Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture

Chapter 3. Relating the New World Back to France: The Development of a New Genre, the Relations de Voyage

75 c h a p t e r 3 relating the new World Back to France The development of a new Genre, the Relations de Voyage The Popular Success of the Relations de Voyage Because colonization has been excluded from the paradigm of France’s cultural self-understanding, one might reasonably conclude that the seventeenthcentury French reading public was kept in the dark about its own policy of assimilation. logically speaking, the nation’s colonial contact with sauvages in the new World could have been kept entirely secret because it took place on the far side of the atlantic. after all, as Marc lescarbot put it in his 1609 Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, the two nations were “separated . . . by a sea so wide that men have apparently never had either the ability or the daring to cross it to discover new lands until these last centuries.”1 Given this distance, one might assume that the sauvage was consigned to the margins of French thought. But in fact quite the opposite occurred. The French church and state aggressively diffused information about the nation’s colonial contact with the new World, eager to make the reading public aware of what was happening in remote lands.2 The relations de voyage were pivotal texts in bringing the new World sauvage into the French reading public’s imagination. This chapter examines the relation de voyage as a genre, emphasizing its relational goal of bringing news about the colonial encounter back home to the motherland. in showing how the French reading public was aware of the nation’s colonial endeavors, the chapter grounds this book’s overarching argument that the nation’s colonial france’s colonial relation to the new world 76 discourse was finely interwoven with its cultural debates, and helped shape France’s emerging cultural self-understanding. Moreover, this chapter helps ground my claim that the new World constituted an important pole in opposition to the ancient World. The relations de voyage were relational, in the religious sense of religare, with a latin root meaning to fasten or tie together.3 a relation can be a report about events as disparate as wars, theatrical productions, or conversations. But Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel (1690) defined the relation primarily as travel reports.4 Furetière observed that more than thirteen hundred relations about travel were in print by the late seventeenth century.5 Hundreds described the new World, although the bulk of them were devoted to other parts of the world. While many writers entitled their travel reports relations, others simply called them “histories” or “voyages,” as in the history of a mission or of a voyage.6 France’s relations de voyage were expressly designed to capture the reading public’s imagination and became widely diffused among the cultivated elite. The relations offered a developed narrative style, with detailed portraits of the native americans’ psychology and sociocultural customs. These reports often sketched scenes that read like a novel, with human interest stories that gave a human face to the other, alive with dialogue, character development, and action. The story about the Frenchman who pursued a native american woman in marriage that i mentioned in the introductory chapter exemplifies one of the most sophisticated narratives. The readability of the French relation differentiated it from its counterparts in england, Spain, and Holland, which were not generally written for a wide, general public. Thus, several centuries later when Thoreau wanted to read about life in the wilderness, he turned to France’s Jesuit Relations rather than to the relations of his own British tradition , as Gordon Sayre has noted.7 The British travel accounts were written in a dry, factual, list-like reporting style, focusing on information about the land, geography, and agricultural resources. The Spanish accounts were written for administrators and were narrowly focused on technical issues of management and resources. The French relations succeeded in reaching a wide audience. They took France’s reading public by storm, becoming more popular than novels, according to Jean Chapelain, a member of the French academy, who had observed that travel accounts held the French imagination captive and were all the rage. in 1663, he noted: “our nation has changed its reading tastes and instead of novels which have fallen out of favor with la Calprenède, travel narratives relating the new World Back to France 77 have become so prized that they are now...