Letteratura scientifica selezionata sul tema "Noblesse – Canada – Histoire"

While the term “visual literacy” has grown in popularity in the last 50 years, its meaning remains nebulous. It is described variously as: a vehicle for aesthetic appreciation, a means of defence against visual manipulation, a sorting mechanism for an increasingly data-saturated age, and a prerequisite to civic inclusion (Fransecky 23; Messaris 181; McTigue and Flowers 580). Scholars have written extensively about the first three subjects but there has been less research on how visual literacy frames civic life and how it might help the public as a tool to address disadvantage and assist in removing social and cultural barriers. This article examines a forerunner to visual literacy in the push to create an international symbol language born out of popular education movements, a project that fell short of its goals but still left a considerable impression on graphic media. This article, then, presents an analysis of visual literacy campaigns in the early postwar era. These campaigns did not attempt to invent a symbolic language but posited that images themselves served as a universal language in which students could receive training. Of particular interest is how the concept of visual literacy has been mobilised as a pedagogical tool in design, digital humanities and in broader civic education initiatives promoted by Third Space institutions. Behind the creation of new visual literacy curricula is the idea that images can help anchor a world community, supplementing textual communication. Figure 1: Visual Literacy Yearbook. Montebello Unified School District, USA, 1973. Shedding Light: Origins of the Visual Literacy Frame The term “visual literacy” came to the fore in the early 1970s on the heels of mass literacy campaigns. The educators, creatives and media theorists who first advocated for visual learning linked this aim to literacy, an unassailable goal, to promote a more radical curricular overhaul. They challenged a system that had hitherto only acknowledged a very limited pathway towards academic success; pushing “language and mathematics”, courses “referred to as solids (something substantial) as contrasted with liquids or gases (courses with little or no substance)” (Eisner 92). This was deemed “a parochial view of both human ability and the possibilities of education” that did not acknowledge multiple forms of intelligence (Gardner). This change not only integrated elements of mass culture that had been rejected in education, notably film and graphic arts, but also encouraged the critique of images as a form of good citizenship, assuming that visually literate arbiters could call out media misrepresentations and manipulative political advertising (Messaris, “Visual Test”). This movement was, in many ways, reactive to new forms of mass media that began to replace newspapers as key forms of civic participation. Unlike simple literacy (being able to decipher letters as a mnemonic system), visual literacy involves imputing meanings to images where meanings are less fixed, yet still with embedded cultural signifiers. Visual literacy promised to extend enlightenment metaphors of sight (as in the German Aufklärung) and illumination (as in the French Lumières) to help citizens understand an increasingly complex marketplace of images. The move towards visual literacy was not so much a shift towards images (and away from books and oration) but an affirmation of the need to critically investigate the visual sphere. It introduced doubt to previously upheld hierarchies of perception. Sight, to Kant the “noblest of the senses” (158), was no longer the sense “least affected” by the surrounding world but an input centre that was equally manipulable. In Kant’s view of societal development, the “cosmopolitan” held the key to pacifying bellicose states and ensuring global prosperity and tranquillity. The process of developing a cosmopolitan ideology rests, according to Kant, on the gradual elimination of war and “the education of young people in intellectual and moral culture” (188-89). Transforming disparate societies into “a universal cosmopolitan existence” that would “at last be realised as the matrix within which all the original capacities of the human race may develop” and would take well-funded educational institutions and, potentially, a new framework for imparting knowledge (Kant 51). To some, the world of the visual presented a baseline for shared experience. Figure 2: Exhibition by the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna, photograph c. 1927. An International Picture Language The quest to find a mutually intelligible language that could “bridge worlds” and solder together all of humankind goes back to the late nineteenth century and the Esperanto movement of Ludwig Zamenhof (Schor 59). The expression of this ideal in the world of the visual picked up steam in the interwar years