Daily Life in New France
In New France there were no privileged orders. This, indeed, was
the most marked difference between the social organization of the
home land and that of the colony. There were social distinctions in
Canada, to be sure, but the boundaries between different elements of
the population were not rigid; there were no privileges based upon
the laws of the land, and no impenetrable barrier separated one
class from another. Men could rise by their own efforts or come down
through their own defaults; their places in the community were not
determined for them by the accident of birth as was the case in the
older land. Some of the most successful figures in the public and
business affairs of New France, some of the social leaders, some of
those who attained the highest rank in the "noblesse", came of
relatively humble parentage.
In France of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the chief
officials of state, the seigneurs, the higher ecclesiastics, even
the officers of the army and the marine, were always drawn from the
nobility. In the colony this was very far from being the case. Some
colonial officials and a few of the seigneurs were among the
numerous "noblesse" of France before they came, and they of course
retained their social rank in the new environment. Others were
raised to this rank by the King, usually for distinguished services
in the colony and on the recommendation of the governor or the
intendant. But, even if taken all together, these men constituted a
very small proportion of the people in New France. Even among the
seigneurs the great majority of these landed gentlemen came from the
ranks of the people, and not one in ten was a member of the
"noblesse". There was, therefore, a social solidarity, a spirit of
fraternity, and a feeling of universal comradeship among them which
was altogether lacking at home.
The pivot of social life in New France was the settlement at Quebec.
This was the colonial capital, the seat of the governor and of the
council, the only town in the colony large enough to have all the
trappings and tinsel of a well-rounded social set. Here, too, came
some of the seigneurs to spend the winter months. The royal
officials, the officers of the garrison, the leading merchants, the
judges, the notaries and a few other professional men--these with
their families made up an elite which managed to echo, even if
somewhat faintly, the pomp and glamor of Versailles. Quebec, from
all accounts, was lively in the long winters. Its people, who were
shut off from all intercourse with Europe for many months at a time,
soon learned the art of providing for their own recreation and
amusement. The knight-errant La Hontan speaks enthusiastically of
the events in the life of this miniature society, of the dinners and
dances, the salons and receptions, the intrigues, rivalries, and
flirtations, all of which were well suited to his Bohemian tastes.
But the clergy frowned upon this levity, of which they believed
there was far too much. On one or two occasions they even laid a
rigorous and restraining hand upon activities of which they
disapproved, notably when the young officers of the Quebec garrison
undertook an amateur performance of Moliere's "Tartuffe" in 1694. At
Montreal and Three Rivers, the two smaller towns of the colony, the
social circle was more contracted and correspondingly less
brilliant. The capital, indeed, had no rival.
Only a small part of the population, however, lived in the towns. At
the beginning of the eighteenth century the census (1706) showed a
total of 16,417, of whom less than 3000 were in the three chief
settlements. The others were scattered along both banks of the St.
Lawrence, but chiefly on the northern shore, with the houses grouped
into "cotes" or little villages which almost touched elbows along
the banks of the stream. In each of these hamlets the manor-house or
home of the seigneur, although not a mansion by any means, was the
focus of social life. Sometimes built of timber but more often of
stone, with dimensions rarely exceeding twenty feet by forty, it was
not much more pretentious than the homes of the more prosperous and
thrifty among the seigneur's dependents. Its three or four spacious
rooms were, however, more comfortably equipped with furniture which
in many cases had been brought from France. Socially, the seigneur
and his family did not stand apart from his neighbors. All went to
the same church, took part in the same amusements upon days of
festival, and not infrequently worked together at the common task of
clearing the lands. Sons and daughters of the seigneurs often
intermarried with those of habitants in the seigneury or of traders
in the towns. There was no social "impasse" such as existed in
France among the various elements in a community.
