Sponsoring Committee: Professor Jennifer S. Tsien, Chairperson Professor Janet R

Sponsoring Committee: Professor Jennifer S. Tsien, Chairperson Professor Janet R. Horne Professor Stéphanie Bérard Professor Emily Ogden BEYOND “QUELQUES ARPENTS DE NEIGE : ” REPRESENTATION OF NEW FRANCE IN FRENCH TEXTS, 1703 TO 1780 Nathan D. Brown Department of French Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of French University of Virginia 2014 Copyright © 2014 Nathan D. Brown TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 3 CHAPTER INTRODUCTION Abandoned Children on the Banks of the Saint Lawrence 5 CHAPTER 1 The Travel Narratives of Lahontan and Charlevoix: Imaging New France and 36 Naming its People CHAPTER 2 Sauvage foils or sauvage foibles ? : Fear of Degeneration and Hope for 88 Regeneration in New France CHAPTER 3 Utopian Visions and Dressing Across Borders : 136 The Discursive Role of New France in Alain-René Lesage's Beauchêne, Les Mariages de Canada, and La Sauvagesse CHAPTER 4 New France in the Discourse of Voltaire and Raynal : Cautionary Tales, 198 Sentimentality, Anglophilia. CONCLUSION Memories of New France : The New Becomes Old 249 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express my gratitude to Jennifer Tsien, who encouraged me to embark on this project, for her continuing advice, support, and enthusiasm. I also wish to thank Janet Horne and Stéphanie Bérard both of whom provided useful guidance and whose courses influenced my thinking on this topic. I would also like to acknowledge and thank Emily Ogden for her thoughts on this project. Any remaining errors and malapropisms in these pages are, of course, entirely my own. Finally, my deepest thanks go to Elizabeth Brown whose encouragement and good humor kept this project enjoyable and on time. Introduction : Abandoned Children on the Banks of the Saint Lawrence No line from literature seems to have had more longevity and been given as much weight in Québécois historiography than Voltaire’s flippant remark about Canada in his 1759 work Candide ou l’optimisme. As Gordon, the great cynic of the conte, remarks to Candide, “Vous savez que ces deux nations sont en guerre pour quelques arpents de neige vers le Canada, et qu’elles dépensent pour cette belle guerre plus que tout le Canada ne vaut.”1 This refrain of Canada as “quelques arpents de neige” – several acres of snow – returns again and again in academic and non-academic works about New France and Canada even when the context is far removed from eighteenth century. It has become a potent metaphor to collapse all visions of New France pre-1763 into a single critical remark. Indeed, since its foundation in the nineteenth century, French-Canadian historiography has paid an enormous amount of attention to the opinion France had of it in the years leading up to the Seven Years’ War. In his 1845 edition of Histoire du Canada depuis sa découverte jusqu’à nos jours François-Xavier Garneau, largely considered the first “historien national du Canada,”2 articulates what has become a common obsession with Voltaire in French-Canadian historiography : Voltaire, retiré à Ferney, célébra le triomphe des Anglais à Québec par un banquet […] Après le banquet, la compagnie se retira dans une galerie terminée par un théâtre élégant, où l’on joua Le Patriote insulaire, pièce remplie de sentiments chaleureux pour la liberté. Voltaire parut lui-même dans le principal rôle. Après la pièce, les fenêtres de la galerie s’ouvrirent, et l’on vit une cour spacieuse illuminée et ornée de trophées sauvages. On fit partir un magnifique feu d’artifice au bruit d’une belle musique guerrière. L’étoile de Saint-Geroge lançait des fusées, au-dessous desquelles on voyait représentée la cataracte de Niagara. 1 Voltaire, Candide ou l’optimisme, The Complete Works of Voltaire, (Oxford : The Voltaire Foundation, 2003) 237. 2 Pierre Savard and Paul Wyczynski, “GARNEAU, FRANÇOIS-XAVIER,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography vol. 9 (University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003). 5 Ce spectacle étrange donné par un Français a quelque chose de sinistre. C’est le rire effréné d’une haine plus forte que le malheur ; mais ce rire effrayant a reçu depuis son explication dans les bouleversement et les vengeances à jamais mémorables de 1793. La cause des Canadiens fut vengée dans des flots de sang. Mais, hélas! La France ne pouvait plus rien pour des enfants abandonnés sur les bords du Saint-Laurent, et un peu plus tard elle en avait perdu le souvenir3 While clearly apocryphal and teleological, this passage reveals the extent to which Garneau employs Voltaire as a metonymy for the opinion of all of France.4 After invoking Voltaire directly, Garneau begins to elide him and France. By the second paragraph Voltaire has become “un Français” and in the final sentence “la France” has completely replaced Voltaire. In this way, Garneau implicates all of France in Voltaire’s unseemly celebration – complete