained the vocation of the countryside, while commerce and diversity were mostly limited to the towns of New France.