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 THE IDEA OF LIBERTY IN C ANADA
DURING THE AGE
OF ATLANTIC REVOLUTIONS,
1776–1838

26210_000_Lim.indd 1 2014-07-22 14:14:06

 M c Gill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Ideas
Series Editor: Philip J. Cercone

1 Problems of Cartesianism 10 Consent, Coercion,

Edited by Thomas M. Lennon, and Limit:
John M. Nicholas, and John The Medieval Origins of
W. Davis Parliamentary Democracy
Arthur P. Monahan
2 The Development of the
Idea of History in Antiquity 11 Scottish Common Sense
Gerald A. Press in Germany, 1768–1800:
A Contribution to the
3 Claude Buffier and
History of Critical Philosophy
Thomas Reid:
Manfred Kuehn
Two Common-Sense
Philosophers 12 Paine and Cobbett:
Louise Marcil-Lacoste The Transatlantic Connection
David A. Wilson
4 Schiller, Hegel, and Marx:
State, Society, and the Aesthetic 13 Descartes and the Enlightenment
Ideal of Ancient Greece Peter A. Schouls
Philip J. Kain
14 Greek Scepticism:
5 John Case and Aristotelianism Anti-Realist Trends
in Renaissance England in Ancient Thought
Charles B. Schmitt Leo Groarke

6 Beyond Liberty and Property: 15 The Irony of Theology and the

The Process of Self- Nature of Religious Thought
Recognition in Eighteenth- Donald Wiebe
Century Political Thought
16 Form and Transformation:
J.A.W. Gunn
A Study in the Philosophy
7 John Toland: His Methods, of Plotinus
Manners, and Mind Frederic M. Schroeder
Stephen H. Daniel
17 From Personal Duties
8 Coleridge and the Inspired Word towards Personal Rights:
Anthony John Harding Late Medieval and Early
Modern Political Thought,
9 The Jena System, 1804–5:
c. 1300–c. 1650
Logic and Metaphysics
Arthur P. Monahan
G.W.F. Hegel
Translation edited by 18 The Main Philosophical
John W. Burbidge and Writings and the Novel Allwill
George di Giovanni Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
Introduction and notes by Translated and edited by
H.S. Harris George di Giovanni

26210_Ducharme.indb 2 2014-07-18 11:43:42

 19 Kierkegaard as Humanist: 29 Jacob Burckhardt and
Discovering My Self the Crisis of Modernity
Arnold B. Come John R. Hinde

20 Durkheim, Morals, 30 The Distant Relation:

and Modernity Time and Identity in Spanish-
W. Watts Miller American Fiction
Eoin S. Thomson
21 The Career of Toleration:
John Locke, Jonas Proast, 31 Mr Simson’s Knotty Case:
and After Divinity, Politics, and Due
Richard Vernon Process in Early Eighteenth-
Century Scotland
22 Dialectic of Love:
Anne Skoczylas
Platonism in Schiller’s
Aesthetics 32 Orthodoxy and
David Pugh Enlightenment:
George Campbell in
23 History and Memory
the Eighteenth Century
in Ancient Greece
Jeffrey M. Suderman
Gordon Shrimpton
33 Contemplation
24 Kierkegaard as Theologian:
and Incarnation:
Recovering My Self
The Theology of Marie-
Arnold B. Come
Dominique Chenu
25 Enlightenment and Christophe F. Potworowski
Conservatism in
34 Democratic Legitimacy:
Victorian Scotland:
Plural Values
The Career of
and Political Power
Sir Archibald Alison
F.M. Barnard
Michael Michie
35 Herder on Nationality,
26 The Road to Egdon
Humanity, and History
Heath: The Aesthetics
F.M. Barnard
of the Great in Nature
Richard Bevis 36 Labeling People:
French Scholars on Society,
27 Jena Romanticism and Its
Race, and Empire, 1815–1849
Appropriation of Jakob Böhme:
Martin S. Staum
Theosophy – Hagiography –
Literature 37 The Subaltern Appeal to
Paolo Mayer Experience: Self-Identity,
Late Modernity, and the
28 Enlightenment and Community:
Politics of Immediacy
Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the
Craig Ireland
Quest for a German Public
Benjamin W. Redekop

26210_Ducharme.indb 3 2014-07-18 11:43:42

 38 The Invention of Journalism 48 Media, Memory, and
Ethics: The Path to Objectivity the First World War
and Beyond David Williams
Stephen J.A. Ward
49 An Aristotelian Account
39 The Recovery of Wonder: of Induction: Creating
The New Freedom Something from Nothing
and the Asceticism of Power Louis Groarke
Kenneth L. Schmitz
50 Social and Political Bonds:
40 Reason and Self-Enactment A Mosaic of Contrast
in History and Politics: and Convergence
Themes and Voices F.M. Barnard
of Modernity
51 Archives and the Event of God:
F.M. Barnard
The Impact of Michel Foucault
41 The More Moderate Side on Philosophical Theology
of Joseph de Maistre: David Galston
Views on Political Liberty
52 Between the Queen and the
and Political Economy
Cabby: Olympe de Gouges’s
Cara Camcastle
Rights of Women
42 Democratic Society John R. Cole
and Human Needs
53 Nature and Nurture in French
Jeff Noonan
Social Sciences, 1859–1914
43 The Circle of Rights Expands: and Beyond
Modern Political Thought Martin S. Staum
after the Reformation, 1521
54 Public Passion:
(Luther) to 1762(Rousseau)
Rethinking the Grounds
Arthur P. Monahan
for Political Justice
44 The Canadian Founding: Rebecca Kingston
John Locke and Parliament
55 Rethinking the Political:
Janet Ajzenstat
The Sacred, Aesthetic Politics,
45 Finding Freedom: Hegel’s and the Collège de Sociologie
Philosophy and the Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi
Emancipation of Women
56 Materialist Ethics and Life-Value
Sara MacDonald
Jeff Noonan
46 When the French
57 Hegel’s Phenomenology:
Tried to Be British:
The Dialectical Justification of
Party, Opposition, and
Philosophy’s First Principles
the Quest for the Civil
Ardis B. Collins
Disagreement, 1814–1848
J.A.W. Gunn 58 The Social History of Ideas
47 Under Conrad’s Eyes: in Quebec, 1760–1896
The Novel as Criticism Yvan Lamonde
Michael John DiSanto Translated by Phyllis Aronoff
and Howard Scott

26210_Ducharme.indb 4 2014-07-18 11:43:42

 59 Ideas, Concepts, and Reality 62 The Idea of Liberty in Canada
John W. Burbidge during the Age of Atlantic
Revolutions, 1776–1838
60 The Enigma of Perception
Michel Ducharme
D.L.C. Maclachlan
Translated by Peter Feldstein
61 Nietzsche’s Justice:
Naturalism in Search
of an Ethics
Peter R. Sedgwick

26210_000_Lim.indd 5 2014-07-22 14:14:06

 T H E I D E A O F L I B E RT Y I N C A NA DA
DURING THE AGE
O F AT L A N T I C R E V O L U T I O N S ,
1776–1838

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 THE IDEA OF LIBERTY
IN CANADA DURING THE AGE
OF ATLANTIC REVOLUTIONS,
1776–1838

Michel Ducharme

Translated by Peter Feldstein

McGill-Queen’s University Press

Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

26210_Ducharme.indb 7 2014-07-18 11:43:42

 © McGill-Queen’s University Press 2014
isbn 978-0-7735-4400-0 (cloth)
isbn 978-0-7735-4401-7 (paper)
isbn 978-0-7735-9625-2 (epdf)
isbn 978-0-7735-9626-9 (epub)

Legal deposit third quarter 2014

Bibliothèque nationale du Québec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free

(100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian
Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to
Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the financial
support of the Government of Canada, through the National Translation
Program for Book Publishing, for our translation activities.

McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada

Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the
financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book
Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Ducharme, Michel, 1975

[Concept de liberté au Canada à l’époque des révolutions atlantiques,
1776–1838. English]
The idea of liberty in Canada during the age of Atlantic revolutions,
1776–1838 / Michel Ducharme; translated by Peter Feldstein.

(McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas; 62)

Translation of: Le concept de liberté au Canada à l’époque
des révolutions atlantiques, 1776–1838.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
isbn 978-0-7735-4400-0 (bound). – isbn 978-0-7735-4401-7 (pbk.). –
isbn 978-0-7735-9625-2 (epdf). – isbn 978-0-7735-9626-9 (epub)

1. Canada – History – 18th century. 2. Canada – History – 19th century.

3. Canada – Social conditions – 18th century. 4. Canada – Social conditions –
19th century. 5. Canada – Intellectual life – 18th century. 6. Canada –
Intellectual life – 19th century. 7. Canada – Politics and government –
Philosophy. I. Feldstein, Peter, 1962–, translator II. Title. III. Title: Concept
de liberté au Canada à l’époque des révolutions atlantiques, 1776–1838.
English. IV. Series: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas; 62

fc95.3.d8313 2014 971.03 c2014-902250-6

c2014-902251-4

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10/12 New Baskerville.

