Assimilation and racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French colonial policy

American Historical Review

Volumn 110, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 322-349

  Belmessous, Saliha ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 29144444128     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/531317     Document Type: Review

References (253)

1. François de Fénelon, Dialogues des morts: Composés pour l'éducation d'un prince (Paris, 1718), dialogue 10.
2. On discussions of race in French thought, see André Devyer, Le sang épuré: Les préjugés de race chez lesgentilhommes français de l'Ancien Régime, 1560-1720 (Brussels, 1973);
3. e siècle (Montpellier, 1981);
4. and Sue Peabody, "There Are No Slaves in France": The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York, 1996).
5. On race in French colonization, see Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur, eds., Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France (Basingstoke, 2002);
6. Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall, eds., The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (Durham, N.C., 2003).
7. Peabody and Stovall, Color of Liberty, 4-5.
8. On French "colonial genius," see eighteenth-century Jesuit historian Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix who wrote, "Only our Nation knows the secret of winning the Americans' affection." Charlevoix, Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle-France, 6 vols. (Paris, 1744), 1: vij.
9. See also Francis Parkman, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (Boston, 1898), 44;
10. Mason Wade, "The French and the Indians," in Howard Peckham and Charles Gibson, eds., Attitudes of Colonial Powers toward the American Indian (Salt Lake City, 1969), 61-80;
11. Grilles Paquet and Jean-Pierre Wallot, "Nouvelle-France/ Québec/Canada: A World of Limited Identities," in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World (Princeton, N.J., 1987), 98;
12. Cornelius Jaenen, "French and Native Peoples in New France," in J. M. Bumsted, ed., Interpreting Canada's Past, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (Toronto, 1993), 1: 80.
13. For skepticism of this historiographic tradition, see Robert Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York, 1978), 116;
14. Bruce Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada's "Heroic Age" Reconsidered (Montreal, 1985), 299-300;
15. John A. Dickinson, "French and British Attitudes to Native Peoples in Colonial North America," Storia Nordamericana 4, nos. 1-2 (1987): 41-56.
16. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, 1991).
17. A few exceptions must be acknowledged: Cornelius J. Jaenen, '"Les Sauvages Ameriquains': Persistence into the Eighteenth Century of Traditional French Concepts and Constructs for Comprehending Amerindians," Ethnohistory 29, no. 1 (1982): 43-56;
18. Olive P. Dickason, The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas (Edmonton, 1984);
19. Allan Greer, "Colonial Saints: Gender, Race and Hagiography in New France," William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 57, no. 2 (2000): 323-48;
20. Jennifer M. Spear, "Colonial Intimacies: Legislating Sex in French Louisiana," William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 60, no. 1 (2003): 75-98;
21. Guillaume Aubert, "'The Blood of France': Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World," William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 61, no. 3 (2004): 439-78;
22. Frédéric Régent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté: La Révolution française en Guadeloupe, 1789-1802 (Paris, 2004).
23. 11A, vol. 38, fol. 210.
24. George F. G. Stanley, "The Policy of 'Francisation' as Applied to the Indians during the Ancien Regime," Revue d'Histoire de l'Amérique Française 3, no. 3 (December 1949): 333-48;
25. Cornelius J. Jaenen, Friend and Foe: Aspects of French-Amerindian Cultural Contact in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1976) is right to underline that "French policy towards the Amerindians ... was based on assimilationist concepts," but he fails to analyze the consequences of the policy of francisation.
26. James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York, 1985), 23-70, deals particularly with the Jesuit missionaries' activity, and his presentation of the civil policy of francisation is both descriptive and very brief; moreover, colonial authorities are considered in relation to their opposition to the Jesuits.
27. Although the word métissage did not appear in the French language before 1834,1 have chosen to use it, even if it may be seen as anachronistic, to refer to a situation it best describes. On the importance of miscegenation in colonial policies, see the comparative study of Patrick Wolfe, "Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race," AHR 106, no. 3 (2001): 866-905.
28. On hybrid places, see White, Middle Ground;
29. on hybrid artifacts, see Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass., 1991)
30. and Serge Gruzinski, La pensée métisse (Paris, 1999);
31. on hybrid peoples, see Daniel K. Richter, "Cultural Brokers and Intercultural Politics: New York-Iroquois Relations, 1664-1701," Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988): 40-67.
