A life on the line : Commander Pierre-Étienne Fortin and his times / W. Brian Stewart.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stewart, W. Brian.

Series:

Carleton library series ; 188.

Carleton library series ; v. 188

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Fortin, Pierre, 1823-1888.

Fortin, Pierre.

Politicians--Québec (Province)--Biography.

Politicians.

Québec (Province)--Politics and government.

Québec (Province).

Physical Description:

xi, 218 p. : ill., port.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

[Ottawa, Ont.?] : Carleton University Press, 1997.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Pierre-Étienne Fortin led a life and plied a career at the heart of Canada's early history. He was an adventurer, an amateur scientist, an early (if ambiguous) conservationist and a Conservative politician from 1867 to 1888. He was a doctor on Grosse-Île amid the horrors of the 1847 typhus epidemic, led a mounted police troop during the infamous Montreal riots of 1849 and, as commander of the armed schooner La Canadienne, policed the Gulf of St. Lawrence from 1852 to 1867, when thousands of New Englanders and Nova Scotians swarmed over the fishing grounds. His official life as magistrate and mid-level bureaucrat often exemplified tensions of early nationhood: those between elites and colonists; and those arising from the nationalistic impulse to impose law and order on the wilderness. The interests, issues and sympathies at work on Fortin in the founding period remain compelling today: job creation versus environmental protection, free trade with the U.S., the exploitation of Canadian fisheries, relations with aboriginal peoples, and the political status of Quebec within confederation.

Contents:

I The Commander and La Canadienne - II Fortins Ancestors and his Youth

III Fighting Plagues and Mobs

IV The Commander and His Domain

V Sellout of the Gulf

VI Magistrate and Policeman

VII A Company Man?

VIII The War of the Candle Snuffers

IX Naturalist and Conservationist

X Conservation versus Jobs

XI "Our Rivers Taken from Us"

XII Fighting with the Bureaucrats

XIII Fortin, the Conservatives, and Confederation

XIV A Constituency Man

XV Final Days.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN:

1-283-53116-X

9786613843616

0-7735-8487-0

OCLC:

767732184