with designers and editors like Fritz Kahn, Gerd Arntz, and Otto and Marie Neurath. Their work transposing complex ideas into graphic form has been rediscovered as an antecedent to modern infographics, but the symbols they deployed were not to merely explain, but also help education and build international fellowship unbounded by spoken language. The Neuraths in particular are celebrated for their international picture language or Isotypes. These pictograms (sometimes viewed as proto-emojis) can be used to represent data without text. Taken together they are an “intemporal, hieroglyphic language” that Neutrath hoped would unite working-class people the world over (Lee 159). The Neuraths’ work was done in the explicit service of visual education with a popular socialist agenda and incubated in the social sphere of Red Vienna at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Social and Economic Museum) where Otto served as Director. The Wirtschaftsmuseum was an experiment in popular education, with multiple branches and late opening hours to accommodate the “the working man [who] has time to see a museum only at night” (Neurath 72-73). The Isotype contained universalist aspirations for the “making of a world language, or a helping picture language—[that] will give support to international developments generally” and “educate by the eye” (Neurath 13). Figure 3: Gerd Arntz Isotype Images. (Source: University of Reading.) The Isotype was widely adopted in the postwar era in pre-packaged sets of symbols used in graphic design and wayfinding systems for buildings and transportation networks, but with the socialism of the Neuraths’ peeled away, leaving only the system of logos that we are familiar with from airport washrooms, charts, and public transport maps. Much of the uptake in this symbol language could be traced to increased mobility and tourism, particularly in countries that did not make use of a Roman alphabet. The 1964 Olympics in Tokyo helped pave the way when organisers, fearful of jumbling too many scripts together, opted instead for black and white icons to represent the program of sports that summer. The new focus on the visual was both technologically mediated—cheaper printing and broadcast technologies made the diffusion of image increasingly possible—but also ideologically supported by a growing emphasis on projects that transcended linguistic, ethnic, and national borders. The Olympic symbols gradually morphed into Letraset icons, and, later, symbols in the Unicode Standard, which are the basis for today’s emojis. Wordless signs helped facilitate interconnectedness, but only in the most literal sense; their application was limited primarily to sports mega-events, highway maps, and “brand building”, and they never fulfilled their role as an educational language “to give the different nations a common outlook” (Neurath 18). Universally understood icons, particularly in the form of emojis, point to a rise in visual communication but they have fallen short as a cosmopolitan project, supporting neither the globalisation of Kantian ethics nor the transnational socialism of the Neuraths. Figure 4: Symbols in use. Women's bathroom. 1964 Tokyo Olympics. (Source: The official report of the Organizing Committee.) Counter Education By mid-century, the optimism of a universal symbol language seemed dated, and focus shifted from distillation to discernment. New educational programs presented ways to study images, increasingly reproducible with new technologies, as a language in and of themselves. These methods had their roots in the fin-de-siècle educational reforms of John Dewey, Helen Parkhurst, and Maria Montessori. As early as the 1920s, progressive educators were using highly visual magazines, like National Geographic, as the basis for lesson planning, with the hopes that they would “expose students to edifying and culturally enriching reading” and “develop a more catholic taste or sensibility, representing an important cosmopolitan value” (Hawkins 45). The rise in imagery from previously inaccessible regions helped pupils to see themselves in relation to the larger world (although this connection always came with the presumed superiority of the reader). “Pictorial education in public schools” taught readers—through images—to accept a broader world but, too often, they saw photographs as a “straightforward transcription of the real world” (Hawkins 57). The images of cultures and events presented in Life and National Geographic for the purposes of education and enrichment were now the subject of greater analysis in the classroom, not just as “windows into new worlds” but as cultural products in and of themselves. The emerging visual curriculum aimed to do more than just teach with previously excluded modes (photography, film and comics); it would investigate how images presented and mediated the world. This gained wider appeal with new analytical writing on film, like