In 1766, the seigneurs of Quebec forwarded a petition to their new sovereign. Less than three years after being formally declared part of the British empire by the Treaty of Paris (1763), they emphasized their devotion to King George III, and sought his intervention on their behalf.Footnote 1 That same year, the French Catholics of Grenada, also until recently residents of the French empire, addressed the British governor of their island. They, too, proclaimed humble submission to the new monarch and implored his governor to allow them to vote in upcoming elections.Footnote 2 Separated by thousands of miles, the individuals who submitted these memorialsFootnote 3 nonetheless had much in common. Most were Catholics and inhabitants of territories that had formerly been French. Many would remain divided from their new rulers by language and faith. All had become British subjects somewhat hastily as the dust settled following the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). But if peace treaties had transformed them into subjects with ‘the scratch of a pen’,Footnote 4 no subsequent agreement or proclamation had advised the French-speakers of Quebec and Grenada about how best to approach the British king or about the proper conventions when seeking redress of grievance. This, they had navigated independently and, judging by the numerous examples of memorials to be found in colonial office correspondence and elsewhere, these formerly French subjects had adapted to petitioning the British crown with relative ease.
Indeed, the period after the British conquest of French Canada is sometimes referred to as the ‘apogee of petitionary practice’ for this eighteenth-century colony.Footnote 5 As several scholars have noted, despite the novelty of collective petitions – those petitions signed by two or more individuals – French-speakers in the Province of Quebec adapted rapidly to this form.Footnote 6 A recent study of 278 collective petitions submitted to colonial administrators between 1764 and 1791 reveals the impressive volume of this petitionary practice, a practice with no documented parallel during the earlier French period of rule.Footnote 7 In addition, the publication of the Gazette de Québec in 1764 meant that a number of collective petitions would be published beginning in 1784, increasing the readership and visibility of such documents and signalling a new era for petitioning in the province.Footnote 8 More generally, the post-conquest period is often regarded as one in which a freeing of communicative practice between periphery and centre occurred as Canada moved from being a French royal colony under absolutist control to a province integrated under the broader constitutional model of representative government and judgement according to English law.Footnote 9
The post-conquest proliferation of petitions, however, raises important questions about how and why French subjects adopted the form of the British petition so quickly. That French-speakers relied on existing British models or turned to British scriveners for assistance in drafting such petitions may partially explain their presence in the colonial archives; such an explanation, however, ignores the rich and analogous traditions of requêtes that existed in Canada before the British conquest. Instead, as this article proposes, inhabitants of this formerly French territory possessed their own rich tradition of approaching the monarch or his representatives, even if forms such as the mémoire, pétition, requête, and remontrance Footnote 10 remain far less studied by French historians. If anything, it was the existence of this earlier tradition of requêtes that shaped the French Catholics’ ability to adapt to the form of the British petition and that helped inhabitants’ transition from the rhetorical practices of the French to those of the British colonial states. Moreover, because Canada was formally transferred to Britain at the close of the Seven Years’ War and became the Province of Quebec, and because its colonial archives have preserved examples of requêtes and petitions from the lengthy periods of both French and British rule, the province provides an ideal site through which to document a transmonarchical and transimperial culture of petitioning.
This article therefore focuses on requêtes and petitions sent to the reigning monarch or his representatives, emphasizing their ongoing and consistent role in these two empires. The form of such petitions, which simultaneously expressed loyalty to a distant sovereign and also sought certain concessions or interventions from him, provided critical continuity as governments changed and the fates of colonies evolved. If the Treaty of Paris occasioned a momentous realignment among the European empires and the transfer of Canada to Britain reverberated throughout North America, the ways in which subjects approached their monarch did not undergo a seismic shift. By tracing similarities in petitions to the crown, this article also offers an important revision of existing historiography: British rule neither witnessed the sudden efflorescence of petitions from French-speakers nor did the British political tradition inspire the precipitous unleashing of popular voices that absolutist France had hitherto stifled.
The first section of this article begins with an overview of the well-known context for petitioning in the British world before then focusing on a close-reading of four petitions submitted to George III in the immediate aftermath of 1763. By reviewing some of the striking commonalities in petitions produced by both natural-born British subjects and formerly French subjects, this analysis establishes that French subjects, shortly after their transfer to the British empire, embraced a standard form and style when addressing the British monarch or his representatives. A second section explores the lesser-known context of petitioning in the French world and examines the form of requêtes produced by French subjects before 1759. It demonstrates not only that French subjects were accustomed to approaching their monarch well before the British conquest of Canada, but also suggests an important continuity of form with later petitions that transcended differences of language, shifting regimes, and imperial rivalries. A third section develops these observations by revisiting what we do know about the history of petitioning in French Canada and exploring the role that requêtes played in the daily lives of inhabitants and administrators even under absolutist rule; this, in turn, sheds light on some of the practices that influenced French inhabitants before they became British subjects and helps to establish some of the historical reasons that French-speakers were apt to submit petitions to George III or his ministers.
As this article identifies a widespread and transimperial culture of petitioning, it also underscores the petition's similar function in the European overseas colonies more broadly, which is the focus of the final portion of this article. A shared written tradition of approaching the monarch for redress of grievance allowed subjects to navigate the various administrations and empires through which many of them moved in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, because petitions frequently worked to legitimize and reinforce the monarchical orders of which they were a part, they remained a form with significant appeal for royal governments in both the French and British contexts. This does not mean that petitioning the crown was always conservative or that petitioners did not sometimes subtly challenge policies and practices in the colonies. On balance, however, both the requête and the petition were viewed as important ways for monarchs to remain accessible and receptive to their distant subjects and to gain valuable information about territories under their purview. The petition's value – its crucial role in mediating relations between subjects and sovereigns across increasingly disparate empires – was one that was apparent in each of these monarchical empires. In the expression of grievance and appeal to the reigning monarch, the differences between French and British were not so great.
