Marital Conflict, Ethnicity, and Legal Hybridity in Postconquest Quebec

This article explores the terrain of marital conflict in Quebec between 1763 and 1830, focusing on a variety of strategies employed by husbands and wives, ranging from elopement, criminal prosecution for marital violence, and separation. Based on an intensive analysis of the colonial newspapers and a large judicial archive of both criminal and civil proceedings, it seeks to discern patterns of ethnic inflection among men and women using these strategies, and seeks to postulate a growing legal hybridity, one that particularly affected the assumptions and practice of French customary law in the first six decades following the British conquest.