I'm still reading Louise Dechêne's People, State, and War under the French Regime in Canada, which I mentioned earlier. I read it in smallish chunks, with two bookmarks, one where I am in the text and another in the endless endnotes -- which constitute almost a parallel text.
It takes time, but I admire the book enormously. I am far from finishing it, but already I go from "Is this the best book ever written about New France?" to "Is Louise Dechêne the best Canadian historian ever?" This sentence from page 168 sums up this book's project and maybe Dechêne's whole historical career.
The only way to know the thoughts of rural people is to listen to them: to dig through the jumble of judicial archives and find their words buried within, to chance upon a revealing account, to grasp the meaning of a word or incident, and so to elucidate the weaknesses and strengths of rural communities.
This book does that work throughout. The amount of work she put into it -- digging through the jumble, as she said, just to chance on something -- for years and years! And from that work she knows the people of New France more precisely (with many qualifications and doubts, to be sure) than one would have thought possible.
To my surprise, I found myself in one of her endnotes. She is discussing how many deaths the Seven Years War might have caused among the population of New France, and the endnote is mostly a long list of the historians who have failed to address this question, failed to do the work, she might say. Then she writes:
To my knowledge, only Christopher Moore poses the question of loss of life during the Seven Years' War, conjecturing a proportion of 10 percent for the whole population.
I confess this pleased me a lot. I have been aware that I may be pretty much the only historian to have attempted such an estimate in public. I just did not imagine that anyone else had noticed.
And I have a question for any specialists of New France history who may see this. Because I didn't pull my estimation out of the air.
My memory is that when I was preparing the essay in question (for my chapter in The Illustrated History of Canada) I came across an article that put forward something like a casualty estimate. But when I came to write the chapter, I could no longer find that source. After much unsuccessful searching for it (even wondering if I dreamed it), I went ahead and made an estimate on my own, citing no support or source at all.
So here is my question: Does anyone know of a published work (earlier than 1987) that discusses Canadien casualties in the Seven Years War -- not military casualties, I'm talking about the whole population of New France. I think the one I am thinking of was written in French, by a francophone historian, probably in an article, not a book. (If I could not get back to it then, and Dechêne had not noticed it, it might be rather obscure, even to specialists.
Ever since, I may have been slightly braced for someone to challenge my estimate or the basis for it. Dechêne refrains from making her own casualty estimate, but from what she writes I think she not only thought the question important but felt I was on the right track. She certainly thought the number was large: "the empty spaces left by the war," she writes, may well have left a measurable drop in the post-1760 population. And trauma that can be imagined.
If you can enlighten me -- there is an email address at right.
