by Conrad Black
Marie de l’Incarnation (1599–1672) and some Ursuline sisters arrived in 1639 to build and staff a convent and provide for the education of the girls of the colony, including Indians. Richelieu’s niece, the Duchesse d’Aiguillon, sent three Augustinian sisters, who founded the Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, a hospital which has been in continuous operation in Quebec City ever since. The bishop and theologian Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet called Marie de l’Incarnation the Saint Teresa of New France. Jeanne Mance (1606–1673) was the founder of nursing services in Montreal, and worked closely with Marie de l’Incarnation, and with Marguerite Bourgeoys (1620–1700), founder of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, who arrived in Montreal in 1653. (Marie de l’Incarnation was beatified in 1980, and Marguerite Bourgeoys was canonized in 1982, both by Pope John Paul II.)
The governor replacing Champlain was Charles Jacques Huault de Montmagny, who had an extensive military background on the fringes of civilization. He was a veteran of the Turkish Wars, and like John Smith in Virginia, he saw the North American Indian in the same light as primitive outlaws to advanced Christian civilization. His appointment did not augur well for New France’s relations with the Indians that Champlain had gone to such lengths to placate. By 1641, the depredations of the Iroquois were causing serious inroads in the free movement of furs into and along the Great Lakes and down the St. Lawrence. Richelieu himself sent funds for the construction of a fort where the Richelieu River flowed into the St. Lawrence, as the Iroquois attacked ever more aggressively, apparently targeting the Huron but also the French. Undeterred by this challenge, France sent Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, a straightforward soldier, to enact Champlain’s plan for a fort at what is now Montreal. He was accompanied by Jérôme Le Royer de La Dauversière, a wealthy and pious man of commerce, and by the Abbé Jean-Jacques Olier de Verneuil, who founded the Sulpician Seminary, and by Jeanne Mance, who for twenty years was, with Maisonneuve, Marie de l’Incarnation, and Marguerite Bourgeoys, the guiding inspiration of Montreal, which for most of that time was severely endangered by the Iroquois. These were people of immense courage and virtue; few cities can have had such exemplary founders.
Cardinal Richelieu died on December 4, 1642, aged fifty-seven, after eighteen years as first minister and twenty-one years as the leading counsellor to Louis XIII, who died five months later, in May 1643, aged forty-two. The two men had greatly strengthened the French state internally and opposite other European powers. Pope Urban VIII commented that “if there is a God, Cardinal Richelieu will have much to answer for. If not, then he was a great man.” He is rivalled only by Bismarck, and possibly de Gaulle, as the greatest statesman in the history of the nations of continental Europe. France remained the greatest power in Europe until the end of the Napoleonic Wars, two hundred years after Richelieu first rose to prominence by dismissing the Estates General. Richelieu was succeeded by his selected disciple, the Italian (but well-acculturated to France) Jules Cardinal Mazarin. Louis XIII was succeeded by his infant son Louis XIV, only five, who would rule for seventy-two years, and in his own right, from 1661 to 1715.
In 1648, the Thirty Years War finally concluded with the Treaty of Westphalia, which Richelieu had largely drafted and left for Mazarin, and which splintered Germany into three hundred principalities and states. This weakening of the Holy Roman Empire in Germany was complimented by the establishment of the independence of the Portuguese and the Dutch Republic from Spain. This terrible war inflicted an estimated eight million casualties in Central Europe, but France dodged most of it, emerged as Europe’s greatest power, and it was the culmination of Richelieu’s work.
Unfortunately, as soon as that war ended, and before the French army could regain the frontiers of France, the wars of the Fronde broke out, unleashed by great nobles who resented the centralization of power under Richelieu and the cardinal’s taxation of them to support the central government and his wars of expansion in Europe. They would not have attempted such a rebellion against Richelieu, but did chase Mazarin out of the country twice. These wars were on behalf of feudal noble rights and were mounted by an odd coalition of dissentient noble traditionalists and overtaxed bourgeois. The toing and froing of the combat had as much the character of opéra bouffe as of real warfare, but the great marshals Turenne and Condé were for a time in opposition to the young king and his chief minister. The royalists prevailed eventually, though they made some concessions. Naturally, the French government was seriously distracted from colonial affairs.
