the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal ofInterdisciplinary History

The Patriots and the People: The Rebellion of 1837 in Rural Lower Canada by Allan GreerReview by: John Herd ThompsonThe Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Summer, 1996), pp. 173-174Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/206528 .

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REVIEWS | 73

On several levels, however, Nixon Reconsidered is unsuccessful, if not infuriating. It is drearily written and overargued. Hoffs Nixon was not the shifty-eyed, liberal Antichrist. He proved more committed to civil rights, for example, than his contemporary critics granted. But should Nixon rank above all previous presidents in civil rights? Lyndon Johnson? Abraham Lincoln? Key aides, not Nixon, stood behind many of the domestic initiatives that Hoff admires. Nixon himself, as Hoff acknowledges from her own interviews with the former president, cared little about domestic affairs. As Graham has noted, indifference caused Nixon to go along with the sometimes creative proposals of senior advisors in domestic matters.1 Yet, Hoff also understates the extent to which Democratic control of Congress pushed Nixon toward decidedly un-Republican responses to environmental protection and inflation.

The hard task of reconstructing internal policy debates-Hoffs strength-has to be combined with a greater sense of Republican politics and presidential power in the I96os and the early I970s. Graham's study of civil rights enforcement far more successfully balances a discussion of the Nixon administration with an appreciation of national and congres- sional politics. As he observed, Nixon resided in neither of the Repub- lican Party's two wings. He was not a moderate Rockefeller Republican nor part of the GOP'S conservative Barry Goldwater-Ronald Reagan faction. From the party's center, he borrowed concepts and conceptu- alizers from both sides, often without conviction. In that regard, and others, Nixon may be a transitional figure. He led a party that, after his resignation, moved to the right, in the process making him appear far more attractive to many like Hoff who had detested him but had to suffer the Reagan and George Bush presidencies.

James L. Baughman University of Wisconsin, Madison

The Patriots and the People: The Rebellion of 1837 in Rural Lower Canada. By Allan Greer (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993) 385 pp. $50.00 cloth $18.95 paper

Greer draws on a vast interdisciplinary literature about revolution, rural history, peasant insurgencies, nationalism, and gender to situate the Lower Canadian insurrection within a "revolutionary crisis" that en- compassed the broad "Euro-Atlantic world." Unlike historians who parade citations from other disciplines through their footnotes to prove their erudition, Greer makes these theoretical frameworks integral to his arguments. But, although Greer's interpretations are informed by work in other disciplines-in particular, cultural anthropology-his method-

I Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy 1960-1972 (New York, I990), 313.

REVIEWS | 73

On several levels, however, Nixon Reconsidered is unsuccessful, if not infuriating. It is drearily written and overargued. Hoffs Nixon was not the shifty-eyed, liberal Antichrist. He proved more committed to civil rights, for example, than his contemporary critics granted. But should Nixon rank above all previous presidents in civil rights? Lyndon Johnson? Abraham Lincoln? Key aides, not Nixon, stood behind many of the domestic initiatives that Hoff admires. Nixon himself, as Hoff acknowledges from her own interviews with the former president, cared little about domestic affairs. As Graham has noted, indifference caused Nixon to go along with the sometimes creative proposals of senior advisors in domestic matters.1 Yet, Hoff also understates the extent to which Democratic control of Congress pushed Nixon toward decidedly un-Republican responses to environmental protection and inflation.

The hard task of reconstructing internal policy debates-Hoffs strength-has to be combined with a greater sense of Republican politics and presidential power in the I96os and the early I970s. Graham's study of civil rights enforcement far more successfully balances a discussion of the Nixon administration with an appreciation of national and congres- sional politics. As he observed, Nixon resided in neither of the Repub- lican Party's two wings. He was not a moderate Rockefeller Republican nor part of the GOP'S conservative Barry Goldwater-Ronald Reagan faction. From the party's center, he borrowed concepts and conceptu- alizers from both sides, often without conviction. In that regard, and others, Nixon may be a transitional figure. He led a party that, after his resignation, moved to the right, in the process making him appear far more attractive to many like Hoff who had detested him but had to suffer the Reagan and George Bush presidencies.

James L. Baughman University of Wisconsin, Madison

The Patriots and the People: The Rebellion of 1837 in Rural Lower Canada. By Allan Greer (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993) 385 pp. $50.00 cloth $18.95 paper

Greer draws on a vast interdisciplinary literature about revolution, rural history, peasant insurgencies, nationalism, and gender to situate the Lower Canadian insurrection within a "revolutionary crisis" that en- compassed the broad "Euro-Atlantic world." Unlike historians who parade citations from other disciplines through their footnotes to prove their erudition, Greer makes these theoretical frameworks integral to his arguments. But, although Greer's interpretations are informed by work in other disciplines-in particular, cultural anthropology-his method-

I Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy 1960-1972 (New York, I990), 313.

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.80 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:36:46 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

174 JOHN HERD THOMPSON

ology is historical in the traditional sense: The book is the result of daunting original archival scholarship.

Greer makes brilliant use of depositions and interrogation records and reexamines the colonial newspapers and the more conventional documents of political-constitutional history. Because he understands that politics is of fundamental importance, but also that political history is more than the history of politicians, Greer astutely couples political event and social context. He finds the collective basis for popular rebellions in the agrarian past and in the social structures of rural Lower Canada-the parish vestries, the charivari, and the militia system. Thus, the book becomes simultaneously a study of rural Lower Canada and its popular culture, an exploration of the minds of the bourgeois and peasant rebels, and a superb narrative history of the rebellion.

Judging from Lord Durham's Report on Canada presented to Parlia- ment in I839, historians have understood the rebellion as an ethnic crisis exacerbated by hard times in the countryside-"a struggle, not of prin- ciples, but of races." Greer dismisses this false dichotomy and reveals a struggle of principles and of races. He shows that the peasants who rose against authority were not duped by a nationalist petite bourgeoisie personified by Louis-Joseph Papineau, but that there were deep divisions between the goals of peasants and those of the bourgeois Patriots. Only swift military repression of the rebellions prevented these class differences from becoming more obvious.

Greer's analysis of the ideology of Papineau and the Patriot leaders is more subtle than any previous account of the period. He also shows that the English-speaking popular classes, who opposed the rebellion in general, were more than guileless rural reflections of the dominant urban elites with whom they shared a language. Greer does not confine his exploration of Lower Canada's limited identities to those of class and ethnicity. An innovative chapter entitled "The queen is a whore!", explores the gendered discourse of the Patriots and explains how their ideas made their rebellion "a fundamentally masculine phenomenon" (213). The revolutionary movement failed, he concludes, because the Patriots, popular and bourgeois, alienated "major elements of the Lower Canadian population, including women, natives, and English speakers" (350).

Greer's book is a triumph both of interpretation and of original scholarship, which reconnects British North America to its "Euro- Atlantic" context. It is a major contribution to nineteenth-century history.

John Herd Thompson Duke University

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