32. On intermarriage and gender relations, see Peggy Pascoe, "Race, Gender, and Intercultural Relations: The Case of Interracial Marriage," Frontiers 12, no. 1 (1991): 5-18;
33. on miscegenation in the peripheral French settlements, see Spear, "Colonial Intimacies";
34. and Carl J. Ekberg, French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times (Urbana, Ill., 1998);
35. on colonial experiences with native peoples, see especially Trigger, Natives and Newcomers;
36. and White, Middle Ground;
37. on the action of the church in francisation, see mainly Cornelius Jaenen, The Role of the Church in New France (Toronto, 1976)
38. and Friend and Foe;
39. see also Axtell, Invasion Within;
40. on the construction of racial boundaries in France, see Peabody, "There Are No Slaves in France";
41. and Peabody and Stovall, Color of Liberty.
42. Olive P. Dickason has studied intermarriages in "From 'One Nation' in the Northeast to 'New Nation' in the Northwest: A Look at the Emergence of the Métis," in Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S. H. Brown, eds., The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America (Winnipeg, 1985), 19-36. The perspective chosen in this article (the creation of a métis identity) has, however, limited her analysis of these marriages. Dickason writes correctly that they were increasingly forbidden and discusses the material conditions that justified this interdiction, but she does not look at the consequences of this decision.
43. On miscegenation as a way to erase Amerindians physically and/or culturally in the nineteenth-century United States, see Wolfe, "Land, Labor, and Difference," 885-93.
44. Such quick judgments can be found in White, Middle Ground, 69-70.
45. Alden T. Vaughan, Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (New York, 1995);
46. Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, 1996);
47. Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods," William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 54, no. 1 (1997): 103-42;
48. Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001);
49. for a comprehensive summary of these debates, see Chaplin, "Race," in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Basingstoke, 2002), 154-72.
50. George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York, 1978);
51. Jacqueline Duvernay-Bolens, Les Géants Patagons: Voyage aux origines de l'homme (Paris, 1995);
52. Hannaford, Race;
53. Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (Houndsmills, 1996).
54. On the construction of race in the British colonies, see Joyce E. Chaplin, "Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing English and Indian Bodies," William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 54, no. 1 (1997): 229-52;
55. and Chaplin, Subject Matter;
56. on race in Spanish America, see Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, "New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600-1650," AHR 104, no. 1 (1999): 33-68;
57. on the Amerindian invention and use of racial categories, see Nancy Shoemaker, "How Indians Got to Be Red," AHR 102, no. 3 (1997): 625-44.
58. Compare Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580-1640 (Totowa, N.J., 1980)
59. and Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000).
60. On the effects of alcohol on religion, see André Vachon, "L'eau-de-vie dans la société indienne," Canadian Historical Association Annual Report (1960): 22-32;
61. on natives' social use of alcohol to solve internal conflicts without weakening the community, see John A. Dickinson, '"C'est l'eau-de-vie qui a commis ce meurtre': Alcool et criminalité amérindienne à Montréal sous le régime français," Études Canadiennes/Canadian Studies 35 (1993): 83-94;
62. see also Peter Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995).
63. Commissions du Roy et de Monseigneur l'Admirai au sieur de Monts pour l'habitation des terres de l'Acadie, Canada, et autres endroits en la Nouvelle-France (1605)
64. in Albert Duchêne, La politique coloniale de la France: Le ministère des colonies depuis Richelieu (Paris, 1928), 15.
65. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 73 vols. (New York, 1959), 5: 211 for the quote, and 10: 26.
66. Jean-Baptiste Colbert to Intendant Jean Talon, January 5, 1666, Rapport de l'archiviste de la province de Québec pour 1930-31 (Québec, 1931), 41.
67. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the philosopher Denis Diderot could still argue that "it would be going against the very purpose of the colonies to establish them by depopulating the ruling country." Encyclopédie, s.v. "Colonies,"
68. cited in Jean Meyer et al., Histoire de la France coloniale: I, La conquête (Paris, 1991), 19, my translation.
