"The will of the people"

“The will of the people” is a political phrase whose meaning is unsettled by the novel’s repeated conflicts over who counts as a people, whose claims receive legal recognition, and who has the power to decide what happens to land. Its sharpest explicit use comes at Lavinia Duke’s dinner table, where a senator invokes popular choice while his own circumstances reveal the exclusions behind his democratic language.

A Democratic Claim and Its Limits

At Lavinia’s dinners, political men and lawyers debate slavery, free soil, and territorial expansion. A senator argues that residents of each state or territory should decide whether slavery is permitted, rather than leaving the question to the government. The language of local decision-making gives the “will of the people” the sound of a general democratic principle; the scene immediately narrows that apparent universality. The senator’s wife owns a cotton plantation with a hundred enslaved people, and he receives income from managing it. He also maintains that the Constitution was made by whites for whites. The phrase therefore serves a political argument whose imagined people are explicitly bounded by race.

The scene’s force comes from the gap between the senator’s appeal to popular choice and the people whose interests his position excludes. The words do not simply describe a neutral process of self-government: their practical meaning depends on who is admitted to the deciding public. The approving response around the dinner table gives the position a social setting as well as a speaker, while Lavinia’s habit of recording dinner conversations in a green-leather-bound book frames political speech as something observed and preserved.

Land, Law, and the Settler Public

The phrase’s underlying problem recurs in the novel’s accounts of settlement and property. Monsieur Trépagny presents the clearing of the forest as both a necessity of human life and a defining purpose of settlement. He defends New France’s river-to-forest land strips as an equitable arrangement, giving settlers farm soil, high ground, and timber. His explanation treats the transformation of the forest as a shared settler project, while leaving the Mi’kmaq’s prior relationship to the land outside the terms of that claimed equity.

That exclusion becomes explicit when Père Crème tells a French official that the Mi’kmaq love their country, which France is taking, and that generations have lived there. The official stresses France’s territorial interests and military needs; Père Crème’s account instead insists on the people who suffer when a country is treated as something a distant power can possess. The disagreement exposes a basic limit of the people’s will when the affected community is not recognized as entitled to determine its own future.

The same conflict appears in the argument over René Sel’s property. After René’s death, Démon Meillard asserts that the land belongs to Renardette because René bequeathed it to her, and dismisses the Sel children’s claim to be René’s children as false. He presents a sale recorded in Captain Bouchard’s ledger as legally conclusive, while calling the competing claimants people with no standing. The episode makes legal record-keeping part of a struggle over recognition: the ledger and the language of a binding sale establish one account of ownership, while the family’s connection to René and the marriage of René and Mari under settler law do not secure their acceptance.

Contested Sovereignty and the Phrase’s Reach

A further contrast appears in the discussion of land transferred between European powers. When Sosep tells Theotiste that the French king has given their lands to the British, Theotiste rejects the premise: the land was not the French king’s to give. Her response challenges the very authority on which the transfer depends. A sovereign’s decision may be described as an act concerning territory, but that description does not make the land his or erase the people already living there.

Read beside these episodes, “the will of the people” is not a stable synonym for consent. The senator’s appeal concerns a white political public; settlement policy treats the forest as land to be improved and divided; and colonial transfers proceed as if Indigenous country were available for European rulers to exchange. The novel places these claims alongside voices that insist on different grounds of belonging, including the Mi’kmaq’s attachment to their country and the Sel family’s claim to its home. The phrase’s significance lies in this disparity: popular sovereignty can be invoked as a democratic ideal even while the boundaries of the public—and the authority to decide over land—remain sharply contested.