In 1657, two years after the daredevil author‘s untimely death at the age of 36, Cyrano de Bergerac‘s fantastic travel narrative A Voyage to the Moon was published. Similar to other utopian writings of the genre, such as Francis Bacon‘s New Atlantis (1627), Thomas Moore‘s
Utopia (1516), Daniel Defoe‘s Robinson Crusoe (1719) Jonathan Swift‘s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and Bergerac‘s own A Voyage to the Sun, the text explores matters of enlightenment philosophy and science, identifies social and political ills while launching a satirical critique of religious doctrine. In concordance with the tradition of utopian writing, Bergerac chronicles the physical displacement of his protagonist (in the case of this fantastic eyewitness report himself) to an imaginative space (the moon) that subsequently serves as a literary counter space to the problem ridden geography of seventeenth-century France. Before Bergerac arrives on the moon, however, a failed launch attempt lands the hero in another alien environment. Bergerac crash lands his primitive space suit, which is devised from nothing more than a number of empty bottles, in the French colony of New France on the seemingly equally distant and mysterious shores of North America. Upon his arrival, Bergerac is immediately surrounded by the native inhabitants, who lived in ―some kind of cottage‖ (Bergerac 17), and were ―stark naked‖
(Bergerac 17). Perplexed by the fact that recently ―men had gone naked in France‖ (Bergerac 18), the failed cosmonaut attempts to question one of the natives about his whereabouts, but soon realizes that the two don‘t share the same language. Further bewildered by the fact that the Indian apparently mistakes him for a divine being just descended from the heavens, Bergerac concludes that the Native American‘s language must be ―the muffling noise of a Dumb-man‖ (19).
While the above cited episode from Bergerac‘s is a premier example of colonial stereotyping at the hands of an Old World subject that in real life never actually set foot on the American continent, the inclusion of New France in his utopian journey speaks volumes about the
European fascination with the New World. For the average French citizen, the colonial antipodes on the far side of the world might as well have been on the moon; both ―other worlds‖ were equally unreachable and similarly inscribed with tales of awe and wonder. In Bergerac‘s case, New France is foremost conceived as a representational space of exotic encounters and intellectual liberation. On the plain of physical reality the literary geography resembles a
primitive Eden populated by naïve inhabitants who dwell in a primordial forest. This allusion to biblical accounts of the lost Paradise would surely reverberate with contemporary European readers of the seventeenth century who, as Peter Moogk confirms, ―yearned to return to that happy era of their imagined past‖ (19). As a spatial metaphor, the colony also represents a realm of intellectual liberation outside the official royal doctrine.34 Geographical ―other worlds‖ here unmistakably translate to uncharted territories of the mind.
A good hundred years prior to the publication of Bergerac‘s fantastic tale, it was less the desire for freedom of thought that caused Francis I to unleash the maritime explorer Jacques
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It is in New France that Bergerac has a lively discussion on the Copernican theses causing the narrator to praise the Vice-Roy of Canada as a ―Man capable of lofty Opinions‖ (21).
Cartier on the American shorelines in the spring of 1534. The French crown was driven by a much more pragmatic desire to ―discover the elusive trade route to the east or, at the very least, to acquire mineral riches such as the Spanish crown was extracting from its possessions in Peru and Mexico‖ (Nicholls 25). Both objectives ultimately failed as the new colony itself posed an insurmountable land barrier halting French westward expansion in its tracks while the shores and forests of Canada produced plenty of fish and furs but very little gold and silver. Nonetheless, Cartier‘s explorations proved effective to threaten Spanish and Portuguese naval dominance in the western Atlantic and to stake France‘s claims in the quickly intensifying global colonial race. After an Atlantic crossing that saw tragedy narrowly averted, Cartier‘s expedition successfully circumnavigated Newfoundland and entered the Gulf of the St. Lawrence. On July 24, two weeks after landing at the Gaspé Peninsula, Cartier and his men symbolically took possession of La Nouvelle France in the name of King Francis I by lodging a thirty foot cross into the virgin soil, especially constructed for the occasion, that bore the fleur-de-lis and the inscription ―long live the king of France‖ (Greene 40).
The ritual of annexation performed by Cartier and his men in 1534 underscored French ambitions in America and must predominantly be understood as a public inauguration of French colonial power. As such, the message of the performance was clearly directed to the French competitors in the North American hemisphere: the crowns of Spain, England, and Portugal. While the royal propaganda of Francis I and his explorer forcefully announced the French ambitions in America, it said very little about their actual achievements as colonizers of America. Possibly, if Cartier and his men would have known that it would take over seventy years until the royal colonists succeeded in establishing a permanent settlement (the founding of Quebec in 1608 by Samuel de Champlain) in Canada, they might have chosen a smaller cross to
signal their arrival. Yet, the French captain could not have possibly foreseen how long it would take his successors to break the long spell of unsuccessful colonization that had defined New France since the establishment of Cartier‘s own winter camp Charlesbourg-Royal (renamed Cap Rouge by Jean-Francois de La Rocque de Roberval) in 1541.
Throughout the history of New France, populating the vast territory would remain the premier challenge of French colonial officials and by 1680 the number of colonists in La Nouvelle France had grown to a meager ten thousand. At the same time, the British seaboard colonies to the south had already grown to over one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. The reasons for the comparative failure of French settlement policy are often explained by the hard physical conditions in the seemingly untamable wilderness of Canada, an environment perceived as so hostile that even Cartier himself wondered if his recent discovery was ―the land God gave to Cain‖ (10). Besides the suspected divine curse, there are a number of pragmatic factors that sealed the fate of the French adventure in America and prepared the colony for British takeover in the middle of the eighteenth century. French emigrants, Peter Moogk points out, frequently failed to identify themselves as permanent settlers, but rather thought of themselves as migrant workers on a temporary job assignment (119). This identification problem, partially due to negative or insufficient propaganda for the colony, paired with the absence of convincing economic incentives and tales of Indian savagery, prevented colonial officials from recruiting a steady supply of settlers for the North American colony (Moogk 119).
New France thus paled in comparison to the economic and social prosperity of the English colonies in America. Nonetheless, its very existence created a potent conflict potential that, if ignited, was guaranteed to unsettle the balance of power in the New World in the near future. As the two colonial empires headed for inevitable confrontation in North America, the inhabitants of
both colonies began to develop their very own independent identities and soon questioned the frame of colonial dependency they were pressed into. It is exactly this understanding of New France as the catalyst for global conflict and revolutionary reorganization that caused Francis Parkman to elect the settlement of New France and the ensuing clash between France and England as the topic for his book Montcalm and Wolfe.
Figure 4.1: Cartier and his men take possession of New France by raising a wooden cross bearing the royal insignias. Image from John Frost‘s Pictorial History of America.