Writing a New France, 1604-1632: Empire and Early Modern French Identity (review)

Many early Americanists have read excerpts from the Jesuit Relations, the series of reports from missionaries in New France published in Paris from 1632 to 1673. The product of the herculean effort of Reuben Gold Thwaites and colleagues to translate the Relations, along with "Allied Documents" from missionaries in Illinois and other colonies and from after 1673, is now available online, and anthologies such as Allan Greer's make the texts even more accessible for classroom use. But few anglophone scholars are aware of the intellectual and religious issues in New France prior to the Jesuit Relations, or of the writings of the first Jesuit to come to Canada, Pierre Biard, who voyaged to Acadia in 1611-13.

Biard promoted in his writings "New France, this new land, first discovered in the last century by our countryman, a twin land to ours, subject to the same influences, lying in the same latitude, and having the same climate" (Brazeau 4-5, qtng. from Thwaites). Brian Brazeau's book analyzes the idea of New France as a reflection of European France, of the colony as a twin, a mirror, or a reexamination of the metropole. In the early seventeenth century the wars of religion in France had subsided, and colonial writers such as Biard and Marc Lescarbot sought to promote the colony in Canada as a chance to remake France or to return to its glorious origins.

In 1606-07 Lescarbot sailed to Port Royal in what is now Nova Scotia with the Sieur de Poutrincourt, an ally of Henri IV and like him a former Protestant. Lescarbot was a lawyer, a humanist historian, and a poet, and though he lived in America for less than a year, when he returned to Old France he wrote a six-volume Histoire de la Nouvelle France, which included redactions of previous exploration texts by Verazzano, Cartier, Laudonnière, Champlain, and others. In a chapter titled "Nos Ancêtres les Américains" Brazeau shows how the sixth volume, an ethnography of the local native people, the Armichiquiou, presents Lescarbot's theory that the indigenous Americans were descended not from Ham nor from a lost tribe of Isreal, but directly from Noah: "Noah, patriarch of the Amerindian, is revealed as not only the biblical father of humanity but also specifically as the progenitor of the Gauls. The French and the Amerindians share a common ancestor" (89). Drawing on a 2001 book about European theories of the origins of the American Indians by Giuliano Gliozzi, Brazeau explains the ideology behind Lescarbot's theory. The Amerindians preserved some of the primitive virtues of the Gauls, and the French should be inspired to recapture the valor of the medieval Crusades, and to "Christianise the peoples of the West, who of their own will give us their lands" (qtd. 73).

Brazeau argues that in spite of a resistance among the French landed aristocracy (the noblesse d'épée) to engaging in commercial activity, and in spite of tensions between Protestants and Catholics, the ideologists of French colonization formulated a coherent appeal to the crown. Brazeau emphasizes the work of Antoine de Montchrétien, who appealed to the king: "vous pouvez planter et provigner de nouvelles Frances" ("you can plant and spread [or 'layer'] New Frances") (112). The root "vigne" in that line becomes significant as well, for Brazeau shows how Lescarbot and Champlain (and one could add Cartier, although his writings are not analyzed in the book) emphasized that Canada, as Biard had noted, was at the same latitude as France and that grapes were found growing there. For Champlain "the presence of grapevines is a condition for the habitability of any area" (31), but the significance of grapes goes beyond the role of wine in French identity, which "was nebulous at the time" (29): "Without the work of man, vines are simply a common plant. Wine is thus a victory over nature. The place of the wine producer is...