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The government of Louis XIV extended pronatalist policy to New France, hoping to use marriage and prolific procreation to implant settled, French‐style civilization in North America. This chapter reviews attempts to promote marriage and population growth in New France. The first part examines the role of marriage in French Jesuits' quest to convert the indigenous population from about 1630 to 1660. Strict Catholic Reformation standards for monogamous, indissoluble marriage proved difficult to maintain in the colonial environment. The chapter then surveys the royal government's investments to promote population growth in the period from 1663 to 1690, including its export of French females to Canada for marriage, financial support for the formation of settler households and use of censuses to monitor population movement. Settler households were marked by high fertility, but the active promotion of settled domesticity failed to “civilize” New France in the ways that royal officials had anticipated.

Bayou Country’s musical terrain and the cultural and historical undercurrents that expanded the genre’s repertoire, stylistic range, and instrumental conventions are outlined in this chapter. Three factors encouraged heterogeneity in the Louisiana’s musical traditions: a musical network that stimulated exchange between musicians, thereby diversifying Louisiana’s soundscape; the historical idiosyncrasies and ethnic variation shaping cultural production in rural enclaves; and the tension between traditional and innovative tendencies within the genre. Residual colonial song structures performed by guitarist Blind Uncle Gaspard, Dennis McGee’s enigmatic fiddling that crossed stylistic and racial boundaries, the friction between conservative and progressive inclinations in regional Cajun popular culture, as performed by Leo Soileau and Moïse Robin, and Cajun readings of American popular culture as interpreted by accordionists Lawrence Walker and Nathan Abshire are used as points of departure in this discussion of heterogeneous musical expression on 78 rpm record.

This chapter examines the role of legal pluralism in the construction of sovereignty in New France. More specifically, it considers how courts established colonial sovereignties in the French Empire. After providing a historical background on French attempts at colonization in North America during the sixteenth century, the chapter turns to struggles for power in New France and the French admiral's extension of his authority to New France. It then considers the interplay between a legally and politically plural order in France and the solidification of French claims in North America. It also discusses six specific legal conflicts among parties active in the colony: the first two involved the selective use of law, personal authority, and force, while the remaining four consider the role of New France in interjurisdictional rivalries in France, especially over the consolidation of maritime authority. It suggests that the ununified political and legal order in the imperial center influenced claims to governance and trade in New France.

This chapter outlines the various interpretations of legitimate violence in the French Atlantic world and describes the stakes that induced European and indigenous men to conduct campaigns or undertake violent actions in the years between 1748 and 1756. It also provides an overview of the different goals and concerns that military elites in France drew from their prior war experience, thereby providing insight into how multiple noble, martial masculinities could coexist in the French Atlantic empire so long as they did not come into direct contact. The year 1748 brought about different results for martial elites in both France and New France. Louis XV’s peace in Europe returned French military nobles to a world of anxiety over their future position, status, and opportunity. New France, on the other hand, experienced no peace at all, making a sixteen-year war in North America, not a seven-year war. Conflict among Native nations, British colonies, and the French regime in Canada carried on after the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle went into effect and flowed seamlessly into the “new war” in 1756. Onontio, the indigenous name for both the governors of New France and the king of France, remained at war, continuing a pattern of borderlands conflict more than a half century old.

The aftermath of the Treaty of Utrecht was a colonial site where natives and Europeans voiced their claims to territory using similar legal arguments (rights of discovery, cession, purchase, conquest). By looking at how the Wabanaki negotiated their disputes over land and forced the Europeans to take seriously their claims, this chapter shows that dispossession was not a legally silent process for indigenous peoples nor was it a straightforward one for European colonisers.

This chapter focuses on the homecoming of military veterans of New France from both the marine service and the army, which tells us much about how the French Crown interpreted and dealt with its reversal of war fortune, and about how New France proved to have been a colony worth giving up and erasing from the nation’s memory. The stunning first blow to the veterans was the suppression of the compagnies franches de la marine as a separate military service in November 1761. Then, a commission impaneled on December 18, 1761, one month after the disbanding of la marine service, began investigating the reasons for the loss of New France, in particular the officers accused of “corrupt practices, embezzlement, and robbery in the fulfillment of their duties in Canada.” When the court rendered judgment, it closed the royal book on two hundred years of imperial aspirations in the North Atlantic.

