Montreal surrendered to a British army on Sept. 8, 1760, ending French rule in Canada and producing a 55-article document whose promises are still argued over in Canadian courtrooms more than two and a half centuries later.
The capitulation was signed by Pierre de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnial, the last governor general of New France, and Maj.-Gen. Jeffery Amherst, commander-in-chief of British forces in North America. It came a year after the fall of Quebec on the Plains of Abraham and four months after the French victory at Sainte-Foy, a win that changed nothing once British warships rather than French ones came up the St. Lawrence that spring.
By late summer, three British columns were converging on the island. Amherst came down the St. Lawrence from Lake Ontario, James Murray came upriver from Quebec, and William Haviland came north by way of Lake Champlain. According to the National Battlefields Commission, roughly 18,000 British troops closed on a city defended by about 2,100 French regulars, most of the Canadian militia having already gone home. Vaudreuil concluded that a siege would destroy Montreal to no purpose and opened negotiations.
The soldiers did not take it well. Amherst refused the French the honours of war, the customary right of a beaten garrison to march out with its flags flying and its drums beating, citing French conduct at Fort William Henry three years earlier. The Duc de Levis, who had beaten Murray at Sainte-Foy and wanted to fight on, asked permission to withdraw his regiments to Ile Sainte-Helene and make a stand there. Vaudreuil refused and ordered him to submit. According to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Levis had his officers burn the regimental colours rather than hand them to the British.
What Vaudreuil could not win on the field he tried to win on paper. The 55 articles run well past the disposal of the army. The Solon Law Archive, which publishes the full English text, shows articles 27 through 35 devoted to religion, guaranteeing the free exercise of the Roman Catholic faith and the position of the parish clergy, and article 37 guaranteeing that inhabitants who stayed would keep their moveable and immoveable property. Those clauses set a pattern that ran forward through the Quebec Act of 1774 and, eventually, into the constitutional arrangements of the country that followed.
The most consequential clause for modern law may be article 40. It provided that the Indigenous nations allied to France would be maintained in the lands they inhabited if they chose to remain, would not be molested on any pretext for having carried arms and served France, and would keep their religion and their missionaries. As The Canadian Encyclopedia notes, no Indigenous representative took part in drafting the articles, yet the clause amounted to a British commitment respecting lands and autonomy at the very moment the French alliance collapsed.
Three days earlier, on Sept. 5, 1760, a separate and shorter piece of business had been done at Longueuil, where the Huron-Wendat of Lorette came to terms with Murray in a one-paragraph document promising them free exercise of their religion and customs and liberty of trading with the English. That paragraph, the Murray Treaty of Longueuil, sat largely unremarked for two centuries until four Huron-Wendat men were charged in 1982 with cutting trees and lighting fires in a Quebec provincial park. In R. v. Sioui, decided May 24, 1990, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled unanimously that Murray’s note was a treaty within the meaning of the Indian Act, and that such documents must be read in their historical context rather than parsed as narrowly as a modern contract.
The capitulation itself was provisional, subject to whatever European peace eventually followed. That came with the Treaty of Paris in February 1763, which formally ceded Canada to Britain, and with the Royal Proclamation issued that October. But the substance was settled on a September day in Montreal, when a governor with no army left signed away a colony and spent his last leverage trying to protect the people who would have to live in it.
Sources:
- The Canadian Encyclopedia, “Capitulation of Montreal 1760” and “Murray Treaty of Longueuil (1760)” and “Sioui Case”
- Solon Law Archive, full English text of the Articles of Capitulation, Montreal
- National Battlefields Commission (ccbn-nbc.gc.ca), “The surrender of Montreal”
- Dictionary of Canadian Biography, entry for Francois-Gaston de Levis
- CanLII, R. v. Sioui, 1990 CanLII 103 (SCC)
- Archives de Montreal, Articles de la Capitulation de Montreal, 8 septembre 1760
