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DUPUY, CLAUDE-THOMAS (the name was sometimes written Du Puy or Dupuis, but he signed Dupuy), lawyer, maître des requites, intendant of New France from 1725 to 1728; b. 10 Dec. 1678 in Paris, only son of Claude Dupuy and Élisabeth Aubry; m. there in June 1724 Marie-Madeleine Lefouyn, and they had no children; d. 15 Sept. 1738 at the Château de Carcé, near Rennes, and was buried two days later in Bruz.

Social advancement

Claude-Thomas Dupuy’s family came originally from Ambert, in the province of Auvergne. His great-grandfather Jacques Dupuy lived there at the beginning of the 17th century. A 1611 document calls him a merchant. His son Étienne was styled a merchant and bourgeois of Ambert, and was a clerk in the bailiff’s court of that town. From 1648 on, Étienne enjoyed the designation “honourable man,” a sign of social progress. Of his numerous sons, Thomas and Claude are the best known. The former made a fortune in the manufacture of paper, an industry very widespread in Auvergne at that time, and in various tax farms. He acquired several seigneuries, in particular that of Grandrif, which he added to his name. His son bought the office of king’s secretary-counsellor, “maison et couronne de France,” in the parlement of Pan, which conferred nobility upon him at the same time. His line has continued under the name Dupuy de La Grandrive.

Etienne’s second son, Claude, the father of Claude-Thomas, left Ambert to try his luck in Paris, where fortune smiled on him. He usually called himself a bourgeois of Paris and a papermaker with his own shop. But the sale of paper, facilitated by his brother’s activity in Auvergne, did not absorb all his energies. He also lent money, speculated on houses, and bought offices for his son, which was an investment for the bourgeois of the time as well as a means of social advancement.

On 20 June 1676 Dupuy had married Élisabeth Aubry, who also belonged to the well-to-do Paris bourgeoisie; she brought him a dowry of 10,000 livres, 8,000 of it in ready money. Although Claude’s father-in-law was only a comptroller of La Bûche in Paris, his brother-in-law, Charles Aubry, was a lawyer in the parlement. Thus, the family was moving finally towards the bar. Jacques-Charles Aubry, Charles’ son, became one of the most famous lawyers in Paris between 1715 and 1735.

Claude-Thomas Dupuy also chose this career. From 1688 to 1696 he studied two doors away from his father’s house, at the Collège de Beauvais, which in that period had an excellent reputation. When he left it, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law, earning his baccalaureate in 1698 and his licentiate the following year. Shortly afterwards he entered the parlement as a lawyer, and in 1701 his parents bought for him the office of “king’s counsellor, His Majesty’s lawyer on the presidial bench of the Châtelet in Paris.” In 1708 he became advocate general in the grand conseil; in his letters of appointment he is styled “chevalier.” In 1720 he bought the office of maître des requites, which was worth more than 200,000 livres. Maîtres des requêtes had important duties, but, it must be noted, the office was normally a stepping-stone to higher posts, especially to an intendancy or to the council of state.

Towards the end of 1722 the new maître des requêtes decided to resign his office, apparently for financial reasons (either substantial losses incurred through the collapse of the system or unfortunate land deals). In the spring of 1723 he received his letters as honorary maître des requêtes, which allowed him to attend the meetings and express opinions there, but without receiving the emoluments of the post. He thus remained almost three years without an office – that is, until his appointment in October 1725 to the intendancy in Canada – a somewhat surprising fact for which a valid explanation has not yet been found.

An unusual appointment

Let us begin by noting all the unusual elements of the Dupuy situation. It was hardly ever the case that one became maître des requêtes if one’s parents had not themselves held such offices for at least one or two generations. To a certain extent Claude-Thomas Dupuy appears like an upstart in this world of highly placed Parisian magistrates. It was partly Claude Dupuy’s money that enabled his son to make headway. Louis Moreri, in Le grand dictionnaire historique ou le mélange curieux de l’histoire sacrée et profane . . . (1759), was himself struck by the personal worth of Claude-Thomas; he worked his way up, he writes, “by his own merit.” This remark is all the more significant because it is not apparent that Dupuy had any “patron” – that is, a highly placed and influential person who would have been capable of furthering Dupuy’s candidacy for the various posts he occupied.

