History has often ignored the influence in modern Quebec of family
dynasties, patriarchy, seigneurial land, and traditional institutions.
Following the ascent of four generations from two families through
eighteenth-century New France to the onset of the First World War,
Patrician Families and the Making of Quebec compares the French Catholic
Taschereaus and the Anglican and English-speaking McCords. Consulting
private, institutional, and legal archives, Brian Young studies eight
family patriarchs. Working as merchants or colonial administrators in
the first generation, they became seigneurial proprietors,
officeholders, and prelates. The heads of both families used marriage
arrangements, land stewardship, and judgeships to position their heirs.
Young 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, they created encompassing cultural landscapes.
Later generations used museums, archives, historian collaborators,
photography, and modern print to elevate family achievement to the
status of heroic national narratives. Sagas of the monied and
entrepreneurial, nationalist imperatives to protect a vulnerable people,
and skepticism about the lasting power of great families and historical
institutions have relegated the influence of the Taschereaus and McCords
to obscurity. Patrician Families and the Making of Quebec resuscitates
the central role these elite families played in English and French
Quebec.