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

On one level, Brian Young’s Patrician Families and the Making of Quebec: The Taschereaus and the McCords represents a challenge to two major interpretations of Quebec history: the Laurentian thesis and the Quebec nationalist perspective. Situated as it is in the tradition of the great Canadian and Quebec historian, Louise Dechêne, Young’s work emphasizes the importance of the feudal tradition in the shaping of Quebec history both before and after the Conquest. But to understand Young’s impressive accomplishment solely on that level would be to do it a great disservice. As a comparative study of elite authority in Quebec, it is deeply informed by a plethora of broad historical debates and represents a culmination of Young’s own intellectual evolution, from a focus upon legal and economic history, to addressing complex questions on how issues of gender, culture, modernity, and family shape history.

Young leaves few stones unturned as his narrative traces the lives of two patrician Quebec families over successive generations — the Taschereaus and the McCords — aligning the family and the individual against and within the backdrop of Quebec history and the larger geo-political events of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.

From the outset, Young draws the reader into the layered and complex lives of the individuals he examines. With great skill, Young depicts the decline of the McCord family after 160 years of ascendency in Quebec. He captures the irony of John McCord’s (1711–1793) family experience as an immigrant to Quebec. McCord was an Ulster Protestant Scot, a successful merchant and trader with international connections, with a decided bent toward an elected assembly, and he lay the foundations of a family dynasty for his son Thomas McCord (1750–1824). Yet, when his son leased Montreal convent lands, unlike his father, he stepped into “a larger understanding of seigneurial legal and social relations” (126) and gradually assumed the mantles of patrician status. This adaptability fails to perpetuate itself into subsequent generations, and by the mid-nineteenth century the McCord dynasty is on the decline. Clinging to the remnants of a fading patrician authority and isolated from the true centres of a modernizing Montreal, by the mid-nineteenth century John Samuel McCord (1801–1865) begins to lose his grip on the family’s position. This descent into obscurity culminates with the next generation, David Ross McCord (1844–1930). Beginning with a brief career in law and politics and a disadvantageous marriage, McCord, mentally unstable and increasingly isolated, eventually devotes himself to memory, collecting, and an obsession with representations of masculine historical violence.

The fortunes of the Taschereau family offer a striking contrast to this grim portrait of dissolution. Generation after generation of successful patrician strategies of consolidation and adaptation in the Beauce culminate in the person of Archbishop Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau (1820–1898). Although deeply entrenched in the traditional Catholic and French Canadian nationalism of his family, he remained selectively open to aspects of modernity that served to consolidate his position, ensuring for himself and his entire family the honour of cult status in the pantheon of Quebec nationalist history. Indeed, as Young points out, in the period following World War I, the monument to Taschereau, situated strategically on la Place de la Basilique in Quebec City, “would serve as a visual reminder of the historical tenacity of a French and Catholic people” (299).

Issues of power pervade the study. Young’s evocation of the cult of Sainte-Anne deftly confirms that religion cannot be reduced to a form of social control, but was deeply embedded in the institutional, cultural, and social fabric of Quebec society, as a powerful web of complex multi-layered, negotiated, and gendered meanings. That feudalism exerted a powerful influence upon Quebec history — both before and after the Conquest — is a historical debate long since settled. However, this does not undermine Young’s...