In Britain, Charles I’s high-handed treatment of Parliament and his erratic conduct led to the English Civil War, the king’s trial and execution, and the Puritanical Commonwealth, set up and governed in very authoritarian manner by Oliver Cromwell, a talented and courageous, but strident and inflexible, man. Britain, too, had things other than colonial adventures to consider, until the return of Charles II, who had been given asylum and assistance by his cousin Louis XIV, in 1660. Under Charles II (reigned 1660–1685) and his brother, James II (reigned 1685–1688), relations were excellent with Louis XIV, and peace reigned between France and Great Britain in all spheres (apart from a brief and inconclusive scuffle in the Netherlands from 1665 to 1667).
In New France, the chief concern was the Iroquois, whose aggressivity was strangely assisted by the diseases that had been imported by the French, Dutch, and British, and had reduced their population by almost half. The leaders of the five Iroquois tribes determined that they had to replenish themselves demographically as increasing numbers of Europeans arrived, and the logical way to do so was to overwhelm and enslave neighbouring tribes (that had been similarly decimated by illness) and add them to their population. From 1648 to 1650, the Iroquois attacked the Huron with relentless persistence, going far beyond the traditional punitive raid.
The Iroquois effectively stopped the fur trade on the Ottawa. The French were able to keep it open on the St. Lawrence, but the Iroquois starved it farther back toward its sources in the north and west. Huronia, near what is now Midland on Georgian Bay, was ravaged on March 16, 1649, and after killing the Jesuits in the most gruesome manner – most infamously Jean Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant – by scalping, mock baptisms with scalding water, and assault with red-hot hatchets, the Iroquois marched the Huron off to captivity, where they were integrated into subordinate roles among the Iroquois. (Brébeuf and Lalemant died, with perfect calm and bravery, in silence, and were canonized in 1930, and Pope John Paul II conducted a very heavily attended service at the site of their deaths in 1984.) Brébeuf had made serious inroads with the Huron, and there is room for conjecture about what the impact would have been if he had substantially succeeded and the Huron had come en masse to Catholicism. It could have vastly increased the viability of New France. As it was, with the parent country seriously distracted, the colony was not able to enjoy peace with the British and had to fight for its life against the Iroquois.
The French set up refuges for the Huron and other victims from friendly tribes at L’Ancienne-Lorette, site of the present Quebec City airport, just west of the city, and at Caughnawaga, across the St. Lawrence and slightly west of Montreal. But the Iroquois were prowling around Montreal and Trois-Rivières, and although they could not frontally attack strong French emplacements, they almost completely stopped the fur trade for more than a year and threatened the strangulation of the raison d’être of New France. Part of the problem had been that Montmagny had not known how to overawe the Iroquois as Champlain had, nor how to inspirit France’s Indian allies against their more ferocious Indian rivals by displays of bold military intrusion and decisive use of firepower.
In 1648, after twelve years, Montmagny handed over the governorship of New France to the acting governor of Montreal in the absence of Maisonneuve, Louis d’Ailleboust de Coulonges. But d’Ailleboust had no particular plan to deal with the crisis, and much of the responsibility for protecting New France devolved on Maisonneuve, governor of Montreal from 1642 to 1665. In 1652, Maisonneuve returned to France to
raise, on his own authority, and in the absence of any coherent government policy, one hundred volunteers to help defend Ville-Marie, as Montreal was still known, whose population had dwindled to fifty frightened souls. Maisonneuve raised his rescue party and returned, and Ville-Marie gradually recovered its population. By this time, d’Ailleboust had retired as governor and been replaced by a career colonial service official, Jean de Lauzon, who held the post from 1651 to 1657. He owned Montreal Island and the Île d’Orléans and was the greatest landowner in New France. Lauzon was learned and distinguished, but was not effective at dealing with the Iroquois.
