Champlain's Dream

by David Hackett Fischer

  The new social history developed in many different forms. In Britain it was linked to issues of social class. In the United States, it gave more attention to race and gender. In Canada, social historians were very eclectic, and their work was among the best in the world. The leader was Marcel Trudel, a truly great and highly prolific historian. He was born in 1915 at the small country village of Saint-Narcisse-de-Champlain north of Trois-Rivières, one of eleven children. After the death of his mother, he was raised by his relatives in a very large extended family and educated in religious schools. “In my student days,” he remembered, “the nuns of Quebec City’s Hôtel-Dieu were still singing an annual mass for the Hundred Associates of 1627…. I myself as a youth, and even in recent years, lived under institutions established during the French Regime.”111

  Trudel was raised in a culture of discipline, piety, and authority. He rebeled against it, and his early writings were about Pascal and Voltaire. In 1939 he won a scholarship to study in Paris, but the war intervened, and he went instead to Harvard. He explored the United States, wrote a novel, and decided that history was the path for him. Trudel taught at Université Laval, joined the Mouvement laïque de langue française, and sought the “entire laicization of society” and the growth of a pluralist society. In Quebec he was bitterly attacked, even by a close friend from the pulpit in his own parish. After that, he wrote, “I left the church, and at the same time I left the Church.”112 At Laval, he was passed over for promotion, and decided to leave the university. All his books and papers were burned in a mysterious fire. Offers came from many Canadian universities and he went to anglophone Carleton. Trudel wrote at the age of forty-eight, “I was beginning anew with a wonderful enthusiasm, in an atmosphere of freedom such as I had never known.”113

  Trudel wrote in a large spirit, and published more than forty volumes, mostly on the history of New France from 1524 to 1760. Trudel’s scholarship was scientific, empirical, meticulous, distinguished by a quality of craftmanship and careful research. Marcel Gagnon observed that Trudel achieved an “authenticity that was probably without equal in French Canada.”114 His major project is an Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, of which five volumes have appeared. It has an extraordinary mastery of sources, and a depth of detailed description and analysis that is unrivaled in any other work. Altogether, it is one of the masterworks of modern history in any language.115

  Among many other works, Trudel also published a book on Champlain, a collection of documents with an important interpretative essay. He also contributed a brief sketch on Champlain to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.116 Where Parkman had thought of Champlain as a medieval man, Trudel saw him as a man caught up in the intellectual currents of his own time, and in the commercial revolution of the early modern era. Trudel argued that Champlain opposed the fur traders’ idea of a colonie comptoir, a colony that was a trading post, and had a larger vision of a colonie commerciale, which was stable and “well populated” with a rounded economy that would ensure a permanent commerce with France. “This,” wrote Trudel, “was the entire drama of his life.”117

  Trudel was critical of Champlain and other Catholic leaders of New France in another way, for not doing more to promote Protestant settlement in New France, which “would have totally altered the history of Protestantism in America; French Protestantism would have had a dominant and long lasting influence here.”118 But mainly Trudel’s Champlain was “a man of ever-reviving plans,” who despite many defeats succeeded in founding three permanent French settlements in America. Trudel’s short biography concluded: “At the starting point of the uninterrupted history of Canada we find Champlain. He was at its origin by his own choice, and because of the principles in which he believed. In him we must salute the founder of Canada.” Trudel’s entire corpus of work is our leading history of that great process.119

  The New Demographic History

  Another advance came with the invention of historical demography. The leaders were French scholars at the Institut national d’études démographiques in Paris. There Louis Henry and others invented a rigorous new method for the study of populations before modern vital registration systems. It is called family reconstitution, and it laboriously reconstructs the demographic history of individual families from fragmentary records of baptism, marriage, and burial in the early modern era.120

  One of its first successes was in the history of New France, where Catholic clergy kept meticulous parish records, and genealogists such as Cyprien Tanguey gathered materials of exceptional strength. In Canada these sources were combined with rigorous methods of family reconstitution to produce some of the best historical demography in the world. A pioneering work appeared in 1954, when Jacques Henripin applied the methods of Louis Henry to Canada, and studied 570 families in Quebec during the seventeenth century. With great care Henripin measured their astonishing fertility. He found that early Québécois families that remained intact to the mother’s age of fifty produced an average of nine children and the population had a doubling time of less than twenty years by natural increase.121

  In 1966, Hubert Charbonneau and a team of Canadian historical demographers established a Programme de recherche en démographie historique at the Université de Montréal. They launched a larger reconstitution project on the entire population of Quebec to 1850, based on parish registers, genealogical materials, and census data that had been refined by Trudel and others. This great labor produced a study of unrivaled depth, rigor, and comprehension. It found that as many as eight million people of French-Québécois ancestry were living in North America during the early twenty-first century. They descended from a very small population of 1,425 women who crossed the Atlantic between 1608 and 1680, and perhaps 1,800 men. An even smaller number of forbears produced an Acadian population that has spread throughout the world, and other interesting patterns apppeared for Métis populations.122

  This demographic research, when combined with the new social history of Trudel and with sources on Champlain, locates an inflection point for sustained population growth in Quebec and Acadia during the years from 1632 to 1635—a moment of deep change between two change-regimes. All this work gives new significance to the role of Champlain, and to his choices in that critical period of deep change.

