Patrician Families and the Making of Quebec: The Taschereaus and McCords

Following the ascent of four generations from two Quebec families through eighteenth-century New France to the onset of the First World War, the author compares eight family patriarchs from the French-speaking Catholic Taschereaus and the English-speaking Anglican McCords, and the central roles these elite families played in French and English Quebec. Working as merchants or colonial administrators in the first generation, these two families became seigneurial proprietors, officeholders, and prelates. The heads of both families used marriage arrangements, land stewardship, and judgeships to position their heirs. The author shows how patriarchy was a central force in both domestic and public life, as well as the ways in which Taschereau and McCord family strategies extended into the marrow of Quebec society through moral authority, influence on national identities, and their positions within senior offices in religious, judicial, and university institutions. Through courthouses, cemeteries, belfries, and their own chapels and neoclassical estates, he shows how they created encompassing cultural landscapes. Later generations, he argues, used museums, archives, historian collaborators, photography, and modern print to elevate family achievement to the status of heroic national narratives.

Montreal and Kingston

McGill-Queen's University Press

2014

xiv-452p.

en

978-0-7735-4436-9