Theme and Subject Matter in Francis Parkman’s The Old Régime in Canada

1 Edgardo Medeiros da Silva School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Lisbon University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies Theme and Subject Matter in Francis Parkman’s The Old Régime in Canada Abstract ‘There are no political panaceas, except in the imagination of political quacks.’ These are the words used by the American historian Francis Parkman (1823-1893) to suggest that the English and French settlements on the North American continent had been quite different from their onset and were quite possibly bound to remain as such in years to come. This paper examines the failure of France to establish the basis of a wellregulated political community in North America in the context of the Anglo-French rivalry for the control of that continent as conveyed by Francis Parkman in Part Four of his History of France and England in North America (1874), entitled The Old Régime in Canada. Though fact-based, Parkman’s narrative evidences a deep-seated political and cultural bias against the French which sheds some light on the colonial beginnings of New England as well, offering us a story that is novelistic in style and all-encompassing in theme and subject matter. KEYWORDS American Historiography / Anglo-Saxonism / New England / New France / Romantic History 2 Edgardo Medeiros da Silva École des sciences sociales et politiques, Université de Lisbonne Centre de l'Université de Lisbonne pour les études anglophones Thème et objet dans L'ancien régime au Canada de Francis Parkman Résumé «Il n'y a de panacées politiques que dans l'imagination des charlatans politiques.» Ce sont les mots employés par l'historien américain Francis Parkman (1823-1893) pour suggérer que les colonies anglaises et françaises sur le continent nord-américain étaient très différentes de leurs débuts et le resteraient probablement dans les années à venir. Cet article analyse l'échec de la France à établir la base d'une communauté politique bien réglementée en Amérique du Nord dans le contexte de la rivalité anglo-française pour le contrôle de ce continent tel que véhiculé par Francis Parkman dans la quatrième partie de son Histoire de la France et de l’Angleterre en Amérique du Nord (1874), intitulée L'ancien régime au Canada. Bien que fondé sur des faits, son récit historique sur la Nouvelle-France met en évidence les préjugés politiques et culturels profonds contre les Français, en jetant aussi une certaine lumière sur les débuts coloniaux de la Nouvelle-Angleterre. Parkman nous offre une histoire romanesque dans le style et vaste en matière de thème et d’objet. MOTS-CLÉS Historiographie américaine / anglo-saxonisme / Nouvelle-Angleterre / Nouvelle-France / Histoire romantique 3 Theme and Subject Matter in Francis Parkman’s The Old Régime in Canada Introduction This paper examines the failure of France to establish the basis of a well-regulated political community in North America as conveyed by the American historian Francis Parkman in Part Four of his History of France and England in North America, entitled The Old Régime in Canada (1874). Parkman’s choice of theme and subject matter for his History points to differences between the English and French settlements which portray, as has been suggested, ‘the struggle between France and England as a heroic contest between rival civilizations with wilderness as a modifying force’ (Jacobs 582). This struggle and these differences reflect a deep-seated cultural and political bias against colonial France on the part of New England historians that stretch as far back as Joseph Dennie’s Portfolio and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). It is my contention that Part Four of Parkman’s History, informed by the ‘Teutonic germ’ commonly associated with the historiography of New England’s nineteenth-century Romantic or literary historians, provides us with an account of the colonization of New France which sheds some light on the colonial beginnings of New England as well. Not infrequently, in fact, Parkman’s historical narrative on New France is juxtaposed on that of New England, one providing a sort of backdrop for the cultural and political make-up of the other. The son of a Unitarian minister, Francis Parkman (1823-1893) was born in Boston, Massachusetts. A graduate of Harvard, he completed the requirements for a law degree in 1845, but never practiced it. In 1846, he went on an expedition to the West along the Oregon Trail as far as Fort Laramie, Wyoming, which was to be hugely important for him in terms of his writing. It allowed him an insight into the seventeenth- 4 century Iroquois which he was able to use in the construction of his narrative, Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life (1849) and History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851). In History of France and England in North America until 1763 (7 vols., 1865-1892), regarded as Parkman’s major historical work, he details the colonization and administration of New France by the French from the late fifteenth to mid-eighteenth century. Part Four, the focus of my paper, is structured around three major sections: ‘The Feudal Chiefs of Arcadia’, ‘Canada, A Mission’, and ‘The Colony and the King’, respectively, each one subdivided into a total of twenty-four chapters. These numbered chapters correspond to a particular period of time and a general title, followed in turn by the standard subheadings found in works of this nature, detailing each of the major topics discussed in the chapter in question. 