Sherry Olson

Research Note / Note De Recherche

Ethnic Partition of the Work Forcein 1840s Montréal

Introduction

AS AN APPRAISAL OF ETHNIC WEIGHTING in the Montréal labour force, I introduce the 1842 manuscript census to estimate the relative sizes of four cultural communities and the social distances among them. The logic of grouping is schematized in Figure 1 in terms of shared language or religion. Since each community occupied a distinctive niche in the urban economy, it is possible that ethnic differences, often cited as a root of the violence of the 1840s, may have veiled its economic basis. For this reason, the ethnic partition of work, coupled with differential vulnerability of the several communities to economic stress, becomes critical to interpretation of the volatility of the 1840s.

Figure 1. Schematic of Four Cultural Communities, 1842
Areas in the diamond represent relative sizes of the four communities and the overlap of shared religion or language. Bar graphs for each community show the percentage of distribution by occupational status, from merchant bourgeoisie at the top (A) to labourers at the bottom (F). Source: Manuscript Census of Lower Canada 1842, as tallied in Table 6.

The political violence of that decade has been overshadowed by the Rebellions of 1837–1839, which were more readily perceived as a milestone in a nation-building historiography. Indeed, imposition of Union in 1841 has been so generally regarded as closure to a drama that textbook accounts, even the periodization of programs of teaching and research, often break off at this point.¹ Yet the decade of dénouement was as bumpy as the winter roads.² Crucial decisions were made, rescinded, revised, or re-imposed, and historians face numerous unresolved questions about the interests at stake.

In that decade of upheaval and experiment, the city of Montréal was a pivot on which events turned. It had been clear since 1812 that its site at the Lachine Rapids was critical to the economic strategy and military logistics of British North America. The uprisings fifteen years later were concentrated in the Montréal region, as a zone of relatively productive and intensive agriculture, steeper inequality, and heavier seigneurial burden.³ From 1840 onward, Montréal outran Québec City in population, and its hinterland became a growth economy, forming one of the best-integrated regions of Lower Canada, with the city as its nodal point.⁴ Waterpower developed on the Lachine Canal in the 1840s launched Canadian industrialization;⁵ and a plethora of railway and telegraph projects made the city the fulcrum of modernization, and in its wake opposition, agitation, and repression. Montréal was, as it is today, a primary node of cultural exchange, cultural conflict, and cultural compromise.⁶

Economic transformation, with its opportunities for speculation in urban land, induced a shift in the conception of property.⁷ Both Young and Kolish have pointed to ordinances imposed by the Special Council (1840–1841) as the first steps toward dismantling the seigneurial system.⁸ The Special Council also abolished imprisonment for debt, withdrew the vote from women, and moved toward "reform" of civil law,⁹ intruding, as Young has argued, into family, marriage, and community relations: rights of dower, inheritance, marital authority, and female access to public space. All of these actions evoked resistance.¹⁰

New instruments such as the Montréal Turnpike Trust (1840) placed power in the hands of engineers, bankers, and merchant-manufacturers.¹¹ "Restoration of the assembly in 1841 and the achievement of responsible government delivered power — and the accompanying problems of establishing authority — to the local élite."¹² Fyson, even while arguing for institutional continuity, has identified mechanisms by which a Montréal élite imposed its will.¹³ Senior, detailing collusion of the garrison with "the English Party" of 1840–1848, underscored the frequency of violence in the process.¹⁴ While the firing of Parliament in 1849 is usually situated in the ethnic hostilities in the wake of the Rebellion, one might inquire more deeply into the harsh fiscal restructuring that was underway, affecting both the Montréal élite and those at the economic margins, in the outskirts of the city.¹⁵

Virtually every dimension of life was transformed in the 1840s by movements that touched the quick of convictions, modified habits, and founded institutions, changing the face of the city as well as its role in a Canadian polity. Religious fervor was revitalized and the groundwork laid for an ultramontanism whose fundamental tenet was superiority of religious over secular power. Yvan Lamonde's latest book spotlights the intellectual reconstruction: the expansion of publishing, emerging threads of romanticism, and the way in which the alliance of Throne and Altar — a Protestant throne and a Catholic altar — throttled a vigorous liberalism and converted a political conception of the nation into a cultural nationalism.¹⁶

Experimentation was everywhere evident in flurries of excitement over annexation, the tithe, and the usury law. Critical choices introduced patronage as a habitual instrument of government,¹⁷ imposed local taxation, and created municipal powers of self-government within limits which confine us today.¹⁸ Decisions of the 1840s established sectarian management of asylums, hospitals, and correctional institutions, and ensured for 150 years to come confessionalism in the schools of Quebec.¹⁹ Struggles of the 1840s marked out fault lines for future confrontations.

All of those actions and outcomes were affected by the partition of property, social status, and economic roles among the several ethnic components of the population. Despite general acknowledgement of the importance of class and privilege, little progress has been made toward taking their measure. Attention to both artisans and labourers remains fragmentary; Protestant evangelism is usually narrated as a separate story, disconnected from the Catholic "réveil,"²⁰ and despite recognition of a changing of the guard in the 1840s, we have no satisfactory analysis of the social origins and social structure for either the Anglo-Protestant community or the city's Irish-born residents.²¹ To fill such holes in the historiography, and to develop a more coherent picture of the ideologies, the coalitions, and the impacts anticipated from new legislation and jurisprudence, it becomes important to open up a source virtually untouched: namely, the manuscript census of 1842.

From the census it is possible to identify members of the Irish Catholic community, of particular interest in that configuration of social relations. Despite the increasing stream of immigrants from 1825 onward, scholars, for want of appropriate sources, have said little about the status of the Irish in Montréal on the eve of the massive famine arrivals of 1847 and 1849.²² Since famine migrants are often presumed to have transformed the Irish community, we look to the census of 1842 for a window onto the receiving community. Montréal and Québec City, in contrast to most cities of England, North America, and Australasia, offered an unusual reception, since immigrants encountered a Catholic majority that hemmed in "anti-papist" prejudices. In the second half of the 19th century, Irish Catholics of Montréal formed a "third people," distinctive in their demographic behavior and institutional allegiances. With colleagues, I have reported elsewhere the relatively high rates of survival of their infants, who as young adults moving into the labour force made substantial advances over their parents in terms of occupational status and housing.²³ Factors in their upward mobility were, arguably, the assertiveness of the receiving community and the alliances they made. We shall see from the census of 1842 that the Irish-Catholic community of Montréal was already numerous and substantial.

Scholarly neglect of the Montréal Irish, both Catholic and Protestant, is an anomaly if we look back on the past decade, with ambitious re-examinations of the social evolution of Ireland, monographs on Irish immigrants in scores of cities, and the attention given to the Irish in other parts of Canada. Donald Akenson, working first in an Ontario county and subsequently in the global literature of the Irish diaspora, has challenged the "long and doleful historiography" that Canadians adopted from an "American model."²⁴ Akenson objected in particular to Pentland's caricature of the Irish of Canada as "Catholic in religion, urban in residence, unskilled in occupation ... a lumpen proletariat who were unequipped to deal with a modernizing economy."²⁵ The ethnocentric flaw in Pentland's account of proletarianization and the want of local empirical evidence were roundly criticized by labor historians.²⁶ Stanley Ryerson reformulated the critical questions about relations of property and labour on a Canada-wide canvas;²⁷ and Bleasdale and Way have since created entirely new accounts of labour on the public works, founded on a richer documentation.²⁸ Lamonde develops the interplay between demands for self-government in Canada and in Ireland, tracks the connections between O'Connell's supporters and the Patriote leaders, and examines how in the 1840s the Irish Catholics of Lower Canada "imposeront leur présence dans la vie politique et électorale de même que dans des formes culturelles comme la presse et les associations."²⁹

Why then have scholars so long hesitated to put to use the one comprehensive source available to us, the census of 1842? That census has been ignored, first because of contemporary dissatisfaction with its implementation in outlying regions. No tables were published, and even the manuscript register of households does not contain the full name and age of each individual member, that is, the data that would provide secure identifications to satisfy genealogists and historical demographers.³⁰ Work with this census shows it to be nevertheless a valuable source for Montréal, with complete coverage of city and urbanized fringes in the embrace of the Parish of Montréal.³¹ The data can be checked for internal consistency and compared with several other contemporary sources, notably a taxroll of tenants, a city directory, and parish registers of high quality. Its street-by-street organization, in conjunction with the detailed 1846 map of surveyor James Cane, provides cues to residential patterns that influenced interactions among the four groups.³² Most important, the household-centred structure of the census offers insights into organization of the labour force: the household was the primary workplace and was backed by force of law as an institution for the management and discipline of the urban workforce.