69. On the expansionist content of the ideology of grandeur, see David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000);
70. on French colonial ambitions, see William J. Eccles, France in America (New York, 1972);
71. Meyer et al., Histoire de la France coloniale, 38-41;
72. Philippe Haudrère, L'Empire des rois, 1500-1789 (Paris, 1997).
73. Colbert to Jean Talon, January 5, 1666, Rapport de l'archiviste de la province de Québec pour 1930-31, 45.
74. Colbert's promotion of interracial mixing has been strangely overlooked in James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670-1730 (Cambridge, 2004), 18-19.
75. On the absence of racial prejudice, as opposed to cultural prejudice, see Bruce Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Montreal, 1976), 274.
76. However, intermarriage and mixed sexual relations taken out of their political context did not imply, as it has recently been argued, that racial and social prejudices could be overcome by the elite. For this statement, see Gary B. Nash, "A Tale of Three Cities (and Their Hinterlands): Race Mixture in Colonial North America," in Serge Gruzinski and Nathan Wachtel, eds., Le Nouveau Monde, Mondes Nouveaux: L'expérience américaine (Paris, 1996), 54.
77. e siècle (Paris, 1985).
78. Berkhofer, Jr., White Man's Indian;
79. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, 1982);
80. Frank Lestringant, Le Huguenot et le Sauvage: L'Amérique et la controverse coloniale, au temps des Guerres de religion (1555-1589) (Paris, 1990);
81. Dickason, Myth of the Savage.
82. Marc Lescarbot, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France (Paris, 1612), xvi-xvii, 4;
83. "Edit du Roy contenant le pouvoir et Commission donnée par sa Majesté au Marquis de Cottenmeal et de la Roche pour la conquête des terres de Canada, Labrador, Ile de Sable, Norembergue, et pays adjacens," January 12, 1598, in Lescarbot, History of New France, H. P. Biggar and W. L. Grant, eds., 3 vols. (Toronto, 1907), 2: 398-405;
84. the patent Henri IV gave to Sieur de Monts on November 8,1603 gave the same title and the same justification for colonization (History of New France, 2: 409).
85. A few examples of such unions can be found in Dickason, "From One Nation," 25-26. Similarly, misalliance between common people and nobles in France did not put into question the institution of marriage.
86. That unsubstantiated argument is found in Dickason, Myth of the Savage, 146-47.
87. Confusing translations can be found in Dickason, Myth of the Savage, 21, 27, 28;
88. and Axtell, Invasion Within, 68.
89. On the "anachronistic use of new concepts of [our] times to translate somewhat similar ancient terms," see Bernard Crick, "Foreword," in Hannaford, Race, xii.
90. Pierre Richelet, Dictionnaire français (1679; rpt. edn., Geneva, 1970);
91. on race as a belief in inherited inequality, see Jouanna, L'idée de race en France, 23;
92. on moral and physical dispositions inherited through lineage, see Devyer, Le sang épuré, 36, 164-69;
93. on the development of the idea of race as a belief in biological inequality in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe, see Hannaford, Race, chap. 7.
94. 11A, vol. 2, fol. 332.
95. François Bernier, "Nouvelle division de la terre, par les differentes Especes, ou Races d'hommes qui l'habitent, envoyée par un fameux Voyageur à M. l'Abbé de la *** à peu près en ces termes," Journal des Sçavans (1684): 133-40.
96. On the historical significance of Bernier's discourse on race, see Siep Stuurman, "François Bernier and the Invention of Racial Classification," History Workshop Journal 50 (Autumn 2000): 1-21;
97. and Pierre H. Boulle, "François Bernier and the Origins of the Modern Concept of Race," in Peabody and Stovall, Color of Liberty, 20.
98. King Louis XIV to Governor General Frontenac, April 22, 1675, Rapport de l'archiviste de la province de Québec pour 1926-27, 80.
99. On the pre-Enlightenment origins of the progressive theory of history, see Peter Burke, "America and the Rewriting of World History," in Karen Kupperman, ed., America in European Consciousness, 1493-1750 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995), 33-51;
100. and David Armitage, "The New World and British Historical Thought," in Kupperman, America in European Consciousness, 52-75.
101. Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, 98-99.