26210_Ducharme.indb 8 2014-07-18 11:43:42

 Contents

Introduction 3

1 Liberty and Revolution in the Atlantic World 14

2 Liberty in the Province of Quebec, 1776–1805 37
3 The Birth of Reform Movements in the Canadas, 1805–1828 54
4 “We, the people”: Republican Liberty in the Canadas,
1828–1838 93
5 The Primacy of Rights: Modern Liberty in the Canadas,
1828–1838 128
6 Citizens, to Arms! The Rebellions of 1837–1838 160

Conclusion: Liberty as the Foundation of the Canadian State 185

Notes 187
Bibliography 237
Index 265

26210_Ducharme.indb 9 2014-07-18 11:43:42

 British North America under the Quebec Act (1774)

26210_Ducharme.indb 10 2014-07-18 11:43:42

 English
Spanish
American
Forts occupied by Hudson
English until 1796 Bay

Contested boundary Labrador

French
Shore
Rupert’s Land
New-
Hudson’s Bay Company Anticosti
foundland
Lake Island
a
ad

Winnipeg
ce
an

en
rC

wr
La
we

P.E.I.
Up Cape Breton
St.
Lo

pe N.B.
Indian rC Rivières des
Rivieres Quebec
an Outaouais Nova Scotia
Territories ad
a Montreal
Michilimackinac Atlantic
ss Oswego
M

Mi is Ocean
s
i

Detroit Niagara
sip
sou

Louisiana 0 200 400 600 km

pi R.
ri R.

United States

British North America under the Constitutional Act (1791)

26210_Ducharme.indb 11 2014-07-18 11:43:43

26210_Ducharme.indb 12 2014-07-18 11:43:43
 T H E I D E A O F L I B E RT Y DU R I N G T H E AG E
O F AT L A N T I C R E V O L U T I O N S ,
1776–1838

26210_Ducharme.indb 1 2014-07-18 11:43:43

26210_Ducharme.indb 2 2014-07-18 11:43:43
 Introduction

on 4 july 1776, thirteen of the sixteen British colonies of North America

declared their independence. The Province of Quebec (1763–91),
along with Nova Scotia and Saint John’s Island (renamed Prince Edward
Island in 1798), did not join the rebel colonies. This decision had pro-
found implications for its development and would colour subsequent
interpretations of that development. The American, French, European,
and South American revolutionaries of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries had waved the banner of liberty; as a result of the
loyalist outcome in Quebec, its history has long been interpreted as one
of having been untouched by Enlightenment ideas and left out of the
struggles that characterized the Atlantic world. Indeed, the province has
traditionally been considered the embodiment of counterrevolutionary
ideals: loyalty and order, not liberty.1
While these ideals were present in colonial Quebec, they were not the
only ones at play.2 This book considers the role played by the concept of
liberty in the development of the Canadian state between the American
Revolution (1776) and the Upper and Lower Canadian rebellions
(1837–38). I will situate Quebec’s history within the Atlantic framework,
presenting a kind of “cis-Atlantic history” or local history told as part of
a broader Atlantic history.3 Few historians of the Atlantic world have de-
voted much attention to the Canadian experience;4 conversely, only a
few Canadianists have attempted to set their work within the Atlantic
context.5 Quebec historians in particular have tended to look at Quebec
through the lens of “Americanness” (américanité),6 or of new societies, or
instead have compared Quebec’s history with that of the small European
nationalities of the nineteenth century.7 English Canadian historians,
for their part, have generally opted for a continental (American) or im-
perial (British) perspective.8 While these various perspectives have shed
light on important aspects of the Canadian experience and are still

26210_Ducharme.indb 3 2014-07-18 11:43:43

 4 The Idea of Liberty in Canada

useful today, the Atlantic framework – at the crossroads of French,

British, and American history – has the advantage of conjoining them. It
allows one to revisit Canadian history in the light of these three spheres
of influence.9
I intend this book primarily as a contribution to intellectual history:
the history of ideas, prejudices, principles, values, concepts, and ideolo-
gies as they influence the lives of individuals and the development of
societies. The ability to think is what enables human beings to make
choices, justify decisions, choose courses of action, structure and legiti-
mize complex sociopolitical systems; it is what allows us to give meaning
to our existence. The ability to think contributes to the shaping of hu-
man societies and guides their development. Ideas, as British historian
Michael Braddick put it, “sketch the boundaries of what can and cannot
be done.” They constitute “limits on the sphere of action that can plausi-
bly be justified with reference to certain particular values.”10 Concepts
are thus essential to life in society in that each “establishes a particular
horizon for potential experience and conceivable theory,”11 in the words
of the German historian Reinhart Koselleck. Obviously, the relationship
between ideas and the horizon of possibilities in a society is not unidirec-
tional. While ideas circumscribe this horizon, they are in turn being
adapted and reinvented as a function of historical circumstances, and
this horizon is continually opening, transforming, and closing accord-
ingly. Thus, to truly grasp the meanings of ideas and concepts, their evo-
lution over time must be studied.
Of all the ideas at play in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, liberty
is certainly one of the most important and subversive. Not only did the
idea of liberty undermine the foundations of the ancien régime in
Europe and pose a threat to colonial ties between European empires
and American colonies, but it also boded a reconceptualization of the
workings of society. The Province of Quebec, and later Upper and Lower
Canada (1791–1841), belonged to this world; yet the manner in which
liberty influenced their development has remained somewhat obscure.12
My analysis in this book is an attempt to shed light on the different mean-
ings assigned to liberty and freedom in this historical context.13 It will
discuss the political implications of these conceptions, how they evolved
over time, and how they influenced Canadian history in the late eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the Atlantic revolutions
were in full swing.
It would be invalid, in my view, to adopt an arbitrary present-day defi-
nition of liberty at the outset as a kind of standard against which histori-
cal conceptions either do or do not measure up. Instead, I will postulate
that all definitions of liberty are, a priori, equally valid. Liberty, for my

26210_Ducharme.indb 4 2014-07-18 11:43:43

 Introduction 5

purposes, is a subjective perception formed by individuals of themselves

and the society in which they live. It is a way of conceiving of the roles,
responsibilities, and rights of individuals vis-à-vis one another, society,
and the state. This perception is influenced by one’s education, culture,
membership in a particular community (ethnicity, class, gender, etc.),
particular circumstances, and personal thought processes. Put another
way, I start from the postulate that an individual is free if and only if he
believes himself to be free within an existing context, political system, or
social hierarchy.

two concepts of liberty

Without question, the revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century

waged their struggles under the banner of liberty. Their definition of this
concept, inspired by the English, American, and French republicans and
radicals, was encapsulated in the phrase “liberty, equality, fraternity
(community).” Founded, as we shall see, on popular sovereignty, politi-
cal participation, and the omnipotence of the legislative branch, it was
conceptualized around an ethic of civic virtue and an agrarian ideal.14
But despite its pervasive influence, the republican conception of lib-
erty was not the only one in play. Facing off against it was another form
of liberty that I shall term “modern liberty.” The term derives from the
fact that the concept originated in the modern era, in conjunction with
the appearance of the modern conception of the individual. Termed
“the liberty of the moderns” by Benjamin Constant in 1819, this form of
liberty is today simply called “modern liberty.”15 Modern liberty origi-
nated in the late seventeenth century, was institutionalized in England
following the Glorious Revolution (1688), and spread throughout
Europe in the century that followed. It was the work of first-generation
Enlightenment philosophers, English Whigs, a few Scottish philoso-
phers, American federalists, and others. It gave primacy to a group of
individual rights that have often been encapsulated in the phrase “lib-
erty, property, security.” Less concerned with equality than individual
autonomy, the partisans of modern liberty conceived of the state in such
a way that it could not, as they saw it, violate these rights. Such a state al-
lowed for private interests to compete for influence within the general
framework marked out by political institutions. It gave impetus to com-
merce and wealth accumulation.
If we are to deepen our understanding of the Atlantic world in general,
and British North America in particular, it will be necessary to elucidate
the differences between these two competing conceptions of liberty. I will
begin by challenging the conventional wisdom that all eighteenth-century

26210_Ducharme.indb 5 2014-07-18 11:43:43

 6 The Idea of Liberty in Canada

thinkers largely shared the same conception of liberty, and hence the
same ideal of society. As a preliminary remark, I would note that revolu-
tionary ideas did not simply spring from the Enlightenment as the night
follows the day. Historians have often struggled to explain the relationship
between these ideas, probably because their roots in the Enlightenment
are much shallower than is generally assumed.16 There was in fact an
abrupt shift between the ideas developed by philosophers from 1700 to
1750 and those developed by republicans and revolutionaries after 1760.
Both attacked the foundations of the state; but while the philosophers
launched their attack from the modern conception of liberty, the republi-
cans and revolutionaries launched theirs from the republican conception.
These two conceptions of liberty produce very different understandings
of the state and the social order. Likewise, they produce different under-
standings of the individual and of his rights, duties, and responsibilities
(to himself and others).
This analytical framework sheds light on the intellectual foundations
of the Canadian experience. It suggests that the Province of Quebec’s
refusal to join the ranks of the rebel colonies did not necessarily consign
it to the margins of the Atlantic world, to a place where the idea of liberty
never took root. In fact, liberty was a matter for debate there in the last
decades of the Enlightenment century and the first decades of the next.
On the one hand, the colonial elites freely borrowed, used, and reinter-
preted prevailing Atlantic ideas during this period. On the other hand,
when the British Parliament passed the Constitutional Act of 1791, it
reconceptualized political power and social relations in the Province of
Quebec (thenceforth Upper and Lower Canada) based on a certain con-
ception of liberty – namely, modern liberty – forcing the colonial elites
to adjust their understanding to the new political reality. The ideal em-
bodied in the new constitution was different from the one that under-
girded the Atlantic Revolutions, yet still proceeded directly from the
Enlightenment. I cannot go along with a Manichean view in which the
British colonists, in rejecting the revolution, ipso facto opted for reac-
tion or counterrevolution. It is fairer to say that they rejected one form
of liberty in the interests of preserving and promoting another.
A close analysis of the concepts of liberty that existed in the Canadas
also provides an opportunity to revisit the Canadian crisis of the 1830s.
Until now, this crisis has been set down to economic, social, and political
causes, particularly as a result of the vexed relationship between the
Canadas and the empire. All this is true and has been amply demon-
strated. Not enough attention has been devoted, however, to the irreduc-
ible ideological clash that took place between two visions of social
relations and power dynamics. The political impasse that gripped Lower