1 The timeframe covered by Parkman’s The Old Régime stretches from 1497, with the arrival of the first French explorers in Acadia, to 1763, the year the English formally took over the control of the territory, a period of precisely two hundred and sixty-six years. Over the past thirty years, criticism on Francis Parkman has been varied and wide-ranging, most it dating to the 1980s. Wilbur R. Jacobs, who taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and David Levin, who taught at the University of Virginia until his retirement in 1992, are central figures in the body of critical works devoted to Parkman. Jacobs, who published regularly on Parkman until his death in 1998, edited Parkman’s correspondence, The Letters of Francis Parkman (2 vols., 1960), and developed a body of critical work on this historian that includes a significant number of essays and monographs on such matters as the literary devices used by Parkman and the latter’s interest in the natural world. In 1991, he brought out Francis Parkman, Historian as Hero: The Formative Years, where he argues that Parkman projected himself on the historical figures he describes in his texts. Levin’s 5 seminal work History as Romantic Art – Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman (1959, reprinted in 1995) is still a highly useful monograph on the overall themes which “gentleman-historians” such as Parkman dealt with in their narratives. Howard Doughty’s Francis Parkman (1962, reprinted, 1983) is a somewhat eulogistic biography of Parkman written by a non-historian, but it remains a comprehensive study of Parkman's writings and ideas, covering the whole of his literary production, from his historical works to his essays and articles for periodical publications, such as the North American Review and Boston's Advertiser. A thorough analysis of the themes and methods used by the Romantic historians, and particularly insightful on account of the stylistic contrasts it draws between them, can be found in Richard Vitzhum’s The American Compromise (1974). The publication of Parkman’s complete works in the Library of America Series, France and England in North America (2 vols., 1983), edited by David Levin, and The Oregon Trail and The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1991), edited by William R. Taylor, have been highly instrumental in keeping Parkman alive among scholars and the general reading public to this day. Romantic History The name of Francis Parkman is usually grouped together with a set of American historians often labeled as Romantic historians, literary historians, or gentlemenamateur historians, among which we find William Hickling Prescott, 2 George Bancroft 3 and William Lothrop Motley. 4 Active throughout most of the nineteenth century, they are labeled as such for obvious reasons, but above all so as not to be confused with the late nineteenth-century, professional or ‘scientific historians’, individuals such as Herbert Baxter Adams (1850-1901), 5 Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932), 6 and J. Franklin Jameson (1859-1937), 7 associated with the newer universities of Johns Hopkins, Clark, and Chicago. The worldview we find in the historical narratives of the 6 Romantic or literary historians is one informed by their social and economic backgrounds: they were men of means who could afford to acquire original manuscripts, hire research assistants and copyists to do the more laborious part of their work, and travel to capital cities in order to gain access to official documents in governmental archives. They could write history independently, without having to rely on it for their own (and their families’) sustenance. The strength of New England’s intellectual tradition, stemming from its Puritan roots, can be seen in the historical narratives of these gentleman-amateur historians, whether in Prescott’s histories surrounding the unification of the kingdom of Spain by Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, in Bancroft’s depiction of the political origins of the United States, in Motley’s description of the beginnings of the Dutch Republic, or in Parkman’s characterization of the French occupation of Canada, more precisely the territory which is now Quebec. Brought up under the strictures of Protestantism, in its Congregationalist or Unitarian form, the gentlemen-amateur historians belonged to the educated elites of New England. They attended Harvard College with their minds set on a legal or religious career, their historical narratives, fact-based (it is common to differentiate among different genres of historical narratives – fictional, fact-based, hybrid), reflecting the values and interests of the dominant classes in the country at the time with respect to what constituted good art, literature or history. Ideologically conservative, they were raised on a stable set of republican principles and ideals which can be traced back to the political origins of the country. They were initially supporters of the Federalist Party, then of its successor, the Whig Party, and finally, in post-Civil America, of Lincoln’s Republicans, the exception being George Bancroft, who always showed a preference for the Jacksonian democrats (it was a commonly-held view that each page of his History voted for the Democratic Party). 