THE FRENCH CANADIANS had lost their struggle for survival by
resort to arms; they were to win it by resort to the arts of
peace. Spurred by the direct attack on their culture which
Durham had made, and by the threat of the assimilation which he
recommended, they soon overturned the political system which was
designed to effect it, and gave vigorous evidence of their cultural
strength. The period between 1840 and 1867 is one of the most
notable chapters in the French-Canadian past.

Faced with the prospect of national extinction, the French
Canadians closed their ranks and won the peaceful victory which
insured their national survival. They were favored by the curious
fatality which befell the first governors-general of United Canada--
three of whom served a total of only seven years, and were overtaken
by death, while two were repudiated at home and two in Canada.
They were fortunate in their own political leaders, Louis-Hippolyte
Lafontaine and George-Etienne Cartier, who displayed qualities of
statesmanship as yet unrevealed by French Canadians: and they
benefited by alliance with Robert Baldwin's Upper Canadian
Reformers. They also profited by disunion among the English-
Canadian Tories, accentuated by economic disorders that were of
less concern to a people as yet largely unconcerned with trade and
commerce. Then French Canada produced a national historian,
François-Xavier Garneau, and a national poet, Octave Crémazie, at
the very moment when a sense of nationality was necessary for
survival. A spirit of liberalism and progress infused new life into an
ancient culture at the very period when it became essential that that
culture should change or perish. This notable era began with
French Canada deprived of representative government and con-
demned to extinction in a wholly British North America; it closed with
the duality of Canada recognized by a new constitution and with a
French-Canadian cultural tradition firmly established.

Such results were unthinkable at the outset of the period. The
union of the two Canadas had been decided upon by the British

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