by Conrad Black
Louis and Colbert soon recognized that part of the problem in New France was the greed and intractability of the commercial interests that effectively ran the colony. Louis abolished the charter of the Company of One Hundred Associates, which had operated somewhat reasonably while Richelieu watched it from France and Champlain supervised its operations, but had become an irresponsible siphoning operation. In 1664, he gave full authority to the French West India Company, which proved an insane idea, though the company never had the time or lack of oversight to permit it to become as steeped in lassitude as the predecessor enterprise. In 1663, New France had become a royal province and was to be governed by a Sovereign Council composed of the governor, the bishop (vicar general until Laval was elevated to bishop in 1674), and five other councillors who were chosen by the king, in practice on the recommendation of the governor and bishop. The council could hear petitions from the syndics representing various groups of inhabitants. (It replaced and had rather greater powers than the Council of Quebec of 1647.)
The metropolitan government was also emulated by the creation of the position of intendant (superintendent may be the closest equivalent in English, in the sense of superintending public policy, not a mundane jurisdiction like a residential building). The first occupant of this position in New France was Colbert’s protégé, Talon (and Colbert held this title in the French state). Talon joined Laval and Governor Saffray de Mézy on the Sovereign Council. The first intendant, the Sieur Robert, had been appointed in 1663 but never arrived to take up his post. Talon arrived on September 12, 1665, with the new governor to replace de Mézy, Daniel de Rémy de Courcelle. Talon accepted the post of intendant from Colbert on the understanding that it would be for a defined term and he would be able to trade in the fur business on the side for his own account.19 Louis had sent three hundred skilled labourers the year before to get cracking on the buildings and roads a serious settlement would require, and they had already accomplished much. (Depictions of these personalities show that the king, Colbert, Talon, and Laval all looked almost the same: dark curly hair in ringlets – except for Laval’s, which in keeping with his tonsure was less luxuriant – and somewhat raffish moustaches.)
In 1665, Louis sent the Marquis de Tracy, a battle-scarred veteran of many campaigns, including the Turkish Wars, to Canada with the Carignan-Salières regiment of one thousand trained and combat-proven troops. (They had an astoundingly top-heavy 117 officers, thirty-five of whom were over sixty, and the regiment rioted when informed of their destination, but they were dispatched with the authority the French state now habitually exercised.20) The Iroquois had never faced anything like this, and Tracy’s first effort, an insouciant plunge through the snows of the Quebec winter, did not achieve anything, but it built forts at Sorel, Chambly, and the outlet to Lake Champlain, and in 1666 Tracy and the regiment, supplemented by six hundred semi-trained militiamen, marched into the heart of Iroquois territory, frightened the Mohawks out of their homes, burned to ashes all five of their villages and all their crops and stores, and returned with minimal casualties. The Indians quickly sent peace envoys to Quebec, and a satisfactory peace was agreed in 1667. His mission largely fulfilled, Tracy moved on to other trouble spots in the French empire, but the combination of Courcelle, Laval, and Talon invigorated administration and life in New France. Talon wrote Colbert letters that demonstrated that he was the first person since Champlain to grasp what Canada could become, but Colbert replied that this would require much accelerated emigration and that neither he nor the king wished “to unpeople France to people New France.” This was rubbish of course, as the provision of five hundred immigrants a year, with the astounding birthrate that French Canadians achieved and maintained, would have given the colony a population of half a million by about 1700, and that level of immigration was not 10 per cent of the casualties France incurred in Louis’s wars. But this response from Colbert indicated that although the will to make something of Canada was greater and more practically executed than before, limits to the scale of the mission persisted.21
Talon set to work organizing an armada of fifty vessels conveying workers, tools, and building materials back and forth to the sites where forts were being built. He founded three towns around what is now Charlesbourg (now Lower Town Quebec), and obtained settler status for many of the Carignan-Salières soldiers; this endowed the colony with a very solid militia, on the model of the Roman military colonies, which Talon invoked. He increased cultivated acreage by 50 per cent a year and harvests accordingly. He founded a successful ship-building industry and launched a commercial maritime exchange with the French West Indies. Copper and iron ore were discovered and developed on the upper Ottawa and at Baie-Saint-Paul. He built a brewery in Lower Town Quebec, which soon produced four thousand hogsheads of beer annually, half for export to the West Indies, and provided a strong market for local grain. Between 1667 and 1671, 1,828 people immigrated, a large number young women, almost all of whom were married within a year. Talon gave away fifty livres in household supplies to every girl or woman getting married, and there was a “king’s gift of 20 livres for every young man marrying by the age of 20 and a penalty for any father who had an unmarried son above the age of 20 or unmarried daughter above the age of 16.” Talon specified that the girls must be “without physical flaws and had nothing about them that might provoke distaste.”22 Colbert encouraged this, and in one letter to Talon suggested “the mark of shame” for those who willfully refused to marry (apart from clergy, of course). From 1665 to 1668, the population increased from 3,215 to 6,282. It was not only people who were prolific. In 1664, there was only one horse in New France; in 1698, there were 684. There were similar patterns with cattle, sheep, and even mules. (There were concerns that too many horses would make the population too social and even alcohol-dependent, and cause it to lose its proficiency with snowshoes.)23
In 1654, the British, in an expedition of four ships from New England, had overwhelmed the small Acadian settlements at Port-Royal and along the Penobscot and Saint John rivers. They seized Acadia as a consolation prize for being insufficiently strong to take New Amsterdam from the Dutch. But in the friendly atmosphere between Louis XIV and his cousin Charles II, Acadia was returned to the French in 1670. Comparatively heavy immigration tapered off after 1673, as Louis and Colbert became heavily engaged in wars on the frontiers of France and manpower and fiscal resources were concentrated there, on Louis’s ambition to advance into Flanders and to the Rhine. Petty criminals continued to be sent (161 smugglers and poachers were received in Canada between 1723 and 1749).24 Talon encouraged the production of tar and potash and hemp, though these products were only moderately successful commercially.