As for the habitants, the people who cleared and cultivated the
lands of the seigneuries, they worked and lived and dressed as
pioneers are wont to do. Their homes were commonly built of felled
timber or of rough-hewn stone, solid, low, stocky buildings, usually
about twenty by forty feet or thereabouts in size, with a single
doorway and very few windows. The roofs were steep-pitched, with a
dormer window or two thrust out on either side, the eaves projecting
well over the walls in such manner as to give the structures a
half-bungalow appearance. With almost religious punctuality the
habitants whitewashed the outside of their walls every spring, so
that from the river the country houses looked trim and neat at all
seasons. Between the river and the uplands ran the roadway, close to
which the habitants set their conspicuous dwellings with only in
rare cases a grass plot or shade tree at the door. In winter they
bore the full blast of the winds that drove across the expanse of
frozen stream in front of them; in summer the hot sun blazed
relentlessly upon the low roofs. As each house stood but a few rods
from its neighbor on either side, the colony thus took on the
appearance of one long, straggling, village street. The habitant
liked to be near his fellows, partly for his own safety against
marauding redskins, but chiefly because the colony was at best a
lonely place in the long cold season when there was little for any
one to do.
Behind each house was a small addition used as a storeroom. Not far
away were the barn and the stable, built always of untrimmed logs,
the intervening chinks securely filled with clay or mortar. There
was also a root-house, half-sunk in the ground or burrowed into the
slope of a hill, where the habitant kept his potatoes and vegetables
secure from the frost through the winter. Most of the habitants
likewise had their own bake-ovens, set a convenient distance behind
the house and rising four or five feet from the ground. These they
built roughly of boulders and plastered with clay. With an abundance
of wood from the virgin forests they would build a roaring fire in
these ovens and finish the whole week's baking at one time. The
habitant would often enclose a small plot of ground surrounding the
house and outbuildings with a fence of piled stones or split rails,
and in one corner he would plant his kitchen-garden.
Within the dwelling-house there were usually two, and never more
than three, rooms on the ground floor. The doorway opened into the
great room of the house, parlor, dining-room, and kitchen combined.
A "living" room it surely was! In the better houses, however, this
room was divided, with the kitchen partitioned off from the rest.
Most of the furnishings were the products of the colony and chiefly
of the family's own workmanship. The floor was of hewn timber,
rubbed and scrubbed to smoothness. A woolen rug or several of them,
always of vivid hues, covered the greater part of it. There were the
family dinner-table of hewn pine, chairs made of pine saplings with,
seats of rushes or woven underbark, and often in the corner a couch
that would serve as an extra bed at night. Pictures of saints hung
on the walls, sharing the space with a crucifix, but often having
for ominous company the habitant's flint-lock and his powder-horn
hanging from the beams. At one end of the room was the fireplace and
hearth, the sole means of heating the place, and usually the only
means of cooking as well. Around it hung the array of pots and pans,
almost the only things in the house which the habitant and his
family were not able to make for themselves. The lack of colonial
industries had the advantage of throwing each home upon its own
resources, and the people developed great versatility in the cruder
arts of craftsmanship.
Upstairs, and reached by a ladder, was a loft or attic running the
full area of the house, but so low that one could touch, the rafters
everywhere. Here the children, often a dozen or more of them, were
stowed away at night on mattresses of straw or feathers laid along
the floor. As the windows were securely fastened, even in the
coldest weather this attic was warm, if not altogether hygienic. The
love of fresh air in his dwelling was not among the habitant's
virtues. Every one went to bed shortly after darkness fell upon the
land, and all rose with the sun. Even visits and festivities were
not at that time prolonged into the night as they are nowadays.
Therein, however, New France did not differ from other lands. In the
seventeenth century most of the world went to bed at nightfall
because there was nothing else to do, and no easy or inexpensive
artificial light. Candles were in use, to be sure, but a great many
more of them were burned on the altars of the churches than in the
homes of the people. For his reading, the habitant depended upon the
priest, and for his writing, upon the notary.
