Lumières reflétées ou les origines du dilemme canadien de la liberté

Résumé En

Alain Tichoux : Canada and freedom : a dilemma. New France, after fighting to retain its freedom, then appears to have lost all taste for it. She stood by while America won its independence and helped the British keep American freedom out of Canada. Historians have ascribed this turnabout to loyalty to the sovreign, to a liking for British rule, or even to a natural penchant for dependency. Recently French-Canadian historians have shown that it was merely resignation to the lesser of two evils. The English speaking settlers soon introduced «freedom» in the form of govern¬ ment by popular assemblies of the Protestant population, excluding French Canadians. Later the American invasion showed that accepting the revolution from the South brought the same result. Canada would rather have been free and French but, realising the impossibility of achieving this, she preferred a remote and relatively tolerant government rather than deliver herself into the hands of the bearers of a militantly Protestant freedom.