102. The English missionaries argued similarity that "In order to make them Christians, they [the Amerindians] must first be made Men." See Axtell, Invasion Within, chap. 7, and 131 for the quote.
103. The construction of a "French" identity is not discussed in the present essay. I have examined it at length in Saliha Belmessous, "Etre français en Nouvelle-France: Identité française et identité coloniale aux dix-septième et dix-huitième siècles," French Historical Studies 27 (Summer 2004): 507-40.
104. Governor Frontenac to Minister, November 13, 1673, Rapport de l'archiviste de la province de Québec pour 1926-27, 43;
105. 11A, vol. 7, fol. 106. Acquiring literacy was also part of the program: on writing and the possession of reason, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Writing 'Race' and the Difference It Makes," in Gates, Jr., ed., "Race," Writing, and Difference (Chicago, 1985): 8;
106. on the perceived necessity of literacy and writing for the possession of history, and on savagery and the absence of literacy, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, Calif., 2001), 114-29.
107. 11A, vol. 7, fol. 152.
108. "Article XVII de la charte de la compagnie des Cent-Associés, " in Mercure de France, XIV, 245
109. cited by Pierre Clément, ed., Lettres, instructions et mémoires de Colbert, 7 vols. (Paris, 1865), 3: 2, 404.
110. Samuel de Champlain, The Works of Samuel de Champlain, H. P. Biggar, éd., 6 vols. (Toronto, 1929), 3: 4, 145-46.
111. 11A, vol. 5, fols. 290, 317; Marc Jetten, Enclaves amérindiennes: Les réductions du Canada, 1637-1701 (Sillery, Québec, 1994), 130-34. On the history of native Catholic villages, see this brief and useful synthesis.
112. Colbert to Governor Frontenac, May 8, 1679, Rapport de l'archiviste de la province de Québec pour 1926-27.
113. Louis XIV to Bishop Lavai, March 2, 1668, cited by G. Stanley, "Policy of Francisation," 340;
114. Colbert to Jean Talon, February 20,1668, Rapport de l'archiviste de la province de Québec pour 1930-31, 94-95;
115. and February 11, 1671, 147; Louis XIV to Governor Frontenac, April 22, 1675 and May 12, 1678; and Colbert to Frontenac, May 8, 1679, Rapport de l'archiviste de la province de Québec pour 1926-27.
116. Allan Greer, The People of New France (Toronto, 1997), 17
117. followed by Aubert, "Blood of France," 454-55, has recently claimed that the state-funded transportation of about 770 French single women (filles du roi) to Canada between 1663 and 1673 showed that the policy of intermarrying was already abandoned. Greer states that "the 'king's daughters' program represented a racial reorientation as much as a demographic developmentalist agenda." Yet the endowment of Christian native women, twenty years after the supposed abandonment of intermarriage, invalidates such statements: intermarriage was still promoted even if few blessed unions were celebrated. The crown sent French women to invigorate colonial demographic development. The "filles du roi" program was parallel to francisation; it was not an alternative. It was a short-term program whereas francisation was still the long-term one.
118. e siècle (Paris and Montreal, 1987), 8-9, 15, 58.
119. Sarah M. S. Pearsall, "Gender," in Armitage and Braddick, The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, 120.
120. Jean Delumeau and Daniel Roche, eds., Histoire des pères et de la paternité (Paris, 1990), 44, 58, 61-62, 71-72, 131, 136;
121. Jean-Louis Flandrin, Familles: Parenté, maison, sexualité dans l'ancienne société, rev. edn. (1976; Paris, 1984), 117-18;
122. Pierre Darmon, Le mythe de la procréation à l'âge baroque (Paris, 1977);
123. Jouanna, L'idée de race en France, 75;
124. on the physical differences thought to exist between men and women, see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
125. On gender and colonialism, see especially Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, 1995);
126. Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996);
127. and Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York, 1999).
128. Isabelle Perrault, "Le métissage en Nouvelle-France" (M.Sc. thesis, Université de Montréal, 1980), 235;
129. Dickason, "From One Nation," 19, 21-22.
130. On the political use of sex in French America, see Spear, "Colonial Intimacies";
131. on French-Amerindian alliance, see Denys Delâge, "L'alliance franco-amérindienne, 1660-1701," Recherches Amérindiennes au Québec 19, no. 1 (1989): 3-15;
132. and White, Middle Ground, chap. 4.
