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Les recherches de ces dernières années ont mis en lumière les ressemblances entre l'ancienne agriculture canadienne et celle de bien des paysanneries françaises de l’Ancien Régime. Dans un contexte comme dans l’autre, le marché étriqué et les forces de production peu développées créent un déséquilibre fondamental : trop de céréales, pas assez de bétail et donc pénurie de fumier. Ne pouvant amender leur terre de façon satisfaisante, les producteurs sont obligés de se contenter de rendements relativement faibles. De vieilles contraintes et non les vastes espaces de l’Amérique expliquent le caractère extensif de l’agriculture canadienne. Son originalité résulte donc de l’adaptation à d’autres particularités du nouvel environnement. Pour trouver des traces de cet ajustement, l’article étudie le régime d’assolement, élément-clé de l’agriculture paysanne qui exprime les contraintes du calendrier agricole. Il démontre que la coexistence de deux régimes différents dans la colonie est due à l’influence déterminante de la brève saison végétative sur la productivité.

Les historiens supposent généralement que pendant les dernières décennies du Régime français au Canada, la concurrence dans le commerce des fourrures suivait les lignes deforce de la rivalité impériale en Amérique du Nord. Situés sur la baie d'Hudson ou au sud du lac Ontario, les postes de l'empire adverse auraient constitué la principale menace pour les commerçants montréalais établis au coeur du pays indien. Cet article cherche les traces d'une telle concurrence à distance dans le commerce du castor. Il s'agit là d'une fourrure que les politiques de la Compagnie française des Indes rendaient moins chère dans le système commercial français que dans celui centré sur Londres. Or la distribution des recettes du castor entre les concurrents se montre peu sensible aux fluctuations dans cette différence intercoloniale des prix ; il semble bien que les marchands canadiens aient brandi l'épouvantait du concurrent étranger afin d'ajouter du poids à leurs demandes faites à l'Etat d'augmenter le prix du castor. Une conclusion s'impose : cette obsession d'un ennemi externe, transmise aux historiens par les sources officielles, a obscurci la dynamique interne du commerce canadien des fourrures au cours de cette période.

Following their colonization of America in the 17th and 18th centuries, the French drew up inventories for the resources of the occupied or coveted territory. Being able to describe all this wealth, natural history thus became the ultimate colonial knowledge and one of the central cogs of the French Colonial Machine. Also, the textual legacy of this activity is considerable and various points of view are taken into account: an enterprising settler, for example, will not see Louisiana’s resources in the same way as a travelling metropolitan official or a botanist on assignment. However, the colonial perspective is widely spread and all these texts, or almost all of them, are evidence of the appropriation of American plants, minerals and animals. The position of indigenous people and slaves – whether of indigenous or African-American origin – as actors in the process of knowledge creation depends on the context and the author’s stance. This thesis focuses on a small number of compelling texts from the natural history corpus of the French mainland colonies in America. Four authors who worked in or visited Canada (Kalm), French Guiana (Barrère) and Louisiana (Le Page du Pratz and Dumont de Montigny) are studied in depth. We first examine the different contexts of knowledge acquisition. Subsequently, we analyze the colonial resources inventories available at that time and how the sources are managed. Lastly, we conclude by looking at how these naturalist writers transmit to their European readers their newly acquired knowledge and the impact that their work will have.

Au cours des années comprises entre 1744 et 1763, le monde atlantique connaît deux guerres majeures. La France et ses colonies américaines sont impliquées dans une lutte acharnée contre l’Empire britannique. Les deux puissances rivales misent alors largement sur la guerre de course. Au-delà des conséquences commerciales et militaires évidentes, la guerre de course perturba aussi les communications transatlantiques. En effet, la prise d’un navire signifiait le plus souvent la perte des lettres qu’il transportait ou, dans le meilleur des cas, leur saisie, interrompant du même coup l’acheminement maritime du courrier. Les archives des Prize Papers, conservant des lettres et autres documents saisis par des corsaires britanniques, incarnent bien cette réalité. On y trouve notamment de nombreuses lettres françaises interceptées dans ces circonstances. Considérant que l’intérêt historique de ce fonds d’archives mérite d’être davantage souligné, cette recherche analysera donc certaines de ces correspondances françaises trouvées au sein des Prize Papers. À travers celles-ci, nous tenterons de reconstituer le système de communication transatlantique français et de ses acteurs en temps de guerre. Nous nous pencherons d’abord sur l’histoire de la constitution de ce fonds d’archives bien particulier, avant de présenter les pratiques de communication employées par les correspondants transatlantiques et les façons dont la guerre a pu les affecter. Il sera ensuite question des informations elles-mêmes qui furent véhiculées dans ce contexte si difficile.

The Great Peace of Montreal (1701) is a manifestation of the success of French-Amerindian diplomacy, highlighting the many cultural adjustments that allowed for a global alliance and peace between New France and the nations of the Pays d’en Haut. This study looks at the following decade, and the ways in which diplomatic relations between French and Natives developed in Montreal at the beginning of the 18th century. Examining the colonial correspondence that was sent back and forth from Versailles to Montreal, it analyses colonial discourses to better understand how diplomatic practices evolved, and how Montreal played a key role as the urban setting for these pluricultural negotiations. Although these letters present a Eurocentric point of view, a particular consideration was given to Native speeches given during peace negotiations that are transcribed in the correspondence, but also to everything left unsaid by the official correspondents. This study analyses first how diplomacy took place in Montreal, taking an interest in the actors, the urban setting and the practices that surround it. Then it observes the development brought to diplomatic practices by new political stakes in the early 18th century. Ending the analysis at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession (Utrecht, 1713), the thesis concludes that this decade contributed to the continuous strengthening of a pluricultural diplomatic tradition that was ingrained in the urban setting of Montreal.

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.

This thesis is an exercise in historiography that deals with the ways French, Quebec and US researchers interested in the Pays d’en haut in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have referred, over the past 35 years, to the theme of Native agency. To represent the Native peoples as agents, as they really are, for what they do and not as bit players of a Europeo-centric narrative, this seems to be the rule of the language game ethnohistorian play. However, when we look at the production of the specialists of these Native societies, we rapidly come to the conclusion that the national question and, more broadly, the dynamics of identity inherent to the communities of researchers, still have a considerable impact on these narratives. In order to understand these dynamics, it is useful to develop a historiographic perspective that is rooted in the sociology of science. I will refer more specifically to the works of Bruno Latour and Pierre Bourdieu on controversies among researchers. The idea is to see how researchers, by situating themselves in relation with their peers through alliance, avoidance or opposition, structure an ethnohistorical project. A project that is devoted to knowing better the Native other, but also a project that needs to pass the postcolonial test and hence refers to an area of postcolonial studies that is itself structured through contentions. By seeing how, through the generations, an ethnohistorical model of good practices is constructed and restructured, how collectives of researchers are built, one learns about the world of Native people, but also about the world of the researchers. It is in this perspective that I conduct the analysis of historiographic narratives produced by renowned practitioners of studies on the Pays d’en haut, ethnohistorians who, a few years after having published their main work on the subject, take stock of the situation in regards with Native agency. The historiographic propositions of Bruce Trigger, Richard White and Gilles Havard will allow us to cover the evolution of the field of ethnohistory since 1985.