Quelques arpents ďAmérique: Population, économie, famille au Saguenay, 1838–1971 by Gérard Bouchard (review)

Book Reviews i9 Quelques arpents d'Amirique: Population, economie, famille au Saguenay, 1838-1971. GERARD BOUCHARD. Montreal: Boreal 1996. Pp. 635, $44.95 The CHR editors have asked me to write a somewhat belated review of this book, the title ofwhich alludes to Voltaire's famous description of Canada's importance to eighteenth-century France. Asked about the loss ofhis country's northernmost possessions in the New World, the great philosophe dismissed Quebec as a few acres of snow. In one manner or another the stigma of that alleged marginality dogged and infuriated French Canada until perhaps the 1950s and 1960s, when the Montreal school ofhistorians began to assert the common nature ofNew France's pattern of development and to argue that the British conquest decapitated a society that was growing in an essentially American fashion. Bouchard 's book is best seen as a unique culmination of the revisionist project ofthe last thirty years in Quebec historiography. It has, accordingly , been showered by prizes from the professional historical community . And rightly so, because unlike many of his contemporaries, Bouchard has pushed the careful Annaliste examination of the rural world that typifies work on the French Regime into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As his title implies, the fruits ofhis twenty-year research program is a paradigm of family reproduction that situates the experience of rural Quebecers firmly alongside that ofother agrarian peoples in North America . From an exhaustive family-reconstitution study of the Saguenay region in northern Quebec, Bouchard draws the outlines of a North American pattern offamilial solidarity and egalitarian succession. Quebecers in the Saguenaywere as much a part ofthis pattern, he concludes, as were Protestant Irish in the Ottawa Valley or German immigrants in the American mid-west. Bouchard concludes that it is fruitless to see 'resistance' to modernity in the mentalities ofthe rural folk who moved to new settlement areas. Rather, the sociocultural structures of rural economic life in these new places created a disarticulated and alternative rationality to that ofthe liberal capitalist marketplace. Book Reviews 351 Quebec was just another American community with stubborn levels ofnatural fertility, because in rural life family service was essential to the project offamily reproduction. By examining an entire region, Bouchard can capture the migration that was essential to fulfill the key promise of New World agriculture - the establishment of multiple heirs. The population and economic equilibriums that typified new areas of settlement , Bouchard argues, are simply not visible in a study limited to one small area or a single point in time. Readers can only marvel at the research apparatus at the author's disposal. It may be some time before funding agencies agree to underwrite a data-driven project as large, one that benefited from health dollars because ofits applications for genetic study, and one that easily rivals the quality ofthe longitudinal data sets recently constructed from similar parish records in Scandinavia. The fichier BALSAC, as the reconstituted family data sets are known, incorporate all the parish data from the region, including over 700,000 acts of baptism, marriage, and burial; household information drawn from the decennial censuses in 1852, 1861, 1871; 306 deeds ofgift and roo9 sales from the land registration records; 1813 marriage contracts; 350 last testaments; 1500 oral interviews; and twenty-six tax rolls from twenty municipalities. In spite ofthis evidentiary wealth, Bouchard's tone is cautious and he carefully anticipates readers' concerns with his findings and conceptual framework. His marshalling of secondary materials is consistently exhaustive , and his comparative observations are as judicious as they are brilliant. Clearly, the strength of the work is the effort to advance a well-articulated theory about patterns of extensive growth in rural North America. Bouchard views the mentalite debate in North America as far too linear, and the marginality attributed to so many regions in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Quebec as essentially false. He rejects the liberal capitalist model and the proto-industrial model. Neither adequately explains the rural economy he sees in the Saguenay. Producers did not develop a market orientation, specialize their output, or tap into growing pools of waged labour. They did not eschew familial solidarity or move beyond localized practices of exchange towards an...