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s main themes. This book explains the conflict between France and New France by exploring the meanings of violence and empire during the 1750s. It offers new insights into the French imperial experience and the legacy of the Seven Years’ War. At the heart of the narrative are the events that informed and followed the multiple meetings from May through June 1756—events that reveal the profound ramifications of the encounter between the Canadian, Indian, and French cultures of war. The book offers a fresh look at the French Seven Years’ War by juxtaposing the experiences of the remarkably diverse individuals who fought in it and by examining the elite combatants’ perceptions of it. It argues that it is impossible to consider the war in France or that in Canada without connecting the two.

This chapter argues that the sacrifice of 150 years of North American colonization was assuaged by colonial experiments in the 1760s and the hope for a more positive experience that would reinforce, rather than challenge, the mission civilisatrice. When the Crown suppressed the compagnies franches de la marine in 1761 and limited the mobility and influence of elite Canadians who had returned to the metropole, their North American colonial experience was silenced. Until peace was established in 1763, almost all of the Canadian notables in France had hoped for the restoration of their colonial homes so that they would not be obliged to undertake new ventures. France used both innovative, “enlightened” colonialism in the Kourou Colony (1763–1765) and the tightly framed voyages of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s expeditions to search for and install a new Atlantic paradigm. Neither strategy referenced New France as an archetype for future colonial encounters, effectively excising it from memory.

This chapter examines the situations of the aboriginal people of Canada during the conquest of New France. At the time of the conquest most of Canada was aboriginal territory. The aborigines initially challenged colonial rule but when the settler dominance was established during the latter half of the 19th century their capacity for resistance was severely reduced. Despite this, the settlers had difficulty in dealing with them because of their diversity and their varied environments and resources.

This chapter details the eruption of violence in the Ohio borderlands in the early 1750s as indigenous peoples, French, and English all sought to impose their authority there. Though ownership of this region had long been disputed, this renewal of conflict resulted directly from the incomplete conclusion to the War of Austrian Succession in 1748. The European struggle to determine the Habsburg succession promoted the long territorial dispute between British New England and New France’s claims to the north and west. The peace treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle did not resolve European sovereignty over the Ohio River lands, nor did it take into consideration indigenous Americans’ perspectives as the peace was hashed out. Instead, the treaty restored colonial boundaries to their 1744 limits. With the return of the Louisbourg fortress in Cape Breton to Quebec, the treaty of Aix reversed Britain’s most significant gain in North America. New France once more seemed to be as strong and threatening to Britain’s North American interests as before 1748. Appearance, however, belied reality.

Two letters written by Father Paul Le Jeune in 1636 are presented, which report back to Old France on what was going on in New France. When Father Le Jeune first arrived in Quebec, he was greeted with great joy and relief by Madame Hébert, widow of Monsieur Hébert, and their children. They had been the first family to settle there. They were devout Catholics and had been frightened and greatly concerned when Quebec had been evacuated by the English in 1634. Le Jeune and Father De Noue reassured them of France's continued concern for her colony, and they reinstated a Catholic presence.

This chapter examines the career development of Georges Barrère during the period from 1917 to 1918. In the fall of 1917, xenophobia reached fever pitch in the U.S., which affected concert stages. To take advantage of anti-German hysteria and gain American support for the post-war reconstruction of France, American supporters of France founded a magazine called New France. This magazine helped stabilize the status of French musicians in the U.S., including Barrère. During this period, Barrère engaged in a series of fund raising projects and his student William Kincaid was awarded a silver medal on the completion of the artists' course at the Institute of Musical Art.

This chapter discusses how Indians employed the Indian slave trade to shape the contours of the alliance even as it limited French options. As French colonizers sought to enlarge their influence in the West, they embraced an ever-expanding number of Indians as commercial and military partners. The Indian slave trade emerged as the most valuable tool employed by New France's Native allies to limit French expansion and determine the makeup of the French-led alliance.

This chapter focuses on women’s military roles in France’s attempts to colonize Canada and Acadia. It argues that political and religious officials in New France were more likely than their counterparts in New England to incorporate women’s social rank into their understanding of those women’s martial activities. Elite French and some Indigenous women were seen as performing roles similar to those of a lady defending a castle or a woman of high rank acting as a diplomat. (Prominent examples include Madeleine de Verchères, Jeanne Mance, and Marie de l’Incarnation.) Jesuit and Ursuline missionaries’ accounts of nonelite French and (allied) Native women more often described those women as informally joining battles with the blessing of their husband or God.