Marc Lescarbot (vers 1570-1641): un homme de plume au service de la Nouvelle-France.

Eric Thierry. Marc Lescarbot (vers 1570-1641): un homme de plume au service de la Nouvelle-France.

Paris: Honore Champion Editeur, 2001. 440 pp. index. illus. map. chron. bibl. [euro] 59.45. ISBN: 2-7453-0625-1.

Marc Lescarbot was a fervent Catholic not inclined to trust the wave of Jesuits imported into France by Marie de Medici in the wake of the assassination of her husband, Henry IV. He was also an undistinguished robin who married into the provincial aristocracy of the sword at the age of fifty, and ended his days successfully prosecuting his wife's many lawsuits and expanding their holdings in the valley of the Aisne.

His primary claim to fame was his account of the construction in 1606-07 of Port Royal, on the site of what became Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia in 1613, when the British destroyed the French fort. The first edition of the Histoire de la Nouvelle-France appeared in Paris in the spring of 1609, to be followed by second and third editions over the course of the next decade. Lescarbot allowed himself to be drawn into a polemic with Samuel de Champlain which worked to his disadvantage, since he wrote to give voice to national aspirations rather than merely to recount historical events. The result was that, in disputes with Champlain or the Jesuit Fuzy over what happened during his brief time in Port Royal, Lescarbot got the details wrong, so he came out second best.

The bulk of Thierry's book is a dispassionate recounting of Lescarbot's writing on the various subjects to which he turned his attention, from the founding of Port Royal to Swiss geography at the beginning of the seventeenth century, but it is not altogether clear, at least to this reviewer, that his writing is interesting enough to warrant such a treatment. Thierry is careful to reconstruct the historical context for Lescarbot's writing, but the resources he deploys in that effort stop at the French border and even, in some cases, short of current scholarship. The most striking example was the royal "Lit de Justice," for which Thierry cited Louis d'Orleans's Les Ouvertures de Parlemens, published in 1607. Sarah Hanley, Ralph Giesey, and W. F. Church are absent from Thierry's bibliography; Nancy Roelker's One King, One Faith makes an appearance, but I could find no trace of it in his text, while Donald Kelley shows up in the text (273)--but not in the bibliography.

This sometimes leads him to questionable assertions, such as that the faith in astrology displayed by a French ambassador to the Swiss named Charles Paschal "fait sourire ses superieurs a la Cour et ses collegues des autres ambassades [amused his superiors at Court and his colleagues in other embassies]" (245). Thierry's source for his assertion was L. Moreri's Grand Dictionnaire historique, published in 1759, but we know from more recent writing as well as from contemporaries like Montaigne's "Des Prognostications" (bk. 1, chap. 11) that faith in astrology was wide and deep in the upper reaches of the aristocracy at this time.

That said, there is much of use to be found in this volume, particularly on Europeans' efforts to conceptualize their discoveries. Thierry evaluated Lescarbot more consistently on this score than on any other, and found for instance that he failed to recognize the symbolic importance of accepting Micmac hospitality at a feast before an expedition against their neighbors. The Micmac viewed their enemies as enemies of the French as well, and expected Lescarbot and the others to support them with their firearms; their failure to do so was the beginning of the failure of Port Royal.

Thierry also suggests that Lescarbot got the antipathy toward the Society of Jesus that later precipitated him into the controversy with Fuzy from his earlier efforts to reaffirm the traditional French alliance with the Swiss, an alliance the Jesuits were working to undo in the interests of the broadest possible alliance against Protestants. As we might expect of a series directed by Frank Lestringant, this volume is most useful on the European antecedents of their image of America.

EDWARD BENSON

University of Connecticut