Champlain's Dream
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On balance he concluded, “We cannot too greatly admire the courage of Mr. de Champlain, who could not take a step without meeting fresh obstacles, who expended his own energies without ever dreaming of seeking any real personal advantage, and who never renounced an enterprise, for which he had constantly to endure the caprices of some, and the opposition of others.” Charlevoix concluded that Champlain was “beyond contradiction, a man of merit, and may well be called THE FATHER OF NEW FRANCE.” This may have been the first use of that phrase.26
The Philosophes on Champlain: Colden, Diderot, and d’Alembert
Charlevoix’s writings had a great impact on men of the Enlightenment throughout the western world. One example was the work of an Anglo-American philosophe in New York, Cadwallader Colden, who wrote about Champlain in exactly the same spirit as Charlevoix. Colden got a few of his facts wrong. He wrote inaccurately of “the French, who settled Canada under Mr. Champlain, their first governor in the year 1603.” He called Champlain’s Indian allies the Adirondacks, and wrote that “Mr. Champlain, desiring to give his Allies proof of his Love and the Valour of the French nation, put himself at the Head of a Body of Adirondacks, and passed with them into Coirlars Lake [sic], which from this time on the French have called by Mr. Champlain’s name.”27 Colden described the battle at the lake in 1609 in great detail from Champlain’s own writings, which he appeared to know well. Like Charlevoix he chastised Champlain for what he had done. “Thus began a War and hatred between the French and the Five Nations, which have cost the French much blood, and more than once had like to have occasioned the entire destruction of the colony.”28
The same memories of Champlain appeared in writings by French leaders of the enlightenment; they celebrated him and established his reputation as the founder of Quebec. In 1751 Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert identified him that way in their great Encyclopédie. They wrote, “It is to the Sieur de Champlain, a gentleman of Saintonge, that the French owe the first establishment in Quebec. He founded it in 1608 and died there in 1635, after twenty-seven years of labor.” They also drew on Champlain’s works of travel, botany, natural history, and ethnography. A vital part of the Enlightenment was this expanding interest in cultures and environments throughout the world, which derived in part from Champlain.29
An Image for an Age of Reason: Champlain as a Man of the Enlightenment
In the Archives nationales du Québec, there is an old sketch of Champlain. It is what artists call a sanguine, a drawing made with a crayon of red ocher that was much favored by Watteau, Boucher, and other artists in the eighteenth century. Champlain’s features are very clear and consistent with the small self-portrait in his own works: a high forehead and arched brows, eyes set widely apart, a fine-boned and slightly aquiline nose, pursed lips, a thin mustache, and a close trimmed beard. The hair is neatly back-combed, and the expression on the face is pleasant and engaging, with the hint of a smile. The gaze is open and direct, with a quality of candor in the classical sense. This is the image of a “gentleman of Saintonge,” as Diderot and d’Alembert called him, who is at ease with others and at peace with himself, a man of reason, observation, benevolence, and enlightenment. The drawing gives much attention to Champlain’s costume. He wears a soldier’s half-armor, an officer’s broad sash, and a gentleman’s laced collar. The drawing is of unknown provenance and uncertain date, but whatever its origin, it is true to interpretations of Champlain in the Enlightenment.30
Quebec’s Progressive Whig Historian: Garneau’s Liberal Catholic Champlain
After the second British conquest of New France in 1759–60, the memory of its founders tended to fade for a generation or two. Comparatively few references to Champlain appeared in the period from 1760 to 1815. But in the nineteenth century, interest began to revive. The leader was one of Canada’s greatest historians, François-Xavier Garneau (1800–1866). He came from a family with deep roots in Quebec and briefly attended its schools, but was largely self-taught. As a young man he became bilingual, traveled widely in the United States, England, and France, and moved easily in the cultural milieu of three nations. In his travels he met many young nationalists; a Polish leader in France had a particular impact. He adopted liberal and Catholic views, and returned to Canada with a deep attachment to its history. His goal was to combine the heritage of Quebec with an ideal of a Canadian nationalism that could unite its French and English inhabitants.
This anonymous sanguine of Samuel Champlain, of uncertain date and origin, matches the interpretations of 18th-century philosophes.