I
Petitions were omnipresent in the British world, both before and after the British empire's dramatic expansion in 1763. In the annals of British history, the right to petition had often been recognized as the ‘indisputable right of even the meanest subject’, whatever his origins, although it was not until 1689 that the Bill of Rights finally enshrined petitioning the monarch as a statutory right.Footnote 11 Even where legislation such as the Tumultuous Petitioning Act of 1661 sought to limit when and how subjects might petition, many nonetheless argued that such statutes fundamentally confirmed the subject's right to address the monarch.Footnote 12 Pamphlets like Jura populi Anglicani (1701) proclaimed the subject's right to petition, an assertion echoed by other publications like The free-born subject's inheritance (1766) or The rights of the people to petition (1769). Petitioners in the British world submitted their requests to any number of authorities, ranging from local assemblies or officials, to local governors and councils, to parliament, to the monarch himself, and the petition was itself recognized as a vital part of governmental practice.Footnote 13
Historians of Britain and its empire have devoted considerable attention to petitionary practices, resulting in important studies of standardization in petitionary forms and of the intricate and varied systems for triaging requests. The wide-ranging purposes of petitioning, whether to initiate parliamentary legislation, to express individual and particular grievances, or to communicate concerns about the ‘public interest’, are well understood.Footnote 14 Although individual scholars may disagree about when petitions began to reflect the ‘sense of the people’ or about when they became overtly political, most agree that the petition was an integral part of communicative practice between periphery and centre beginning in at least the medieval period.Footnote 15 If anything, recent scholarship has emphasized the petition's integral role in the emergence of a public sphere and in allowing an increasingly diverse group of subjects to participate in a dialogue with king-in-parliament.Footnote 16
Perhaps not surprisingly, receiving and forwarding petitions had become a routine part of British colonial administrators’ work by the eighteenth century, whether those related to an individual's lands or to a group's request for political privileges. In their correspondence with the Board of Trade or the privy council, local governors sometimes enclosed for consideration multiple petitions in a single letter,Footnote 17 and the reprinting of numerous colonial petitions in parliamentary papers suggests that such documents were considered significant enough to be copied and circulated at the highest levels of governance. While not all subjects were able to draft their own addresses, models for petitions proliferated across the British empire and individuals of all backgrounds submitted them. Whether drafted by natural-born subjects or subjects acquired by treaty, most petitions submitted to colonial administrators tended to adhere to a standard form, style of writing, and predictable formal conventions.Footnote 18
In particular, petitions to the king or his servants proceeded by characteristic formula, whose component parts each worked to foreground the relationship between subject and sovereign. This section briefly compares four such petitions produced in the immediate aftermath of the 1763 cessions in order to highlight these conventions and to document their appearance in the petitions of even relative newcomers to the British empire. Although this article focuses largely on petitioning practices in Canada, the petitions considered below were produced in the British colonies of Quebec and Grenada between 1764 and 1766; the comparison serves to widen the evidentiary base for this argument and to indicate that these similarities of language and style prevailed not only in Quebec but also that French Catholics across the British empire seem to have adapted to British practices of petitioning the crown. Submitted by both French Catholic and British Protestant inhabitants in each colony, these four petitions addressed a range of different grievances that surfaced when the new governments of Quebec and Grenada were established. They reflected challenges that arose when majority French Catholic populations faced small but vocal British Protestant communities; in Quebec, 60,000 to 70,000 French Catholics dwarfed the population of 200 to 300 British merchants and traders, and in Grenada, most of the 3,500 white inhabitants were French Catholics.Footnote 19 They furthermore indicate that, however cherished a right by natural-born British subjects, petitioning was also a right that French Catholic subjects appeared remarkably quick to embrace when they became part of the British empire.
In Quebec, a group of British merchants drafted the ‘Petition of the Quebec Traders’ in 1764, which included a long litany of complaints relating to the ‘deprivation of the Open Trade’, and sought, among other things, the appointment of a new governor and the election of a house of representatives. The ‘Address of the Principal Inhabitants of Canada to the King relative to the Establishment of Courts of Justice’ was submitted by French inhabitants in 1765 and detailed the difficulties they faced at the hands of certain jurists who expected them to accept English law and judgements meted out in a language they did not understand. They entreated the king to authorize a system of justice that would maintain French customs and language. In Grenada, royal permission to call an assembly was granted in 1766 and provoked a series of petitions. The ‘Memorial of the Undersigned British Protestant Inhabitants of the Island of Grenada’ was the work of several British Protestants who sought to prevent French Catholics from participating in those elections, arguing that allowing Catholics to vote struck at the constitution of the ‘mother country’. The ‘Memorial of His Majesty's Adopted Subjects in the Island of Grenada’, signed by thirty-four French Catholics in that same year, asserted that their rights as British subjects and freeholders actually entitled them to vote in the upcoming elections.Footnote 20
Even as these four petitions addressed a range of different issues and problems, each began with an address to the king or his representatives and displayed a series of conventions typical of petitions submitted throughout the British world.Footnote 21 Those from Quebec opened with ‘To the King's Most Excellent Majesty’, or ‘To the King’, while the petitions from Grenada were addressed ‘to His Excellency, Robert Melvill’ and to members of the council, all of whom were servants of the crown. Following the opening address, petitioners identified as devoted subjects, regardless of their origins: the British merchants and traders promised that they were ‘Your Majesty's most faithful and loyal Subjects’; the inhabitants of Quebec proclaimed that they had ‘sworn at the foot of the altar, unalterable fidelity to Your Majesty’; the Grenadian French Catholics identified as ‘His Majesty's adopted subjects’; and the Grenadian Protestants merely stressed that they were ‘His Majesty's Protestant Subjects’. Signatories repeatedly positioned themselves as subordinate subjects whose enduring loyalty either entitled them, or encouraged them, to seek the favour of higher authorities.
In each of these four memorials, petitioners then proceeded to underline their unwavering allegiance and devotion to king, country, and law. The British merchants of Quebec noted the ‘zeal and attachment we have to your Majesty's Person and Government’. In the case of the Grenadian French Catholics, they reminded the governor of the ‘oaths of allegiance, supremacy, and abjuration’ they had taken ‘as well to give a Testimony of their Attachment as to entitle them to the Rights of British Subjects’. Not to be outdone, the British Protestants of Grenada explained that they were motivated by ‘a just respect and veneration for the most fundamental and constitutional laws of the Mother Country’ and concern for the welfare of the island. As part of their ardent declarations of allegiance, however, many signatories deliberately emphasized their invaluable contributions to the empire. True to form, the British traders argued that since their settlement in the colony, they had ‘contributed to the advantage of our Mother Country, by causing an additional increase to her Manufactures’. In another petition, this time from Grenada, the French Catholics noted that ‘they have endeavour'd by every effort of industry, by additional purchases, and by settlement of new Lands, to become as useful as they shall ever be faithfull subjects’. Both English- and French-speakers similarly called attention not only to their allegiance but also to the pivotal role they played in the empire. It was here that the language of allegiance was used in potentially provocative ways: petitioners knew that stressing their loyalty and utility would help to secure royal justice and intervention, just as many recognized that hinting at a withdrawal of that allegiance if their grievances were not redressed might equally prompt the monarch into action.
