Source: Courtesy of Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec / 52327/2070894

VALLIÈRES DE SAINT-RÉAL, JOSEPH-RÉMI (baptized Joseph-Rémi Vallières, he signed Vallieres de St Real), lawyer, militia officer, businessman, politician, judge, office holder, and jp; b. 1 Oct. 1787 in Carleton (Que.), fourth of eight children of Jean-Baptiste Vallières, blacksmith, and Marguerite Corneillier, dit Grandchamp; d. 17 Feb. 1847 in Montreal.

Joseph-Rémi Vallières was born into a family that had been settled in New France since at least 1670. His parents, after a stay in Carleton, on the Baie des Chaleurs, had moved to Quebec by 1792. Seven years later Joseph-Geneviève de Puisaye*, Comte de Puisaye, established a settlement of French refugee nobles at Windham, Upper Canada; soon finding that he lacked workers, Puisaye hired a number of Canadians, including Jean-Baptiste Vallières. Joseph-Rémi, then staying in Montreal, possibly for economic reasons, moved to Windham by June 1799. Vallières père died within a couple of years, however, leaving his widow destitute, and Joseph-Rémi was sent to Quebec to live with a maternal aunt and her cooper husband, Basile Amiot.

By mid 1803, therefore, although aged 15, Vallières had had little formal education, but thanks to a superior intelligence, voracious reading, much travelling, and prolonged contact with the cultivated population of Windham, he had independently acquired social graces and an astonishing range of knowledge. He was soon brought to the attention of the parish priest of Quebec, coadjutor bishop Joseph-Octave Plessis*, who took him into his residence and personally tutored him for 17 months. At the beginning of 1805 Vallières was enrolled in the Philosophy course at the Petit Séminaire de Québec. A classmate, Philippe-Joseph Aubert* de Gaspé, was dazzled by his intelligence and wit and charmed by his compassion. Aubert de Gaspé recounts that Vallières learned to speak Portuguese fluently in the space of three weeks in order to provide conversation for a lonely apprentice-clerk (his neighbour in Lower Town), brought from Lisbon by a business firm.

Vallières declined to study for the priesthood, bitterly disappointing Plessis. Determined to go into law, in the fall of 1806 he obtained from the parish priest of Carleton, Michel-Auguste Amiot, who was possibly a relative, the necessary certified copy of his baptismal record; either on his own initiative or at Vallières’s request, Amiot added “de Saint-Réal” to the family name in the copy. From February 1807 to October 1808 and from the latter date to May 1812, Vallières studied successively with Charles Thomas, at Trois-Rivières, and Edward Bowen*, interim attorney general of Lower Canada, at Quebec. On 30 May 1812 he was commissioned a lawyer; Bowen, having recently been named a judge, left his current cases to his protégé.

Vallières had only begun to practise, however, when the War of 1812 broke out. In September he was commissioned a lieutenant in Quebec’s 2nd Militia Battalion, and he did garrison duty until June 1813 at least. Meanwhile, at Quebec on 16 Nov. 1812, he married Louise Pezard de Champlain, daughter of Pierre-Melchior, “sieur de la Touche de Champlain, seigneur of Godefroy, Roctaillade, and other places.” By September 1813 he was residing on one of the best streets in Quebec, called, ironically, Rue des Pauvres (Côte du Palais).

Vallières resumed the regular practice of his profession. On circuit, as at Quebec, he delighted in the exuberant company of his closest friends (and frequent opponents), Aubert de Gaspé, Louis Plamondon*, and Jacques Leblond; with Aubert de Gaspé and Plamondon he had been a member in 1809 of the short-lived Literary Society of Quebec. Of those Vallières represented in the Court of King’s Bench at Quebec between 1815 and 1824, small retail merchants constituted 25–30 per cent, farmers 25–30, artisans 15, large merchants 10, professional men and government officials 10, and labourers 5. About 50 per cent of his clients were from Quebec and 45 per cent from rural parishes, particularly around Quebec, in the Beauce, and at Baie-Saint-Paul, La Malbaie, Sainte-Anne-de-La Pocatière (La Pocatière), and Kamouraska. Prominent clients included John White and Company [see François Languedoc], the businessmen John Munn* and James McCallum*, the painter Jean-Baptiste Roy-Audy, and Surveyor General Joseph Bouchette; important British merchants in the colony generally placed their confidence in Andrew Stuart. Archbishop Plessis, who had resigned himself to Vallières’s independence of spirit, consulted him regularly after 1820, in particular on the erection of parishes and on legal aspects of the conflict opposing Plessis and Bishop Jean-Jacques Lartigue of Montreal to the Sulpicians and the priest Augustin Chaboillez*. Vallières trained a number of law students, among them Louis Lagueux* and a son of judge Olivier Perrault*. In 1822 Governor Lord Dalhousie [Ramsay] considered Vallières and Plamondon “the first at the Quebec Bar in accomplishments & eloquence.”