Clothing was almost wholly made at home. It was warm and durable, as
well as somewhat distinctive and picturesque. Every parish had
spinning wheels and handlooms in some of its homes on which the
women turned out the heavy druggets or "etoffes du pays" from which
most of the men's clothing was made. A great fabric it was, this
homespun, with nothing but wool in it, not attractive in pattern but
able to stand no end of wear. It was fashioned for the habitant's
use into roomy trousers and a long frock coat reaching to the knees
which he tied around his waist with a belt of leather or of knitted
yarn. The women also used this "etoffe" for skirts, but their waists
and summer dresses were of calico, homemade as well. As for the
children, most of them ran about in the summer months wearing next
to nothing at all. A single garment without sleeves and reaching to
the knees was all that covered their nakedness. For all ages and for
both sexes there were furs in plenty for winter use. Beaver skins
were cheap, in some years about as cheap as cloth. When properly
treated they were soft and pliable, and easily made into clothes,
caps, and mittens.
Most of the footwear was made at home, usually from deerhides. In
winter every one wore the "bottes sauvages", or oiled moccasins
laced up halfway or more to the knees. They were proof against cold
and were serviceable for use with snowshoes. Between them and his
feet the habitant wore two or more pairs of heavy woolen socks made
from coarse homespun yarn. In summer the women and children of the
rural communities usually went barefoot so that the soles of their
feet grew as tough as pigskin; the men sometimes did likewise, but
more frequently they wore, in the fields or in the forest, clogs
made of cowhide.
On the week-days of summer every one wore a straw hat which the
women of the household spent part of each winter in plaiting. In
cold weather the knitted "tuque" made in vivid colors was the great
favorite. It was warm and picturesque. Each section of the colony
had its own color; the habitants in the vicinity of Quebec wore blue
"tuques", while those around Montreal preferred red. The apparel of
the people was thus in general adapted to the country, and it had a
distinctiveness that has not yet altogether passed away.
On Sundays and on the numerous days of festival, however, the
habitant and his family brought out their best. To Mass the men wore
clothes of better texture and high, beaver hats, the women appeared
in their brighter plumage of dresses with ribbons and laces imported
from France. Such finery was brought over in so large a quantity
that more than one "memoire" to the home government censured the
"spirit of extravagance" of which this was one outward
manifestation. In the towns the officials and the well-to-do
merchants dressed elaborately on all occasions of ceremony, with
scarlet cloaks and perukes, buckled slippers and silk stockings. In
early Canada there was no austerity of garb such as we find in
Puritan New England. New France on a "jour de fete" was a blaze of
color.
As for his daily fare, the habitant was never badly off even in the
years when harvests were poor. He had food that was more nourishing
and more abundant than the French peasant had at home. Bread was
made from both wheat and rye flour, the product of the seigneurial
mills. Corn cakes were baked in Indian fashion from ground maize.
Fat salted pork was a staple during the winter, and nearly every
habitant laid away each autumn a smoked supply of eels from the
river. Game of all sorts he could get with little trouble at any
time, wild ducks and geese, partridges, for there were in those days
no game laws to protect them. In the early winter, likewise, it was
indeed a luckless habitant who could not also get a caribou or two
for his larder. Following the Indian custom, the venison was smoked
and hung on the kitchen beams, where it kept for months until
needed. Salted or smoked fish had also to be provided for family
use, since the usages of the Church required that meat should not be
used upon numerous fast-days.
Vegetables of many varieties were grown in New France, where the
warm, sandy, virgin soil of the St. Lawrence region was splendidly
suited for this branch of husbandry. Peas were the great stand-by,
and in the old days whole families were reared upon "soupe aux
pois", which was, and may even still be said to be, the national
dish of the French Canadians. Beans, cucumbers, melons, and a dozen
other products were also grown in the family gardens. There were
potatoes, which the habitant called "palates" and not "pommes de
terre", but they were almost a rarity until the closing days of the
Old Regime. Wild fruits, chiefly raspberries, blueberries, and wild
grapes, grew in abundance among the foothills and were gathered in
great quantities every summer. There was not much orchard fruit,
although some seedling trees were brought from France and had
managed to become acclimated.