26210_Ducharme.indb 6 2014-07-18 11:43:43

 Introduction 7

Canada as of 1836, giving way to the rebellions of 1837–38, can be as-

cribed in large part to a clash between the defenders of the constitution,
who subscribed to the ideals of modern liberty, and the forces demand-
ing a reconfiguration of power in the colonies, who subscribed to repub-
lican liberty. If this clash had not occurred, a peaceful solution to the
crisis might have been easier to find. This reinterpretation of early
Canadian intellectual history is also useful in reincorporating the rebel-
lions into the ideological framework of the revolutions that shook the
Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century, as Allan Greer has sug-
gested they should be.17 From this perspective, the 1837–38 rebellions
emerge as the final chapter of the Atlantic revolutions.18
And finally, by clarifying the underlying principles of the pre-rebellion
colonial state, I will try to shed light on the foundations of the modern
Canadian liberal state. Historians have examined in detail how Canada’s
governmental apparatus began to modernize in the 1840s with the revi-
sion of many laws and the creation of new institutions and functions,
­including police, municipalities, schools, responsible government, a pro-
fessional bureaucracy, prisons, and statistics.19 More recently, Ian McKay
and Jean-Marie Fecteau have described what took place at this time as
the inception of a new liberal order.20 But the antecedents of this new
order are less well known, a lacuna this study seeks to rectify in the wake
of recent work on Whiggism and liberalism.21
Note, however, that while modern liberty is indeed fundamental to the
liberalism that developed in Canada after 1840, I prefer the term “con-
stitutionalism” to describe its predecessor ideology. “Commercialism,”
the term preferred by intellectual historians of the Atlantic world, is less
well suited to a reconceptualization of this ideology as the political
equal of republicanism. As for the term “liberalism,” its usage in this
context would be largely anachronistic.22 In British North America pri-
or to 1840, “liberal” mainly meant “generous”; “liberalism,” referring to
an ideology based on individual rights, was largely unknown. Further­
more, most eighteenth-century theorists of modern liberty could hardly
be classed as ideological liberals in today’s sense. Many of them advo-
cated a social order whose economic, social, and hierarchical underpin-
nings emanated directly from the ancien régime, a regime with which
later liberals would be perpetually at odds. “Whiggism” is another alter-
native for describing the ideology in question, but this term had too
many different and contradictory meanings in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries to be truly useful here.23 Moreover, the use of this term
would focus attention on the intellectual and political divide between
the Whig and Tory politicians of the time, ignoring their shared adher-
ence to a certain conception of liberty. On an ideological plane, then,

26210_Ducharme.indb 7 2014-07-18 11:43:43

 8 The Idea of Liberty in Canada

this study deals with the historical opposition between republicanism

and constitutionalism. The former would, in the nineteenth century,
give rise to democracy (political equality) and socialism (economic
equality) while the latter would engender British and Canadian liberal-
ism and conservatism.24

methodological approach

I have chosen in this study to re-examine the histories of both Upper and
Lower Canada. My purpose in doing so is to bring English Canadian and
Quebec historiography out of their mutual isolation. There is nothing
problematic or illegitimate about viewing history within a ­ national /
­nationalist framework, but it is unfortunate that this framework has led
the two solitudes to develop two almost entirely separate historiogra-
phies since the nineteenth century. Apart from textbooks and a few
works published in English Canada in the 1960s,25 the two Canadian
historiographies have been practically deaf to each other, as if the histo-
ries of English Canada and French Canada (Quebec) have not been in-
timately linked for two centuries; as if the experience of each of these
groups had nothing to teach the other.
My book, then, takes up Jocelyn Létourneau’s suggestion that the na-
tionalist framework within which Quebec historiography has developed
since 1845 is due for revision. It is time, says Létourneau, to transcend
Quebec nationalist historiography by reincorporating Quebec history
into the Canadian framework. Canadianness (canadianité), his term for
this approach, seeks neither to deny the internal conflicts existing in
Canadian society nor the specificity of Quebec, but rather to see them as
part and parcel of a broader Canadian experience.26 A discussion of lib-
erty lends itself well to such an approach, since the two Canadas were
characterized by a single constitution, similar political institutions, a
shared preindustrial framework, and the existence of political ferment
during the 1830s. This is not to deny the problems that cultural diversity
has caused in the development of the Canadas, nor the contempt in
which certain colonial or British anglophones held the French Canadians,
nor the desire of the former to minimize the power of the latter in Lower
Canada. The point is that the national or colonial framework is not nec-
essarily the best suited to a study of liberty, state legitimacy, and power
dynamics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Therefore, I make no attempt in this book to study state legitimacy with
reference to the national question; rather, I integrate the issue of cul-
tural diversity, where useful, into the analysis of liberty as an important
source of state legitimacy in Canada.

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 Introduction 9

My approach is elite-centred: it concerns itself only with the leaders of

the groups in question. Obviously, I make no claim that the relationship
between the elites and the general public was unidirectional, with the
former simply manipulating the latter. Still, before examining the inter-
actions between these two groups, it is necessary to understand the prin-
ciples, ideals, and values specific to each. In The Patriots and the People,
Allan Greer dwells on popular republicanism in Lower Canada during
the 1830s and the ways in which it was autonomous with respect to the
ideology of the elites. But elite discourse itself has yet to be subjected to
an equally meticulous analysis. While certain groups – the Patriotes, for
example – have received a great deal of attention from historians,27 oth-
ers, such as the Lower Canadian anglophone elite, have been practically
ignored. What is more, there is no existing general framework of inter-
pretation applicable to the intellectual history of the period. This book
aims to sketch an outline of such a framework.
In attempting to discover how liberty was variously defined in the
Canadas and how these definitions influenced the development of the
state, I opted for the method of discourse analysis. When a member of
the colonial elite spoke in public, he was conscious of the political and
social issues facing the colonies as well as the implications of his particu-
lar conception of liberty for colonial development. My analysis, then, is
intended to reconstruct the ways in which state legitimacy and power
relations were constructed (unilaterally) by the metropolitan authorities
in 1791, as well as the manner in which the colonists proceeded to either
recognize or contest this legitimacy.
Any discourse, need it be said, contains an element of propaganda
and manipulation – not to mention that discourse often veils as much as
it reveals. But discourse was nonetheless central to the legitimation of
power dynamics and social relations in the eighteenth-century Atlantic
world. Societal order was preserved not mainly by a strong military but
by the articulation of a discourse distinguishing legitimate from illegiti-
mate conduct. Physical force was used only to compel holdouts and devi-
ants to obey laws that were, all things considered, just a formal recitation
of the rules of society.
While I understand that pointed personal interests can lurk behind
words and ideologies,28 it is, I think, valuable to focus on the internal
logic of colonial political speech and its evolution from 1776 to 1838,
not on the reasons why various individuals spoke as they did. It is con-
ceivable that the two concepts of liberty are reducible to mere tools used
by people wishing to hold onto power (e.g., bureaucrats and members of
the Family Compact) and by people wishing to wrest it away from them
(e.g., the reformers, radicals, and Patriotes). But while I make occasional

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 10 The Idea of Liberty in Canada

allusion to these actors’ personal interests, a thorough study of those in-

terests goes beyond the bounds of this study.
As a related point, the approach taken here focuses more on intellec-
tual constructs than on institutions. Institutions, inasmuch as I give con-
sideration to them, are studied with reference to their intellectual
underpinnings. This approach facilitates our understanding of the orga-
nizational logic of the colonies, since their political institutions rested, as
they do everywhere, on (frequently fictitious) premises whose purpose
was to keep them running smoothly. To understand the nature of the
colonial state, it is not sufficient to determine who had the power to do
what; what is needed is to understand the grounds on which certain in-
stitutions and / or people were asserted to possess certain powers and
not others. This intellectual approach is likewise useful in elucidating
the nature and importance of the colonial protest movements. Most per-
tinently, such a movement is more threatening if it attacks the founda-
tions of the state than if it merely calls for institutional reform.
The two concepts of liberty that I have reconstructed based on con-
temporaneous discourse represent ideal types sensu Weber – analytical
categories useful for finding meaning in Canadian political history at the
time of the Atlantic revolutions. This categorization, I think, affords a
fair rendering of the fundamental opposition existing between well-­
defined groups in society at that time; yet, for all it illuminates, it does
have its limitations. It does not fully do justice to the malleability of these
concepts, the ways in which they were adapted and remade by politicians
and intellectuals as the context required. For some examples, it makes
no attempt to illuminate the tensions that existed within the republican
and modern ranks, whether regional (Montreal versus Quebec, York /
Toronto versus Kingston), linguistic (French Canadian versus English
Canadian), or political (conservatives versus reformers among the advo-
cates of modern liberty); nor does it account for the positions taken by
more moderate intellectuals and politicians, or the peculiarities of each
colony’s experience.
Another point of qualification: since this study deals with liberty as
the anchor of state legitimacy, it does not concern itself with the indi-
vidual rights and freedoms that existed in the colonies, such as habeas
corpus, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of associa-
tion, and suffrage. Nor is the religious question considered. To begin
with, Catholics and Protestants of all denominations enjoyed the same
rights in the Province of Quebec as of 1774. The question of freedom
of conscience and religion was not much debated from then until
the ­rebellions, except as regards the rights of Jews. Still, the religious
question did find itself central to several conflicts in both Upper and
Lower Canada, though these often involved rather temporal issues.

