Solar Power

The fleur-de-lys has come to signify the aspirations of many Quebecers to form a sovereign nation. It adorns Quebec’s licence plates and flag (the province was the first to adopt an official one). When the French president Charles de Gaulle went to Montreal in 1967 to deliver his tribute to “le Québec libre,” he drove along the historic Chemin du Roy, which nationalists had profusely stencilled with the royal arms. The symbolism had come full circle. With his latest book, the York University Canadian studies professor Colin M. Coates returns us to a time when the fleur-de-lys was not an emblem of freedom but a mark of absolute dependence on a distant king, one that was branded onto the bodies or even the faces of convicts. Notwithstanding its dry academic title, Political Culture in Louis XIV’s Canada: Majesty, Ritual, and Rhetoric is an evocative exploration of the outsized if flickering shadow that the Bourbon monarchy cast across the Atlantic from the sixteenth to...