After the American War of Independence, reverberations of the French Revolution (1789) were felt in Canada. The British initially supported a revolution that occurred a century after their own of 1688. Opposition to tyranny can be found in Henri Mézière's La Bastille septentrionale (1792). Backed by the Catholic Church and Bishop Plessis, the British position changed with the Reign of Terror of 1793: Louis XVI's beheading with Mr. Guillotin's new machine generated a powerful counter-revolutionary movement in the colony. American Independence and the French Revolution forced London to grant its colony a Constitution in which strong imperial control, exercised through the governor, the executive council and the legislative council, was offset by an elected legislative assembly. Joseph Papineau, Pierre-Louis Panet and Thomas McCord, Sarah Solomon's husband, were among the first elected members of the newly established Assembly. Parliamentary life, the expansion of printing and newspapers such as the Gazette de Québec, the Quebec Mercury and Le Canadien generated public opinion and debates often encouraged by judge Pierre-Amable de Bonne. Joseph Quesnel is a witness to this period through his play, Anglomanie, performed in 1807. Political pratices are ridiculed in Louis Dulongpré's satirical cartoons. Parliamentary democracy was associated with the rise of the Francophone members of the professions who, through professional, political or family connections, developed new forms of sociability. The inside of bourgeois homes was oriented towards such activities as reading, card games, water-colouring, drawing or holding salons, such as Amélie Panet Berczy, which extended beyond family circles.