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 Introduction 11

For example, English-­speaking Lower Canadian constitutionalists com-

plained of the power of the Catholic Church in the colonies, whereas
Catholics in Britain and Ireland were not yet emancipated, at least not
before 1829. Their position found its roots in the British anti-­Catholicism
that provoked violent episodes ranging from the Gordon Riots of 1780
to the violence surrounding the creation of a Catholic hierarchy in
Great Britain in the early 1850s. Similarly, a struggle for power and in-
fluence pitted the clergy against the Assembly in Lower Canada after
1791.29 In Upper Canada, the two main bones of contention between
the Anglican elite and the other groups were the distribution of clergy
reserves among the various churches and the privileged status of the
Church of England.30 Despite the importance of these issues during
and after the period in question, they did not relate to liberty or state
legitimacy so much as to the relationship between church and state,
between temporal power and spiritual power.
It would certainly be interesting to delve deeper into various aspects of
the intellectual nexus between the colonial churches and the political
scene in which they evolved. What specific concept of liberty did each
subscribe to? What were the religious affiliations of the era’s prominent
intellectuals and politicians, and to what extent did those affiliations in-
fluence their public discourse? Conversely, what was the political posi-
tion of these figures on the contentious issues surrounding Church-state
relations and the official recognition of churches at the time of the
Atlantic revolutions? Unfortunately, I did not have space here to focus
on these issues, which would be fruitful subjects for further research.
Given the nature of my object of study, I relied heavily upon official
documents and minutes of debate. The parliamentary system in which
the two Canadas evolved after 1791 provided ample opportunities for
both defence and criticism of the colonial order; indeed, competition
between political ideas and agendas was a cornerstone of Canadian po-
litical life in that era. The formal documents of the period, including
resolutions, petitions, addresses, and laws, reflect this vibrancy. Reso­
lutions, along with the petitions and addresses stemming from them,
generally gave a clear and concise expression of the overarching prin-
ciples to which their partisans subscribed, while legislative texts must
surely have reflected the principles shared by a good number of the
members sitting at the time of their passage. British documents, such as
laws (including the Canadian constitution), dispatches from British
ministers, correspondence between London and the colonial gover-
nors, and reports of commissions of inquiry were also consulted. Since
London made the key decisions concerning the nature of the Canadian
state, a study of these sources is essential to an understanding of how
state legitimacy was constructed.

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 12 The Idea of Liberty in Canada

While some of the principles in question transpire from these official

documents, these principles were frequently elucidated or made explic-
it during colonial and imperial parliamentary debate; hence the min-
utes of these debates have been another important documentary
resource for this study. The British debates are contained in the
Parliamentary Register and the Hansard, while for the colonial debates
several news­papers were searched. All these speeches constitute vitally
important sources of contemporaneous opinion on the concept of lib-
erty. These documents are complemented by extraparliamentary sourc-
es including polemical books and pamphlets published in the colonies
between 1776 and 1841, but especially after 1828. Since these docu-
ments are few in number, they were given exhaustive consideration. I
also consulted newspapers of the time for polemical writings and inter-
national news that help situate the Canadian experience within the
Atlantic framework.
The outline of the book is as follows. In Chapter 1, I discuss the rela-
tionship between liberty and revolution. I situate pre-rebellion Canadian
history within the Atlantic world and discuss the two conceptions of liberty
that were then prevalent. In Chapter 2, I discuss the influence of the
American and French revolutions on the colonies and the nature of
the liberty that formed the basis for the Constitutional Act of 1791. Here
I demonstrate that the Canadian state, while it came under the influence
of revolutionary movements, developed from this period onward in ac-
cordance with the modern ideal of liberty. In Chapter 3, I analyze the
principles according to which protest movements took shape in the
Canadas after 1805, explaining how the colonial reformers came to aban-
don the modern concept of liberty during the 1820s and to gravitate
­towards the republican concept.
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 deal with the crisis of the 1830s from the stand-
point of ideology. The discourses of the Lower Canadian Patriotes, the
Upper Canadian radicals, and the defenders of the constitution (consti-
tutionalists) are reconstructed with reference to their basic principles,
their preferred institutional arrangements, and the principles of exclu-
sion they articulated. This discourse analysis is important in that it allows
for a comparison of the two major ideologies present in the colonies. It
sheds light on the ideological aspects of the crisis of the 1830s, when the
partisans of republican liberty (Patriotes and radicals) and the advocates
of modern liberty (constitutionalists) came head to head. Chapter 6 il-
lustrates the extent to which Lower Canadian politics found itself at an
impasse in 1837; it explains the ideological nature of the opposition
between the two groups, which made it increasingly difficult for them to
cooperate within the existing political institutions. This impasse drove

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 Introduction 13

the two camps towards an extraparliamentary clash. With the military

defeat of the Patriotes and radicals in 1837–38, the British succeeded
not only in liquidating the republican opposition in the colonies but also
in putting an end to the cycle of the Atlantic revolutions begun with the
empire’s own defeat in 1783.

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 1

Liberty and Revolution

in the Atlantic World

in the late eighteenth century, Europe and the Atlantic world un-
derwent profound political, economic, social, and religious upheavals,
representing the culmination of a hundred years of vibrant intellectual
debate. Throughout the Enlightenment century, philosophers had chal-
lenged the social and political order of the ancien régime, questioning
the power relations that existed in society. This led them ultimately to
call for the abolition of privilege, the recognition of freedom of religion,
freedom of the press, and freedom of association, and even at times to
defend the right of subjects to political participation. That these philoso-
phers demanded certain reforms was not in itself threatening; that they
questioned the established order by rejecting its traditional justifications
– divine right, dynastic right, and right of conquest – certainly was. In
essence, they demanded that power relations and the social order be
reconfigured to accord with the principle of liberty. Liberty was the nec-
essary foundation of state legitimacy and the social order; its protection
and promotion was the yardstick by which acts of authority must be mea-
sured. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, these philosophers
were joined by polemicists, pamphleteers, and politicians in both Eu­
rope and the Thirteen Colonies. By century’s end, this contrarian ten-
dency had turned into a wave of revolution that shook the Atlantic world
to its foundations.
According to Robert R. Palmer and Jacques Godechot, all these indi-
vidual revolutions, notwithstanding each one’s peculiar features, consti-
tuted a single movement, in essence a single “Atlantic revolution” taking
place at the end of the eighteenth century.1 While there were troubles in
Geneva during the 1760s, it was the American Revolution (1775–83)
that inaugurated nearly a half-century of revolutionary agitation. The
success of the American Revolution not only robbed Great Britain of its
best colonies but forced it to concede some autonomy to Ireland and to

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 Liberty and Revolution in the Atlantic World 15

reorganize its remaining North American colonies. The revolution also

inspired radicals in the home country, and the American influence was
soon felt throughout all of Europe.2 Next to be seriously shaken by
­revolts were the United Provinces (the patriots’ revolt of 1783–87) and
the Austrian Netherlands (1787–90). Then it was France’s turn. The
Revolution of 1789 was pivotal not only because it fundamentally trans-
formed one of Europe’s most important kingdoms but also because,
from 1792 on, France’s foreign policy gave impetus to other revolutions
and attempted revolutions in Europe.3
As ambitious as it might be, this first attempt by Palmer and Godechot
to integrate the revolutions of the late eighteenth century into a broad
interpretive framework was somewhat limited in time and space. The
putative Atlantic revolution only encompassed the United States and
Europe during the period from 1776 to 1800, to the exclusion of the
rest of the Americas (e.g., the Saint-Domingue slave revolts leading to
the independence of Haiti in 1804). More recently, the Haitian experi-
ence has been integrated into this Atlantic framework, as has that of the
Spanish and Portuguese empires, where revolutions swept across Central
and South America in the early nineteenth century.4 In view of the diver-
sity of these experiences, it is more accurate at this point to speak of not
one but several Atlantic revolutions.
Despite its limitations, the Palmer and Godechot framework bolsters
two important arguments about these late eighteenth-century events.
First, it shows up the inadequacy of the thesis of American or French
exceptionalism, reminding us that these were not the only Atlantic na-
tions shaken by revolutions after 1776. Second, it highlights the com-
mon ideological thread running through these revolutions, regardless of
their peculiarities and final outcomes, since most of the revolutionaries
were inspired by similar ideals. Palmer uses the word “democratic” to
describe these revolutions.5 While this word was indeed extant in that
era, its several meanings were quite far from the meaning it has today.6
Nevertheless, the democrats of the revolutionary era agreed on the need
for equality among citizens and had no use for any hereditary privileges,
whether of the monarchic or aristocratic variety. While describing these
revolutions as “democratic” was initially useful for their integration into
a new analytical framework, the term ultimately leads to confusion in
view of the very different definition of democracy now in common use.
Beginning in the 1960s, intellectual historians such as Bernard Bailyn,
J.G.A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and Gordon Wood began giving clos-
er study to the ideological nature of protest movements in the Anglo-
American world, including those that led to the English Commonwealth
in the seventeenth century and the American Revolution in the eighteenth

