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Un article de la revue Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Histoire connectée, histoire transnationale, histoire croisée, histoire partagée, histoire « enchevêtrée » (entangled history) : toutes ces « histoires » s’intéressent aux flux ou mouvements (de personnes, d’objets, d’idées, d’institutions, de pratiques…) entre champs d’influence réciproque. Cette approche transfrontalière est actuellement en vogue. Après l’avoir décrite et située dans son contexte d’émergence, cet article s’en inspire en présentant quelques exemples de flux qui englobent le Québec (au xxe siècle) et la vallée laurentienne (sous le Régime français).

The cultivation of hemp in Canada under the French and British Regimes has long attracted the attention of historians. Until recently, the focus has been on repeated attempts by administrators to develop this culture in Canada. Another element remained largely ignored: the discourse formulated by the colonial authorities on the subject of hemp, an agricultural product as unloved by the Canadian peasantry as it was cherished by the colonial administrators. Whether French or British, the official program, centred on naval supplies (hemp was used in particular for the manufacture of sails and ropes) and associated with mercantilist designs, aimed to replace with Canadian hemp that which successive metropolises import from abroad, mainly from Northern Europe. However, this policy responded only with difficulty to colonial conditions. Despite everything, from Quebec, the colonial administrators, both French and English, persisted for a long time in introducing it, devoting long passages to it in their correspondence with the various ministries in Paris or Versailles, and later in London. By listing the obstacles to hemp culture, they developed a fundamentally stereotyped discourse on the Canadian peasantry, and even on the Creole population in general. These images will have a long life, surviving then change of regime at the Conquest and influencing both contemporary authors and the historical narratives that would be produced until the middle of the 20th century. Nevertheless, there was a learning process. It manifested itself in two stages: in the more lucid formulations of the administrators of the late French Regime and, nearly half a century later, in the agronomic discourse emerging in the vicinity of the Colonial Assembly, more sensitive to the possibilities of local agriculture.

This thesis explores the rivalries between Jesuit, Recollect and Sulpician missionaries in the 17th century in New France. Specifically, it examines the polemical discourse about the missionaries, whether it came from religious competitors or from members of the colonial administration. Although these missionaries were all part of a common apostolic project, the sources reveal that different networks were struggling at the time so that some missionaries could enjoy a monopoly over the souls of the colony, while others were relegated to the background. In this nascent Church, several disagreements that raged between these three religious families can help to explain the tensions that we find in their writings. The main issues were the francization of the First Nations and the founding of the bishopric of Quebec. Furthermore, the rivalries between the Jesuits, the Recollects and the Sulpicians went far beyond the spiritual framework and regularly led to commercial issues. Certain missionaries, the Jesuits in particular, were accused throughout the century by various actors of enriching themselves in various ways, and of engaging in the fur trade. Rather than focusing on the veracity of these attacks, this thesis proposes to analyze them and to try to understand their origin and function. These accusations must also be put in relation to the rivalries that the missionaries had to face in their other missions during the same period.

Communications between France and Canada, in the 18th century, were defined by an annual rhythm marked by the seasons and the dangers of crossing the Atlantic. Louis-Guillaume Verrier was the king’s attorney-general at the Conseil supérieur of Québec between 1728 and 1758. Born in France, he moved to Québec to join the Conseil supérieur at the age of 37. He left us around 200 letters that he received during those 30 years. By reading these documents, we understand the importance of a good organization to make sure that the letters reach their addressee efficiently. All kinds of people write to Verrier, from close members of his family to mere acquaintances who wish to obtain services for a relative in New France. Family and friends of the attorney-general send news of their health and hope that their addressee’s is good too. Verrier also receives a lot of news concerning European politics and administrative or judiciary matters. This reflects (indirectly) Verrier’s desire to be kept informed of what goes on in the world that he left behind, pointing to his attachment to his motherland and the people that he no longer saw, but also a desire to return someday to continue his career. Living in an Atlantic world, Louis-Guillaume Verrier belongs at the same time to Canada, where he lives, and to France, where his relatives’ letters take him each year.

