Obscure historical research question about New France

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.  (page 518, at footnote 151.)

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 thin 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.

Update, May 28: Not surprised to report that no one has had any suggestions.  But in the meantime I have found myself in another of Louise Dechêne's footnotes:  p.485, footnote 34, this time to Louisbourg Portraits

 

  

Quick trip to Quebec et la Nouvelle-France

We were briefly in Montreal last week  -- colder and snowier than Toronto, but still a pleasure to visit.  

While we were there, the debate about Quebec's Bill 21, the one about secularism that mostly bans various clothing items for Muslims, Jews, and others, was in the Supreme Court of Canada and in the news.

As it happened we were staying on Rue Saint-Paul, and the streets around us were called Francois-Xavier, Notre-Dame, and Saint-Sulpice, and so on.  When we took the subway we noted stations with names like Pie IX, and l'Assomption, and Sainte-Catherine. Way above us the cross atop Mont-Royal shone bright.

Either the movement for official secularism has a long way to go, or maybe the critics are right to say it is mostly cover for an effort to keep the visible minorities in their place.

Meanwhile, I have been reading People, State, and War Under the French Regime in Canada by Louise Dechêne, translated by Peter Feldstein. The original French-language edition was published (posthumously) in 2008 and the translation in 2021. I regret having to admit I had not been aware of either until very recently.

Because Louise Dechêne really was a terrific historian, and this, like all else she wrote, is most original, deeply source-based, deeply thought-out, and frequently takes no prisoners in what she says of other scholars of New France.  I admire her immensely, and may have more on this book when I'm done with it.

Summer listening: with me

Quite by accident I have discovered that on Friday the CanHist podcast "Witness to Yesterday" reposted my half-hour conversation with Patrice Dutil from 2018 entitled "How George Washington Killed 10 French Canadians and started a World War."

Reheard after seven years, it's quite a delight  -- you oughta listen.

"Witness To Yesterday" has evolved since 2018.  It's now pretty exclusively a CanHist book review podcast, with a new crew of host interviewers.  But there was a time when "How George Washington" was its top-ranked #1 listened-to episode.

Patrice and I have evolved too. He has become perhaps John A. Macdonald's most vigorous advocate as I have continued to express doubts about "the man who made us." And I was dropping a few criticisms of his recent book Ballots and Brawls into my review of it in the current Canada's History mag.  

So it was a particular pleasure to hear us together in full sync over obscure details of 18th century New France. Thanks, Patrice!

 

History of Havre St-Pierre

History is always where you find it.  We've been on holiday on Prince Edward Island, and one day we walked the beautiful dunes trail at Prince Edward Island National Park's Greenwich site, close by the community of St Peter's. One of my favourite places.  Vaut le voyage.

The very next day, I happened to catch the Brock University historian Daniel Samson's post on TwitteX about the French military engineer Louis Franquet's 1751 report on his visit to the very same Saint-Pierre on the island then called Ile Saint-Jean.  Tonight, I'm having trouble embedding the post, but you could find it at https://twitter.com/ruralcolonialNS, for August 15.  Here is a little of Franquet. (Turns out Daniel Samson had been walking the same dunes a week earlier.)

"There were in this country 11 fishing boats and six [drying] stages belonging to seven fishermen, however several of them pointed out that these agreements were totally in favour of the suppliers and that they often found themselves very happy to avoid [i.e. to smuggle] ...

History of what sells

On TwitteX, Mark Bourrie expresses disappointment in his recent history Crosses in the Sky being less successful than he had hoped and partly blames himself.  

I've never had much talent for seeing what might or might not make a best-settling Canadian history book.  (1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal -- a confederation book in the wake of Meech and Charlottetown  -- was one occasion I did maybe get in time with the zeitgeist.) 

Stories of heroic white men in rugged settings still hold surprising appeal for CanHist book buyers, so I would not have been surprised to see Crosses in the Sky, a retelling of the Brebeuf and the Huron story.

But I wonder if the moment is not right for white authors using white sources to present indigenous history. Bourrie's sympathies are entirely with the Huron, not with the Jesuits and the French colonizers behind them, for sure. But he tells the same story that has been circulating among Europeans for four hundred years, based almost on the Jesuit Relations' knowledge of the Huron.