At the beginning of June 1726, however, he left Paris for a quite new adventure. He set out for Quebec, to take on very different duties from those which had hitherto occupied him. He came to replace Michel Bégon*, who had held the intendancy since 1712.

In 1723 Bégon had indeed asked the king to replace him in the post of intendant of Canada. Edme-Nicolas Robert, who was appointed at the beginning of 1724, never made it to Canada, having died suddenly in July on the boat that was bringing him to New France. The following year Guillaume Chazel disappeared when the Chameau was shipwrecked within sight of the shores of Cape Breton Island. On learning the news of Chazel’s death, Dupuy presented his candidacy for the still vacant post. The colonial office accepted at once, for it considered “that there are few persons in the Marine who are fitted for this position.”

The new intendant took possession of his office on 2 Sept. 1726. He was to remain only two years in Canada. In the normal discharge of his duties, Dupuy displayed competence and perspicacity, but in a critical moment he showed so little restraint and self-possession that the minister decided to recall him.

Intendant of New France

The first duty of an intendant of New France was to administer justice; “good and prompt justice,” said the instructions. Having spent his life in the highest courts of the mother country, Dupuy cannot have encountered many problems in the cases that came before him at Quebec. In what remains of his enactments, nothing appears abnormal, even if one might perhaps reproach him for showing a certain partiality towards seigneurs, to the detriment of copyholders. With him justice was expeditious; a sentence was sometimes pronounced on the very day of the offence.

People accused him of being excessively severe in his judgements, possibly repeating the assessments he himself gave regarding his own actions. However, a close examination of the relevant documents reveals nothing of this kind. Among other things, he was taken to task over the fine of 200 livres imposed on a young man who had sold spirits illegally, but this severity, which was in no way excessive, was justified by the fact that Dupuy wanted to make an example of the man.

Maintaining order also fell to the intendant, and in the 18th century this included all the internal administration of the colony. In examining Dupuy’s correspondence, one can see that he thought a great deal about the problems posed by the colonization of North America. He initially considered the vertical dimension, or the relationship of colony to mother country. On this point the court’s instructions were clear: the “colony of Canada is good only to the extent that it can be useful to the kingdom.” After studying the Canadian setting, he came to the following conclusion: first, Canada offered France “inexhaustible wealth,” which it unfortunately could not take full advantage of, either through ignorance or through lack of manpower. Secondly, Canadians were in the process of becoming a new people, who were different from the French, and whom the mother country, unless she were careful, would soon find hard to control. “The colony is on the verge of ruin,” he wrote in 1727, “unless we are assisted with men and money.” He thus asked the French government to invest in shipbuilding in Canada, and in the establishment of glassworks and potteries and all industries requiring large quantities of wood. Above all, he recommended sustained immigration to develop the Canadian population, whose spirit of independence had impressed him. A strong colony would be of service to the mother country in many ways. His appeal fell on deaf ears.

Then there was the horizontal dimension, the integration of New France in the North American setting. Two salient facts engaged his attention: the presence of the English and relations with the First Nations. Dupuy recognized with considerable perspicacity the sharpness of the sword that the British held poised over the colony. He had not been there for a year before the English were installed, and firmly, at Oswego on Lake Ontario. “Now we are reduced to being on the defensive in our own country!” he exclaimed. He asked for an immediate endeavour by the mother country: “Moderate efforts will do more at present than great projects that would be implemented too late,” a prediction that was to be realized 30 years later, during the Seven Years’ War.

Being a good jurist, Dupuy did not hesitate to state his theory concerning the rights of the French over the territories of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) after the treaty of Utrecht. To show that the territories in question were in truth Iroquois property, William Burnet, the governor of New York, had argued the fact that the French asked the consent of the Iroquois before reconstructing Fort Niagara. But, Dupuy hastened to retort, this “consent . . . does not prove anything in a country which is a colony and newly discovered, as we have at all times shared everything with the natives by common consent.” Hence Indigneous consent was the basis of joint ownership of the territories. Dupuy saw proof of this consent in the fact that members of the First Nations called the king of France their father and the French their brothers. A fragile confirmation indeed, but the notion of joint ownership is interesting in some respects.