with fireworks and a play – at Ferney on the occasion of the French defeat on the Plains of Abraham. Voltaire’s “rire effrayant” reveals a “sinister” “hatred” towards the Canadiens. But, the Canadiens have their “vengeance.” Jumping forward thirty years, Garneau portrays the Terror of 1793 as a sort of cosmic revenge against France, which dared to “abandon” and forget its “children” in Canada. In this short and fanciful passage, Garneau is able to tie together three of the most important planks in French-Canadian historiography : the “mauvaise réputation” of Canada, the Providential Conquest – whereby British control saves Canada from the Jacobin’s Terror – and, what Girard Bouchard has called, “le paradigme du bâtard.” It almost goes without saying that Voltaire is the central figure in this historiographical trifecta. 5 3 François-Xavier Garneau, Histoire du Canada depuis sa découverte jusqu'à nos jours (Beauchemin, 1882) 388, 389. 4 Garneau claims to have taken this account from an article published the London-based paper Public Advertiser on November 28, 1759. While we may rightly inquire about the political ideology behind this article, published for an English audience, other aspects of the account raise questions of authenticity. The play Un Patriote insulaire either never existed or did not survive to the contemporary era. I have unable to find this text or any independent reference to it. In an endnote to his work Behold the Hero : General Wolfe and the Arts in the Eighteenth Century, Alan McNairn concisely sums up the problematic nature of Garneau’s account. See page 257, note 36. 5 For a more complete vision of Quebec historiography in the twentieth-century see Ronald Rudin, Making History in Twentieth-Century Quebec (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 6 To this day, the citing of Voltaire as representative of French public opinion towards New France continues to be commonplace in French-Canadian and Québécois historiography. In fact, Voltaire’s line from Candide has become so ubiquitous and well-tread in studies of the New World, that scholars can use it without even attributing it to Voltaire. For example, in Susan Mann’s provocative 1980 work The Dream of Nation : A Social and Intellectual History of Quebec she employs it in a decontextualized and uncited manner. As Mann writes in her brief discussion of the Seven Years’ War : “England would be left holding those disdained few acres of snow north of the rich American states (my emphasis)”6 Although she uses Voltaire’s words, Mann gives no mention of Voltaire. Moreover, in a pattern that reoccurs frequently, Mann precedes to make an ahistorical link between Voltaire and Charles De Gaulle’s famous 1967 cry from Montréal’s City Hall, “Vive le Québec libre.” As Mann’s use of Voltaire’s comment suggests, context is unnecessary because the line has become something more than a flippant line from Candide. It has become an unquestioned truism – a universal reference – that stands in succinctly for the sense of abandonment that permeates Québécois historiography. Voltaire’s comment has become a short-hand way for scholars to prove the poor reputation of New France for the French. Even Cécile Vidal and Gilles Havard, whose 2003 work Histoire de l’Amérique française is counter discusive in many ways, fall back on this old trope : “le souvenir [of New France] semble se résumer à la formule dédaigneuse de Voltaire (‘pays couvert de glaces huit mois de l’année, habité par des barbares, des ours et des castors’).”7 Although they do not employ the Candide reference, perhaps recognizing the problematic nature of using an ironic conte in the study of history, Vidal and Havard still use Voltaire as a spokesman for the French 6 Mann, Susan, The Dream of Nation: A Social and Intellectual History of Quebec (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002) 27. 7 Havard, Gilles, and Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l'Amérique française (Paris : Flammarion, 2003) 11. 7 public. As the quotation from Mann already reveals, the convention of quoting Voltaire in historical studies is not confined to francophone scholarship. Peter Moogk, an Anglophone Canadian scholar, for example, again looks to Voltaire to prove New France’s “fearsome reputation” in France in his 2000 work La Nouvelle France, The Making of French Canada : A Cultural History. “the loss of Canada was not regretted” Moogk argues. “Voltaire’s flippant remark in Candide (1759) that the war in North America was being fought for ‘a few acres of snow’ reflected the superficial thinking of his day.”8 Like others before him, he then uses an ahistorical juxtaposition of comments from Marc Lescarbot (1533) and Pierre Boucher (1664) to give the impression that French opinion about Canada was static over two centuries! Thus, if this current project might be critiqued for focusing on rosy depictions of New France, this is not the case.

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