Codes in Conflict

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 continent, French officers worried about how their Native allies might react to the event. To these officers it meant that French society had shamefully produced someone so unspeakably loathsome as to strike at the heart of national order and harmony in the person of the king.

But they need not have worried. According to Christian Ayne Crouch, author of Nobility Lost: French and Canadian Martial Cultures, Indians and the End of New France, such ritual torture as was visited on Damiens’s body Native North...