On the whole, even in the humbler homes there was no need for any
one to go hungry. The daily fare of the people was not of great
variety, but it was nourishing, and there was plenty of it save in
rare instances. More than one visitor to the colony was impressed by
the rude comfort in which the people lived, even though they made no
pretense of being well-to-do. "In New France," wrote Charlevoix,
"poverty is hidden behind an air of comfort," while the gossipy La
Hontan was of the opinion that "the boors of these seigneuries live
with, greater comfort than an infinity of the gentlemen in France."
Occasionally, when the men were taken from the fields to serve in
the defense of the colony against the English attacks, the harvests
were small and the people had to spend the ensuing winter on short
rations. Yet, as the authorities assured the King, they were
"robust, vigorous, and able in time of need to live on little."
As for beverages, the habitant was inordinately fond of sour milk.
Tea was scarce and costly. Brandy was imported in huge quantities,
and not all this "eau-de-vie", as some writers imagine, went into
the Indian trade. The people themselves consumed most of it. Every
parish in the colony had its grog-shop; in 1725 the King ordered
that no parish should have more than two. Quebec had a dozen or
more, and complaint was made that the people flocked to these
resorts early in the morning, thus rendering themselves unfit for
work during most of the day, and soon ruining their health into the
bargain. There is no doubt that the people of New France were fond
of the flagon, for not only the priests but the civil authorities
complained of this failing. Idleness due to the numerous holidays
and to the long winters combined with the tradition of hospitality
to encourage this taste. The habitants were fond of visiting one
another, and hospitality demanded on every such occasion the proffer
of something to drink. On the other hand, the scenes of debauchery
which a few chroniclers have described were not typical of the
colony the year round. When the ships came in with their cargoes,
there was a great indulgence in feasting and drink, and the excesses
at this time were sure to impress the casual visitor. But when the
fleet had weighed anchor and departed for France, there was a quick
return to the former quietness and to a reasonable measure of
sobriety.
Tobacco was used freely. "Every farmer," wrote Kalm, "plants a
quantity of tobacco near his house because it is universally smoked.
Boys of twelve years of age often run about with the pipe in their
mouths." The women were smokers, too, but more commonly they used
tobacco in the form of snuff. In those days, as in our own, this
French-Canadian tobacco was strong stuff, cured in the sun till the
leaves were black, and when smoked emitting an odor that scented the
whole parish. The art of smoking a pipe was one of several
profitless habits which, the Frenchman lost little time in acquiring
from his Indian friends.
This convivial temperament of the inhabitants of New France has been
noted by more than one contemporary. The people did not spend all
their energies and time at hard labor. From October, when the crops
were in, until May, when the season of seedtime came again, there
was, indeed, little hard work for them to do. Aside from the cutting
of firewood and the few household chores the day was free, and the
habitants therefore spent it in driving about and visiting
neighbors, drinking and smoking, dancing and playing cards. Winter,
accordingly, was the great social season in the country as well as
in the town.
The chief festivities occurred at Michaelmas, Christmas, Easter, and
May Day. Of these, the first and the last were closely connected
with the seigneurial system. On Michaelmas the habitant came to pay
the annual rental for his lands; on May Day he rendered the Maypole
homage which, has been already described. Christmas and Easter were
the great festivals of the Church and as such were celebrated with
religious fervor and solemnity. In addition, minor festivals,
chiefly religious in character, were numerous, so much so that their
frequency even in the months of cultivation was the subject of
complaint by the civil authorities, who felt that these holidays
took altogether too much time from labor. Sunday was a day not only
of worship but of recreation. Clad in his best raiment, every one
went to Mass, whatever the distance or the weather. The parish
church indeed was the emblem of village solidarity, for it gathered
within its walls each Sunday morning all sexes and ages and ranks.