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 16 The Idea of Liberty in Canada

century. Reacting to the liberalism and individualism then dominant in

the West, these historians sought to put the historical importance of liber-
alism as an oppositional ideology in England and the United States into
perspective.7 Drawing upon the work of Zera Fink and Caroline Robbins,
who had rediscovered republicanism in seventeenth- and eighteenth-­
century English political thought,8 they minimized liberalism’s role as a
reformist and emancipatory ideology in the eighteenth century by relativ-
izing the intellectual influence of John Locke before 1750.9 For these his-
torians, classical republicanism, not liberalism, was the true emancipatory
ideology of the eighteenth century.
Republicanism’s roots, they argued, stretched back to antiquity.
Rediscovered by Machiavelli in the sixteenth century, it was asserted to
have been imported into England by James Harrington (1611–77) and
reprised by the seventeenth-century Commonwealthmen as well as by
the American rebels.10 Its partisans believed that society should be orga-
nized around independent and virtuous small landholders who were re-
sistant to corruption (or, put another way, untouched by clientelism)
and capable of putting the common interest or “commonwealth” before
their own when participating in the political affairs of the republic.11
While the work of Bailyn, Pocock, Skinner, and Wood initially focused
on the Anglo-American landscape, it spawned similar studies by histori-
ans focusing on other countries. This new analytical framework helped
revitalize the intellectual history of the Atlantic world and Europe in
general,12 as well as of England and Ireland, the United States, France,
and the United Provinces in particular.13 Many historians now acknowl-
edge the republican ideological kinship of several eighteenth-century
revolutions. The nineteenth-century Latin American revolutions stand
apart in that they were not fundamentally inspired by this kind of repub-
licanism (even though they did lead to the creation of new republics).14
Thus, republicanism fundamentally and durably changed the concep-
tion of the state and the social order in the northern Atlantic world. It set
legitimate authority, power, and social relations on new foundations, pit-
ting liberty and equality against privileges and hereditary rights.
The history of these Atlantic revolutions now covers, to varying de-
grees, essentially the entirety of Europe and the Americas from 1760 to
1826. But Canada has yet to be integrated into this framework in any
systematic way;15 to date, only Jean-Pierre Wallot (focusing on Lower
Canada) has made any attempt to accomplish this. Other historians
working on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have de-
voted more attention to the direct or indirect effects of the American
and French revolutions on Canada and to the arrival of the Loyalists.16

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 Liberty and Revolution in the Atlantic World 17

If Atlantic and Canadian historiography is our guide, the North

American colonies that stayed with the empire must have remained aloof
from all this Atlantic ideological ferment. Yet the colonial population
(except of course for the First Peoples) was composed of European and
American immigrants of relatively recent provenance. They brought with
them their political, intellectual, and cultural references. In economic
terms, the colonies were part of a mercantile empire. Constitutionally,
they were subordinate to the British government. And intellectually, the
Canadian elites were well aware of the issues being debated in Europe
and America from the 1780s on. There was, in short, no reason why
these colonies would have developed at the margins of the Atlantic world,
or why their inhabitants would not have participated in or been influ-
enced by the great debates of the epoch in one way or another.

i n t e l l e c t ua l l i f e i n t h e at l a n t i c wo r l d
during the enlightenment

It is of course undeniable that the Province of Quebec did not join the
ranks of the rebel colonies in 1775–76, and that a revolution did not take
place there in the 1790s. Republican revolutionary principles did not
triumph in Canada. How, then, can this experience be integrated into
the framework of the Atlantic revolutions? An answer to this question
begins with the observation that the intellectual history of the eighteenth-­
century Atlantic world is not exhausted by republicanism. This is clearly
true for the Latin American revolutionaries, who drew their inspiration
from other sources. But it is also true for the British world, whose intel-
lectual historians now consider republicanism to be only one strand of a
more sophisticated analytical framework.
In their view, the modern history of the British Empire is not correctly
characterized by the traditional opposition between conservatives fa-
vourable to the status quo and reformist liberals. It is better viewed as an
opposition between partisans of commercialism and classical republican-
ism. Commercialism, a conservative ideology grounded in the works of
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), David Hume (1711–1776), and Adam
Smith (1723–1790), posited a definition of life in society based on indi-
vidual rights and autonomy vis-à-vis the state. Its partisans, often depict-
ed in the historical literature as liberals, insisted on the inviolability
of private property, the benefits of wealth accumulation and concentra-
tion, and the necessity of patronage. Classical republicanism was a re-
formist, emancipatory, communitarian ideology that advocated for the
right of political participation by all citizens. If the history of the Province

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 18 The Idea of Liberty in Canada

of Quebec and the Canadas is difficult to analyze in terms of republican-

ism alone, it makes better sense when interpreted in the context of an
opposition between republicanism and commercialism.
A number of Canadian and Quebec historians, political scientists, and
sociologists have drawn upon this analytical framework in recent years.
Apart from David Milobar, however, who focused on the influence of
republicanism (also known as the Country ideology) in the discourse of
English-speaking merchants in the Province of Quebec,17 all of these
scholars have used this analytical framework to study the nineteenth cen-
tury. Gordon T. Stewart, the first Canadian scholar to do so, in The Origins
of Canadian Politics, argued that nineteenth-century Canadian history was
characterized by the triumph of the commercialists (the Court ideolo-
gy). In 1995, political scientists Peter J. Smith and Janet Ajzenstat took
this approach further, contending that an opposition between republi-
canism and liberalism has driven Canada’s history since the nineteenth
century. The book they edited, Canada’s Origins, constituted the first
genuine effort to recast Canadian history in the mould developed by in-
tellectual historians of the Atlantic world.18
Louis-Georges Harvey used a similar framework to study the roots of
reformist discourse in Lower Canada. He found that while Canadian re-
publicanism did not triumph in parallel with the revolutions in the
United States and Europe, it did provide inspiration to the Lower
Canadian reform movement from 1805 to 1837. Attempting to recon-
cile republicanism with the thesis of Americanness, Harvey presented
the 1837–38 rebellions as inspired by republicanism and therefore simi-
lar in nature to the American Revolution.19 Allan Greer made the same
point, arguing that republicanism characterized political activity down
to the local level.20 The sociologist Stéphane Kelly, in La petite loterie,
paired the Atlantic framework with the pariah theory developed by
Hannah Arendt. He sought to demonstrate that the history of Canada
East in the era 1837–67 was in essence that of the Court party’s victory
over the Country party due to the corruption of Étienne Parent, Louis-
Hippolyte La Fontaine, and George-Étienne Cartier.21
While interesting, the general interpretive framework pitting commer-
cialism against republicanism poses some problems. First, these ideolo-
gies are not generally given equal consideration in the academic literature,
and it is republicanism that has tended to dominate. Quebec historians in
particular have tended to address the question from a pro-republican
standpoint, either by focusing on the Patriotes’ republican discourse
(Harvey) or by presenting the proponents of the Court ideology in a par-
ticularly negative light (Kelly). Meanwhile, scholars in English Canada
(e.g., Ajzenstat) have tended to look favourably on commercialism, which

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 Liberty and Revolution in the Atlantic World 19

they liken to liberalism. Such reciprocal bias has made it difficult to gain
a true picture of this crucial ideological clash. What is needed in order to
revitalize the analytical framework is to put the study of both ideologies
on an equal footing.
Second, the classic works taking this approach have exaggeratedly po-
larized the opposition between republicanism and commercialism, ob-
scuring or ignoring many subtleties. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment
and Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, to name two, greatly
minimized the importance accorded to individual rights in republican
discourse, particularly around the time of American independence. This
bias began to be rectified in the early 1980s with works by Isaac Kramnick,
Joyce Appleby, and Lance Banning, who maintained that republicanism
and liberalism were not as antithetical as once believed. In this they fol-
lowed in the footsteps of Bailyn, who argued that both these ideologies
were in evidence during the American Revolution.22 Others, including
Paul A. Rahe and Vickie B. Sullivan, have shed light on the liberal fea-
tures of English republicanism.23 Still others have attempted to elucidate
the many factors that distanced American republicanism from forms of
republicanism that have little regard for individual liberties. According
to Rahe, Thomas Pangle, and Jean M. Yarbrough, the “republicanism” in
play during the American Revolution was not classical in nature but
modern, and thus accepting of individual liberty.24 Similarly, Mark
Hulliung and Lee Ward have presented the United States as being the
product of both republicanism and liberalism.25
Nothing about this debate negates the relevance of the analytical
framework in which republicanism and commercialism (liberalism) are
presented as two distinct ideologies. The point here is to underscore the
ambiguity surrounding their definition as ideologies. If ideology is
­defined as a hierarchy of principles allowing an individual to face the
world and give it meaning, to comprehend the organization of the society
in which he lives or wishes to live, and to justify his political actions,26 it
becomes clear that republicanism and commercialism constitute two dif-
ferent ideologies, two distinct ways of conceiving of society and the state.
It can certainly be said that people in the eighteenth century were either
ideologically republican or ideologically commercialist. The republicans
structured their thinking around the idea of popular sovereignty and the
political participation of the virtuous citizen; the commercialists, around
individual autonomy with respect to the state. The republicans were inter-
ested primarily in the nature of sovereign authority, liberals in the limits
to its power over the individual. Still, these ideologies shared certain prin-
ciples. For example, republicans could acknowledge, as their adversar-
ies did, that individuals possess numerous and extensive civil rights.