133. Similar policies were used when the French tried to colonize the island of Maranhão in northern Brazil between 1612 and 1614 and in the early days of colonization of the Illinois country and Florida in the eighteenth century (see Dickason, "From One Nation," 33 n. 16).
134. On the use of assimilation to dispossess indigenous peoples, see Wolfe, "Land, Labor, and Difference," 867, 885;
135. on French early colonial claims, see Brian Slattery, "French Claims in North America, 1500-59," Canadian Historical Review 59, no. 2 (1978): 139-69;
136. on the European religious argument to justify colonization, see Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York, 1990), 66, 80-81;
137. on the development of French claims throughout French rule, see Belmessous, "D'un préjugé culturel à un préjugé racial: La politique indigène de la France au Canada" (Ph.D. dissertation, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1999), 316-40.
138. 11A, vol. 6, fol. 90. Demographers have confirmed De Meulles's estimate, recording six official intermarriages for the seventeenth century (that is 1.6 marriages for a thousand) and ninety-five for the whole period of the French regime. See Hubert Charbonneau and Yves Landry, "La politique démographique en Nouvelle-France," Annales de démographie historique (1979): 54.
139. e siècles [Saint-Laurent, Québec, 1996], 191).
140. 11A, vol. 6, fols. 87-88.
141. Paul Le Jeune, "Relation of What Occurred in New France in the Year 1633," in Thwaites, The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 5: 145;
142. on Jesuit efforts to convert Amerindians to Christianity, see Axtell, Invasion Within, 46-127.
143. Jetten, Enclaves amérindiennes, 128.
144. Officials' opposition to the Jesuits was part of a larger effort to decrease ecclesiastical authority to the benefit of royal power. See Axtell, Invasion Within, 67, 69;
145. and James F. Traer, Marriage and Family in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980), 22-47.
146. Colbert, "Instruction pour M. de Bouterone, intendant du Canada, 5 avril 1668," in Clément, Lettres, instructions et mémoires de Colbert, 3: 2, 404.
147. Eccles, "Sovereignty-Association," 479, 493, 498;
148. White, Middle Ground 69, 74, 165.
149. Bruce M. White, "The Woman Who Married a Beaver: Trade Patterns and Gender Roles in the Ojibwa Fur Trade," Ethnohistory 46, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 128, 138.
150. White, Middle Ground, 65-66.
151. Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870 (1980; Norman, Okla., 1983), 4;
152. White, Middle Ground, 65, 69;
153. White, "Woman Who Married a Beaver";
154. Susan Sleeper-Smith, "Women, Kin, and Catholicism: New Perspectives on the Fur Trade," Ethnohistory 47, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 423-51.
155. Jan Grabowski, "The Common Ground: Settled Natives and French in Montreal, 1667-1760" (Ph.D. dissertation, Université de Montréal, 1993).
156. On the close link between the fur trade and intermarriage, see Jacqueline Peterson, "Many Roads to Red River: Métis Genesis in the Great Lakes Region, 1680-1815," in Peterson and Brown, The New Peoples, 53.
157. Farming was the responsibility of women in northeastern and northwestern indigenous societies: see Bruce G. Trigger, ed., Northeast, vol. 15 of Handbook of North American Indians, William C. Sturtevant, ed. (Washington, D.C., 1978).
158. 11A, vol. 7, fols. 90-91 for the quote; September 10, 1686, vol. 8, fol. 146; Denonville, "Mémoire à Monseigneur de Seignelay," August 10, 1688, vol. 10, fol. 66;
159. Denonville, "Mémoire concernant le Canada pour Monseigneur le marquis de Seignelay fait en janvier 1690," vol. 11, fol. 188.
160. 11A, vol. 10, fol. 26.
161. Denonville's plea for military conquest was not exceptional: François de Laval, bishop of Quebec and apostolic vicar between 1658 and 1688, called several times for military action against the Iroquois to ensure the evangelization of indigenous peoples. See Luca Codignola, "The Holy See and the Conversion of the Indians in French and British North America, 1486-1760," in Kupperman, America in European Consciousness, 211.
