La Nouvelle France

The Making of French Canada - A Cultural History

Peter N. Moogk

• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780870135286
• eBook ISBN:
  9781628954579
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

On one level, Peter Moogk's latest book, La Nouvelle France: The Making of French Canada—A Cultural History, is a candid exploration of the troubled historical relationship that exists between the inhabitants of French- and English- speaking Canada. At the same time, it is a long- overdue study of the colonial social institutions, values, and experiences that shaped modern French Canada. Moogk draws on a rich body of evidence—literature; statistical studies; government, legal, and private documents in France, Britain, and North America— and traces the roots of the Anglo-French cultural struggle to the seventeenth century. In so doing, he discovered a New France vastly different from the one portrayed in popular mythology. French relations with Native Peoples, for instance, were strained. The colony of New France was really no single entity, but rather a chain of loosely aligned outposts stretching from Newfoundland in the east to the Illinois Country in the west. 
     Moogk also found that many early immigrants to New France were reluctant exiles from their homeland and that a high percentage returned to Europe. Those who stayed, the Acadians and Canadians, were politically conservative and retained Old Régime values: feudal social hierarchies remained strong; one's individualism tended to be familial, not personal; Roman Catholicism molded attitudes and was as important as language in defining Acadian and Canadian identities. It was, Moogk concludes, the pre-French Revolution Bourbon monarchy and its institutions that shaped modern French Canada, in particular the Province of Quebec, and set its people apart from the rest of the nation.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. My Discovery of French Canada
• Chapter 1. Cyrano de Bergerac’s Imaginary Voyage to Canada: A Survey of the Colony
• Chapter 2. Europeans and “The Wild People”: French-Amerindian Relations
• Chapter 3. Scepter and Main de Justice: Government Ambitions to Create a Renewed France in North America
• Chapter 4. The Difficulty of Finding Settlers for New France and the Reluctant Exile of Manon Lescaut’s Countrymen
• Chapter 5. Sea Voyagers and Bonhomme Terreneuve: The Newcomers’ Reception and Appeals to Come Home
• Chapter 6. Proud as a Canadien, Stubborn as an Acadien: The Emergence of New Peoples
• Chapter 7. Group and Institutional Loyalties: Social Rank, Occupation, and Parish
• Chapter 8. The Sovereign Family
• Chapter 9. Magic and Religion in the Colonists’ World
• Conclusion. “The Apples Do Not Fall Far from the Tree”: The Legacy of New France in Modern Canada
• Endnotes
• Index