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Overview
Apostles of Empire is a revisionist history of the French Jesuit mission to indigenous North Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, offering a comprehensive view of a transatlantic enterprise in which secular concerns were integral. Between 1611 and 1764, 320 Jesuits were sent from France to North America to serve as missionaries. Most labored in colonial New France, a vast territory comprising eastern Canada and the Great Lakes region that was inhabited by diverse Native American populations. Although committed to spreading Catholic doctrines and rituals and adapting them to diverse indigenous cultures, these missionaries also devoted significant energy to more-worldly concerns, particularly the transatlantic expansion of the absolutist-era Bourbon state and the importation of the culture of elite, urban French society.
In Apostles of Empire Bronwen McShea accounts for these secular dimensions of the mission's history through candid portraits of Jesuits engaged in a range of secular activities. We see them not only preaching and catechizing in terms that borrowed from indigenous idioms but also cultivating trade and military partnerships between the French and various Indian tribes. Apostles of Empire contributes to ongoing research on the Jesuits, New France, and Atlantic World encounters, as well as on early modern French society, print culture, Catholicism, and imperialism. McShea shows how the Jesuits' robust conceptions of secular spheres of Christian action informed their efforts from both sides of the Atlantic to build up a French and Catholic empire in North America through significant indigenous cooperation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496208903 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2019 |
| Series: | France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization |
| Pages: | 378 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Mission for France
Writing home to Paris from "the middle of a forest" in Canada on June 6, 1632, Paul Le Jeune told his Jesuit superior that, after treading American soil for the first time — at Gaspé in eastern Quebec — he had asked some French laymen already there to build an altar so he could offer Mass. The priest added that, during his first act of divine worship in America, he was astonished that the texts from his missal that day included words from the Great Commission at the end of St. Matthew's Gospel. There, after rising from the dead, Christ says to his apostles: "All power is given to me in Heaven and earth. ... Teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." Le Jeune took this as a "good omen" and declared that he and the small band of missionaries who had crossed the Atlantic with him were like "pioneers" in an army, digging "trenches" for "brave soldiers" who would later "besiege and take the place."
Three decades later, working in Paris as metropolitan procureur or development officer for the mission to New France, Le Jeune urged King Louis XIV to send troops across the Atlantic to extend French colonial rule and Catholic worship into Iroquois, English, and Dutch lands. He would not live to see the commissioning of the Carignan-Salières Regiment for North American action in 1665, or receive news of its victories against "the little Turk of New France," as another Jesuit called the Iroquois at that time.
Le Jeune was a leader not only of efforts to bring Native American populations into the Catholic fold, but also of a worldly enterprise of building up a French Atlantic empire. Throughout his career he would cast himself and other missionaries as a Christian army that wielded spiritual weapons against Satan and a host of indigenous "superstitions." At the same time he would tirelessly promote North America's physical transformation through commerce, mining, agriculture, town-building, and actual military conquests by French troops and allied Indian warriors. He and other Jesuits were pioneers for France, as well as for Catholicism, in America.
Le Jeune was the first major author and redactor of the Relations de la Nouvelle France, published annually beginning in 1632. He served for many years as mission superior, and as an active missionary in and around Quebec, before serving the mission administratively in Paris from 1649 to 1662. His story opens a window onto the French metropolitan world in which the mission to New France was conceived, and upon which it would depend for decades for manpower, material resources, and moral support. The contours of that world, centered in Paris, also bring into focus the core concern of this book: a dynamic relationship between Catholicism and a sometimes militant French expansionism that is seen in numerous sources left behind by the missionaries.
A Young Jesuit in Bourbon Paris
Le Jeune was nearly forty when he received orders in March 1632 to cross the Atlantic and take up duties as mission superior at Quebec. At that time Quebec was a small French settlement and trading post overseen by its founder, Samuel de Champlain. In his first report on the colony, Le Jeune declared that, on the day he was given a Canadian assignment, "the joy and happiness" he felt was greater than any he had known in twenty years. Those two decades before, he had been discerning a call to the priesthood and seeking admission into the Society of Jesus.