162. 11A, vol. 5, fol. 317.
163. 11A, vol. 17, fol. 101.
164. Stanley discusses the three essential factors for assimilation in "Policy of Francisation," 347.
165. 11A, vol. 14, fol. 47; Governor Vaudreuil to Minister, September 16, 1714, Rapport de l'archiviste de la province de Québec pour 1947-48 (Québec, 1948), 268;
166. 11A, vol. 67, fol. 104; "Mémoire ou Journal sommaire du voyage de Jacques Repentigny Legardeur de Saint Pierre chevalier de l'Ordre Royal et Militaire de St Louis, capitaine d'une compagnie des troupes détachées de la Marine en Canada, chargé de la découverte de la mer de l'Ouest (1750-1752)," Explorations du nord-ouest: Journal de La Vérendrye (1738-1739), 160
167. Newberry Library, Chicago, Ayer Collection, 169.8, N8 L2; "Relation de Mr Poulariès envoyée à Mr le Marquis de Montcalm, 1757," Rapport de l'archiviste de la province de Québec pour 1931-32 (Québec, 1932), 61.
168. e siècle" (M.A. thesis, Université de Montréal, 1981);
169. and Catherine M. Desbarats, "The Cost of Early Canada's Native Alliances: Reality and Scarcity's Rhetoric," William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 52, no. 41 (1995): 619-20. Attempts to manipulate the natives should not, however, be interpreted as a sign of indifference to conversion. Even if Christianity was no longer at the heart of early modern nobiliary thought and culture, the de-Christianization of the French elites had not yet transpired.
170. e siècle (Paris, 1978), 264.
171. 11A, vol. 6, fol. 140.
172. e siècle (1974; rpt. edn., Montreal, 1988), 173-76.
173. 11A, vol. 9, fol. 75.
174. In the eighteenth century, furs represented seventy percent of exports from Canada and fifty percent of exports from New France. On the eve of the Seven Years' War, the fur trade still remained, despite a significant slowing, the most lucrative activity. Jean Hamelin et al., Histoire du Québec (Toulouse, 1976), 20.
175. On the life of illegal traders, see Helen Hornbeck Tanner, "The Career of Joseph La France, Coureur de Bois in the Upper Great Lakes," in Jennifer S. H. Brown, W. J. Eccles, and Donald P. Heldman, eds., The Fur Trade Revisited (East Lansing, Mich., 1994), 171-87.
176. Peterson, "Many Roads to Red River," 42-45, 48;
177. White, Middle Ground, 68.
178. Historians quite often confuse Philippe de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, born in France in 1643 and governor general of New France from 1703 to 1725, with his son Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil de Cavagnial, born in Canada in 1698 and the last governor general of New France from 1755 to 1760.
179. 11E, vol. 14, fols. 35-36, 58.
180. Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 12-13;
181. Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998), 105-06;
182. Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500-1625 (Cambridge, 2003), 19.
183. 11E, vol. 14, fols. 194-95.
184. 11E, vol. 15, fol. 27.
185. The reality, however, of the relations between settlers and natives ensured an important social and economic role for Amerindian women: see Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties;
186. and White, "Woman Who Married a Beaver."
187. 11E, vol. 15, fol. 27.
188. Pontchartrain to Governor Vaudreuil, July 6, 1709, Rapport de l'archiviste de la province de Québec pour 1942-43 (Québec, 1943), 406.
189. Governor Vaudreuil and Intendant Jacques Raudot to Minister, November 14, 1709, Rapport de l'archivste de la province de Québec pour 1942-43, 420.
190. White, Middle Ground, 214-15.
191. Dickason, "From One Nation," 25-27.
192. See Gules Havard, The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701: French Native Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century, Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott, trans. (Montreal, 2001).
193. Jouanna, L'idée de race en France, 86-87.
194. In Saint Domingue, métis were similarly stigmatized by the Spanish: see, for instance, Hugo Tolentino, Origines du préjugé racial aux Amériques (Paris, 1984), 86-93.
195. Antoine Furetière, Dictionaire universel, contenant generalement tous les mots français, tant vieux que modernes, et les termes des sciences et des arts (1610; rpt. edn., Paris, 1978).