Laval departed for France from 1672 to 1675 for the purpose of elevating his domain to a bishopric after his intense battle with the archbishop of Rouen, who persisted in treating Canada as a far-flung group of his parishes. Laval returned with a fine episcopal ring to present for obedient veneration by all, as the bishop of New France in 1675, victorious again, as he almost always was in this sort of infighting, which was as constant on the Sovereign Council in Quebec as it was with the Sulpicians in Quebec and the secular orders of France. Laval’s success with the king was more remarkable as he was seeking an ultramontane status, reporting directly to Rome and not to bishops of the Gallican Church whose elevation had been approved by the king.
In 1674, Louis and Colbert wearied of the effort to charge money-grubbing merchants with a mission of national expansion and Christian and cultural edification and finally declared New France a colony where France paid the bills and reaped the rewards and made all the decisions.
Despite Talon’s efforts to diversify the economy of New France, the relentless economic reality, heightened by the turn of fashion in Paris to emphasize fur coats for women and fur hats for both sexes, was that the fur trade was more important than ever. The Iroquois threat had been beaten back by the mid-1670s and renewed interest arose in the question of wh
ether there was a passage to China through or around Hudson Bay. The scale of competition between France and Britain in the fur trade was fairly civil while the Stuarts reigned in London, up to 1687, but both sides were putting outposts and trading stations farther and farther away from points of export (Quebec, Boston, and later New York). The expansion of the fur trade was facilitated by the relative quiescence of the Iroquois. When they contemplated an attack on the Ottawas, the partner of the French in the fur business, they were advised by the effective governor, Courcelle, that that would bring full-fledged war with France and they desisted. By this time, the first serious efforts to expand the hinterland of fur production and exportation were being focused on the west and south.
René-Robert Cavalier de La Salle, a Norman Jesuit who left the Society for the temptations of exploration, teamed up with Louis Jolliet, a Quebec native, and the French Jesuit Jacques Marquette, and from 1669 to 1672 they explored south to the Ohio River and as far as the present Louisville, Kentucky. In 1673, Jolliet and Marquette went down Lake Michigan and struck west up the Fox River, discovered the northern Mississippi and followed it down to about 430 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, at the mouth of the Arkansas River, where they started to run into Indians with Spanish goods. They were the first people to engage in serious mapping of the middle and upper Mississippi, and they beat a path for ambitious French fur traders. Jolliet and Marquette returned and wintered near the present Chicago. Jolliet would later explore the northern Labrador coast and vanished in 1700 while sailing to take possession of Anticosti Island, which had been granted to him in recognition of his services. Marquette struck farther west but died in 1675 of the effects of dysentery in what is now Michigan. All this while, two vintage swashbucklers, Pierre-Esprit Radisson (1636–1710) and his brother-in-law Médard des Groseilliers (1618–1696), were active fur traders, sometimes for the French and sometimes for the English, depending on the identity of the highest bidder. (Radisson married the daughter of “Admiral” Sir John Kirke, who had seized Quebec in 1629.)
Jean Talon departed Quebec in November 1672 and was graciously received by the king and his finance director, Colbert. Talon became premier valet to the king and premier secretary of the king’s cabinet, and served in these influential capacities to his master’s entire satisfaction until he died in 1694, aged sixty-nine.
5. Governor Frontenac, 1672–1689
The new governor who replaced Courcelle in 1672 was Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, one of the epic personalities of New France. If Champlain’s father had been friendly with Henry IV, Frontenac’s father was a childhood friend of Louis XIII, and Governor Frontenac was allegedly named after him. Frontenac was eighteen years older than Louis XIV and knew him, cordially but respectfully, most of his life. He joined the army at age fifteen, in 1635, became a colonel at twenty-three and a brigadier general at twenty-six, and fought continuously in Flanders, the Netherlands, and Italy, until France, under the great marshals Condé and Turenne, got to the Rhine, to the gates of Munich, and humbled the Spanish, and in 1648 the Peace of Westphalia was signed.