At the heart of the memorial, petitioners detailed their concerns, described their rights as they understood them, and proposed remedies to alleged wrongs. The principal French-speaking inhabitants of Quebec, for example, noted that they had understood ‘that it was His Majesty's Intention that the Customs of our Fathers should be adhered to, so that what was done before the Conquest of Canada should be adhered to’. In Grenada, their compatriots specified that ‘His most gracious Majesty, by adopting them as Subjects, by permitting them the enjoyment of their properties, and by the promise of every priviledge and indulgence’, had promised them certain rights, including the right to vote. The British Protestants of Grenada, who felt wronged under the new government, similarly proposed a remedy they believed would preserve ‘their most sacred rights and properties’. Throughout passages where they described grievances, appealed for redress, or deferentially made demands for privileges they believed to be their due, petitioners continued to frame their statements with fervent declarations of loyalty to king, country, and law.
Finally, each of these petitions concluded by recapitulating requests and reiterating the humble submission of its signatories. Before affixing their signatures, the principal inhabitants of Quebec promised that ‘most faithful Subjects, we do, with the most unalterable Respect, hereby declare Ourselves’. The French Catholics of Grenada identified themselves one more time as loyal British subjects, repeated their request that they be allowed to vote at the upcoming election of representatives, and concluded by saying that ‘your Memorialists as in duty Bound shall ever Pray’. The British traders of Quebec closed with an almost identical phrase: ‘and for Your Majesty and your Royal House your Petitioners as in Duty bound shall ever pray’. Thus, the emphasis on subjects’ subordinate position and personal relationship to the monarch remained critical throughout each of the memorials.
Whether they represented the interests of French- or English-speakers, both these and other petitions submitted to the British crown, parliament, and colonial authorities displayed fairly predictable structure and wording.Footnote 22 Given that French Catholic subjects had only been part of the British empire for a few years when they submitted the memorials in question, however, the adoption of this form and style by formerly French subjects may seem particularly rapid, perhaps unexpected. Reliance on common legal assistance or networks of writers may explain some of the similarities between these written documents, but such an explanation is too facile and fails to consider the influence that the tradition of requêtes in the French world may have exerted well after 1759. Formerly French subjects were predisposed to capitalize on British forms because of significant continuities in the practices of petitioning the monarch between the two empires. To understand fully how the written practices of recently minted subjects so closely resembled those of life-long British subjects, it is therefore essential to compare the form of requêtes produced in Canada before it became part of the British empire to those produced after its cession, as well as to consider the history of petitioning in French Canada more generally.
II
Although petitions were regularly hailed as the birthright of Britons, petitioning was hardly unique to the British empire and unknown elsewhere. Whether it be Geoffrey Koziol's analysis of how the act of supplication permeated the culture of early medieval Europe, echoing the ancient traditions of Hellenic kings and Roman emperors, or David Zaret's current work, which documents the ‘ubiquity’ and ‘surprising uniformity’ of petition-and-response in pre-modern Eurasia, a range of recent scholarship has in fact underlined the enduring and global nature of petitioning.Footnote 23 Petitioning was arguably the most important and consistent way of communicating with authorities of all sorts, and the notion that the king was the highest earthly authority, the source of justice whose role it was to hear the grievances of subjects, was widely held.
While historians of France and the French empire have largely focused on the politicization of plaintes that occurred after 1789 and the role played by petitions during the revolutionary era, requêtes and pétitions had nonetheless been an important part of French legal and governmental practice for centuries. Most significantly, ‘the act of hearing and granting petitions was described as a “royal custom”’ even in early medieval France.Footnote 24 French kings heard the plaintes and requêtes of their subjects personally for centuries, though processes for receiving and triaging the volume of such requests emerged with the creation in the thirteenth century of the maîtres de l'Hôtel du Roi.Footnote 25 The responsibilities of these maîtres des requêtes, as they came to be known, were formalized by edicts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which stipulated, among other things, that they were to hear the grievances of the people, either remedying them directly or apprising the king so that he might do so.Footnote 26 Furthermore, since at least the thirteenth century, members of many French communities had elected procureurs-syndics to protect the common good and to represent their interests before the authorities, and the maîtres des requêtes were specifically instructed to communicate with these representatives during their tours of the countryside.Footnote 27
Certainly, the advent of monarchical absolutism led to shifts in the government's approach to requêtes. Several directives indicate that assemblies and collective petitions without royal authorization were forbidden in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote 28 In general, plaintes and requêtes during this period tended to focus on individual and particular matters, and collective petitions evoking the intérêt général were largely a feature of the revolutionary period.Footnote 29 Scholars like Benoît Agnes have nevertheless insisted that even on the eve of 1789, the monarchy's approach to petitions could be described as quite liberal, and that requests relating to private and public issues, to individual and collective issues, were possible, if not necessarily typical.Footnote 30 Regardless of the restrictions placed on requêtes in Old Regime France, there was a long-standing practice of entreating the monarch.
Nonetheless, the historiographical tendency to view the petition as a distinctly British right has persisted, largely shaped by several key differences in the British and French petitionary traditions. First, and perhaps most significantly, the 1689 Bill of Rights upheld petitioning the crown, whether from individuals or from groups, as a formal right in the British context; this meant that both individual and collective petitions were widely accepted by the British crown and its ministers in the eighteenth century. In Old Regime France and the French empire, however, while systems existed for responding to individual petitions, attitudes towards collective petitions vacillated, and it was only with the 1793 Déclaration des droits that petitions were enshrined as a legal right and practice.Footnote 31 Furthermore, as numerous scholars have noted, the long-established tradition of addressing petitions to both the king and to parliament, and the formal rules developed for their presentation in Britain, served to persuade subjects that they were entitled to have their grievances heard.Footnote 32 In the British colonies to the south of Canada, the right to petition assemblies was an ‘affirmative right’ and there was widespread acceptance that government had a duty to consider petitioners’ grievances.Footnote 33 Reinforcing these widespread popular understandings was a familiar pamphlet literature that routinely insisted that British subjects were entitled to petition the monarch; a parallel discourse has not yet been documented to the same extent for the French world. Finally, although petitions tended to be presented in a specific manner and there were some requirements for securing approval in the British context, formal approval was far more often a pre-requisite for petitions in French Canada than it was in the British North American colonies.Footnote 34 In general, British administrators of all denominations seemed to accept that the petition remained a cherished right that could very rarely be abrogated,Footnote 35 just as they also expected that it was a right that would be asserted. By contrast, French ministers seemed far more inclined to limit the avenues for submitting requêtes.
