Harold Bérubé. Des sociétés distinctes: Gouverner les banlieues bourgeoises de Montréal, 1880-1939. Studies on the History of Quebec Series. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015. 288 pp. $100.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7735-4393-5; $37.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7735-4392-8.

Reviewed by Dan Horner (Ryerson University)
Published on H-Urban (December, 2015)
Commissioned by Alexander Vari (Marywood University)

Brightness on the Edge of Town: Making Elite Space in Suburban Montreal

Historians of the urban experience tend to be drawn to the clamor and tumult of the world’s largest cities. You can hardly blame them; the material is rich to the point of being seemingly inexhaustible. The narrative of great cities is marked by social conflict and political intrigue, suffering, and ingenuity. Bookshelves groan with countless tomes on New York, London, Paris, and Mumbai, to name just a few examples. Yet this focus on urban centers undermines an essential reality. For the better part of the past few centuries, a steadily growing segment of urban dwellers from across the social spectrum have, for a variety of reasons, fled the city center for its periphery. In Montreal, the decades at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries saw working-class people move to suburban communities on the urban periphery in order to be closer to factory work. At the same time, the city’s elites were also choosing to abandon the city center. Harold Bérubé examines the emergence of three elite suburbs that took shape during this period: Westmount, a bastion of the Anglophone elite on the western slope of Mount Royal; the Town of Mount Royal, a railway suburb on the north side of the mountain; and Pointe Claire, nestled on the shores of Lake Saint Louis to the west of Montreal.

Des sociétés distinctes is a study of (sub)urban governance. It looks at how civic leaders in these three communities used the political, economic, and cultural tools at their disposal to create and foster a society and culture distinct from Montreal proper. It does so by examining how civic leaders organized and regulated space, social relations, and urbanization both legally and culturally. Bérubé’s engaging study joins a growing body of historiography on the suburban experience that is organized around a shared set of questions: What made these suburban communities appealing to urban elites? How did they function as projects of governance? What was their relationship to the downtown core?

What makes Bérubé’s study particularly interesting is his expansive definition of city building. While much here pertains to the nuts and bolts of urban governance, like the efforts of municipal governments to impose building codes that would uphold a distinct and refined built environment in their respective towns, Bérubé also examines the impact of less tangible but equally important elements of identity and community formation. This is a crucial line of inquiry given the role that subtle manifestations of segregation—by gender, race, ethnicity, and class—played in these processes.

Civic leaders in the three communities were determined to create a suburban setting that was distinct from Montreal’s urban landscape and that confidently asserted the values of its elite residents. With that being said, their efforts to do so were shaped by the contours of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century liberal governance. They wished to avoid authoritarian measures that would interfere with the pursuits of private actors, most notably, the real estate developers responsible for so much of their period’s steady growth. Instead, they resorted to more subtle forms of social, cultural, and environmental engineering. Bérubé demonstrates how the licensing and taxation powers of these governments were carefully used to nudge away the sorts of cultural pursuits and building projects that were seen to be undesirable. On this point, his discussion of building codes is particularly illuminating. Bérubé demonstrates how civic officials carefully regulated everything from the use of building materials to the distance that houses had to be set off from the road in their efforts to sculpt a suburban landscape that communicated an identity that was distinct from the booming metropolis that loomed in the distance, and one that conveyed an elite sensibility. Trees were planted along major thoroughfares and utility wires were buried. These were not mere aesthetic concerns; civic leaders were attempting to create a genteel landscape that would reflect a very specific cultural vision. For instance, municipal regulations actively discouraged the building of apartments. The single-family dwelling was not only an aesthetic goal but also an integral component of a broader moral order they were seeking to create. Suburban officials approached the project of building local infrastructure through this same lens of creating a distinct moral order. Westmount was particularly active in this sense, building institutions like Victoria Hall designed to cultivate the manners of local residents through a program of music and high culture, all with a distinctly British and imperialist flavor. To the degree to which they were able, civic governments invested in parks and public monuments that wove their differences with Montreal into the suburban landscape.

