“[T]hey Were Now Become Subjects of England”: Allegiance, Protest, and Subjecthood in Late 18th-Century Quebec

During the past two decades, scholars of the Revolutionary era have expanded the field’s geographic framework. Insights garnered from those studies have shed greater light on the multifaceted causes that shaped the movements and ideologies that circulated during the Revolutionary era. They have likewise broadened our understanding of allegiance and the many forms it could take amidst the shifting contours of the revolutionary era. Considering the geopolitical stakes of the American Revolution, questions of allegiance were at the center of the struggle.

This paper explores the changing nature of allegiance among Quebec’s French-speaking inhabitants during the Revolution. It focuses on the agrarian peasants known as the habitants that made up the vast majority of the colony’s population. Quebec’s habitant communities negotiated not just new, but also increasingly politically-charged subject statuses. Rather than being passively affected by the actions of other colonists elsewhere in British America, habitants also took active roles in attempting to redefine their relationship to their sovereign. I argue that, in so doing, they also altered the meaning of allegiance.

At the center of this paper are a series of colonial protests that reshaped much of Quebec’s socio-political landscape. Beginning in 1775, thousands of habitants fought against British administrative policies they considered oppressive. They attempted to leverage the threat of coordinated resistance to negotiate greater rights as British subjects rather than independent citizens. When they fought against what they considered oppressive legislation, they were not protesting infringements on longstanding, cherished rights or liberties that ultimately weakened their allegiance to their sovereign. Instead, they attempted to negotiate the meaning of a new subject status, positioning themselves as loyal Britons. Resistance to Crown policies had the counterintuitive effect of positioning Quebec more explicitly within the British empire rather than independent of it.