Historians have also acknowledged the relative difficulty of analysing petitionary practices in France given that the French king did not keep those requêtes submitted to him, and this archival silence may account for the more limited exploration of such practices under the Old Regime.Footnote 36 But even if they are not nearly as numerous as those in the British colonial archives, requêtes and mémoires, sent to local councils and governors, to ministers of the Marine, or to the king himself, are nonetheless readily found in the French colonial archives, including the Fonds Séminaire de Québec and the Archives Nationales d'Outre-Mer, from which this section draws.Footnote 37 And the exemplars that do exist reveal not only were there striking similarities of form and style between French requêtes themselves, but also that many requêtes possessed turns of phrase and structures not unlike those found in petitions submitted to the British crown after 1763. Most of these requêtes, for example, began with an address either to the king or to a local personage whose authority derived from the king; detailed the petitioners’ subordinate position; included some reference to signatories’ humble submission; alluded to the memorialists’ potential contributions to society; declared a specific grievance and proposed a certain remedy; and closed in predictable and deferential fashion. At the level of the written form, the French requête and British petition reveal some telling commonalities.
Although the addresses in French colonial petitions were often less embellished than their English counterparts, many did begin with a simple ‘Au Roy’ or ‘A Monseigneur L'Intendant’, the king's servant, emblazoned in prominent letters across the top of the page. The simplicity of this address may reflect what Giora Sternberg has identified as ‘inverted curtness’ in seventeenth-century letters; in many letters, the particulars of address were minimal for higher-ranking addressees but lengthier for lower-ranking addressees. The assumption behind such practices was that the rank and office of distinguished individuals was common knowledge.Footnote 38 Immediately following this, requêtes typically noted that those whose signatures followed ‘very humbly requested’ or ‘supplicated’ intervention in a cause.Footnote 39 As part of this respectful opening, petitioners frequently identified themselves and their relationship to the individual being addressed. In one requête, petitioners declared themselves ‘the undersigned inhabitants of the lower town of Quebec’.Footnote 40 In another addressed to the king, they described themselves as ‘councillors in His Majesty's Sovereign Council of Quebec’,Footnote 41 and went on to list the names of individual subscribers. Like British petitions, French requêtes prompted petitioners to classify themselves as subjects before the authorities and had the subtle effect of confirming monarchical supremacy by seeking the arbitration or intervention of the sovereign or his ministers.
Frenchmen petitioning the French crown seem to have spent considerably less time emphasizing their allegiance and loyalty than Frenchmen petitioning the British crown. Although this observation echoes Benoît Agnes's argument that French petitions were often written more like official letters to a person of superior rank than their British counterparts, the language of submission and of humility was nonetheless present in requêtes.Footnote 42 Aside from the opening lines, petitioners often repeatedly characterized themselves as supplicantsFootnote 43 throughout a requête. They typically noted the authority of the party addressed and insisted that they were reliant on his justice to decide their cause: ‘it is you, Your Excellency, who must judge’.Footnote 44 The use of the formal and subjunctive tense further contributed to the tone of supplication and dutiful submission in these requêtes: many contained phrases such as ‘if it could please you to order…’.Footnote 45 Like petitioners in the British empire, those who submitted requêtes were accustomed to confirming the king's authority over them in order to ensure that their grievances were heard.
If petitions submitted to the British king enumerated complaints, French requêtes also spent the vast majority of their time detailing offences for which they sought redress. Whether these grievances related to the water supply, the fur trade, the privileges of the clergy, or the trade with Indians, petitioners invariably noted the hardships they would suffer should such problems remain unremedied. Although most of the French requêtes related to personal and particular grievances rather than to overtly political issues and many came from individuals rather than groups, their parallels of form with later British petitions remain significant. For example, in urging immediate resolution, the petitioners sometimes asserted that they had certain rightsFootnote 46 that needed protecting, and sometimes noted the advantages that would accrue to the colony should their requests be granted.Footnote 47 They, like subjects in the British empire, sought to leverage their contributions for concessions, and they generally proposed specific remedies, whether that involved the intendant issuing a decree about the water supply or the king confirming their right to trade with Indians.
Parallels between requêtes in the French empire and petitions in the British empire also surface in the concluding lines of these French exemplars. After reiterating the issue at hand and the remedy sought, many French requêtes closed with: ‘and they will be ever obliged to pray God for the continuation of your prosperity and health’.Footnote 48 One such petition addressed to the king noted that should it please the king to grant their request, the undersigned members would be ‘that much more obliged to continue their wishes and prayers for the health and prosperity of his Majesty’.Footnote 49 Such humble prayers for the health of superiors were surprisingly akin to those of British petitions, whose closings of ‘in duty bound shall ever pray’ also evoked similar submission and reflect some of the broader connections between petitionary prayer and civil petitions in both societies.Footnote 50
French Catholic subjects who found themselves suddenly members of the British empire were thus already well-versed in addressing their monarchs, a fact observed by many of their contemporaries. The widely known Encyclopédie, for example, published by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert between 1751 and 1772, dedicated separate entries to mémoire, pétition, remontrance, and requête. Though discussed individually, each was identified as a written form that ‘made a demand’ or ‘represented a cause’. The Encyclopédie called attention to the monarchical world of the eighteenth century, and remontrance, more particularly, was defined as being a ‘remonstrance to the king’. The entry for requête is the most intriguing of these entries, implying that there was a certain predictability and pattern to such documents:
the requête begins with the address, in other words the name of the judge to whom it is addressed…after which, it humbly supplicates that person…next it exposes the facts and the means and then finishes with the conclusions which begin in the following terms, ‘consider, Your Excellencies, should it please you’, or ‘gentlemen’, depending on the tribunal where the plaint is made…and the conclusions generally close with the words ‘you will do as is best’.Footnote 51
Like British petitions, requêtes utilized a predictable form and language in communicating with the crown and with royally appointed administrators. Moreover, the Encyclopédie suggested not only that such written practices were commonplace enough to deserve lengthy entries, but also that requêtes were addressed to the French king both before 1759 and also during the very period that French Catholics simultaneously submitted memorials to the British crown.
