Patrician Liberal: The Public and Private Life of Sir Henri-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière, 1829–1908 by J.I. Little (review)

There has been much chatter recently about the rehabilitation of biography and its reconciliation with mainstream history. That reconciliation has barely begun and the road will be long. Success will depend on tolerance from “orthodox” historians, especially those of the social bent, and on the perfecting of new approaches to biographical writing. J.I. Little has taken some valuable strides down the road with this book, showing us the promise of the reconciliation as well as some of the pitfalls along the way.

Henri-Gustave Joly is a subject who offers much to the social historian and the biographer. He was at the centre of important events and developments for half a century. He was a seigneur and great land owner, a lawyer and businessman, forest conservationist, leader of the Quebec Liberal party, and briefly premier, Cabinet minister under Laurier, and influential lieutenant governor of British Columbia. He was a Protestant in a Catholic province, a provincialist in federal politics, a French Canadian much admired in Anglo British Columbia. This is rich ore to mine.

Little employs this material to good effect. We learn a good deal about how a landlord managed his property after the seigneurial regime was abolished. We gain insights into the origins of the forest conservation movement in Canada, of which Joly could reasonably claim to be the founding father. Little skilfully navigates the complexities of the formative years of Quebec and British Columbia politics, where alliances formed and dissolved with bewildering rapidity, and describes the struggles to establish the ground rules of dominionprovincial relations and English-French cooperation in the early years of Confederation. In short, this is a truly important study of late nineteenth-century Canadian society and politics.

It is less successful as biography. Little remains tied to the structure of traditional academic monographs. It begins with an introduction devoted largely to the standard historiographical exercise. The body of the text is organized into thematic chapters such as “Seigneur and Lumberman” and “Forest Conservationist.” This is an effective way to discuss the social history of these issues but much less so for creating a rounded portrait of the man. Little quotes with approval Marx’s aphorism that “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please … but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past.” There are two parts to that. We must understand the roots of ideas and behaviour and the context in which they exist. But we must also understand the individual and the peculiar way in which that person developed. The latter is largely missing here. We do learn something about Joly’s father, and his sons occasionally appear, usually as they were involved in Joly’s business ventures. However, his childhood is passed over perfunctorily, his wife hardly exists here, and his home life has less than a cameo role. The result is that the book is a social/political history with some concessions to biography.

Little is fond of Joly and admires his honesty and commitment to the values of bilingualism and biculturalism. Joly indeed seems to have been a charming aristocrat. What he believed is less clear. In the conclusion, Little tries to sort that out and classifies him as a moderate conservative. Earlier, however, Little has gone to great lengths to establish the consistency of Joly’s liberal ideology. That includes efforts to place the man within the framework of liberalism proposed by Ian McKay (who, curiously, does not appear in the index). The evidence seems to support the argument in the conclusion more than that in earlier chapters. Joly changed his view on free trade and protection several times. He believed in provincial rights but did Laurier’s bidding by intervening in the politics of British Columbia. He was a proponent of retrenchment who spent large sums on...