Most of Vallières’s clients being of modest means, he was often obliged to give them credit, and he earned some income from interest. He also made small loans – rarely more than £25 – to farmers, retailers, and artisans, many of whom were clients. Some paid him back in land, and it was probably in this manner that he got into land speculation; outside Quebec many of his acquisitions were in parishes in which he had clients. Occasionally Vallières shared in the exploitation of land, as in the seigneury of Fossambault where he supplied lessees with livestock, seeds, and implements in return for the clearance and planting of bush sections or up to one-half of the harvest. He also obtained grants of rural land, bought interests in small seigneuries for resale, and purchased lands for speculation in the townships of Ham, Jersey, Ixworth, Windsor, and Horton.

Vallières dealt even more frequently in land at Quebec. He held lots and houses in Upper and Lower Town as well as in the parish of Sainte-Foy, but he was particularly active in the fastest growing parts of town, the faubourgs Saint-Roch and Saint-Jean. Although he even had a pew in the church of labouring-class Saint-Roch (in addition to one in the cathedral of Notre-Dame), he was most attracted to Saint-Jean, inhabited as it was by artisans and shopkeepers, people of his former social background and an important segment of his clientele. In September 1815 Vallières obtained from the Ursulines two vast grants of land in the faubourg, one on his own account and one in association with Aubert de Gaspé and Plamondon; he later bought out Plamondon and made other, minor, acquisitions. Between 1819 and 1827 he sold at least five large lots to speculators for a total of £2,623. Since most prospective grantees were artisans and shopkeepers, unable to purchase outright, Vallières usually ceded lots in return for the interest – generally between £2 and £5 annually – on a life annuity that constituted the price of the transaction and for the obligation by the grantee to build a house on the lot. From 1819 to 1828 he made at least 31 such grants for a total of £100 per annum in rents. In 1820 he became involved in running an inn in the faubourg after paying for the liquor permit of the penurious keeper.

Vallières had other sources of income. In 1819–20 he purchased three-quarters of the Pont Plessis, a toll-bridge over the Rivière Etchemin near Quebec. He was a substantial stockholder in the Quebec Fire Assurance Company by December 1819. In September 1822 he and the surveyor Patrick Henry Smith formed a copartnership for two years with the Montreal firm of MacPherson and Cuthbertson to produce timber and lumber for the booming Quebec market. He was a partner with François Languedoc and William Phillips in the King’s Posts Company in 1823, and from 1826 to 1828 at least he rented out the Bécancour flour-mill in return for two-thirds to three-quarters of its flour production.

By 1819, despite an extravagant (some said dissipated) social life, Vallières had been able to purchase the home of Olivier Perrault, well situated on Rue Sainte-Anne at the Place d’Armes. The cost was a substantial £3,600, but Vallières was given 18 years to pay on the security of Pierre Casgrain*, seigneur of Rivière-Ouelle; in 1825 he made a large two-storey addition. The house was a manifestation of Vallières’s social ascent, which his reconciliation with Plessis accelerated singularly. According to a contemporary, when the archbishop arrived back at Quebec in August 1820 from a trip to Europe Vallières was delegated to give the welcoming speech and, as a result, grew “by ten cubits in the eyes of the immense crowd that shook the heavens with its acclamations.” That October Vallières was a subscriber to the Quebec Emigrants’ Society, and the following year he was elected to the committee of the Education Society of the District of Quebec, headed by Joseph-François Perrault. He was a proprietor of the Bibliothèque de Québec in 1822, when it was liquidated.

