Joël Pedneault

There is no shortage of writing on the events surrounding the conquest of Canada by the British Empire during the Seven Years’ War. Roch Carrier’s Montcalm and Wolfe: Two Men Who Forever Changed the Course of Canadian History, originally published in French, is a recent contribution to the genre, focusing on the lives of the two military leaders whose armies clashed during the siege of Quebec City in 1759.

The highbrow McCord Museum, on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal, and the more lowbrow Taschereau Boulevard on the South Shore have something in common: both are named after members of two prominent Quebec families whose power was established in the eighteenth century and lasted well into the twentieth. In Patrician Families and the Making of Quebec, Brian Young traces the history of these two families over four generations marked by conquest, wars, rebellions, revolutions abroad, and the piecemeal democratization of Quebec society.