After a brief discussion of present-day understandings of labour force segmentation, and a review of the methods I employed for specifying ethnicity of households and handling complementary sources, I shall report the distinctive economic profiles of the four communities, make a tentative interpretation of their relative social status, and highlight the differences in household structure and residential pattern which framed a social space.³³

The Logic of Segmentation

Labour market studies in the quarter-century just ended have demonstrated how global pressures restructure urban economies, with massive international transfers of workers and realignments of their bargaining power. Understanding labour markets as segmented by gender and ethnicity has stimulated new discussion of the evolution of factory labour since the late 19th century, and some of these ideas can be usefully applied to a commercial city of the 1840s.³⁴ Edwards, Reich, and Gordon in 1975 shaped a distinction between primary and secondary labour markets, essentially "good jobs" and "bad jobs." They argued that the two do not necessarily converge to a single market, and that their persistence as distinct arenas for wage-setting is made possible by social distinctions.³⁵ They showed how "ethnics" were confined to the bad jobs: non-union jobs defined as unskilled, subordinate, and subject to high turnover, with confined lines of promotion.³⁶ Mechanisms that allow the compartmented structure to persist depend upon distancing some workers by racial or ethnic typing. The basic message of analysts of segmented labour markets of the 1970s, useful in the study of any era, is this recognition: "The market is a social and not an exclusively economic institution."³⁷

Feminist scholars pursued the analysis of segmentation by dissecting its gendered basis.³⁸ More difficult is interpretation of the interactions between ideologies of ethnicity and gender, but the empirical findings of Reitz et al. on the partition of work roles in Toronto in the 1970s are widely applicable: "The specific occupations in which women are segregated are not the same for each ethnic group."³⁹ Their interpretation has been reinforced by recent studies of the international division of labour, and of immigrant roles in New York and London. Because labour force segmentation is multi-dimensional, an understanding of "otherness" must take into account the interplay of ideologies of gender, race, religion, age, origin, and place.⁴⁰ Helpful in this respect is Frager's concept of interlocking hierarchies that ensure that labour market segmentation responds to shifts in ethnic balance and technological change.⁴¹ Such shifts, familiar in the 1970s and 1980s, also occurred in Montréal in response to the massive arrivals of immigrants in the late 1840s.

An important feature of a segmented system is the vulnerability of workers in the secondary market. Even at the best of times and in the wealthiest of societies, people who hold the bad jobs live close to the margin of subsistence and whenever the economy as a whole is brought under stress, this group is pushed below the line of humane existence. Others who find their circumstances reduced attempt to transfer the pressures downward, and find a justification in othering the group they perceive as not quite human, or, in 19th-century parlance, "undeserving." This is the utility (for some) of the ideology behind segmentation, and it is the spring of resistance, militancy, and mobilization that perennially bring the system into question.

Economic stresses may arise from various causes — deflationary, political, ecological, or military — and despite brief speculative bonanzas in flour, timber, and real estate, the seven or eight years following the census of 1842 imposed severe pressures on the urban economy. Commerce was still subject to persistent scarcity of specie and a two-year turnover time for merchant capital, vulnerable to any collapse of credit in Britain or the US. Leading up to Christmas 1842, six months after the census, a broker noted in his journal: "18th (November) first snow this fall. 21 Radenhurst Turnbull & co failed this day. 22 Patterson & Co do. John Collins do ... at night snow and all 1st December fell snow. 13 December Bigelow & co failed. 26 December Bagg & Campbell stopt. 24 Playfair stopt. 29 John Willock stopt. Great fall snow at night, 30 snowed all day."⁴² He added in a letter of 4 January, "Money at present is very scarce here, scarcely any persons paying their bills, nothing but failures daily. Numbers of our butchers are making great sacrifices to keep their credit good at the banks.... Sales of property ... very low indeed."⁴³ In October 1843, the engineer of Public Works had already proposed to take full advantage of the squeeze on labour: "In consequence of the large immigration, as well as in consideration of the then existing low rates of provisions, and other necessaries, upon the prices of which the cost of public works greatly depends, it was deemed advisable ... that no time should be lost in commencing with, as many as possible, of these works...."⁴⁴

While such a public works program might today be envisioned as a countercyclical policy, this was not its object, and appeals to the Crown argued that channel-dredging and canal-building were critical to the future of British North America as a commercial colonial enterprise. At this point entered into the equation the much-debated effects of freer trade: the Canada Corn Act 1841, reduction of timber duties, suspension of of the Corn Laws January 1847, and the passage of the US Drawback Act.⁴⁵ The repeal of protection, which dampened timber exports and diverted shipments of grain through New York instead of Montréal, affected the value of property. The Governor, in a letter of 23 April 1849 echoed the brokers: "Property in most of the Canadian towns, and more especially in the Capital, has fallen 50p.ct in value within the last three years. Three fourths of the commercial men are bankrupt."⁴⁶ All of these factors combined to produce a political crisis among Canadian merchants, provincial deficits in 1848 and 1849, and a crisis in municipal finance that involved draconian restructuring.⁴⁷

These disruptions were aggravated by seasonal stresses. The winter of 1846–1847 had been more harrowing than usual, and the drama of March 1847 when a hundred emigrant ships were waiting off shore for a late spring to break up the ice in the St Lawrence, brings into a single frame the ecological disaster in Ireland, the cruelty of its management, the transfer of human freight, and the intense seasonality of the Montréal economy. Between mid-May and mid-October, tens of thousands of immigrants were landed at Québec or its quarantine station at Grosse-Île. The survivors were forwarded in boatloads to the docks of Montréal, in all a number larger than the population of the city. Over the unusual warm spell of 50 days in July and August, 1,200 deaths from typhus were recorded at the immigrant sheds at Montréal, 400 orphans were under care, and in the winter of 1848 the Grey Nuns were still issuing 72 buckets of soup daily to Irish and French Canadians in alternate shifts.⁴⁸

The first small breakthroughs towards overcoming the annual freeze-up of the urban economy were observed at the end of the summer of 1847, when La Minerve reported the "three marvels of the century" — steam railway, canal, and telegraph — visible from the Lachine road: "d'un côté cette file de chars poussés par la vapeur et qui franchissent l'espace avec la rapidité de la flèche, pendant que de l'autre côté on aperçoit les steamboats et les autres vaisseaux chargés de produits qui descendent et remontent dans le canal, et dans le centre, la ligne de télégraphe."⁴⁹ But the crisis persisted, aggravated by an equally massive immigration in the summer of 1849, another hot summer, and an epidemic of cholera.