The habitant did not separate his religion from his work or his
amusements; the outward manifestations of his faith were not to his
mind things of another world; the church and its priests were the
center and soul of his little community. The whole countryside
gathered about the church doors after the service while the
"capitaine de la cote", the local representative of the intendant,
read the decrees that had been sent to him from the seals of the
mighty at the Chateau de St. Louis. That duty over, there was a
garrulous interchange of local gossip with a retailing of such news
as had dribbled through from France. The crowd then melted away in
groups to spend the rest of the day in games or dancing or in
friendly visits of one family with another.
Especially popular among the young people of each parish were the
"corvees recreatives", or "bees" as we call them nowadays in our
rural communities. There were the "epuchlette" or corn-husking, the
"brayage" or flax-beating, and others of the same sort. The
harvest-home or "grosse-gerbe", celebrated when the last load had
been brought in from the fields, and the "Ignolee" or welcoming of
the New Year, were also occasions of goodwill, noise, and revelry.
Dancing was by all odds the most popular pastime, and every parish
had its fiddler, who was quite as indispensable a factor in the life
of the village as either the smith or the notary. Every wedding was
the occasion for terpsichorean festivities which lasted all day
long.
The habitant liked to sing, especially when working with others in
the woods or when on the march. The voyageurs relieved the tedium of
their long journeys by breaking into song at intervals. But the
popular repertoire was limited to a few folksongs, most of them
songs of Old France. They were easy to learn, simple to sing, but
sprightly and melodious. Some of them have remained on the lips and
in the hearts of the French-Canadian race for over two hundred
years. Those who do not know the "Claire fontaine" and "Ma boule
roulant" have never known French Canada. The "foretier" of today
still goes to the woods chanting the "Malbrouck s'en va-t-en guerre"
which his ancestors caroled in the days of Blenheim and Malplaquet.
When the habitant sang, moreover, it was in no pianissimo tones; he
was lusty and cheerful about giving vent to his buoyant spirits. And
his descendant of today has not lost that propensity.
The folklore of the old dominion, unlike the folk music, was
extensive. Some of it came with the colonists from their Norman
firesides, but more, perhaps, was the outcome of a superstitious
popular imagination working in the new and strange environment of
the wilderness. The habitant had a profound belief in the
supernatural, and was prone to associate miraculous handiwork with
every unusual event. He peopled the earth and the air, the woods and
the rivulets, with spirits of diverse forms and varied motives. The
red man's abounding superstition, likewise, had some influence upon
the habitant's highstrung temperament. At any rate, New France was
full of legends and weird tales. Every island, every cove in the
river, had one or more associated with it. Most of these legends had
some moral lessons attached to them: they were tales of disaster
which came from disobeying the teachings of the Church or of
miraculous escape from death or perdition due to the supernatural
rewarding of righteousness. Taken together, they make up a wholesome
and vigorous body of folklore, reflecting both the mystic temper of
the colony and the religious fervor of its common life. A
distinguished son of French Canada has with great industry gathered
these legends together, a service for which posterity will be
grateful.(Sir J.M. Lemoine, Legends of the St. Lawrence
(Quebec, 1878).)
Various chroniclers have left us pen portraitures of the habitant as
they saw him in the olden days. Charlevoix, La Hontan, Hocquart, and
Peter Kalm, men of widely different tastes and aptitudes, all bear
testimony to his vigor, stamina, and native-born vivacity. He was
courteous and polite always, yet there was no flavor of servility in
this most benign trait of character. It was bred in his bone and was
fostered by the teachings of his church. Along with this went a
"bonhomie" and a lightheartedness, a touch of personal vanity, with
a liking for display and ostentation, which unhappily did not make
for thrift. The habitant "enjoys what he has got," writes
Charlevoix, "and often makes a display of what he has not got." He
was also fond of honors, even minor ones, and plumed himself on the
slightest recognition from official circles. Habitants who by years
of hard labor had saved enough to buy some uncleared seigneury
strutted about with the airs of genuine aristocrats while their
wives, in the words of Governor Denonville, "essayed to play the
fine lady." More than one intendant was amused by this broad streak
of vanity in the colonial character. "Every one here," wrote
Meulles, "begins by calling himself an esquire and ends by thinking
himself a nobleman."
