“The physiognomy of a government,” says De Tocqueville, “can best be judged in its colonies, for there its characteristic traits usually appear larger and more distinct. When I wish to judge the spirit and the faults of the administration of Louis XIV., I must go to Canada. Its deformity is there seen as through a microscope.”
In this, the fourth book in Parkman’s epic France & England in North America series, Parkman kind of pulls his perspective back a bit and gives us a bigger picture view of what’s going on in terms of the French colonies in the New World and, while he’s been very high on a lot of the individuals of the story in terms of seeing them as heroic and idealistic, his vision of the enterprise as a whole is refreshingly cynical. Because, of course, this is a series of books entirely about exploration, but, while you’re thrilling to the adventure stories and luxuriating in the beautiful prose, it’s easy to kind of forget that it could also, perhaps more accurately, but called a series entirely about colonization, something we don’t feel quite as good about these days as people did in the 1870s. So it honestly just feels pretty good to be along for the ride as Parkman just kind of demolishes the French enterprise in North America from the foundations up.
There are still a lot of characters in play here and a lot of individual stories, but this is kind of the first book in the series to really try to explore what the day to day lived reality was for the colonists who were, you know, just regular people. And, of course, it’s pretty terrible, with all the hardships you’d expect and quite a few extras exacerbated by a pretty incompetent government back home in France. So, yes, there’s always the potential of being slaughtered by angry Native Americans and you might starve because your crops failed, but you also might starve because the food shipments got delayed and by the time they arrived from France, everything was spoiled. And the corruption and power struggles within the colonial governments was almost more of a threat than the Native Americans. You could basically know which tribes you could trust and which you couldn’t, who was friendly and who was at war with who. But it’s harder to predict when one of your own countrymen might write a nasty letter to the King back home about you and, by spreading lies, undermine your leadership position and/or get you recalled to France where you might face crippling financial repercussions for your failures or, you know, you might get killed. And meanwhile on the horizon, the other titular character of this series has started to lurk around the perimeters. For being, as I said, a titular character of this series, England hasn’t really had much of a presence. There were explorers in the first book, but in the last two, they’ve hardly been mentioned. But here I believe we’re moving into a transition point where England is going to become a major player going forward, expanding their influence a little more every time France loses a little more of its grasp. This is easily the darkest of the first four books and it’s kind of like watching a slow motion train-wreck. This one wasn’t as compelling a page-turner as The Jesuits in North America, but it was a more morally complex book, I think, and so, while it dragged a bit at times, it was still a fascinating read. 4 stars.
tl;dr – Parkman at his most cynical explores the various reasons the French colonies in North America collapsed; a morally complex, dark and fascinating read. 4 stars.