196. The statement, recently made by Aubert, "Blood of France," 453, that Colbert was using a "quasi-biological" language to conceptualize Amerindians remains unsubstantiated.
197. Hannaford, Race;
198. Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 102, has claimed that Vaudreuil understood "blood" in terms of "class," by which he seems to refer to the question of genealogy, but he does not account for the changing meaning of the term "blood" in the eighteenth century.
199. Duclos to Minister, December 25, 1715, quoted in Spear, "Colonial Intimacies," 95.
200. See also Spear, "Colonial Intimacies," 95-96.
201. On French commanders' acceptance of intermarriage, see Peterson, "Many Roads to Red River," 42-43
202. and White, Middle Ground, 69.
203. Dickason, "From One Nation," 28.
204. e siècle" (Ph.D. dissertation, Université de Poitiers, 1981), 371.
205. Canadian single mothers would sometimes give their children to native families who then adopted them: see Denys Delâge, "Les Iroquois chrétiens des 'réductions,' 1667-1770, Part I: Migration et rapports avec les Français," Recherches Amérindiennes au Québec 21, nos. 1-2 (1991): 64;
206. and Yoland Bouchard, "Les 'enfants du roi' dans le gouvernement de Montréal," in Lachance, Les marginaux., les exclus et l'Autre, 84.
207. On adoption in early modern France, see Jean-Pierre Gutton, Histoire de l'adoption en France (Paris, 1993);
208. and Kristin Elizabeth Gager, Blood Ties and Fictive Ties: Adoption and Family Life in Early Modern France (Princeton, N.J., 1996).
209. On native independence and French laws, see John A. Dickinson, "Native Sovereignty and French Justice in Early Canada," in Jim Phillips, Tina Loo, and Susan Lewthwaite, eds., Crime and Criminal Justice (Toronto, 1994), 17-40;
210. and Jan Grabowski, "French Criminal Justice and Indians in Montreal, 1670-1760," Ethnohistory 43, no. 3 (1996): 405-29.
211. 11A, vol. 38, fol. 210.
212. "Ordonnance de l'intendant Michel Bégon sur les femmes qui deviennent enceintes par voies illicites du 6 février 1722," in Pierre-Georges Roy, ed., Inventaire des ordonnances des intendants de la Nouvelle-France conservées aux Archives Provinciales de Québec, 4 vols. (Beauceville, Québec, 1919), 1: 216-17.
213. Louis Franquet, Voyages et mémoires sur le Canada (Montréal, 1974), 107.
214. Spear, "Colonial Intimacies," 86. Blessing intermarriages did not mean that the missionaries promoted such unions: their hierarchy certainly did not as it required that the missionaries seek their bishop's approval, as well as the consent of the governor and the groom's family, before celebrating a mixed marriage. Jaenen, Role of the Church, 29.
215. Comte de Maurepas to Governor General Charles de Beauharnois, 1735, AN, B, vol. 63, fol. 88.
216. On the French Enlightenment, see Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (1971; rpt. edn., Paris, 1995);
217. and Duchet, Le partage des savoirs: Discours historique, discours ethnologique (Paris, 1984);
218. see also George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York, 1987), chap. 1.
219. Ironically, the model of civilization the philosophes established in the late eighteenth century to save the Amerindians from extinction owed very much to the policy of francisation: natives had to settle down and farm the land; they had to assimilate to European culture through intermarriage. Finally, the Europeans had to encourage the Amerindians to develop new needs in order to stimulate agriculture and commerce. Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire, 209-26.
220. 11A, vol. 96, fols. 265-70;
221. William J. Eccles, "The Social, Economic, and Political Significance of the Military Establishment in New France," in Essays on New France (Toronto, 1987), 110-24.
222. Compare with Maurice Filion, La pensée et l'action coloniales de Maurepas vis-à-vis du Canada, 1723-1749: L'âge d'or de la colonie (Ottawa, 1972).
223. e siècle canadien: études (Montreal, 1970), 179;
224. Leslie Choquette, "Center and Periphery in French North America," in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500-1820 (New York, 2002), 202.