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 20 The Idea of Liberty in Canada

Commercialists (liberals) could at times acknowledge popular sovereign-

ty and advocate for political participation if these were perceived as useful
for the protection of civil liberties. Given this overlap, it is not sufficient to
study the specific rights held dear by each side; one must also determine
the priority accorded to each.
Third, this framework is not readily applicable to Canada without
modification, for it was originally designed to be applied to a specific
spatiotemporal context. Jean-Marie Fecteau has, moreover, expressed
doubts about the possibility that such an ideological conflict could have
existed in the colonies in the 1830s. He writes that this approach “would
appear to pose enormous analytical problems, if only because it postu-
lates the continuity and stability of this ideological rivalry beyond the
great revolutions of the turn of the nineteenth century.”27 All ideologies
are indeed born out of particular contexts, but nothing prevents other
people and thinkers from borrowing them, reworking them, or adapting
them to new contexts, which explains why ideologies typically survive, in
some form, the context in which they emerged. By revisiting the founda-
tions of the republican and commercialist ideologies, one can discover
how they were adapted to new contexts.

the concept of liberty during the enlightenment

In my view, the analytical framework used by Anglo-American intellec-

tual historians of the Atlantic world can be liberated from the context in
which it was devised, and thereby adapted to the Canadian context (with-
out denaturing it completely), by recentring it around the concept of
liberty. Liberty was certainly one of the most important values of the
time. It did not refer solely to the exercise of certain rights but was also
construed as the foundation of state legitimacy.
An apparent obstacle to this approach arises in that the Atlantic revolu-
tions have always seemed to go hand in hand with liberty, as if the rise of
liberty in the eighteenth century necessarily had revolution as its conse-
quence. The opponents of revolution have thus been portrayed as the
enemies of liberty: as conservatives, counterrevolutionaries, or reactionar-
ies. While there was certainly a link between revolution and liberty in the
European and South American nations, this connection is more problem-
atic to establish for the British Empire. The British authorities, it is true,
did move to crush protest movements and radical groups as the ancien
régime was being toppled in Europe.28 These measures were often reac-
tionary and counterrevolutionary in nature. But this does not mean that
the British constitution was itself counterrevolutionary. The Whig consti-
tution of the 1790s was, after all, based on fundamental principles arising
out of a much earlier revolution: the Glorious Revolution of 1688.29

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 Liberty and Revolution in the Atlantic World 21

This association between liberty and revolution is also predicated on

the idea that liberty meant the same thing for all of its eighteenth-­century
partisans. Not so.30 While they all considered liberty fundamental to the
state and the social order, their consensus extended to only two other
points. First, they considered liberty to be proper to “individuals,” not
social groups. (No matter that only a small minority of individuals could
at that time claim to possess individual liberty: many years would pass
before slaves, women, the poor, and foreigners would enjoy it.) It was a
different concept from medieval liberty, which was synonymous with
privileges granted to either groups or persons.31 It was also different
from the liberty of nations or of social classes, two categories developed
in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.
Even though eighteenth-century liberty was a matter of individual
rights, it had collective implications. Its advocates strove for compati-
bility between the potentially conflicting dictates of individual autono-
my and societal coexistence. Liberty went beyond the individual to
en­com­pass the dynamics of power and submission within society. It
marked out the rights, duties, and responsibilities of individuals to one
another as well as the nature of the relationship between individuals
and the state.
Second, all proponents of liberty considered it tantamount to law.
Based on this fact, historian John Phillip Reid has contended that there
was only a single, unambiguous concept of liberty at play in the eighteenth-­
century Anglo-American world.32 But that was not the case: these think-
ers did not agree on what constituted a legitimate law, much less on what
constituted legitimate legislative institutions.
The fact is that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers in the
Atlantic world recognized the existence of at least two forms of liberty.
Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651), was among the first to distinguish
between “[the] Libertie of Particular men” and the liberty of the
“Common-wealth.” The first was proper to men as individuals or subjects.
The second, derived from classical Greek and Latin writings, concerned
the social body created by individuals when they banded together out of
a need for security: the Commonwealth.33 This opposition between indi-
vidual and collective forms of liberty was reprised in different forms
throughout the Enlightenment century. Jean-Louis de Lolme (1740–
1806) reiterated it in his commentary on the English constitution. Jean-
Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) continually appealed to the example of
the ancients (liberty of the Commonwealth). Madame de Staël (1766–
1817) discussed it in a 1798 essay on how to put an end to the excesses
of the revolution. Finally, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de
Montesquieu (1689–1755) studied the governmental structures that
would allow these two types of liberty to be institutionalized.34

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 22 The Idea of Liberty in Canada

But it was Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) who gave the best presen-
tation of this opposition in a speech titled “De la liberté des anciens com-
parée à celle des modernes” (Of the Liberty of the Ancients Compared
to That of the Moderns), which he delivered at the Athénée royale
de Paris in 1819.35 A devotee of liberty, Constant had nonetheless been
disgusted by the excesses of the revolution. He strove to demonstrate a
fundamental contradiction between two distinct forms of liberty, one of
which could be condemned without invalidating the idea of liberty itself.
For him, all the ills that had afflicted Europe in the preceding thirty years
– the revolutions, the Jacobins’ crimes, and what came after – had been
caused by the rediscovery of the “liberty of the ancients,” which could be
summarized as the “sharing of social power among the citizens of the fa-
therland.”36 This form of collective freedom required citizens to accept
“the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the com-
munity.”37 Individuals enjoyed no independence but were subsumed
within the body politic.
Constant espoused instead a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century in-
vention, the “liberty of the moderns,” that involved individual autonomy
and could be summarized as the enjoyment of individual rights. For a
modern, liberty was

the right to be subjected only to the laws, and to be neither arrested, detained,
put to death or maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one or more indi-
viduals. It is the right of everyone to express their opinion, choose a profession
and practice it, to dispose of property, and even to abuse it; to come and go
without permission, and without having to account for their motives and under-
takings. It is everyone’s right to associate with other individuals, either to discuss
their interests, or to profess the religion which they and their associates prefer,
or even simply to occupy their days or hours in a way which is most compatible
with their inclinations or whims.38

An individual was free in the modern sense if he could act within soci-
ety as he saw fit, in keeping with his own tastes and interests. For Constant,
this type of liberty was better suited to the state of the world in the nine-
teenth century. Modern citizens, unlike the citizens of the ancient
­republics, could not enjoy the sensation of wielding influence over the
state because nation-states were now much bigger. In compensation, they
could enjoy private rights: “Our freedom must consist of peaceful enjoy-
ment and private independence.”39 It is not that Constant disapproved
of political participation – on the contrary, he considered it a right of all
citizens – but that he believed it needed to be subordinated to the enjoy-
ment of the individual rights it made possible.

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 Liberty and Revolution in the Atlantic World 23

After 1850, many writers came to believe that the advent of “liberal
democracy” had resolved the opposition between the liberty of the an-
cients and the liberty of the moderns. Democracy and individual auton-
omy now seemed inseparable. To be free meant both to participate in
politics and to enjoy autonomy with respect to other citizens. While this
idea never gained unanimous approval, it was and still is influential in
the West.
At his 1958 inaugural lecture in Oxford, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin
revived the old distinction between two forms of liberty, which he termed
“negative” and “positive” liberty, claiming that both still existed in the
West. The first concerned the autonomy permitted to individuals in soci-
ety, or “freedom from”; the second, the capacity of individuals to be guid-
ed by their own lights, or “freedom to.”40 Berlin’s distinction remains
controversial, as does his definition of these two concepts; still, it re-
stored currency to the idea that liberty in the West has been a polyse-
mous idea since the seventeenth century.41

republican liberty versus modern liberty

Constant’s distinction between the liberty of the ancients and that of the
moderns is a good starting point from which to rethink the ideologies of
the eighteenth century. When the opposition between republicanism
and commercialism is recast as a struggle over the meaning of liberty, the
result is a flexible interpretive framework for Atlantic intellectual history
that is freed from the context in which it emerged. This framework is
useful in explicating, at least in part, a number of late eighteenth-­century
disputes between different advocates of liberty – between Rousseau and
Voltaire, between British Whigs and Radicals at the time of the American
and French revolutions, between anglomanes and américanistes in 1780s’
France, and between Jeffersonian republicans and Hamiltonian federal-
ists in the United States (1787–1815), for some examples.42 In all these
disputes, the partisans of two concurrent and frequently contradictory
conceptions of liberty – republican and modern – squared off.
Among the republicans were various thinkers who made political par-
ticipation the central feature of their definition of liberty. They included
seventeenth-century Commonwealthmen such as John Milton (1608–
1674), James Harrington (1611–1677), Marchamont Needham (1620–
1678), Henry Neville (1620–1694), and Algernon Sydney (1622–1683);
the advocate of “country” ideas Henry Saint John, 1st Viscount Bo­
lingbroke (1678–1751); the English radicals Richard Price (1723–1791),
Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), Thomas Paine (1737–1809), James Mac­
kintosh (1765–1832), and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797); the French