The requêtes and mémoires preserved in French colonial archives readily confirm what the Encylcopédie underlined more than two centuries ago – the existence of a form akin to the petition produced in the English-speaking world. Juxtaposing this form with its British counterpart reveals significant parallels between these two traditions. Analogous structure and language suggest that the conventions of French requêtes translated effectively to the style and phrasing of British petitions.Footnote 52 Indeed, at the day-to-day level, written practices of petitioning assisted in the transition between monarchs and empires. For French-speakers concerned to represent their interests and find appropriate outlets for grievance before British colonial officials and the crown, the rhetorical distance was not so great.
III
If comparing specific texts reveals remarkable similarities in the form, language, and style of requêtes and petitions, the history of requêtes in Canada before 1759 suggests that despite the significant political and administrative differences between French Canada and British Quebec, expressing one's grievances to the reigning monarch remained an important commonality between the French and British periods of rule. In many existing accounts, of course, the beginning of British rule in the Province of Quebec is hailed as a period when restrictive and absolutist practices were loosened – a moment when freedom of expression finally dawned and representative institutions were at least countenanced. The emergence of printed petitions and the ‘apogee of petitionary practice’ are largely associated with the advent of much-vaunted British constitutional privileges, and historiographical analysis tends to cleave to these fault-lines.Footnote 53 French Canada, by contrast, is often still described as a royal province where an absolute monarch, who did not share power with a parliament, appointed the gouverneur, inténdant, and many members of the conseil. The monarch played an integral role in colonists’ lives, and this predominantly ‘feudal’ and ‘martial’ society remained ‘thoroughly subordinate to metropolitan authority’ and a successful example of centralizing zeal.Footnote 54 But revisiting the history of requêtes before 1759 and underlining some of the similar practices between absolute and constitutional monarchies provides a means to reconsider this dominant narrative.
Although the requête itself remains largely unstudied in French colonial history, historians of Nouvelle France have readily questioned whether inhabitants found ways to make their voices heard during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.Footnote 55 As they have debated the broader question of representation and of democratic tendencies in Canada, some scholars have nevertheless noted in passing that the requête was one means of making grievances and perspectives known under an absolutist regime. From these earlier accounts, this section aims to reconstruct a brief history of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century policies and practices relating to requêtes in Canada, demonstrating that although subjects’ ability to express grievances under absolutist rule was less secure than that of their neighbours in the British colonies, little deterred its inhabitants from seeking redress and from engaging in a petitionary practice of their own.
Under the Company of New France (1627), Canada was administered by a governor, who shared legislative, executive, and judicial powers with the Old Council of Québec formed in 1647. Beginning in 1647, three syndics, elected by the inhabitants of Québec, Trois-Rivières, and Montréal, were permitted to attend council meetings, although they did not have a deliberative voice. Like their colleagues in the metropole, the syndics of Canada aimed primarily to serve their communities and to communicate grievances to the administration: ‘their mandate can be summarized as representing their communities and addressing requêtes’.Footnote 56 In 1663, Canada became a royal colony and, in subsequent years, would come under increasingly centralized control with the creation of a new governing Conseil Souverain and the appointment of an inténdant. Nonetheless, between 1647 and 1677, the syndic, who had already been approved, continued to provide one well-known conduit through which collective grievance could be heard, particularly because representations of communal interests required the sanction of the governor, intendant, ministers, or king in Canada, as they did in the metropole.
In 1677, however, the governor sought to tighten control even further, abolishing the syndics. He did so at the advice of the king's minister, who urged: ‘with time, the syndics, who present requêtes in the name of all the inhabitants, should be suppressed, it being good that each should speak for himself, but that no one person should speak for all’.Footnote 57 Inhabitants were ordered not to convoke assemblies but rather to present their individual requêtes quietly and without trouble.Footnote 58 Henceforth, official policy seems to have done a volte face, requiring that communications with the authorities should now come directly from individuals rather than from syndics. Indeed, shortly thereafter, when the inhabitants of Montréal asked to have their syndic reinstated, the governor forbade ‘all reunions, assemblies, or conventicles whatsoever’.Footnote 59 In the 1680s, the governor even sanctioned a group of petitioners in order to prevent any such further submissions, ‘which could only be composed by public assemblies’.Footnote 60 After 1677, the collective petition was repeatedly prohibited as potentially dangerous to the public order. Communal representation would remain largely out of favour under the absolutist regime, although Peter Moogk has observed that the bias was strongest against collective petitions from social inferiors, whereas those from members of the upper ranks were often indulged.Footnote 61 In 1717, for example, prominent merchants secured permission to handle their affairs in common and to submit requêtes to the governor and intendant via their chosen syndic.Footnote 62
Despite the 1677 prohibition on syndics, however, most colonial administrators and monarchs agreed that the ‘voice’ and the ‘interests’ of subjects should be consulted and that the inhabitants of Nouvelle France must be allowed to air grievances. At the moment that syndics were suppressed, for instance, the ordonnance of 1677 nonetheless stated that ‘His Majesty wishes that all of his subjects have the opportunity to represent their reasons and their grievances.’Footnote 63 On another occasion, the council noted that it was ‘important to the king's service and the public good that there be persons of requisite probity and well-known loyalty to pay attention to the common interests of the community of inhabitants in the city of Quebec’.Footnote 64 This willingness to gauge the people's views took at least two specific forms: general assemblies and receiving requêtes from individuals. First, notwithstanding prohibitions on collective petitions and public assemblies, the governor and intendant, the two highest administrators in the colony, were still required to call a general assembly and to follow the majority opinion of those who were directly ‘interested’ in specific legislation before passing any laws relating to the ‘common good’. Between 1672 and 1700, there were, in fact, seventeen such sessions.Footnote 65
Second, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there remained a distinct tradition of individual entreaties to superiors in Canada. Although colonists in the British empire may have felt freer to advance petitions, inhabitants of Canada nevertheless did so despite the mercurial responses they sometimes faced. And even during the years when syndics were recognized as the legitimate forum for voicing complaints or when officials enforced the policy that required collective petitions to have official sanction, inhabitants persisted in submitting individual requêtes. As Gustave Lanctot's research demonstrated many years ago, individuals or a small group of inhabitants petitioned the Conseil Souverain about the fur trade, the price of goods, and the poor state of roads throughout the 1650s and 1660s while the syndics were most active. When the influence of that council started to wane and the syndics ceased to be active, inhabitants changed tactics and began addressing the governor, the intendant, or even the king himself. As Lanctot also argued, petitions from individuals continued to suit the needs of an absolutist monarchy, which, ‘without being hostile to requêtes or remontrances in which popular sentiments were expressed’, nonetheless preferred to keep such initiatives individual rather than collective. French monarchs were happy to handle such requests ‘person to person’, but were reluctant to appear to be dealing ‘power to power’.Footnote 66 Thus, although it is appropriate to differentiate the British tradition, where individual and collective petitions were systematically accepted, from the French tradition, where requêtes from groups were often prohibited and administrative responses towards grievances often unpredictable, it is essential to note that there was a long-standing practice of individuals petitioning the king or his representatives in French Canada.