The economic pressures were interwoven with outbreaks of violence, notably electoral violence in March 1841, March 1842, April 1844 (a stabbing), December 1844 (two deaths), April 1845, and April 1846 (two deaths).⁵⁰ Violence accompanied repression of strikes on the Beauharnois canal works in 1843 (eleven deaths), and, closer to Montréal, on the Lachine canal works in January and March 1843, April and August 1844, followed by canallers' "outrages" in October.⁵¹ Oratory and journalism were exceptionally virulent from February through August 1849, and provocations by the Anglo-Protestant merchant élite reached a peak with the firing of the hall of Legislative Assembly 25 April 1849.⁵² In each incident where a life was lost and a formal inquest was held, contemporaries identified ethnic rivalries as a factor: French versus British, French versus Irish, Catholic versus Protestant, or Connaught versus Cork.⁵³

Much work remains to be done to understand the relationship between these episodes, class formation in 1840s Montréal, and the significance of those processes for shifts in the ethnic balance. The objective in this paper is a modest preliminary: merely to use the census of 1842 as an X-ray of ethnic partition of the work force. From the bare skeleton we may be able to identify some deformations which point to stresses in the economic environment. At the outset, we need to frame our questions in a straightforward way: What ethnic components can be distinguished in the urban population? How were workers grouped into households? What clues are offered to the status of a household? How were the households distributed over the urban space? Finally, how were the layers of status and the differentiated spaces of the city constituted in ethnic terms?

Methods of Inquiry

In order to answer those questions, we shall need, within the constraints of available sources, to define categories of ethnicity used in classifying households. It is necessary to establish who belonged to the labour force, to categorize economic sectors and status indicators, and to make a meaningful districting of the city. One of the advantages of the census manuscript is that it covers only the urbanized area of the Parish of Montréal. This can be seen in Table 1, where my tallies from the surviving manuscript census for 1842 are matched with a table published for Montréal County in 1844. The 1842 document contains only half as many households, very few farms or cows, and a much smaller proportion of French Canadians and a higher proportion of people of other origins. Of 6,250 households in the 1842 document (excluding vacant dwellings and businesses), only 83 reported that they occupied or cultivated any land; about 12 per cent possessed at least one cow, 13 per cent at least one horse, but only one third of those (about 250 households) had as much as a cow and a team of two horses.

Use of the manuscript census is constrained also by a framework that assigned a personal identity and occupational role to only one individual as "head of household," and situated the household in a particular street but without a "house number."⁵⁴ Because the household is the basic unit, the census taker recorded counts of its members in various categories: the numbers of servants, of sheep, or of persons by country of birth, by religious denomination, and by gender.

To arrive at classifications consistent with social meanings of the time, I explored the tags used by the press for "placing" actors in the system of social relations. Journalists of the 1840s, in reporting fires, thefts, deaths, accidents, or freakish or comic episodes, systematically pegged individuals into a four-dimensional frame: first, a trade or occupation, second, cues to language and religion; third, a role in a household such as "father of a young family," "Mrs Smith's lodger," or "apprentice to Mr Beaudry," and fourth, a street-corner location for the event, residence, or workplace. While any interpretation of a system of social relations must remain tentative, journalists' tags coincide with the conceptual structure of census questionnaires. Journalists' ethnic references were exacerbated by editors' prejudices: the Protestant Witness, for example, like Dun's credit agent, was untrusting of "those of Irish persuasion."⁵⁵ My decision to aggregate seventeen categories of religions, for example, into two (Catholic and Protestant), follows the rough and often repugnant guidance of those contemporary discriminations.

Ethnicity Inferred

In order to sort households into four cultural communities, I cross-referenced the members of each household from the manuscript tally of their birthplaces and religions. The procedure required some intuitive leaps, and I obtained additional cues to linguistic affiliation by inference from names and origins. I assumed, for example, that in a merchant family of five, such as Thomas Day's (in Table 2), the report of one born in England refers to one of the parents, the two "Anglo Canadians" to a spouse and child, and the two servants were probably the two Roman Catholics and the two of French Canadian origin. The remainder of the analysis is based on the 6,044 households that could be classed in the four principal groups (97 per cent). From such awkward assumptions a particular household may well be wrongly classified,⁵⁶ but each of the resulting four groups, as shown in Table 3, possess a reasonable homogeneity, sufficient to reveal strong group differences.

In the set of 2,522 households classed as French Canadian, 97 per cent of members were Catholics and 94 per cent were reported as French Canadian; indeed, 5 out of 6 of those households were composed entirely (100 per cent) of French Canadians, 93 per cent entirely of Catholics. In the other groups mixing was slightly more common, with about 10 per cent of household members on the other side of the Catholic/Protestant religious divide from the assigned identity. In households classed Irish Catholic, the membership included, therefore, one Protestant among every ten persons. We find 60 per cent born in Ireland, with another 9 per cent born in England, Scotland, or the US; 27 per cent were the Anglo-Canadians I have presumed to be their children, and 4 per cent French Canadians. Households classed as Irish Protestant resembled them: 62 per cent born in Ireland, with 29 per cent more their Anglo-Canadian children. Among households classed "Other Protestant," a greater diversity reflects a larger share of older and longer-settled couples: over half born in the British Isles, with a larger share (one third) designated Anglo-Canadians.

"Irish Catholic" and "Irish Protestant" households, as populations of more recent arrival, more often included a religious mix. Of the former, three-quarters were composed entirely of Catholics (78 per cent); of the latter, 69 per cent entirely of Protestants. "Other Protestant" households, which contained larger numbers of servants, were less often "pure," only 60 per cent entirely Protestant. The other 40 per cent correspond closely to the 42 per cent in which a servant was present. Thus, the number of Catholics present in "Other Protestant" households was about one in eight overall, or, in the mixed households, one in five.

As one might expect, the array of Protestant religious denominations reflects levels of religious activity in their regions of origin (Table 4). In households inferred Irish Protestant, close to half the members were Anglican (48 per cent), the remainder Scotch Church or British Wesleyan. In "Other Protestant" households, of rather mixed national origins, primarily English and Scottish (37 per cent), we find fewer Anglicans (36 per cent), a comparable share of Scotch and other Presbyterian, and a greater variety of Methodist, Congregational, and Baptist.

The logic of shared language or religion, as diagrammed in Figure 1, is apparent in the household data, illustrating the polarity of the "French" or "English party" and the zones of greatest fraternization and greatest tension: French Canadians with Irish Catholics, Irish Catholics with Irish Protestants, and Irish Protestants with other Protestants. This structure is still apparent in census and news media twenty years later. It is important to note the inclusion among "Irish Catholics" of some Catholics born in Scotland, England, or the US.⁵⁷ In certain years, presence of a regiment containing Irish Protestant soldiers was especially favourable to cross-religion marriages.⁵⁸ For the 1840s we have more hints at the tensions and intensity of religious feeling, with numerous abjurations, mixed marriages, clerical pronouncements, vigorous revivalism, and proselytizing activities.⁵⁹ Since the Irish-born amounted to a third of all English-speaking Protestants, we need to know more about their lines of communication with Irish Catholics⁶⁰ and with the governing Anglican leadership in the newly chartered municipal Corporation (1840), the courts, the colonial government, the Legislative Council, and Legislative Assembly.⁶¹ Montréal's role as the seat of government of a "United Canada" in the years 1843–1849 reinforced a strong resonance among all these institutions.

Complementary Sources

In order to take full advantage of the 1842 census, I shall refer to several other sources, each with its own logic and its own bias. The most important is the municipal taxroll where rental value provides an estimator of purchasing power for every household. The local taxroll is unusual because, in principle, it enrolled all tenant householders and business occupants as well as owners, and the rental values can therefore be used to rank occupation titles by relative economic status.⁶² A city directory published by Lovell in 1848 is often useful for confirming an address or differentiating households of father and son, but the census alone permits an adequate multivariate definition of ethnicity.

As part of teams studying infant survival and urban ecology, I have in fact cross-referenced the three sources — the census of 1842, the city directory of 1848, and the taxroll of 1848 — in an iterative process of matching surnames, first names, streets of residence, and occupations. Of 5,192 residential entries in the rental taxroll, 75 per cent can be matched to the directory, 45 per cent to the census 5 years earlier, and 41 per cent to both sources. Although annual moves were a local habit, concentrated by French-régime standardization of leases to the first day of May,⁶³ the large number of non-matches does not necessarily imply removals out of the city. Sources five years apart are affected by deaths (higher than usual in 1847) and by rearrangements of household membership; but even sources of the same month (like the taxroll and directory) may differ as a result of alternative reporting of household head.⁶⁴ Where a second household occupied the attic of a "one and a half," or, in a "two and a half," the dwelling over the shop, we can sometimes confirm a directory entry with a second address around the corner. In a household with two or three incomes and diversified economic activities, or with a widowed mother present, the name of only one person appears in the taxroll, only one in the census, while one or more may appear in the directory.

