During the period from the Conquest of New France to the mid-nineteenth century, Montreal was first and foremost a commercial centre. Although trade remained its principal economic function, the city underwent important changes which prepared it for the industrialization that began in the 1850s. At the time of the Conquest, Montreal had already been in existence for over a century. Founded in 1642 by Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve as a mission settlement for the conversion of Amerindians and as a trading post, it very soon became the capital of the fur trade in New France. This role, however, did not result in rapid growth, and the city remained small; a century after it was founded, Montreal had about 3,500 inhabitants, and in 1760 perhaps a thousand more.
Growth of the City
After the Conquest, in spite of the changes connected with becoming part of a new empire, Montreal's population grew only slightly faster than during the preceding fifty years; it was about 5,500 in 1784. The growth rate subsequently increased somewhat but remained below that for Lower Canada in general. With the beginning of the nineteenth century, the situation changed radically and Montreal entered upon a phase of much faster population growth. It overtook the capital, Quebec City, and became the most populated city in British North America.
Montreal's Population Growth,
1805-1851:
Year Population
1805 9,020
1815 15,000
1825 22,540
1831 27,297
1844 44,591
1851 57,715
At the same time that the population increased, physical growth could be observed in the continual expansion of built-up areas. In 1760, the majority of the population was still living in the old, walled city of the French regime. The growing populace had barely begun to spill over the walls and establish faubourgs, or suburbs, around the city's three main entrances. In the next few years, however, the pace increased and from 1781 on the suburbs outside the walls took the lead over the city proper. The colonial government acknowledged the new situation when it defined the Montreal city limits in 1792: the new, rectangular-shaped territory encompassed the old city core, all the suburbs and a belt of rural land surrounding them. These limits were to remain unchanged for almost a century. By 1825, only twenty-four percent of the population still lived in the old city, with the rest distributed among seven suburbs, the largest of which were Saint-Laurent, Quebec (or Sainte-Marie), and Saint-Joseph. When the city was granted administrative autonomy, these suburban boundaries served as the basis for establishing ward boundaries.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Montreal had attained new stature. Its population was thirteen times greater than that of 1760 and its area was considerably more extensive. By that time it had become Canada's major city. The reason for the growth was a combination of factors, which went beyond the narrow confines of the city itself.
In the decades immediately following the Conquest, just as during the period of French domination, the fur trade remained the economic mainstay. Montreal controlled a vast trading empire that covered the west and northwest of the North American continent and extended to the Pacific Ocean. Each spring a flotilla of large canoes loaded with trade goods and manned by a few hundred voyageurs left Lachine for the Great Lakes. They returned in September, loaded with furs. Fur magnates, such as the Frobishers, McGillivrays, McGills and McTavishes, dominated Montreal society. The great majority of them were Scottish, although Englishmen and French Canadians sometimes managed to secure a place in the group. They gathered for parties at the Beaver Club; an organization to which only people who had spent at least one winter in the West could belong. They lived in beautiful houses, and Simon McTavish, the most important among them, started to build a huge mansion on the slope of the mountain. Because of the owner's death in 1804, the edifice was to remain unfinished.
Most of these merchants were partners in the powerful North West Company, a fierce rival of the Hudson's Bay Company to which it yielded in 1821. The fur trade, however, was not an important factor in the expansion of the city itself. Most of the activity took place in the West, and the work of management and storage, centred in Montreal, was not labour intensive. The city had no other major economic activities, and immigration from the British Isles remained low. For these reasons Montreal's growth between 1760 and 1800 remained slow.
At the end of the eighteenth century, conditions began to change. This resulted chiefly because of the creation and development of a vast hinterland dependent upon Montreal. A constant overflow population from the French-Canadian rural areas settled in the wide, flat countryside around Montreal and established the richest agricultural region of Quebec. In addition, with the arrival of the Loyalists, Upper Canada was opened for colonization. In both cases, people and goods came by way of Montreal. It was a new commercial role to which Montreal owed its subsequent growth. Because of its strategic position on the St. Lawrence River, Montreal became one of the gathering points for colonial commodities exported to Britain, as well as the distribution centre for products sent to the colony from elsewhere in the British Empire. As a direct result of the relationship between the city and its hinterland, the former grew as the latter expanded.
