Performing Allegiance through Protest: Rethinking Loyalties in Early British Quebec

In the summer of 1775, just over a decade after Britain incorporated Quebec into its North American holdings, thousands of colonists in the formerly-French province rose up in armed resistance. They protested the actions of their colonial government. Like many other British colonists in North America at the time, they fought against perceived threats to representative governance. Yet, unlike colonial unrest elsewhere, their protests began more as vehicles through which to both reiterate and negotiate their loyalty to the British crown, rather than a means with which to renounce it. As new subjects of Britain, Quebec’s French-speaking colonists found themselves navigating shifting subject statuses as the broader revolutionary struggles of the period unfolded. This paper argues that one of the ways in which the colony’s inhabitants sought to actively redefine their place within a new empire was through engaging in colonial protest.

Because of the various colonial uprisings and independence movements of the period, the Age of Revolutions tends to be viewed as an era when colonists fought for greater self-determination and political rights by breaking away from their respective empires. Conventional histories of the American Revolution fit that narrative mold nicely. Yet, as some recent studies have argued, comparable colonial struggles also took place within the confines of imperial networks without independence being the primary aim—and, in some cases, precisely because it was not. As this paper argues, such was the case in 1775 Quebec, where thousands of the colony’s peasant agrarian inhabitants protested against their colonial government as a way to negotiate the meaning of their British subjecthood. By focusing on these often-overlooked series of colonial protests, this paper sheds greater light on the competing loyalties colonists navigated at the time.