Raymond Spottiswoode's Grammar of the Film (1950) which sought to formulate the grammatical rules of visual communication (Messaris 181), influenced by semiotics and structural linguistics; the emphasis on grammar can also be seen in far earlier writings on design systems such as Owen Jones’s 1856 The Grammar of Ornament, which also advocated for new, universalising methods in design education (Sloboda 228). The inventorying impulse is on display in books like Donis A. Dondis’s A Primer of Visual Literacy (1973), a text that meditates on visual perception but also functions as an introduction to line and form in the applied arts, picking up where the Bauhaus left off. Dondis enumerates the “syntactical guidelines” of the applied arts with illustrations that are in keeping with 1920s books by Kandinsky and Klee and analyse pictorial elements. However, at the end of the book she shifts focus with two chapters that examine “messaging” and visual literacy explicitly. Dondis predicts that “an intellectual, trained ability to make and understand visual messages is becoming a vital necessity to involvement with communication. It is quite likely that visual literacy will be one of the fundamental measures of education in the last third of our century” (33) and she presses for more programs that incorporate the exploration and analysis of images in tertiary education. Figure 5: Ideal spatial environment for the Blueprint charts, 1970. (Image: Inventory Press.) Visual literacy in education arrived in earnest with a wave of publications in the mid-1970s. They offered ways for students to understand media processes and for teachers to use visual culture as an entry point into complex social and scientific subject matter, tapping into the “visual consciousness of the ‘television generation’” (Fransecky 5). Visual culture was often seen as inherently democratising, a break from stuffiness, the “artificialities of civilisation”, and the “archaic structures” that set sensorial perception apart from scholarship (Dworkin 131-132). Many radical university projects and community education initiatives of the 1960s made use of new media in novel ways: from Maurice Stein and Larry Miller’s fold-out posters accompanying Blueprint for Counter Education (1970) to Emory Douglas’s graphics for The Black Panther newspaper. Blueprint’s text- and image-dense wall charts were made via assemblage and they were imagined less as charts and more as a “matrix of resources” that could be used—and added to—by youth to undertake their own counter education (Cronin 53). These experiments in visual learning helped to break down old hierarchies in education, but their aim was influenced more by countercultural notions of disruption than the universal ideals of cosmopolitanism. From Image as Text to City as Text For a brief period in the 1970s, thinkers like Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan et al., Massage) and artists like Bruno Munari (Tanchis and Munari) collaborated fruitfully with graphic designers to create books that mixed text and image in novel ways. Using new compositional methods, they broke apart traditional printing lock-ups to superimpose photographs, twist text, and bend narrative frames. The most famous work from this era is, undoubtedly, The Medium Is the Massage (1967), McLuhan’s team-up with graphic designer Quentin Fiore, but it was followed by dozens of other books intended to communicate theory and scientific ideas with popularising graphics. Following in the footsteps of McLuhan, many of these texts sought not just to explain an issue but to self-consciously reference their own method of information delivery. These works set the precedent for visual aids (and, to a lesser extent, audio) that launched a diverse, non-hierarchical discourse that was nonetheless bound to tactile artefacts. In 1977, McLuhan helped develop a media textbook for secondary school students called City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media. It is notable for its direct address style and its focus on investigating spaces outside of the classroom (provocatively, a section on the third page begins with “Should all schools be closed?”). The book follows with a fine-grained analysis of advertising forms in which students are asked to first bring advertisements into class for analysis and later to go out into the city to explore “a man-made environment, a huge warehouse of information, a vast resource to be mined free of charge” (McLuhan et al., City 149). As a document City as Classroom is critical of existing teaching methods, in line with the radical “in the streets” pedagogy of its day. McLuhan’s theories proved particularly salient for the counter education movement, in part because they tapped into a healthy scepticism of advertisers and other image-makers. They also dovetailed with growing discontent with the ad-strew visual environment of cities in the 1970s. Budgets for