The matching efforts provided some insights into the meaning of occupational titles, the logic of missing records, and local practices in a bilingual society, such as ambiguities among printer, typographer, or compositor; the contemporary calque of garde-magasin for storekeeper; as well as a degree of interchangeability that reflected "real" identities or nuances, terms such as grocer, innkeeper or tavernkeeper, policeman or constable, and carpenter or joiner.⁶⁵ Of greater importance to an interpretation of occupations are biases of selection. The commercial directory was more likely to include shopkeepers, professionals, and artisans who sought easy access by their customers, and were less likely to capture day labourers, a practice which in turn implied underrepresentation of the Irish.⁶⁶ While some families were missed in a census or a taxroll, the bias against labourers was not, it appears, as systematic as it was in the directory.

To the census data I made one important adjustment: the male household heads whose occupations are not specified are treated as labourers. This was a conclusion reached after a thoughtful series of tests by Robert Lewis, who compared the data, street by street, with the taxroll of 1848. Census takers in Queen's Ward (later divided into Sainte-Anne and Saint-Antoine wards), appear to have interpreted the question "profession or trade" to exclude those unskilled or unspecialized, who worked by the day.⁶⁷ Because Irish Catholics were numerous in Queen's ward, the adjustment increases the number of labourers in that community by 150 per cent, in other communities by 100 per cent. Throughout the analysis, confrontation of sources is essential, to tease out the significance of the labouring sector to the story, to uncover its ethnic partition, its sensitivity to economic stress, and its susceptibility to political agitation.

Economic Sectors

Just as I assumed that everyone possessed an ethnic identity, in estimating the labour force I treated everybody over fourteen years of age as "working." The census, however, reported occupation or profession for only two sets of people: male household heads and their "servants," male or female. The estimates (Table 5) of ethnic concentrations in various sectors of the economy are based on occupations of household heads, but this demands further exploration into household composition. Neglect of the 2,005 female servants (discussed later), the 4,056 other unmarried women, and the 5,202 unmarried men would introduce serious biases of age, gender, and marital status into analysis of the labour force. The unmarried sons, apprentices, and 671 male servants together amounted to one-fifth of the pool of labour over 14 years of age, the unmarried women one quarter. Neglect of that family labour component would eliminate the whole of the personal service sector, as well as hundreds of seamstresses essential to the clothing sector, and the apprentices and journeymen who were present in rough proportion to artisan heads and who contributed to various sectors of production.⁶⁸ Of butcher Thomas Day's two servants, for example (Table 2), the male, separately classed in the original source, was probably an apprentice butcher. As we shall see, the proportions of such workers differed among the four cultural communities.

The most intractable problem, as in most North American censuses and other Montréal sources to the end of the century, is the absence of information about women's roles in production.⁶⁹ All of these sources are affected by a gendered conception of occupations and a gendered definition of household head. One household in eight was reported as headed by a woman, but her occupation is rarely explicit: she appears in the census merely as "Widow Aussem," "Mrs McCready," or "Miss Telfer." A few milliners, midwives, grocers, and marchandes publiques were designated, but other sources, such as inventories, seizures of property, and market registers, tell us that most women householders (775 persons) were generating income, and that many wives and daughters, in addition to keeping house, were managing a family business or operating a shop or boardinghouse.⁷⁰ Market licenses and petitions show numerous French Canadian and Irish Catholic women among the stallholders, and arrests identify regrattières (hawkers). A well-known hotel keeper, Mme St-Julien, recorded merely as "widow, "was on the night of the census heading a household of 35 persons of diverse origins, likewise Mme Provandier (28) and Mrs Bellamy (25). Since the percentage of female heads varied little among the four cultural groups (slightly higher for Irish Protestants), it has no statistical effect on my overall measurements of ethnic concentration in occupations and economic sectors, but the economic roles of the women householders may have varied in ways we cannot discover.

Table 6 displays male occupational status as six categories, with merchants at the top, professionals (equivalent to a petite bourgeoisie), clerks, skilled, semi-skilled, and, at the bottom, labourers. To generate this classification, the 68 reported occupational titles were sorted by their median rental values, as calculated (independently) from the rental taxroll.⁷¹ Rental valuations provide a good estimator of household purchasing power, since they were based upon floor area, corresponded closely with market rents, and implied proportional outlays on fuelwood and labour for cleaning and maintenance.⁷² Using either this measure or the more conventional categories of Hershberg et al. we discover large differences of ethnic concentration only in the very highest and lowest ranks, that is, the top 10 per cent who were merchants or professionals (rent groups A and B) and the bottom 30 per cent who were labourers (rent group F). ⁷³ This is the "one big thing" that characterized the pecking order in 1842. Of that lowest 30 per cent, Irish Catholics made up 38 per cent, present in nearly twice the numbers one would anticipate (this is the meaning of the concentration quotient of 1.87). In stark contrast, French Canadians and Other Protestants were less often recorded as labourers: Other Protestants only half as often as one might expect (a quotient of 0.51). At the other extreme, in the top 10 per cent, we find 62 per cent "Other Protestant," with a notable contingent of Presbyterians of Scottish origins; nearly three-quarters Protestant overall (74 per cent). The top 10 per cent contained families who controlled real wealth and were visible and powerful in the politics of the new United Canada. Their ranks included individuals who styled themselves gentleman, inspector, honourable, or esquire, and who managed the municipal corporation as councillors and justices of the peace.⁷⁴

Let us look more closely at the middle ranks. In trade — and Montréal was still an essentially commercial city — occupational titles were nuanced. While the term merchant (négociant) was reserved for the "big fish," the term trader more often (but not always) referred to small operators: pedlars or dealers in secondhand goods who were overwhelmingly French Canadian. Storekeepers and commerçants were of middling scale, while the term marchand was somewhat broader and less indicative. Among the middling and smaller fish, the several cultural groups were represented in due proportion, with concentration quotients close to 1.00. In food processing it is not always possible to distinguish crafts and manufactures from services and trade. Butchers, who were licensed by the municipal Corporation to specific outlets and hours, and well networked by kinship and marriage, were two-thirds French Canadian. Some Irish Catholic merchants and traders were successful in their Atlantic connections and their familiarity with butter, pork, cattle, and horses. Individuals reporting themselves as innkeeper or tavernkeeper (aubergiste) were more often Irish Catholic than expected, but grocers, who also sold liquor, were two-thirds Protestant. The census was taken at a time of especially vigorous temperance campaigns, and tavern licenses confirm that grocer was often a euphemism for the liquor dealer, who was supplied at wholesale by the highest-ranking merchants.⁷⁵

Immigrants from England and Ireland were favoured by their higher rates of literacy and schooling, as well as by colonial structures that imposed the use of English in trade, government, military affairs, public works, and intercity transport by steamboat. Among the handful of printers (eleven reported) there were both French and English shops. Clerks, 61 per cent Protestant (nearly half Other Protestant), were primarily pen-pushing clerks in service of merchants and public authorities.⁷⁶ French Canadians accounted for 20 out of 25 notaries who interpreted the French customary law, and 13 of 19 doctors, while English-speaking Protestants dominated other professional and white-collar occupations.

