Champlain's Dream

by David Hackett Fischer

  Just before the work was to be published, a fire destroyed the printing plant and melted the type, which had all been set—a scholar’s worst mightmare. But the author and his publisher were undeterred. A single set of proofs survived. From it they reset the book and printed it as the “second edition,” though there was no first. The entire set appeared in 1870, under the patronage of Laval University. It is a magnificent specimen of the printer’s art, beautifully set in monotype, and a monument of scholarship.50

  Laverdière shared the conservative clerical memory of Champlain, tempered by a strong hostility to the Jesuit order. He was a great historian, devoted to scholarship and to the accuracy of his work. He corrected printers’ errors and garbled passages that abound in Champlain’s books, and subsequent editors have accepted his judgment in many cases. He also added notes and appendices that are still very valuable today. Some francophone historians still prefer Laverdière’s texts, and every serious scholar of Champlain will always consult them.

  Laverdière greatly stimulated serious study of Champlain by making his major texts more accessible than ever before. In 1908, as heroic sculptures of Champlain were rising in many cities, the Abbé Gosselin wrote that Laverdière’s volumes were “the real monument in honour of Champlain.”51

  Images of Champlain for a Catholic Revival

  Clerical interpretations inspired a new image of Champlain. In 1854, a French lithograph was brought to Quebec, and registered as an authentic image of “Samuel de Champlain, governor general of Canada.” It was a formal portrait, attributed to Louis-César-Joseph Ducornet (1806–1856), an artist renowned in France for his physical disability, and for the quality of his work, which triumphed over it. Ducornet had been born without arms. He worked by gripping a brush in his mouth or holding it between his toes. He specialized in devotional images and individual portraits of extraordinary detail.52

  This lithograph of Champlain was brought to Quebec by Pierre-Louis Morin, a designer and entrepreneur who claimed that it was the work of Ducornet. It represented Champlain in middle age. He appeared overweight and out of shape, with heavy jowls and a double chin. The features had a tentative expression, an air of passivity, and even a feeling of timidity. The hair and beard were impeccable and the dress was immaculate: a dark doublet cut to the latest fashion, with sleeves slashed to reveal a shirt of lustrous silk that shimmered in the light. In the background was a heavy Renaissance curtain, drawn back to reveal a distant scene of Quebec.53

  Altogether this image was very surprising for a man of Champlain’s recorded acts. The face lacked strength, character, and authority. He looked less like a soldier, seaman, or explorer, and more like a man in a sedentary occupation—perhaps a merchant or minor public official. But Morin testified to its authenticity, and the engraving began to be reproduced in Canada, the United States, and France. The image matched the interpretation of the Abbé Ferland, who had represented Champlain as a pious son of the Church whose role had been to support the missionaries whom Catholic historians represented as the true founders of New France. It was also consistent with Laverdière’s idea of Champlain. One version of this engraving appeared as the frontispiece to Laverdière’s great work.54

  It also inspired many copies. The painter Théophile Hamel did a handsome oil painting, which was made into a steel-plate engraving by artist J. A. O’Neil. Champlain’s face was much improved. Hamel and O’Neil elongated the head, removed the jowls, erased the double chin, refined the features, and created a more attractive portrait of Champlain that was an image of strength and authority. By the end of the nineteenth century the Ducornet-Morin engraving of Champlain and its variants were widely accepted as authentic, and became the conventional image of Champlain.55

  But after 1900, two scholars in Canada and the United States began to study the Ducornet engraving and its provenance. Both came to the same conclusion: this was not an image of Champlain at all. Worse, it was not merely an error but a fraud. This was the finding of Victor-Hugo Paltsits, chief of manuscripts and the American History Division at the New York Public Library. Paltsits discovered evidence that the image was a deliberate counterfeit, concocted by a ring of French artists, bibliophiles, publishers, and literati—among them George-Barthélemi Faribault and publisher Léopold Massard.56

