At the same time it was very much a product of the pluralist culture of the United States, where many different ethnic and national groups met. In that setting, many people became even more conscious of their own national origins than they had been in the nations whence they came. And something else happened as well. When one ethnic group celebrated its heritage with pride, Americans of other ethnic groups rallied to their support, and even joined the celebration, as on St. Patrick’s Day when most Americans become a little bit Irish. So it was on July 4, 1907, when the English-speaking citizens of Champlain, New York, turned out and joined their francophone neighbors to honor a French Catholic hero. In that act they became a little bit French themselves in their cultural affiliation—a great unwritten theme in America, where historians and journalists tend to exaggerate the horrors of nativism, and ignore a larger and happier and more important countertheme.77
The largest monument of the tercentenary was erected in another part of the United States at Crown Point, New York. It is a heavy granite structure that still looms high above a steep bank overlooking Lake Champlain. It was built upon an error, and marks the spot where Champlain did not fight his battle against the Mohawk, despite fierce local claims. The monument was sponsored by a New York tercentenary commission. The Canadian government was invited to be a cosponsor but declined. In France another group was formed under the leadership of respected historian Gabriel Honotaux. Its purpose was to celebrate the spirit of France in the United States. A subscription was raised to pay for a bas-relief by the renowned sculptor Auguste Rodin. Titled “La France,” it was mounted at the base of the monument. Above the image of France is a sculpture of Champlain as the heroic discoverer, gazing at the lake that bears his name. New Yorkers added a functional purpose. They designed the monument to double as a lighthouse for the assistance of mariners who ventured down the great lake at night, as Champlain had done.78
Another tercentenary statue of Champlain also went up at Plattsburgh, New York. It is unusual among Champlain monuments. Sculptor Carl Augustus Heber represented Champlain as a soldier wearing a cuirass and carrying an arquebus—one of the few monuments that showed him arrayed for battle. It was dedicated on July 5–6, 1912, with much ceremony, as a symbol of peace and Franco-American unity.
The Canadian capital city of Ottawa erected yet another very large monument to Champlain that still dominates the skyline of the city. It was the work of Hamilton MacCarthy, who had already done the monument at Saint John. For Ottawa he made a change. Champlain is holding an astrolabe at full length above his head. It was meant to be a triumphant celebration of Champlain’s career as a navigator and the astrolabe was held high so that members of the Canadian Parliament could see it from their building as they embarked on projects of political navigation. It is not the most hopeful symbol, as astrolabes were normally suspended from a ring, and Champlain is holding his navigational instrument upside down.
MacCarthy modeled the face of Champlain on the features of the historian Benjamin Sulte. The project was supported by both anglophone and francophone Canadians and was meant to be a symbol of national unity. It was dedicated on May 27, 1915, after the First World War had begun. In Quebec that great struggle was widely regarded as an imperial venture for the greater glory of Britain, and many French Canadians chose not to serve. That attitude infuriated English-speaking Canadians, who believed that France was fighting for her survival. They could not understand why French Canadians would not support their own patrie. The dedication of the Champlain monument in Ottawa was diminished by those tensions. Patrice Groulx writes, “If the Royal Society and political leaders wanted to make Champlain a unifying symbol, they missed their mark.” To broaden the appeal, another figure was added to the base in 1917—an Algonquin guide. Champlain remained the dominant figure, but the addition of an allegorical Indian gave it yet another layer of symbolism.79
Another monumental theme appeared in Carl Augustus Heber’s sculpture, dedicated at Plattsburgh, New York, in 1912. It is one of the few monuments that shows Champlain as a soldier in armor and helmet, carrying an arquebus and arrayed for battle.
In 1925, one of the most elaborate Champlain monuments was erected in Orillia, a small town in the region he had known as Huronia. It had become a summer community where affluent Canadians built summer cottages. A monument was proposed in 1913, but the war delayed its completion until 1925. The sponsors selected a British sculptor, Vernon March. He created a narrative monument with many figures representing the history of the region: Indians, traders, missionaries, and above all the heroic statue of Champlain. It told the story of New France and Canada as an interplay of many actors.