Le Jeune hailed from the French province of Champagne. He was born on July 15, 1592 into a respectable bourgeois, Protestant family of the Swiss Reformed persuasion. They lived in the small village of Vitry-le-François close to Châlons-sur-Marne (present-day Châlons-en-Champagne), a manufacturing town of about ten thousand inhabitants that had seen better days.
The Huguenot community of Châlons lost a member in 1607 when Le Jeune, while still in his teens, was sacramentally received into the Roman Church. The young man's reasons for converting are unclear. But in becoming Catholic, he followed a path taken by many in Counter-Reformation France, including his king, Henry IV, who from Paris a hundred miles to the west ruled a large, divided realm still recovering from the Wars of Religion.
Le Jeune relocated to the royal capital in late September 1613, entering the Jesuit novitiate at Paris at age twenty-one. Given the small social world of Châlons and its environs, it is likely Le Jeune was influenced in this path by the young Louis Lalemant, son of the bailiff of the local Comte de Vertus and later famous for his writings on spirituality. Lalemant, born in Châlons in 1578, had joined the Jesuits in 1605. He later became Le Jeune's spiritual director.
Paris must have astounded Le Jeune. Teeming with nearly four hundred thousand inhabitants, it dwarfed Châlons and was many times over the largest city in France. Quickly, too, Le Jeune would have met many young men like himself who had left behind a provincial existence for a cosmopolitan setting full of new possibilities. Going back to the days of Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas, Paris for centuries had been a magnet city for scholars and clerics on the make from all over Christendom.
The city was legendary in another way that would appeal especially to a young Jesuit. It was where Ignatius Loyola had formed the Society of Jesus with six of his friends, inside a small chapel atop the butte of Montmartre. This had occurred in 1534 on August 15, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Despite Loyola's Basque origins and his order's strong association with Spain, the Society was indelibly marked by its early French history. Four of its first ten members were from France or Francophone Savoy and, with Ignatius and others, had been educated in Paris. Furthermore, by the late sixteenth century, the Jesuits were sought-after educators for elite children and confessors to high-ranking officials. By 1547, only a few years after Pope Paul III's formal approval of the Society, the Jesuits in France had secured the patronage of Guillaume du Prat, bishop of Clermont. By the end of his life the bishop had established three Jesuit colleges, two in the Auvergne at Billom and Mauriac, and another in Paris, where the school would be named Clermont in his honor. By 1575 there were fifteen Jesuit colleges in the kingdom, patronized by the duc de Nevers, the archbishop of Lyons, and other princely figures. Jesuits even became court preachers and confessors of choice to the royal family.
Partly because they had catapulted so rapidly to such influence, the Jesuits faced fierce opposition in the French capital region throughout the same period. Plans for the Collège de Clermont were frustrated for years as members of the Parlement de Paris, the archbishop of the city, and officials at the University of Paris protested the venture. They were alarmed by the Society's Spanish connections and its innovative "fourth vow" of obedience to the pope, required of Jesuits when professing final vows to the traditional three of chastity, poverty, and obedience to religious superiors. More offensive still to many parlementaires was that during the Wars of Religion, many Jesuits collaborated with the militant, ultramontane Holy Union led by the Guise family, themselves major patrons of the order. And in 1594, after a student of the Jesuits failed to assassinate Henry IV, the Parlement banished the Society from its jurisdiction. Officials in Normandy and Burgundy followed suit.
Paradoxically French Jesuits benefited from this period of exile, which lasted until 1603. Henry IV rehabilitated the Society to demonstrate the sincerity of his Catholic conversion and to assert royal power over the parlementaires. To secure Henry's favor, the Jesuits agreed to a stipulation in his Edict of Rouen that all members of the Society laboring in the kingdom be French-born or naturalized Frenchmen, and that all swear an oath of loyalty to the Crown. This overlaid the troublesome fourth vow with (so to speak) a kind of fifth vow of allegiance to France. The requirement made the Jesuits of early Bourbon France an unusually nationally homogenous group of male religious, and one that in Paris, especially, took pains to demonstrate political loyalty. This patriotic corps of French Jesuits would fill positions in the mission to North America, distinguishing the enterprise from Iberian Jesuit missions in the same period, which included in their ranks not just Spanish and Portuguese men, but also Italians, Danes, men from the British Isles, and even men from the Middle East and mission lands themselves.