  Economic and Econometric History: From Biggar to Innis and Egnal

  In the twentieth century, new research in economic history also enlarged our understanding of Champlain and his world. The early work was descriptive and institutional, and the best of it is still very useful. A leading example is H. P. Biggar’s study of trading companies in New France. On the basis of primary research, Biggar credited Champlain with playing the central role in the economic development of New France from 1608 to 1635, by strongly supporting commercial companies, developing a sound economic policy, and framing an Indian policy that worked. Biggar wrote, “It was the failure of his successors to adopt this policy which brought such ruin and disaster on the colony in later years.”123

  In the mid-twentieth century, as the discipline of economics became more theoretical, a great Canadian scholar, Harold Innis, took the lead in developing a new theory of early modern economic growth which has come to be called the staple model. He and his followers hypothesized that when factors of production such as labor and capital shifted to a resource-rich environment, marginal returns rose and productivity increased without change in technology. A fisherman who moved from European waters to the Grand Bank suddenly became much more productive, by reason of the greater abundance of larger fish. The same thing happened in extractive industries such as furs and forest products. Innis’s staple model has since been applied throughout the world and is critically important in econometric history, as explaining a transitional stage of economic growth in the early modern era.124

  The staple theory helps us to understand how the economy of New France grew, and why it did not grow more rapidly. The fur trade and fishing industries were so profitable that for two centuries they drew c
apital away from other patterns of investment that yielded less in the short term but much more in the long run. A new generation of theory-driven econometric history gives us a better way of understanding Champlain’s economic policies and acts. And Champlain’s career in turn helps us to understand how this process of staple-growth developed through the acts and choices of individual people. Other opportunities exist for the study of Champlain’s experiments in mixed enterprise, which took him beyond practices in his era, and also beyond the constraints of neo-classical economic theory in our own time.125

  Images: A Streamlined Champlain as a Symbol of Economic Development

  In 1958, Canadians observed yet another anniversary, the 350th birthday of Quebec, by creating a new image of Champlain. It appeared on a postage stamp designed specially for the occasion by an artist with a sense of humor. An imagined face of Champlain appears from a new angle. He is seen in profile. The features are consistent with earlier images and once again follow the formula of Benjamin Sulte: “lively eyes, thin cheeks, accentuated aquiline nose, a thin mustache, light imperial beard, and the head set squarely on the shoulders in the attitude of a man on the lookout. A slight air of a musketeer, in short.”

  But this time that image is drawn in a different spirit. The founder’s profile is streamlined, with a bold simplicity of line that was typical of mid-twentieth century design. Much of the face is drawn with a few flowing curves. The curve of the brow and the aquiline nose make a single line. This streamlined Champlain is looking toward the modern city of Quebec, with its tall buildings and the Château Frontenac rising high above his own Old Town. In the foreground a passenger ship sails down the river, which is now part of the great St. Lawrence Seaway, begun in 1954 and completed in the spring of 1959. Champlain in his seventeenth century dress studies this twentieth century scene with a look of satisfaction. The interplay of past and present makes a charming, witty, and very gallic drôlerie historique.

  Marxist and Neo-Marxist History: Hunt to Delâge

  In the twentieth century, Marxists have contributed much important scholarship to our understanding of Champlain. Marx and Engels themselves were interested in applying their models to early stages of history, and studied Lewis Henry Morgan’s great work on the Iroquois with close attention.126 In the troubled years of the 1930s, Marxist historiography grew rapidly in North America. An important and provocative book appeared in George Hunt’s The Wars of the Iroquois, an exercise in historical materialism. It argued that the power of the Iroquois derived from their central position in trading relationships among European and Indian nations, and that their wars were driven by economic determinants. This thesis received much criticism from non-Marxists for its reductive model and its determinism, which in some forms made individuals into the objects of history, rather than its agents. But the best Marxist scholarship was careful in its chronology, precise in its causal models, and it deepened understanding of structure and process even for historians who did not share its ideological assumptions.127