Dupuy also concerned himself with the exploitation of the colony – that is, the development of its economy. Being of the opinion that the fur trade was destined to die out rapidly, he decided to concentrate his efforts on the products of the soil. For example, he encouraged the growing of hemp, but his success was short-lived. He tried, in vain, to persuade the mother country to build vessels in Canada. He came up against insurmountable obstacles everywhere, including the lack of outlets for produce and the dearth of specialized workmen. When all was said and done, the metropole could not make up its mind about investing heavily in the colony, and this would have been the only way to get out of the impasse.

With regard to law and order in the towns, Dupuy had very decided views. He wanted to set the taverns to rights, and to this end he issued ordinances that many considered excessive and untimely. But it was town planning that particularly interested him, and he wanted to make Quebec into a beautiful capital. He repaired the streets, laid out squares, and planned to put fountains and basins in them. Governor Charles de Beauharnois* de La Boische was shocked by an expenditure that he deemed useless, and the king’s engineer, Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros* de Léry, was annoyed at not having been consulted. Dupuy had indeed decided everything on his own initiative, and had even thought of directing the construction work himself.

As to the financial situation, which he subsequently prided himself on having clarified, it must be admitted that during the first months of his intendancy he conducted a fairly extensive investigation. The reports of his successors confirmed his conclusions: the court never sent enough money, and as a rule it arbitrarily reduced the requests of its administrators, which resulted in a lack of currency, sometimes a tragic lack, in the colony. Moreover, the court did not stop pedlars from draining off this currency. Above all, the minister was unwilling to admit that the costs of administration went on increasing with the general growth of the colony. Brutal reminders of these truths were unpalatable to him, and in the autumn of 1728 the minister was shocked to discover that in the last months of his administration Dupuy had pretty well neglected financial details; several accounts were not in order, and workmen whom he had taken on had not been paid. When the minister of Marine, Jean-Frédéric Maurepas [Phélypeaux], wrote to the new intendant, Gilles Hocquart*, in the spring of 1729, to advise him to pay particular attention to His Majesty’s finances, he said: “His Majesty is informed that financial matters in the colony are not in order, that accounts of expenditures are four years behind and have not been closed, and that those of the warehouses have not been closed since 1 Oct. 1726 either.” One might question whether Dupuy, whose own finances were never in perfect shape, was well qualified to manage those of the king.

Tense relations with the governor

The minister’s dissatisfaction and disapproval extended to another sphere: the intendant’s relations with certain people, particularly Governor Beauharnois. Each year in his instructions the king brought up insistently a point considered essential: perfect understanding between the governor and the intendant. The first contact had raised hopes of a harmonious relationship, but nothing came of it. By the end of 1726 Beauharnois, who was a little touchy, had the impression that Dupuy, with his insatiable desire for honours, wanted to be his equal in prestige and power. At that moment a climate of tension between the two was created. Not a month passed without a heated squabble breaking out, whether it was over a marriage to be authorized or a drum to be supplied to the troops. Each time the incident, often trivial in itself, assumed the proportions of an event. The general was not as learned as the magistrate, but he had a caustic style; from his pen have come pithy sentences on the subject of the intendant, which historians have taken pleasure in repeating. Following the quarrel over the drum, he said to the minister: “If we had crossed the tropic on our way here, I might have thought that he had been touched with madness, since there is no common sense in any of his requests.” Then, when he pointed out that Dupuy would not listen to reason, his comment was: “He hearkens to no one, he fancies that he has become a god.” It came to the point where they detested each other thoroughly: “I have only to say white for him to say black,” remarked Beauharnois; “I have only to be of one opinion for him to be of another.” In fact the governor always had the impression that his rights were being encroached upon, and for his part Dupuy saw the dark designs of Beauharnois everywhere, and accused him of being involved in the fur trade.

There was probably an incompatibility of temperament between the two men; but it must also be acknowledged that they were diametrically opposed as much by their social origin as their professional training. Dupuy spent his life in the magistracy and came from a bourgeois family, for whom the king’s service was something new; that is why the intendant, at every turn, made it known that he had served His Majesty such and such a number of years. Dupuy went so far as to identify his ideas and wishes with those of the sovereign. The king even had to remind him, in 1727, that he was only “the second person in the colony.” For Beauharnois, on the other hand, whose whole family history had been bound up for more than two centuries with the magistracy and the royal services, this had become a natural thing, about which there was never any question in his correspondence. As for his own career, he had spent it almost entirely in the Marine; he knew nothing about the legal mind and easily got lost in the subtle turns of a parliamentarian’s arguments. Hence we can more readily understand why they were at odds from the beginning of their joint administration to the end.

