A Response to Michael Cross on Patrician Liberal

I wish to respond to the two main criticisms in Professor Cross’s otherwise generous review of my Patrician Liberal: The Public and Private Life of Sir Henri-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière (CHR, June 2014). First, he claims that I admit in the conclusion that Joly was not a liberal, after all, but a moderate conservative. While I did write that Joly was socially conservative (as were most liberals) and that his political ideology was close in some respects to moderate Conservatives (with a capital C), such as J. Adolphe Chapleau, the fact is that Chapleau himself was essentially a nineteenth-century liberal, and I take considerable pains in the conclusion to argue that Joly was as well. As a seigneur and descendant of the old office-holding class, Joly was a patrician in many respects, but he grew up in his Protestant father’s bourgeois Paris family and he was a supporter of classic economic liberal policies, as well as a proponent of education reform, forest conservation, a professional civil service, and a national weights and measures system, among other progressive measures. As a pragmatic businessman and politician, Joly could obviously be inconsistent, but he was far from the only Liberal to waver on free trade, which he supported ideologically but felt compelled to abandon in the face of American tariffs. Professor Cross’s claim to the contrary, Joly remained committed to provincial rights in British Columbia (much to Laurier’s annoyance), and his decision to complete the railway begun by his Conservative predecessors did not mean that his government had abandoned fiscal retrenchment.

To turn briefly to the second criticism, Professor Cross complains that I neglected Joly’s family, yet I devote an entire chapter to them, examining his relationship with his parents, his brother, his wife, and each of his seven surviving offspring, as well as their marriage partners. All but one son and daughter spent their adult lives in Britain and the British colonies, so Joly clearly did not have much contact with them, but his eldest son appears throughout the book as Joly’s chief correspondent. As for Mme Joly, her incoming correspondence has not survived and there are only a half dozen or so letters between her and her husband simply because she was almost always by his side. But, the book does make it clear that they had a close, loving relationship and that Joly played a strong paternalist role within the family, a role that he also assumed as a seigneur and politician. Professor Cross would have preferred a more traditional biography, one that “abandon[ed] literature reviews and formalized conclusions.” My response is that popular biography has its place, but the steadfast Joly with his modest political career would have been a poor subject for such a book, and I do examine very carefully how he reconciled the conflicting cultural and ideological forces in his life. More important than Joly as an individual, however, was the opportunity his well documented life and career provided to follow a connecting thread through a number of important themes in Canadian history, themes that are largely ignored in Professor Cross’s review.