Mythe et reflet de la France: l’image du Canada en France, 1850–1914 by Sylvain Simard (review)

HUMANITIES 191 l'iconographie (photos, dessins, gravures) est etonnante, une image valant parfois un chapitre entier. Viennent enfin s'y ajouter un tres utile 'Index detaille des productions de la N. c.T. de 1964a1988' et un 'Index des titres de pieces cites.' En somme, un precieux volume pour Ie critiquehistorien , comme aussi pour l'etudiant-amateur, Ie fanatique et Ie professionnel de la scene. (L.E. DOUCETTE) Sylvain Simard. Mythe et reflet de la France: ['image du Canada en France, 1850-1914 Les Presses de I'Universite d'Ottawa 1987. Cahiers du CRCCF 25· 440 • $34.95 Its subtitle, rather than its title, describes the content of this important doctoral thesis (Bordeaux III, 1975), now published a dozen years later with little revision. The delay may be attributable to the appearance in 1975 of Armand .Yon's Le Canada franfais vu de France (1830-1914), a shorter study covering some of the same material. Simard's corpus is extensive: more than seven hundred volumes belonging to a wide variety of categories (travel, fiction, history, religion, politics, economics, geography, emigration and colonization, language, and literary criticism). His method is analytical and quantitative, most of the statistical analyses being based on a core listing of a hundred books. The first chapter provides a minute socio-economic profile of the authors studied ('Qui sont-ils?'), the image they present ('Que disentils ?'), and the readers they address ('Pour quels lecteurs?'). This is one of the more original sections of the book, most such surveys having no comparable methodological preoccupation. The second chapter proposes a typology based on 131 travel narratives, together with a thematic study of the three principal destinations (Quebec City, Montreal, and Niagara Falls) and the chief exotic attraction, the Indian population. The third chapter treats two topics: Canada in French fiction of the period, and the fortune of nineteenth-century French-Canadianliterature in France. The first section conveniently brings together information about some thirty French novels set wholly or partly in Canada, and stresses the importance of such fiction in disseminating a certain image of Canada to a wide public. The second section is less satisfactory, as it seems to have been written without reference to earlier studies of the same subject. A preliminary bibliography of the question appeared in the Canadian Review ofComparative Literature, 6:2 (Spring 1979) and Pierre Hebert has recently reviewed the evidence in an article in Voix et images, 32 (Winter 1986). The lack of updating of the bibliography is apparent: there is no reference to studies by Bruno-Andre Lahalle (1979) and Paulette Collet (1984), or to the 1981 Universite de Montreal colloquium 'Lectures europeennes de la litterature quebecoise.' 192 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 A short fourth chapter summarizes the contribution to a Canadian image made by immigration pamphlets, popular descriptions of Canada, or specialized studies of its politics, society, religious life, history, and geography. The fifth chapter and a brief conclusion recapitulate positive and negative features of the profile of Canada, and stress its unchanging character: 'l'image du Canada transmise dans la plupart des ouvrages et des articles parus en France evolue ... peu. Du milieu du siecle a la Grande Guerre, la perception des aspects majeurs de la vie canadienne et la fa~on meme des voyageurs de presenter Ie pays restent quasi inchanges.' The last quarter of the book is given over to an impressive bibliography, in which books are arranged under a dozen subject headings and articles are listed under the titles ofapproximately a hundred periodicals in which they appear. The reader is thus confronted with more than a hundred pages ofbibliography, fragmented under more than a hundred headings, and not indexed in any way. The book's final index of proper names is similarly limited in its usefulness: it does not include either the massive bibliography or the numerous endnotes to chapters. Despite some shortcomings, Simard's study, recently awarded the Prix France-Quebec Jean Hamelin, is a useful synthesis of its subject, and its analyses of the major books and articles concerned are penetrating and judicious. The author's statistical approach introduces a new precision into inquiries about national images, and his attention to ideological presuppositions gives rise...