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Micheline's Blog

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Daily Archives: March 16, 2012

Cartier, Champlain & Missionaries: a Chronology

16 Friday Mar 2012

Posted by michelinewalker in Canada, History

≈ 159 Comments

Tags

Canada, Jacques Cartier, Jesuit, Louis Jolliet, Mississippi River, Montreal, Quebec, Quebec City

800px-Jacques_Cartier_by_Hamel

Jacques Cartier
by Théophile-Abraham Hamel (1817–1870) 

I have developed a passion for the material I am putting online. So here I am re-examining the history of Canada, finding links with what is happening in France, and giving dates that allow me to follow the settlers and the missionaries in a systematic manner. One detail I omitted to provede is that Père Marquette and Louis Jolliet entered the Mississippi River at Prairie-du-Chien or Dog’s Prairie, which means that our coureurs de bois and voyageurs had already travelled that far. After Marquette and Jolliet mapped out the Mississippi, the Jesuits sent missionaries to these newly discovered areas.

The Jesuit Relations: on the internet

I have just discovered that the Jesuit Relations or Relations des Jésuites can be read online. For me, this is a Godsend. It is now possible to include a link to these sites: Jesuit Relations or Les Relations des Jésuites. Would that I were still teaching!

As for information about the authors of the Relations, I have provided links with Wikipedia, The Catholic Encyclopedia and the Encyclopædia Britannica.

The Standard Anthology

The excerpts my students had access to were published in the following anthology: Gilles Marcotte, rédacteur, Anthologie de la littérature québécoise (L’Hexagone, 1994). The Relations my students read were included in book 1 (tome 1) of the Anthologie entitled Écrits de la Nouvelle-France and edited by Léopold LeBlanc. My students read several complete texts, but the Anthologie was our organizer and browser. Two “tomes” have since been added to the original four. This Anthologie is considered the standard reference anthology on Quebec or French-Canadian literature.

Although the Anthologie is entitled Anthologie de la littérature québécoise, it includes texts written by other French-speaking authors and notably Gabrielle Roy (from Manitoba) and Marguerite Maillet, an Acadian writer and winner of the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious literary award for works written in French.

Jacques Cartier

I will search the internet for texts by Jacques Cartier, who claimed Nouvelle-France for France in 1534 and made a second trip in 1534-1536 (mentioned below), and Samuel de Champlain who is considered the father of Nouvelle-France. Champlain established a settlement first in Acadie (1604) and second in what the Amerindians called Canada. Québec city (1608) was in Canada and located near an Iroquoian village called Stadacona.

Jacques Cartier sailed up to Montreal or Hochelaga

Jacques Cartier (31 December  1491 – 1st September 1557) went up the Saint-Lawrence River, in search of China (la Chine), but could not proceed further than the Lachine Rapids. So Montreal (Hochelaga) was settled by Maisonneuve, in 1642.

Chronology

  • Jacques Cartier discovers what will be Canada in 1534;
  • Acadie is settled by Du Gua de Monts & Samuel de Champlain in 1604;
  • Quebec city is settled by Champlain  in 1608;
  • The Jesuits start arriving in 1609, when Quebec city was settled;
  • The Jesuits arrived at Port Royal, in Acadie, the current Nova Scotia, on 22 May 1611;
  • Récollets (Recollect) missionaries sail with Champlain from Rouen to Quebec City, arriving on 2 June 1615;
  • The Jesuit missions “would gain a strong foothold in North America in 1632, with the arrival of the Jesuit Paul Le Jeune. Between 1632 and 1650, 46 French Jesuits arrived to preach among the Indians” (Wikipedia);
  • Montréal is founded by Maisonneuve in 1642;
  • Eight Jesuits, killed between 1642 and 1649, became known as the North American Martyrs.

The First three settlements: Port-Royal; Québec (city) and Montréal

Port-Royal, established in 1604 in Acadie, by Champlain, is the first French settlement in North America. The Second is Quebec City, settled in 1608, by Champlain,  The Third was Montréal, settled by Maisonneuve in 1642.

