George-Etienne Cartier: A biography - Hardcover

Sweeny, Alastair

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0771083637 ISBN 13: 9780771083631

Publisher: McClelland and Stewart, 1976

Synopsis

352 pages of excellent text, with many great photos and illustrations. First Edition.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

Foreword by W.L. Morton
It is well known that there is a great obstacle to overcome in the writing of a fully documented life of George-Etienne Cartier. His personal papers are thought to have been destroyed; even the scholarly study of Cartier by Dr. Henry Best firmly admits what we cannot know. Our knowledge of Cartier as a person must remain fragmentary or shadowy.
Alastair Sweeny in this bold and zestful life accepts that limitation, and transcends it. He does so by dealing fully with Cartier as a public man, the well known and dynamic Cartier. He seizes on the central fact that Cartier - the poet of the rebellion of 1837 - became the central figure, latterly the human dynamo, to use a for once justified metaphor, of railroad development in Canada from 1847 till his death in 1873. His passions - to give Canada an ice-free winter port and unite British North America by the new magic of the iron horse, to win the Northwest and British Columbia by a railroad to the Pacific, and above all, to ensure the survival of the French Canadians in a federal state - were the fiery themes of Cartier's life. By developing this focus, Alastair Sweeny not only gives us Cartier as the great-hearted, never beaten terrier of Canadian politics, but also gives us, as it were by reverberation, the personality of the man and makes coherent what is known of his private life. The result is very much a "life" of Cartier, vivid, spirited and dramatic.
In the accomplishment of Confederation, Cartier was the ever-loyal, mutually recognized equal, of John A. Macdonald. Cartier exemplified, as the author well demonstrates, the full partnership, dynamic and invigorating, of English and French in the Canada of Confederation. Cartier needed Macdonald's easy sagacity as much as Macdonald needed his fiery resolution. Yet, it is above all to be noted Cartier remained at the same time, in his style, his energy, his tastes, French - French, all wool and a yard wide, français pure laine, pur-sang.
W.L. Morton

Edition details

• Publisher: McClelland and Stewart
• Publication date: 1976
• ISBN 10: 0771083637
• ISBN 13: 9780771083631
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352