Christian Ayne Crouch

Rather meandering for a relatively short monograph, Crouch’s agenda is to tease out social meaning in the three-way interaction between the French regular army, the French colonial marines and the indigenous nations of New France and what this meant for the loss of the French empire in North America.

Essentially, Crouch argues the colonial tradition that had arisen out of interaction with the First Nations as valued partners in the pursuit of defending New France at all cost ran afoul of the aristocratic regular army leadership, one that saw its honor and that of the French crown at stake. Partly this was due to wanting to leave the total-war traditions of the Wars of Religion behind, partly due to a dynasty that was under stress due to military failure and a sovereign who was possibly not up to the job, but mostly due to the how the officer corps of the French regular army saw itself as being under siege by changing social circumstances in France. The result was this made Montcalm and his circle hold on all the tighter to their self-image and living up to what that self-image demanded. While it would be too much to say that personal image was more important to these men than winning, there is no doubt that they saw what had become the traditional New France way of doing business, which essentially made the First Nations the core of the French North American empire, as being corrupting. This is particularly in the wake of the taking of Fort Ticonderoga as being the validating victory that proved French North America could be held without the distasteful (and monetarily expensive) compromises that colonial war had previously demanded.

As for what the people of the First Nations made of this is hard to say in retrospect, seeing as French society essentially repressed their memory of this whole affair; this is between adopting the rhetoric of “civilizing mission” that kept the colonial “other” at arm’s length and how many of the old elites of New France gravitated back to North America once the Seven Years’ War ended (after being essentially purged from French official life). At the very least Crouch argues that the non-participation of the native peoples in the terminal battle for New France was a sign that metropolitan French disdain was paid back in its own coin; these people were certainly not “auxiliaries" in their own minds.

The final irony for Crouch is that the memory of New France that survived was largely the one that was held by the First Nations; that of a community built on trade and social interaction of disparate communities as cultural equals.… (mehr)