The wars that destroyed the Huron nation in the mid 1600s were the largest and bloodiest ever fought in what is now Canada, I would guess.  In less than a century, across much of the territory that is now southern Ontario, one empire was destroyed by another and then the second one was displaced by a third, with great loss of life, dispersion, and dispossession thoroughout. I'm not talking of the French empire, still less of the English.  It was Huron-Wendat, then Haudenosaunee, then Anishnabeg, military, economic, and diplomatic power that drove these events.

That is still an almost entirely untold story, one in which Brebeuf and the other Jesuits would be very much marginal. It needs to be told from Indigenous sources -- Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Anishnabeg.  And I assume only an indigenous scholar will be able to access and interpret those sources.  

I wish Mark Bourrie were happier with the sales of Crosses in the Sky, because I like to see books about Canadian history succeed.  But I think CanHist readers might be thinking that when it comes to Indigenous history, the time is right for indigenous historians. 

Book Notes: Pekka Hamalainen on Lakota America; Mark Bourrie on Brebeuf

I've been reading in Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, a recent book by Pekka Hamalainen. Hamalainen is not an American historian with a Finnish name, but a true Finn, raised and educated in Europe. He teaches at Oxford and is part of a European network of scholars interested in nomadic empires: societies that endured and held power even without a fixed territorial base. His main work is in a field its practitioners in the US call "the new Indian history" ('new' for a few decades now): trying to look at North American history from Indigenous perspectives.  

Lakota America presents the rise of the Lakota from a minor Siouan-speaking group in the woodlands between the Mississippi and the Great Lakes in the 1600s to being (in the 1800s) a dominant power on the great plains around the headwaters of the Missouri River. In that process they contended variously with gradually shifting French, Spanish, British, American empires, and other indigenous powers. They were the power that put George Custer's army to the sword in 1876 1776 but which was overwhelmed (and slaughtered) by the American army at Wounded Knee. It's a big book, but a bold and impressive one. 

What brought me to Lakota America was reading about Mark Bourrie's current best-seller Crosses in the Sky, a biography of the Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf, who spent 15 years among the Huron-Wendat and died in 1649 at the hands of the invading Haudenosaunee armies that were overrunning Huronia. 

Let me be clear; I have not read Crosses in the Sky, and I will give it proper attention when I do.  Even from publicity and reviews, it is clear Bourrie did not come here to hero-worship. His sympathies seem to be entirely with the Huron-Wendat, for whom contact with all things French and European turned out to be almost entirely disastrous. This is no white-saviour narrative. 

But it does seem to be a white-centered narrative, for sure, using Brébeuf's career to seek a way into what was done to the Huron-Wendat.  I find myself wondering, meaning no disrespect to Bourrie's project, what a Huron-Wendat-centred history of that story, the collapse of Huronia in the 1640s, would look like, and if one could be written.  

It may be possible. I don't have those contacts (to my regret and shame) but I once talked to an anthropologist/ethnohistorian who claimed to have talked with members of the Haudenosaunee nation who preserved oral history passed down from the masses of "Neutral" ancestors incorporated into the Haudenosaunee after the destruction of the Neutrals. Who knows, really, what indigenous historical traditions endure from the mid-17th century Huron-Iroquois war? Well, only indigenous scholars and memory-keepers know, if anyone does. But I would not be very surprised if significant versions of that story do exist among existing Haudenosaunee or Wendat communities.

How different the historic of the mid-17th century wars in what is now southern Ontario would be if the Jesuit Records were not practically the only source historians use! If an indigenous-kept historiography of those events exists.  

Hamalainen's Lakota America at least tries to imagine a long and consequential war in the centre of North America from a non-European perspective -- as in a different voice Bourrie's Crosses in the Sky also attempts. But I note that Haimalainen's Wikipedia biography includes mention of vigorous criticism of his work by indigenous scholars who apparently reject his whole "empire" construction of the Lakota and (it seems) insist instead on Lakota victimization at the hands of the settler-colonial world.

I don't know what an indigenous-written history of "early Canadian history" would look like.  Or who would write it. No doubt many Indigenous scholars have more recent matters urgently demanding their attention. 