225. Yvan Debbasch, Couleur et liberté: Le jeu du critère ethnique dans un ordre juridique et esclavagiste, vol. 1: L'affranchi dans les possessions françaises de la Caraïbe (1635-1833) (Paris, 1967);
226. Pierre Boulle, "In Defense of Slavery: Eighteenth-Century Opposition to Abolition and the Origins of Racist Ideology in France," in Frederick Krantz, ed., History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology (Oxford, 1988);
227. Peabody, "There Are No Slaves in France," chap. 4.
228. Pierre Boulle, "La construction du concept de race dans la France d'ancien régime," Outre-Mers: Revue d'histoire 89, nos. 336-37 (2002): 155-75.
229. Peterson, "Many Roads to Red River," 53;
230. Spear, "Colonial Intimacies," 96;
231. e siècles canadiens (Montreal, 1998), 95-108.
232. The British officially encouraged intermarriage in Acadia after the French strongly rejected it. Although intermarriage had been formally proscribed in the English colonies from the seventeenth century for ideological reasons that were related to the development of the idea of race, in 1729 British authorities in Acadia offered material incentives to any British man who would marry a native woman. Their aim was to challenge the French-Abenaki alliance by establishing kinship between British settlers and indigenous peoples. On English rejection of intermarriage, see David D. Smits, "'We Are Not to Grow Wild': Seventeenth-Century New England's Repudiation of Anglo-Indian Intermarriage," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 11, no. 4 (1987): 1-32;
233. and Smits, "'Abominable Mixture': Toward the Repudiation of
234. On British promotion of intermarriage in Acadia, see Public Archives of Canada, Archives des Colonies, Misc. Docs., 2:196, cited in Dickason, "From One Nation," 36 n. 64.
235. Intendant Antoine-Denis Raudot [wrongly attributed to P. Antoine Silvy, S.J.], Relation par lettres de l'Amérique Septentrionalle (années 1709 et 1710) (Paris, 1904), letter 23, 61-62.
236. Yet "pride and savagery were seen as inextricably intertwined." See Karen O. Kupperman, "Introduction," in Kupperman, America in European Consciousness, 10.
237. Interestingly, the French change in perception of Amerindians can be compared to changing attitudes toward Andeans in New Spain a century earlier. There, too, Spanish failure to Christianize and assimilate Andeans generated deep skepticism in colonial minds, and the native refusal to renounce ancestral religious practices was blamed on their bodies whereas earlier deviance had been blamed on the devil. Cañizares-Esguerra, "New World, New Stars."
238. On the fear of Amerindians shown by French officials, see Belmessous, "D'un préjugé culturel à un préjugé racial," 120-34.
239. ème siècles)," in Jean-Claude Marimoutou and Jean-Michel Racault, eds., Métissages, vol. 1: Littérature-Histoire (Saint-Denis and Paris, 1992), 214;
240. and Owen White, "The Decivilizing Mission: Auguste Dupuis-Yakouba and French Timbuktu," French Historical Studies 27, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 541-68.
241. See also Jean-Pierre Vernant, La mort dans les yeux: Figures de l'Autre en Grèce ancienne (Paris, 1998), 17-18.
242. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Journal, September 1757, Rapport de l'archiviste de la province de Québec pour 1923-24 (Québec, 1924), 313.
243. For an account of French maneuvering, see Ian K. Steele, Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the "Massacre" (New York, 1990).
244. Although exploitation, legitimized by racialization, was the new colonial policy toward Amerindians, the French never had the means to implement it; on the field, they had to recognize native agency and content themselves with a formal rather than real authority. See White, Middle Ground;
245. Grabowski, "French Criminal Justice and Indians"; Belmessous, "D'un préjugé culturel à un préjugé racial," 404-07.
246. Chaplin, "Natural Philosophy";
247. Cañizares-Esguerra, "New World, New Stars."
248. Compare Burke, "America and the Rewriting of World History";
249. and Armitage, "The New World and British Historical Thought."
250. See for comparison Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, Calif., 1998);
251. and John Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia (Cambridge, 2002), chap. 8.
252. In our postcolonial era, policies of "development" proposed for, even sometimes imposed on, a large number of countries seem to be the historical recipients of a premodern intellectual structure.
253. Wolfe, "Land, Labor, and Difference," 871.