Garneau’s greatest work was his History of Canada, published in four small volumes (1845–52), and reprinted in many editions. It is a major work, remarkable for its command of primary sources, breadth of thought, accuracy of detail, and maturity of judgment. Garneau wrote as a Catholic and a Liberal in the nineteenth-century sense. His works were similar in outlook to the books of George Bancroft in the United States, and Thomas Babington Macaulay in Britain. Like these Whig historians, Garneau thought of history in teleological terms as the progress of liberty, freedom, democracy, and national self-determination. The result was another great work of Whig historiography, and a monument of Canadian literature.31
Garneau took a liking to Champlain and recognized him as the most important figure in the founding of New France. He associated him with Henri IV. “In losing Henry IV two years after the founding of Québec,” Garneau wrote, “he lost a friend and mentor [bon maître] whom he had served faithfully, and who had been of great assistance to him.” Garneau described Champlain’s work in detail, observing that he was important not merely for the things he did but for the way he did them. Garneau’s Champlain was himself a proto-whig, a man of reason, experience, liberality, and large purposes who had been endowed with a “judgment sound and penetrating [jugement droit et pénétrant], and a practical genius [génie pratique)], Champlain was able to conceive and follow without ever swerving an extended and complicated plan for thirty years of effort to found Canada [établir le Canada] which proved his perseverance and his strength of character.” He assured to France the possession of immense countries “without the help of almost any soldiers, by the sole means of missionaries and alliances with the indigenous people.”32
Garneau defended Champlain from Charlevoix’s criticism that he was responsible for hostilities with the Iroquois, and for the destruction of the Huron nation. Not so, Garneau insisted: “He had been blamed for having declared war against the Iroquois, but the war already existed between them and other nations in Canada. He never ceased his efforts to maintain them in peace.”33 Garneau also believed that the destruction of the Huron was the result of changes in French policy after Champlain: “His death was a great loss for the Huron, who had great confidence in him.” Garneau’s Champlain was a man of large spirit: “One finds him a faithful author, a judicious and attentive observer, whose works are filled with detail on the customs of the indigenous people and the geography of the country.” He was also a liberal supporter of toleration and even freedom of conscience, a vision of a union of the Canadas.34 Altogether Garneau’s Champlain was a truly heroic character, and looked the part. From sources that he did not identify Garneau wrote, “Champlain had a handsome appearance, a noble and military bearing, a vigorous constitution which gave him the strength to resist physical stress, and a spirit that he sustained throughout a hard life.35
The Canadian response to Garneau’s great work was mostly very positive. The book went through several French editions, and in 1860 Andrew Bell published it in English, informing his readers that he had tried to do a “moderately free rather than a slavishly literal translation” which was “shaped, to some extent, to meet the reasonable expectations (but not to flatter the prejudices) of Anglo-Canadian readers.” Bell’s translation gave little attention to Champlain’s Catholic faith, which was muted into a vaguely “religious turn of mind.” Bell’s Champlain “effected the exaltation of New France” by “equitable diplomacy and C
hristianising influences,” more than by a close connection to the Catholic Church.36
In Quebec, other reactions to Garneau’s history went the opposite way. Conservative Catholic clerics in Quebec liked its literary strength, but criticized Garneau’s interpretation of Champlain as a liberal Catholic, and rejected his vision of Canada as a bilingual nation. Garneau himself was called a Liberal (which he was) and a Protestant freethinker (which he was not). After Garneau’s death, Catholic conservatives writers worked with members of Garneau’s family to revise his work. Subsequent editions made the book less liberal, more conservative, and more supportive of the clerical establishment in Quebec. Marcel Trudel remembered: “We were referred to the work of François-Xavier Garneau as to a bible. As late as 1935 you didn’t speak of New France in classical colleges without citing Garneau.” But Trudel also recalled that “this veneration resulted in a falsified edition of Garneau’s work.” In 1913 Garneau’s grandson made many changes and marked them with brackets. Yet another revised edition in 1944 kept the changes but removed the brackets. Through it all, Garneau became a major figure in Canadian culture. Today his home is maintained in Quebec as a living shrine.37
Parkman’s Medieval Champlain
While Garneau’s liberal whig history had a major impact in Canada, a very different book on Champlain was published in the United States by Francis Parkman (1823–1893). He called it Pioneers of France in the New World, the first in a series of nine volumes called “France in America.” Parkman was a gentleman-scholar of independent means, and this great historical project was his life’s work. He prepared himself by traveling widely in his youth through New England, New York, and Canada, visiting the scenes of the history that he meant to write. His youthful rambles in New England and Canada had made him “familiar with most of the localities of the narrative.” He was deeply interested in American Indians, and after going west to study them he wrote a book about his experiences called The Oregon Trail.38
His first volume on New France was written during the American Civil War and dedicated to three kinsmen who had been “slain in battle.” Parkman wrote that the history of New France was about “the attempt of Feudalism, Monarchy and Rome to master a continent where, at this hour, half a million of bayonets are vindicating the ascendancy of a regulated freedom.”39 This Boston-born Anglo-Saxon Protestant was a conservative Whig who believed strongly in ideals of freedom and republicanism, but those large principles were bounded by a narrow arrogance of race, class, gender, nation, religion, and place. He hated slavery but showed no sympathy for the enslaved. He celebrated liberty but opposed the great liberal reforms of his day, and wrote polemics against women’s suffrage. Race was central to his thinking. He observed the American Indians in the years of their decline and despised them as a “fickle and bloodthirsty race.”40