advertising had mushroomed in the1960s and outdoor advertising “cluttered” cities with billboards and neon, generating “fierce intensities and new hybrid energies” that threatened to throw off the visual equilibrium (McLuhan 74). Visual literacy curricula brought in experiential learning focussed on the legibility of the cities, mapping, and the visualisation of urban issues with social justice implications. The Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI), a “collective endeavour of community research and education” that arose in the aftermath of the 1967 uprisings, is the most storied of the groups that suffused the collection of spatial data with community engagement and organising (Warren et al. 61). The following decades would see a tamed approach to visual literacy that, while still pressing for critical reading, did not upend traditional methods of educational delivery. Figure 6: Beginning a College Program-Assisting Teachers to Develop Visual Literacy Approaches in Public School Classrooms. 1977. ERIC. Searching for Civic Education The visual literacy initiatives formed in the early 1970s both affirmed existing civil society institutions while also asserting the need to better inform the public. Most of the campaigns were sponsored by universities, major libraries, and international groups such as UNESCO, which published its “Declaration on Media Education” in 1982. They noted that “participation” was “essential to the working of a pluralistic and representative democracy” and the “public—users, citizens, individuals, groups ... were too systematically overlooked”. Here, the public is conceived as both “targets of the information and communication process” and users who “should have the last word”. To that end their “continuing education” should be ensured (Study 18). Programs consisted primarily of cognitive “see-scan-analyse” techniques (Little et al.) for younger students but some also sought to bring visual analysis to adult learners via continuing education (often through museums eager to engage more diverse audiences) and more radical popular education programs sponsored by community groups. By the mid-80s, scores of modules had been built around the comprehension of visual media and had become standard educational fare across North America, Australasia, and to a lesser extent, Europe. There was an increasing awareness of the role of data and image presentation in decision-making, as evidenced by the surprising commercial success of Edward Tufte’s 1982 book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Visual literacy—or at least image analysis—was now enmeshed in teaching practice and needed little active advocacy. Scholarly interest in the subject went into a brief period of hibernation in the 1980s and early 1990s, only to be reborn with the arrival of new media distribution technologies (CD-ROMs and then the internet) in classrooms and the widespread availability of digital imaging technology starting in the late 1990s; companies like Adobe distributed free and reduced-fee licences to schools and launched extensive teacher training programs. Visual literacy was reanimated but primarily within a circumscribed academic field of education and data visualisation. Figure 7: Visual Literacy; What Research Says to the Teacher, 1975. National Education Association. USA. Part of the shifting frame of visual literacy has to do with institutional imperatives, particularly in places where austerity measures forced strange alliances between disciplines. What had been a project in alternative education morphed into an uncontested part of the curriculum and a dependable budget line. This shift was already forecasted in 1972 by Harun Farocki who, writing in Filmkritik, noted that funding for new film schools would be difficult to obtain but money might be found for “training in media education … a discipline that could persuade ministers of education, that would at the same time turn the budget restrictions into an advantage, and that would match the functions of art schools” (98). Nearly 50 years later educators are still using media education (rebranded as visual or media literacy) to make the case for fine arts and humanities education. While earlier iterations of visual literacy education were often too reliant on the idea of cracking the “code” of images, they did promote ways of learning that were a deep departure from the rote methods of previous generations. Next-gen curricula frame visual literacy as largely supplemental—a resource, but not a program. By the end of the 20th century, visual literacy had changed from a scholarly interest to a standard resource in the “teacher’s toolkit”, entering into school programs and influencing museum education, corporate training, and the development of public-oriented media (Literacy). An appreciation of image culture was seen as key to creating empathetic global citizens, but its scope was increasingly