In New France in the eighteenth century, illicit trade between Montreal and Albany had become commonplace. The economic structures of the colony and the repressive measures aimed at contraband gave this trade its particular organization. Another important factor in the normalization of illicit trade was the discourse produced by colonial authorities on contraband. As top magistrate and administrator of the colony, the intendant of New France occupied a singular place in the repressive and discursive apparatus set up to fight unauthorized trade. The intendant and his Montreal subdélégué brought smugglers to trial, and the intendant often took up the matter in his correspondence with his superior in metropolitan France, the secretary of state of the Marine. In this thesis, three intendants will bring their own unique brand of discourse to bear on the Montreal-Albany trade. Based on information obtained from first-hand reports, these intendants classify facts and behaviours related to contraband, for judicial proceedings and ministerial decision-making. But the means and methods they employ to defend the fur exporting privilege of the Compagnie des Indes prove to be rather deficient and counterproductive. As their discourse delineates the many obstacles to the full application of French colonial law, the intendants give the Montreal-Albany trade its colouring. In official correspondence, the intendant describes the consolidated network of merchants who hold intercolonial commerce in their grasp, and the deleterious effects of distance on colonial subjects from the civilizing ways of the metropole. The intendant scrutinizes how the Compagnie's policies stimulate the phenomenon it deplores and anticipates breaches to colonial security related to the participation of the Domiciliés, or "settled" Natives, in the prohibited trade. This study focuses on the discursive strategies of three intendants, Michel Bégon de La Picardière (1712-1726), Claude-Thomas Dupuy (1726-1728), and Gilles Hocquart (1728-1748), who formulate in their correspondence with the secretary of state of the Marine in France matters of official policy toward a contraband which they officially must fight, but also tolerate.

Examining a specific publication, l’Histoire naturelle des Cétacées (1804), this study seeks to determine how Lacépède managed to compose his classic work of cetology without having seen a single whale in his entire life. The operating hypothesis is that, while referencing numerous well-read naturalists’ and other authors’ works, Lacépède was in fact exploiting the knowledge held by the persons that were the most familiar with the species: the whalers. Since this vernacular maritime knowledge does not appear clearly in the book, we will investigate the naturalist’s methods, sources and relationships with other fellow natural philosophers of the Museum d’histoire naturelle to try to understand the role seamen could have played in this work. To help us examine the complex mechanisms of the circulation of natural knowledge, we will benefit from a bibliography mostly composed with research on the Atlantic world, highly comprehensive on these topics. We will carefully take into consideration the political, scientific and cultural context of early nineteenth century France.

Publiés en 1838 mais datant pour l’essentiel de la fin du régime français au Canada, Les Mémoires du S... de C..., contenant l’histoire du Canada durant la guerre, et sous le gouvernement anglais sont attribués depuis 1940 à Louis-Léonard Aumasson de Courville (c. 1722-1781), un notaire et écrivain d’origine champenoise ayant vécu en Acadie française et dans la vallée du Saint-Laurent.. Le manuscrit (conservé aux archives du musée McCord de Montréal) à la base de cette publication daterait donc de la fin des années 1750. Peu après la prise de la colonie par les Britanniques, Courville s’est mis à réviser ce texte à l’intention de la nouvelle administration, rédigeant un deuxième manuscrit correspondant, à se fier à l’exemplaire conservé (également aux archives McCord), à une partie seulement du premier. Les deux versions se distinguent de nombre d’autres témoignages de cette période par leur ton incisif et leur touche anticléricale. Le premier chapitre du mémoire s’attache à suivre l’histoire des textes courvilliens : les circonstances de leur rédaction et leur utilisation dans l’historiographie, mais aussi leur étude par Aegidius Fauteux, celui qui percera le mystère entourant la personne qui s’est cachée pendant presque deux siècles derrière le pseudonyme du « S... de C... ». Le deuxième chapitre s’interroge sur les motifs de l’auteur de ces mémoires, s’attachant pour ce faire à suivre son parcours personnel difficile. Enfin, le troisième chapitre est consacré à l’analyse du propos de Courville dans les deux versions de ses Mémoires, véritable réquisitoire contre la corruption du régime français finissant.

