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The Canadian Historical Review 86.1 (2005) 114-117



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Histoire de l'Amérique française. Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal. Paris: Flammarion, 2003. Pp. 560, €25.00

This overview of the history of 'New France,' in the broad sense encompassing all of North America (though not the West Indies) settled or otherwise, dominated by the French from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth, is a welcome and long-overdue contribution to the field. Not since the works of W.J. Eccles, published more than thirty years ago, has there been such a comprehensive survey of French North America, and not since Emile Salone's La colonisation de la Nouvelle-France (1906) has there been a book written by French historians for the benefit of French readers to remind them of their long-forgotten ancien régime empire. Part of a venerable tradition of New France interpreters, Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal are also innovators, updating this colonial saga in light of current research in the field (though it must be said that their use of the English-language literature is rather spotty, with curious omissions) and reframing it in interesting ways.

Readers of this journal may be struck with how fully the authors have succeeded in de-Canadianizing the history of New France. Havard, whose previous work focused on French and Natives, especially in the [End Page 114] pays d'en haut, and Vidal, an 'Upper Louisiana' specialist, give ample coverage to the plantations and trade networks of the Mississippi and the military-diplomatic webs that Natives and French wove in the Great Lakes region. Their book is a refreshing antidote to the pronounced tendency in previous syntheses to focus on the St Lawrence settlements and to treat Louisiana and the western interior as appendages. This narrative rebalancing allows the authors to delve much more deeply into topics such as slavery. For me, the chapters on slaves and slave-owners in Louisiana and the Illinois country were the highlights of the book; drawing on records of the superior council, the authors draw a series of vignettes conveying, through concrete examples, a sense of the complexity of ancien régime slavery in all its brutality, as well as its compromises and openings. I do think the analysis would have been stronger had they made fuller use of the literature on slavery in other American empires (for example, the works of Robin Blackburn, Philip Morgan, Herbert Klein, Stuart Schwartz) to contextualize French slavery, but their portrait of the institution remains vivid and compelling.

There are gains in shifting the balance of attention in favour of the Mississippi Valley, but inevitably there are some losses as well. Havard and Vidal give short shrift to several aspects of life in French-régime Canada, notably the Catholic church as an institution and religion as a cultural fact. As eighteenth-century colonies, Louisiana (and Ile Royale) had a more secular tone than Canada, a product of the Catholic Reformation of the seventeenth century. The religious encounter between Iroquoians, Algonquians, and French is a particularly salient feature of the history of New France, one that generated unusually rich source material that, in turn, supported a considerable body of scholarly work. But the Histoire de l'Amérique française gives the topic a brief and superficial treatment (226-8), one seemingly untouched by recent work in the field.

Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal set out to change our perspective on New France in a different way. Like others in the larger field of colonial/imperial history, they aimed to give equal prominence to the colonized and the colonizers. Whereas earlier generations of historians saw New France essentially as a French enterprise, these authors see it as the joint creation of Natives, Europeans, and Africans. France dominated a large portion of North America mainly through 'une alliance interculturelle entre Français et Amérindiens,' and so 'French' America can be understood only 'à condition de refuser la seule perspective métropolitaine' (12). In problematizing the concept of 'empire' in this way, they announce their...

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