limited. With rising austerity in the education sector (a shift that preceded the 2008 recession by decades in some countries), art educators, museum enrichment staff, and design researchers need to make a case for why their disciplines were relevant in pedagogical models that are increasingly aimed at “skills-based” and “job ready” teaching. Arts educators worked hard to insert their fields into learning goals for secondary students as visual literacy, with the hope that “literacy” would carry the weight of an educational imperative and not a supplementary field of study. Conclusion For nearly a century, educational initiatives have sought to inculcate a cosmopolitan perspective with a variety of teaching materials and pedagogical reference points. Symbolic languages, like the Isotype, looked to unite disparate people with shared visual forms; while educational initiatives aimed to train the eyes of students to make them more discerning citizens. The term ‘visual literacy’ emerged in the 1960s and has since been deployed in programs with a wide variety of goals. Countercultural initiatives saw it as a prerequisite for popular education from the ground up, but, in the years since, it has been formalised and brought into more staid curricula, often as a sort of shorthand for learning from media and pictures. The grand cosmopolitan vision of a complete ‘visual language’ has been scaled back considerably, but still exists in trace amounts. Processes of globalisation require images to universalise experiences, commodities, and more for people without shared languages. Emoji alphabets and globalese (brands and consumer messaging that are “visual-linguistic” amalgams “increasingly detached from any specific ethnolinguistic group or locality”) are a testament to a mediatised banal cosmopolitanism (Jaworski 231). In this sense, becoming “fluent” in global design vernacular means familiarity with firms and products, an understanding that is aesthetic, not critical. It is very much the beneficiaries of globalisation—both state and commercial actors—who have been able to harness increasingly image-based technologies for their benefit. To take a humorous but nonetheless consequential example, Spanish culinary boosters were able to successfully lobby for a paella emoji (Miller) rather than having a food symbol from a less wealthy country such as a Senegalese jollof or a Morrocan tagine. This trend has gone even further as new forms of visual communication are increasingly streamlined and managed by for-profit media platforms. The ubiquity of these forms of communication and their global reach has made visual literacy more important than ever but it has also fundamentally shifted the endeavour from a graphic sorting practice to a critical piece of social infrastructure that has tremendous political ramifications. Visual literacy campaigns hold out the promise of educating students in an image-based system with the potential to transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries. This cosmopolitan political project has not yet been realised, as the visual literacy frame has drifted into specialised silos of art, design, and digital humanities education. It can help bridge the “incomplete connections” of an increasingly globalised world (Calhoun 112), but it does not have a program in and of itself. Rather, an evolving visual literacy curriculum might be seen as a litmus test for how we imagine the role of images in the world. 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Lors d'une conférence prononcée en 1922, Louis Alexandre Taschereau, premier ministre du Québec et d'ascendance noble, fait l'apologie de la noblesse canadienne en insistant sur le fait qu'elle occupe toujours le premier rang de la société. À l'inverse, une certaine historiographie (Ouellet, 1966; Brunet 1969 ; Séguin, 1970) a prétendu que le groupe nobiliaire a perdu son autorité dès la Cession de la Nouvelle-France. Il est indéniable que la noblesse s'est transformée lorsque la période préindustrielle a peu à peu laissé place à l'ère industrielle, mais dans quelle mesure? Cette thèse poursuit l'objectif d'établir un portrait du devenir de l'ensemble des familles nobles d'origine française restées au Canada, de la Cession de la Nouvelle-France jusqu'à la Première Guerre mondiale, en portant une attention particulière à ses comportements démographiques et matrimoniaux ainsi qu'aux parcours professionnels et à l'identification à ses lignées ancestrales.Si la Cession nécessite une adaptation, la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle constitue un choc encore plus important. De nombreuses familles nobles ont connu un glissement social, mais ce processus s'est effectué progressivement dans le temps et à des moments différents selon les cas. Surtout, l'ensemble des thèmes étudiés convergent vers un noyau de familles ayant réussi à conserver une position élitaire et à maintenir une autorité locale, régionale et, dans quelques cas, nationale, voire plus rarement, impériale. Des caractéristiques du régime français persistent au sein de ce sous-groupe restreint, telle que la propriété foncière et la valeur du service. Celui-ci fait aussi preuve d'adaptation, par exemple sur le plan professionnel et du choix des conjoints. Alors que de nombreuses familles déclinent au fil du XIXe siècle, des initiatives identitaires émergent parallèlement chez celles s'étant maintenues, qui revendiquent une appartenance à une lignée le plus souvent en voie d'extinction démographique