Ce mémoire explore la place de l’évolutionnisme culturel dans les premières années d’existence de la Société royale du Canada. Il représente une contribution à l’histoire culturelle et sociale du monde intellectuel canadien. La recherche est basée sur une analyse des communications traitant de la question autochtone présentées dans les Mémoires entre 1882 et 1894. La période couverte recoupe une partie des années durant lesquelles le gouvernement canadien développe et applique une politique de colonisation dans l’ouest du pays. Cette histoire de la production de la Société royale du Canada offre une perspective originale sur l’histoire scientifique du pays et illustre le rôle de l’institution dans l’élaboration de certains discours racisés. Les publications révèlent en particulier l’importance de l’anthropologie linguistique dans la diffusion du paradigme évolutionniste. Cette étude présente les indices du développement de ce paradigme à travers certaines interactions entre les membres de la Société royale du Canada. L’adhésion à la rhétorique évolutionniste est manifeste dans les textes consacrés aux Autochtones parus dans les Mémoires, particulièrement à travers la manipulation de théories linguistiques qui produit des classifications hiérarchiques.

This thesis presents representations of the traditional ritual practices of the Iroquoians and Algonquians that the French Jesuit missionaries have revealed in their writings. Sometimes in spite of themselves, the missionaries describe Indigenous people endowed with religious powers, descriptions which we will examine. The territory analyzed is therefore mainly that of the missions, namely the St. Lawrence Valley, the surrounding country and the Great Lakes region, a slice of America that remained largely Indigenous during the period of interest to us, namely from 1632, date of the first Relations with the Jesuit Paul Le Jeune, until 1724, the date of publication of the book Mœurs des Sauvages by Joseph-François Lafitau. This careful examination of the Jesuit works reveals, from a perspective of gender history, excerpts relating to rituals and spheres of activity of Aboriginal men and women. These results are confronted with numerous studies on First Nations or on the Jesuits and their North American missions. This multidisciplinary convergence then leads us to ask: what do missionaries see, or do not see, in the role of men, women, and to some extent, “men-women” and “women-men” within Aboriginal rituals, and in what circumstances?

Subdelegates of the intendancies indirectly served the king of France at the local level. The study of their institution in five intendancies offers an original point of view on the Ancien Regime state and its administration. Subdelegations existed in all the provinces of the kingdom: in those known as pays d’élections, pays d’États or pays d’imposition, as well as in the colonies. Studying them makes it possible to question this typology and especially the centralization of the Kingdom of France. By comparative prosopography, 687 subdelegates in the 159 subdelegations of the intendancies of Caen in Lower Normandy, Fort-Royal in the Lesser Antilles, Lille in Flanders, Quebec in Canada and Rennes in Brittany are studied. This method allows for inter-provincial and transatlantic as well as intra-provincial comparisons and a multiscalar analysis of the royal administration. Subdelegations emerge as institutions of intendancy, in the service of the monarchy and exercised by local notables. Taxation, civil justice or administrative litigation, investigations, surveys and statistics, royal militia and corvée, public contracts, epidemics and assistance, supervision of municipalities, many powers concern them. In practice, they varied between provinces and between subdelegations. Everywhere, magistrates, mayors, marine commissioners or other notables served as subdelegates. Between bureaucracy and patronage, they participated in a limited administrative centralization. Subdelegations mainly generated multiple mediations of royal power, transforming it through provincial variations and local translations.

