The Office of Intendant in Nezu France 23 the colony. France had at this time no colonial civil service, but chose her colonial officials from among the members of the royal service at home.' Usually those appointed to the Canadian inten- dancy were drawn from the ranks of the lesser nobility, the gens dc robe, or the bourgeoisie." They were men who had entered the service at an early age, and had been promoted as the result of tested fidelity to the interests of the monarchy and of industry shown in office. As no one, with the single exception of Talon, seems to have held a provincial intendancy in France before coming to Can- ada, it may be presumed that the post of intendant in New France was less to be desired than the headship of a small gencralitc at home. Of the other colonial intendants, Begon had been director of stores at Rochefort, Raudot a member of the board of excise (cour des aides), Duchesneau royal treasurer at Tours, Dupuy ad- vocate-general of the royal council, and Bigot commissary of the military forces at Louisburg. The others are referred to in their respective commissions as having served the king faithfully " in the various offices" heretofore held by them.^ All of them proved to be men of more than ordinary ability, and some of them displayed unusual qualities of administration and statesmanship. While one of the number may justly be pilloried as a rogue, none showed himself incapable — a statement which can scarcely be made with truth in regard to the dozen governors of the old regime.* We have the word of De Tocqueville that the duties and powers of the Canadian intendant were far wider than those of his proto- type at home." In one sense the philosopher-historian is probably correct ; for, while the authority given to the intendant of New France was not, judged by the terms of his commission and in- structions, so extensive as that given to a provincial intendant at home, the distance of three thousand miles which separate Quebec from Versailles necessarily involved the exercise of wider discre- tionary powers by the colonial official. In France protests against the action of an intendant could be laid before the higher authori- ties and a decision be rendered within a few days, or at most a few 1 To this fact a later student of French colonial policy attributes many of the capital errors of the old regime. See Leroy-Beaulieu, De la Colonisation chea les Peuples Modernes (Paris, iSgi, 4th ed.), 450-451. 2 Five of the colonial intendants were born in Touraine, two each in Bour- gogne and Orleanais, one each in Hainaut, Poitou, Auvergne, Champagne, and Guyenne ; cf. Roy, " Les Intendants ", 66. 'See the various commissions in Edits et Ordonnances, III. 21 ct scqq.
- Governors De la Barre and De Denonville may be singled out as strikingly
incapable. 5 '■ An intendant far more powerful than his colleagues in France ". De Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution (New York, 1876), 299, note f.