But I think it may start to appear sometime, and that there will be sources, there will be perspectives, that are entirely new to most historians who have (in effect) only the Jesuit Relations to go on.    

(Pleasures of) the History of New France

An attractive thing about the history of New France is how deep back it goes, at least among Canadian subjects. Indigenous history goes way farther, obviously, but not with the same wealth of documentation. If you like a subject to research where you are definitely in a foreign country where they do things differently and there are lots of sources to show you just how, New France fits -- even for 21st century pur-laine Quebeckers, I'd say.

I was reminded of that by a recent post on the Query the Past blog that reviews a couple of micro-studies by Gaston Deschênes, one that examines Canadien responses to the American revolutionaries' invasion of the St-Lawrence corridor in 1775-6, and the other on the same subject during James Wolfe's invasion of 1759. There are abundant studies of the political/military aspects of both conflicts. What Deschênes sought to do was see what local sources might add to the big story.  

What he has able to do, apparently (I'm reading Patrick Lacroix's review, not the originals), is tease out as much detail as possible on who among the francophone population got involved in these conflicts, where exactly they stood in their communities and, for the 1775-76 conflict, at least, which of them joined the American cause and (possibly) why.  Given the nature of those local sources in New France/Quebec, diligent research makes it possible to find out quite a lot about even the most obscure individuals. Good to see that kind of work still goes on in New France studies.

I once tried to consider why in 1813 loyalist John Crysler became a hero of Canadian resistance to another American invasion, while his first cousin Adam Crysler was hanged for giving armed support to the same invaders. Let's just say the New-France/Quebec files (parish records and notarial files in particular) seem a lot more detailed on local communities and obscure individuals than the Upper Canadian ones.  

History of colonial mourning customs

At Active History, Colin Coates offers a clever essay on the death of a monarch. Just not the monarch you are thinking of: 

Early September saw the death of the European monarch who had reigned the longest over the territory some call Canada. The death was not unexpected. In some quarters, it might even have been welcomed. But it took some time for the news to reach Canada. The last ships had left months earlier on their Atlantic crossing. When they arrived in September and October 1715 with their missives from the court, issued in the name of Louis XIV, no one in Canada knew that the king had died.

Image: Hyacinthe Rigaud, Musée du Louvre (full details in Coates essay). 

History of the Census

Historians and genealogists a century from now will be grateful: the 2021 census is in progress.

To mark the event, Canada's History online is featuring my recent article "Making it Count," on the first census taken in what is now Canada: the 1666 Rolle des habitants of New France. It's about the making of the census ordered by Jean Talon, but also of its remaking in the late twentieth century by the historian Marcel Trudel, who made his own tally -- and increased the names on the census by twenty-five per cent.

This month at Canada's History

At Canada's History, the current issue's lead story is Bill Zuk's account of how pioneer American flyer (or as they said then, "aviatrix") was formed as a flier and adventurer by the years she spent in Toronto during the First World War, where she did medical work, survived the 'flu pandemic, and discovered aircraft. "I can attribute the beginning of my aviation career to what I experienced here in Toronto," she said later.

Wierdly, the Nazi bureaucrat Joachim von Ribbentrop also launched his career in Canada, spending the years 1910-14 as a well-connected, seemingly harmless young businessman and social climber from Montreal, Ottawa, and upcountry British Columbia. Cec Jennings reports how Ribbentrop fled home to Germany at the outbreak of the First World War. He never returned and was hanged for war crimes in 1946.

My own contribution this month looks at the census of New France, taken by Jean Talon in 1666 and remade by historian Marcel Trudel three hundred years later. The 2021 census of Canada takes place in May.

Plus Nancy Payne on BC's Sointula settlement, indigenous artists reclaiming the Rockies, a bunch of reviews, and much more. 

Subscribe! There's a photo and story on the back page that's not to be missed.

New France as a society of the "long middle ages"?

Boralia offers a nicely provocative question in a recent post by Arnaud Montreuil: Was New France a society of the 'long middle ages"?