In 1814 Vallières had been elected to the House of Assembly for Saint-Maurice. Defeated two years later, he was returned in March 1820 for Upper Town Quebec, which included the faubourg Saint-Jean, edging out the executive councillor William Bacheler Coltman* by four votes; he was elected again in July, without opposition, in the company of Andrew Stuart. Both in and out of the assembly Vallières made his mark as a moderate Quebec member of the nationalist Canadian party. In 1822, for example, he was a leading figure at Quebec in a popular movement opposed to the projected union of Lower and Upper Canada, a union strongly favoured by Coltman. In January 1823 the virtual head of the Canadian party, Louis-Joseph Papineau*, was chosen as a delegate to London to oppose union, and Vallières, on a motion by the tory Charles Richard Ogden*, and strongly supported by the nationalist Louis Bourdages*, was elected to replace him as speaker of the assembly; previously, the house had rejected, among others, Papineau’s choice, his cousin Denis-Benjamin Viger*. Although unanimous, Vallières’s election signified that leadership of the party, which had shifted to Montreal after the retirement to a judgeship of Pierre-Stanislas Bédard*, had swung back to Quebec, whose deputies were generally more moderate.

No doubt sensing a potential improvement in the political climate, which had become increasingly tempestuous, Governor Lord Dalhousie courted Vallières in April 1823 by involving him in preparations for the creation of a provincial literary and historical society [see William Smith]. However, at the founding meeting held at Quebec in January 1824, Vallières angered Dalhousie and Montrealer John Richardson* by persuading the gathering to adopt the name Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, rather than of Lower Canada, arguing, according to Dalhousie, that Quebec was “entitled to the distinction as the Capital, the residence of govt. & virtually implying the Province.” Vallières was elected a vice-president of the society. Later in 1824 he accepted appointment as a trustee of the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, even though it was opposed by Canadian nationalists and boycotted by Plessis as unfit to supervise the education of Catholic children [see Joseph Langley Mills*].

Dalhousie had noted in late 1823 the good-humoured, business-like atmosphere in the legislature with Vallières at the head of the assembly. Vallières even had the entire body to dinner so that, Dalhousie remarked, “the Speaker of the Commons entertained for the first time in Canada, King, Lords, & Commons in a body.” The governor cautiously opened negotiations with Vallières to regulate the problem of supplies, which had long bedevilled the administration of the colony, but Papineau, who had arrived back in November and alone had refused Vallières’s invitation to dinner, stiffened opposition in the house. After a procedural duel between Vallières and Papineau, a partial accommodation was reached; however, Dalhousie informed Colonial Secretary Lord Bathurst, “I can no longer entertain any hope that good sense and moderation will calm the irritation in the House of Assembly.” Indeed, Papineau’s return induced Vallières to reinforce his image as a nationalist. In February 1824 he strongly supported resolutions by Louis Bourdages condemning the Canada Trade Act, which had been passed by the British parliament in 1822 in place of an act of union; both men charged that parliament had interfered in the internal affairs of the colony through a clause encouraging conversion from seigneurial tenure to free and common socage. Papineau, who defended the act as a legitimate product of the supremacy of the imperial parliament, won the round, but Vallières triumphed in other battles during a sharp rivalry that persisted until Dalhousie prorogued the legislature in March 1824. The following month Vallières helped plan celebration of the king’s birthday; yet in the winter of 1824–25 he complained strongly to visiting British mps that Canadians were neglected in government appointments, which, he added, too often went to British dependants of the governor.

With Dalhousie in Britain, Lieutenant Governor Sir Francis Nathaniel Burton* called a new legislature, which met in January 1825. Despite a vigorous campaign in his favour by Bourdages and Joseph Le Vasseur Borgia, Vallières lost the vote for the speakership, 32 to 12, to Papineau, who rallied the Montrealers and certain Quebec area representatives, including the influential John Neilson. A rift appeared in the Canadian party as Vallières and Bourdages unsuccessfully contested in the assembly the election of some Papineau supporters, while Papineau reproached “the foolishness, the weakness, [and] the greed” of his Quebec opponents. Jean-Thomas Taschereau*, Andrew Stuart, and Vallières were “hand in glove,” he grumbled in February 1826. “Never has the administration had in the house such an array of talent ready to undertake anything asked of it.” Yet, while still attempting to effect a compromise on supplies, Vallières regularly stole Papineau’s thunder with nationalist pronouncements on seigneurial tenure, introduction of English laws, and use of French in the administration of justice. In April 1826 a disconcerted Dalhousie wrote that “in this Session [Vallières] has shewn himself a straw blown by the wind, acting in direct contradiction of his line when Speaker in 1824.” Later that year Viger remarked disapprovingly of Vallières that “the habits of the bar sometimes narrow ideas by concentrating them on questions of individual rights” as opposed to collective rights; he added that Vallières took positions on public affairs with the insouciance of a lawyer taking on a legal case. Yet Vallières took his nationalism seriously. In 1827, finding the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec dominated by British members, he joined Bouchette and others in founding the Société pour l’Encouragement des Sciences et des Arts en Canada [see Andrew Stuart].

