What was quebec like in the 19th century?

[old lady]

In the 19th century (the 1800s) Quebec, like most of Canada, was largely an agricultural culture. In the larger cities (Montreal, Quebec) there were some manufacturing plants, but industrialization didn't really hit Quebec until late in the 19th century.

[Charles K]

Quebec in the 19th century was mostly rural,big families,very catholic,Catholic Church was everywhere education,hospitals,many educated people were priests,nuns.It was the survival of the French Canadians as a french speaking and catholic society.They did not want to be assimilated.(maybe half emigrated to US and became Americans) Many parishes were founded because new lands were colonised by new farmers(big families,high birth rate.), ,each community have a church,on sunday, people attended the mass and went shopping in the village; most students stopped after the primary school(free),secondary collegial schools were private,teaching was done by religious and not free.,At night people went to meet neighbors,played cards,accordions(music) danced square dance ' set carré' .Families were big, united,most marriages occurred by people of the same village,or a near village.Cultuvation was mainly hay,oats,cows,pigs,hens. Christmas and New Year was very religious and everybody visit others members of the family.(horse,(cariole)sleigh on snow big family meetings,cards,beer)Also on New Year the father will give his benediction to his children knelt in front of him.During winter roads are not opened,doctors travel with a cariole A cariole (also spelled carriole) was a sleigh used in the 19th century. drawn by a single horse)..People will travel with snow shoes also the youth during the winter worked in the wood(chantier),cutting trees for paper mills,and construction.Wood logs were transported on snow or by the currents of the rivers (la drave picture worker with logs http://www.answers.com/topic/maria-chapdelaine-1 -------------The next link might help you if you read it, it is in Saguenay a part of Quebec some sentences illustrate the 19th century---------------------The Quelques Arpents d'Amerique: Population, Economie, Famille au Saguenay, 1838-1971 is a study of the settlement and of the development of an agrarian population in a region of Quebec: the Saguenay, in the north-eastern part of the province. The Saguenay received its first white settlers in the 1830s. The great majority of the early and later immigrants came from Charlevoix county, immediately to the South. In the nineteenth century, its economy rested on agriculture and the forest industry. After viewing their history as a story of "La Survivance" of a French and catholic population in the midst of an hostile Anglo-protestant continent, survival made possible by the "Conquest of the Soil," Quebec historians have become very insular. The reason he found North America looking for Quebec is that the Saguenay, for most of the period he investigates, was a frontier society, characterized by an ample supply of farm land. The availability of land for settlement by white farmers was of course a characteristic of many North American regions in the nineteenth century, and remained a characteristic of some parts of Canada in the early twentieth. .https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=945

The rural settlements were created under a variation of the French seigneurial system of landlords and tenants, under which the latter, who came to be called habitants, had considerable autonomy because land was plentiful and because they could supplement their livelihood with work in the fur trade or in the burgeoning forestry industry after 1800. These dispersed rural settlements, which existed during and after the period of French control, were limited to the banks of the St. Lawrence, forming a continuous line between the urban centres of Montreal and Quebec city. Outside of Quebec city, Trois-Rivières, and Montreal, the land was divided into long, narrow individual strips. Habitant families built houses at the end of each of these strips, on the side of a road, which eventually created nascent villages, thereby forming a type of ribbon settlement pattern. As each river road became fully settled, a parallel road was opened farther inland, a process that was repeated until the whole of the St. Lawrence Lowlands was occupied. As a result, rural Quebec had no formal villages until the late 18th century, and most rural parishes, controlled by the Catholic Church, were created during the 19th century. This system of colonization, in which houses were located equidistantly along a road, allowed for maximum settlement density but was responsible, along with the seigneurial system, for delaying the introduction of commercial agricultural activities even when the regional and international markets developed. The demise of the seigneurial system in the 1850s and the advent of railroads in the 1870s and ’80s brought about an agricultural revolution based on feed grains a