Patrician Families and the Making of Quebec: The Taschereaus and McCords by Brian Young (review)

Brian Young describes his latest book as a “comparative study of elite authority in Quebec,” but it is much more than that (4). By following closely the trajectory of the heads of the Taschereau and McCord families over four generations and a little more than two centuries, he is able to take his reader deep into the process of modernization that transformed Quebec from a small French New World colony to an industrialized North American society. The families in question are well chosen. The Taschereaus were, in many ways, the incarnation of the landed gentry of New France, deeply rooted in the seigneurial system and Quebec City. For their part, the McCords arrived in Quebec with the British conquerors and made their fortune in Montreal through trade and the long-term lease of large tracts of land owned by Catholic religious communities. By identifying them both as “patrician” families, Young leaves behind a strictly economic definition of elites to encompass social and cultural elements, such as religious affiliation, values, ideologies, professions, and titles. The term also emphasizes the deeply patriarchal nature of the families, despite the central role played by wives, widows, and daughters in their development. In fact, the first family head presented by Young is Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière, who would secure the position of the Taschereaus despite the fall of New France.

Through the four parts of the book – one per generation – Young explores the day-to-day life of the heads of these patrician families in great detail, but he is also able to shed new light on much larger issues, including the evolution of law and authority in rural Quebec, the influence of British, French, and American culture on the elites of the province, and the impact of major political events. By looking at the “making of Quebec” through the lenses of these two very different families and through the particular temporality imposed by the often complex succession of generations over the “longue durée,” he challenges a number of assumptions about the ways in which gender and ethnicity interacted with authority.

Young’s mastery of historiography is evident throughout as he engages in a rich dialogue with historians from Quebec and the rest of Canada as well as from France, Great Britain, the United States, and beyond. He touches on historiographical debates in a variety of fields, such as the role of the elites in the construction of public memory and their role in the construction and enforcement of social norms. The book highlights the inherent complexity of the process of modernization, a central question in the historiography of a society that was described (and caricatured) for a long time as being backwards. This is particularly evident in the last chapters of the book, when Young describes the divergent trajectories of the fourth generation of Taschereaus and McCords. On the one hand, the Taschereaus deftly manoeuvred through the turbulent waters of the last decades of the nineteenth century under the leadership of Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau, a Catholic high cleric who would rise to the rank of cardinal and who was also a well-educated observer of society, adept at using modern technologies to achieve often very conservative goals. On the other hand, despite an apparently advantageous position, the McCords were unable to adapt to the intense pace of change in Montreal, staying true to values and economic practices that were not well suited to the metropolis of early twentieth-century Canada. In this sense, one of the most striking aspects of Young’s study may be the way it reveals the fragility of the influence of these families.

The book would be a fine addition to any patrician’s library. Printed on heavy glossy paper, it is richly illustrated, providing numerous representations of the actors and places mentioned by the author (along with very useful family trees of the...