In this same period from 1890 to 1929, smaller monuments honored Champlain’s friends and companions. The sieur de Mons was given a monument in Annapolis Royal, and La Violette at Trois-Rivières. Nearly nothing was known of La Violette beyond a reference to his name in Champlain’s Voyages. This project was the work of Trois-Riviére’s own historian Benjamin Sulte and his friend, the sculptor Louis Hébert. Sulte wrote: “The face of the person is unknown to us. Here, I will use my imagination. Lively eyes, thin cheeks accentuated aquiline nose, a thin mustache, light imperial beard, and the head set squarely on the shoulders in the attitude of a man on the lookout. A slight air of a musketeer.”80 This became a formula for the founders of Canada, who began to look like fraternal twins. Sulte offered the rationale of a scholar without a source: “When documents are unavailable,” he wrote, “it is customary to rely on things of the time and to convey our thought through forms that do not contradict the facts as a whole.”81
For a monument in Ottawa, Hamilton MacCarthey sculpted Champlain as an explorer and navigator with an astrolabe in hand. Perhaps it was meant to inspire Canadian legislators, who could see it from the Parliament buildings. But Champlain is holding his instrument upside down. One wonders if the artist was making a political statement.
Champlain and the Cataclysms of the Twentieth Century
In the early twentieth century, authors in America and Europe began to give more attention to the inner life of Champlain. This was not easily done. Champlain’s writings centered more on his acts than on his thoughts or feelings, and his biographers rarely wrote of him in an intimate way. Even so, twentieth-century writers became more attentive to his personality and searched Champlain’s writings in a new spirit, looking for clues to the man himself. They did so in conversation with the scholars of the nineteenth century—Garneau, Parkman, Sulte, Dionne, and others.
The new generation of scholars in the twentieth century were equally positive about Champlain, but they wrote about him with a different purpose and in a different historical context. The two leading examples were men who had served in the world wars and saw Champlain as a kindred spirit, who lived in an earlier age of conflict and cruelty comparable to their own time. From their experience they greatly admired his strength of character and the way that he conducted himself in an era of extreme violence and disorder.
Constantin-Weyer’s Champlain: A Portrait in Patience
In France, a leader of this literary generation was Maurice Constantin-Weyer (1881–1964). He was born to a “good family” of Bourbonne-les-Bains, and educated at the Lycée Henri IV. In 1904 he emigrated to Manitoba, where he lived in the French settlement of Saint-Claude, and worked as a rancher, hunter, trapper, horse-dealer, and journalist. He married a Métisse in 1910 and fathered three children. In 1914, he returned to France, fought on the western front and near east, received the Médaille Militaire and Légion d’Honneur, suffered fifty-three wounds, and left the army as an 80 percent invalid. He became a successful writer and won the Prix Goncourt in 1928 for his novel Un homme se penche sur son passé (A Man Considers His Past). Constantin-Weyer published forty-six books, many on Canadian themes. His purpose was to engage the history of Canada in the literature of France.82
In 1931, Constantin-Weyer brought out a short biography of Champlain in a series called “Les
grandes figures coloniales.” It was done in a hurry, one of four books he published that year, and it was dedicated to young Canadians, particularly those educated in the universities of Laval and Montréal, as “the heirs of French thought.” Constantin-Weyer opened his book with a preface on Francis Parkman, “le grand historien américain.” He challenged Parkman’s thesis that the conflict between France and England in North America was an epic struggle between “feudalism, monarchy and Rome” on one side, and the cause of liberty and republicanism on the other. In particular, he took issue with Parkman’s claim that the moral advantage lay on the side of English-speaking people. Constantin-Weyer observed that the democracy of the English-speaking people became a tyranny of the majority. He argued that in the United States, a republic that loved liberty had destroyed many indigenous nations of America for its own gain.