Montreuil seeks to bring to the historiography of New France an argument or observation from French history: that in the 1600s the still dominant ancien régime monarchies of Europe were rather successful in transplanting the long-established social structures inherited from the middle ages to their new colonies in the Americas. Latin America acquired feudal-ecclesial institutions: church and aristocratic authority, seigneurial forms of landholding, etc. broadly resembling traditional European structures, Montreuil declares, and so did New France:

To say that New France was a society of the long Middle Ages does not mean that it was backward, as a whole series of disparaging speeches, especially during the 19th century, have asserted. Rather, the idea is to highlight emphatically the fact that the dominant logic of Laurentian society was not capitalist, but feudal-ecclesial, in a manner similar to that which prevailed in medieval society.

Montreuil suggests mostly this is a concept not much taken up or debated by histories of New France.  And he's is probably right. But the concept has been out there. I recall being struck by Robert Sweeny's declaration some years ago that 

Canada [ie, New France on the St. Lawrence] was the world's last feudal society, whereas Newfoundland was the world's first capitalist society.

His point is that, where as New France was defined by traditional agriculture and landlord-tenant relations that supported aristocratic control and governance, the fishing stations that dominated the colonization of Newfoundland  were largely devoid of both ecclesiastical and aristocratic influence and operated almost entirely as little factories, with labour relations not entirely unlike an Amazon warehouse today. 

It would be interesting to include New France's Atlantic outposts, which like Newfoundland, broadly resembled the industrial model than the feudal one, into the analysis that Montreuil proposes.  But New France studies usually mean studies of the St.Lawrence valley almost exclusively.

The argument also leaves out entirely why the British colonizations in North America and the Caribbean managed to create broadly capitalist, rather than "feodal-ecclesial," social and economic structures. 

Image: from Borealia

 

The seigneurial regime in the twentieth century

At the Borealia site for early Canadian history, Olivier Guimond offers a fascinating review of Benoît Grenier (dir.) (coll. Alain Laberge et Stéphanie Lanthier), Le régime seigneurial au Québec: fragments d’histoire et de mémoire (Sherbrooke, Les Éditions de l’Université de Sherbrooke, 2020). The book, by a seigneurial scholar and a group of his students, explores the survival of seigneurial influences in Quebec long after the abolition of the seigneurial regime in 1854 and down into the present.

The abolition of seigneurial tenure in Lower Canada came with significant compensation for the seigneurs for the loss of their landholdings and rents.  (As with slavery in British possessions, where owners were compensated for the loss of their "property" at the time of abolition.) In some cases, the continuation of payments by former seigneurial tenants continued into the late twentieth century.

Apart from the ongoing payments, the book's exploration of survivals and memories seem perhaps to emphasize positive and sentimental memories of seigneurial society.  But the whole study seems to be a remarkable report on the depth of history in Quebec.     

New France at the Tour de France

 

Brouage -- as the Tour helicopters saw it

It looked like New France day at the Tour de France yesterday. Not that anyone on the Tour knew or cared, but at least one viewer noticed. (Actually, it reminded me of hitchhiking through this area a long time ago.)

Racing along the southwestern coast of the country from Ile d'Oleron to Ile de Re (it's okay, they both have causeways to the mainland), the peloton zoomed right past the citadel of Brouage, birthplace of Samuel de Champlain, a seaport then, now well inland. They continued through Rochefort, the headquarters from which the French navy's supply frigates sailed for New France every year for a century. Near the finish, they passed right by the fortified harbour of La Rochelle, one of the principal departure points for settlers and trading vessels alike.

 Flat stage, obviously, lots of crosswinds off the ocean. Sam Bennett won a big sprint at the end.

In Which I Briefly Return to the History of New France

Jumonville Glen in autumn

The Champlain Society runs both an online document publishing forum, Findings/Trouvailles, and a podcast, Witness to Yesterday, and and today I have a little corner of the history of New France in both of them. The document here is the casualty list of the 1754 skirmish at Jumonville, the first skirmish of the Seven Years War, and the podcast here is my discussion with Patrice Dutil of why it is of interest.

Cool history watch: digitizing New France

I've done a little work on New France. I've mostly assumed that while there were some Protestants in New France, they were mostly merchants from the port cities of western France and pretty transient between the colony and the metropole. Maybe not entirely, it seems.