La figure des « pionniers » et des « pionnières » est devenue un référent culturel identitaire fondamental dans le développement de la mémoire collective québécoise. Nous montrons que ces objets culturels s’intègrent et participent à la représentation identitaire imaginée et conçue à l’intérieur d’un discours visant à affirmer une identité fondée en bonne partie sur l’histoire des Canadiens issus de l’immigration française du XVIIe siècle. La conjoncture politique du XIXe siècle favorise l’émergence d’un récit patriotique et d’un discours nationaliste conservateur, tissés par certains auteurs et appuyés par les élites politiques et les membres du clergé. Ces discours ont contribué à construire la nation canadienne et à l’inscrire dans un passé lointain et glorieux - dans l’imaginaire des « civilisations ». Dans cette perspective, l’objet culturel « pionnier » et l’objet culturel « filles du roi » sont mobilisés avec force dans la construction du passé magnifié de la nation canadienne. Nous nous intéresserons donc à la construction de l’image de ces deux figures pionnières dans les récits sur les origines nationales, ainsi qu’à leur utilisation dans le développement d’un sentiment identitaire canadien-français.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, historians’ attention was turned towards the disappearance of a bourgeoisie canadienne which should have made the transition from commercial to industrial capitalism. These studies began, so to speak, with the end, in attempting to define the long-term historical consequences of the Conquest on an as-yet ill-defined group that in principle included some merchants. This thesis follows new investigations in both Europe and the USA which have permitted to look anew, often with a cultural history approach, at merchants of the Early Modern period. Focusing on a Montreal merchant outfitter (marchand équipeur) and his family, the investigation first seeks to determine if the Canadian merchants’ culture (broadly defined) was similar to that of their French counterparts who worked on the same business level. A second aim is to evaluate the leeway available to individuals in face of the general conditions of the trade and the role of networks in the merchants’ career. Finally, the thesis attempts to define the self-conception of these men while looking at their lifestyle and the various roles they played in their community. To complete such a study, we have chosen to look « wide and deep » like micro-historians have before us. The study examines the long life of the équipeur, Jean Alexis Lemoine dit Monière, who chose to settle in Montreal in 1715 and whose career Louise Dechêne had followed until 1725. After her, historians have since pictured Monière as a typical marchand équipeur. But he might not have been typical, he might even have been a « limiting case ». The thesis follows him to the end of his life and looking for all the opportunities that were offered to him along the way. It accords considerable importance to the material and immaterial legacy of his father, Jean Lemoine, and to what Monière passed on to this son, Pierre Alexis and a few nephews. Situating Monière between his father who emigrated from Rouen, his brothers and his own son, permits us to see the emergence of a profession, that of équipeur. We look at how Monière, who died in 1754, was prepared to embrace the merchant’s profession and how he perceived the way he should work as an équipeur. This study affords a better understanding of merchants’ culture, broadly conceived, in early French Canada. Exploring a variety of sources and using a micro-historical approach, we hope to have followed Dale Miquelon’s suggestion to look (again) at the merchants’ world with the eyes of the people of the times in order to answer today’s questions.

