The council, though officially established in 1663 by King Louis XIV of France, was not created from whole cloth, but rather evolved from earlier governing bodies.
[5] The creation of the Sovereign Council was part of a broader effort to reform the administration of New France by Louis XIV and his finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert.
The King and Colbert felt that New France's administration had been badly mismanaged by charter companies and that the colony should be brought under tighter monarchal control.
[9] More than just a judicial body, however, the Sovereign Council made lasting achievements in agriculture, commerce, the maintenance of public order, and sanitation.
It dictated when certain types of commercial interactions could occur, and public markets in Québec City, Montréal and Trois Rivières were only established under the Sovereign Council's auspices.
In an effort to protect the peasant's most valuable commodity, the cow, a 1686 ordinance enforced Louis XIV's edict that creditors could not seize cattle for debts until the year 1692.
[13] Similarly, after complaints were made that merchant monopolies were storing surpluses of wheat and preventing its circulation on the market in 1701, the Sovereign Council ordered a committee to inspect Quebec's granaries.
For example, the Sovereign Council allowed seigneurs to extract undue feudal tithes from peasants, which ran contrary to the Coutume de Paris until Louis XIV intervened and abolished the practice in 1717.
[16] Reflecting colonial society's emphasis on righteousness and morality, the Sovereign Council mandated that every tavern-keeper provide sufficient proof of his virtuous character in order to obtain a business licence.
One of its greater successes was actually enforcing an ordinance mandating that inhabitants in Quebec's Lower Town clear the area in front of their homes, until a seasonal worker with a horse and cart was eventually introduced.
Cahall notes that drilling wells was likely not a priority because no epidemics arose as a result of inhabitants drinking contaminated water under the entirety of the Sovereign Council's administration from 1663 to 1760.
[22] There was some hope in a more favourable outcome, as the attorney general who sat on the Council was the only official in New France required having formal university legal training.
[26] Concentration of prosecuted crimes was mainly around urban settings, notwithstanding the fact that towns represented only an average of 20% of New France's population.
Bishop François de Laval had called for an outright prohibition on the sale of alcohol to Indigenous Peoples in the early 1660s, and conflict between the Church and Jesuits on one hand and the Governor on the other is argued to have contributed to the establishment of the Council.
[30] The Council eventually agreed with the Bishop's demands, but with a fine as opposed to a harsher punishment for conviction initially, but the issue would remain open.