It is now generally believed that the turning point in the fortunes of the struggle of New France with the Iroquois came in May 1660, when the twenty-four-year-old soldier-adventurer Adam Dollard des Ormeaux, with the approval of Maisonneuve, led a group of sixteen volunteers on a ten-day canoe trip up the Ottawa River for a raid on the Iroquois. At an abandoned stockade at Long Sault, his party was surrounded by seven hundred Iroquois and attacked. Dollard and his companions, assisted by about forty Huron, conducted a fierce three-day fight against overwhelming odds and eventually all were killed, but after killing or wounding perhaps twenty times their number of the enemy. The engagement, known as the Battle of Long Sault, has achieved a folkloric status in Quebec, largely thanks to the historical treatment of it by the twentieth-century Quebec nationalist leader Canon Lionel Groulx. He portrayed it as like the Battle of the Alamo at San Antonio, Texas, in February and March 1836, when 189 Texans were finally overwhelmed by 1,800 Mexicans under the seven-times president of that country, General Antonio L. Santa Ana. The resisters, led by Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and William Travis, all perished, but killed four to six hundred of their opponents. Dollard’s stand inspired his countrymen and was a caution to the Iroquois of what aroused and well-armed Frenchmen could do.
This was the era when enthusiasm for the fur trade caused young Frenchmen in New France to venture determinedly into the back country as what became known as coureurs de bois, spending years on end with the natives and becoming themselves the middlemen in the fur trade, and the Algonquin took the place of the Huron. The coureurs de bois tended to be lawless, disorderly people, rough and ready and brave men who did not take direction from the civil government or the ecclesiastical authorities, but performed an essential service in reviving the fur trade, the commercial lifeline of New France. Because of the intervention of the Iroquois, it became much more difficult for the French to get their hands on furs – the Huron could not get them to the docks of Trois-Rivières or Quebec, and the coureurs de bois had to open new routes or organize their suppliers to approach more circuitously, where the Iroquois did not penetrate. For the perilous history of New France through the first half of the seventeenth century, under Champlain’s inspired and clever example, the French, minimal though their numbers were, could work with the Indians, favouring some against others and being indispensable to their allies. For the last half of that century, there was a war for the survival of the colony, although the colony gradually got the upper hand and strengthened. While the Iroquois could intimidate, kill, scatter, and subsume the Huron, they could not replace them in the fur trade. They were not as efficient canoers, nor as adept at growing corn, which the Huron bartered for fur, and did not have the commercial aptitude of the Huron. This was also the time when the issue of selling brandy to the Indians became particularly heated. The French needed it as an inducement, especially as the British were selling rum, but the religious character of the colony was also becoming more pronounced; the spirit of Protestantism, so useful in commercial matters, was sorely missed.
The principal agent of this intensification of religious zeal and organization was François de Laval de Montmorency, appointed apostolic vicar by order of the pope (Alexander VII) in a compromise between the Sulpicians, who wanted a loyalist of the king of France, and the Jesuits, who wanted someone who would be more independent of the crass secular interest of the French crown. Laval had been educated by the Jesuits, but he was a secular deacon, and, as a relative of the Montmorency family, one of the greatest in France, was an abbé and a nobleman. Laval gave up his considerable fortune to his family to pursue missionary work and was going to embark for Tonkin, in China and Indochina, when that mission was stopped by the Portuguese government, which had been inconvenienced by the agitation of missionaries, especially Jesuits, for more humane treatment of natives in the Portuguese and Spanish territories in Latin America.
Lauzon was followed as governor by Pierre Voyer d’Argenson de Mouzay, governor from 1658 to 1661, and then by Pierre d’Avaugour, governor from 1661 to 1663, and Laval quarrelled with all of them over the sale of liquor and the primacy of authority between Church and state. Under cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, the French state and Church worked closely together and the French Church was Gallican, essentially a national church that obeyed the pope in doctrinal matters but tried not to disagree with the French state – that is, the king – in secular affairs. The Jesuits tended, though Laval because of his worldly background finessed this, to report directly to the pope through the Society of Jesus, and were thus ultramontane (taking their direction from across the mountains, i.e., Rome) and sought complete independence from secular rulers, whose material interests they had often felt – as in the appalling exploitation of the natives of South and Central America – differed sharply from Christian spiritual values.
