Éditer la Nouvelle-France by Andreas Motsch, and Grégoire Holtz (review)

Historians of pre-1760 Canada quote excerpts from such writers as Samuel de Champlain, Gabriel Sagard, Pierre-Esprit Radisson, or Joseph-François Lafitau as evidence to support a particular interpretation of the past. These writers were witnesses to some of the events they describe and that fact gives them authority. Historians are aware that partisanship, such as that created by the Franciscan-Jesuit rivalry, or the self-promotion of Jean-Louis Hennepin and Louis-Armand de Lahontan led to distortions and invented discoveries. Plagiarism, hearsay information, and invented dialogues with Amerindians — such as those in Chrestien Le Clercq’s book Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie — are common features of these early accounts. Human History and Natural History had not yet been separated from one another and so all that was curious and strange in North America’s plants and animals was reported along with observations on the customs and costumes of the native peoples. Even the father of critical, scholarly history in Canada, Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, did not fully escape these currents. Awareness of these shared traits and of individual peculiarities is the extent of the caution exercised by historians. There is one more area about which we historians know little.

That subject is the effect of contemporary literary fashions. Éditer la Nouvelle-France is a collection of essays about the problems of understanding, evaluating, editing, and presenting early narratives about New France. The collection grew out of a 2008 conference on the problems of editing. This book advances our appreciation of the contextual influences, especially the literary fashions of seventeenth-century France, which shaped published and unpublished accounts of the North American colony. Stylistic conventions determined the form of travel narratives which, sometimes, were presented as a series of private letters (the epistolary format).

In the first essay, Normand Doiron explores Sieur de Dièreville’s Relation du Voyage du Port Royal (1708), which alternates between poetry and prose. The poetic form allowed Dièreville to exaggerate and to dramatize his observations. Doiron also considers the claim that there was an entirely-poetic and lost version of the Relation. Robert Melançon asks if first-hand accounts of Canada’s aboriginal peoples, like those of Father Paul Le Jeune and Joseph-François Lafitau, can be treated as a branch of literature. The answer is “yes” because the presentation of details in Lafitau’s Moeurs des Sauvages (1724) was determined by literary conventions and even Le Jeune’s 1634 account, which was not as extensively revised, employs rhetoric and drama to enliven the report.

Georges Tissot develops the analysis of Lafitau’s book by focusing on its account of aboriginal religious beliefs. The French Enlightenment’s impact is most evident in Lafitau’s search for traces of a universal faith and recognition of a divinity — beliefs once held to be inherent to all mankind. Lafitau, like others of his generation, believed that this natural religion had once existed among Canada’s native peoples, but had been corrupted.

Jean-Claude Laborie’s historical essay, “Du Tupi au Huron,” argues that the published accounts of the Jesuit missions in Brazil allowed this order to develop a model for the evangelization of “primitive barbarians.” Missionaries in Canada and Brazil concluded that Christian Indians should be isolated from European settlements. This segregation policy conflicted with the desire of the colonies’ royal governments to merge European colonists and aboriginal peoples. The Society of Jesus was able to create distinct mission communities because it was financially independent of the Crown, unlike other religious orders.

Vincent Masse deals with varying accounts of seven “hommes sauvages” from the Americas who were brought to Rouen in 1509. These reports are compared with the perception of Amerindians who arrived in Lisbon in 1501. He then traces the modifications in the story of the natives who came to Rouen as subsequent authors repeated the tale and modern scholars interpreted the details. The result is a brilliant illustration...