7 For them, the writing of history was an art, to be put side by side with literature. They felt that the writing of history required creativity and imagination, which meant that they considered themselves to be artists as well as judges of what constituted good historiographical work. Peter Novick observes in his book That Noble Dream – The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (1999) that Romantic historians wrote because they had some urgent message to communicate to their reading public, preferring ‘to tell’ rather than ‘to show’ (45-46). These historians lacked the objectivity and distance from the subject matter one associates with a ‘scientific’ analysis of historical facts, which means that not infrequently the neutral voice which must characterize historical discourse is missing. The slow-moving action and universal themes of Romantic historians imply that their histories run for many, many pages, resulting in works with a large number of volumes, with a sort of ‘novelistic quality’ to them. Although they were primarily interested in political and constitutional matters, we find in their narratives the kind of love for Nature that we associate with fiction writers of this period, two of their favorite authors being the historical romancers Sir Walter Scott and James Fennimore Copper. Their narratives include, therefore, elaborate descriptions of scenery and landscape, as well as setting, an essential element of their depictions of the past. Just like the historians Gibbon, Michelet, Tocqueville, and Carlyle, they were read for ‘literary pleasure’, in the words of Richard J. Evans (60). In the construction of his narrative on New France, Parkman followed the methodological precepts of nineteenth-century German historiography, as laid down by of Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), 8 who had maintained that the primary goal of the historian was to provide a version of history as it really was or happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen ist), having argued for the use of documentary evidence and philological methods in history, in conjunction with a critical attitude towards primary 8 sources. In the Preface to The Old Régime, he writes that he employed all the documents he could lay his hands upon, letters, dispatches, memorials, and official records from government and religious archives on both sides of the Atlantic. With a certain degree of sarcasm, he alludes to the massive amount of information available to the historian interested in the colonial beginnings of New France, remarking that ‘[t]he pen was always busy in this outpost of the old monarchy’ (x). He also details the kind of primary materials he used to compose his narrative, ‘letters, despatches, and memorials’, as well as the records of the Superior Council of Quebec and the documents in the civil and ecclesiastical archives of Canada (x). Again there is sarcasm when he writes that this voluminous documentation exists because ‘[t]he king and the minister demanded to know everything;’ (x) moreover, he adds, these documents managed survive ‘the perils of revolution and the incendiary torch of the Commune’ (x), the latter comment an obvious reference to New Englanders’ dislike for radical forms of political activity such as Jacobinism. In the Preface to Part Four of his History, he also states unequivocally the thesis of his work: ‘This volume attempts to show by what methods it [the monarchical administration of France] strove to make good its hold, why it achieved a certain kind of success, and why it failed at last’ (x). And he continues: the aim of the first volume is ‘to examine the political and social machine’, whereas that of the volume that follows is to see ‘the machine in action’ (xii). His claim to historical objectivity is also clearly asserted by him at the beginning of his narrative: ‘With the help of a system of classified notes, I have collated the evidence of the various writers, and set down without reserve all the results of the examination, whether favorable or unfavorable’ (xi). In line with the precepts of good Romantic historiography, Parkman also follows stylistic convention in his narrative on The Old Régime, paying attention to character, 9 scene and incident, three of the prerequisites of good fictional writing. In his description of Louis XIV’s court at Fontainebleau, Parkman’s literary style is particularly noticeable, namely the attention to detail, the fast pace of the narrative and the copious use of adjectives, as the following quotation suggests: Leave Canada behind; cross the sea, and stand, on an evening in June, by the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau. Beyond the broad gardens, above the long ranges of moonlit trees, rise the walls and pinnacles of the vast chateau, — a shrine of history, the gorgeous monument of lines of vanished kings, haunted with memories of Capet, Valois, and Bourbon. There was little thought of the past at Fontainebleau in June, 