Nonetheless, while the right to petition was repeatedly and widely proclaimed in the British empire, French administrators remained deeply ambivalent about the petition's utility. Unlike the British empire, where glorification of petitions may have prompted and encouraged their use, official suspicion and dismissal of collective petitions may have worked to discourage their submission in Canada. If they were concerned to circumscribe who might petition the monarch – and how – French colonial officials were also unsure about whether requêtes served or undermined royal interests. On the one hand, petitions could provide a crucial means for gauging the public temper and could help promote better governance; the French monarchical state was not unlike the British in feeling that the interests of its subjects needed to be heard. On the other hand, French colonial administrators were often wary of responding to petitions and popular grievances, especially those that had not received royal permission. When they appeared to yield to petitions from butchers and bakers asking that prices be increased in the city of Québec, the council and Prévôté Court were both careful to note that prices had been raised ‘without any regard for their petition’.Footnote 67 Moreover, many administrators believed that unsanctioned ‘gatherings and conventicles…only provide an easy pretext for all sorts of monopolies, secret associations, and plots that ill-intentioned individuals might wish to form’.Footnote 68 Throughout the history of Canada, however, the absolutist regime grappled with whether requêtes provided a useful way to monitor subjects, or whether they merely fostered discontent among the masses, an uncertainty that was reflected in vacillating policies towards popular grievances more generally.
Regardless of limitations placed on petitioning, inhabitants persisted in submitting requêtes, with or without the aid of the syndic and with or without official sanction. There was, in Canada, often a discrepancy between official policies and daily practice, and in their daily practices, French subjects were not unlike their British counterparts. Petitions remained an integral part of the routine communication with administrators and the crown. The humble expression of grievance remained one outlet for articulating the interests of individuals and, occasionally, of groups. As Moogk has noted, ‘the obsequiousness, the appeal to a paternal monarch, and the piteous wish for positions of profit and honor’ which so many of the Canadiens demonstrated in their petitions to George III, ‘came naturally to a class nurtured on royal patronage under the Bourbons’.Footnote 69 Even if official policies vacillated, even where individuals and groups suffered reprimands and fines for having affixed their signatures to unsanctioned documents, the requêtes preserved in colonial correspondence as well as the recurring references to them in political histories of Canada, remind us of this enduring, if somewhat overlooked, tradition.
When British colonial officials arrived in the Province of Quebec, they may have been more willing than their French predecessors to recognize the petitions of social inferiors.Footnote 70 Natural-born British subjects may proudly have vaunted the petition as the ‘birthright of British subjects’ given that the right to petition was limited in France and New France, particularly where collective petitions were concerned. However, the requêtes addressed to the French monarch or his representatives before the conquest of Quebec challenge the assumption that petitioning was somehow a peculiar birthright of Britons. The obvious attention paid to requêtes and remontrances before 1759, even if it was ambivalent, suggests that French subjects were accustomed to approaching their superiors humbly, expressing grievances, and making certain demands. French inhabitants who chose to remain in Quebec after 1763 were predisposed to capitalize on the British tradition of petitioning precisely because they themselves had a rich, albeit inconsistent, history of entreating the monarch and his ministers. For all its divergences with the British tradition, the history of petitions in Canada confirms that the requête was in fact well-used before the British conquest and points to an important transmonarchical and transimperial culture of petitioning.
IV
Common written forms and analogous practices of expressing grievance thus provided a critical continuity as inhabitants moved between French and British rule. But documenting this common and widespread culture of petitioning also begs the question of whether petitions performed similar functions in these rival societies and empires. One clue lies in the very addresses and assertions of loyalty examined in the French and British traditions, respectively. Whether petitions began with ‘Au Roi’ or ‘To the King's Most Excellent Majesty’, whether signatories described themselves as ‘supplicants’ or ‘ever faithful subjects’, monarchs remained familiar and accessible figures in all of these documents, and subjects were accustomed, even encouraged, to repeatedly articulate allegiance to their monarchical orders. Indeed, petitions were an essential feature of monarchical systems, serving to foreground the king's central role in mediating relations between his subjects, uphold monarchical authority, and strengthen bonds between periphery and centre. The tradition of petitioning survived the repeated transfers of territories and peoples in the eighteenth century because direct addresses from subjects to sovereigns remained integral to the functioning and governance of overseas empires.
Historians have duly noted that monarchy often served as a unifying force across empires characterized by miscellaneous populations and shifting borders. For the British empire, sovereigns continued to serve as a crucial focal point for subjects dispersed across expanding polities.Footnote 71 In the case of the French empire, despite the transition to an increasingly centralized state, absolutism remained ‘intensely personal’ and inhabitants’ deep attachment to the person of the monarch provided one of the only commonalities between inhabitants of France and settlers in the colonies.Footnote 72 In both of these empires, fealty to a monarch who governed from afar remained one of the only shared experiences among peoples who lived in diverse territories and under various systems of law, spoke different languages, and practised different religions. As it was one monarch who relinquished subjects when a treaty was signed, it was a second monarch who provided a recognizable figure when those subjects became part of a rival empire. However, if the role of monarchs and monarchy as familiar referents and systems is largely accepted for the European empires, it was the requête or petition to the monarch which persisted as a quotidian way to strengthen the relationship between subjects and their sovereigns.