In the middle 60 per cent, cultural differences were woven into a more elaborate segmentation of craft networks that differed in terms of ladders of upward mobility. Within each were further nuances of entrepreneurial scale, clientèle, and neighbourhood.⁷⁷ In the display of economic sectors in Table 5, modeled on summary tabulations of later censuses,⁷⁸ French Canadians were overrepresented in the sectors of largest employment: wood-working (12 per cent of household heads), construction (10 per cent), shoe and leather (7 per cent), and hauling (7 per cent), where they occupied the identifiable skilled, artisanal, and entrepreneurial roles. Irish Catholics were decidedly underrepresented in the tabulations, but were present on every worksite in the supporting cast of labourers who were massively employed in construction, excavation, hauling, and dock labour. Since labourers were largely occupied with moving earth and loading ships, rafts, and carts, the construction and transport sectors were in fact larger than the table suggests, and Irish Catholic participation in them was considerable.⁷⁹ In transport, carters were reported 79 per cent French Canadian, as were all of the boatmen, navigators, and river pilots. Invisible are the French and Irish youth who rivaled as shantymen in the woods, and the Irish raftsmen who were spring visitors to the city on a massive scale.⁸⁰

Despite the size of the construction sector and its overall concentration of French Canadians (quotient 1.31), the building trades seem to have been segmented. There were, for example, more Irish Catholics than we would expect among plasterers. Bricklayers were few, nearly all Protestant, but stone masons and stonecutters were predominately French Canadian.⁸¹ Joiners, ship carpenters, and carpenters were heavily French Canadian, and other wood-workers as well: sawyers, coopers, carriage-makers, and carvers. Segmentation in the crafts was perpetuated by apprenticeship and kinship. Among shoemakers, saddlers, tanners, and other leather trades, the strong French Canadian presence was based on traditions and kinship networks centred in villages just outside the city limits, but Irish Catholics were represented in normal proportions, Irish Protestants in exceptional numbers, while Other Protestants were more often importers or retailers of shoes.⁸² The size of the clothing sector is understated: of 200 tailors, one-third were Irish Catholic (concentration quotient 1.41), but in addition to the milliners and dressmakers who headed households or their own shops, there were much larger numbers of women who worked at home and daughters who worked as seamstresses, apprentices, and servants in the shops, many of them of Irish origins.⁸³

A closer look at specific occupational titles suggests further distinctions in the cultural economy, but the small numbers require caution. Prior to the important advance of steam power in the 1850s, metal-workers, machinists, mechanics, founders, or boilermakers were few in numbers. For French Canadians, the crafts of tinsmith, roofer, carriagemaker, and wheelmaker provided springboards into mechanical work. Surprisingly few Irish Catholics were recorded in metal-working, carting, and other sectors where they emerged in greater numbers by 1861.⁸⁴ Ten out of fifteen millers were Other Protestant. No soap boilers were enumerated among French Canadians, but they were present among the Irish as an adjunct of their dealings in animals and animal products such as butter and lard. In the selection of policemen, where stature and reputation for brawn were criteria more prized than literacy, the census reports a concentration of Irish Catholics, as in Boston, Toronto, and New York: eight out of eighteen, with three others Irish Protestants.

Those niches of economic activity imply a meshing of gears such that the four groups dealt with one another on a daily basis in kitchen and garden, across the shop counter, at the butchers' stalls in the markets, on the "beach" where firewood was measured and sold, and on the docks where gangs were hired to unload a ship and carters to remove the goods to warehouses. They negotiated prices and sureties in the notary's office, at Her Majesty's Commissariat, or, more often, in the tavern, and the extent of their interactions created a need for agents and intermediaries who had achieved a minimal bilingualism.⁸⁵ Irish Catholic women, through apparently marginal roles as servants, penetrated upper-class homes and all the commercial places of greatest sociability and intercultural exchange; they also show higher rates of intermarriage with the three other groups.⁸⁶ While partners in mixed marriages were often regarded (notably by the clergy) as cultural deserters or transfuges, many such couples responded with resilience to the contradictions and assumed gatekeeper functions in society.⁸⁷

Social Status

To supplement my rankings of occupations from the rental taxroll, the census provides several alternative indicators of status. In the mercantile city, property ownership was a prime distinction, and the privileges of voting and holding office were determined by the value of the property one owned. Whether there was a "working class" is debatable, but there certainly was a "propertied class." The census taker reported whether the household head owned the property in which the family resided, and some significance can be attached to the differentials: 27.5 per cent of French Canadian household heads, 18.5 per cent of Other Protestant, 12 per cent of Irish Protestant, and 8 per cent of Irish Catholic. Such figures understate the true number of property owners, since it was common enough for a wealthy family to be at once tenant and landlord to others,⁸⁸ and one obtains more reasonable and more uniform values by adding the percentage who, not being owners of their dwellings, were nevertheless entitled to vote (Table 7). Under the charter of 1845, this included the owner or occupant of a house that yielded £8 yearly rent.⁸⁹

From 20th-century patterns we might expect a correlation of social status with homeownership. This was not the case. Although French Canadian Montréalers have a reputation for tenancy, in 1842 their ownership of the dwellings they occupied (27.5 per cent) was substantially higher than Protestants, and Irish Catholics' exceptionally low.⁹⁰ The phenomenon arose from other features of what Bourdieu refers to as "cultural and social capital,"⁹¹ notably French Canadian ownership of the rural lots into which urban growth was spilling, and French Canadian predominance in masonry and wood-working skills adapted to a house-by-house scale of building (Table 6).⁹² Their owner occupancy was concentrated in very small houses on the urban fringe. Among wealthier French Canadians, investments in real estate were employed, under the Custom of Paris, to secure marriage contracts and inheritances, virtually the only forms of life insurance on which to found a family.⁹³ While colonial land grants in the rural townships were the basis for slow and erratic development, a fast-growing city offered immense scope for speculative gains in land development, and the four groups vied for these opportunities.⁹⁴

The class selection of schooling was so great that we cannot in 1842 distinguish among the various aspects of socio-economic status: income, wealth, status, and education. Incentives and educational resources were directed toward men: 85 per cent of Anglo-Protestant men were able to sign the marriage register in the 1840s, 71 per cent of Irish Catholics, and 27 per cent of French Canadians. Rates were much lower among women: 65, 20, and 18 per cent respectively. The penal laws that braked literacy in Ireland and pushed Catholic schoolteachers underground, had, in response, provoked a high value on schooling and writing.

Since living standard was determined by command over services rather than consumption of fabricated goods, the number of servants may be the best indicator of status, as shown in Table 7 and discussed below.⁹⁵ The sharp distinctions of purchasing power can be grasped from the set of rents and contract wages typical of a neighbourhood of four or five houses in the east end. The owner of a grocery and tavern hired a clerk-manager at £35 a year. His neighbour, also a trader, let a brand new two-story brick house for £36 a year. A dyer took his younger brother as partner "to learn the trade," and the elder brother took two-thirds of the profits on the understanding that his wife would reside in the house "making herself useful in receiving and giving out goods for work for the firm;" and the two brothers agreed to pension their widowed mother at £10 per year. Another merchant, with his wife, operated a straw bonnet factory and millinery shop in a wood house with shopfront and four rooms (£25 a year). He hired Mary Lavery, "spinster of age" from "Bellycastle" (County Antrim) as a sewing girl in the straw-breaking business. He paid Mary £6 a month in winter and £9 in summer (an 11 versus 13-hour day), paid his journeyman dyer £15, started a 16-year-old male apprentice at £4 with the promise of a fourth and final year at £11. Hannah, a thirteen-year-old girl to whom he provided board but no pay, was withdrawn from her apprenticeship when her father found her "doing servant's work" and being beaten by the wife.⁹⁶

Transparent in the examples is the slimness of earnings in the initial phase of entry to the labour force. Apprenticeship or clerkship involved training and implied several years investment on the part of the apprentice in anticipation of a future "family wage." This was precisely the zone of tension characteristic of the bad jobs and the population under governance. In the same neighbourhood, labourers who headed households were renting at £6, £7, or £8 a year, at the threshold of voter status. On a major construction site active in 1843–1847, a labourer with reasonably steady work was probably earning £20 a year, comparable to the rent paid by the artisan or storekeeper in the smallest combination of dwelling and workplace: a shop with a room behind.⁹⁷