  A Canadian scholar, H. P. Biggar, dug deeper and identified the source of the image. It had been copied from a portrait of Michel Particelli, an Italian courtier who became a superintendent of finance in France during the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. Particelli was reported to be a corrupt and despicable character. One court memoir described him as a “gross and vicious spiritual swine.” The portrait had been painted in 1654 by Balthazar Moncornet of this other man who was very different from Champlain.57

  To an historian, the most astonishing part of the story followed after the fraud was discovered. The false portrait continued to be reproduced even more widely than before. Scholars who knew it to be a forgery published it over and over again in their works without any warning to the reader that it was false. Denis Martin writes that “among the most important historians of New France, only Marcel Trudel seems to have avoided the pitfall of the false portrait of Champlain.”58 The indefatigable Champlain Society has published an essay on its website, reproducing the Ducornet engraving and its variants with a stern warning: “These pictures are NOT Champlain.”59 But in vain. As recently as 2007, the false portrait was represented as genuine in publications by major institutions in Canada, Europe, and the United States. In the twenty-first century, the fraudulent Champlain is reproduced on the web more frequently than ever.60

  This image of Champlain began as a fraud by French promoters who reproduced a 17th-century painting of a corrupt and hated courtier and sold it in 1854 as a portrait of Champlain. Its tone matched an interpretation of Champlain as a pious son of the Church. This version, one of many, was published in good faith by the Abbé Laverdière as the frontispiece of his great Oeuvres de Champlain (1870).

  Dionne’s Paternal Champlain: Founder of Quebec, Father of New France

  In 1891, a new biography of Champlain appeared in Quebec. The author was Narcisse-Eutrope Dionne (1848–1917). Trained as a physician, he became a distinguished historian, an eminent scholar, and provincial archivist of Quebec. In the judgment of Marcel Trudel, Dionne became the leader of a generation of Canadian scholars who “advanced historical methodology.” He was careful with his sources and meticulous in his facts. At the same time, Dionne celebrated Champlain as a paragon of Catholic faith and virtue, a man “impossible to overpraise.” The book was revised in 1926, and reissued in 1962 in an abridged English translation.61 Other biographies followed quickly in the same vein. Leading works were by Abbé Henri-Raymond Casgrain in Quebec and Gabriel Gravier, who published in France. Gravier summarized his interpretation in two concluding sentences: “The name of Samuel de Champlain is inscribed in letters of gold on the frontispiece of the history of Canada…. He had been faithful to his God, his country, his work, and fundamentally, it is with good cause that he is called the First of Canadians.”62

  Benjamin Sulte’s Plebian Champlain: A Rough-Hewn Man of the People

  A new idea of Champlain appeared in the writing of Benjamin Sulte (1841–1923), a self-taught man of modest origins from Trois-Rivières, who fought against the Fenians, became a civil servant in Ottawa, and was a highly productive historian. His Histoire des Canadiens français in eight volumes (1882–84) was an extraordinary achievement by a prolific writer who is said to have published 3,500 articles in his career. History was Sulte’s life work and his great passion. “I wrote for the fun of it,” he said, “and made no money from any of it.”63

  Sulte took an important step forward in his writing. He moved beyond an idea of an history of Canada to write a massive history of Canadians. He was part of a world movement in historical writing. A kindred spirit was John Bach McMaster, whose History of the People of the United States began to appear in 1883.64 Th
ese scholars were passionate nationalists who thought of the nation not as a territory or a state, but as a people and a popular culture. Sulte celebrated the people of Canada and fiercely attacked historians in France, England, and the United States—especially Francis Parkman, whom he despised. But like Parkman he also thought in racial terms. A student of his career observed that he “uses the terms ‘people’ and ‘race’ interchangeably.” He celebrated the French Canadians as a race, and thought of Indians as racially inferior, and “hardly more civilized than animals.” At the same time he was a liberal anti-clericalist, hostile to the Jesuits and Catholic clergy, who sought power for the Church. Most of all, he was an outspoken agrarian, who thundered against commercial exploitation, and celebrated honest Canadian farmers and tillers of the soil.65

