Corporatism or Physiocracy? The Trades of French Canada in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Leslie Choquette

This essay questions the view of New France as a traditional, Ancien Régime society by examining the issue of corporatism in the Canadian trades. Proceeding from the premise that the French Ancien Régime was itself more complex than the stereotype allows, the paper argues that royal governance of the colony emphasized modern, statist elements of the French polity at the expense of traditional corporatism and privilege. Trades guilds were officially prohibited in New France, and that policy generally met with little resistance from the colonists. A century before the French Revolution, the tradesmen of Canada already lived, to a large extent, in the world that would be advocated by the Physiocrats: that of discipline, individual enterprise, and rational absolutism.

[WP #97005]