To be sure, all these difficulties annoyed the minister: however, he saw nothing irreparable in the situation. Such was not his reaction, however, when at the end of May 1728 he received the report, dispatched to him by the chapter of Quebec, concerning events that had marked the beginning of that year.

A strange decision

Bishop Saint-Vallier [La Croix], who had died during the night of 26 Dec. 1727, had chosen Intendant Dupuy as his executor. The latter took his role very seriously. Early on the morning of 26 December, he affixed seals to the bishop’s possessions, transmitted the seals of the diocese, the emblems of authority, to the canons, and proclaimed the beginning of the regale. For their part the canons, having met immediately, elected Étienne Boullard as capitular vicar. On 31 December a dispute broke out in the chapter as to who should preside at the funeral, which had been set for 4 January. Eustache Chartier* de Lotbinière maintained that this honour belonged to him, in his capacity as archdeacon. Boullard, as capitular vicar, claimed it for himself. Lotbinière conceived the unfortunate notion of taking the dispute to the intendant, who summoned the canons for 2 January. The latter, questioning the intendant’s authority in matters of ecclesiastical discipline, refused to appear. Dupuy, extremely annoyed, then made a strange decision: as it had been reported to him that the canons wanted to remove the bishop’s body to transport it to the cathedral and bury it there, contrary to the bishop’s last will and testament, he decided to advance the date of the funeral. Without warning anybody, not any of the clergy or faithful of Quebec, he ordered Lotbinière to proceed forthwith – it was early afternoon on 2 January – with the interment of the bishop, which the archdeacon did, before the astonished eyes of the nuns and paupers of the Hôpital Général. Boullard reacted immediately: he placed the chapel of the Hôpital Général under interdict and deposed the mother superior. Dupuy replied at once that these acts were invalid because Boullard had not shown his letters of appointment. Furthermore, his election was worthless in the eyes of intendant, who had just discovered the existence of a coadjutor in France who had automatically taken office. The canons were summoned to the Conseil Supérieur for the following Monday, 5 January.

Thus began the battle between the chapter, led by Boullard, and the Conseil Supérieur, directed by Dupuy. The latter’s weapons were ordinances and fines, the former’s interdicts and threats of excommunication. The January and February meetings of the council were almost entirely given over to violent, impassioned speeches by the intendant against the canons and particularly against Boullard. The affair reached the point where the governor considered it his duty to intervene. He came in person to the Conseil Supérieur and forbade the intendant to arraign Canon Boullard, despite the writ that had been issued shortly before. This intervention did not convince Dupuy, who challenged the governor’s authority in legal matters and countermanded his orders. The wrangling continued in this way until the end of May.

A brutal recall

These dissensions had created a great stir in the colony. The clergy were divided. Several officers had to make a difficult choice between two authorities whose orders were contradictory. This all caused great wonderment among the people. The king was quickly informed of events. At the end of January the canons, with the governor’s connivance and despite the intendant’s veto, sent one of their members as a representative to Paris via New England. The latter reached Versailles before the end of May, and a few days later it was decided to recall the intendant. The minister was astonished at the numerous irregularities of procedure perpetrated by Dupuy, and was shocked by his intemperate language as well as by his ill-timed decisions. Those at Versailles could not comprehend how such an experienced magistrate could act in such an ill-advised fashion. Dupuy lacked the prudence that a good administrator needs; he never doubted his own ideas, or rather he would not give them up, for in his opinion the authority with which the king had invested him gave them an inviolable character and put them above discussion.

