The Parti rouge (alternatively known as the parti democratique) was formed in what is now Quebec, Canada, around 1848 by radical French-Canadians inspired by the ideas of Louis-Joseph Papineau, the Institut canadien de Montréal, and the Patriotes Movement of the 1830s.
The party was a successor to the Parti patriote. The radical reformist rouges did not believe that the 1840 Act of Union had truly granted a responsible government to former Upper and Lower Canada. They advocated important democratic reforms, republicanism, separation of the state and the church. They were perceived as anti-clerical. Some of its members desired the abolition of the semi-feudal seigneurial system of land ownership, although Papineau was himself a seigneur and a vocal defender of the traditional system.
They opposed the union of Upper Canada and Lower Canada into the United Province of Canada, and demanded its termination. When talks for Canadian confederation began, its members either opposed the idea, or suggested a decentralized confederation. They were opposed to the ultramontane politics of the Catholic clergy of Quebec and the Parti bleu.
For a short period, the elected rouges allied with the Clear Grits in the legislature of the united province of Canada. The coalition government it produced quickly collapsed. After the failure of most of the party's political actions, its more moderate members joined the Liberal Party of Canada or the Parti libéral du Québec.
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