Frontenac’s gallantry was conspicuous, and he was wounded many times. He was cunning and fierce and a proven soldier, but was effectively unemployed after peace broke out, and he returned to his estate and abruptly married the beautiful and socially prominent Anne de La Grange, contrary to her parents’ wishes. Frontenac’s wife was very friendly with one of the great diarists and court figures of the second half of the seventeenth century, Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier, niece of Louis XIII, god-daughter of Richelieu, daughter of Gaston d’Orléans, whom Richelieu had exiled because of his attempted coup against him, and the grandest and wealthiest heiress in Europe at the time. Louis XIII had given her the title “granddaughter of France,” and as her father was known as “Monsieur,” she became universally known as “la Grande Mademoiselle.” She rejected marital overtures from England’s King Charles II (her cousin), Portugal’s Alfonso VI (whom she dismissed rather severely as “alcoholic, impotent, and paralytic”), and Duke Charles Emmanuel of Savoy. Frontenac’s marriage was unhappy, and his wife influenced the princess to disparage him acerbically in her sulphurous diaries. (Vita Sackville-West, in her biography of la Grande Mademoiselle, remarked that “M. de Frontenac seems to have got on better with red Indians than with his wife.”25)
Frontenac lolled on his estate in a condition of some dissolution and racked up heavy debts in the fifteen years after Westphalia, and was glad to go back to war, first against the Turks in Hungary, and then, by the intervention of Turenne, on loan to the Venetians in the French mission to assist that fading city state in its forlorn attempt to keep the island of Crete from the Turks. Frontenac put up a tremendous fight in an impossible cause and was rewarded with the governorship of New France at the age of fifty-two. He was an erratic administrator, extravagant and somewhat financially corrupt, showy, boastful and impetuous, but a strong leader and a capable general, a flamboyant personality who had little of the administrative judgment of Talon, who departed as Frontenac arrived, or of the principles and self-discipline of Laval, with whom he quarrelled constantly for decades, usually over utterly trivial matters. Canada was an appointment for Frontenac that promised to erase his financial problems, because of the salary and the opportunity for self-enrichment, and got him away from his wife and her friends, who found his presence anywhere near the court annoying. The king gave him a special grant of fifteen thousand livres for expenses and a personal guard of twenty men.
The Quebec habitant of this time was a rugged but independent-minded man. His life was not gentle, but the seigneurs depended on the tenant farmers to clear their land, and the habitant was far from a serf. He had a respectable, handmade home, plenty to eat as long as he could shoot, grow, or trap it himself, and he was more prosperous, more optimistic, and healthier than the distant cousins he had left behind in France, and was less likely to be overtaxed, conscripted to war, or uneducated. And the seigneurs had nothing like the material or social incumbency of the French nobility, steeped for centuries in the wealth of la douce France.
“For young and daring souls the forest meant the excitement of discovery, the licence of life among the Indians, and the hope of making more than could be gained by the habitant from his farm. Large profits meant large risks, and the coureur de bois took his life in his hands. Even if he escaped the rapid and the tomahawk, there was an even chance that he would become a reprobate.”26 The coureur, however (who numbered about four hundred at the time of Frontenac’s arrival), was valuable in keeping the fur trade moving, and worth his weight in gold in wartime, when he knew the country and the woodcrafts as well as the Indians did, and was as technically sophisticated as the best-trained French or British soldiers. But the coureurs were insubordinate and self-interested and often fell afoul of the governors and the clergy.
The Quebec Church, Jesuits, Sulpicians, and Récollets were missionaries, and their original principal activity was ministering to and trying to convert the natives. By the time Frontenac arrived, the policy of Talon to increase the European population by immigration and encouragement of procreation had created a demand for a more pastoral church, which gave Frontenac all the pretext he needed to begin a lengthy tug-of-war with Laval. Frontenac’s other opening gambit was to summon the various leaders of social and corporate elements in the colony in a miniature Estates General, for which he was as sharply slapped down by the king and Colbert as the several months required for back-and-forth communication allowed. Louis and those in his entourage were absolutists, and they did not want any such popular consultations anywhere in the kingdom.
Frontenac’s next endeavour was a summit meeting with the Iroquois at Cataraqui, where Kingston now is, in July 1673. Here in 1674, La Salle built the first of many forts that were strung out along the fur-trading routes over the next fifty years, but Frontenac arranged that he would profit substantially from it. Frontenac brought as many soldiers as possible and ar
rived at Cataraqui in a large flotilla of canoes and barges with cannons mounted on them, the governor and his entourage in rich finery. It was an effective show of strength, and Frontenac was always theatrical. This opening encounter was a success, and the new governor was clearly the heir to Champlain at the subtleties of dealing with the Indians, firm but respectful and honourable and well-served by his desire always to present a powerful facade. Less successful was Frontenac’s dispute with Maisonneuve’s successor as governor of Montreal (and Talon’s nephew-in-law), François Perrot, whom Frontenac imprisoned for ten months over the status of coureurs de bois, whom Perrot favoured and subsidized. For good measure, Frontenac hanged a coureur within sight of Perrot’s prison cell. Finally, the matter was pleaded before the king himself by Perrot (after whom Île Perrot, adjacent to Montreal, is named). The king found for Frontenac and sent Perrot for a symbolic three weeks in the Bastille, but told Frontenac not to be quite so heavy-handed with local governors again.