The trend became more pronounced after 1815, when the immigration flow from the British Isles, which until then had been moderate, increased considerably. The majority of the newcomers settled on the land, in Quebec and mainly in Ontario, but a few thousand of them stayed in Montreal where they formed a new, urban proletariat, available for heavy construction and the transportation of goods.
The relationship between the city and its hinterland became even closer as communications improved, and in particular with the building of canals which made navigation on the St. Lawrence easier. The Lachine Canal was inaugurated in 1825, and enlarged in the 1840s. The first railway lines, La Prairie to Saint-Jean (1836) and Montreal to Lachine (1847), appeared on the scene only at the end of the period, precursors of the industrial era.
Thanks to its new role as a commercial centre, Montreal continued to grow and was able to take in its stride the passing of the fur trade after 1821.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, manufacturing took its place beside trade as an economic activity which, while not as important, should not be underestimated. By 1825, several hundred craftsman and apprentices produced in their shops a wide range of articles, from shoes to hats, from tool moulds to bird cages. Even at that time, shoemaking already played an important role, with its 279 shoemakers and 49 apprentices. But production was not yet on an industrial scale. There were, however, a few forerunners of industrialization which had already passed the small-scale production stage. These included the Molson brewery and the Alger ironworks. During the winter the latter firm employed thirty men. However, it was only with the late 1840s and early 1850s that modern industry took a foothold. From 1760 until 1850, Montreal was clearly a pre-industrial city, a commercial centre, where the production of goods was not the main component of growth.
Montreal Society from 1760 to 1850
For the period under examination, Montreal society was dominated by a vigorous and enterprising business bourgeoisie. In the 1820s and 1830s, George Moffat, Horatio Gates, Augustin Cuvillier, John Molson, Joseph Masson and others took over from the fur magnates who had earlier dominated commerce. When we compare the merchant-adventurers of the period of the Conquest with the big importers and distributors of the nineteenth century, we may notice a difference of scale, methods or commodities, but the goal remained the same: to make Montreal the hub of a commercial network for which they would be the moving forces. With this in mind these merchants dominated life in Montreal in all its important aspects. They were the principal employers and also wielded political power, since they belonged to the group of justices of the peace who acted as municipal council before the city was incorporated. Even after the first city council was elected in 1833, the merchants were still not excluded from power; some of them were elected to council, and in any case, from 1837 to 1840 the city was again governed by justices of the peace. Some of these merchants occupied high positions as members of the assembly, the legislative council or executive council. Furthermore, the merchants quite early on established the means to exercise their power: from the late eighteenth century on, the Beaver Club provided them with an opportunity to meet; the Bank of Montreal, founded in 1817, enabled them to extend their hold upon the economic sector, and in 1822 they established the Committee of Trade, the direct predecessor of the present Montreal Board of Trade, which facilitated the exercise of political influence.
Concurrent with the merchants' activities another, predominantly francophone, part of the Montreal bourgeoisie exercised an indirect control over urban development through the land and real estate business. The Berthelet, Viger and Papineau families were particularly active in this sector. Pierre Berthelet, for instance, was the city's wealthiest landowner; in 1825, he owned twenty-three lots or buildings.
In addition to the merchants and landowners, of whom the latter often pursued other occupations as well, a number of members of the liberal professions lived in Montreal. Lawyers, notaries and doctors practised in the city's courts and hospitals and, as elsewhere in Lower Canada, a good many lawyers and notaries were active in politics.
From the middle of the eighteenth century to 1850, the manufacturing sector grew in Montreal. In the city's early history very few goods were produced locally and had, as a result, to be imported. With the emergence of craftsmen, however, the population's requirements for manufactured goods were gradually satisfied by local production. At this stage of development, goods were produced mainly in small workshops by the craftsman, assisted by a few apprentices. Certain sectors, however, already foreshadowed the industrial city with its proletariat. Along with craftsmen there were clerks, small merchants and shopkeepers for whom work would slow down during the winter when shipping was disrupted, but would pick up again as soon as the shipping season opened.
At the bottom of the social pyramid were a great many labourers and servants. In the 1825 census, which was particularly well conducted in Montreal, these two occupations accounted for forty percent of all listed occupations. Such was the lot of immigrants, whether they came from the surrounding countryside or from Ireland or England. Their living conditions were precarious, especially during the winter when jobs became scarce, and they were indirectly supported by the merchants who wanted to be sure of manpower during the summer. It was for this reason that charitable organizations financed by merchants took care of a large proportion of these labourers and servants.