At Borelia, by way of Unwritten Histories, Stephanie Pettigrew goes deep into digital databases of individuals who married in New France but were baptised in old France and starts finding out a truly unwritten history: colonists of New France who may have made a Catholic marriage but had been baptised Protestant back home. This post may be a teaser -- no numbers yet, no lists of names, but at least one vivid example. Some Quebeckers may be about to start exclaiming: 'Stie, calisse, on etait protestant!

Update:  Speaking of Unwritten Histories, their annual guide to holiday gifts for historians is out -- and terrific.  (Might quibble a bit on the rule only allowing books from university presses by Ph.Ds  -- to my eye that eliminates most of the good ones!)

Debating seigneurialism -- UPDATED

Props to Borealia for hosting a debate, still ongoing, about the meaning or even the existence of a "seigneurial system" in New France -- because lively debate about anything in early Canadian history always seems all too scarce and rare. Allan Greer, who thrives on controversy (in the best way!) launched the exchange with his essay "There was no Seigneurial System" in late September, and various parties have been responding with Borealia posts since, including Greer.

But I fear this is a debate with almost no there there. Greer now clarifies

my piece was aimed primarily at a certain version of the history of New France found in textbooks, reference works and heritage sites. This is the idealized story of a “seigneurial system,” unique to French Canada and featuring seigneurs and censitaires living in harmony, each with their respective duties and benefits. I was really speaking to an anglophone phenomenon, an interpretation that is consistent with a long tradition of patronizing English-Canadian views of Quebec history and society.

I do not doubt remnants of this vision of New France can be found. But attacking amateurs and "heritage sites" seems a bit like taking on targets unworthy of his scholarly skills. Among students of New France, even anglophone ones, that vision of seigneurial land tenure was pretty thoroughly disposed of as long ago as the early 1960s by Cole Harris's The Seigneurial System in Early Canada. Harris established that seigneurial tenure did not determine the geography of settlement, did not much enrich the seigneurs and did not much control the life and work of censitaires. In his wake, it became pretty much de rigueur among scholars to declare that Canadian seigneurialism was hardly the determining factor in the society, geography, and economy of New France, and certainly was not a relic of European feudalism.

Greer himself  had a substantial role in restoring the importance of seigneurialism by demonstrating (in Peasant, Lord, Merchant) that while it may not have enriched the seigneurs much, seigneurial tenure definitely did help to impoverish the tenants, who had forever to pay substantial rents and charges from their meagre revenues. Greer, indeed, did not hesitate to associate seigneurialism with feudalism, in the sense of a landowning class exploiting a labouring agricultural class.  I suspect he would still stand by that, though indeed, in New France power did not flow from control of the land (a classic and useful definition of feudalism)  More the reverse.

Which leaves me wondering if the attack here is on something of a strawman: a complaint mostly that others, particularly non-scholarly others, make too much of a rigid and fully elaborated seigneurial "system." The latest contributions to the exchange seem limited to teasing out whether "system" is an appropriate term -- though indeed the more indeterminate "regime" is surely more common.

But the Borealia exchange will serve its purpose if it attracts interested readers to Greer's new book, the latest of a long line of powerful, and original scholarship:  Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America -- and to the work of the other commentators and critics at Borealia

Update, October 19:  Allan Greer responds:

Oh my Goodness, that was a severe misreading of my little piece on the “Seigneurial System.” You write as if what’s at issue is some sort of measure of economic impact (which is what historians argued about 30 years ago). My article was about the concept of a “system,” a distorted view that’s quite widespread in school textbooks and in scholarly writings in English. Cole Harris’s book is a prime case in point, even though you somehow have me in agreement with him. (I do agree with him on a lot of things, but not on this point.) The question is not whether it’s important or not: it’s whether or not there is an “it.”

I should note belatedly, that Allan and I became friends many years ago.  I trust that the above is further evidence that we both hold that writers and historians should be able to disagree without endangering their friendships.  Allan, I'm still not convinced that debating whether it is an "it" is worth such attention, but I appreciate your correction to my account of your position.

Image at top: from Borealia

Borealia on Ann Little's Esther Wheelwright

Historiann does not post much anymore at her blog, more's the pity, but Professor Ann M. Little, her alter ego, is interviewed in a recent Borealia post, talking about her recent book The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright and, among other things, the challenges of writing book length biographies about people who never left any first person testimonies.

