| Summary: | Between 1840 and the end of the 1850s, the French-Canadian elite dominating the political landscape was calling for "reformism". Besides belonging to the same generation, the members of this elite shared several features: they had accepted the Union, campaigned for responsible government and opposed annexation to the United States. This thesis aims to put forward some of the main ideas of this elite, and thereby of the reformist period. In the historiography of Canada and Quebec, the reformists are generally portrayed as founders, be it of a nation, a political regime or a bourgeois social order. To avoid teleological pitfalls, this thesis attempts to bring back, in context, the flavour of the thought of a particular time. === Reformist thinking was reconstituted from three kinds of sources: the reconstruction of debates in the legislative assembly, the French-Canadian "ministerial press" of the mid-nineteenth century, and the many reformist writings left by the figures under study, including government reports, personal diaries, public discussions and two novels. Attentive study of these sources reveals five main axes of thought, revolving around the time, politics, the economy, the social fabric and religious concerns. A chapter is devoted to each of these themes. === I argue that reformist thought has its own consistency, that is to say that it is distinct from the reactionary ultramontanism of Mgr Bourget and from the doctrinaire liberalism of "les rouges" and the "Institut canadien". It seeks to show that the reformists believed in the virtues of progress, of responsible government and of the free market, but that at the same time they were anxious about the future of their nationality. Their constant concern for the unity of their nationality and their will to establish, with the clergy, a more rigorous morality, able to "make people better", bears witness to this uneasiness about the future and a concern for preservation which typifies the conservative.
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