The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701: French-Native Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century by Gilles Havard (review)

392 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 hold on this occasion.= Earlier in the play, a more despondent Manoa had cast doubt on Samson=s earlier achievements, noting that >Israel still serves with all her Sons.= Samson had then earnestly defended himself: That fault I take not on me, but transfer To Israel=s Governors, and Head of Tribes, Who seeing those great acts which God had done Singly by me against their Conquerors Acknowledg=d not, or not at all consider=d Deliverance offer=d. Samson insists that freedom is possible for those who have the courage to take it. Those who decline God=s offer have no one to blame but themselves. The fact that Manoa comes round to Samson=s view suggests that there is something to be said for the view. It is hard to resist the parallel with England after the Civil War. Wood in his final chapter, >Milton and Politics in Old Age,= argues that Milton turned his back on violence as an answer to political problems. But these two passages B never mentioned by Wood B suggest that Milton blamed England=s backsliders, not her revolutionaries. (JOHN LEONARD) Gilles Havard. The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701: French-Native Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century. Translated by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott) McGill-Queen=s University Press. xvi, 308. $24.95 This book is a translation of a memorable Laval University MA thesis first published in French in 1992. Revised for the occasion, the English version arrived in time for the tercentenary celebrations held in Montreal. In 1701, after protracted negotiations, the French, the Iroquois, and some three dozen nations in the French alliance, mostly from the Great Lakes region, concluded a general and lasting peace. Although it did not quell all the conflicts in the area, the treaty did mark the beginning of Iroquois neutrality and the end of decades of intermittent warfare between the Five Nations and the Franco-Native coalition. In the event, New Yorkers would also be spared French and Native raids during the War of the Spanish Succession, which the Treaty of Utrecht brought to a close in 1713. Historians have not exactly ignored the 1701 agreement, either in the eighteenth century B Charlevoix, in his influential Histoire et description générale de la NouvelleFrance of 1744, included a lengthy summary of Bacqueville de la Potherie=s contemporary account of the negotiations B or in recent studies of colonial or Native history. But as Gilles Havard points out, for a long time, an imperial chronology made Utrecht the only Great Peace of the period. humanities 393 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Reminding us of the importance of the 1701 accord is, of course, to urge us to focus more on events taking place in the North American interior, then inhabited largely by Native people. The book=s main purpose is precisely that: to write Aboriginal players into this episode of colonial diplomatic history, >[to pay] attention to the strategies of all the actors,= as the author puts it. To this end, Havard presents the Great Peace both as a process and an event, using ethnohistorical techniques throughout to combat the Eurocentrism of the documentary sources (principally the French official correspondence and Bacqueville). The drama unfolds logically, the suspense only increased by pauses for ethnographic description or comments on scholarly debates. Three chapters set the scene, presenting the Amerindian art of diplomacy, the region=s troubled history in the seventeenth century, and the strategies of the various parties to the negotiations. A further three chapters follow developments from 1697, when Iroquois peace initiatives gained momentum, down to the eve of the final talks and signing of 1701. The book=s longest chapter is devoted to the analysis of the events of that summer, when some thirteen hundred Native people converged on Montreal, braving an epidemic in order to participate in the peace ceremony. The final chapters discuss various issues raised by the agreement or at least by historians, including the exchange of prisoners and access to hunting territories, as well as aspects of the...