French Connections

Cultural Mobility in North America and the Atlantic World, 1600–1875

Andrew N. Wegmann, Robert Englebert, Andrew N. Wegmann, Robert Englebert

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780807174579
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

French Connections examines how the movement of people, ideas, and social practices contributed to the complex processes and negotiations involved in being and becoming French in North America and the Atlantic World between the years 1600 and 1875. Engaging a wide range of topics, from religious and diplomatic performance to labor migration, racialization, and both imagined and real conceptualizations of "Frenchness" and "Frenchification, " this volume argues that cultural mobility was fundamental to the development of French colonial societies and the collective identities they housed. Cases of cultural formation and dislocation in places as diverse as Quebec, the Illinois Country, Detroit, Haiti, Acadia, New England, and France itself demonstrate the broad variability of French cultural mobility that took place throughout this massive geographical space. Nevertheless, these communities shared the same cultural root in the midst of socially and politically fluid landscapes, where cultural mobility came to define, and indeed sustain, communal and individual identities in French North America and the Atlantic World. Drawing on innovative new scholarship on Louisiana and New Orleans, the editors and contributors to French Connections look to refocus the conversation surrounding French colonial interconnectivity by thinking about mobility as a constitutive condition of culture; from this perspective, separate "spheres" of French colonial culture merge to reveal a broader, more cohesive cultural world. The comprehensive scope of this collection will attract scholars of French North America, early American history, Atlantic World history, Caribbean studies, Canadian studies, and frontier studies. With essays from established, award-winning scholars such as Brett Rushforth, Leslie Choquette, Jay Gitlin, and Christopher Hodson as well as from new, progressive thinkers such as Mairi Cowan, William Brown, Karen L. Marrero, and Robert D. Taber, French Connections promises to generate interest and value across an extensive and diverse range of concentrations.

Making Indians in the American Backcountry

Récits de voyage, Cultural Mobility, and Imagining Empire in the Age of Revolutions

ROBERT ENGLEBERT

It was an inauspicious beginning to a very short chapter in an otherwise storied career. The newly appointed governor of Guadeloupe, Georges-Henri-Victor Collot, arrived on the small Caribbean island amid growing political and racial tensions in 1793.1 A veteran of the American War for Independence who had served under Marshal Rochambeau, Collot had risen through the ranks, navigating the revolutionary zeal and horror that had gripped his homeland and brought so many of his compatriots to ruin. And yet this decorated French general, seemingly adept at negotiating the political minefield of the early French republic, was ill-prepared to fully grasp the shifting geopolitical landscape and the social ramifications of racially charged policies in the Caribbean.2

Upon his arrival in Guadeloupe, Collot was quickly confronted with a slave revolt, imperial miscommunication, and the prospect of British invasion. With few appreciable resources at his disposal, the governor reacted to events on the fly. Nowhere was this more evident than in Collot’s decision to arm gens de couleur and slaves in defense of the colony. Overturning the colonial racial social order to cobble together a defense force further split the already fractious white planters, and when the British attacked in March of 1794, French royalists sided with France’s longtime imperial rivals. Defeated and deflated, Victor Collot surrendered Guadeloupe to the British, who then remanded him to the United States.3

The story of Collot’s short tenure in Guadeloupe clearly elucidates the widening social and political fissures that threatened to tear France’s Atlantic empire apart. Notions of race, nation, and citizenship were all being redefined, and the prospect of a new world order must have been unsettling for this moderate republican. Collot would tell his own version of events from America, what historian Laurent Dubois has interpreted as a selective and sanitized account, meant to expunge all sense of personal culpability or transgression.4 Writing to the French minister of the marine, he framed his all-too-brief governorship as an impossible task, determined by forces greater than himself, and he prefaced his compte rendu with the disclaimer, “I governed the island of Guadeloupe at a time when it was nearly impossible to do any good, and very difficult to prevent evil.”5 In this no-win scenario the governor and, by proxy, the empire were the ultimate victims of circumstance.

Collot’s compte rendu is most assuredly revisionist, but also highly imaginative, weaving an idealized French Atlantic empire as backdrop against which insurrecting slaves, Jacobin threats, and treasonous monarchists are explicated. Of course, the backdrop, subtle as it is, is a fiction. Collot’s version of imperial governance more closely resembles a romanticized ancien régime France, replete with references to benevolent governors and unified loyal—read tepid and docile—subjects.6 His notion of French order, moreover, belied the reality of terror and political strife, even while regularly referencing a homeland in shambles. These inaccuracies, however, are beside the point. Contradictory and self-serving as it was, Collot’s compte rendu was an act of imperial imagining.

Building on a legacy of colonial writing, Collot sought to elicit his own particular vision of empire. But while his account of Guadeloupe fabricated an elusive imperial ideal meant to salvage a French Atlantic empire that was seemingly crumbling all around him, Collot’s next œuvre imagined a new French Empire, built on the foundations of lost colonies in the heart of North America. By 1795, Collot found himself paroled in Philadelphia and facing a lawsuit for damages over the loss of a merchant’s ship while still governor. Faced with the prospect of a lengthy stay in America, he then struck an agreement with the French ambassador, Pierre-Auguste Adet, to embark on a voyage to survey the western territories.7 In much the same manner that Louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s Voyage autour du monde had attempted to set a new vision for French imperialism following the loss of New France a generation earlier, Collot’s account of the American backcountry offered the prospect of remaking the French Empire.8 And he was not alone in this endeavor.

The late eighteenth century was a period of heightened French cultural mobility. People, goods, and ideas diffused throughout the Atlantic World, informing and reacting to the rampant sociopolitical change that historians have come to call the Age of Revolutions. Revolution-turned-terror in France prompted an exodus of political ref...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Patchwork and Pathways in French Colonial History
• A Deliverance from Demons: Possession and Healing at the Seigneurie of Beauport
• Mask of the Colonizer: French Men, Native Passions, and the Culture of Diplomacy in New France
• The Ancien Régime Culture of Labor Mobility and Migration to New France
• A French Huguenot’s Career as a British Colonial Administrator in Acadie/Nova Scotia/Mi’gma’ki, 1710–1750
• The Trials of Brother Chrétien: A Case of Ruin and Redemption in the French Atlantic
• Family Formation, Race, and Honor in Colonial Haiti’s Free Communities, 1670–1789
• From Voyageurs to Emigrants: Leaving the St. Lawrence Valley for the Detroit River Borderland, 1796–1846
• Making Indians in the American Backcountry: Récits de voyage, Cultural Mobility, and Imagining Empire in the Age of Revolutions
• Chasing La Chasse-Galerie: Honoré Beaugrand and the Life of a Journalistic Voyageur
• Epilogue: “Next Stop, Honoré Beaugrand”: Connections, Dislocations, and Redirections
• Contributors
• Index