In a 1922 conference, Louis Alexandre Taschereau, of noble descent and Prime Minister of Quebec, insisted that Canadian aristocracy still occupied at that moment the highest social rank. On the other hand, some historians claimed that aristocrats had declined in tandem with the Cession of New France in 1763 (Ouellet, 1966; Brunet, 1969; Séguin, 1970). In fact, it is undeniable that nobility metamorphosed as the pre-industrial period gradually made its way to the Industrial Era. In that respect, how did aristocracy evolved ? From the Cession of New France to the First World War, the present thesis aims to analyse the becoming of noble families of French descent who stayed in Canada. Indeed, this study focuses on their respective demographic and matrimonial background, as well as their career paths and their identification with their ancestral lineages.If the Cession required adaptation the second half of the 19th century constituted an even more significant shock as aristocracy lost its bearing. This came as a challenge to aristocrats who had to reinvent themselves in order to maintain their high social status. Many noble families progressively experienced a social shift over time and at various moments throughout different events. But all the studied themes converge toward a core of families who succeeded in retaining an elite position and maintaining local, regional and, sometimes national, and somewhat rarely, imperial authority. We observe that characteristics of the French regime persist within this restrictive subgroup, such as land ownership and the value of service. These aristocrats also adapted their career paths and choices of spouse. While aristocracy declined over the course of the 19th century, identity initiatives emerged among those who remained noble, claiming to belong to an aristocracy lineage, that often was on the verge of demographic extinction

Le milieu du XVIIIe siècle marque une césure dans l'histoire du Canada. Après deux siècles de présence française, le pays passe sous domination anglaise à l’issue de la guerre de Sept Ans qui entraîne la fin de la Nouvelle-France. Ce changement de domination génère des bouleversements structurels dans le paysage social du pays, touchant particulièrement les élites, dont la plupart étaient officiers militaires chargés du maintien de l'ordre et de la domination sur le territoire et représentants du pouvoir royal gérant les structures et l'encadrement politique. Souvent nobles, elles offraient un code de conduite et un modèle culturel indéniable. La perte de la position centrale qu’elles occupaient dans la société canadienne pose la question de leur adaptation sous le régime anglais, étudiée au travers de l’exemple de la famille Salaberry. Cette famille, affiliée à la noblesse, proche du prince anglais Édouard duc de Kent, compte dans ses rangs un héros d’une bataille durant la guerre de 1812-1815 et présente un profil atypique. Cette étude, menée à partir des documents personnels dont une importante correspondance et de nombreux documents notariés, permet d'entrer dans l'intimité d'une famille de la noblesse canadienne-française du tournant du XIXe siècle, d'en dégager les comportements familiaux et sociaux ainsi que leurs évolutions, mais aussi d'étudier l'adaptation politique et professionnelle par la participation au fonctionnement du nouveau régime et l'acculturation du point de vue linguistique mais aussi religieux des élites sous les premières décennies du régime anglais au Québec
The mid-eighteenth century marked a break in Canada's history. After two centuries of French presence, the country came under British domination at the end of the Seven Years' War after New France’s defeat. This shift in dominance brought about structural upheavals in the country's social landscape, particularly affecting the elites, most of whom were military officers in charge of maintaining order and domination on the territory, and representatives of the royal power. Often of noble origin, they embodied a code of conduct and an undeniable cultural model. The loss of the central position they hold in Canadian society raised the question of their adaptation under the British regime, which is studied in this thesis through the example of the Salaberry family. This family presents an atypical profile: it was affiliated with the French nobility but was close to the English prince Edward Duke of Kent and it counted among its ranks a hero of a battle fought during the war of 1812-1815. This study, based on personal documents, including a large correspondence as well as many notarized documents, allows to critically examine the intimacy of a family of the Canadian nobility at the turn of the 19th century. In doing so it helps to identify and trace the development of family and social behaviors. This case study also allows for an analysis of the political and professional adaptation of French elites through the participation in the workings of the new regime and their linguistic and religious acculturation during the first decades of the British regime in the Quebec Province