Yet despite this attempt to keep up appearances, the people were
poor. Clearing the land was a slow process, and the cultivable area
available for the support of each household was small. Early
marriages were the rule, and families of a dozen or more children
had to be supported from the produce of a few "arpents". To maintain
such a family as this every one had to work hard in the growing
season, and even the women went to the fields in the harvest-time.
One serious shortcoming of the habitant was his lack of
steadfastness in labor. There was a roving strain in his Norman
blood. He could not stay long at any one job; there was a
restlessness in his temperament which would not down. He would leave
his fields unploughed in order to go hunting or to turn a few "sous"
in some small trading adventure. Unstable as water, he did not excel
in tasks that required patience. But he could do a great many things
after a fashion, and some that could be done quickly he did
surprisingly well.
One racial characteristic which drew comment from observers of the
day was the litigious disposition of the people. The habitant would
have made lawsuits his chief diversion had he been permitted to do
so. "If this propensity be not curbed," wrote the intendant Raudot,
"there will soon be more lawsuits in this country than there are
persons." The people were not quarrelsome in the ordinary sense, but
they were very jealous each one of his private rights, and the
opportunities for litigation over such matters seemed to provide
themselves without end. Lands were given to settlers without
accurate description of their boundaries; farms were unfenced and
cattle wandered into neighboring fields; the notaries themselves
were almost illiterate, and as a result scarcely a legal document in
the colony was properly drawn. Nobody lacked pretexts for
controversy. Idleness during the winter was also a contributing
factor. But the Church and the civil authorities frowned upon this
habit of rushing to court with every trivial complaint. "Cures" and
seigneurs did what they could to have such difficulties settled
amicably at home, and in a considerable measure they succeeded.
New France was born and nurtured in an atmosphere of religious
devotion. To the habitant the Church was everything--his school, his
counselor, his almsgiver, his newspaper, his philosopher of things
present and of things to come. To him it was the source of all
knowledge, experience, and inspiration, and to it he never faltered
in ungrudging loyalty. The Church made the colony a spiritual unit
and kept it so; undefiled by any taint of heresy. It furnished the
one strong, well-disciplined organization that New France possessed,
and its missionaries blazed the way for both yeoman and trader
wherever they went.
Many traits of the race have been carried on to the present day
without substantial change. The habitant of the old dominion was a
voluble talker, a teller of great stories about his own feats of
skill and endurance, his hair-raising escapes, or his astounding
prowess with musket and fishing-line. Stories grew in terms of
prodigious achievement as they passed from tongue to tongue, and the
scant regard for anything approaching the truth in these matters
became a national eccentricity. The habitant was boastful in all
that concerned himself or his race; never did a people feel more
firmly assured that it was the salt of the earth. He was proud of
his ancestry, and proud of his allegiance; and so are his
descendants of today even though their allegiance has changed.
To speak of the habitants of New France as downtrodden or oppressed,
dispirited or despairing, like the peasantry of the old land in the
days before the great Revolution, as some historians have done, is
to speak untruthfully. These people were neither serfs nor peons.
The habitant, as Charlevoix puts it, "breathed from his birth the
air of liberty"; he had his rights and he maintained them. Shut off
from the rest of the world, knowing only what the Church and civil
government allowed him to know, he became provincial in his horizon
and conservative in his habits of mind. The paternal policy of the
authorities sapped his initiative and left him little scope for
personal enterprise, so that he passed for being a dull fellow. Yet
the annals of forest trade and Indian diplomacy prove that the New
World possessed no sharper wits than his. Beneath a somewhat
ungainly exterior the yeoman and the trader of New France concealed
qualities of cunning, tact, and quick judgment to a surprising
degree.
These various types in the population of New France, officials,
missionaries, seigneurs, voyageurs, habitants, were all the scions
of a proud race, admirably fitted to form the rank and file in a
great crusade. It was not their fault that France failed to dominate
the Western Hemisphere.
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