Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France by Bronwen McShea, and: Les Récollets en Nouvelle-France. Traces et mémoire ed. by Paul-André Dubois (review)

As their titles suggest, Les Récollets en Nouvelle-France and Apostles of Empire closely examine, respectively, the first religious order to arrive in the St. Lawrence Valley and the one that has long epitomized the evangelizing mission. While each approaches its subject from a different angle, both reflect and contribute to the growing tendency to situate the history of New France in broader geographical and contextual frameworks. They are complementary in their consideration of the long history of each order and in the more nuanced, complex portrait that emerges.

The main historiographical contribution of each work is distinct. McShea explores the "forgotten imperial history of the Jesuit mission to New France" (xvi), challenging the tendency to see the Jesuits as other worldly, concerned with a purely spiritual mission in opposition to French imperial ambitions. "Enthusiastic, enterprising empire-builders for the Bourbon state," the Jesuits were "knee-deep in an untidy world of politics, social pressures, and war" (xvi, xxvii). This perspective departs from recent Jesuit historiography, which has adopted a global, comparative framework to trace influences and identify a Jesuit approach to missionizing across regions. While McShea does not deny the role of affiliation to Rome or a broader Jesuit identity, she argues that some French Jesuits were tied more closely to political and social elites in Paris than to fellow members of the order in distant places. The book also contributes to a recent early modern literature that examines the entanglement of religion and empire. In McShea's view, the national and the imperial, which have been minimized by the transnational turn, are essential to understanding early missionizing experiences.

Early Canadian scholars are probably not surprised to hear that the Jesuits contributed to empire building, as their role in encouraging trade and military alliances with Indigenous nations is well known. One of the strengths of the book's approach, however, is to delineate a Jesuit vision of empire in New France, characterized by "Catholic worship, trade, self-policing, French-cum-indigenous civilité and sociabilité, and military service to the state" (261). Although this vision did not always overlap with that of the Crown and its colonial representatives, the consequence was not, McShea argues, wholesale Jesuit rejection of the imperial project; on the contrary, the Jesuits remained hopeful that their vision would be eventually realized. The book is thus part of a nascent literature that acknowledges multiple imperial agendas within France and expands "agents of empire" beyond colonial and imperial administrators.

Apostles of Empire charts the evolution in Jesuit approaches to missionizing in New France, their vision of empire, and their relationship to metropolitan and colonial authorities and elites. Part 1, "Foundations and the Era of the Parisian Relations," focuses on the period from the 1610s to the 1660s; part 2, "A Longue Durée of War and Metropolitan Neglect," examines the lesser studied later period of the Jesuit mission after the Relations ceased publication in 1673. The first four chapters trace the networks of social and political elites with which the Jesuits were affiliated and their impact on the order's evolving definitions of "Frenchness" and their social missions to the Wendat and Innu. Far from merely a way to raise funds for the missions, the Relations were part of a wider publishing effort to support Cardinal Richelieu's military and political objectives and, later, were used to galvanize Louis xiv into declaring a crusade against the Iroquois (94). Addressing many of the same themes as part 1, part 2 highlights changes in Jesuit approaches and the priorities of the Crown and metropolitan elites over the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Jesuits "acculturated Catholicism to the warrior ethos of the Iroquois" and increasingly differentiated between...