Jesous ahatonhia

 

Postage stamp 1908

© Micheline Walker

16  March 2012
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More on the Jesuit Relations

16 Friday Mar 2012

Posted by michelinewalker in Canada, History, Uncategorized

≈ 33 Comments

Tags

Amerindian, François de Laval, Jesuit, New France, Paul Le Jeune, Relations des Jésuites de la Nouvelle-France, Society of Jesus, St. Francis Xavier University

A Jesuit preaching to the Indians © Charles William Jefferys / BIBLIOTHÈQUE et ARCHIVES Canada / C-005855
A Jesuit preaching to the Indians by Charles William Jefferys, 1745 (learnimage.ca)
 

Les Relations des Jésuites

It would be my opinion the Jesuit Relations do not belong to a discourse or speech that I would call indirect or an “indirection.”  What is said by an animal (fables, beast epics, Orwell’s Animal Farm, etc.), a “bon sauvage,” a Turk, a Persian (Montesquieu‘s Lettres persanes),  Pascal in his Provinciales or Voltaire in Candide is said and not said, or a dire-sans-dire.  However, the Jesuit Relations are not the discours oblique that eighteenth-century Encyclopédistes cultivated to avoid being thrown into the Bastille, jail.

Le Bon Sauvage

However, the Relations occasionally depict the Amerindians in a manner that makes Amerindians seem morally superior to Europeans. So, as I suggested in my last post, the concept of the “bon sauvage” or “noble sauvage” may well find its birthplace in the Relations. Pierre Biard (1567-1622), who worked in Acadie, the eastern province of Nouvelle-France, has nothing but praise for Amerindians, except that they are “pagans,” a matter he and other missionaries are in Nouvelle-France to correct.

The “Bon Sauvage” becomes a barbarian

However, when François Le Mercier (1604-1690) describes the torture and very slow death of an Iroquois captured by Hurons, he cannot understand that torture could be so slow and so cruel. The missionaries are so horrified than a superior among them speaks to one of the Amerindians. He wants to know why they are killing their captive so painfully and so slowly. The missionary says to the Amerindian that they may indeed kill an enemy, but need they do so in such an atrocious manner. The Amerindian he is addressing is prompt to answer that the French do the same to their own people.

I must say that this particularly relation, included in the Anthology we used, was difficult to present to students.  These missionaries were speaking as Jesus of Nazareth would have spoken. But there was truth to what the Amerindian was saying, if indeed the Amerindian said what he was reported to have said. This, we will never know, but what we know for certain is that the Jesuit who wrote that relation, François Le Mercier, was a compassionate man. As for his superior, he was very brave. He himself could have been subjected to the same death. Several missionaries were indeed tortured and killed, not to mention settlers. They constitute our martyrs and saints.

* * *

So, as depicted in the Jesuit Relations, the Amerindians were not always “bon sauvages” or “nobles sauvages,” but the Amerindian who pointed out to an appalled missionary that the French were no better than the Amerindians was making a valid point.  What could the Jesuit answer?  Suddenly, he could only speak for himself and express a point of view that would have been Christ’s point of view.  He could not speak for the French.  Marguerite de Valois, Dumas’s Queen Margot, could not prevent her mother, Catherine de’ Medici, from having La Môle, who was probably innocent, tortured and beheaded.

Unlikely ‘Casuistes’  &  Francois de Laval

These missionaries were not our casuists taking sinfulness out of sin. The casuistes were in Europe sleeping in comfortable beds. They were not missionaries fighting their way through black flies to go and convert Amerindians that fur traders turned into alcoholics. Paul Le Jeune (1591-1664) so reprimanded fur traders who were ruining the lives of Amerindians. As for Monseigneur Laval, François de Laval (1623-1708), Nouvelle-France’s famous bishop, he threatened with excommunication fur traders who stooped to exchanging pelts for alcohol. As well, the Jesuits considered Huguenots as greater ‘pagans’ than Amerindians.

When the Amerindian told the Jesuit that the French also burned people, he did pull the rug from under the missionary’s feet, but that relation was not meant to be a criticism of France.  They were not speaking obliquely.  In other words, the Jesuits who compiled the Relations were not in America to find ways of indicting France.  It may have happened occasionally, but I believe it would have been inadvertent and unintentional criticism.

 An Avocet

N. B.  By the way, in yesterday’s post, I forgot to mention that St. Francis Xavier University, not a Jesuit university, has the complete Relations, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites. They can also be read online at Jesuit Relations or Les Relations des Jésuites. 

À la claire fontaine (Université de Moncton Male Choir)
(please click on the title to hear the song)
______________________________
  • Theodore C. Blegen, Songs of the Voyageurs (St Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1998[1966]), p. 44.
  • Charles William Jefferys © / BIBLIOTHÈQUE et ARCHIVES Canada / C-005855
Art by Michael Marcon

© Micheline Walker
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