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Thepatriotes movement was a political tendency that existed inLower Canada (present-dayQuebec) from the turn of the 19th century to thePatriote Rebellion of 1837 and 1838 and the subsequentAct of Union of 1840. The partisan embodiment of the movement was theParti patriote, which held many seats in theLegislative Assembly of Lower Canada (the elected lower house of the Lower Canadian parliament).
The movement was at once a liberal and republican reaction against colonial control of the government of Lower Canada, and a more general nationalistic reaction against British presence and domination over what had previously been an exclusively French settler colony.[1] It was inspired by theAmerican Revolution, thedecolonization of the Americas, as well as the political philosophy ofclassical liberalism[citation needed] andrepublicanism. Among its leading figures wereFrançois Blanchet,Pierre-Stanislas Bédard,John Neilson,Jean-Thomas Taschereau,James Stuart,Louis Bourdages,Denis-Benjamin Viger,Daniel Tracey,Edmund Bailey O'Callaghan,Andrew Stuart,Wolfred Nelson,Robert Nelson,Thomas Storrow Brown, François Jalbert andLouis-Joseph Papineau. Its ideals were conveyed through the newspapers theMontreal Vindicator,Le Canadien, andLa Minerve.
The patriotes demanded democratic reforms, such as an elected Legislative Council, as opposed to the contemporary council whose members were appointed for life by the British Crown.[2] The Parti patriote also sought to place control of the colony's budget in the hands of the elected assembly, thus supporting Lower Canada's position as semi-autonomous within the Empire.[3] In 1834, Louis-Joseph Papineau drafted theNinety-Two Resolutions toUnited Kingdom to obtain these and other aims. The Resolutions were in great part denied by the Russell Resolutions, which resulted in a radicalization of the Patriotes and their moving closer to demands of outrightindependence and a Lower Canada republic. Many of its followers ended up taking part in an armed insurrection known as theLower Canada Rebellion, which was put down by the British army and its volunteermilitia.