When young Le Jeune arrived in Paris for his novitiate, the Society was enjoying rich fruits of this rapprochement with the monarchy. Henry had reopened Jesuit colleges, channeling money and favor their way. He also established eighteen new Jesuit colleges, taking a special interest in the Collège de La Flèche, housed in a magnificent château near Angers, where Le Jeune and many other Jesuits sent to Canada would undergo part of their formation. Henry further approved the creation of a new level of Jesuit administrative bureaucracy in his realm, the Assistancy of France. This enabled the five Jesuit provinces of the kingdom to be overseen from a national perspective in Paris, rather than answer directly, one by one, to the Society's generalate in Rome as had previously been the case. This new degree of autonomy from Rome was soon exhibited following the assassination of Henry IV by François Ravaillac. Once again under clouds of suspicion, the Jesuits in Paris issued a declaration of their allegiance to the French Crown and the special "liberty of the Gallican church." They were quickly reprimanded by the Jesuit superior general, Claudio Acquaviva, and by Pope Gregory XV. Nevertheless the French Jesuits continued to promote a Gallican vision of the Church and a conception of the French monarchy as specially favored by God. As a result even Parisian magistrates once hostile to the Society were by 1614 citing Jesuits' self-regulation under French law as exemplary.
Amid such optimism about the Jesuits' relationship with the governing elites of France, Le Jeune in 1613 entered a brand new house of novitiate in the wealthy faubourg of Saint-Germain, close to Paris's bustling Latin Quarter. The building, the Hôtel de Mézières, close to the Église de Saint-Sulpice, had several years before been gifted to the Jesuits for their novices by Madeleine Luillier de Saint-Beuve and her nephew, the baron de la Bussière. Le Jeune and other aspiring Jesuits thus studied, prayed, and socialized in stately quarters furnished and supplied by wealthy patrons that included also the young King Louis XIII and his mother, the queen regent Marie de' Medici.
In Saint-Germain Le Jeune was close to the administrative heart of the French kingdom in the period of the prince de Condé's machinations against the queen regent, the rare calling of the Estates General in 1614, and the young king's declaration of his majority. He was also just a few blocks from the River Seine — full in those days of commercial boat traffic and lined with fisheries and mills — at a point at which the newly reconstructed Palais de Louvre on the opposite bank stretched imposingly across one's line of vision. Paris as Le Jeune first encountered it was undergoing dramatic transformations as a result of Crown-sponsored projects. These included commercial-residential centers such as the Plâce-Dauphine, new bridges and quays, and land reclamation efforts in the Seine such as the creation of the Île de Saint-Louis out of two smaller islands.
Just as Le Jeune entered the novitiate at Paris when its facilities were new, in 1622 he returned to the city for theology studies, after several years at La Flèche, Rennes, and Bourges, when the Collège de Clermont was in the first years of resurrected life. The college, established in 1563, was situated on the Rue Saint-Jacques in the Latin Quarter, close to the University of Paris. It had closed its doors during the period of Jesuit exile early in the reign of Henry IV and, due to parlementaire opposition, its reopening was delayed until 1618, when Louis XIII insisted the college was needed to ensure that talented youth would continue relocating to the royal capital.
Le Jeune's second period in Paris, 1622 to 1626, was crucial for his professional formation. Also at Clermont at the time were the Parisian brothers Charles and Jérôme Lalemant, along with Barthèlemy Vimont from Lisieux. Vimont would eventually succeed Le Jeune as mission superior at Quebec. The Lalemants were the sons of Sieur Gabriel Lalemant, a lieutenant criminel of the early Paris police force who also judged cases brought to the city's criminal court. Charles had met Le Jeune and Vimont at La Flèche during his own theology studies, and in Paris he served as principal of the boarding school at Clermont before being posted to New France in 1625. He was the first superior of the Jesuit mission there and would later precede Le Jeune, as well, in the office of metropolitan procureur of the mission. His brother Jérôme, who would also eventually serve in Quebec as mission superior, was by 1623 already a professor of theology at Clermont.