Social tensions in Montreal during the period of 1760-1850 were aggravated by changes in the city's ethnic character. Before 1815, immigrants were few in number; there was some migration from the rural areas to the city, and a trickle of immigration from Great Britain. But after 1815 a flood of immigrants from the British Isles, most of them Irish, began to arrive and, in a few years, changed the face of Montreal. Between 1832 and 1861 a majority of the city's population was anglophone. The effects could be seen in several areas. First of all, there were physical changes: the architecture of that period was British-inspired, as was evidenced by the terrace houses which sprang up in Montreal during the 1840s. As regards religion, the arrival of new immigrants of different denominations created a pressing need for places of worship; many Protestant congregations and the Irish Catholic church erected buildings over the period 1820-1850. The social and economic life of the city was significantly affected as Irish immigrants became very keen competitors of the French Canadians on the job market. This led to a certain animosity between the groups, which erupted in violence at the time of election activities.
Montreal's urban area was being differentiated along both social and ethnic lines; it was during these years that the city's traditional distinction between the anglophone west and francophone east took shape. Whereas in the 1825 census francophones and anglophones were about equally represented in all suburbs, except Sainte-Anne, by 1851 the distribution had become clearly polarized. In 1825 francophones made up more than fifty-four percent of the population, but only forty-five percent in 1851. By that time, French Canadians were concentrated in the districts east of St. Lawrence Street and, in addition, accounted for barely more than a third of the population of the old city. The principal anglophone groups were those born in Lower Canada and the Irish; together they made up more than forty percent of the population. The Irish retained their hold on Sainte-Anne, but could be found elsewhere as well. Divisions were also based on social class; in 1825, the bourgeoisie resided mainly inside the old city and in the Saint-Antoine suburb, while the other suburbs presented a more composite social picture. At that time, social differentiation occurred between streets much more than between suburbs. However, some suburbs did have distinctive characteristics. Sainte-Anne, for example, was a point of arrival for Irish immigrants, and had a very high proportion of labourers and servants. With slight variations, these characteristics were still in evidence by 1850.
Urban living conditions.
The most striking feature of life in the pre-industrial cities was without a doubt the recurrence of great catastrophes. The cities seemed powerless to control both natural disasters and diseases. In Montreal these calamities were fires, epidemics, and to a lesser extent, floods.
Fire was the most immediate threat to a city in which, in 1825 and still in 1851, more than three-fifths of the buildings were constructed of wood. In the old city, as a result of fires in the eighteenth century, stone buildings had replaced wooden ones, but in the suburbs not even a fifth of the houses were made of stone. In 1765, for example, 180 houses were lost in a fire; three years later, a similar number of houses burned down, and there was yet another outbreak of fire in 1803. Finally came the last of the great fires of Montreal, which, in its very magnitude, made an indelible impression on the memory of Montrealers; in early July 1852, fire broke out in the Saint-Laurent suburb. By the time the fire had run its course, the city was 1200 houses the poorer, and the site of the present Lafontaine Park had been turned into a camp for the thousands left homeless.
Less spectacular but even more deadly were the epidemics. In 1832 the first cholera epidemic struck the city, ravaging the population. Between June and September, there were at least 1,904 deaths attributable to cholera; this constituted a doubling of the death rate and gave Montreal, along with Quebec, the unenviable record of being amongst the cities of the western world worst hit by the epidemic. There were periodic outbreaks of cholera later on, but these were less severe. In 1847, typhus decimated the Irish immigrant population of Montreal.
The third great scourge, flooding, was more localized. Every spring, the low-lying areas of the city, especially the heavily populated Sainte-Anne district, were threatened by the swollen waters of the St. Lawrence.
It was only when the lives and property of the ruling classes were threatened, that the city as a whole began to mobilize in response to the disasters. Only then did the city turn its attention to setting up an adequate water main and sewer system and to dealing with the problems created by floods. Initially, organization was rather haphazard. There were certainly fire brigades to deal with fires, but they were manned by volunteers. Moreover, their effectiveness was somewhat diminished as they also functioned as sports and social clubs. The water main system was quite rudimentary: beginning in 1800, two successive companies supplied water to subscribers by means of a primitive network of pipes. Very few houses were serviced in this way, and drinking water supplies still came mainly from the water seller, who, with a barrel on a horse-drawn cart, went around to houses distributing water drawn from the river. The water was untreated.
