Catholic Church and to that Church the conquered habitant has since clung with a tenacity really heroic.  He accepts its creed, he believes in its clergy.  Whatever license of conduct marked the clergy of France in the bad days before the Revolution, the clergy in Canada during the 300 years of its history have been notable for a severity in morals so austere that hardly once in that long period has there been a whisper of scandal.  In consequence, they have always retained the respect of the people and to-day, in every village, the cure commands extraordinary influence.

It may be that to the Church chiefly does the habitant owe the preservation of his identity.  Inferior to the heretic conqueror in social status, the habitant yet retained in religion the sense of his own superiority.  Was he not a member of an ancient body, in the presence of which Protestantism represented a mushroom growth of yesterday?  The Church taught him that wealth, honour, and worldly power were not always given to the faithful; they had the truer riches of spiritual privileges and spiritual hopes.  What mattered the pride of life in the face of these eternal treasures?  So the habitant went his way.  Led by his teachers he showed striking tenacity of character.  He would not follow the customs of the English.  He looked with suspicion upon their methods.  Even in agriculture, where he had everything to learn, he would not imitate him.  Their language he would not learn, their religion he abhorred; so he remained, and he remains still, true to his own traditions, a Gallic island in the vast Anglo-Saxon sea of North America.

The habitant has not proved a pliable person.  The very name shows his sense of his own dignity.  Though he held his land under feudal tenure he would not accept a designation that carried with it some sense of the servile status of the feudal vassal in old France.  So the Canadian peasant, a feudal tenant en censive or en roture, yet wished not to be called censitaire or roturier, names which he thought degrading; he preferred to be called a habitant, an inhabitant of the country, a free man, not a vassal.  The designation obtained official recognition in New France and has come to be the characteristic word for the French Canadian farmer among English-speaking people.

In other respects too the Canadian has been hardly less assertive.  Earlier writers, while they call him obliging, honest and courteous, speak also of his self-conceit, boastfulness, fondness for drink.  At Malbaie Nairne found him defiant when his spirit was aroused.  Not less tenacious than the men were the women.  Malcolm Fraser tells how when he was stationed at Beaumont, near Quebec, in January, 1761, he sent one of his men to cut wood on the property of a certain habitant, the man himself consenting.  But Madame, his wife, was not pleased.  She abused Fraser, called him opprobrious names, and, in a war of words, remained, he admits, mistress of the field.  The wrathful virago carried her appeal to Murray in Quebec, who, she said, had passed many officers under the rod and Fraser found himself called upon to explain the matter.  In a petition he humbly begs that some “recompence” (of punishment of course) may be made to the woman for “the insolent expressions used by her as well against the general, as the officers, who have the honour to serve under His Excellency.”