CHAPTER XII

FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY DESIGNS

MONTREAL THE SEAT OF JACOBINISM

THE ASSEMBLY AT LAST--MONTREAL REPRESENTATIVES--FRENCH AND ENGLISH USED--THE FRENCH REVOLUTION--MUTINY AT QUEBEC--THE DUKE OF KENT--INVASION FEARED FROM FRANCE--MONTREAL DISAFFECTED--ATTORNEY GENERAL MONK’S REPORT--THE FRENCH SEDITIONARY PAMPHLETS--PANEGYRIC ON BISHOP BRIAND--MONTREAL ARRESTS--ATTORNEY GENERAL SEWELL’S REPORT--M’LEAN--ROGER’S SOCIETY--JEROME BONAPARTE EXPECTED.

The persistence of the English merchants had at last secured constitutional government with an assembly. It was inaugurated by the lieutenant-governor, Sir Alured Clarke, in the absence of Lord Dorchester in England, the day of its coming into effect being December 26, 1791. The division of the province into twenty-one counties with four town buroughs was made later in 1792, viz., Gaspé, Cornwallis, Devon, Hertford, Dorchester, Buckinghamshire, Richelieu, Bedford, Surry (sic), Kent, Huntingdon, York, Montreal, Northumberland, Orleans, Effingham, Leinster, Warwick, St. Maurice, Hampshire and Quebec. Each county returned two members except Gaspé, Bedford and New Orleans, returning one each. Quebec and Montreal were to return four each, Three Rivers two and William Henry (Sorel) one; in all fifty members.

The house met on December 17, 1792, there being about sixteen members of British origin, a proportion more or less maintained for forty-six years. The Catholic members, objecting to take the oath prescribed by the act of 1791, were allowed by Sir Alured Clarke to take that of the act of 1774. The meeting was held in the Bishop’s palace of Quebec hired by government and altered and repaired at a cost of £428. Chief Justice Smith was nominated speaker of the legislative council, the fifteen (legal number) members being J.G. Chaussegros de Léry, Hugh Finlay, Picotté de Belestre, Thomas Dunn, Paul Roc de St. Ours, Edward Harrison, François Baby, John Collins, Joseph de Longueuil, Charles de la Naudière, George Pownal, R.A. de Boucherville, John Fraser, and Sir Henry Caldwell, Receiver General, subsequently named.

The assembly met to chose a speaker. Mr. Joseph Antoine Panet, a lawyer of eminence in Quebec, was appointed. Montreal was represented in the west ward by James McGill and J.B. Durocher and in the east ward by Joseph Frobisher and John Richardson, the county being represented by James Walker and Mr. Joseph Papineau. French and English were both used from the beginning, being accepted as a matter of course without any formal resolution.[1] The first formal vote on the subject was taken a year later, on December 27, 1792, when the following motion was proposed by Mr. Grant, who accepted an amendment by Mr. Papineau “that it be an instruction of the committee of the whole house charged with the correctness of the minutes (or journals) that the digest they may prepare as the journal of the house from the commencement to the time of reference shall be in the English or French language, as it may have been entered in the original minutes without drawing into precedent for the future.”

Number 9 of the rules for conducting the business of the assembly ran:

“No motion shall be debated or put unless the same be in writing and seconded. When a motion is seconded it shall be read in English and French by the speaker if he is master of both languages. If not, the speaker shall read in either of the two languages most familiar to him and the reading in the other language shall be at the table by the clerk or his deputy before the debate.”

On the method of keeping the journals:

“Resolved, that this house shall keep its journal in two registers, in one of which the proceedings of the house and the motion shall be wrote in the French language, with a translation of the motions originally made in the English language; and in the other shall be entered the proceedings of the house and the motions in the English language with a translation of the motions originally made in the French language.”

Finally it was resolved that the rules for introduction of bills should be as follows:

“The bills relative to the criminal laws of England enforced in this province and to the rights of the Protestant clergy as specified in the act of the thirty-first year of His Majesty,