If we combine rent-paying capacity with the number of mouths to feed, and set a poverty line at 35 shillings "per person per-year" (or £7 for a family of four), the taxroll suggests that one quarter of all households fell below a living wage: one third of French Canadians, one fifth of the Irish (whether Protestant or Catholic), and one eighth of Other Protestants.⁹⁸ The same disproportion among the several communities would emerge even if we set the threshold a little higher in view of the number of doubled-up households in the taxroll, or a little lower to match the appraisal of the Grand Jury in February 1847, that 1,100 families, or 1 in 5, "languissent dans la dernière indigence ... se couchent plusieurs fois par semaine sans feu et sans souper, ayant à peine de quoi se couvrir."⁹⁹ A simpler distribution at three levels of occupational status is sufficient to convey the distinctive balance in each cultural community, and, weighted by mean rent, to indicate their relative purchasing power (Figure 2). This illustrates the situation of economic privilege of Other Protestants relative to French Canadians, the large mass of labourers among Irish Catholics, and the curious mix of privilege and poverty among Irish Protestants. In this situation, the alignment of relatively small numbers of Irish households would have a strong influence upon the balance of power between status fractions or, in the short term, upon the polarization around a particular religious or linguistic issue.

Figure 2. Relative Weights of Groups by Status and Community, 1842
The three categories of occupational status are re-grouped from Table 6. Squares are proportioned to size of the census population (left) and its purchasing power (right) as represented by aggregate rents paid by the group, estimated on the basis of mean rent of householder's occupation. Source: Manuscript Census of Lower Canada 1842; mean rents of occupations from municipal taxroll 1848.

Age and Household Structure

Since the household was the fundamental work site, household structure provides an indication of labour power. Day or night, houses were never empty, since scarcity of space and high costs of building favoured intensive occupancy, and round-the-clock supervision was advantageous in response to the risks in a harsh climate and a city built of wood. In 1848 one household in six was assessed for a shop or workshop on premises adjoining the dwelling. The teacher lived over her school room, clerks slept in a garret under the dome of the bank, the distinguished geologist had a dwelling over the survey office and museum, jailers lived on the premises, the head doctor and nurses in the General Hospital, and each church was flanked by a modest dwelling for the sexton and, for the clergy, a rectory designed to impress.

As a consequence, it is virtually impossible to distinguish spaces of production from spaces of consumption or reproduction. For each married man identified by an "occupation" there were three more adults over fourteen (see Table 8), and it is reasonable to infer that the labour force internal to the household amounted to three-quarters of its gross domestic product. Homes and yards were sites of scrubbing, boiling laundry, sewing on contract, paid hospitality, baking, butchering, horseshoeing, selling, chopping wood, hauling water, and moving snow, manure, or slops. While there were numerous exceptions to idealized gender roles, both the appearance of respectability and the need for brawn to defend it compelled a gendered constitution of the household, and 94 per cent reported the presence of both a woman and a man over 14. In terms of reproductive demands, 44 per cent of households contained at least 1 child under 5, and in all 4 groups a married woman under 40 bore a child every 2 years.¹⁰⁰ Earlier marriage among French Canadian men and women contributed to greater economic stress in these households.¹⁰¹

The presence of servants can be interpreted as a redistribution of labour power. The differences of purchasing power among the four cultural communities therefore generated differences in household structures, as shown in Tables 7 and 8. One-quarter of households reported a servant, but there were wide gaps between the communities: 1 in 6 or 7 of Catholic families, 1 in 4 of Irish Protestants (27 per cent), and 42 per cent of Other Protestants. A larger house required labour to keep the fires burning, trim the candles for evening entertaining, tend the garden and fruit trees, clear ice from roof and gutters, and handle the horse and carriage. Since the merchant, butcher, or artisan-entrepreneur was operating a household as a unit of production, his servants included male apprentices, journeymen, and shop assistants, and, in proportion to the live-in male personnel, female labour to handle the contractual meat and drink, boarding, washing, and mending.¹⁰² Other Protestant households (28 per cent of all) kept one-half of the servants. Turnover in the servant population was characteristic of the bad jobs, and their assignment as unskilled and subordinate. During the 1840s, the Irish Catholic proprietor of a boardinghouse recorded in his daybook the hiring of a new Liza or Maggie on average every four weeks.¹⁰³

The smaller size of Irish Catholic households overall, their smaller proportions of children 5–13 (inclusive), single men 14–21, and single women (14 and over), all reflect the export of their young people into Protestant households. As anticipated in my rules for assigning ethnicity, the total number of Catholics present in "Other Protestant" households approximates the numbers of servants they contained.¹⁰⁴ Transfers were greatest in the case of young women 14–29, and their social significance considerable.¹⁰⁵ This reflects a stress associated with migration and aggravated in the famine generation; their offspring subsequently showed strong avoidance to domestic service. Despite the personal costs of their vulnerability, the transfers facilitated education and assimilation; they permitted some accumulation of savings and transfer of know-how between communities. Earlier acceptance of vaccination in the Irish community is suggestive of the lines of communication and education involved with the mobility of women in households of greater resources.¹⁰⁶ A comparable export of young people occurred within the French Canadian community, as young women especially came from the villages to the city to help their sisters or sisters-in-law with their growing families. The exchange of labour within an extended family is not apparent from the census, but can be inferred from sample cases and from the high rate of marriages of rural-born women in the city.¹⁰⁷

Of large households (the 15 per cent with ten or more persons), most belonged to distinct types of economic structures. Among French Canadians, one-third were homes of carters, sawyers, or construction entrepreneurs who housed their work force, while among Protestant households they included numbers of merchant heads and "gentlemen," as well as bakers, founders, and teachers. Among Irish Catholics, units as large as 25 people were headed by men who reported themselves as labourers and functioned as foremen or brokers for labour teams, and whose wives were managing a boardinghouse. Construction shanties ranged up to 100 persons, among them a shipbuilding site. Sixty-seven inns and boarding houses reported ten to twenty-five persons each, and the largest workplaces as well as the largest residences were eight institutions: jail, hospitals, schools, and orphanages. In addition to washing and personal care for infants and indigent sick or handicapped on the premises, the nunneries provided laundry services for households of male clergy such as the Bishop's household of 22. The largest "family" not included in the census was the barracks in the east end of the Old City, where 1,200 soldiers were accommodated in an average year, usually in 12-man rooms. Outside the canvassed zone were the largest public works, which reached peak sizes in 1843, about 2,000 employed on the Lachine Canal (within a few kilometers of the City) and 2,000 on the Beauharnois Canal, lodged in construction shanties.¹⁰⁸

The conception of such an entreprise as a "household" was recognized also in the application of the Masters and Servants Act, founded on medieval practice, integrated into municipal by-laws, and enforced by justices of the peace. Thus the ideology of the private "family" under male governance was backed up by formidable legal sanctions to regulate the least visible components: a work force of women and an adolescent proletariat of unmarried minors of either gender.¹⁰⁹ As we have seen, these amounted to three-quarters of the labour force, none of whom earned what was at the time understood as "a family wage."¹¹⁰ More variable was the situation of the labourers who constituted 30 per cent of household heads in the city, plus those quartered at nearby public works. As Bettina Bradbury has shown for a slightly later date, their problem was the day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month variability of their income, and the vulnerability of their households to illness, injury, or layoff of the "breadwinner."¹¹¹ There was no work on construction sites when the weather was rough or the ground frozen. Although labourers on the Lachine Canal works were initially paid three shillings a day, in January 1843 they were reduced to two shillings, and the city was paying 1/3 to 1/8 for stone-breaking, essentially relief work.¹¹²

All three of these work force components — women, youth, and labourers hired by the day — were vulnerable, limited in their ability to give testimony, and confined to the bad jobs: low-paid, subordinate, and subject to high turnover. The four ethnic communities were incorporated to different degrees in the good or the bad jobs, and we have noted the specific export of labour power by the Irish Catholic community to the governance of Irish Protestant and Anglo-Protestant communities, net capture of labour value by the Anglo-Protestant community, and strong seasonal transfers between economic sectors. These are the sectors in which a "living wage" was a persistent issue, seasonally acute, and further aggravated in years of financial crisis. The recurrent signs of stress in the 1840s are apparent from the census x-ray, arising from the relative sizes of the populations living at the margin between a viable household and "la dernière indigence."