1661. The present was too dazzling and too intoxicating; the future, too radiant with hope and promise. It was the morning of a new reign; the sun of Louis XIV was rising in splendor, and the rank and beauty of France were gathered to pay it homage. (229-30) And Parkman continues in the same register, adding to his text a reference to the source of his inspiration, the painting of Louis XIV by Philippe de Champagne: A youthful court, a youthful king; a pomp and magnificence such as Europe had never seen; a delirium of ambition, pleasure, and love, — all this wrought in many a young heart an enchantment destined to be cruelly broken. […] Here was Anne of Austria, the King's mother, and 16 patience, and public spirit. The cement of common interests, hopes, and duties compacted the whole people like a rock of conglomerate; while the people of New France remained in a state of political segregation, like a basket of pebbles held together by the enclosure that surrounds them. (464) Parkman clearly saw the French and English political systems as rivals, the former having replaced the latter for its intrinsic superiority, but he does not fail to recognize those cases in which extremes do indeed meet. In a visibly presentist reading of history, he writes in the Preface to The Old Régime: ‘The political system which has fallen, and the antagonistic system which has prevailed, seem, at first sight, to offer nothing but contrasts; yet out of the tomb of Canadian absolutism come voices not without suggestion even to us. Extremes meet, and Autocracy and Democracy often touch hands, at least in their vices’ (ix-x). In chapter XVIII, for instance, he details the characteristics of Canadian feudalism, writing that with one difference it was simply an extension of French feudalism in North America. The settlers were entirely at the mercy of the King, as nothing could be changed without an order from the monarch: A decree of the King, an edict of the council, or an ordinance of the intendant, might at any moment change old conditions, impose new ones, interfere between the lord of the manor and his grantees, and modify or annul his bargains, past or present. He was never sure whether or not the government would let him alone; and against its most arbitrary intervention he had no remedy. (309) 17 Parkman holds, in effect, that the system was totally unpredictable, with the rights of individuals, be they noblemen or not, in any way protected. This contrasts clearly with the history of the English colonies prior to the 1776 Revolution, which had been left more or less alone to run their affairs and without much interference from the Parliament in Westminster, with American colonists in no way doubting their rights as Englishmen. In the case of New France, the authority of the King over his colony was absolute and undivided, serving, in Parkman’s words, ‘a double end, — to produce a faint and harmless reflection of French aristocracy, and simply and practically to supply agencies for distributing land among the settlers’ (305). It was a ‘well-meaning despotism’, according to him, whereby the censitaire had obligations towards his seignior which included payments in money, kind or both, but these payments were not very high, neither regularly enforced on the habitants, as Canadian noble families, Parkman adds, were destitute, practically beggars, though full of ‘pride and sloth’ (319). As Howard Doughty points out in connection with The Conspiracy of Pontiac, Parkman's narratives are infused with contrasting formulations of two competing cultures, that of the French and that of the English, creating binary oppositions between Feudalism and Democracy, Popery and Protestantism, the sword and the ploughshare, war and adventure versus trade and industry, monopoly as opposed to free enterprise (179). He labels as "counterexperiment" the dissimilarities between the colonization of New France and that New England (251), identifying a triad of ideas in Parkman which explains the success of the New England settlements: “Libertarianism, laissez faire, and the Puritan gospel of mundane works [...]” (251-2). Parkman, he adds, was "steeped [...] in the Puritan-individualist ethos of personal accountability" and contrary to English 18 settlers, those of New France, in his view, were accountable not to themselves, but to a higher entity, the centralized authority of the King of France (264). Common to all the Romantic historians, Parkman included, was the idea that human progress, which they thought could be traced in the history of nations, was a sort of line that ran, if you looked at the globe, invariably from East to West and from North to South. Politically, this progress had been associated to a change from autocrat to democratic regimes, from absolutism to democracy (the idea that Feudalism and Royal Absolutism are archaic forms of government is implicit in The Old Régime, as the title itself suggests), but as far as religion was concerned it was closely tied to Christianity. It was a line of evolution that, as David Levin has pointed out, ran from Roman Catholicism to the Reformation and Protestantism and from the latter to Bostonian Unitarians, with Roman Catholics, Amerindians, Moors and Jews being regarded for the most part as anti-progressive forces (126). Although religion informed the foundation of New England and New France, the outcomes were unmistakably different. In this passage from the final paragraph of The Old Régime, the superiority of English Protestantism, which Parkman associates with the material progress of its society and with the individual freedom enjoyed by citizens in general, is evident: 15 This English conquest was the grand crisis of Canadian history. It was the beginning of a new life. With England came Protestantism, and the Canadian Church grew purer and better in the presence of an adverse faith. Material growth; an increased mental activity; an education, real though fenced and guarded; a warm and genuine patriotism, -- all date from the peace of 1763. (467-8) 19 One of the arguments put forth by Parkman for the divergent political paths chosen by the colonies of New England and New France has to do with the exclusion of the Huguenots from the settlement of Acadia. The Company of New France, created by Cardinal Richelieu to regulate the administrative affairs of the colony, excluded the French Protestants from the settlements along the St. Lawrence River, as well as the Franciscan Récollets, rivals of the Jesuits. For Parkman suggests that if Louis XIV had allowed the Huguenots to immigrate to New France, freer, more industrious and independent communities would have emerged along the St. Lawrence River, similar to those that had developed in the Massachusetts Bay area. For him, this was a major flaw in the colonization of New France, as the Huguenots, excluded from a process that was solely in the hands of the Jesuits, were associated with a more entrepreneurial spirit and stronger work ethic (and how much of this idea is a reflection of Gilded Age thinking is an open question). All of this would have translated, Parkman observes especially in his narratives The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (1867) and La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869), into material growth and progress for the men and women of New France. Parkman's anti-clericalism against the Jesuits and Catholic priests in general was quite strong (and recurrently against the Puritans of New England as well), not infrequently noting that their power and influence had been left unchecked by the authorities. In Montcalm and Wolf (1884), for instance, referring to François Xavier de Laval (1623-1708), who was to become the first bishop of Quebec, Parkman observes: “The Jesuits, adepts in human nature, had made a sagacious choice when they put forward this conscientious, zealous, dogged, and pugnacious priest to fight their battles" (qtd. in Doughty 342). 20 Superstition, fanaticism and religious belief were all anathema to rationalists like Parkman, who along with other literary historians, liked to contrast, in the words of Novick, ‘Protestant virtue with Catholic vice, as well as Anglo-Saxon liberty with Latin absolutism’ (46). The Catholic clergy was an obvious target of literary historians for its supposedly licentious behavior and corrupt morals, the priestcraft being precisely, as Levin also puts it, ‘the most unnatural, non-libertarian, non-Teutonic subject’ (92). Parkman’s criticism of religious institutions in New France extended to the subject of education, entirely in the hands of the Jesuits, who are strongly criticized not only for their shortcomings as educators, but also for their co-responsibility in maintaining the political status quo in the colony. The following passage is to that effect: All education was controlled by priests or nuns. The ablest teachers in Canada were the Jesuits. Their college of Quebec was three years older than Harvard. We hear at an early date of public disputations by the pupils, after the pattern of those tournaments of barren logic which preceded the reign of inductive reason in Europe, and of which the archetype is to be found in the scholastic duels of the Sorbonne. The boys were sometimes permitted to act certain approved dramatic pieces of a religious character, like the Sage Visionnaire. On one occasion they were allowed to play the Cid of Corneille, which, though remarkable as a literary work, contained nothing threatening to orthodoxy. They were taught a little Latin, a little rhetoric, and a little logic; but against all that might rouse the faculties to independent action, the Canadian schools prudently closed their doors. There was then no rival population, of a different origin and a different faith, to compel competition in the race of 21 intelligence and knowledge. The Church stood sole mistress of the field. Under the old regime the real object of education in Canada was a religious and, in far less degree, a political one. The true purpose of the schools was: first, to make priests; and, secondly, to make obedient servants of the Church and the King. All the rest was extraneous and of slight account. (425-6) It should not be forgotten, however, as has been suggested, that although the Catholic and the Protestant clergy had different interpretations of ‘the tenets of the One True Faith’, ‘they stood united in their scorn for native religious beliefs’ (Nobles 29). A believer in the ‘manifest destiny’ of the Unites States as nation, Parkman shows biased attitudes in his historical narratives