George-Etienne Cartier has traditionally been interpreted as primarily a federal politician, as Macdonald's ally in building a united Canada, and as a representative French Canadian. Brian Young downplays ethnic and national political factors and focuses on Cartier's function as spokesman for a specific social group, the Montreal bourgeoisie. The dominant politician in Quebec in the mid-1980s, Cartier directed the transformation of that society's fundamental landholding, legal, business, and educational institutions. Confederation was the political ingredient in the integration of Quebec into Canadian industrial society.

Through the use of new sources, this study gives prominence to Cartier's business, social, and family milieu. It examines his emergence as a corporation lawyer, company director, landlord, and railway promoter as well as his political battles with his in-laws, his disintegrating marriage, and his long liaison with the unorthodox Luce Cuvillier. A rebel and political exile in 1837, Cartier by the 1850s was a member of the militia, a government minister, and a perennial defender of British traditions. His solid conservatism brough him support and rewards from the English-speaking bourgeoisie, the Grand Trunk Railway, and the Seminary of Montreal. After confederation, Cartier's political energies lessened, and his interest turned to his country estate and to pleasures of the table, drawing room, and stable. His degenerative disease and his alienation from his working-class voters in east-end Montreal made him vulnerable to his opponents, and his life ended in political defeat and implication in the Pacific scandal. His career, Young concludes, illustrates the development of bourgeois hegemony in Montreal after 1840 and the progressive integration of institutional, political, and economic structures to preserve that power.