In 1757, in the midst of the Seven Years War, François Damiens was put to death for his attempt to assassinate Louis XV. It was as cruel a death as could be devised—Damiens’s right arm was burnt in sulphur, other portions of his body torn off by red-hot pincers, and so on. In North America, where the king’s regulars were then fighting the English for control of the…
Philip Marchand
Philip Marchand is the author of Ghost Empire: How the French Almost Conquered North America (McClelland and Stewart, 2009) and books columnist for the National Post.
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Philip Marchand
The Glamour of Lost Causes
How the French Empire was erased from this continent by disciplined troops and money May 2005
The first adult novel I can remember reading, as a young teenager, was Kenneth Roberts’s historical epic, Northwest Passage. The first half of the novel dealt with the 1759 expedition of Rogers’s Rangers to destroy an Abenaki mission on the St. Francis River, in what is now the Eastern Townships. Well I remember the gripping tale Roberts told—the stealthy march of the brave New Englanders through the…