His book was an argument that a higher ethic appeared in New France and that Champlain was its personification. Constantin-Weyer wrote that Champlain’s relations with the Indians and “the simple grandeur of that life, entirely consecrated to the King and the Faith (au Roi et à la Foi) [was] a better response than any other argument to the assertions of Francis Parkman.”83 The book was about Champlain’s devotion to his grand dessein, and his perseverance through thirty years of hardship, frustration, suffering, and defeat. It was also about Champlain’s concern for the Indians, his fidelity to French habitants, and his combination of “courage and humanity.” Most of all Constantin-Weyer admired Champlain’s ability to persist in the face of adversity, and wrote that Champlain “suffered fatigue, pain and sickness not only without complaint, but even with a smile!” He painted a word-portrait of Champlain as a saint for a secular age: “A saint, I say to you,” he wrote, “and the proof is that he has the greatest virtue of the saints: patience.”84 Altogether, Constantine-Weyer interpreted the life and work of Champlain as evidence of moral strength in French culture. The author added with pride: “Voilà qui est français! Voilà aussi qui est chrétien! That’s what it means to be French! That’s also what it means to be Christian!” He emphasized that others who are not French or Christian had much to learn from such a model.85
Bishop’s Champlain: The Life of Fortitude
A kindred interpretation appeared in another biography of Champlain by an American, Morris Gilbert Bishop (1893–1973). Bishop was a soldier in three wars. He served with the cavalry on the Mexican Border, the infantry in the First World War, and psychological warfare in the Second World War. He was also a businessman (advertising), a public servant (the American Relief Administration in Finland), a literary figure (frequently writing for the New Yorker), and a professor of Romance Literature at Cornell. Like many of his generation, Bishop was raised to high moral purposes in the reign of Queen Victoria and experienced at first hand the horror of total war in the twentieth century. He was a tough-minded idealist, all the more so because of the realities of his age.
Bishop’s most substantial book was his biography of Samuel de Champlain. Mainly he sought to answer one question: “What manner of man was he?” Bishop answered: “The passion of his mind was exploration, discovery. He was possessed of the old libido sciendi, the lust of knowing. His lust turned to the great unknown of his time, the white void on sailors’ maps.”86 Most of all, Bishop admired Champlain for his moral qualities. “He was a good man,” Bishop wrote. “He had the qualities necessary for the adventurer: toughness, tenacity, foresight, courage. But it was the natural virtue of his spirit that little by little impressed itself on the hard fur-traders and on the perfidious Indians. Not many of the great conquerors of our continent have been eminently good men…. The reader of Champlain’s works, the student of his life, must feel himself constantly in touch with a man to whom good was a reality; one who believed in the goodness of God’s purpose, and who sought to realize it in the welfare of his fellow men.”87
Bishop was quick to note Champlain’s flaws, but saw them as linked to his strengths. “He had the faults of the idealist,” Bishop wrote. “He stood a little apart from men. He was not sly enough to overreach the sly … he dreamed too far ahead. This was his passion. His character was fit for the fulfillment of his passion.” Bishop returned again and again to one great strength: “the mark of his character, as it had been developed through war, adventure, and privation, was fortitude.” Bishop explained: “Fortitude is, I think, the strength to endure for a purpose. Champlain possessed this strength. When others complained, he did his work. When others turned back, he persevered; when others died, he lived. His strength was physical, for only a man of extraordinary toughness could have survived his trials. His strength was also mental, for his whole long life was a battle against faint hearts, the mean-spirited, the avaricious, the sensual.” Altogether Bishop concluded, “the life of fortitude is a noble thing to contemplate.” He thought of Champlain as a model for others who live in troubled times.88
Deschamps’ Champlain: A Humane Imperialist
Another interpretation in the mid-twentieth century came from a French leader and scholar of great distinction. Hubert Deschamps was himself a son of Saintonge, born at Royan in 1900 to a prosperous middle class family. During the First World War he served in the French navy; he then went to the École Coloniale and was sent to Madagascar as a district officer, or in his words roi de la Brousse, a king of the bush.89 A democratic socialist, he joined Léon Blum’s Popular Front in 1936, became an aide to the Premier, and was later appointed governor of three colonies in Djibouti, Côte d’Ivoire, and Senegal. Deschamps continued to hold office under the Vichy government from 1939 to 1943, though he was not of its politics, until the Gaullists removed him from office. He changed careers, and became the first professor of African history at the Sorbonne. A superb French stylist, he published thirty books, mostly on exploration, African politics, and colonial administration.90
