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 the eighteenth centuries.

When Jacques Cartier arrived in the St. Lawrence valley in 1534, he probably heard some Basque words from the locals. This was a legacy of the long-standing contacts between First Nations and European fishermen. What distinguished Cartier from earlier European visitors was his determination to penetrate into the interior and his insistence on marking the lands he encountered with a cross on behalf of his remote sovereign. In the decades to come, French kings handed out vast seigneuries to aristocrats and religious orders, who parcelled them out to habitant farmers. The result was a pyramidal social structure, topped by the Crown. After entering into his majority in 1651, Louis XIV initially brought new zeal to expanding “my country of New France.” While his first priority was to gain absolute control of his kingdom, he also viewed thriving colonies as a flattering expression of his glory.

It might seem as if majesty was no match for the tyranny of distance. Coates concedes that the glacial speed of communications with the metropole left a lot of discretion to local officials in Quebec. Letters for France went with fur trading ships, which left in October or November before sea ice could form. The king’s ministers dated their replies the following April or May; they did not arrive in Quebec until September. During these silences, the tough intendants who ran the colony’s finances often quarrelled with the king’s governors and bishops. Yet their squabbles, which turned on fairly trivial considerations of precedence, also spoke to his ultimate authority.

Officials had to imagine the king’s legitimacy before they could exercise it. Coates manufactures from thin sources an evocative picture of the performances with which the colonists kept the monarch top of mind. Cannons thundered and Te Deums rang out when his governors arrived at Quebec City. Settlers fired muskets and set off fireworks in what were noisy and — in a combustible wooden town — risky displays of loyalty. The French fondly imagined that the Indigenous people who viewed these baroque ejaculations would conclude that their power “extended even over the Realms of fire, and that we could do what we like with that Element.” Jesuits trained their pupils to act stage plays, which amplified such theatrical welcomes. In 1658, Pierre de Voyer d’Argenson watched a (mercifully short) production in which the “Universal Spirit of New France” greeted him as governor. French students impersonated Indigenous leaders and spoke words of homage in their languages.

These rituals masked the fragility of French power. In 1629, English privateers led by the Kirke brothers seized Quebec City and burned it to the ground. When Samuel de Champlain returned as governor three years later, muskets and drums sounded in a frantic reassertion of legitimacy. Although the colony survived this near-death experience, there was always something faintly improbable about trying to reproduce the cult of the Sun King in the forests of North America. When one intendant, Jean Bochart de Champigny, installed a bronze bust of Louis in Quebec City’s Lower Town — at just the moment when such images began to proliferate in France — a local toolsmith shot a merchant from Paris in the leg during the celebratory volley (perhaps deliberately). The merchant succumbed to feverish agony a couple of weeks later —“Mon Dieu, je suis mort!” he had shouted when hit — and a new governor later moved the bust indoors, supposedly because the harsh winter frosts were damaging it. The sculpture quickly vanished after that. Not until the French Republic gifted Quebec City another bust in 1931 did Louis once more preside over his city.

The king asserted a firmer hold over Canada on paper than in public space. The maps commissioned by his officials exaggerated the extent of his sovereignty, bathing vast swaths of North America in blue. They represented the St. Lawrence as a smooth highway to the Great Lakes, playing down the hazards that rendered it barely navigable. The cartouches decorating such maps contained engravings of French settlements that grossly exaggerated the height of church spires and the size of public buildings. Even sober surveys of landholdings along the St. Lawrence were acts of wish fulfillment, representing virgin forest as cleared meadows.

Coates grants that for all its symbolic clout, Louis’s regime struggled to enact the basic elements of sovereignty. The administration of justice was reserved to royal courts, but it was difficult to find a full-time hangman. Officials sometimes settled for hanging criminals in effigy. Coining money, an activity that had allowed monarchs to circulate idealized images of themselves since antiquity, was no less of a problem. Although Louis struck the odd medal celebrating events in Quebec, France never supplied it with enough currency for its economy. Officials had to borrow Spanish coinage (which explains why piastre remains a Québécois word today) or even rely upon signed playing cards.

The colonists were more consistently interested in their king than he was in them. Louis never saw his colony. That is unsurprising. As Coates reminds us, in the last decades of his reign, he left Versailles for nearby Paris only sixteen times. In fact, no ruling sovereign visited Canada until George VI came in 1939 to firm up backing for Britain as war in Europe loomed. It is true that Louis had been enthusiastic about his colony — at first. “The king is now master of this country,” crowed Marie de l’Incarnation, the founder of its Ursuline order of nuns, in 1663. Crucially, he resolved to people it. Soldiers in its garrison were encouraged to take up land in emulation of the Roman colonization of Gaul. Louis subsidized the sending of poor women to become their wives: the filles du roi, from whom most Quebecers today are descended.