towards Native Americans, who are often depicted as being treacherous, irresolute, and controlled by the senses, rather than by reason. As Stephen Tonsor has noted, rather than seeing the Indian as embodying the image of the noble, though uncivilized, human being, ‘Parkman found the Indian to be savage, cruel, capricious and incapable of rational thought’ (249). He saw no problem in the displacement of the Indian populations from their territories, considered as simply a victory of civilization over barbarism. Parkman is particularly critical, for instance, of Indian superstition, as we can infer from this passage in connection with Jesuit attempts at proselytizing the native populations: There was a beastly superstition prevalent among the Hurons, the Iroquois, and other tribes. It consisted of a "medicine" or mystic feast, in which it was essential that the guests should devour everything set before 22 them, however inordinate in quantity, unless absolved from duty by the person in whose behalf the solemnity was ordained, — he, on his part, taking no share in the banquet. So grave was the obligation, and so strenuously did the guests fulfil it, that even their ostrich digestion was sometimes ruined past redemption by the excess of this benevolent gluttony. These festins a manger tout had been frequently denounced as diabolical by the Jesuits, during their mission among the Hurons; but now, with a pliancy of conscience as excusable in this case as in any other, they resolved to set aside their scruples, although, judged from their point of view, they were exceedingly well founded. (90-1) The narratives of the Romantic or literary historians are of an exceptionalist nature, American institutions and political practices being praised for their unrivalled qualities. Parkman is no exception in this respect, as we have been trying to demonstrate. A historian in whose narratives the exceptionalist quality of the American political nation is particularly noticeable is George Bancroft. Though admitting in his History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent (1838) that the progress of the country had occurred under the banner of ‘a favoring Providence’, he observes that the ‘germ’ of American institutions, namely the desire for freedom and popular sovereignty, can be found in the early history of the country. He writes that the United States was the first nation ‘in the practice and the defense of the equal rights of man’, a nation where ‘the sovereignty of the people’ was undisputed (1). When Parkman posits in his text Liberty and Providence versus Absolutism / Royal Prerogative and Jesuitical Fanaticism, he is writing in the literary vein of Bancroft, therefore. The following passage from the opening pages of Bancroft’s History of the 23 United States is particularly telling, not just for being tendentious and biased, something of particular interest to us, historiographically, but because it condenses the moral creed, the political rhetoric, and the historical myths that have been perpetuated throughout U.S. history from Parkman’s days to the so-called consensus historians of the 50s and early 60s. 16 The United States of America constitute an essential portion of a great political system, embracing all the civilized nations of the earth. At a period when the force of moral opinion is rapidly increasing, they have the precedence in the practice and the defence of the equal rights of man. The sovereignty of the people is here a conceded axiom, and the laws, established upon that basis, are cherished with faithful patriotism. While the nations of Europe aspire after change, our constitution engages the fond admiration of the people, by which it has been established. […] Our government, by its organization, is necessarily identified with the interests of the people, and relies exclusively on their attachment for its durability and support. Even the enemies of the state, if there are any among us, have liberty to express their opinions undisturbed; and are safely tolerated, where reason is left free to combat their errors. (1-2) Parkman shares with the historian Henry Adams, author of History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889-91), and a transitional figure between the above-mentioned Romantic historians of the earlier part of the nineteenth century and the ‘professional’ historians of the latter part of the 24 century, the idea that the colonization of the North American continent had represented an extension of European civilization in the New World. Parkman, though, as John Higham has noted in his book History – Professional Scholarship in America (1989), always showed a particular preference for ‘exploring the common experience of the great mass of the American people’, unlike Adams, who chose the proximity of the corridors of power (155). Precisely on what separates these two historians, Wayne Fields, in an essay entitled ‘The American Adams’, observes: ‘If Francis Parkman (1823-93) wrote history in which heroes occupy center stage, generate the energy which drives history, Adams regarded heroes as harder to come by, forcing history, for the most part, to get along with them’ (202). In The Old Régime Parkman shows a keen interest in social matters in New France. 