Une elite en deroute: Les militaires canadiens apres la Conquete (review)

In this slim volume, Roch Legault traces the careers of French-Canadian military elites and their progeny from roughly 1760 to 1815. As his title suggests, Legault argues that these officers found themselves marginalized after the Conquest, experiencing a steady decline in social status as the British military foreclosed their opportunities for leadership.

Legault begins with a brief sketch of the institutional and cultural differences between the military establishments of French and British North America. Here, there are no surprises. Echoing the conclusions of W.J. Eccles and many others, Legault depicts a French military establish- ment that played an important social and political role in New France. Prior to the Conquest, these officers effectively built a multi-generational status as important men in the colony through access to leading military posts.

When British military leadership took control of Canada, however, these men rather unsurprisingly experienced diminishing fortunes. During this period, Legault characterizes military service as 'a dangerous course' ['une voie hasarduese'] for the French elite to follow. By tracing the fate of six of New France's prominent military families, Legault concludes that French officers and their sons faced a host of difficult circumstances, including 'the necessity of leaving the colony if they wanted to join the regulary army, the virtual inaccessibility of patronage, [and] the lack of financial resources' ['l'obligation de quitter la colonie s'ils veulent joindre l'armée régulière, la quasi-inaccessibilité du patronage, (et) le manque de ressources pécuniaires'] (75).

Rather than analyzing the deep social and cultural roots of these changes, however, Legault relies on multi-generational family stories to illustrate his claim. Offered as a series of loosely connected vignettes, the experiences of the Duchesnay, Saint-Ours, D'Estimauville, Monviel, de Léry, and Salaberry families effectively demonstrate the downward course of French-Canadian military life. Yet because he relied so heavily on the excellent, but short, entries in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Legault's tales are often thin and underdeveloped. In the end, they tell us what we already knew: British military elites supplanted their French counterparts following the Conquest.

Even had he created a richer texture for these stories, Legault's narrow focus on the personal fortunes of military elites often keeps him from relating his subject to larger themes in early Canadian (or broader still, early North American) history. This is especially evident in the book's penultimate chapter, which discusses the American Revolution and the War of 1812. One of the strengths of this chapter is Legault's suggestion that the decline of the French-Canadian military elite was not a foregone conclusion in the 1770s. Some British authorities (especially Guy Carleton) supported a strong role for French officers after the Conquest. But these supporters found themselves overruled by their superiors who were concerned about the implications of an alliance between France and the American rebels during the War of Independence. Ultimately, the British restricted the number of available posts and seriously limited the benefits of taking up such positions. Rather than placing these developments into the larger military histories of these two well-studied wars, however, Legault persists in following very particular details about specific men. We are left to guess at the overall significance of British military structure to the course of these conflicts specifically and to the time period more generally.

The most interesting and provocative portion of this book is Legault's seven-page epilogue, in which he speculates on the study's meaning and charts a course for future research. In a claim that will surely face stiff resistance, Legault conjectures that French Canadians' tepid involvement in the twentieth-century military may be traced to French officers' alienation and to British efforts to distance the military from Canadian social life. But critics should not make too much of this point. Legault floats the idea as an enticement to further study rather than as...