As each of the petitions examined for Quebec and Grenada demonstrates, the French and British petitioners who proclaimed their unswerving allegiance and submission to the reigning monarch, were first and foremost inscribing and reinscribing themselves within a monarchical community. Each time they addressed the monarch or his representatives, petitioners appealed to their sovereign directly, relying on a sense of personal connection to a physically and socially distant figure. Through their written representations, ordinary subjects secured the right to approach the body of the monarch or used their texts as a substitute for being physically present in court; in these different ways, the petition forged a connection between individuals who would not otherwise have come into contact.Footnote 73 By appealing directly to the monarch, signatories posited an irrevocable bond to their monarch and a belief that he would take a direct and particular interest in their individual lives. The petition thus remained an essential means for enacting and renewing personal links between subjects and sovereigns in states and empires that were becoming increasing disparate.
Moreover, in its very form, the petition required individuals to proclaim their humility and submission, reminding both petitioners and monarchs of the allegiance that bound them. The direct appeal to the crown, which required subjects to position themselves as supplicants before a wiser and higher power, even had the subtle effect of making all petitioners equal subjects before the higher authority of the king. In fact, in both the French and British contexts, the requête and petition were permitted mechanisms for ‘remonstrance’ precisely because they were worded in a language of deference, humility, and supplication.Footnote 74 Whether submitted by syndic or individual, the requête and petition both ultimately issued from inferiors to superiors, repeatedly confirming the subordinate position of signatories.
The deferential language of the petition, of course, allowed subjects to testify to their unfailing obedience while simultaneously pleading for, and even demanding, certain privileges and liberties. As numerous scholars have observed, the humble supplication might, in fact, offer implicit, explicit, or subversive critique. Petitions could be radical; some ‘sought sweeping reform, named enemies, urged their signatories quite as much as their recipients to action’. Even addresses, intended to be acclamatory and to shower praise upon specific occasions, were not necessarily mere expressions of loyalty but might serve as propaganda and as part of the more general process of political negotiation.Footnote 75 Even where its authors expressed a strong grievance, however, requêtes and petitions always ‘encapsulated the relationship of lordship and dependence that was the core of ideal political relations’,Footnote 76 and it was this that most helps to explain their continued and global presence.
In fact, despite the uncertainty expressed by many French administrators about whether requêtes would strengthen or threaten the absolutist regime, neither French nor British colonial petitions were fundamentally anti-monarchical.Footnote 77 If anything, when they addressed the monarch or his ministers, petitioners willingly invoked and accepted the monarch's ultimate authority in mitigating grievances and granting requests.Footnote 78 They addressed those they considered ‘supreme authorities’, even as they recognized that ‘minor officials and expressly delegated magistracies’ would most likely evaluate their claims.Footnote 79 In the eyes of both French and British petitioners, relief was the uncontested province of the sovereign, a recognition that confirmed the essential role of the monarch. Fundamentally, as Zaret observes, petitions legitimized the role of rulers, allowing them to proclaim and demonstrate their responsiveness to subjects.Footnote 80 Because many petitions were ‘deeply conservative’,Footnote 81 they were particularly useful to monarchs who often needed to strengthen royal authority and royal government over the distant colonies. They might, however, also be attractive to the many colonial assemblies who sought to extend their jurisdictions by encouraging appeals to their own authority.Footnote 82 In general, though, because they repeatedly underlined subjects’ loyalty and subordination, petitions subtly reinforced the framework of royal authority, confirmed the relevance of traditional hierarchies, and upheld monarchical structures and institutions across empires.
Despite some administrators’ concerns that petitions could ‘cast doubt on the royal officials’ ability to determine the public good and to undertake the necessary action’,Footnote 83 petitions served a number of critical functions in monarchical empires at the level of everyday governance. For monarchs and ministers, they were a key source of information about conditions in distant colonies, whether these related to individual subjects suffering under particular economic difficulties or to conflicts brewing between inhabitants over representative assemblies.Footnote 84 Petitions also provided both subjects and sovereigns with a forum to air and weigh grievances, respectively. This meant that throughout the colonies, individuals had access to non-violent means to voice complaints and had outlets for dissatisfaction.Footnote 85 For their part, monarchs understood that petitions provided a crucial means for understanding the temperament of the people without necessarily convoking representative assemblies; many made clear their desire to hear the needs and grievances of their subjects in order to improve governance.
Daniel Hulsebosch has argued that the petition was one of several ‘calibrated forms for expressing grievance’, and that a more general pattern of complaint and response was built into the British empire's structure.Footnote 86 The same might be said of the French empire, where petitions in which individuals both proclaimed their loyalty and articulated grievances, provided colonial administrators, ministers of the Marine, and the crown with the written means to gauge problems or frustrations among those who identified as part of their empire. Because the alternative to petitioning was often insurrection or other more overt forms of dissent, memorials could provide administrators with an opportunity to respond to discontent before it was transformed into open violence or rebellion.Footnote 87 Allowing large numbers of subjects to approach officials on a personal level could work to defuse tension and serve as a pressure valve for empire,Footnote 88 and even where some administrators remained uncertain about whether petitions furthered or weakened royal authority, most accepted that petitions allowed governments to monitor and manage grievances.
Perhaps just as significantly, as much recent scholarship on the British empire has shown, petitions allowed voices to be heard that might otherwise not have been, permitting representation of opinions from across the social spectrum. For many, the petition was the only form of political expression to which they had access and an approved means for voicing their complaints to the authorities. In both the British and French tradition, individuals who were not entitled to elect assembly or council members could nonetheless submit memorials.Footnote 89 Even in an absolutist context, the petition meant that ‘no group in colonial society was entirely without power’.Footnote 90 Often drafted by trained lawyers or writers, the petition also remained a form that was generally accessible to both the literate and illiterate.Footnote 91 As Derek Hirst has argued, ‘the petition was at least formally a socially cohesive devise available to all, up and down the social ladder’.Footnote 92 Moreover, as recent scholarship has suggested, even as they upheld monarchical authority, petitions might nonetheless become an important site for public debate and might broaden the range of those who could participate in shaping public opinion.Footnote 93 Thus, common subjection to the monarch – and in the French case, a willingness to submit petitions as was required and to seek official sanction – were often all that was required to express opinions and grievances.
