“Tied to a specific mid-nineteenth-century milieu, Cartier, in his family, life-style, social ambitions, politics, and professional and business interests, serves as one barometer of the Montreal bourgeois experience.”

Canadian independence was rather less traumatic than the American experience, lacking a revolutionary war or even (so far) a civil war. Nevertheless, involved significant institutional change, as a country that initially consisted of only four provinces in Eastern North America attempted to develop its own institutions, culture, and society. One of the leaders in this process was George-Etienne Cartier, a French-Canadian statesman and partner of John A MacDonald.

I don’t really expect anyone who isn’t a Canadian history buff to have heard of Cartier, and since Brian Young’s book quotes liberally from French sources without translating, I wouldn’t recommend the book to anyone who wasn’t one either, or at least to anyone who doesn’t speak French. The book is interesting though: rather than attempting to retread old ground, it focuses on Cartier’s origins and bourgeois background, before skipping to his political life.

It is his political activities, in the context of a young country trying to grow, that are particularly interesting. He was instrumental in codifying the laws of Quebec, which still operates under a different legal code than the rest of Canada; helped establish the school system of Quebec, imposing a tax-supported system on a reluctant population; and most of all bringing Quebec into Confederation, his alliance with MacDonald instrumental in convincing Quebec to join. Cartier was a French nationalist, but one who believed that Quebec was better off in a union within a greater Canada, rather than outside it or paired only with Ontario.

Canada still struggles to reconcile the French and English elements within it, a cause that has endured from Cartier’s day. Without him, though, and people like him, Canada might never have existed as it does today.