Le milieu du XVIIIe siècle marque une césure dans l'histoire du Canada. Après deux siècles de présence française, le pays passe sous domination anglaise à l’issue de la guerre de Sept Ans qui entraîne la fin de la Nouvelle-France. Ce changement de domination génère des bouleversements structurels dans le paysage social du pays, touchant particulièrement les élites, dont la plupart étaient officiers militaires chargés du maintien de l'ordre et de la domination sur le territoire et représentants du pouvoir royal gérant les structures et l'encadrement politique. Souvent nobles, elles offraient un code de conduite et un modèle culturel indéniable. La perte de la position centrale qu’elles occupaient dans la société canadienne pose la question de leur adaptation sous le régime anglais, étudiée au travers de l’exemple de la famille Salaberry. Cette famille, affiliée à la noblesse, proche du prince anglais Édouard duc de Kent, compte dans ses rangs un héros d’une bataille durant la guerre de 1812-1815 et présente un profil atypique. Cette étude, menée à partir des documents personnels dont une importante correspondance et de nombreux documents notariés, permet d'entrer dans l'intimité d'une famille de la noblesse canadienne-française du tournant du XIXe siècle, d'en dégager les comportements familiaux et sociaux ainsi que leurs évolutions, mais aussi d'étudier l'adaptation politique et professionnelle par la participation au fonctionnement du nouveau régime et l'acculturation du point de vue linguistique mais aussi religieux des élites sous les premières décennies du régime anglais au Québec
The mid-eighteenth century marked a break in Canada's history. After two centuries of French presence, the country came under British domination at the end of the Seven Years' War after New France’s defeat. This shift in dominance brought about structural upheavals in the country's social landscape, particularly affecting the elites, most of whom were military officers in charge of maintaining order and domination on the territory, and representatives of the royal power. Often of noble origin, they embodied a code of conduct and an undeniable cultural model. The loss of the central position they hold in Canadian society raised the question of their adaptation under the British regime, which is studied in this thesis through the example of the Salaberry family. This family presents an atypical profile: it was affiliated with the French nobility but was close to the English prince Edward Duke of Kent and it counted among its ranks a hero of a battle fought during the war of 1812-1815. This study, based on personal documents, including a large correspondence as well as many notarized documents, allows to critically examine the intimacy of a family of the Canadian nobility at the turn of the 19th century. In doing so it helps to identify and trace the development of family and social behaviors. This case study also allows for an analysis of the political and professional adaptation of French elites through the participation in the workings of the new regime and their linguistic and religious acculturation during the first decades of the British regime in the Quebec Province

Entre la fin du régime français et l’adoption de l’Acte constitutionnel par le Parlement de Londres en 1791, le rapport que la noblesse canadienne entretient avec le système judiciaire civil de la colonie change de façon majeure. Les Canadiens doivent s’adapter au nouveau système mis en place par l’administration britannique de la colonie. En Nouvelle-France, les nobles présentaient leurs différends juridiques civils devant le Tribunal royal, régi par la Coutume de Paris ; à partir de la Cession (1763), ce sont officiellement les lois britanniques qui s’appliquent jusqu’au retour des lois civiles françaises en 1774. Après quelques adaptations, la Cour des Plaidoyers communs devient la cour de prédilection des Canadiens, et par conséquent, de l’ancienne élite militaire. Le système judiciaire constitue un élément important de l’étude de l’évolution de la colonie, car l’attitude de la caste élitaire face aux tribunaux est un indicateur de sa capacité d’adaptation et de son degré d’implication dans la vie sociale.