Founding fathers of the mission thus knew each other first as peers, teachers, and students in Paris before their travels to New France. This Parisian network of Jesuits associated with the mission was tied to another at La Flèche. There a Jesuit named Enemond Massé, who in the early 1610s spent a very brief period in Acadie (present-day Nova Scotia and part of New Brunswick), was a member of the faculty from 1614 to 1625. He influenced many future missionaries to Canada: Le Jeune, Vimont, and Charles Lalemant; Alexandre de Vieuxpont, Claude Quentin, Charles Dumarché, and Nicolas Adam; and the femininely named Anne de Nouë, who was of noble lineage and who had earlier served Henry IV as an officer of the privy chamber.
Perhaps due to his early contact with Massé and Charles Lalemant, Le Jeune in 1625 sent a letter to the Jesuit general in Rome, Mutius Vitelleschi, expressing a wish to be posted for missionary work, but not necessarily in America. In his reply Vitelleschi praised the young Jesuit's desire to labor apostolically "among barbarous peoples where, in human terms, there is no comfort." But he did not promise Le Jeune a missionary assignment, encouraging him rather to continue on the path of charity and obedience until the will of "good Jesus" for his future was brought more clearly to light.
While in Paris as a theology student and new priest, Le Jeune had access to writings by Jesuits who worked as missionaries in different parts of the world, thanks partly to a publishing project of an enterprising young printer and merchant named Sébastien Cramoisy. In his print shop on the Rue Saint-Jacques, which catered to teachers and students at Clermont, Cramoisy produced and sold at affordable prices a number of French translations of missionary relations, the first appearing in 1624. This was Nicolas Trigault's translation of missionary letters from Japan, recounting martyrdoms endured by Christian converts there. Around the same time Cramoisy printed more titles on Jesuit missions in East Asia. Later in his own Relations from Canada Le Jeune would allude to details about China and Japan, likely gleaned from these books.
Le Jeune at this time may also have drawn inspiration from the canonization of the first Jesuit missionary saint, Francis Xavier, in 1622. The first Jesuit to travel to India and Japan, Xavier was declared a saint along with Ignatius Loyola on March 12 by Pope Gregory XV. Several months later, as Le Jeune was about to commence theology studies, the Clermont faculty hosted a day of festivities to celebrate the canonizations. These were commemorated in a book published by Cramoisy, who also printed a French-language biography of Loyola at this time.
Four years at Clermont furthermore brought Le Jeune near to persons of rank and wealth based in Paris. His spiritual director at Clermont, Jean de La Bretesche, was close to the family of Henri de Lévis, the young duc de Ventadour. Ventadour's uncle was Henry II de Montmorency, the viceroy of New France from 1620 to 1625. At La Bretesche's funeral late in 1624, Ventadour was persuaded by some Jesuits at Clermont to purchase his uncle's colonial office from the Crown. This action, accompanied by the duke's expressions of support for launching a Jesuit mission in New France, marked a turning point for Jesuits who hoped to be sent to North America. However supportive General Vitelleschi was in Rome, they needed patronage at the French court to launch any such mission. Providing this, Ventadour turned his grand home close to the Jesuit novitiate in Saint-Germain into a center of activity devoted to New France. His salon was then frequented by Champlain, prominent merchants, nobles considering overseas investment, and Jesuits. Ventadour would personally fund the expenses of the first group of Jesuits sent to Quebec in 1625: Charles Lalemant, Massé, and the future martyr Jean de Brébeuf.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Note on Primary Sources
Part 1. Foundations and the Era of the Parisian Relations
1. A Mission for France
2. Rescuing the “Poor Miserable Savage”
3. Surviving the Beaver Wars and the Fronde
4. Exporting and Importing Catholic Charity
Part 2. A Longue Durée of War and Metropolitan Neglect
5. Crusading for Iroquois Country
6. Cultivating an Indigenous Colonial Aristocracy
7. Losing Paris
8. A Mission with No Empire
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index