Spatial Arrangements

As in other commercial cities, the residential space of Montréal in 1842 was highly polarized, with wealth at the centre and poverty on the rim.¹¹³ In this respect also, it is useful to have a better-etched portrait (Figure 3 and Table 9), since the combined effects of conflagrations and a major industrial boom changed the picture considerably in the 1850s. The "old city," whose walls were crumbling by 1800 and were demolished by 1810, was distinguished in 1842 by its concentration of merchants — the big fish — in nearly five times the numbers we would expect, also professionals, religious and civic institutions, and activities of printing and publishing. Wholesalers and warehouses were concentrated along the waterfront (Commissioners and Saint-Paul Streets), the finest retail shops and residences parallel on the higher ground of Notre-Dame Street, with the governor's office, courts, and military headquarters in the east end, public markets at either end, and in the west end the markethouse that was being renovated with wood paneling and gas chandeliers for the Legislative Assembly of United Canada.

Figure 3. Districts of Montréal Grouped by Mean Rent, 1848
Source: Municipal taxroll, taxe locative (Ville de Montréal, Service des Archives) as compiled in Table 9.

Specialization of economic activities in Old Montréal explains the larger households (mean size 7.4 versus 6.3 elsewhere) as attributable to the presence of more servants: at least 1 servant in 71 per cent of households in Centre ward (the kernel), 61 per cent in flanking East and West wards; as well as larger-than-average numbers of servants per household. Indeed, only one-eighth of all households lived in the old centre, but well over one-third of all live-in servants. This accounts also for the higher percentage of single women in the old town (23 per cent of its population), double their concentrations elsewhere in the city. Even when hospitals, hotels, and inns are excluded, the old town contained fewer two and three person households than in the city as a whole, and more eight and nine person households. The centre was already being built up to four stories, and by 1860 would empty to become a non-residential "hole in the doughnut."

Centre-city characteristics extended along the "main streets" of Quebec Suburb, St Lawrence Suburb, and St Joseph (Recollet) Suburb.¹¹⁴ Farmers' traffic to city markets justified commercial activities along these tentacles of the commercial core, and in view of their relatively dense settlement an act of 1845 specified fireproof materials. Throughout the 19th century the three main streets retained a distinctive pattern of development, land use, rents, and mixed occupancy, as well as an impressive solidity of stone façades.¹¹⁵ In St-Lawrence Suburb in particular, clusters of artisans and their apprentices had sprung from roots a generation earlier,¹¹⁶ and the district was advantageously situated relative to the rim of new construction, the country homes of the wealthy, and the "New Town" or "Golden Square Mile" suburb under development (later Saint-Antoine ward).¹¹⁷

The several cultural communities shared a single economic space. Despite a strong degree of residential segregation between Catholic and Protestant, all four cultural communities were present in all districts. Concentrations of French Canadians were as high as four-fifths in two districts (24 and 19), two-thirds in several more, and fewer than one-quarter in three others. Irish Catholic households reached one-third in Griffintown, at the mouth of the Canal, and in an east end district with one-quarter Irish Protestants (28). Wherever "Other Protestants" made up a strong minority (40 per cent in Old Montréal 05 and its flanking neighborhoods 08 and 14), the district figures show higher mean rents, more single women, and more horses.

While the three wards of the Old City had populations about the same size, they differed somewhat in ethnic composition: West ward was 55 per cent Protestant and 95 per cent English-speaking, Centre was 52 per cent and 80 per cent, East ward was only 45 per cent and 66 per cent, in other words the majority was Catholic. Irish Catholics were politically prominent in West ward, French Canadians in East ward. The nuances pinpoint homelands from which the several communities were expanding into the western or eastern suburbs, producing political divisions which remained in 1900 (known as the Western and Eastern Districts of municipal administration), despite a boundary zone of greater diversity on either side of St Lawrence Main.¹¹⁸

Within the elaborate differentiation, the Irish Catholic community was decidedly less segregated than in many cities, and this seems to have been a factor important in its integration into the economy.¹¹⁹ The ethnic distribution across the urban space, with subdominants in various districts, added to the political salience of Irish Catholics, who could deliver to their allies a swing vote in several electoral districts. In the spring of 1841 Sydenham redrew the urban boundaries, in what Ryerson has termed "a colossal gerrymander" to reduce the representation of French Canadians and the partisans of "responsible government."¹²⁰ Both he and the next governor (Metcalfe) employed "as instruments in the electoral process" intimidation by the troops, provocations at the polls, and roving gangs armed with axe-handles. In 1845, 1846, and 1847, Reform candidates obtained support from canal workers, largely Irish, both Catholic and Protestant.¹²¹ The census of 1842, by uncovering the spatial variations in the interplay of ethnicity with wealth, points to key sources of the violence in the electoral politics of Montréal.¹²²

Conclusion

The manuscript census of 1842, treated as an x-ray of the labour force, brings into view the articulations between ethnicity and occupational status. When the data are re-compiled and subjected to analysis to estimate the relative weights of the city's four cultural communities, they reveal the tensions inherent in an unstable situation. Stresses experienced in the economy during the years 1843–1849 were transmitted to labouring segments as a compression of the "living wage." But the census itself, in its treatment of households as the fundamental units of the economy with household heads as the bearers of status and authority, masked the segmentation of labour consistent with a firm ideology of family and gender. Unequal bargaining power in the four communities was reflected in the transfer of youth, in particular of single women and Irish Catholic youth, into household-structured enterprises of the economically dominant group. Systematic underpayment of female labour was associated with recurrent seasonal and cyclical appeals for charity to widows and orphans, while campaigns against oisiveté or "idleness," backed by the legal requirement that minors and persons without property be forced to work, kept wages low for the bad jobs.

In a city of formidable religious and linguistic cleavages, the position occupied by Irish Catholics was strategic. In each decade, including the most strenuous years of famine arrivals, the newcomers were sustained by an articulate and well-organized community of Irish Catholics who preceded them, as well as a French Canadian leadership prepared to negotiate alliances as a Catholic majority. Also sustaining them was a Protestant élite prepared to court the votes of English-speaking Catholics, to leverage their own votes by hiring the bare-fisted, and, when that failed, to direct the firepower of the state at those who claimed a right to a living wage.

From the pivotal situation of the Irish in 1842, it is possible to grasp the power of negotiation that favoured their subsequent social advancement. The incentives to coalition hint at the pressures for instant assimilation of Irish-born Protestants and for the more gradual and more uncomfortable alignment of Irish Catholics with the loyalism of a broader English-speaking community. The variables of social status suggest reasons for the volatility of coalitions based on cultural affiliation. The intersection of ethnic with economic categories provides a foundation for understanding a certain opportunism and the experimentation so characteristic of the political reconstruction of the 1840s.