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 24 The Idea of Liberty in Canada

pamphleteer and politician Emmanuel-Joseph Sièyes (1748-1836); the

French Girondists Jacques-Pierre Brissot (1754–1793), Antoine Nicolas
de Condorcet (1743-1794), and Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793); and
the American Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). More radical in their con-
ception of the world, the French and francophone republicans, including
Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709–1785), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean-
Paul Marat (1743–1793), and Maximilien Robespierre (1743–1794),
pushed this conception to its outer bounds.
While they shared a single idea of liberty, these people did not all con-
cur on its political and practical implications. Some were moderate and
open to compromise, others were extremist. Differences between repub-
lican currents at times became so extreme that they degenerated into a
fight to the death, viz. the confrontation between the Girondists (led by
Jacques-Pierre Brissot) and the Montagnards (including the Jacobins led
by Robespierre) that ended with the former’s liquidation in October
1793. The context in which republican discourse was articulated also
influenced the overall shape of institutions and the manner in which
politics were practised. To see this, one need only compare the divergent
outcomes of the American and French Revolutions, both stemming
from republican agitation. Republican rhetoric and policy were unavoid-
ably adapted to suit the form of the preexisting state, the prevailing po-
litical culture, and the existence of an internal or external enemy
(whether real or perceived). Still, all republicans shared a common
­ideal: to live in a republic composed of virtuous citizens.
As to the modern conception of liberty first appearing in seventeenth-
century England, it held that there are certain inalienable rights –
­variously termed natural rights, absolute rights, sacred rights, or birth
rights – that exist among humans in a state of nature. Among the theo-
rists of modern liberty were the first Enlightenment generation, includ-
ing John Locke (1632–1704),43 Voltaire (1694–1778), Charles-Louis de
Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), and Louis de Jaucourt
(1704–1780); admirers of the British constitution such as William
Blackstone (1723–1780) and Jean-Louis de Lolme; Scottish thinkers
such as Adam Smith; the Physiocrats, including François Quesnay
(1694–1774), Jacques Turgot (1727–1781), and Mercier de la Rivière
(1719–1801);44 the English Whigs, including Charles James Fox (1749–
1806), Edmund Burke (1729–1797), and their conservative disciples;
the French ­anglomanes, including Jean-Joseph Mounier (1758–1806),
Stanislas de ­Cler­mont-Tonnerre (1757–1792), and Trophime-Gérard de
Lally-Tolendal (1751–1830); and American Federalists such as Alexander
Hamilton (1755–1804) and John Adams (1735–1826). Since Great
Britain was the only eighteenth-century nation built upon this notion of
liberty, the partisans of modern liberty generally admired the British

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 Liberty and Revolution in the Atlantic World 25

constitution (excepting the French Physiocrats who for many years

leaned towards legal despotism before, in the case of Turgot and others,
falling into the republican camp).
Like the republicans, the moderns had internal conflicts. They were
not always political allies, as shown in Britain by the opposition between
Fox and Burke during the French Revolution or between the Whigs and
Tories in the nineteenth century. Nor did they shrink from alliances with
those whose conception of liberty differed – one thinks of the anglomane -
américaniste collaboration in the initial months of the French Revolution,
or the Whig-Radical alliance in 1830s’ Britain. But such cohabitation was
infrequent. It was generally provoked by the presence of a common en-
emy, whose eventual defeat or victory obviated the need for the lesser
evil of further collaboration.

Liberty and Equality

In terms of its principles, republican liberty was closely tied to the con-
cept of civic equality, a form of equality that had moral, legal, social, and
economic components.45 To begin with, equality was considered the
natural state of individuals – an essential postulate, since only equals
could participate in politics and, in so doing, be free. Republican equal-
ity was also a legal construct. Individuals could only be free if they en-
joyed the same rights and were subjected to the same laws. Finally,
republican equality was economic and social. It was based on the idea
that the concentration of wealth in a small number of hands under-
mined political freedom and thereby threatened the very foundations of
society. While the advocates of this form of liberty did not reject private
property, they considered it a civil and not a natural right: “The very idea
of property, or right of any kind, is founded upon a regard to the general
good of the society, under whose protection it is enjoyed; and nothing is
properly a man’s own, but what general rules, which have for their object
the good of the whole, give to him.”46 On this premise, property had to
be subordinated to the will of the whole. Rousseau wrote,

My thought … is not to destroy private property absolutely, because that is impos-

sible, but to restrict it within the narrowest limits; to give a measure, a rule, a
brake that restrains it, that directs it, that subjugates it, and keeps it always subor-
dinated to the public good. In a word, I want the property of the state to be as
great, as strong and that of the citizens as small, as weak as possible.47

As this quote illustrates, republicans did not seek to abolish private

property but only to rein in economic inequality to the greatest extent
possible.

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 26 The Idea of Liberty in Canada

The partisans of modern liberty, for their part, did not reject the
idea of equality but gave it a legal definition that did not have social
leveling as a necessary consequence. This is evident from an Encyclopédie
­passage written by Louis de Jaucourt, whose vision was representative
of the moderns:

Let no one do me the injustice of supposing that with a sense of fanaticism I ap-
prove in a state that chimera, absolute equality, which could hardly give birth to
an ideal republic. I am only speaking here of the natural equality of men. I know
too well the necessity of different ranks, grades, honors, distinctions, preroga-
tives, subordinations that must prevail in all governments. And I would even state
that natural or moral equality are not contrary to this.48

Against republican equality, which they regarded as inimical to the

foundations of society, the moderns pitted two putatively natural rights:
property and security.49 All free human beings, they argued, should be
able to enjoy and possess the fruits of their labour. As Adam Smith wrote,
“the property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original
foundation of all other property … is the most sacred and inviolable.”50
Freedom thus implied the protection of persons and property. De facto
inequality among individuals would result from their putting different
amounts of effort into personal enrichment. Inequality, though anathe-
ma to the republicans, was perfectly acceptable to the moderns. What is
more, unequal wealth was not only the result of well-employed freedom
but also a condition for the prosperity and progress of society as a whole.
Wealth accumulation being (for the moderns) a natural fact, it fol-
lowed that people were entitled to the security of their person and prop-
erty.51 Indeed, the moderns considered the relationship among liberty,
property, and security so strong and fundamental that they were prone
to conflating the three. Montesquieu wrote, “The political liberty of the
subject is a tranquillity of mind arising from the opinion each person has
of his safety.”52 He added, “Political liberty consists in security, or, at least,
in the opinion that we enjoy security.”53 The role of guaranteeing the
security of persons and property fell to the state.

Virtue versus Wealth

Not only did the two concepts of liberty differ at the level of principles
but they were predicated on two different conceptions of the social or-
der. The republicans articulated an ethic of virtue that they derived from
the seventeenth-century Commonwealthmen, in which notions of equal-
ity and independence were paramount. To be free, it was not enough for

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 Liberty and Revolution in the Atlantic World 27

individuals to be equal: they also had to be mutually independent, both

economically and politically. This was the essence of republican virtue.
On a practical level, independence meant that no person could be
under the control of another; and for this to be the case, the partisans
of republican liberty believed that society, and the state governing it,
should be fundamentally agrarian, made up of small, mutually indepen-
dent landholders. Property was generally presented as a sacred natural
right, but the term referred to the agrarian smallholdings that formed
the basis for equality among citizens. It did not mean the unbridled ac-
cumulation of wealth, which led to social inequality. In a republic, agri-
culture ought to be the economic activity par excellence. It guaranteed
people’s equality and independence while encouraging farmers to em-
body simplicity and frugality, two values integral to the republican con-
cept of virtue. Members of an agrarian society were independent if they
owned land and contented themselves with the simple life it afforded.
Republican virtue thus was inseparable from an agrarian ideal. As
Rousseau put it, “It is better … to live in abundance than in opulence;
be better than pecunious, be rich. Cultivate your fields well, without
worrying about the rest, soon you will harvest gold.”54 Because this eco-
nomic system allowed for independence, encouraged frugality, and
maintained equality among citizens, it was the only one compatible with
liberty. The republicans did not necessarily oppose commerce but they
generally subordinated it to agriculture.
The independence in question was a political concept as well as an
economic one. It was essential to their independence that individuals
remain uncorrupt, free of undue influence. They must never sell their
allegiance to the highest bidder but always hold the general interest
above their private interests where these two were at odds. As Priestley
wrote, “the happiness of the whole community is the ultimate end of
government … and all claims of individuals inconsistent with the public
good are absolutely null and void.”55 Robespierre expressed the same
sentiment in different terms: “the long convulsions that tear states apart
are only the combat of prejudice against principle, egoism against the
general interest.”56 In sum, republican virtue was synonymous with both
economic and political independence. Its corollary was patriotism –
­citizens were expected to put the general interest before their own.
The moderns, on the contrary, espoused an ethic of personal enrich-
ment. Accumulation of property was the visible sign of the proper use
of liberty. The most extreme example of this ethic is found in The Fable
of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Public Benefits (1723–28) by Bernard
Mandeville (1670–1733). Mandeville contended that while luxury
might be considered a vice from a moral standpoint, society still

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 28 The Idea of Liberty in Canada

prospered from its enjoyment by the rich. Not everyone took such an
extreme position. Nevertheless, the moderns saw no reason to adopt
the republican opposition between the public and the private interest.
On the contrary: for them, the public interest was merely the sum of
legitimate private interests.
It was still necessary to ensure that all these private interests encoun-
tering one another in society could be harmoniously accommodated.
The moderns understood that there would have to be limits on individ-
ual liberty – which, to repeat, they regarded as a natural right – so that
individuals could not harm each other. What could impose such limits?
For the moderns, the answer was reason. Reason is what enables indi-
viduals to know the scope and limits of their own liberty. It is the brake
on excess that renders private interests compatible. As such, it is the fac-
ulty that the moderns set up against republican virtue.