In the elections of 1827 Vallières and Stuart defeated the Papineau candidates George Vanfelson* and Amable Berthelot in Upper Town, but Papineau supporters won almost everywhere else. Although in November Vallières was again advanced for the speakership, Papineau – proposed by Bourdages – won 39 to 5. When Dalhousie refused to accept Papineau as speaker, however, Vallières strongly denounced the action and asserted that the governor’s approval was a mere formality. In the Montreal area the Patriote party (as the Canadian party was now known) hastily channelled popular indignation into a monster petition against Dalhousie’s administration. At Quebec, a committee of 35 citizens, headed by Vallières, found the Montreal petition too radical and, to Papineau’s disgust, carefully drafted another, which was both more complete in its coverage of controversial issues and more moderate in tone. For his part in the movement Vallières was stripped of his militia commission – he had risen to major – by an enraged Dalhousie, who would also have annulled his lawyer’s licence had not cooler heads urged restraint. “Fickle as he is,” Civil Secretary Andrew William Cochran told the governor, “he is the only man in the assembly who on a new election of a speaker would be chosen to replace Mr P.” In November 1828, following Dalhousie’s replacement by Sir James Kempt*, Vallières attempted to start off the legislative session on a cordial note; his flowery reply to the speech from the throne, however, was substantially amended by Papineau and his allies. A week later, when Papineau was delighted to see the house heating up against the administration, Vallières suddenly intervened. “Mr Vallières is always ready to mitigate the abuses that tend to uncover the faults of the administration,” he complained to his wife, Julie Bruneau. “He is specious, he dragged along [François Quirouet, Marc-Pascal de Sales* Laterrière, Louis Lagueux, Robert Christie*] and Ogden, who think like him, and all the rest of the house.” Early in 1829 Julie warned her husband that most of the clergy found him too strident and, like Pierre-Flavien Turgeon*, preferred Vallières’s more moderate nationalism.

Plessis’s death in 1825 had not affected Vallières’s position with the Quebec hierarchy. The new archbishop, Bernard-Claude Panet*, gave him a free rein on such issues as the establishment of a Roman Catholic Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning [see Joseph Langley Mills] and the civil erection of parishes. Indeed, in February 1828 Panet proposed to Lartigue that they send Vallières to London with an address from the clergy opposing the sale of the Sulpician estates to the government. Lartigue, who had his own legal opinions on ecclesiastical matters and consulted, if anyone, his cousins Viger and Papineau, distrusted Vallières’s independence of mind and insisted that a priest be sent instead.

By the late 1820s, Vallières had tired of his increasingly futile rivalry with Papineau; following the death of Olivier Perrault in March 1827 he had been “particularly urgent and busy,” according to Dalhousie, in soliciting a judgeship. Possibly thanks to his election as speaker in 1823, Vallières’s law practice had picked up considerably and he had taken into partnership 21-year-old Jean-François-Joseph Duval. He had acquired several important new clients, such as the businessmen James Hunt, John Caldwell, John Cannon*, John Goudie*, Moses Hart*, and Samuel Gerrard*, several English firms, and the Union Company of Quebec, but most were occasional and the cream of the market still went to Andrew Stuart. In 1824, in 32 appearances in the Court of King’s Bench, Vallières and Duval represented large businessmen 12 times; they appeared for farmers on 4 occasions only and not once for an artisan or a labourer. By October 1827 Duval had given way to Alexander Stewart Scott, who was also just beginning his career; the new association was only moderately active. Vallières had acquired an almost legendary reputation in judicial circles for spontaneous eloquence and brilliant argumentation, but also for erratic conduct. During one phase of a celebrated marathon case opposing Marie-Amable Foretier*, Viger’s wife, and Toussaint Pothier, Vallières, who represented Mme Viger, arrived in court one morning still swimming in the vapours of the previous night’s potations. He mistakenly, but brilliantly, pleaded the case of his legal opposite, James Stuart*, before being placed on the right track by a bemused judge; he then demolished his own demonstrations with his accustomed flair and subsequently obtained judgement in his favour when Stuart and his assistants were unable to improve on them. Indeed, when facing Stuart, the only lawyer who intimidated him, he could become so nervous as to lose all consciousness of what he was saying and, being most eloquent when spontaneous, utterly rout his opponent. In the late 1820s he continued to train young men for the law, among them Charles Hunter and Étienne Parent*.

