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What happened to the seigneurial system after 1854? The seigneury remained a source of revenue and the seigneur, a person or organization deriving income from the land, as the Act for the abolition of feudal rights and duties in Lower Canada converted the cens et rentes into constituted rents, which led to the financialization of the seigneury. This is all the more obvious in the seigneury of Beauharnois, a valuable seigneury whose last two owners were financial institutions, namely The Montreal Investment Association and The Montreal Investment Trust. Assuming that most of the "censitaires" or tenants would not redeem the capital of their rents in order to commute the tenure of their holdings into freehold, these companies were able to obtain substantial revenue from their seigneury until 1940, when the Quebec government definitively put an end to the constituted rents. Paradoxically, in Beauharnois this revenue was even greater after the abolition of the seigneurial system than it was before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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