In many ways, the petition only gained in importance as British and French soldiers and settlers ventured further and further abroad and settled at greater and greater distances from the monarchs to whom they swore loyalty. Closing as so many memorials did with signatures or affixed marks, requêtes and petitions represented the literal coming together of an undersigned community, something that was intensely important as small groups of settlers and adventurers confronted the difficulties and isolation of colonial life. By agreeing to familiar turns of phrase, groups and individuals were figuratively held together. As Mark Knights argues, addresses and petitions helped construct identities by forcing subscribers to commit themselves to a ‘side’, by articulating certain ‘positions’, and by binding them to a broader community of adherents.Footnote 94 Shared understandings of the form and meaning of the petition and of its language essentially worked to ‘covenant communities’Footnote 95 of subjects across the empire. In this sense, French administrators were prudent to be suspicious of syndics and of collective petitions, when all other forms of reunions and assemblies had been prohibited.
As a form, petitions to the reigning monarch were thus an integral part of life for peoples of all classes and backgrounds in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century monarchies, just as they played a vital role in royal governance itself. Studies of addresses to various authorities across the world in both the early modern and modern periodsFootnote 96 remind us of petitions’ role in mediating relations between the more and less powerful. In much the same vein that Edmund Morgan described elections as a ‘legitimizing ritual, a rite by which the populace renewed their consent to an oligarchical power structure’,Footnote 97 so too did the petition provide a time-honoured means for reiterating and re-enacting the bond between monarch and subject. Most importantly, petitions submitted throughout the French and British empires confirmed that the monarch was the locus of loyalty and the fount of justice, allowing colonial inhabitants repeatedly to identify with a monarchical order and empire. If petitions functioned as a means for binding subjects to their king and for airing and gauging grievances in the British empire, they served similar purposes across the rival French territories, where inhabitants also regularly addressed their sovereign. Indeed, both the form and the function of petitions in these two monarchical empires suggest powerful continuities in the fluid world of imperial governance.
V
In 1763, thousands of French subjects became British ones as France officially ceded Canada and numerous other territories to Britain. A massive shift in the global power of two monarchs and two empires resulted. But despite the innumerable changes in government, law, religion, language, economy, and daily life that followed, a monarchical culture with certain powerful commonalities endured across these two periods of rule. And the petition to the monarch or his representatives, which allowed even the lowliest of subjects to appeal to and access a distant sovereign, continued to provide a familiar outlet for French-speaking inhabitants as they transitioned between empires. Where forms of government and representative practices differed greatly, where legal systems and religious practices often clashed, petitioning the crown consistently provided formerly French subjects with a means for making their grievances and perspectives known. Where differences might otherwise have divided inhabitants of a city, they could join voices in swearing loyalty to a shared monarch and seeking his intervention. Where such voices might have remained undocumented, petitions to the king preserved in both the French and British archives testify to commonalities in the daily lives of individuals living between two different empires.
Nonetheless, the fact remains that petitioning was largely accepted and vaunted as a birthright of Britons whereas its status remained far less secure and renowned in the French-speaking world. It was not merely national pride that spurred the anonymous author of The rights of the people to petition (1769) to claim: ‘no people…have a more ample claim to the Right of Petitioning, than the people of Great Britain’.Footnote 98 In Britain and its colonies, petitioning was cherished as a right in large part because it was seen as a means for protecting, and sometimes securing, other rights.Footnote 99 What this also meant was that the voiced concerns of petitioners ranged from the mundane to the politically combative. An individual might seek relief in his penury, a family might seek restoration of their lands and titles, or a constituency might demand the right of assembly or make controversial suggestions about the administration of justice. The Petition of Right (1628), in which parliament remonstrated against the king and demanded the protection of certain rights, or the Olive Branch Petition (1775), in which American colonists swore loyalty to George III yet excoriated his ministers, may have provoked the ire of government, but they were still received and given at least some consideration by British monarchs. In 1770, the British governor general of Quebec even carried with him to London a petition from numerous French Catholics, asking that the laws and government of Quebec be adapted to their ancient traditions.Footnote 100 Not only did British administrators expect to receive a range of petitions – they also facilitated their presentation.
In French territories, although a tradition of submitting requêtes and mémoires certainly existed, subjects remained unsure of their being heard and administrators remained ambivalent about receiving them. Shifting policies and practices regarding individual and collective petitions no doubt contributed to this uncertainty in Canada. Outright hostility to anything construed as a public gathering in the later seventeenth century – including the drafting of requêtes – probably furthered official suspicion of written grievances. Initial research also seems to indicate that many of the requêtes from Canada dealt more with the day-to-day concerns of inhabitants, such as the fur trade, the price of goods, or the grievances of individual families, than with more controversial issues such as prohibitions on holding public meetings or the fact that administrators themselves were responsible for fixing prices. The requête tended to remain focused on individual grievance in French Canada, while it was becoming increasingly political in the British context.Footnote 101
The expectations of those both drafting and receiving petitions thus seem to have differed in French Canada and British Quebec, even as petitions’ formal conventions and their functions for subjects and sovereign were remarkably similar. A shared tradition of expressing grievance eased the transition from French to British rule for French Catholic subjects in Quebec and predisposed them to adapt to a British petitionary practice, but the advantage French Catholics took of the petition implies something distinct and more confident about the culture of petitioning in the British empire. Perhaps the fact that petitioning the monarch was established by statute in Britain bolstered the verve of petitioners and administrators alike. Perhaps a preference for handling requests ‘person to person’ in the French empire successfully discouraged more politically motivated and combative petitioning. Perhaps had French requêtes been filled with the more overt invocations of loyalty so common to British petitions, they might have generated a warmer welcome from French administrators.
A juxtaposition of French requêtes with British petitions necessarily requires that we pause over some of these differences and that we consider further what they suggest about these two monarchical orders. Comparing these traditions need not necessarily reify the age-old opposition between an absolutist French empire and a British empire that encouraged the propagation of representative institutions. Petitions were part of a common monarchical culture in these two empires, reminding individuals of their connection and loyalty to a distant monarch, while simultaneously providing measured outlets for popular grievances. It may be, however, that we should take seriously French administrators’ wariness of public gatherings, remembering that even petitions to the crown were an important vehicle for galvanizing persons of like minds and interests, and that their role in monarchical orders was always potentially problematic. Many of these French administrators actually recognized and wondered about the democratic capacities of the humbly phrased petition so characteristic of monarchical orders. This did not mean that petitions were forbidden or effectively suppressed; perhaps, though, it meant that, despite their glorification in the British empire, petitions garnered even greater consideration and monitoring from administrators throughout the French empire. A comparison of requêtes and petitions, then, suggests commensurability in lived experiences and written practices across shifting empires, just as it encourages further research into how both absolute and constitutional monarchies similarly sought to manage and mediate with their subjects.
