cultivateur

Cultivateur is someone who cultivates the land or runs a farm, a woman being a cultivatrice. It appears in French civil records and in Quebec parish registers as the occupation of fathers, grooms and the dead.

In France the word took the place of laboureur during the 1800s, and a study of peasants in western France found no cultivateurs at all in tax rolls or registers from before the Revolution. In French Canada the older word habitant meant much the same. Neither word tells you whether the man owned or rented his farm, or how large it was; land and notarial records are where to find that.