  In the late twentieth century, an academic movement called neo-Marxism gathered strength throughout the world. One of the best scholars of this school is the Canadian social scientist Denys Delâge. In 1985, he published a major work called Le pays renversé: Amérindiens et Européens en Amérique du Nordest, 1600–1664. It has been translated by Jane Brierley as Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America.128 This work is Marxist in its historical materialism, its model of historical stages, and its attention to systems of production. It is neoMarxist in its attempt to integrate a materialist model with cultural history and in its efforts to combine a concern for individual actors with its attention to structure and process. Delâge summarized his frame in a sentence: “The race to accumulate capital drove European ships to the shores of northeastern North America, bringing into conflict two civilizations—one on the brink of the Industrial Revolution, the other still in the Stone Age.”129

  Delâge gave much attention to individual acts and choices, especially those of Champlain. He wrote: “Champlain, more than anyone, understood that simply being a trader was not enough when engaging in the fur trade. Amerindian mores must be taken into account. This is the secret of his success—not just the force of his personality, but his ability to organize the fur trade in ways that were compatible to the two economies.” He also recognized that the Indians played equally vital roles: “Champlain would travel seated in the middle of a canoe manned by Amerindians…. Without the Amerindians, neither Champlain nor the Jesuits would have been able to draw maps of northeastern North America.” But at the same time he reminded the reader, “It is not so much the political acts of their leaders that interest us as the transition of these social groups to capitalism.”130

  Denys Delâge constructed a neo-Marxist interpretation of Champlain as important for structuring the fur trade, and as a French leader who “would travel seated in the middle of a canoe manned by Amerindians,” and could not have functioned without them. Both themes were captured in this image.

  Delâge was careful with his evidence and attentive to fact, but I would tend to disagree on one issue of interpretation. He observes that the early French settlers and Indians of Acadia and the St. Lawrence Valley lived close together, “traded, made treaties, and intermarried,” but he believes that “the relationship between First Nations and the French was based on a serious misunderstanding.” Here was the Marxist theme of “false consciousness” for historical actors who were in denial of the Dialectic. Another interpretation is a better fit for the evidence. The alliance of Champlain and the Indians rested on a solid basis of material interest, in terms of military security, trading networks, and political coalitions. One might ask, what choices would have served them better? These were highly intelligent people on both sides, and they had a deep understanding of their alliances in both their costs and benefits. Others will disagree.131

  The New Ethnohistory: Bruce Trigger

  While Trudel, the historical demographers, economic historians, and the new Marxists were at work on their projects, another important field for Champlain scholarship was rapidly developing. Historical ethnography emerged from the interplay of many academic disciplines. It transformed our knowledge of native culture in North America and had a major impact on Champlain studies.

  Among its leaders was Bruce Trigger, an archaeologist and anthropologist at McGill University. His idea of ethnohistory was a step forward in two ways at once. It expanded historical methods in anthropology, and applied ethnographic methods to history.132 Trigger’s The Children of Aataen-tsic recast the history of an Indian nation in its own terms rather than those of Europeans. In that effort it brought a new depth of understanding to the history of the Huron in particular and American Indians in general, in large part by studying them as agents rather than objects of historical processes. Trigger found that Huron history had been dynamic before European contact, that it must be understood in terms of relations within and among indigenous populations, and that “Huron culture flourished as a result of European contact as long as the Huron people were not dominated by Europeans.” The book was less successful in its interpretation of the French, and denied to European actors the empathy and empirical understanding that it demanded for the Indians. Even so Trigger’s work on Huron remains a landmark of historical ethnography and a major contribution to the history of an indigenous nation.133

  Academic Iconoclasts: Trigger Once More

  In the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of academic historians came of age. They were very diverse in their interests but shared an historical moment that framed their thought and set them apart from generations that preceded and followed. Many worked in the new social and cultural history, particularly in the study of race, class, gender, and ethnicity, and they greatly expanded the discipline of history in those dimensions. They tended to move toward the political left, even the far left; and they matured at a time when North American governments and electorates were
shifting to the right. Their early work was positive in tone. The Civil Rights movement and liberal governments in the early sixties gave them much encouragement. But then came Vietnam, Watergate, and the world events of 1968, which many on the academic left remembered as a revolution that failed. In North America, historians of the left became deeply alienated from their own societies and institutions, and were filled with rage and bitterness.

  The result was the growth of iconoclastic writing about American culture and American leaders. In scholarship on Champlain, the strongest iconoclastic voice was that of Bruce Trigger. In 1971 he brought out an article called “Champlain Judged by His Indian Policy: A Different View of Early Canadian History,” and followed with a larger work, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered.134 Trigger argued persuasively that much writing in early American history had been ignorant and contemptuous of Indians, and he made a strong plea for an integration of historical and ethnographic approaches. Many historians were with him on that. But then he turned to the history of the French in America and dismissed out of hand much of what had been published on the subject. Trigger wrote that virtually all “biographies of Champlain, even recent ones, were mere hagiography.” Among them he included the work of Dionne, Bishop, Morison, Trudel, and many others. He launched a sweeping and highly personal attack on Champlain, reversing the judgments that most scholars had made before him.