Interviewer Keith Grant asks her about the title.  She says:

I think it’s a useful way of thinking about people in the eighteenth century in general, because most people were born into a situation and station in life and they didn’t have all that many choices to make about how they made a living or how they prayed. But I also think it’s an especially useful metaphor for understanding girls’ and women’s lives in all of these cultures–among Protestant British subjects, among the Wabanaki people, and among Catholic French Canadians, women at every level of these communities had fewer choices and options than their male peers.

Esther Wheelwright (1696-1780), daughter of a New England Protestant minister, was captured by the Wabanaki at the age of 7, lived in the Ursuline convent at Quebec City from the age of twelve, and became a nun and eventual mother superior there.

A little bit of Cuba that is forever Nouvelle-France

The grave marker of Pierre LeMoyne d'Iberville, now in the Museum of the City of Havana on Plaza de la Catedral. 

Back to school roundup

Active History returns from hiatus with Alan MacEachern going deep on Bering Land Bridge theory -- and, it seems, the penchant of Canadian history textbooks for publicizing somewhat cranky versions of human origins in the Americas.

Borealia continues its survey of new books in early Canadian history, including The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright, by Ann M. Little, who is also American blogger Historiann -- and lately too caught up in American politics  (national and academic) to blog much about history.

Economic Principals asks if there is room in the academy for history of economics -- and notes a couple of worthwhile Canadian initiatives in the field.

The Vancouver Sun interviews historian Daniel Francis, who, in presenting the history of his hometown, offers us the concept of the "wilderburb."

"A wilderburb is a community situated at the interface between urban and wilderness, a community that combines the density of city living with direct access to the outdoors. The idea of a bear in your backyard, a very familiar phenomenon in North Vancouver, very much encapsulates the District’s identity."

We must have quite of few of those across Canada. I was thinking any community at some risk of being destroyed by forest fire would fit the definition.  But I don't know if the suburbs of Los Angeles should qualify.

Reimagining the Romance of History in the CHR

Never happened.

Catching up on some reading, I recently opened the June 2016 Canadian Historical Review.  One of its articles is a new take on an old subject:  "Brébeuf was Never Martyred: Reimagining the Life and Death of Canada's First Saint " by James Taylor Carson.  (abstract here)

Carson writes of "the enormous edifice that has been built atop Brébeuf's blessed bones" and condemns historians' uncritical acceptance of hagiography.

Instead of questioning the hagiographic narrative, however, historians have, for the most part, left Ragueneau's first telling, and Brébeuf's consequent legacy, largely untouched for more than three-and-a-half centuries.

For the most part?  This seems an extraordinarily selective reading of the historiography of 17th century Euro-Amerindian relations. A small army of ethnohistorians, anthropologists, and New France specialists has produced a shelf of honoured and influential volumes reassessing the Jesuit-Huron encounter and permanently displacing (for any serious reader) the saint-worshipping folktales Carson disparages. Think of the work of Fenton, Trigger, Heidenreich, Jaenen, Dickason, Sioui, to name a few who actually appear in Carson's footnotes. All historians are tempted, of course, to declare their work "revisionist" or "ground-breaking," but surely it is a good deal less than revolutionary to present Brébeuf as something other than simply a holy Catholic martyr .

I think Carson's real innovation -- at least for an article in a scholarly journal -- is the vivid "you are there" reconstruction of the events of 1649 in what is now called Huronia. His title promises a "reimagining," and there is certainly a lot of imagining:

The invaders passed the snowy months hunting and talking, and when the daylight started to stretch they began to ponder their impending assault on Wendake's eastern towns.

Powder pans flashed. Balls whistled through the air. Knives slit throats. Arrows found their marks. Hatchets crunched heads. Blood pooled. The several hundred not killed were captured, doomed to be tortured.

How does a scholar analyze or criticize this evocative language, often from inside the heads ("they began to ponder") of its subjects?  I find myself thinking of Bruce Trigger's studied rationalism in addressing the same subject:

In The Children of Aatientsic I privileged a rationalist approach. [...] I therefore sought to explain native behaviour as far as possible in terms of rational calculations of how desired ends might be achieved. In doing this I eschewed the alternative romantic approach.

I certainly should not be discouraging historians from stylistic innovation and experiments in form. But which is more successful as a mode of scholarship?