17 He goes to great lengths to describe Canadian society in its various aspects, thus providing a social backdrop to his narrative (this was not uncommon for nineteenth -century historians: Thomas Macaulay (1800-1859) and J. R. Green (1837-1883), for example, included detailed information on the state of English society in separate chapters of their narratives). But, again, Parkman’s account of the settlement of New France contrasts strongly with that of the English colonies. He writes, for instance, that the French Crown worked hard to encourage emigration to the colony, drawing on the best elements from different parts of the country, even though these were mostly uneducated peasants, with little or no money. Furthermore, he notes that the officers who had served in the colony were given incentives to remain in the territory, including tracts of land, a ‘military colonization’ which, in his view, marked indelibly the character of the Canadian people (279). Women had to be imported to the colony from different parts of France and from different socio-economic backgrounds, some of whom of ill-repute (280). 25 Rhetorically, he asks why despite such generous policies encouraging people to emigrate and to have children the population of Canada never grew much (estimated to be approximately 25,000 at the time). The answer, according to him, was because ‘it was mainly an immigration of single men and single women’ (291), rather than families already constituted, which would have provided a much better background upon which to build stable communities. Moreover, the whole process was directed by the King himself: ‘The new settler was found by the King, sent over by the King, and supplied by the king with a wife, a farm, and sometimes with a house. Well did Louis XIV earn the title of Father of New France’ (291). For Parkman, this excessive centralization of policy was counterproductive, suggesting that this fact made Canadian settlers less entrepreneurial, less educated, and quite possibly less democratic in their political aspirations. Where was room for the kind of rugged individualism and self-reliance that had characterized the settlement of the US, traditionally associated with profit in the South and religious feeling in the North? This excessive interference in the life of the colony by the royal government in Paris extended to the economy as well. True, the settlers could engage in trade or commerce, but those activities were limited in scope, as Parkman remarks, so much so that ‘exposed to such vicissitudes from the intervention of intendants, ministers, and councils, […] at times it [the domestic trade] was almost banished’ (322). To make his point, Parkman describes one of the most interesting ‘characters’ in his historical narrative, the ‘roving gentilhomme’, the untitled noblemen who engaged in trade, the Western fur-trade that is, in time of peace and were ‘a menace and a terror to the neighbouring English colonist’, in these terms: 32 Parkman, Francis. History of France and England in North America. Toronto: George N. Morang, 1898. Prescott, William Hickling. History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic, of Spain. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1841. Tonsor, Stephen.‘The Conservative as Historian’, Modern Age, Summer/Fall 1983. 24655. Vitzhum, Richard. The American Compromise – Theme and Method in the Histories of Bancroft, Parkman,, and Adams. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974. 33 1 I have used the 1898 edition of Francis Parkman’s works published by George N. Morang (Toronto), which was based on the one by John Wilson and Son (Cambridge), with copyrights by Little, Brown, and Company (1897). Parkman introduced a note to his revised edition of 1893 where he writes that he has added chapters on the ‘rival claimants to Acadia, -- La Tour and D’Aulnay’, as well a few other details of lesser importance, due to an absence of materials on those subjects. 2 William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859) was born in Salem, Massachusetts. A graduate of Harvard, he published History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic, of Spain (1838), The Conquest of Mexico (1843), The Conquest of Peru (1847), and History of the Reign of Philip II (3 vols., 1855-1858), left incomplete. 3 George Bancroft (1800-1891) was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. A graduate of Harvard, he studied at Heidelberg, Göttingen and Berlin. He published History of the United States from the discovery of the continent to the end of the Revolutionary War (1834-1874), in ten volumes (a six-volume abridged version of it came out in 1876) and The History of the Formation of the Constitution of the U.S. (1882). 4 John Lothrop Motley (1814-1877) was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Also a graduate of Harvard, he studied in Göttingen, from 1832 to 1838. His best-known historical works were: The Rise of the Dutch Republic (3 vols., 1856), History of the United Netherlands (4 vols., 1860-1867), and The Life and Death of Barneveld (1874). 5 Herbert Baxter Adams taught at the department of history and political science at the Johns Hopkins University from 1876 to 1901. His major writings include: The Germanic Origin of the New England Towns, Saxon Tithing-Men in America, Norman Constables in America, and Methods of Historical Study. 