When Pierre-Stanislas Bédard, provincial judge in Trois-Rivières, died in 1829, Vallières applied for his post. Kempt appointed him on 13 May, although it meant losing a voice for moderation in the assembly. According to Viger, competition had been stiff, but the nomination of Vallières “appears to give general satisfaction” as compensation for his persecution at Dalhousie’s hands. “If there is not entire confidence in M. Vallières as a constitutional expert or legislator,” remarked Viger (who also worried about indolence), “people have a just idea of the superiority of his understanding and of his knowledge in matters of civil jurisprudence.” The Quebec Gazette applauded the appointment of a man “who has both the will and the capacity to administer justice according to the established laws of the country; without fear, affection or bias.” In the subsequent by-election his protégé, Duval, defeated Papineau’s candidate, Vanfelson

In early February 1830 Vallières sold his home at Quebec to the lawyer and businessman Daniel McCallum for £2,000, but the entire sum went to the estate of Olivier Perrault. From 1829 to 1833 Vallières made his last 15 grants in the faubourg Saint-Jean and sold off land in the Eastern Townships and on the lower south shore of the St Lawrence. Possibly he made acquisitions around Trois-Rivières. His last personal tie to Quebec, his wife Louise, had died in April 1829 and a significantly broad mixture of mourners had attended the funeral, including James and Andrew Stuart, Solicitor General Ogden, Vanfelson, Le Vasseur Borgia, and Perrault. In Trois-Rivières Vallières struck up a relationship with the Jewess Esther Eliza Hart, daughter of Ezekiel. A licence to marry was apparently obtained in Montreal in July 1831, but is unlikely to have been used. Esther was still alive when, on 26 April 1836, Vallières married the widow Jane Keirnan in the Catholic church at Trois-Rivières. He had had at least one son with Louise; he adopted several children while in Trois-Rivières and became a father figure for others, among them Joseph-Guillaume Barthe*, who idolized him. According to Barthe and to Barthe’s contemporary Antoine Gérin-Lajoie*, as a judge Vallières found himself incapable of pronouncing the death sentence and went to any length to escape having to do so. In October 1830 he was given a commission of the peace for all of Lower Canada, and on 10 December his commission as provincial judge was replaced by another as resident judge of the Court of King’s Bench in the Trois-Rivières district.

Trois-Rivières offered few outlets for a man of Vallières’s social dispositions. He was the first president of the Société d’Éducation de Trois-Rivières, formed in 1830. He also took part in some political activities. In March 1830 he presided over a royalist dinner in honour of the local deputy, Ogden, and in the 1830s and early 1840s he and René-Joseph Kimber led a movement for revision of the lease to the Saint-Maurice ironworks, held by Mathew Bell, in order to open new lands for agriculture. After the uprising of 1837 Vallières granted a writ of habeas corpus to lawyer Édouard-Louis Pacaud* for the rebel André-Augustin Papineau, brother of Louis-Joseph. In June 1838 the new governor, Lord Durham [Lambton], who considered Vallières the premier Canadian legal mind, appointed him to the Executive Council to arbitrate between the judges from Quebec and those from Montreal when the council acted as the Court of Appeals.