Republican Popular Sovereignty

The differences between republican and modern ideals had major impli-
cations for the organization of the state, and in particular, for the defini-
tion of sovereignty. Any discussion of liberty must grapple with this issue;
the degree of autonomy enjoyed by individuals in society and the nature
of their relationship to power depends on it. While the word sovereignty
has other meanings,57 I will use it here primarily to refer to the source of
supreme authority in a state.
Since republicans structured life in society around civic equality, inde-
pendence, and political participation, they all agreed that sovereignty
could not belong to anyone in particular: only to the people, the nation,
as a totality.58 This was the central concept of popular sovereignty.
Rousseau went as far as to contend that the social contract could be
summed up in a single fact: “the total alienation of each associate with all
of his rights to the whole community.” On these grounds he argued that
“each of us puts his person and his full power in common under the su-
preme direction of the general will; and in a body we receive each mem-
ber as an indivisible part of the whole.”59 While not all republicans were
as categorical as the Citizen of Geneva, they all believed that the people
were the sole source of legitimate authority.60 In a republic, the people’s
will was law. This form of sovereignty was the foundation of both the US
constitution (1787) and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the
Citizen (1789).
Caution is called for, however, in interpreting the republican concept
of the “people.” It does not refer to the sum of the individuals living in a
republic; rather, it is an intellectual construct, a metaphysical reality, a

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 Liberty and Revolution in the Atlantic World 29

legal fiction whose purpose is to legitimize power and to structure the

relations among political institutions in a republic.61 To quote Edmund
S. Morgan, “the success of government … requires the acceptance of fic-
tions, requires the willing suspension of disbelief, requires us to believe
that the emperor is clothed even though we can see that he is not.”62 The
fiction of the people was central to the discourse of republican liberty in
that it constituted the primary organizing principle of the republic. The
people were to the republic what God was to absolute monarchies: the le-
gal fiction through which power was conferred on those who held it.
Thus, there was no necessary correlation between the sum total of
electors and the “people,” between the will of the majority (a sum of in-
dividual interests) and the general will (the people’s interest). As
Rousseau wrote, “There is often a considerable difference between the
will of all and the general will: the latter looks only to the common inter-
est, the former looks to private interest, and is nothing but a sum of
particular wills.”63 The popular will might even contradict the will of the
majority. In such cases, Rousseau contended, the guidance of a legislator
– for example, Lycurgus in Sparta – was needed. Robespierre presented
himself as such a legislator, invoking the general will and the good of the
nation in his justification of the Jacobin dictatorship and the Terror.
Such was a republic: an enactment of popular sovereignty whose pur-
pose was to preserve the common good. Its citizens were free when they
had their say in the making of laws. Republican liberty was in this way a
form of civic liberty. But modern republics were too large to allow for the
direct expression of all members of society. Representation was the only
way for all citizens’ political voices to be heard. For such representation
to be genuine, it had to conform to certain rules:

First, the representation must be complete. No state, a part of which only is rep­
resented in the Legislature that governs it, is self-governed … Secondly, the repre-
sentatives of a free state must be freely chosen … Thirdly, after being freely chosen
they must be themselves free … Fourthly, they must be chosen for short terms
and, in all their acts, be accountable to their constituents … With respect, in par-
ticular, to a government by representation, it is evident that it deviates more or less
from liberty in proportion as the representation is more or less imperfect.64

It was thus a matter of “subject[ing] the representatives to following

their instructions exactly and to giving a strict account to their constitu-
ents of their conduct at the Diet.”65 In this way, the representatives be-
came the ambassadors of their constituents.66
In our day, republic and monarchy are routinely considered the an-
tithesis of one another. A republic is theoretically based on popular

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 30 The Idea of Liberty in Canada

sovereignty while a monarchy is based on the sovereignty of a king. It is

true that eighteenth-century republican principles had no room for the
kind of monarchical sovereignty to which Louis XV alluded during
the Séance de la flagellation held in the Paris Parliament on 3 March 1766:
“It is in my person alone that sovereign power resides … It is to me alone
that legislative power belongs, without dependence and without shar-
ing.”67 But what really posed a problem for republicans was monarchic
absolutism. As long as the king’s power was limited to the executive
sphere, he could be tolerated or even defended. Indeed, as Rousseau
put it, a republic could have any “form of administration” or executive
power.68 But it could not be a republic without popular sovereignty be-
ing embodied in the legislature. Indeed, seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century republicans such as Rousseau, Harrington, and the American
rebels appealed to Polybius’s theory of mixed government, in which
monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy complement one another.69 But
for all these thinkers, the role of the aristocracy and the monarchy was
either consultative or strictly tied to executive power. The French repub-
licans and revolutionaries, for their part, tried to restructure French po-
litical institutions after 1789 in such a manner as to reconcile their
principles with the existence of the Capetian monarch, which created all
sorts of problems.70 It was not long before they abandoned this idea of
republican mixed government or monarchy, and from the nineteenth
century on this idea was taken up exclusively by the moderns.

Parliamentary Sovereignty

Mixed government entailed an entirely different conception of sover-

eignty and the state. Rather than entrust sovereignty to a one-­dimensional
fiction – the “people” – that was equated with the state, the moderns
entrusted it to an entity whose constitution was based on an internal divi-
sion of power. They did this because their main interest was to guarantee
the natural rights and autonomy of individuals, whereas they believed a
sovereign people would threaten these rights. In contrast, mixed govern-
ment would put a check on any tendency for the state to become too ty-
rannical. In the British case, sovereignty was vested in Parliament, which
was in turn composed of the House of Lords (aristocracy), the House of
Commons (democracy), and a monarch. Each of these entities derived
its legitimacy from a different source and had different interests, and it
was practically inconceivable for them to conspire against individual lib-
erty. The “people” represented by Parliament was thus a different sort of
fiction. It was not an indivisible entity speaking with a single voice but a
composite of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. The representatives

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 Liberty and Revolution in the Atlantic World 31

of the general public only accounted for one-third of Parliament. Put

another way, the modern state was organized around a balance of power
and forces within the sovereign power: a mixed government.
As we have seen, the republicans structured the state around the legis-
lative branch as the sovereign people’s legitimate voice. The moderns, by
contrast, put executive and legislative power on a more equal footing.
Their system of government established balance between these two
branches of government, even though it was the legislative branch –
Parliament – that was theoretically sovereign. In practice, the moderns
made the executive branch the guardian of liberty, autonomy, and secu-
rity as well as the promoter of societal development. As they saw it, no
other body was capable of fulfilling this role. To prevent the executive
branch from interpreting its powers too broadly and thereby encroaching
on individual rights, it was enough to subordinate its power to the legisla-
tive branch in certain respects. The judicial branch played a similar role.
As Montesquieu put it, “To prevent this abuse [of power], it is necessary
from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.”71
Since sovereignty and legislative power rested with Parliament, it fol-
lowed that the moderns based their state not on popular sovereignty but
on the rule of law. For a republican, the unambiguous will of the people
found expression in the laws enacted by one sovereign body. Nothing in
theory restrained the exercise of republican law, other than a belief that
the legislative branch would not act so as to tread recklessly upon indi-
vidual liberty. But the moderns were suspicious of an all-powerful sover-
eign legislative power, and because of that suspicion they entrusted
sovereignty to a parliament composed of divergent interests. They claimed
on several grounds that this approach would protect liberty. First, as we
have seen, it would take an unlikely conspiracy between three conflicting
sets of interests (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy) to pass a repressive
law. Second, since individual liberty was reasonable, laws were regarded as
the collective expression of reason, which made liberty possible in society.
Moreover, Locke and Blackstone both associated liberty with law, arguing
that “where there is no law there is no freedom.”72 It was to guarantee the
reasonability of law that the majority of moderns appealed to representa-
tion. This was what enabled the moderns to transpose the idea of indi-
vidual liberty into the societal framework. Collective self-government
guaranteed society that laws would be based on reason and not on the
prejudices of a few individuals. Third, if Parliament did manage to pass a
repressive law, the judiciary could strike it down. This check on legislative
power did not exist in Great Britain, where Parliament was all-powerful,
but the American Federalists gave the Supreme Court the role of guaran-
teeing the constitutionality of laws passed by the legislative branch.73

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 32 The Idea of Liberty in Canada

Since the moderns did not regard political participation as the funda-
mental component of liberty, they conceived of representation in a very
different way from the republicans. Elected representatives were not and
need not be beholden to the will of their constituents. They were more
like trustees:

It ought to be the happiness and glory of a Representative, to live in the strictest

union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication
with his constituents … But, his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his en-
lightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you; to any man, or any sett
[sic] of men living … Your Representative owes you, not his industry only, but his
judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opin-
ion … Parliament is not a Congress of Ambassadors from different and hostile
interests … but Parliament is a deliberative Assembly of one Nation, with one
Interest, that of the whole; where, not local Purposes, not local Prejudices ought
to guide, but the general Good, resulting from the general Reason of the whole.
You chuse a Member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not Member
of Bristol, but he is a Member of Parliament.74

Thus, a member was not elected to represent the opinion of his elec-
tors but to think and make decisions on their behalf.

Civil Rights and Political Rights

A final fundamental difference between republicans and moderns con-

cerns the relationship each perceived between civil rights and political
rights. To begin with, we must dispense with a simplistic equation of re-
publican liberty with political freedom and modern liberty with civil lib-
erties. For both camps, the relationship between these freedoms was
much more complex.
This complexity, as regards the republicans, relates to the fact that
they did not form a homogeneous group in terms of the degree of im-
portance they accorded to civil liberties. Rousseau and de Mably, for ex-
ample, paid little attention to civil liberties, while Price and Priestley at
times used rhetoric that all but erased the distinction between civil liber-
ties and political freedom. Generally speaking, the complementarity
­between the two was central to the republican discourse in the Anglo-
American world. All republicans agreed, however, that the people’s will
had to trump individual rights, or else it would not be sovereign. It fol-
lowed that individual rights were conventional, since they were granted
to citizens at the behest of the “people.” It was not that the citizens of a
republic could not enjoy natural rights but that political freedom

26210_Ducharme.indb 32 2014-07-18 11:43:45

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