Deschamps had a great love for the African people. He favored the intermixing of Africans and Europeans, and practiced what he preached in a complicated personal life with two wives and many mistresses from both cultures. A keen student of history, he discovered a kindred spirit in his fellow son of Saintonge, Samuel de Champlain. In 1951, Deschamps published a one-volume anthology of Champlain’s works with the Presses Universitaires de France.91 A long introduction offered a new interpretation of Champlain by a man who had witnessed the worst of the twentieth century and remained an idealist. In an essay of luminous intelligence, Deschamps analyzed Champlain’s career as one colonial governor on the work of another. He thought of Champlain as “one of the most illustrious sons of Saintonge” and a leading model of “colonisation humaine.“92
The Debunkers’ Champlain: Imposter, Liar, Fraud, Fantasist
After the celebration of Champlain’s personal qualities by so many generations of writers, a reaction inevitably followed. The mid-twentieth century was an age of irreverence, and in 1922 Americans coined a new word for its attitude toward history. They called it “debunking,” after Henry Ford’s half-remembered axiom that “history is bunk.” For debunkers, things were never what they seemed to be. Reality was the underlying fact, and truth was “the lowdown” in more senses than one. Idealists of all varieties were suspect. Debunking was often done in good humor, almost as an intellectual prank, and with a knowing smile. Debunkers delighted in reviling leaders who had been heroes and saints to earlier generations. Champlain made a perfect target.
A leading example was a little book by Florian de la Horbe, L’incroyable secret de Champlain. The author, a French essayist and novelist, took his point of departure from Champlain’s obscure origins. He claimed that Champlain was an imposter. He was really Guy Elder de la Fontenelle, “a renowned ruffian who was sentenced to be broken on the wheel, and who is presumed to have escaped this punishment and turned up again as an honest man, under the name of Champlain.”93
Could it be true? Many things might have happened in the past, but not this hypothesis. Florian de la Horbe’s incroyable secret w
as unbelievable in more ways than one. Marcel Trudel wrote that it was “nothing more than a very inferior roman policier,” a crime fiction story that began with the mystery of Champlain’s origins and was developed as history “after the manner of Alexandre Dumas.” It was a classic example of the debunking impulse, and it represented a leading genre of debunkery—part fact, all fiction.
Much debunking was done in good humor, but some of it had a hard edge and a nasty bite. In Canada, Jean Bruchési published an essay in 1950 called “Champlain a-t-il menti?” Had he lied? Was he a liar? Bruchési strongly suggested that much of what Champlain wrote was false and even fraudulent—that he lied when he claimed military service in Brittany, lied again about many of his activities, lied once more when he claimed to have been captain of the Saint-Julien, never made a voyage to the West Indies, and used Captain Provençal’s logbooks “to write under his own name, an account of a voyage that he did not make.” All this was offered not as a set of firm conclusions, but a cunning set of strong suggestions. Nearly all of the suggestions were on one side of the question, and very hostile to the document and Champlain.94
Bruchési’s debunking essay was followed by others. Claude de Bonnault, a prominent Canadian archivist, adopted some of Bruchési’s suggestions and added arguments that Champlain was never in Blavet, that he invented the story of Captain Provençal, and that he was not in the West Indies at all. Bonnault topped it off with a conspiracy theory that the Brief Discours was concocted in 1612 to support the comte de Soissons and prince de Condé against the queen’s Spanish party in France, and to support rapprochement with England. Bonnault concluded that the entire Brief Discours was an “histoire fantaisiste,” a mere fantasy. Neither of these essays was supported by evidence, and both would be proven false by the research that they inspired. The debunkers themselves turned out to be the fantasists. It was a strange phenomenon, but in the mid-twentieth century, many people wanted desperately to disbelieve.95
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