Parkman’s national stereotypes also appeared in his contempt for the institutions of France. But he greatly admired individual Frenchmen, and most of all Champlain. Two-thirds of the first volume in his great work was called “Champlain and His Associates.” Parkman extolled Champlain for his selfless and “untiring” devotion to the cause of New France. “His books mark the man,” Parkman wrote of Champlain, “all for his theme and his purpose, nothing for himself.” He celebrated the character and achievements of Champlain, and wrote that he had been “fittingly called the father of New France. In him were embodied her religious zeal and romantic spirit of adventure.”41
Parkman raised Champlain to the stature of a world figure, but his understanding of the man was fundamentally misconceived. He thought of the French leader as a living anachronism, and wrote that “Champlain belonged rather to the Middle Age than to the seventeenth century … a true hero, after the chivalrous medieval type. His character was dashed largely with the spirit of romance.” From Lescarbot he took the false theme of Champlain’s credulity and reinforced it. “Though earnest, sagacious and penetrating, he leaned to the marvelous,” the historian wrote, and he judged Champlain as “prone to overstep the bounds of reason and invade the domain of fancy. Hence the erratic character of some of his exploits.”42 Parkman interpreted Champlain’s entire career in these terms, celebrated the medieval virtues of a “faithful soldier,” and wrote: “A soldier from his youth, in an age of unbridled license, his life answered to his maxims.” But he also judged Champlain severely for his attacks on the Iroquois, and suggested that he prepared the way for the conquest of a medieval and feudal New France by modern and progressive forces in New England.43
All this was deeply mistaken. Champlain was a man of his own age, not at all medieval. Parkman’s work was marred by major interpretive error, but it was important in another way. He created the most visually striking images of Champlain, ironically so. Parkman himself was nearly blind and said that his physical and mental condition “never permitted reading … continuously for more than five minutes, and often has not permitted it at all.” He could write only a few words a day, with his pen guided by wires across the page. But he saw his subject clearly in the mind’s eye, and this blind bard of Boston wrote some of the most vivid prose that any historian has put on paper.44
Parkman also drew on another strength in his command of sources. He worked carefully from primary materials—the published writings of Champlain in their original editions, the manuscript of the Brief Discours, the works of Lescarbot, LeClercq, Sagard, and the Jesuit Relations. He employed a researcher in French archives, and manuscripts came to him from friends, colleagues, and collectors.45 Large lacunae appeared on many subjects, especially economics, and there were many errors of detail. But he applied to his sources his gift of creative imagination. Ethnohistorians in the late twentieth century noted a surprising strength. Even as his work was marred by strong racist judgments on Indians, ethnographer Bruce Trigger observed that Parkman was the first general historian who understood the differences among Indian nations.
In the United States, anglophone scholars were drawn to the subject of Champlain by Parkman’s prose. In France and Quebec, others responded with deep and justified resentment against Parkman’s contempt for their culture and history. But here again, Parkman’s work inspired both groups to write their own correctives. His great contribution was to dramatize his subject in ways that attracted others to it.
The Abbé Ferland’s Filial Champlain: A Faithful Son of the Church
While Francis Parkman was toiling away in his Boston study, a circle of clerical scholars were writing on Champlain in Quebec. Chief among them was the Abbé J. B. A. Ferland, who published a major two-volume work called a Cours d’histoire du Canada (1861–65). It was a serious and substantive work, informed by a broad reading in the history of the French and British colonies, which he knew well.
Ferland thought of New France as “above all a missionary colony” whose primary purpose was to bring Christianity to the Indians. He believed that it succeeded in this divine mission, which was still ongoing at the time he was writing. He himself promoted a new surge of Catholic missionary activity in the 1860s, from Ontario to the Pacific. Ferland was very sympathetic to the Indians and attentive to the diversity of their cultures. He wrote that they could be “monsters of barbarity,” but he respected their pride, their strength, and their devotion to their own ways. It troubled him not at all that the Indians refused to become French—an attitude similar to Champlain’s. “Well,” Ferland wrote, “although they did not adopt the customs of the French, they became excellent Christians!” He believed that “life in the bush maintains them in their attachment to the Catholic faith and the purity of their morals. The less frequent their contacts with civilization, the more they keep to the dignity of nature and innocence of life which belong to Christ’s true disciplines.”46
This approach gave Champlain a new role. In Ferland’s judgment, his most important contribution was to assist French missionaries in America. Ferland agreed with many others that Champlain’s greatest error was his decision to attack the Iroquois: “
The attack of the French against one of the Five Nations was probably the beginning, the cause of hostility which … stopped the progress of the colony and indeed nearly killed it in its infancy.” But in general Ferland celebrated Champlain for “establishing the small colony on the only solid foundations of a state: religion and honor.”47
The Abbé Laverdière’s Great Project of Champlain Scholarship
A landmark in the historiography of Champlain was the first publication of a major modern edition of his works in 1870. The editor was the Abbé Charles-Honoré Laverdière, a professor of history and librarian at the Séminaire de Québec. In the 1850s, Laverdière had begun to gather unpublished materials on the early history of Canada. He also edited an historical journal for young people and called it L’Abeille (The Bee). His office became a hive of historical activity.
In 1859, an English translation of Champlain’s Brief Discours on his voyage to New Spain had been published by the Hakluyt Society, with a brief biography that was judged “by no means remarkable for accuracy.”48 Clerical leaders in Quebec decided that the time had come to publish Champlain’s works in a French edition, with editorial notes that supported their interpretations. In 1864, Laverdière took on the job, with strong support from clerical administrators, who gave him a house, a staff, and the resources of the seminary. Laverdière made rapid progress, and finished his huge task five years later. The manuscript was sent to a printer and set in type.49