From the end of New-France to the adoption of the Constitutional Act of 1791, the relationship between the nobility and the colonial civil court underwent drastic changes. The ‘Canadiens’ needed to conform to the British system. In New-France, aristocrats sued each other before the ‘tribunal royal’, using the Custom of Paris; but as of 1763, it was the British laws which prevailed. After some modifications, the Common Pleas Court became the French nobility’s (and therefore the military elite’s) favourite courthouse. The judicial system is an important part of research on colonial evolution because the population’s behaviour (and in our case that of the elite) before its courts shows its ability to adapt and its degree of involvement in the social life of the time.

Les historiens ont eu tendance à effacer les femmes de leurs écrits lorsqu’il était question des élites de la Nouvelle-France ; ce concept a longtemps été associé au monde masculin. Le choix d’exclure la gent féminine n’est pas surprenant lorsque l’on sait que les définitions rattachées à l’élite proviennent principalement de la profession, ainsi que de la place occupée par les gens dans les institutions ou dans les structures de pouvoir. À cette époque, la majorité des femmes n’occupaient aucune fonction décisionnelle ; elles étaient maintenues, ‘’grâce’’ au patriarcat, dans la sphère domestique. Malgré ces constats, ce mémoire s’intéresse tout de même à la pertinence d’une définition de l’élite au féminin. Nous essayons donc de démontrer que les femmes en Nouvelle-France avaient aussi des lieux de rassemblement élitaire. Pour y parvenir, nous étudions le parcours des principales officières de la confrérie des Dames de la Sainte-Famille (Montréal) entre 1724 et 1760. Afin de connaître leur statut socio-économique, ce mémoire s’emploie à relever divers éléments caractéristiques : statut socio-professionnel de leur père et de leurs maris, les montants des douaires et des préciputs dans leurs contrats de mariage, l’âge au premier mariage, le nombre de naissances ainsi que la mortalité infantile. Ces divers indicateurs révèlent que la majorité de ces dames provenaient effectivement d’un milieu élitaire. Pour consolider cette conclusion, ce mémoire analyse ensuite le comportement de ces femmes en lien avec une des caractéristiques propres aux élites soit le réseautage. Il s’intéresse particulièrement à la pratique du marrainage ; qui sont les parrains et marraines des officières, qui sont les marraines de leurs enfants et de qui elles sont les marraines. Cette dernière partie du mémoire vient à son tour confirmer la dimension élitaire des officières de la Sainte-Famille.
When it was about of New France's elitism, historians have tended to erase the women from their writings; this concept has long been associated with the male world. The decision to exclude the feminine gent is not surprising when we know that the definitions attached to the elitism, primarily come from the profession as well as the places of people in the institutions or in the structures of power. At that time, most of women haven't held a decisional function; they were maintained, ''thanks'' to patriarchy in the domestic sphere. Despite these findings, the memory is still interested in the relevance of a feminine elite definition. So, we try to show that women in New France also had elite gathering places. To achieve this, we study the journey of the main Officers of the Holy Family Ladies’s brotherhood (Montreal) between 1724 and 1760. In order to know their socio-economic status, this memory is used to know some characteristic elements: the socio-professional status of their fathers and husbands, the amounts of dowries and préciputs in their marriage contracts, the age at first marriage, the births and the infant mortality. These varied indicators show that actually the majority of these ladies came from an elitist environment. To consolidate this conclusion, the memory analyzes the behavior of these women in connection with the distinct characteristic of elites : the networking. Networking is particularly interested in the practice of godmothering ; who are the Officers' sponsors, who are the godmother of their children and from whom are they the godmothers. This last part of memory come to confirm the elitist dimension of Officers of the Holy Family.