• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Document generated on 09/29/2021 2:43 p.m. Ontario History Ghost Empire: How the French Almost Conquered North America By Philip Marchand Stephen Kenny Volume 98, Number 1, Spring 2006 URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1065845ar DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/1065845ar See table of contents Publisher(s) The Ontario Historical Society ISSN 0030-2953 (print) 2371-4654 (digital) Explore this journal Cite this review Kenny, S. (2006). Review of [Ghost Empire: How the French Almost Conquered North America By Philip Marchand]. Ontario History, 98(1), 120–122. https://doi.org/10.7202/1065845ar Copyright © The Ontario Historical Society, 2006 This document is protected by copyright law. Use of the services of Érudit (including reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online. https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ This article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit. Érudit is a non-profit inter-university consortium of the Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and the Université du Québec à Montréal. Its mission is to promote and disseminate research. https://www.erudit.org/en/ 120 ONTARIO HISTORY Ghost Empire How the French Almost Conquered North America By Philip Marchand. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2005. xvii+ 444 pp. Maps. $37.99 hardcover. ISBN 0-7710-5677-X. hilip Marchand’s touching and per- sonal pilgrimage to the dim past Pof the French in North America reminded me of my own encounter with that increasingly vague and little appreci- ated epoch. Twenty-five years ago, while teaching Canadian history at the Uni- versity of Vermont and raising two tod- dlers, I recall walking along Church Street in Burlington. Hearing my wife and me speaking in French to the children, senior citizens of grandparent age stopped to do likewise. More than once I saw tears well up in their eyes as they explained that for imminent disappearance. Of course he their own grandchildren the language was is neither the first nor will he be the last gone. For their part students with names to perceive such decline. René Lévesque like Aubuchon, Paquet and Tremblay once referred dismissively to French found their way to my classes, wondering speakers beyond Quebec as dead ducks about their origins and reminding me that and novelist Yves Beauchemin described their own grandparents still spoke a smat- them callously as cadavres encore chauds tering of French. Imagine my surprise to (still warm cadavers). Indeed, according discover a French speaking Santa Claus at to Beauchemin Canada was a fatal dis- Gaynes Department Store up by the I-89. ease for the French language and those Such bilingualism was not for the benefit who spoke it. If this country had such a of native Franco-Americans; rather it was negative effect one can only imagine what for the droves of pre-Christmas Mon- Beauchemin might conclude about the treal bargain hunters. After all, the store’s impact of the United States. important Québecois clientele required As a means to enter the story of the some sensitivity! French in North America, Philip March- Is Vermont the rule, Quebec the ex- and focuses on the travels, adventures ception? When one thinks of the condi- and tragedy of the life of René-Robert tion of the French language and heritage Cavelier de La Salle. The controversial in North America one can only note how discoverer of the mouth of the Mississip- they have faded. Philip Marchand is yet pi River was born at Rouen in 1643 and another witness to this sense of their murdered by his own men somewhere book revews 121 in Texas in 1687. La Salle visited a vast Throughout the book the reader con- swath of the uncharted continent, travel- fronts an extraordinary and disconcerting ling from the St. Lawrence valley all the galimatias of disconnected reflections. way to the Gulf of Mexico. He stopped For example, Marchand stopped to visit and traded at many places in what is now a huge Romanesque Roman Catholic the province of Ontario. His journeys church he once happened upon in rural provide the theme for Marchand’s own southwestern Michigan. Surprised that exploration of what he poetically charac- the door was open on a weekday, he en- terizes as a ‘ghost empire.’ Like a guide, tered. This simple experience leads to a La Salle’s wanderings provide a map of digression on the pre-Second Vatican places to which Marchand travels and Council Catholic devotion of First Fri- upon which he reflects in these pages. days. He then proceeds to a discussion By standard criteria Marchand’s work of the apostate priest Charles Chiniquy, cannot be defined as a serious historical the philosophy of Marxism and Friedrich investigation. The usual expectations of Engels’ notions of the concept of fam- any professional historian reading this ily. Every chapter is similarly replete with material will not be met. The book con- such pensive and disparate ruminations. tains no index. Authors are cited without It is as though the model and expanse of use of footnotes. There is an eclectic and La Salle’s incessant travels allow March- admittedly intriguing bibliographical base. and the latitude to include material on Antiquarian, literary, local and historical, anything that might strike his fancy. Stop- the sources are of very mixed and highly ping in a church, driving through country unequal value. Moreover, the author re- fields, drinking a beer in a decrepit bar, fers to numerous titles which he does not conversing with amateur historians or his- include in his bibliography. More recent torical enactors, all provide inspiration for and serious studies by scholars such as Marchand’s meditation on a lost French Gerard Brault and Yves Roby are either North American empire. But what under- missed or disregarded. Unfortunately, the standing the reader might draw from all timeworn insight of the Boston Brah- of this is less obvious. man, Francis Parkman, hovers over this Rather late in the game Marchand ac- text like a malign phantom. It is no sur- knowledges his own sense of history. He prise that Marchand is seized by the sense likens his work to “an endless dark house, of ghostliness. full of crazy corridors and unexplored At a practical level, this work is written rooms.” (p. 327) What an apt metaphor! with a degree of insouciance that verges One might strike a match and shed a sur- on startling. On one occasion Marchand prising bit of light but still there is much writes of meeting a certain Gail Moreau, darkness beyond. To be fully enlight- née Schreiner, who he describes as the ened about the past is quite impossible. widowed vice-president of the French- No historian would disagree. Marchand’s Canadian Heritage Society of Michigan. book ought not to be read primarily as A few pages later he writes of seeing history, but as a travelogue and a mem- her again at a special mass for people of oir it is both exotic and compelling. In French descent at St. Anne’s parish in his perambulations across the continent, Detroit, this time in the presence of her the author meets a unique and colourful fully-alive husband, Monsieur Moreau. cast of characters. He also learns in a very 122 ONTARIO HISTORY personal way of the quality and richness his past and his profound dismay at its of his own antecedents. A thoroughly an- loss should be considered the most admi- glicized Franco-American, he was born in rable and essential contribution of these Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He heard his ed- pages. His book can most certainly be ucated, middle-class parents speak French judged a worthy if imperfect enterprise. only when they did not want the children Read it and weep! to understand. Marchand opines “that it would have seemed vaguely un-Ameri- Stephen Kenny can for them to have taught us French at University of Regina home.” (p. 355) Only during his own me- anderings, the recounting of which has Bibliography: resulted in this book, did he actually learn Brault, Gerard. The French-Canadian heritage in what “tourtière” was. In the Marchand New England. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s family that dish had long given way to the University Press, 1986. New England staple of baked beans. Roby, Yves. The Franco-Americans of New Eng- If an important part of true his- land: dreams and realities. Translated by torical sensitivity be memory, then both Mary Picard. Sillery, Quebec: Septentri- Marchand’s deeply emotional search for on, 2004. 4Square An introduction to the Sharon Temple National Historic Site, to the Children of Peace who made it, and to their place in the history of Canada before Canada. By Mark Fram and Albert Schrauwers. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2005. 64 pp. Illustrations. $10.00 softcover. ISBN 1-55245-164-X. SQUARE is more than a story The Sharon Temple is now a National about a religious building; it is an ac- Historical Site and one of the most re- 4count of a religious community and markable pre-Confederation structures its interaction with place. A collabora- in Ontario. This book also speaks to the tive effort, this monograph combines the larger societal context in which the com- theoretical expertise of Albert Schrau- munity and the Temple existed. As Fram wers (Awaiting the Millennium) and the and Schrauwers write, “the Temple sits at architectural knowledge of Mark Fram the intersection of two axes of history – (Well Preserved). Both authors’ works are a commonplace local society of the early landmarks in their respective fields and I nineteenth century in Upper Canada, in- would recommend each as worthy read- tersecting a three-thousand-year struggle ing.

Load more

  4

Copy Link