Bérubé turns to the Great Depression to demonstrate how a distinct moral order was being constructed in these three elite suburbs. While high rates of unemployment strained the budgets of Montreal and its working-class suburbs, Pointe Claire, Westmount, and the Town of Mount Royal were better equipped to weather the crisis. Bérubé makes clear that these three communities were not entirely isolated from the ravages of the crisis. What made them distinct, however, was the way that they shaped their response to it. While Montreal and other large cities focused on providing direct assistance to the unemployed, Bérubé demonstrates, these elite suburbs adopted strategies designed to encourage self-sufficiency. Private philanthropy was favored over public assistance. Efforts were made, for example, to assist families in stretching their household budgets. What funds were being spent on relief were directed toward those who could not work, rather than those who found themselves unemployed as a result of the crisis.

Through this historical account of the development of these three communities, Bérubé contemplates their relationship to Montreal. As much as developers and civic leaders attempted to transform these affluent suburbs into distinct and independent territories on the island of Montreal, their fortunes were tied directly to the city. These three elite suburbs, to varying degrees, constructed their political identity as the polar opposite of Montreal. While the governance of the nearby metropolis was mired in corruption and political scandal, Westmount, Town of Mount Royal, and Pointe Claire were run by small, transparent, and efficient governments that bore the cultural and ideological imprint of the City Beautiful Movement. As much as Montreal was demonized in this sort of rhetoric, civic leaders in these towns recognized that their continued growth was inextricably linked to the dynamism of the metropolis. Moving deeper into the twentieth century, it became increasingly difficult for these municipalities to maintain their independence from the city. While poorer suburbs were annexed by Montreal because they could no longer afford to handle the burdensome costs of maintaining their infrastructure, cities like Westmount were being pulled closer into the orbit of Montreal by a desire to protect their interests and have their voice heard in regional development projects.

Montreal’s fraught linguistic politics loom over Bérubé’s study. The three communities that he examines were defined as Anglophone bastions. Even the book’s title alludes to the sectarian squabbles that dominated Montreal’s public life in the second half of the twentieth century. The distinctly Anglophone character of these three communities—and Westmount in particular—was imbued with contentious political significance as public life in post-World War Two Quebec became increasingly defined by struggles over language and sovereignty. By the end of the twentieth century, many Anglophones who remained in Montreal experienced the city through the filter of one of these suburban enclaves; my own family’s century and a half sojourn in the city included pit stops in each of the three municipalities examined by Bérubé. During the heated debates over the Quebec government’s decision to merge municipalities on the island of Montreal into a single entity, the fierce opposition to the project in cities like Westmount and Pointe Claire were interpreted through the lens of linguistic conflict. Interestingly, however, Bérubé argues that the linguistic divide did not play a significant role in the way that these affluent suburbs went about crafting a distinct identity. Instead, it was through a combination of wealth, cultural practices, and political values that the three communities emphasized their differences with Montreal.

Bérubé has taken what could have been a somewhat dry topic—the governance of affluent turn-of-the-century suburbs—and crafted an important contribution to the historiography of urban Quebec and Canada. Much of this is owed to Bérubé’s expansive and nuanced approach to the study of governance. Des sociétés distinctes does more than simply outline the political narrative of these three communities. It mines the daily grind of municipal governance to demonstrate how local elites crafted distinct social, political, and geographic space on Montreal’s periphery. The levers of power are placed under the microscope, and Bérubé meticulously demonstrates how bylaws and municipal regulations were crucial factors in this process. Yet these actions did not occur in a vacuum, but in the midst of efforts of more complicated processes of cultural formation.

Des sociétés distinctes makes an important historiographical contribution, with regard to both suburban governance and, more specifically, Montreal itself. Bérubé examines three communities that are pushed to the margins of Montreal’s historical narrative. By doing so, he enriches our understanding of a complex city’s development. In an era where historians of Montreal chart the city’s emergence as an industrial metropolis, distinct yet inextricably linked processes of city building were going on just down the roads out of town. If we understand cities to be the product of the decisions and the strategies adopted by the people who settle in them, then it is absolutely crucial to reflect on the decisions made by a growing number of people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to migrate to the urban periphery.

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Citation: Dan Horner. Review of Bérubé, Harold, Des sociétés distinctes: Gouverner les banlieues bourgeoises de Montréal, 1880-1939. H-Urban, H-Net Reviews. December, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=43739

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