We often hear about land tenure in New France and then Quebec being semi-feudal, all the way up into the twentieth century in certain cases. Why did this system manage to persist so late, what were its effects on the people living under it, and who was motivated to finally abolish it? Are there any vestiges of the Seigneurial System that still exist today?
(Super excited about Canada week, btw! Thanks!!)
The "abolition" of the Seigneurial system only really manifested itself in the partitionning of new lands, starting with the canton/township system in 1791. These new system is quite obvious in more recently settled areas such as the Eastern townships, or even better: Abitibi, where the spacing of roads and even villages is built around a square matrix whose lenght was calculated so that nobody would be so far from a church that a horse and buggy ride couldn't bring the parishionners to Sunday mass on time.
Are there any vestiges of the Seigneurial System that still exist today?
Existing seigneurial lots with their long narrow "30 arpents" lots still largely exist to this day, and are a prominent feature of the Québec cadastre/land registry. They are also extremely obvious on aerial/satellite imagery - just browsing rural Québec on Google Maps should provide you with so many examples it's not even funny (random exemple, east of Québec City [Ile d'Orléans + Côte de Beaupré + Montmagny])
There are also several patrimonial building such as Moulins and Manoirs which were at the very core of each Seigneurie which have been preserved and are still around. Exemples comprise the Moulin seigneurial des Éboulements, the Moulin Seigneurial de Tonnancourt, or the Manoir Seigneurial Mauvide-Genest on Ile d'Orléans, the Manoir Gamache, or even to some extent what I semi-jokingly refer to as "my first Office" (student job - I was lucky...) - the Château Ango at Maizerêts...