Laval would remain a mighty force in the colony for fifty years, and he plunged into controversy at the outset, rejecting the claimed authority of the archbishop of Rouen, who regarded New France as part of his see and who already had a vicar general in the colony, as did the Jesuits and Sulpicians. Laval had the inside track with both the pope and the king and would not hear of it. He began his episcopate (he was technically the bishop of Petraea) by visiting every family in the See in its home.18 Laval’s passion for his faithful was matched by the fervour he displayed in enforcing his will on the secular community. He returned to France in 1662 to demand the recall of the governor, d’Avaugour, for authorizing the sale of brandy to the Indians, and Louis XIV obliged him. Laval returned to Quebec in 1663 with the new governor, Augustin de Saffray de Mézy. He immediately set up a seminary, where he lived, and this became the nucleus for Laval University, which grew into one of the premier institutions of higher learning in the French-speaking world.
By the time Laval arrived in Quebec, New France, under the original planning of the Company of One Hundred Associates led by Richelieu and Champlain, was supposed to have a population of thirty thousand, be flourishing in agriculture, fisheries, fur, lumber, and a variety of precious and base metals, and a reliable profit centre and source of gains for the company’s investors. But in fact it had only three thousand inhabitants, compared with fifty thousand English in New England, thirty thousand in Virginia, and ten thousand Dutch in the New Netherlands (New York), including some families that went on to very great renown, such as Roosevelt, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt. Charles II founded new colonies in Pennsylvania (allotted to the evangelical Christian William Penn) and in North and South Carolina (named, of course, after his indecorously deceased father and himself). Thus, even 350 years ago, the European populations of what became, more than a century later, the United States and Canada, were at a ratio of thirty to one. This demographic correlation would not only tilt the scales between the British and the French in North America, but, in subsequent centuries, between the sovereign countries themselves.
By this time, Cardinal Mazarin had died and been succeeded as chief minister (but only as director of finance, as Louis XIV would govern personally) by the very capable secular administrator Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who later assumed all the other posts to do with trade, economics, and shipping. Louis XIV was now twenty-three and determined to exercise power directly, and without so powerful a minister as his father had had with Richelieu, or even Mazarin, who commended Colbert to the king. Louis had been much shaken as a child
by the violence and mob disorder in the wars of the Fronde, with Paris itself twice in the hands of unruly insurgents and hordes of mere vandals. He was set at the head of Europe’s and the world’s most powerful country with the engine of Richelieu’s unprecedentedly centralized state under him, and the strategic fruit of the Thirty Years War to harvest. Louis was ambitious as monarch and Frenchman, and was determined to change the world and start by asserting his authority everywhere. It was part of his concept of France’s role in the world that it should strengthen its presence in North America and redefine its civilizing mission well beyond and above conducting desperate canoe sorties among the swarms of insolent, savage bushwhackers that terrorized his overseas subjects right up to the walls of their fortified towns.
Colbert exposed the extravagance and embezzlement of his rival, Nicolas Fouquet, thus enhancing his own prospects. Fouquet had built himself the opulent house Vaux-le-Vicomte, as well as a fortified island to which he could retire if out of favour. Louis manoeuvred him into selling his office as attorney general and then prosecuted him and sentenced him to life imprisonment, where he was comfortable, and stoical, but lonely and accompanied by his servant, whom Alexandre Dumas made famous as the title character in The Man in the Iron Mask. Once installed in Fouquet’s official place, Colbert raised tariffs, promoted the production in France of sophisticated glass and mirrors, on which Venice had enjoyed a virtual monopoly, fostered textile manufacturing that competed with that in the Netherlands, and founded the Gobelins tapestry works. He founded the French merchant marine and tried to reduce the ranks of the clergy by raising the eligible age for seeking holy orders. He also tried to reduce the exemptions and privileges enjoyed by nobles and the clergy in the tax system, and impressed upon the king the fact that half of the taxes assessed in the country either were not paid or were embezzled. He was able to make a good deal of progress here, and to reapportion tax more efficiently and equitably. Colbert famously stated that “the art of taxation consists in pulling the quills out of the goose so as to get as many feathers with as little hissing as possible.”