He had given free rein to his passionate feelings; his speeches were full of violent diatribes against all who dared to oppose him, be they members of the chapter, religious, or officers. He seems to have delighted in this dispute, which allowed him to give public expression to his ideas on the superiority of the civil power over the church. But it must be recognized, as the court did, that his legal knowledge had limitations. The nonvacancy of the episcopal see was far from being established, and in all these questions of ecclesiastical law, with which Dupuy was less familiar, he ought to have shown more discretion and prudence. Furthermore, the minister approved Beauharnois’ intervention in the Conseil Supérieur, even if this was extraordinary. Indeed the governor, the sovereign’s personal representative in the colony, possessed supreme authority there. It was his duty, by virtue of his letters of appointment, to “maintain and keep the peoples in peace, quiet, and tranquillity.” It seemed to him – the minister shared his opinion – that the “tranquillity” of the colony was threatened by Dupuy’s behaviour.

One may legitimately ask whether Dupuy was induced to act as he did because of the prejudice, shared by many magistrates, that their profession was superior to that of the military. “If force were not controlled by law,” Charles Loyseau had written at the beginning of the 17th century, “robbery and brigandage would prevail.” Dupuy’s attitude might well derive from such an outlook.

The king’s decision vexed him. The grief that this brutal recall caused him was further aggravated by some very unpleasant occurrences. As he had incurred heavy debts (65,000 livres) during his two-year stay in Quebec, an order of restraint was obtained against him. Of the 50-odd bales that he had brought with him to Quebec, he took back to France only a few clothes and some papers. The sale of his possessions was subsequently carried out; he had to send back to France his library, for which there were no purchasers at Quebec, along with his astronomical instruments, which would have had to go for a ridiculous price. The intendant emerged from his Canadian adventures profoundly humiliated and completely ruined. No one, on his return to the mother country, would offer him a position, but the king took pity on his misfortune and granted him an annual pension of 1,500 livres.

A new career in science

Dupuy did not, however, lose heart, and one might even say that his return to France heralded the beginning of a new career, a scientific one. Dupuy was a cultured man and sometimes passed for a scholar; the doctor at the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec, Michel Sarrazin, had a high esteem for his learning. It has been possible to verify that this reputation was not overrated. Indeed we know the composition of his library, which contained more than 1,000 volumes. Its main features should be noted: a prominence given to the Bible, of which he possessed the text in several languages; a well-stocked and well-balanced legal section; an important place devoted to the arts and sciences, music, and mechanics, among other subjects. We know by cross-checking that Dupuy’s interest in these fields, the last in particular, was not merely theoretical. Had he not brought with him to Quebec a well-equipped physics laboratory containing many models made by himself?

This long-standing interest in experiments in mechanics occupied the last years of his life. He constructed hydraulic machines, some of which were fairly widely talked of and were mentioned in the scientific reviews of the period. On three occasions inquirers from the Académie des Sciences came to see his inventions. Their report on the visit was favourable: “Monsieur Dupuy’s pump is very good, and its capacity is at least as great as that of any pump so far shown before the academy.” The king’s privilège was then granted to his widow, for at that date (1741), the inventor had been dead for three years. He had died on 15 Sept. 1738 at the Château de Carcé, near Rennes, where he had been asked to come to “pump out the waters” that were filling the mines at Pontpéan. But as his death had interrupted the experiment, it was his pupil, Antoine de Gensanne, who had completed it, and apparently with success. The experiment had no sequel, however, and it is easy to understand why: it was based on the principles of Cartesian physics, which was already disappearing under the attacks of the Newtonians. There, too, Dupuy’s success was ephemeral.

An ill-prepared intendant

To what can Dupuy’s original failure as an intendant in Canada be attributed? One can draw on several details for an answer. First, his psychology: in particular his inflexibility and inadaptability. This natural rigidity had no doubt been strengthened by Jansenist influence, which appears evident in Dupuy. His inclination towards violence probably did not help in the execution of duties in which contacts with the public were so frequent. As for prudence, he seems to have been devoid of it; he did not know how to wait, to play his hand skilfully, to dissimulate. A long family tradition in the king’s service would have perhaps imparted more tact and taught him the art of compromise. It is also evident that his training had ill prepared him for his post as intendant in New France. His whole career had been spent in Paris courts, where he was never alone in making decisions, where he was only one cog among many others, several of whom were his superiors. He found himself in Quebec with extensive power in his hands, and with no equal except the governor, whom moreover he could not bear to acknowledge as his superior.

After Dupuy’s administration, the court deemed it wise to return to the traditional practice of appointing to the Canadian intendancy an officer from the Marine cadres, experienced in office work and administrative routine.

Jean-Claude Dubé