6 A professor of history at Wisconsin (1890–1910) and later at Harvard (1911–1924), Frederick Jackson Turner is best-known for his ‘Frontier Thesis’, which he put forth in a paper entitled ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ (1893), read before the American Historical Association in Chicago, during the city’s 1893 World Columbian Exposition. 7 J. Franklin Jameson was the first managing editor of the American Historical Review (AHR). In 1905, he became the director of the Department of Historical Research of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. His best-known work is The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (1926). 8 This German historian, regarded as the father of modern historical scholarship, exerted a tremendous influence on American scholars and universities throughout the nineteenth century. 9 Daniel de Rémy de Courcelle (1626 –1698), who was the Governor General of New France from 1665 to 1672, introduced improvements in the judicial system of the colony. He carried out an aggressive war against the Iroquois, but succeeded in sorting out many of the conflicts that existed among the different Indian tribes in Acadia. 10 Jean Talon, Count d'Orsainville (1626 – 1694), was the first Intendant of New France to actually reside in the colony (Louis Robert was Intendant from 1663 to 1665, but never came to New France). Appointed by Louis XIV and his minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, as the Intendant of Justice, Public Order and Finances in Canada, Acadia and Newfoundland, Talon served for two terms: 1665 to 1668 and 1669 to 1672. He was instrumental in promoting emigration to the colony, including over 1,000 women known as the filles du roi – the king's daughters. 11 Some of the titles of the chapters are themselves self-explanatory as to the overarching theme of The Old Régime: ‘Royal Intervention’ (chap. XIII), ‘Paternal Government’ (XV), ‘Canadian Feudalism’ (chap. XVIII), ‘Canadian Absolutism’ (chap. XXIV). 12 In the History of Ferdinand and Isabella, for instance, on the early history of Castile and Aragon, Prescott does not fail to point out the ‘liberal principles of government’ brought by the Visigoths to the Iberian Peninsula, who, in his view, shared with their Teutonic brothers ‘the germ of some of those institutions which, with other nations, and under happier auspices, have formed the basis of a wellregulated constitutional liberty’ (3). The same is true of Motley, who, in The Rise of the Dutch Republic also alludes to this Teutonic germ, writing that the Dutch Revolution, the English Revolution, and the American Revolution had all been part one chain of events: ‘To all who speak the English language, the history of the agony through which the Republic of Holland was ushered into life must have peculiar interest, for it is a portion of the records of the Anglo-Saxon race – essentially the same, whether in Friesland, England, or Massachusetts’ (iv). 13 Turner had been a student of Herbert Baxter Adams, one of the above-mentioned professional historians, who taught him at Johns Hopkins in the 1880s. 14 Their most influential works were, in the case of Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), and with respect to Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (1909) 34 15 At the end of the Seven Years' War, or the French and Indian War, as it is often referred to on the North American continent, the Bourbons lost New France to Great Britain, as well as Spanish Florida, some Caribbean islands and Senegal. The terms of the agreement were set in The Treaty of Paris, also known as the Peace of Paris, signed on 10 February 1763 by the kingdoms of Great Britain, France and Spain. 16 Henry Steele Commager, Louis Hartz and Daniel Boorstin are the names that come immediately to mind. Their most influential books were: Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind (1950), Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), Daniel Boorstin, The Americans – The National Experience (1965). It should not be forgotten, however, that the Progressive historians of the early twentieth century had already questioned this vision of American history. 17 The titles of the following chapters of The Old Régime indicate their social subject matter: ‘Marriage and Population’ (chap. XVI), ‘The New Home’ (chap. XVII), ‘Trade and Industry’ (chap. XX), ‘Morals and Manners’ (chap. XXIII). 18 Parkman quotes Jacques-René de Brisay de Denonville, Marquis de Denonville (1637-1710), Governor General of New France from 1685 to 1689, who in one of his letters to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, dated November 13, 1685, warns him of this real danger in Canadian society: ‘Above all things, Monseigneur, permit me to say that the nobles of this new country are everything that is most beggarly, and that to increase their number is to increase the number of do-nothings. A new country requires hard workers, who will handle the axe and mattock. The sons of our councillors are no more industrious than the nobles; and their only resource is to take to the woods, trade a little with the Indians, and, for the most part, fall into the disorders of which I have had the honor to inform you.’ (320)