Joseph-Édouard Cauchon, (December 31, 1816 – February 23, 1885) was a prominent Quebec politician in the middle years of the nineteenth-century. Although he held a variety of portfolios at the federal, provincial and municipal levels, he never achieved his goal of becoming the Premier of Quebec. Born to a well-established family of seigneurs, Cauchon received a classical education at the Petit Séminaire of Quebec from 1830 to 1839, and subsequently studied law. He was called to the Quebec bar in 1843, but never practised. Instead he turned to journalism, working for Le Canadien from 1841 to 1842, and launching his own Le Journal de Québec in December of the latter year. This paper was known for its sharp political wit and generally supported Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine's French Canadian Reformers during its early years. In 1841, he published an elementary treatise of physics entitled Notions élémentaires de physique, avec planches à l'usage des maisons d'éducation. Cauchon himself entered political life in 1844, winning election for the riding of Montmorency in the Province of Canada's legislature. He defeated a Mr. Taschereau by 475 votes to 147, and sat with Lafontaine's French Canadian group on the opposition benches for the next three years. Lafontaine's party won a major victory in 1847, and Cauchon was re-elected by acclamation. He did not, however, join the cabinet of Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin. Cauchon supported the union of Canada East and Canada West as a guarantor of rights for both regions and sought to have the bilingual Augustin-Norbert Morin elected as speaker of the provincial legislature. When Francis Hincks replaced Lafontaine as Premier in 1851, Cauchon's position was one of ambivalence. He opposed Hincks's alliance with the Clear Grit faction (which he described as "socialist and anticatholic"), and turned down Hincks's offer to become assistant Provincial Secretary. While he did not abandon the Reform cause entirely, his newspapers's criticisms of the Hincks government weakened the ministry's position in Quebec. Cauchon was himself re-elected in 1851 and 1854, defeating one Mr. Glackemeyer by 883 votes to 529 on the latter occasion. His political position in 1854 was ambiguous, and he held some hopes of replacing Hincks as a coalitionist Premier when the overall results proved inconclusive. He abandoned this plan, however, to support the alliance of Allan Napier McNab's Conservatives with the French Canadian bloc (then led by Morin) and a part of Hincks's Reform group. In the year