  Sulte brought all these passions to bear on the life of Samuel Champlain and created a new idea of him. He made Champlain his hero, and hoped that Canadian poets also would “study this great man’s career and celebrate his work.” Sulte described him as an honest, generous, disinterested man, who “died a victim of the egoism of the merchants and the pettiness of the Court.” In the many pages of Sulte’s work, Champlain was a man who opposed “mercantile interests” and worked to bring farmers to New France and establish an agrarian base for a new and more virtuous society. “Our forefathers were farmers,” Sulte wrote, and he thought of Champlain as their leader and patron.66 Sulte believed that the settlers of Sainte-Croix had failed because “most of them knew only city life; they were unable to fend for themselves; they were totally lacking in the initiative prevalent among rural people. It was a different matter when later Champlain was able to recruit farmers for the soil of Lower Canada! The resources of the country were available to these men of experience and good will; they took advantage of them; the Canadian spirit was in these men.”67 Altogether, Sulte thought of Champlain as a “patriot of the highest rank,” which in his thinking meant a man who served the welfare of ordinary French people in America. Sulte outraged conservatives of many stripes—businessmen, politicians of the right, and especially the clergy of Quebec, who preached and wrote against him. But his thinking was widely shared by others in his generation. His understanding of Champlain caught on, and his vision of a history for the people began to grow. Sulte and MacMaster were mocked by scholars of the old school, but they made a major contribution. Marcel Trudel wrote: “People derided Sulte, but he represents an important stage, because his work marks the advent of ordinary people—le petit peuple—as a subject for historians.”68

  This coarse image of Champlain as a plebian figure was engraved by French artist Eugene Ronjat and was used by Benjamin Sulte in his new interpretation of Champlain as a rough-hewn man of the people, circa 1882–1884.

  In 1870 the French artist Eugène Ronjat produced a new image of Champlain that perfectly matched Sulte’s plebian interpretation. The artist began with the fraudulent Ducornet-Morin engraving and rearranged its features. He enlarged the jowls and thickened the double chin. The features became more heavy and fleshy. The face bore marks of hard experience, and a scar ran downward from the mouth across the lower cheek. The bridge of the nose appeared to have be broken and badly healed. The eyes were large, sad, weary, and distant. It was the image of a man who had risen from poverty, identified with the people, experienced their suffering, shared their hopes, and known their sorrows. Ronjat’s engraving was reproduced in Benjamin Sulte’s Histoire des Canadiens français.

  Canadian Anglophones: An Imperial Champlain

  A very different Champlain emerged in the late nineteenth century, mainly from the work of English-speaking Canadians. A central figure was Sir Edmund Byron Walker (1848–1924), an eminent Victorian with a long white beard. He began as the son of English immigrant-farmers in Ontario. “I was taught,” he wrote, “to appreciate that the truth regarding nature was a divine thing, and that we must learn it so far as was possible.” His schooling ended at the age of twelve and he went to work as a clerk in a Hamilton bank, became its president, accumulated a large fortune, and devoted his wealth to the pursuit of the learning in Canada. A patron of the sciences and arts, Walker studied the Burgess Shale fossils, founded the Toronto Art Gallery, promoted the Canadian Group of Seven, supported classical music in Canada, and helped make the University of Toronto the great university that it is today. In 1905 he founded an organization to gather documents in Canadian history, and called it the Champlain Society.69

  The society’s first major publication was an edition of Champlain’s books, maps, engravings, and some of his manuscripts. The editor was Henry Percival Biggar (1872–1938), who was born in Carrying Place, Ontario, studied at the University of Toronto and Oxford, and became chief archivist for Canada in Europe. The object was to create a definitive bilingual edition with accurate texts in old French and modern English.70 In general the editors and translators did a careful job of establishing authentic French texts. With some exceptions they produced accurate translations, but notes and commentaries have been superseded by subsequent research.71 The Champlain Society also published more than ninety volumes of primary material, including bilingual editions of major primary sources for Champlain’s era.72