The lines of cleavage and the balance of power established in that decade framed the social space for a first surge of industrialization in the 1850s, in which the city tripled in size, the Irish Catholic population increased from 20 to 25 per cent, French Canadian from 41 to 48 per cent, while Protestants (Irish or Other) diminished from 37 to 27 per cent. Despite the new proportions and the changes concomitant with steam power, there was only a modest shift in the ethnic partition of the labour force: in 1861 Protestants were still four times as likely to be merchants, bankers, or professionals, and they still dominated the fast-growing printing and metal trades; Irish Catholics moved into hauling (1.0) and metalwork (1.2), but remained twice as likely to be labourers.¹²³ Change in the ethclass structure was gradual because upward mobility was essentially intergenerational, and, judging from a small longitudinal sample, the labourer remained a labourer to life's end.¹²⁴

While the census of 1842 provides new evidence of the ethnic partition of labour at that moment and sharpens our awareness of the pivotal role of the Irish in the cultural balance, there is a need for more thorough research on several fronts. Sources may be slim for exploring the violent and emotionally-freighted incidents of the election of 1832, the Rebellion,¹²⁵ the canal strikes, and the Rebellion Losses Bill, but much more can be learned about the rapid assimilation of Irish Protestants into the Protestant community of Montréal, about Irish Catholic lay leadership in the 1840s, and about the ways in which both English- and French-speaking personnel and clientèles were integrated into the several religious orders. The cultural triangulation of the 1840s generated the social space for reception of all subsequent waves of immigrants and "allophones."¹²⁶ To write the Irish fully into the labour history of Québec,¹²⁷ and to examine the position of succeeding waves of immigrants, we need a more comprehensive and contrapuntal treatment of the historical sociology of education,¹²⁸ since institutions structured in the 1840s incubated leadership in the next generation, metred social mobility, and ensured those interlocks of gender, language, religion, and origin that have continued to segment markets for labour, both locally and globally.

The research was conceived in collaboration with Patricia Thornton of Concordia University, with support from the Social Science Research Council of Canada (Ottawa); and with Jean-Claude Robert, with support from the Fonds FCAR (Québec) and the Centre interuniversitaire d'Études québécoises (Laval and Trois-Rivières). I am grateful for the assistance of the Parishes of Notre-Dame and Saint Patrick's, the Hospital Sisters of Saint-Joseph (Hôtel-Dieu), Cimetière Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, the Mount Royal Cemetery Company, numerous archivists, research assistants, and colleagues.

Notes

¹ For example the analyses of Evelyn Kolish, "L'introduction de la faillite au Bas-Canada: conflit social ou national?" Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française, 40 (automne 1986), 215–35; Evelyn Kolish, "Imprisonment for Debt in Lower Canada 1791–1840," McGill Law Journal, 32 (May 1986–87), 603–35; Evelyn Kolish, Nationalismes et conflits de droits: Le débat du droit privé au Québec 1760–1840 (Montréal 1994); Murray Greenwood, Legacies of Fear: Law and Politics in Quebec in the Era of the French Revolution (Toronto 1993); Jean-Marie Fecteau, Un nouvel ordre des choses: la pauvreté, le crime, l'état au Québec, de la fin du XVIII^e siècle à 1840 (Montréal 1989); Fernand Ouellet, Eléments d'histoire sociale du Bas-Canada (Montréal 1972); and Allan Greer, Peasant Lord and Merchant: Rural Society in Three Quebec Parishes 1740–1840 (Toronto 1985).

² Exceptional in their recognition of the "crucial decade" are J.L. Little, State and Society in Transition: The Politics of Institutional Reform in the Eastern Townships 1838–1852 (Montréal 1997), 3, 6, 238–39; and Bruce Curtis, True Government by Choice Men: Inspection, Education, and State Formation in Canada West (Toronto 1992). The vexed issue of "responsible government" is reviewed by Stanley B. Ryerson, Unequal Union: Confederation and the roots of conflict in the Canadas, 1815–1873 (Toronto 1973), 137–39. For the winter roads issue as an insight into public opinion see Stephen Kenny, "'Cahots' and Catcalls: an Episode of Popular Resistance in Lower Canada at the Outset of the Union," Canadian Historical Review, 65 (June 1984), 184–208.

³ Allan Greer and Léon Robichaud, "La Rébellion de 1837–1838 au Bas-Canada: une approche géographique," Cahiers de géographie du Québec, 33 (December 1989), 345–77.

⁴ Jean-Claude Robert, "Réseau routier et développement urbain dans l'Île de Montréal au XIXe siècle," in Horacio Capel and P.A. Linteau, eds., Barcelona-Montréal: Desarollo urbano comparado / Développement urbain comparé (Barcelona 1998), 99–115; Jean-Claude Robert, Atlas historique de Montréal (Montréal 1994), 98–99; and Serge Courville, Entre ville et campagne (Sainte-Foy 1990).

⁵ Gerald J.J. Tulchinsky, The River Barons: Montreal Businessmen and the Growth of Industry and Transportation (Toronto 1977), 203–31.

⁶ While earlier accounts of Union politics presume a reduction of tensions after 1839, recent local accounts emphasize "increasing ethnic and social hostilities" in the 1840s. See, Brian Young, The Politics of Codification: The Lower Canadian Civil Code of 1866 (Montréal 1994), 8.

⁷ Brian Young, In its Corporate Capacity: The Seminary of Montréal as a Business Institution, 1816–1876 (Montréal 1986); Young, The Politics of Codification, 43–65; and Kolish, Nationalismes et conflits de droits.

⁸ Seigneurial tenure in Lower Canada was partially extinguished in 1840 when censitaires in the Sulpician seigneuries of Montréal, Deux-Montagnes, and Saint-Sulpice were permitted to commute their dues for cens et rentes, lods et ventes into a fixed capital. See Young, In its Corporate Capacity, 55. The Seigneurial Commission of 1843 further exposed the crumbling.

⁹ Young, Politics of Codification, 186–7.

¹⁰ The Common School Bill of 1841, Registry Ordinance of 1841, and bankruptcy reforms of 1842 and 1846. See Young, Politics of Codification, 44–45, xvi.

¹¹ Also by act of the Special Council, 1840. See Robert, "Réseau routier."

¹² Young, Politics of Codification, 13–14; and Guy Bourassa, "Les élites politiques de Montréal: de l'aristocratie à la démocratie," Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 31 (February 1965), 35–51.

¹³ Donald Fyson, "Les structures étatiques locales à Montréal au début du XIXe siècle," Les Cahiers d'histoire, 17 (Spring 1997), 57. On the way in which the Montréal Constitutional Party ensured that the agenda of the Special Council corresponded with their own see Steven Watt, "Authoritarianism, Constitutionalism and the Special Council of Lower Canada, 1838–1841," MA thesis, McGill University, 1997.

¹⁴ Elinor Kyte Senior, British Regulars in Montréal: An Imperial Garrison, 1832–1854 (Montréal 1981); Elinor Kyte Senior, Roots of The Canadian Army: Montréal District 1846–1870 (Montréal 1981); and H. Senior, "Quebec and the Fenians," Canadian Historical Review, 48 (March 1967), 37.

¹⁵ Municipal restructuring to sink the debt was carried out by E.R. Fabre, and has been examined only by his biographer Jean-Louis Roy in his book Edouard-Raymond Fabre libraire et patriote canadien 1799–1854 (Montréal 1974); and his earlier work, "Édouard-Raymond Fabre, bourgeois patriote du Bas-Canada, 1799–1854," PhD thesis, McGill University, 1972.

¹⁶ Yvan Lamonde, Histoire sociale des idées au Québec 1760–1896 (Montréal 2000).

¹⁷ Little, State and Society in Transition, 31; and Stéphane Kelly, La petite loterie: comment la Couronne a obtenu la collaboration du Canada français après 1837 (Montréal 1997).

¹⁸ Little, State and Society in Transition, 13; and Caroline Andrew et al., Dislocation et permanence: l'invention du Canada au quotidien (Ottawa 1999).

¹⁹ Central are the municipal acts of 1845 and 1847, and the school acts of 1845, 1846, and 1849. See Andrée Dufour, Tous à l'école, État, communautés rurales et scolarisation au Québec de 1826 à 1859 (Ville LaSalle 1996); Huguette Lapointe-Roy, Charité bien ordonnée: le premier réseau de lutte contre la pauvretéà Montréal au 19e siècle (Montréal 1987); Little, State and Society in Transition.

²⁰ An exception is René Hardy, Contrôle s