The sewer system really only developed in the 1840s; until that time, inaction was the order of the day. Medical reports and travellers' accounts condemned the habit of dumping refuse in the snow during the winter, with the result that in the spring many yards were turned into nauseating and unhealthy cesspools. The municipal administration of the period was not very concerned with such problems. There were a number of by-laws forbidding specific practices considered dangerous to public health or representing a fire hazard, but nothing more. The municipality fulfilled its responsibilities concerning public health much as it depended on private initiative for fire fighting. During an epidemic, a public health system was rapidly set up, only to be dismantled as soon as the danger was past; if any recommendations were made, they were never implemented.
With this general setting in mind, let us look at housing in Montreal. The typical house of the period was a wooden, one-or-two-storey building with a sloping roof and dormer windows. Unfortunately, very few dwellings of this type have survived fire and the wrecker's ball. Consequently, housing conditions in the nineteenth century are often assessed on the basis of houses built of stone which have survived. These were mainly to be found in the old city. Built in the traditional style and not unlike the wooden ones, the stone houses had one or two storeys, a sloping roof and dormer windows. In the course of the nineteenth century, the traditional wood and stone buildings gave way to British or American style houses which were higher and had less sloping roofs. This trend began toward 1840-1850.
With a certain time-lag the number of houses seems to have followed the pattern of population growth; whereas in 1825, there were 7.5 inhabitants to a house, in 1851, the proportion had risen to 8 people per house, which seems to point to a tendency towards a shortage of housing.
Along with this residential construction, the city embarked upon an extensive public building programme. Many churches were built to meet the needs of the growing population. The most impressive of these was undoubtedly the new Catholic parish church of Montreal, Notre-Dame, built in neo-Gothic style between 1824 and 1829. First class hotels were opened to cater to what seems to have been largely an American clientele. In 1842 the municipality began work on the vast Bonsecours market with its imposing architecture. Towards 1833, John Ostell completed the customs building, commissioned by the government, on the present day Place Royale. A little later, in the 1840s, the Sainte-Anne market was converted to house the Parliament and its associated offices. The period 1820-1850 was thus marked by a sustained activity in public building, thereby reflecting the new status of the city.
Institutions were very slow to adjust to new conditions and to problems posed by urban expansion. There was a need for an elected city council. Provincial laws pertaining to local conditions were applied by justices of the peace who thus exercised a trusteeship over the city's administration. They adopted by-laws to prevent totally haphazard expansion, but this was not enough for the local bourgeoisie. The merchants demanded the creation of a municipal administration which would do more to stimulate the city's development by providing better coordination and carrying out essential public works. This demand was met in 1833, with the election of the first city councillors and of Jacques Viger as the first mayor of Montreal. The system was interrupted by the 1837-1838 rebellion, and it was only after 1840 that a municipal government was established on a permanent basis. Montreal witnessed considerable transformations during this period. Around 1780, it was only a small town, largely French-speaking and dominated by an English-speaking bourgeoisie involved in the fur trade. By the middle of the nineteenth century, fur trading, which had been the trademark of the city for nearly two centuries, had disappeared as a significant activity. The city had become a colonial economic capital, and the pace of its growth had increased. The British were in the majority, and social divisions had become more pronounced.
Montreal, however, remained a pre-industrial city, typified as much by its main economic activity as by its social structure and organization of labour, and by the living conditions of its inhabitants. A pre-industrial city which, from 1820 on, showed early signs of industrialization.
ICONOGRAPHIC SOURCES
The iconographic sources we have drawn upon for this Canada's Visual History set pose certain historical problems. The maps and plans, like the paintings and engravings, are not only illustrations of past events, they are interpretations of them. Consequently, they should be used with the greatest of caution and their evidence cross-checked as much as possible. John Adams' map of 1825 (illustration 4) for instance, is highly reliable; first, because Adams was a man of acknowledged ability and second, because the facts can be checked against the census of the same year. Even so, total confidence in him is not recommended; when he shows Place d'Armes on his plan, he shows it as it was in 1830 and 1840, when the old parish church and its tower had been demolished, and not as it actually looked in 1825.
The same caveat applies to paintings and engravings: R.A. Sproule had no hesitation in depicting Notre-Dame Church as being in proud possession of its twin towers in 1830, even though it was to be another ten years before they were completed. So a questioning attitude has always to be adopted towards visual records of the period when these are to be used as a source of information for social history rather than purely as illustrations.