Yet, as one of his ministers once acidly reminded Governor Louis de Buade de Frontenac, “You should realize that His Majesty can tire of a colony which continuously costs him immense sums and whose products, far from being of any great utility, make him lose considerable amounts every year.” Quebec was an expensive plaything. By the end of the king’s reign, the treasury was spending half a million livres a year on its upkeep, only about a quarter of which came back in revenues. Like an irrepressible realtor today, the colony’s boosters talked up the enormous potential of this fixer-upper. The Jesuit missionary Louis Nicolas produced the Codex Canadensis, which represented the colony’s rich flora and fauna as living emblems of the king’s majesty. Pride of place went to the chipmunk, which was beautiful, agile, and, above all, tasty (“as delicious as young ortolans,” according to Coates). Nicolas had pleased Louis by presenting him with a captive one, which he consigned to the menagerie at Versailles rather than to the kitchens.

Chipmunks were hardly a satisfying return on the king’s investment. Nor were beavers. Pelts were the colony’s staple export, but they never proved as lucrative as the sugar of France’s Caribbean plantations, and the English were soon trying to divert trade from the interior to the shores of Hudson Bay. The royal commitment to Quebec became increasingly conditional, especially in Louis’s last years and under the reign of his great-grandson Louis XV, who ascended the throne in 1715. What mattered to their ministers was not the defence of an expensive and thinly populated outpost but an economic and military struggle for supremacy with Britain that was assuming continental and eventually global dimensions. Louis’s willingness to surrender Acadia at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 revealed a fidgety approach to the colonies, in which settlers were just counters to be traded. He shifted his attentions from penurious Quebec to a more strategic project: a fort at Louisbourg on Île Royale (today’s Cape Breton) to protect the rich fisheries of the Grand Banks. “Within a short while, it became the third-largest French settlement in northern North America,” Coates explains. “Royal power still manifested itself through the names of the fortress and the streets within it.”

The elaborate rituals of fealty that the colonists of New France had developed did not bind the king. Nor did they do much to impress those who had lived there for generations. Although the negotiation of treaties that acknowledged royal sovereignty over First Nations preoccupied officials, the formulaic references to “faithful subjects” were in Coates’s view just flourishes for European consumption. Indigenous people also sidestepped assimilation efforts, even when they embraced Roman Catholicism. The king gave bounties to Christianized women who married settlers and urged religious orders to educate Indigenous children, but few took up such offers. The willingness some showed to adopt European dress or learn French did not entail acceptance of foreign rule. Coates finds it telling that First Nations steered clear of the colony’s legal system, the most tangible expression of the king’s authority.

The intellectual unravelling of absolute monarchy in Europe began, ironically, on the St. Lawrence. The frontispiece to the travelogue published by Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce de Lahontan, in 1704, was a Sun King’s nightmare: a hunter wearing nothing but a loincloth cheerfully tramples on the emblems of royal authority: a legal codex, a crown, and a sceptre. Lahontan was a rogue aristocrat who bore a grudge against the minister in charge of the colonies, Jérôme de Pontchartrain. Yet he turned his gripes with the regime into an enlightened attack on the very principle of monarchy, suggesting to European readers that they emulate what he represented as the spirited anarchism of the Indians. He dreamed up the person of Adario, a Wendat leader modelled on the historical Kondiaronk, who invites the character Lahontan to join him in the woods. “We are born free and united brothers, each as much a great master as the other,” Adario tells Lahontan. “Instead, you are all slaves of a single man.”

Coates ends his book with a paradox: royal Quebec was a failed state that produced a resilient people. Louis XV’s reluctance to defend it properly from mounting English encroachment caused its abrupt collapse after decades of under-investment. When James Wolfe seized Quebec City in 1759, the French king promptly yielded the colony to the British. Yet the monarchy had nonetheless planted what de Gaulle called a “French fact” in North America, which has grown in numbers and cultural assertiveness ever since Wolfe’s men scaled the cliffs below the Plains of Abraham.

When de Gaulle flew home after delivering his speech in 1967, his aides applauded him for clearing the “debt of Louis XV.” But French Canadians were by that point much more Canadian than French: they appreciated de Gaulle’s friendliness but did not want the patronage of a kingly president who viewed them as living fossils from the age of Cartier. “Je me souviens,” says the motto accompanying today’s fleur-de-lys, but the Bourbons have long been forgotten.