Bougainville, Lévis, Vaudreuil : trajets dans les historiographies de la guerre de Sept Ans

Very popular since the 1980s, studies on collective memory have stimulated interest in historiography and especially in the construction of heroic figures. The thesis follows this trend in studying how a multinational historiography treated three French officers of the Seven Years’ War’s North American theatre. We observe how Vaudreuil, Bougainville and Lévis have fared at the hands of historians from Great Britain, France, the United States and English and French Canada, from the eighteenth century to the present. The purpose of the study is to isolate the varying perspectives from which historians of different times and national allegiance have examined the three figures. In the end, the three men were seen to incarnate three contrasting, variously interpreted postures. Since historians were particularly sensitive to what they saw as national conflicts, they judged their heroes accordingly. Vaudreuil, the Canadian-born governor of Canada, thus became the champion of his “country”; Bougainville, French-born future navigator and protagonist of the Enlightenment who wrote disparagingly about the colony, was judged on these opinions; while Lévis, a Frenchman who was more discreet in his writings, was evaluated above all as the victor of the battle of Sainte-Foy in 1760.