Shortly before Durham’s arrival, and again in early November 1838 after his departure, Administrator Sir John Colborne* suspended habeas corpus. In November judges Elzéar Bédard and Philippe Panet*, considering the action unconstitutional, granted a writ; they were suspended by Colborne, on 10 December. Four days earlier, but well aware of the risk he took, Vallières too had granted a writ, for a farmer from Rivière-du-Loup (Louiseville). When summoned to provide Colborne with the documents relative to his decision, Vallières complied, but he protested that an investigation by the executive would tend “to lessen the independence of the Bench.” Nevertheless, supported by the Executive Council, the law officers, Ogden and Andrew Stuart, and the chief justices, James Stuart and Michael O’Sullivan, among others, Colborne suspended Vallières on 27 December. A few days later Barthe, having learned that he himself was to be arrested for having had published a poem that had been judged subversive, sought Vallières’s advice; Vallières congratulated him on the publication, told him to receive his “baptism as a patriot and a political martyr,” and gave him books to read in prison. Deprived of his salary, Vallières lived in financial embarrassment, but the chastisement did not deter him from signing a petition, in the spring of 1840, against a union that Britain was determined to impose on the Canadas through Governor Charles Edward Poulett Thomson. With Papineau in exile, Canadian nationalists prepared to bring Vallières back into politics and propose him as speaker of the united assembly. However, on 8 August, Vallières, Bédard, and Panet were reinstated (with back-pay) by Thomson, who did not want political martyrs threatening the fragile union he was effecting.

On 1 June 1842 Sydenham’s successor, Sir Charles Bagot, named Vallières to succeed O’Sullivan as chief justice of the Court of King’s Bench in the Montreal district; Vallières thus became the first Canadian to hold a chief justiceship. He stood, Bagot told Colonial Secretary Lord Stanley, “consensu omnium single and alone as the first lawyer in the country . . . equally versed in French and English laws and languages.” The appointment effectively reduced the opposition to union; its leaders, Neilson and Viger, applauded unreservedly the elevation of “a man of genius who for 12 years shone under a bushel.” However, according to Barthe, Vallières left Trois-Rivières a “shadow of himself” physically. He was subsequently so racked by leg pains that he often had to be carried to the bench, and he was even threatened by the ministry of William Henry Draper* with forced retirement as a result of frequent absences. Consequently, in July 1846 he rejected with disdain an offer of the presidency of the Executive Council made by the same government, which hoped by that means to undermine the Lower Canadian reform movement, led by Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine*. At the end of the year Vallières was residing in Donegana’s Hotel, a luxury establishment in the heart of Montreal. There he wrote his will, in a single sentence, leaving all his possessions “unto my beloved wife Mrs Jane Keirnan in full and unlimited property.” He died the following February. Antoine Gérin-Lajoie delivered a eulogy before the Institut Canadien of Montreal, a liberal intellectual body of which Vallières had been a member.

Aubert de Gaspé asserted that Vallières “was the most naturally talented man that Canada has ever produced,” and this assessment has since been endorsed repeatedly. Vallières has inevitably been compared with Papineau by authors seeking to discover why he had been unable to lead the Canadian party on a more moderate course. Papineau’s equal in intelligence and eloquence, a serious student all his life (he always had a book in his pocket), Vallières nevertheless enjoyed the good life too much to share Papineau’s quasi-masochistic devotion to duty, public and private. As well Vallières was independent-minded; his lines of thought, resulting in part from a largely informal education, were too original and complex to excite a mass following and too flexible to attract party support at a time when political views were hardening into the opposing ideologies of liberal nationalism and colonial imperialism. He was thus ostracized by both sides in the late 1820s and throughout the 1830s. Only in the 1840s, when new patterns of thought and alliances emerged, did his originality become appreciated.

Vallières seems to have left no personal papers and consequently remains an enigma to historians, as he had been to his contemporaries. Laurent-Olivier David* wrote that his life “belongs to tradition rather than to history; there remains of him only the recollection of his abilities in the memory of those who knew him.” Such a source must be employed with discretion, for Vallières amused himself by spinning tales of his mysterious past to such admirers as Aubert de Gaspé and Barthe, who faithfully consigned them to their memoirs. But if the ‘facts’ his contemporaries recount are often contradictory or patently incredible, the impressions of him formed by his friends – and grudgingly concurred in by his opponents – leave no doubt that Vallières de Saint-Réal was an extraordinary man.

James H. Lambert in collaboration with Jacques Monet