Louis-Joseph Papineau was one of the most influential political thinkers and activists in pre-Confederation British North America, and a champion of the cause of equal rights for French-Canadians. As a landlord, a lawyer, a violent radical, and later a representative in the joint Legislature of the United Province of Canada, Papineau was a staunch upholder of democratic ideals. His importance was such that in the annals of French-English conflict in Canada he might be considered a hero.

Papineau was born on October 7, 1786 in Montreal. His career as a politician began early on; he was twenty-two years old, studying to become a lawyer, when he was elected as a Member of Parliament in the riding of Kent in 1808. Graduating law school he was admitted to the bar in 1810, though he was able to work only sporadically because of his commitments to Parliament and to his constituents.

As befitted any Lower Canada radical, Papineau offered his support to the Parti canadien, whose fundamental aim was quiet subversion of Anglophone domination.

When the War of 1812-14 broke out at the end of his first term in office, he was appointed leader of the local militia; this put Papineau in a position that forced him to collaborate with Anglophone military leaders. Strangely enough, it was successful, and one of the first examples of Anglo-French co-operation following 1791's Quebec Act.

Slightly wiser and less cynical following the war, Papineau was elected Speaker of the Legislative Assembly in early 1815, and later that same year the leader of the Parti canadien. No less committed to political reform than before the war, the party campaigned against the financial excesses and flagrant infringements of the democratic process on the part of the Legislative Council, appointed by the colony's governor. Under his guidance, the Parti canadien became a powerful force lobbying for the restructuring of Lower Canada's political system.

In 1818 he married a young Francophone woman, Julie Bruneau, in Quebec City. She was a strong supporter of her husband's political aspirations and a reformer in her own right.

Lord Dalhousie, governor of Lower Canada, offered Papineau a position in the Legislative Council, an appointed body of representatives who held the power to veto any decision voted on by the larger House of Representatives, in 1822. True to his ideological roots, Papineau declined it. The same year, rumours of a proposed union between Upper and Lower Canada reached the populace; this was cause for alarm among most French Canadians, who felt that such a move would effectively eliminate their influence in government. Papineau wrote to his colleague, John Neilson:

The country does not wish to submit to the injustices planned against us all by the handful of intriguers who would sacrifice the happiness of all Canadians to their boundless ambition. These men whom chance has made so great in this country, who would have remained so unknown elsewhere, why do they not enjoy in peace the innumerable preferences which are theirs without undertaking to strip the habitants of the province of their rights?¹

Papineau and Neilson gathered a petition of 60 000 signatures against the principle of unification and presented it in London in 1822. They met with success; representatives of the British Crown, sensing impending disaster, assured them that unification was not something to be taken lightly and therefore would be put aside pending careful examination of the issue from both perspectives.

Political reform in Lower Canada was directed not only toward institutions but also toward the parties themselves. In 1826 the Parti canadien was dissolved and restructured as the Parti patriote, even more radical than before and under Papineau's leadership.

Equality in all things for all people was one of the guiding tenets of the new party; this was demonstrated in 1831, when Papineau sponsored a law which granted full political rights to Jews, who were a small minority group in the Canadas at the time. This was fully twenty-seven years before a similar step was taken anywhere else in the British Empire, and it served to increase his popularity among and appeal toward other such minorities.

The Parti rouge were strongly against the nearly absolute power held by the Roman Catholic Church over more moderate French-Canadian politicians. On this, Papineau wrote:

It matters little who are the men of the hour, but rather what are the principles which will prevail. Let each raise his loudest voice, the one for monarchy and the fabriques, the other for liberalism and a republic; 50 years from now the reasonable side will win out; for, in an age when miracles and trickery have ceased, reason must eventually win out. There are no more blindly accepted prescriptions or compulsory professions of faith, and everything ... ends in debate. Sceptres, mitres, parchments are playthings become objects of derision. Make your choice, compose waggish couplets, or lament over ruins; each side has its lyricism.... ²

Political unrest grew in Lower Canada throughout the 1830s, centred around Papineau and the Parti patriote. In 1834 the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada passed a list of resolutions, many of them written by Papineau himself, demanding major reforms in the House of Assembly and the Executive and Legislative Councils. The list was sent to London, bypassing the councils in question and the governor; all of the requests were denied.

The 1837 Lower Canada rebellion was Papineau's triumph as a radical and advocate for reform. After the Ninety-Two Resolutions were ignored, the Parti patriote and its affiliates were left with no choice but to resort to violence to achieve their goals of reform; a committee was formed that organised the boycott of British products imported to Lower Canada, and Papineau agitated the working classes to riots.

Along with twenty-five other executives in the Parti patriote, Papineau's arrest was called for by Lower Canada governor Lord Gosford. Forced into exile, Papineau and the others spent a year in the United States before heading to Paris to drum up support for their cause. Despite his convincing rhetoric and talks with influential French politicians of the time, the French crown under Louis-Philippe remained neutral in the conflict.

It was six years before he was granted amnesty. Papineau returned to Montreal in 1845, to be elected to Parliament in the new United Province of Canada in 1848, representative for the constituency of Saint-Maurice. During his time in exile, however, his views had changed drastically.

After having seen the failure of his proposed reforms, and heavily influenced by his stint in the United States, Papineau was now a staunch republican, supporting the annexation of Canada to the American federal republic.

To the contemporary Canadian it sounds an absurd proposal, and it was even at the time. Papineau was defeated in his riding in the election of 1851; though he won a by-election the year following, he abstained from standing in the 1854 election, instead retiring from politics permanently until his death shortly following Confederation, in 1871.

Even though he was not directly involved with the conferences surrounding Confederation, Papineau's influence was still felt in the persons of representatives from the Parti rouge, yet another French-Canadian political party based on Papineau's example and this time advocating annexation. They met with almost no popular support; with the enabling of the British North America Act, Papineau's legacy of radicalism at its most extreme seemed to have died out.

¹ Fernand Ouellet, Lower Canada 1791-1840: Social Change and Nationalism (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1980), 202. ² Ibid., 174.

Sources: Louis-Joseph Papineau. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/2/18/h18-2089-e.html. Library and Archives Canada. 4 June 2004. Louis-Joseph Papineau. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis-Joseph_Papineau. Wikipedia. 4 June 2004. Ouellet, Fernand. Lower Canada 1791-1840: Social Change and Nationalism. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1980.