CAPE BRETON, N.S. -For 2008, the historical focus has been on Quebec City, marking its 400th anniversary this year. Fair enough, as the establishment of Quebec and the subsequent battle over it loom large in Canadian history. But what about Louisbourg?
Never heard of it? I was embarrassed a few years back to discover, at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, that I had never heard of a major colonial centre and site of a key battle. Perhaps growing up in Calgary, our schools focused on Western Canadian history, but even then Louisbourg should not draw the blank I would reckon it does for most Canadians.
Louisbourg was here on Ile Royale, as Cape Breton Island was called when France had it in the 18th century. Established by the French south of present-day Sydney, it was not only a strategic fortification at the entrance to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, but an important fishing and commercial town in its own right.
During the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) -- what Winston Churchill call the "first world war" as it involved all the European powers and was fought around the globe -- the English and French fought twice for Louisbourg. The French held it in 1757. The English conquered it in 1758. This year marks the 250th anniversary of that summer battle.
Without conquering Louisbourg in 1758, would the English have taken Quebec in 1759? If they hadn't taken Quebec then, Canadian and American history would have been very different.
Louisbourg was established in 1713 as a key centre for Nouvelle France, and by the 1940s it was a fully fortified town of some 4,000 inhabitants -- not huge, but not insignificant either. The historian A. J. B. Johnston reports that in its 45 years of existence, Louisbourg had some 565 marriages, 2,200 baptisms and 1,200 burials. It was a growing and vibrant centre.
The strategic importance was recognized by both the French and English, with the former defending Louisbourg with more than 8,000 troops. The English
came in 1758 with 27,000 troops, so the Battle of Louisbourg involved nearly 40,000 people, making it a major battle in the Anglo-French war for supremacy in the North American colonies.
Louisbourg 1758 was seen as key turning point. The English has tried to take Louisbourg in 1757, but failed in the face of the French navy and bad weather. In 1757, the Seven Years' War -- at least in its North-American theatre -- was not going well for the English. They had lost a series of battles, including at Oswego and Ticonderoga, and had they lost for a second time at Louisbourg it might have moved the Seven Years' War decisively in the French direction.
But the English took Louisbourg, and then took Louisbourg out. Almost all of the French inhabitants were deported quickly back to France, as many as 12,000. The English began to dismantle the fortifications almost immediately. Louisbourg effectively disappeared and became what it is today: a largely forgotten heritage site.
The success of Louisbourg emboldened the English to press on through the Gulf of St. Lawrence into the river itself, laying siege to Quebec the following year: 1759. No doubt the battle on the Plains of Abraham, with its world-changing consequences and the poetic balance of the twin deaths of Generals Wolfe and Montcalm, is a major reason that we forget Louisbourg today. Yet without Louisbourg, it would have all been different.
Historical counterfactuals can be fun to pursue. If the French had prevailed in the Seven Years' War and kept all of Nouvelle France, would history have unfolded to make Canada all French and the United States all English? Would the French communities in America have survived to be something like Quebec would become in a majority-English Canada?
A critical consequence of the English victory was that French Catholics experienced religious liberty under the English crown, making them more favourably disposed to English rule. If the French did not have that experience, would they have accepted the American revolutionaries' plea for assistance and joined in the Revolutionary War of 1776?
Such questions come to mind on Cape Breton Island -- which we all regard as a transplanted bit of the Scottish highlands, but may have become a new world version of the French provinces. Such questions are intellectual puzzles which cannot be solved, but asking them reminds us of the importance of what took place at Louisbourg. It reminds us to remember Louisbourg at all.
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