This study compares methods of information gathering in two territories that became part of the British Empire after the Seven Years’ War. We bring these two extremely different regions into the same frame by asking: how did the British gather information about the populations of Canada and Bengal? Our study is part of several historiographical currents that offer a rereading of the history of Great Britain and its colonies, which is the subject of our first chapter. In the next chapter, we explore the post-conquest era in Canada. After the conquest of this territory (1759-1760), British authorities faced the task of administering the Canadian population. At first, they tried to implement a new governmental regime deemed suitable for the Canadian context. However, since the majority of the population they governed was of different religious denomination (Catholics) and of French origin, they had to modify the regime ten years later. In the third chapter, we look at the British presence in Bengal after the battle of Plassey in 1757. The British, through the East India Company, acquired a certain influence over local authorities, which allowed them to govern indirectly via the Mogul Empire’s governors, the nabobs. Nevertheless, cultural differences were much more significant than with the Canadian population of European origin: the Mogul Empire was a Muslim polity, with a Persian administration, and much of the population was Hindu. From our reading of the official correspondence, between the colonial administrators and the metropolitan government in the first case, and between the agents of the company and its directors in the second, we affirm that in both situations the British tried to gather more information. However, important institutional and cultural differences distinguish the types of information sought as well as the approaches to collecting information. The results of our research ultimately converge on one point: the search for information passed through a whole range of local intermediaries. In the last chapter, after having explored the “information order” implemented or adapted by the British in each colonial context, the study considers how colonial information was received and shaped by the metropolitan authorities. To this end, the efforts of officials and parliamentarians to learn about colonial conditions during the drafting of two laws, the Quebec Act (1774) and the Regulating Act (1773) are highlighted through a reading of the Parliamentary debates. Here also, many differences are visible. To become informed about Canada, British authorities relied heavily on the help of the colonial administrators who stayed in Canada after the regime change. However, in the Indian case, they depended mostly on documentary sources, namely the books of the EIC.

In 1683, the French monarchy decided to send three companies of infantry of the Marine to quell the Iroquois, who were waging war against the colony that was then under Marine jurisdiction. Unable to put an end to the threat, the king sent more companies whose officers had Marine or infantry experience. The war, now extended to the British colonies forced the Marine to station troops permanently in Canada. They called by the administrators : troupes de la Marine. Another sign that this colonial army had become permanent is the opening of the officer corps to the local nobility. A few decades later, the officier corps nearly entirely consisted of Canadian noblemen. Some of the officers, most of them born in Canada, have been the subject of biographies. Some historians have studied the military noblesse as a social group. The military career of the officers of the troupes de la Marine has not, however, been studied has a whole. The captains, that is, the men who reached the top of the hierarchy of the troupes de la Marine before 1739, are the subject of this analysis. The study examines the main stages of their colonial military experience, while taking into account the officers birthplace, so as to highlight certain trends of Ancien-Regime society.

L’historien n’écrit pas de nulle part. Ancré dans son présent et participant à la société, il en épouse – ou critique – les projets, les utopies et les grands récits. Nous proposons dans ce travail d’approfondir cet ancrage à travers une histoire croisée et comparée des expériences du temps de deux historiens français (Michel de Certeau, François Furet) et d’un historien-sociologue québécois (Fernand Dumont). Notre objectif est double : il s’agit d’établir, dans un premier temps, les correspondances entre leurs expériences lors de deux tournants, celui des années 1960 et celui des années 1970. Tout en prenant en compte les contextes des auteurs à l’étude, nous élargirons l’échelle d’analyse afin de cerner la contemporanéité d’expériences du temps qui ne se réduisent pas aux seuls cadres nationaux. Nous pourrons ainsi établir les coordonnées des régimes d’historicité à chaque tournant en contribuant à préciser les différentes combinaisons des modes futuristes et présentistes en jeu. Dans un deuxième temps, nous explorerons les liens entre historiographie et régime d’historicité afin de mettre en évidence les jonctions entre les considérations épistémologiques et l’horizon d’attente des historiens à l’étude. En abordant plus spécifiquement la question du rôle de l’historien dans sa société, nous jaugeons les transformations parallèles de son expérience du temps et de ses pratiques historiographiques. Le passage de l’expérience d’une Histoire en marche au tournant de 1960 à celle d’une histoire bloquée au tournant de 1970 affecte considérablement la place et le statut de l’historien. D’éminent passeur du temps à l’écoute du sens du progrès, l’historien voit son statut contesté et marginalisé, ce qui ne veut pas dire que son rôle est moins important. Qu’il débusque des alternatives passées ou court-circuite des téléologies, il est chargé de maintenir coûte que coûte ouverts les horizons du temps. Nous verrons spécifiquement le sens que prenait cette tâche à un moment où la possibilité d’une « société nouvelle », après Mai 68, pointait à l’horizon des contemporains.