  Another scholar in this circle was William Francis Ganong (1864–1941). His Loyalist forbears had moved from New York to New Brunswick, and he preserved their strong sense of attachment to the British Empire. Ganong was a scientist who trained at the universities of New Brunswick, Harvard, and Munich and went on to become professor of Botany at Smith College in 1894. His hobby was the history of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and he applied his scientific discipline to the research, traveling through the region by canoe and on foot, interviewing Mi’kmaq and Maliseet informants, doing archaeological and documentary research in an empirical spirit. The result was a careful history of Champlain and the French settlement on Sainte-Croix, still in print and very useful.73 Ganong celebrated Champlain’s role as the founder of a bicultural New France that became part of Canada within the British Empire. He caught the mood of this interpretation when he wrote that Champlain’s career was part of the “expansion of two of the most virile races of Europe into the wonderful New World.”74

  Hero-Images of Champlain: The Monumental Man, 1898–1925

  This spirit flourished in Canada during the years from 1898 to 1925. Champlain became an heroic figure with many faces: a cultural hero for people of French identity throughout the world, a national hero for Canada, an imperial hero for the British Empire, and a Pan-American hero for admirers in the United States. A triggering event was the 300th anniversary of the founding of New France, which began to be celebrated as early as 1870 and continued for fifty years into the 1920s.

  The most striking expression of these proud attitudes were monuments of Champlain in many cities and towns. They were ornate structures of bronze and stone—large full-length figures, mounted on massive pedestals and set in prominent places—altogether, seven major monuments and many smaller ones.

  A new interpretation of Champlain as a powerful and energetic colonial leader appeared in this monument by French sculptor Paul Chevré, erected on Quebec’s Duff erin Terrace in 1898.

  One of most important was erected at Quebec in 1898: a statue more than four meters high, atop a massive pedestal. It stands in a dramatic spot on the Dufferin Terrace near the Château Frontenac, high above the old town, with a long view down the St. Lawrence River. Champlain appears to be striding forward into a wind that catches the folds of his clothing and blows it back against his muscular frame. French sculptor Paul Chevré invented a very masculine image, far removed from Ducornet’s engraving. Champlain’s body has the strength of youth, and his face has the character of maturity. He wears a handsome doublet, broad breeches, and high-topped seven-league boots. Strapped to his side is his heavy sword, sheathed in its scabbard but ready for use. He has swept off his broad-brimmed hat with its great panache, in what historians have variously interpreted as a salute to the city of
Quebec or to the land of Canada. In his other hand he holds a roll of papers, which might be his commission from the old world or his plans for the new. This is a portrait of Champlain as a great founder and a formidable leader.75

  Other monuments stressed different aspects of Champlain’s life and work. In the maritime city of Saint John, New Brunswick, sculptor Hamilton MacCarthy created a full-length bronze monument to commemorate Champlain’s first visit on St. John’s Day, June 24, 1605. It is an image of Champlain as an explorer, holding one of his maps. For the tercentenary, a huge celebration was staged on the same day in 1905, with a reenactment, speeches, and parades. The monument itself was finally completed on June 24, 1910. One observer wrote that Champlain “was perched at a less lofty height than in Quebec city, but he appeared more dynamic, pointing toward the horizon, like a guide or a visionary.”76

  On July 4, 1907, another monument to Champlain was erected in the United States, in the small town of Champlain, New York, on the border with Canada. This community had been settled by a francophone population from Quebec. Its Catholic priest, Father François-Xavier Chagnon, was the driving spirit. He raised $4,800, mainly from French Canadian immigrants throughout the United States. Patrice Groulx writes that “all of Franco-America was asked to contribute by its clergy and national societies.” The bronze monument was erected between the Catholic and Presbyterian churches within what Groulx calls “the symbolic perimeter of francophone Catholicism.” It still stands as a symbol of national pride in the history of Quebec, the heritage of New France and the values that Champlain personified.